Yasuhiro Nakasone

Yasuhiro Nakasone (中曽根 康弘, Nakasone Yasuhiro; 27 May 1918 – 29 November 2019) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1982 to 1987. His political term was best known for pushing through the privatization of state-owned companies, pursuing a hawkish and pro-United States foreign policy and his rejection of Keynesianism and his support of neoliberalism.

Born in Gunma Prefecture, Nakasone graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and served in the imperial navy during the Pacific War. After the war, he entered the National Diet in 1947 and rose through the ranks of the Liberal Democratic Party, serving as chief of the Defense Agency from 1970 to 1971 under Eisaku Satō, international trade and industry minister from 1972 to 1974 under Kakuei Tanaka, and administration minister from 1980 to 1982 under Zenkō Suzuki. As prime minister, he passed large defense budgets and controversially visited the Yasukuni Shrine. A conservative contemporary of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, Nakasone privatized the Japanese National Railways and telephone systems, and favored closer ties with the U.S., once calling Japan an "unsinkable aircraft carrier". After leaving office in 1987, he was implicated in the Recruit scandal, causing the influence of his LDP faction to wane before he retired from the Diet in 2003.