Nobusuke Kishi

Nobusuke Kishi was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who served as the prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. He was known for his exploitative rule of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in the 1930s, and was nicknamed the "Monster of the Shōwa era". He later served in the wartime cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō as Minister of Commerce and Vice Minister of Munitions, and co-signed the declaration of war against the United States on December 7, 1941. After World War II, Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a suspected Class A war criminal, but was released without trial by the U.S. government, who considered him to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction. With U.S. support, he consolidated the Japanese conservative camp against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party in the 1950s. He was instrumental in the formation of the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) through a merger of smaller conservative parties in 1955, and thus is credited with being a key player in the initiation of the "1955 System", the extended period during which the LDP was the overwhelmingly dominant political party in Japan. As prime minister, Kishi's mishandling of the 1960 revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty led to the massive 1960 Anpo protests, which were the largest protests in Japan's modern history and which forced him to resign in disgrace. He was the grandfather of Shinzo Abe and Nobuo Kishi, who also became prime ministers of Japan.