Yasuo Fukuda, Japan's first prime minister whose father also held the job, dies at 90
Fukuda led Japan from September 2007 to September 2008. The Liberal Democratic Party said on Monday that he died of heart failure in a Tokyo hospital on 22 October.
Yasuo Fukuda, who was Japan’s prime minister from September 2007 to September 2008, has died at 90. The Liberal Democratic Party, announcing the news on Monday, said he died of heart failure in a Tokyo hospital on 22 October.
His place in Japanese history was settled before he did anything in office. His father, Takeo Fukuda, had been prime minister from 1976 to 1978, and Yasuo became the first son of a Japanese premier to take the same job. Unlike a crown, such as the one that passed from Harald V to Haakon VIII in Norway in August, Japan’s top job cannot be inherited, which makes the Fukuda pairing rarer than it sounds.
A late start
He came to politics at 53, after years working in the oil business, winning the old Gunma 3rd district in the 1990 general election. He then won seven elections in a row.
His first big post came in 2000, as chief cabinet secretary under Yoshiro Mori and then Junichiro Koizumi. He held it until 2004, longer than anyone before him, a record later broken by Yoshihide Suga.
One year at the top
Fukuda took over in September 2007 when Shinzo Abe resigned, and inherited a split parliament with the opposition running the upper house. In 2008 he hosted the G8 summit in Hokkaido, agreed a “mutually beneficial strategic relationship” with China’s Hu Jintao, and met South Korea’s Lee Myung-bak.
On 1 September 2008 he announced he was stepping down, saying a new team was needed to get policy moving again. Taro Aso replaced him weeks later.
The dove
Inside his party Fukuda was counted among the doves, more interested in steady relations with Japan’s neighbours than in symbolic gestures. Asked soon after taking office whether he would visit the Yasukuni Shrine, he answered with a question of his own: why do something the other side dislikes?
He left parliament in 2012 but kept a hand in diplomacy. In 2014 he went to Beijing, met Xi Jinping, and helped lay the ground for that year’s first summit between Xi and Abe. The day his government was sworn in, 26 September 2007, is still on record in the Japanese prime minister’s office archive.
Image: Cabinet Public Relations Office of Japan (内閣官房内閣広報室) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
