The International Cold Warrior: Ikeda Hayato

Abstract

The turmoil around the 1960 security treaty revision is often seen as representing a dividing line in Japan’s postwar history. Yet, in the end, not much had happened. Soon after Kishi resigned, domestic politics calmed down and problems in the relations with the United States settled. The credit for this development was given to Kishi’s successor, Ikeda Hayato, a former finance ministry bureaucrat and consummate technocrat who was catapulted into power as a result of the security-treaty revision upheaval. He was the first prime minister of the postwar generation (Itō, 1981, pp. 5f) and a prize student of ‘the Yoshida school’, the group of young and gifted bureaucrats who had caught the eye of Yoshida and rode to powerful positions on his coat-tail (Nakamura, 1993, p. 457).