Tanaka: Prisoner of 'Money Power'

The spartan cell is no different from that of any ordinary inmate at the Tokyo House of Detention--a 6-ft. by 9-ft. concrete cubicle furnished with two tatami mats, a collapsible table and a toilet. Former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka's new quarters were a long way from the exquisitely landscaped home across town where he lived until his arrest last week. Yet the House of Detention was not wholly unfamiliar to "Kaku-san," as he was once affectionately nicknamed. In 1948, as a brash young member of the Japanese Diet, he spent three weeks there on charges stemming from a coal industry bribe scandal. His return in abject disgrace brought to full circle the most extraordinary political career in postwar Japan.

Tanaka's success was built on what the Japanese call kinken--money power, meaning jobs, contracts and very often raw cash liberally applied to advance political aims. Money has always played a key role in Japanese politics; Tanaka, a horse trader's son who lacked both the prestigious education and family connections usually necessary for a big-time political career, needed it more than most. But when, in the past few years, a recession at home and the example of Watergate abroad made the Japanese more sensitive to the private morals of their public leaders, Tanaka's fall became inevitable.

A native of a sleepy town in Niigata prefecture, Kaku-san went to Tokyo at the age of 15 with only a grade school education and less than $3 in his pocket. By the time he was 19, the cocky, hardworking Tanaka owned a contracting business. During World War II, his firm was big enough to handle a $20 million contract for the Japanese army in Korea. In 1947 he became a member of the Diet by bankrolling his way through a lower house election.

The next year, Tanaka made his first trip to the Tokyo House of Detention; acquitted of the bribery charges against him, he soon resumed his rise--to Postal Minister, Finance Minister, and, at 54, the youngest Prime Minister in postwar Japanese history. By the reckoning of the Tokyo economic daily Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun, Tanaka spent no less than $34 million in 1972 in the form of loans and cash gifts to fellow members of the Liberal Democratic Party to secure his selection as party president--and hence automatically as Prime Minister.

Tanaka's folksy ways and humble origins appealed then to the press and public alike. Earthy in speech and impatient in manner (the Japanese, he once said, "must learn the art of coming to the point as fast as possible"), he built up a cando, populist image. Although he was popular and admired, Kaku-san was never able to free himself of the whiff of financial scandal. Typical was the Shinano-Gawa riverbed case of 1964. A nameless company bought an abandoned tract of dry land in the Shinano River, then made a killing later on when the government revealed railroad and highway projects that caused land prices to skyrocket; the company also turned out to have a former secretary to Tanaka on its board of directors. Though accused repeatedly of corruption, Tanaka until last week always managed to avoid legal action. But in November 1974, an expose of his kinken record in a Japanese magazine, describing dummy corporations, secret bank accounts and false tax statements, triggered a party revolt that forced him from office.

"I have no school or financial ties to speak of," Tanaka once said. "In the end, I knew all along that I had no choice but to rely on myself and my power." Unfortunately, for him, power also meant money, and in a Japan now searching for a new government morality, his extravagant exploitation of kinken became intolerable.

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