by Robert Whiting
I read with sadness of the passing of Tsuneo Watnabe, the long time shogun of the Yomiuri group, which publishes the Yomiuri Shinbun–(editor note: and also owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, Yomiuriland–an amusement park and more) . He died recently at the age of 98 after a bout with pneumonia.
He was so powerful I didn’t think he would ever actually die.
Under Watanabe’s leadership, the Yomiuri Shinbun became the largest newspaper in the world with a daily circulation 12 million for its morning edition.
Watanabe was known for his close ties with political leaders, including many in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), especially Yasuhiro Nakasone. His editorial direction often supported conservative policies and advocated for constitutional revision, particularly revising Japan’s pacifist Article 9.
He also became the “owner” of the Yomiuri Giants, a post he was unqualified for, as he did not particularly like baseball and did not even understand the rules. During his regime at the top, he conspired with Seibu Lions owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, in an ill-advised plan to contract the 12 NPB teams of the Central and Pacific league into one 8 team league, starting with a plan to combine the Kintestu Buffaloes and the Orix Blue Wave into one team, the Orix Buffaloes . This led to the only player strike in the history of professional baseball, lasting all of two days, which effectively canceled the plan to contract and effected the creation of a new team, the Rakuten Golden Eagles to restore the 12 team balance.
I knew Tsuneo Watanabe fairly well. In 1968, while I was a student at Tokyo’s Sophia University, a professor named Kan Ori who was teaching a class I attended in Japanese politics, approached me about teaching English to his friend Watanabe, who at the time was one of Japan’s top reporters and who was being assigned to take over the Washington DC Yomiuri Shinbun Bureau.
As I understood the situation, the Yomiuri Shinbun wanted to buy some land and put up a new building in Ohtemachi. The government agreed to cooperate only on the condition that Watanabe—who had greatly irked the Sato Eisaku cabinet with constant criticisms in his newspaper columns—be sent out of the country, hence the DC appointment.
I accepted and for the next year I went to Watanabe’s apartment in San Ban Cho for three times a week.
We would retreat to Watnabe’s den, seated on tatami at a low table, surrounded by stacks of books on government and politics around the world. He would drink tea and talk about affairs of the day in English, which he was in fact, quite good at. Occasionally we would be joined by his friend Sam Jameson, the famed correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and later the Los Angeles Times, It was there that I also Yasuhiro Nakasone and a Mr. Kobayashi who was Nakasone’s secretary general. They were all regular members of Mr. Watanabe’s benkyo-kai, a weekly study group, that Watanabe had organized for his political associates, to discuss politics and play mah-jongg.
Watanabe was not a typical Japanese conservative. The son of a banker Tokyo who died prematurely from stomach cancer, Watnabe grew up in comfortable circumstances and, as a junior high school student, openly opposed the army and teachers who promoted militarism. In high school, he was called to work in a factory making airplanes which he resisted by making defective parts. Drafted by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945 during the last stages of the war, as a lowly private, he suffered physical abuse at the hands of his superiors.
It was during that time that the military began dispatching kamikaze pilots, whom the Japanese right wing went on to glorify as willing martyrs for the emperor.
“It’s all a lie that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, ‘Long live the emperor!’ ” Watanabe would tell me, with anger in his voice,. “They were sheep at a slaughterhouse. Everybody was looking down and tottering. Some were unable to stand up and were carried and pushed into the plane by maintenance soldiers.” (NY Times)
Tsuneo Watanabe was the Rupert Murdoch of Japan, ruling over the Yomiuri Shimbun Empire for decades.
He told me that he had hated the militarism of Japan with every fiber of his being.
After the war, in September 1945, he entered Tokyo University, he had applied for membership in the Youth Communist Federation. He distributed pamphlets, fliers and encouraged people to attend the lectures. By 1947, he was acknowledged as a regular member of the Communist party. He belonged to one of the cells in the university and delivered speeches in other universities which resulted in increasing party members.
But he came to find the movement too dogmatic and in December 1947, he submitted his resignation from the JCP. Others say he was booted out for criticizing the movement.
After graduation, he joined the Yomiuri Shimbun where by the end of the 1950’s he had become the paper’s leading reporter and by then had become conservative in his leaning. He was captain of the Kisha Club reporting on Ono Bamboku a leading conservative in the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party and developed a close relationship with Yasuhiro Nakasone, a up-and-coming politician (and future prime minister of Japan), whom many Japanese were comparing to a JFK—young, healthy, vigorous, and dressed in tailored suits with designer silk ties.
Watanabe was gruff, blunt. He wore his politics on his sleeve. He absolutely hated the Emperor and the Imperial system, which, of course, was an amalgam of state and religion. In particular, he blamed the Emperor for allowing the war to happen and he told me he thought the Imperial Palace should be torn down, the grounds paved over and turned into a parking lot.
He was an outspoken opponent of Yasukuni Shrine and thought Shinto was a mumbo-jumbo religions.
I did my best to help Watanabe-san improve his English. As it turned out, however, I was the one who got the education.
It was from Watanabe that I first learned how corrupt politics in Japan was. It was all about money, starting with Prime Minister and LDP Party Boss Eisaku Sato.
“Japanese politics is dirty,” he liked to say “It’s all about money. Not policy. Only money. “
Watanabe absolutely despised Eisaku Sato, the elephant-eared, prime minister of Japan at the time. Sato, son of a samurai turned sake brewer, was the younger brother of the aforementioned Nobosuke Kishi, the American puppet and CIA favorite. Watanabe thought he was corrupt to the core and indeed the PM’s tenure at the top was engulfed in a string of corruption scandals that earned the nickname the Black Mist. Among them, bribes paid by the Kyowa sugar company to LDP politicians for help in obtaining $20 million in loans, Sato’s Transportation Minister arranging for an express train to stop at his local home town station, and LDP Dietman extorting businessmen for money, the head of the Self-Defense Force using YS-11 for private use, the speaker of the Lower House dealing in fraudulent bank drafts (“tegata”) (all in 1966)
Watanabe described in detail how he thought Sato obtained won the post of Prime Minister. In 1964 former Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, suffering from throat cancer, was compelled to resign his post because of failing health. It was decided by party officials that rather than endure a difficult intra-party battle between the leading factions over his successors that it would be better for Ikeda to chose the next party president who would automatically become PM, in Japan’s parliamentary system. The logical choice was Ichiro Kono, the man who had organized the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and who was close to Ikeda. Ikeda, who was unable to speak because of his illness, wrote down the name of his successor, Kono, on a piece of paper, folded it and handed it to an aide.
“Somewhere along the line,” said Watanabe, “the paper was intercepted, made to disappear, a large amount of money changed hands, and a new piece of paper appeared with Sato’s name on it.”
For a naïve 24 year old, that was quite a revelation.
Corruption in the Sato regimen was a frequent target of Watanabe’s columns and he told me that Sato’s wife had visited his wife with a gift—an envelope full of money—a not so subtle hint that she might suggest to her husband to ease off on his attacks on the PM’s office. Watanabe’s wife, a former actress and model, refused.
“Sato should commit hara-kiri” said Watanabe with contempt in his voice.
In November 1966, Sato went on television and told a nationwide audience: “It is regrettable that my administration and party have invited public distrust for lack of moral standards. The main thing is that I, as the responsible person, fully grasp the implications.” On the theory that he could best correct the situation, Sato thereupon announced his candidacy for a second term as party president. (TIME, Nov. 4) No one doubted that he would win, as he in fact did in the December election.
I introduced Watanabe to friends in Washington DC, who helped him settle in and I saw Watanabe periodically over the years. He ran a nice interview and story about me in his newspaper for my first book The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, which helped make it a best seller..
But I relationship went south in 1990 when I wrote a column in the Shukan Asahi exposing the Yomiuri Giants false attendance reports at their new stadium the Tokyo Dome.. The Giants reported a capacity crowd of 56,000 for every home game at the Tokyo Dome. But I counted the seats—42,761 and the standing crowd 3,600—and also discovered a sign on the B3 Level of the Dome parking area posted by the Tokyo Fire Department which read 46,134.
According to Sam Jameson, Watanabe was very angry about that story and told him “I’ll never forgive that son-of-a bitch Bob Whiting for writing that to the Asahi.”
Said Sam, “It was the disloyalty that bothered him.”
So much for truth and objectivtity in reporting.
Tsuneo Watanabe RIP.
Note: This column was cross-posted from Robert Whiting’s Substack with his permission. If you want to know about the history of post-war Japan and get a deeper look at current events, definitely subscribe.