Honorable Premier

Kiichi Miyazawa is a honorable premier. I strongly hope a statesman like him will come out in Japan again.

Kiichi Miyazawa, who, as prime minister and holder of many other top government posts, helped guide Japan from postwar ruin to economic superpower.

Kiichi Miyazawa, Japan Premier in the ’90s, Dies at 87

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: June 29, 2007
The New York Times

....Kiichi Miyazawa, who, as prime minister and holder of many other top government posts, helped guide Japan from postwar ruin to economic superpower, died yesterday at his home in

Mr. Miyazawa emerged from a wealthy and politically powerful family to attain influence as an aide to policy makers who fashioned Japan’s immediate postwar recovery and went on to hold important cabinet posts, including that of foreign minister, before becoming prime minister in November 1991.

In his two years at the head of the government, he pushed for better ties with Japan’s Asian neighbors and was the first Japanese prime minister to acknowledge the involvement of the nation’s military in forcing Asian women to serve as sex slaves for soldiers.

His government passed a watershed law paving the way for Japan to send peacekeeping troops overseas, but resisted more profound changes in the pacifist Constitution. He negotiated a major trade accord with the United States and instituted banking reforms as he battled a gathering economic malaise that would endure for a decade.

As finance minister in 1986 and 1987, he won popularity with high levels of public works spending, financing some of it through privatization of government companies.
To Americans he was vividly etched in the public consciousness when in 1992, President Bush fell ill at a banquet during a trip to Japan and vomited on him. The prime minister cradled the head of the flu-stricken president in his lap afterward.

....His career was thought to have ended in December 1988, when he was forced to resign as finance minister because of his involvement in a corporate influence-peddling scandal. In 1993 he was ousted as prime minister after he could not pass political reform bills he had promised. That ended the Liberal Democratic Party’s 38 consecutive years of rule.

In a rare case of a former prime minister’s taking a lesser cabinet post, he returned to serve as finance minister at the age of 78 in 1998. He proposed a system of bilateral currency swaps between Asian countries that is still in place today.

Kiichi Miyazawa was born on Oct. 8, 1919, in Tokyo. His father represented the Hiroshima area in Parliament, and his mother came from a prominent political family. A teacher wrote on his report card, “He speaks his own mind, and some of his classmates don’t like his straightforwardness.”

He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, and he attended a conference of American and Japanese students in the United States in 1939. His intellectual prowess allowed him to avoid military service in World War II.

In 1942 he joined the Finance Ministry and within seven years had become the minister’s private secretary. Like many Japanese, he recalled the American postwar occupation with distaste, particularly having to listen to lectures by Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur. “It may be hard for young people today to understand how unpleasant it was to live under the occupation,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Mr. Miyazawa was an aide to his country’s delegation at the peace conference in San Francisco in 1951. There, 49 nations restored “full sovereignty” to Japan while permitting the continuing presence of American troops on Japanese soil. From 1953 to 1965, Mr. Miyazawa served in the largely ceremonial upper house of Parliament. In 1967 he was elected to his father’s seat in the lower house. His government posts while a member of the house included general director of the Economic Planning Agency and minister of international trade and industry. He was also chairman of his party’s executive council.

....Mr. Miyazawa admired the United States as a student, and his excellent English allowed him to forge warm relationships with Americans. When he concluded a major trade pact with the United States in 1993, he attributed his success to charming President Clinton over a sushi dinner. He could also be provocative. As prime minister, he said Japan must show “compassion” for social problems like homelessness in the United States, and criticized Americans’ work ethic.