Ryoichi Sasakawa (4 May 1899-18 July 1995) was a Japanese businessman and far-right ultranationalist politician.
Biography[]
Ryoichi Sasakawa was born in Osaka, Japan on 4 May 1899, and he became wealthy from rice speculation during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Sasakawa was not only an ultranationalist, but also openly admired Benito Mussolini and founded a private militia uniformed in the style of the fascist Blackshirts of Italy; among his followers was an ardent young rightist named Yoshio Kodama. Sasakawa and Kodama were imprisoned in Sugamo prison from 1945 to 1948 during the Allied occupation of Japan following World War II, and Sasakawa learned to cultivate the Americans. SCAP saw him as a threat to Japan's political future, as he was squarely behind the Japanese military policies of aggression and xenophobia for two decades. After being released in December 1948, he made trips too the United States and spread largesse among influential Americans for both personal and political advantage. He approached various local governments and split his take from motorboat races, allowing him to build an enormous gambling empire, the Japan Motorboat Racing Association. By 1980, Sasakawa's company grossed $7.4 billion. At the same time, Sasakawa won over the bakuto gangs, becoming a drinking companion with Yamaguchi-gumi head Kazuo Taoka, and also serving as mediator between feuding yakuza gangs. Sasakawa also resumed his right-wing activities, transforming his prewar "Patriotic People's Mass Party" into the "All-Japan White Collar Workers' League", and co-founding the Asian People's Anti-Communist League and the World Anti-Communist League, along with Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek. By 1963, Sasakawa had become an advisor to the Japanese branch of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, and Moon and Sasakawa united a large number of Japanese rightist groups in a WACL subsidiary known as the "International Federation for Victory over Communism", with Sasakawa as president. He continued to advise and fund rightist groups until, by the late 1970s, he claimed to have the allegiance of some 8 million Japanese. These groups counted both rightist groups and traditionalist groups such as karate foundations and sword dancing groups, and he later advertised himself as a humanitarian and, in 1974, as "the world's wealthiest fascist" in a Time article. He and Kodama would exert enormous influence over the LDP and have a say in the naming of cabinet ministers, even the prime minister himself, much as Kodama did with the third sugamo power, Nobusuke Kishi. Sasakawa died in Tokyo in 1995 at the age of 96.