Nakasone Yasuhiro and the Ideological Origins of Japan’s Nuclear Regime, 1945–55

For Japan’s conservative leaders, the first decade after 1945 was a period of crisis. Left-wing parties and independent unions challenged the political establishment; a lively intellectual field questioned the verities of the prewar emperor-system; ordinary Japanese, tired of war, embraced the pacifism articulated in the new, progressive Constitution. From the perspective of the social and political establishment, it appeared as though these forces, combined with the reforms of the Occupation, threatened the Japanese ruling classes as they had emerged from World War II.

This paper asks how Japanese elites devised ways to manage postwar democracy by focusing on the actions and thought of Nakasone Yasuhiro (1918-). Trained as a bureaucrat and naval officer, after the war Nakasone embarked on a successful political career that would see him prime minister in the 1980s. A staunch anticommunist and die-hard nationalist, Nakasone opposed the pacifist Constitution and called for rearmament. It is less well known that he was also a key figure behind Japan’s development of nuclear energy. He secured the first budget for scientific and technological research on the atom, sought the support of Japan’s top scientists while liaising with power brokers, such as the fixer Shôriki Matsutarô and the leader of the Liberal Party, Hatoyama Ichirô. How did Nakasone’s obsession with nuclear energy connect to his anxieties about restoring conservative power and maintaining social order? This paper suggests that in the transition from the prewar principles of autarky, military power, and oligarchy to the new solutions of free trade, pacifism, and popular sovereignty, Nakasone promoted nuclear power as a way to refashion political conservatism as a modernization project. In so doing, it sheds new light on the restoration of the Japanese ruling classes after World War II.