The Satō–Kishi–Abe family is a Japanese political family. It has produced three prime ministers: Nobusuke Kishi, Eisaku Satō, and Shinzo Abe, who combined have served as Prime Minister of Japan for over 20 years. Kishi led the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in its first election as a combined party. All politicians from the family continue to be associated with the LDP today.
Family members
Hidesuke and Moyo Satō had three children: Ichirō Satō (佐藤 市郎; 28 August 1889 – 12 April 1958) Imperial Japanese Navy Vice Admiral. Nobusuke Kishi (岸 信介, Kishi Nobusuke; born Nobusuke Satō; 13 November 1896 – 7 August 1987), Prime Minister: 1957–1960, Minister of Foreign Affairs: 1956–1957. Yoko Abe (岸 洋子; née Kishi; 11 June 1928 – 4 February 2024), married Shintaro Abe (安倍 晋太郎, Abe Shintarō, April 29, 1924 – May 15, 1991), (Minister of Foreign Affairs: 1982–1986), son of Kan Abe (安倍 寛; 29 April 1894 – 30 January 1946) (Member of the House of Representatives: 1937–1946). They had three children: Hironobu Abe (安倍 寛信; born 30 May 1952), businessman and former CEO of Mitsubishi Corporation Packaging. Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三; 21 September 1954 – 8 July 2022), Prime Minister: 2006–2007, 2012–2020, married Akie Abe (安倍 昭恵, Abe Akie; née Matsuzaki; born 10 June 1962). Nobuo Kishi (岸 信夫; born 1 April 1959), (Member of the House of Councillors 2004–2012; Member of the House of Representatives 2012–2023; Minister of Defense 2020–2022) Nobuchiyo Kishi (岸信千世; born 16 May 1991), Member of the House of Representatives 2023–present. Eisaku Satō (佐藤 栄作; 27 March 1901 – 3 June 1975), Prime Minister (1964–1972). Married Hiroko Sato, niece and ward of Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka. Eisaku and Hiroko are the father of: Shinji Satō (佐藤 信二; February 8, 1932 – May 3, 2016), (Member of the House of Representatives 1979–2000 and 2003–2005; Member of the House of Councillors 1974–1979; Minister of International Trade and Industry 1996–1997; Minister of Transport 1988–1989). His son-in-law is: Masashi Adachi (阿達 雅志, b. September 27, 1959) Member of the House of Councilors 2016–present.
Family tree The family names come first in the following family tree, and Prime Ministers in bold:
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History First generation of politicians Ichirō Satō (1889–1958), Nobusuke Satō (1896–1987), and Eisaku Satō (1901–1975) were the sons of Hidesuke Satō and his wife, Moyo (her name could also be read as "Shigeyo"). Hidesuke was a businessman who had recently fallen on hard times but was from a once illustrious samurai family, claiming descent from Satō Tadanobu and, through him, the Fujiwara.
Hidesuke and Moyo were distant cousins, as Moyo was the granddaughter of Satō Nobuhiro, a samurai of the Chōshū Domain. Nobuhiro served as magistrate of the Hamada Domain and was the first governor of Shimane Prefecture after the Meiji Restoration's abolition of the han system. Nobuhiro was part of the Meiji oligarchy. He, along with other Choshu followers Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru, and Kido Takayoshi, formed much of Japan's post-Meiji government and held a disproportionately large influence, historically sending more prime ministers to the capital than any other region.
Through Moyo, the Satō have been tied to the Matsuoka family for several generations. This is because Moyo's brother married the sister of influential diplomat, Foreign Minister, and fellow Choshu descendant, Yōsuke Matsuoka, and Moyo's aunt had married Yosuke's father, Sanjuro, before dying without children. Through the Matsuoka, the Satō were related to the royal family through Kacho Haruko, who was the daughter of Marquis Fushiminomiya Hironobuo and Princess Kaninnomiya Hanako. Haruko was once considered as a potential match for Crown Prince Akihito. Haruko would end up marrying Yosuke's son Shinzo.
Ichirō Satō
Ichirō Satō graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908. From 1920, Satō was stationed in France, and in 1923, he was appointed as a staff officer in the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In 1927, he represented the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Geneva Conference on Naval Disarmament, where he argued that the Japanese Navy was nothing more than a means of self-defense and that Japan could never afford to engage in a war with a great naval power. That same year, he became Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, and the following year, he was named Captain of the cruiser Nagara.
In 1929, Satō represented the Imperial Navy on the Permanent Military Advisory Committee to the League of Nations, and in 1930, he served as an IJN representative at the London Conference on Naval Disarmament. In 1932, he was appointed First Chief of the Education Bureau, Ministry of the Navy, and later served as vice principal of the Naval War College. In 1938, he was promoted to Vice Admiral and assigned to command the Japanese naval station at Port Arthur but was transferred to the reserves in 1940 due to ill health.
Upon his retirement, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. Thereafter, he embarked on a second career as a naval historian, writing A Fifty-Year History of the Japanese Navy (1943). Satō died of uremia complicated by pneumonia on April 12, 1958.
Nobusuke Kishi
Nobusuke Kishi, born Nobusuke Satō, was adopted by his uncle Nobumasa Kishi. As Nobumasa had no male heir, Nobusuke married his daughter Yoshiko and took her name. Nobusuke passed the extremely difficult entrance examination to enter First High School in Tokyo, the most prestigious high school in the country. Afterwards, he attended Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1920 at the top of his class and with the highest grades in the university's history. While at the university, Kishi became a protégé of the right-wing ultranationalist legal scholar Shinkichi Uesugi. Because he studied German law under Uesugi, Kishi's views tended toward that of typical German-style statism during the 1930s, which was in contrast to the more progressive approaches favored by some of his classmates who studied English law. Uesugi was so impressed by Kishi that he sought to make Kishi his successor as a professor in the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, but Kishi declined. Instead, upon graduation, Kishi entered the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. In 1926–27, Kishi traveled around the world to study industry and industrial policy in various industrialized states around the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Kishi became known as one of the more prominent members of a group of "reform bureaucrats" within the Japanese government who favored a statist model of economic development with the state guiding and directing the economy.
Known for his exploitative rule of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in the 1930s, Kishi was nicknamed the "Monster of the Shōwa era" (昭和の妖怪; Shōwa no yōkai).
Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria. Kishi had first come to the attention of the Kwantung Army officers as a rising star in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry for openly touting the policies of Nazi Germany and calling for policies of "industrial rationalization" to eliminate capitalist competition in support of state goalsideas that accorded with the Army's idea of a "national defense state". In 1935, Kishi was appointed Manchukuo's Deputy Minister of Industrial Development. Kishi was given complete control of Manchukuo's economy by the military, with the authority to do whatever he liked just as long as industrial growth was increased.
In 1936, Kishi was one of the drafters of Manchukuo's first Five-Year Plan. Modeled on the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan, Manchukuo's Five-Year Plan was intended to dramatically boost heavy industry in order so that more coal, steel, and electricity could be used for military purposes.Hotta, Eri Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931–1945, London: Palgrave, 2007 p. 125. In order to enact the new plan, Kishi persuaded the military to allow private capital into Manchukuo. This was done by arguing that the military's policy use of state-owned corporations to lead Manchukuo's industrial development cost the Japanese state too much money. One of the new public-private corporations founded to assist in carrying out the Five-Year Plan was the Manchuria Industrial Development Company (MIDC). Established in 1937, it attracted a staggering 5.2 billion yen in private investment, making it by far the largest long-term investment in the Japanese empire. The sum was especially large when compared to Japan's annual government budget of 2.5 billion yen in 1937. The man handpicked by Kishi to lead the MIDC was his distant relative and First High School classmate, Nissan Group founder Ayukawa Yoshisuke. As part of the deal, the Nissan Group's entire operations were supposed to be transferred over to Manchuria to form the basis of the new MIDC. The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development and, subsequently, that of South Korea and China as well.
In order to make it profitable for the zaibatsu to invest in Manchukuo, Kishi had a policy of lowering the wages of the workers to the lowest possible point, even below the "line of necessary social reproduction". The purpose of Manchukuo was to provide the industrial basis for the "national defense state", with American historian Mark Driscoll noting that "Kishi's planned economy was geared towards production goals and profit taking, not competition with other Japanese firms; profit would come primarily from rationalizing labor costs as much as possible. The ne plus ultra of wage rationalization would be withholding pay altogetherthat is, unremunerated forced labor." Accordingly, the Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a decree calling for the use of slave labor to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e., war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs while guaranteeing healthy profits for state and private investors. From 1938 to 1944, an average of 1.5 million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo. The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.
Kishi showed little interest in upholding the rule of law in Manchukuo. Kishi expressed views typical of his fellow colonial bureaucrats when he disparagingly referred to the Chinese people as "lawless bandits" who were "incapable of governing themselves". According to Kishi's subordinates, he saw little point in following legal or juridical procedures because he felt the Chinese were more akin to dogs than human beings and would only understand brute force. According to Driscoll, Kishi always used the term "Manshū" to refer to Manchukuo, instead of "Manshūkoku", which reflected his viewpoint that Manchukuo was not actually a state, but rather just a region rich in resources to be used for Japan's benefit.