Talk:Nobusuke Kishi

About the his surname's origins

The article says, He was born Nobusuke Satō in Tabuse, Yamaguchi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, but left his family at a young age to move in with the more affluent Kishi family, adopting their family name.

After reading Japanese and Chinese versions, it seemed there is a blank to be filled: Sato is actually the surname of his mother, his father married into the Sato family (This the common practice between powerful Japanese families.). However, by tradition, since he is the second son of the marriage, he was sent back to the Kishis, as an adopted son of the Kishi family, to continue the family line.

I just don't know how to word this, so may someone help? --Samuel Curtis 14:22, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

CIA may have funded his campaign

Kishi Nobusuke was elected Prime Minister in 1957, allegedly with the aid of CIA funds. From this source Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory Rifts' in Historical ...By Philip A. Seaton Page 38-39(Greg723 (talk) 15:10, 30 June 2014 (UTC)).

Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, "Legacy of Ashes," has a whole chapter discussing this... I think this is worth adding to the page here and I'll do it myself later this month.Mr Subtlety (talk) 17:55, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

And the CIA pushed hard for Kishi Nobusuke to become prime minister. The LDP was basically a CIA op to get the US-Japan security treaty passed. --91.54.4.151 (talk) 22:05, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

What a mess!

This article desperately needs a re-write. It goes into off-topic tangents, editorializes, repeats historians' opinions as fact, and repeats the same citations over and over and over. Not to mention all the spelling and grammar errors. I attempted to clean it up, but my edits were reverted. Sekicho (talk) 18:16, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Can you summarize the changes you want to make? Trying to read the diffs for 18k of changes is difficult. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 18:30, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Sekicho's version is oldid=805951769. I agree with him. Who wants "sex" and "alcohol" for Nobusuke Kishi? Some sections of the article is biasing. Even the Japanese article and the Chinese article do not mention to "sex" and "alcohol". There are too many references from "Driscoll, Mark: Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism". A few dubious publicated matters (books)... I can not know the facts about Kishi's personality and Manchuria, but I can read that the article asserts the facts with few sources. Japanese and Chinese (people/peoples) will be surprised. (I am a Japanese youth) --211.131.31.183 (talk) 09:30, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

 Done @Sekicho: I went checked every single source citation in the Manchukuo and ADF sections, removing numerous instances of original research and editorializing that were not actually found in the cited sources, corrected various factual inaccuracies, toned things down a bit to match a more encyclopedic tone, eliminated long asides and tangents not directly relevant to Kishi, removed numerous redundant sentences, streamlined overly wordy prose, grouped information on related topics into the same paragraphs, and put events into chronological order rather than having them skip around randomly. As long as the Manchukuo section still is, amazingly it is now only about half as long as when I first started, and is, in my view, much more coherent and organized. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 18:50, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Sekicho's version is better

Actually, I kind of preferred Sekicho’s version of this article. The current article is excruciatingly detailed in certain portions, while including almost nothing about some of the most important events of Kishi’s prime ministerial and post-prime ministerial career. The sections on Manchukuo constantly fly off on tangents about conditions in Manchuria that only partially or barely relate to Kishi. Looking back at the page history, I can see that Sekicho’s version was nicely balanced and much better written and edited to boot.Hadassah16 (talk) 03:45, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Seconded.Panicles3 (talk) 14:53, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

It is oldid=805951769, I agree. Who wants "sex" and "alcohol" for Nobusuke Kishi? Some sections of the article is biasing. Even the Japanese article and the Chinese article do not mention to "sex" and "alcohol". There are too many references from "Driscoll, Mark: Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism". A few dubious publicated matters (books)... I can not know the facts about Kishi's personality and Manchuria, but I can read that the article asserts the facts with few sources. Japanese and Chinese (people/peoples) will be surprised. (I am a Japanese youth) --211.131.31.183 (talk) 09:30, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

 Done @Hadassah16: @Panicles3: See my note to Sekicho above, regarding the Manchukuo section. I also added much more explanation of the Anpo protests and Kishi's resignation, as well as a new section on the stabbing incident. I also added information on Kishi's family and his death.

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Post-1961 life and death?

Strangely, the article body does not mention his death (or anything after 1961) at all. Nor is his death date & place referenced. These are glaring missing details that should be added should someone find the time and sources! — MarkH₂₁^talk 11:19, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Assassination attempt?

On July 14, 1960, Taisuke Aramaki attacked Kishi, who was leaving the prime minister’s residence to attend an election party for Hayato Ikeda. Aramaki stabbed Kishi six times in the thigh, but denied that he wanted to kill Nishi, despite the nature of the attack. Does anyone have objections to including this incident? Matuko (talk) 12:42, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

 Done - I have added a whole new section on this incident, including source citations --Ash-Gaar (talk) 14:17, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Many exaggerated claims and excessive, sensationalistic wording

This article suffers from many exaggerated claims and sensationalistic wording, especially in the section on Manchukuo. A number of these claims cite Driscoll's sensationalistic claims based on gossip and innuendo, but then exaggerate even beyond what Driscoll was willing to say in the cited source. There is a pressing need to go through these claims one-by-one in comparison to the text of the Driscoll book and see if they can be fully verified. Some of this sounds a lot like original research. In addition, the language needs to be significantly toned down to conform to an encyclopedic tone and WP:NPOV. Frankly, Kishi was bad enough without the need to go overboard. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 23:43, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

 Done I went through every source citation (as described above) --Ash-Gaar (talk) 18:55, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Credibility of Peggy and Sterling Seagrave

I made an entry on 04:27, 29 September 2021 that provided information about Kishi's economic activities in Manchuria.The information came from the book The Yamato Dynasty by Peggy and Sterling Seagrave. A user removed the entirety of my post under the premise that the Seagraves do not do real research, making them an unreliable source.

Would like to know what others think, considering that the authors have published several history books under a few publishing companies. This article currently cites information from their book, so I thought it would be credible to include more information from their book.

Peggy Seagrave author page: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKseagraveP.htm Sterling Seagrave author page: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKseagraveS.htm

-- SweetPigs (talk) 06:12, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest in improving this article. I'm happy to have a discussion about the reliability of the Seagraves' book. Suffice it to say, there is some useful info in there, but it is a bit jumbled up, so it needs to be cross-checked against other sources to avoid errors and also put into chronological order. For example, Matsuoka Yōsuke retired as president of the SMRC in 1930, and was not in charge again until 1935, so it makes no sense to talk about him in relation to the Manchurian Incident of 1931, because he wasn't involved at that time. But more importantly, you shouldn't just randomly undo changes I made without any explanation. I had already explained some of the issues with that particular passage in an earlier edit summary, which you did not address. Moreover, you should not just basically cut-and-paste text from the Seagraves' book and drop it randomly into the article as a big chunk without integrating it into the paragraphs that are already there. I spent a lot of time reorganizing the section on Manchukuo to put things in chronological order and group associated topics together, and you paid no attention to any of that. In particular, you started talking about things Kishi did in Manchukuo before the article even mentioned that Kishi was put in charge of Manchukuo's development. If you want to add new information, you should look for ways to integrate it into the content that is already there and put it in appropriate places in the chronological narrative. Otherwise, you are just recreating the jumbled, repetitive, incoherent mess that was there before. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 06:59, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

On the credibility of Mark Driscoll

This is about the Economic manager of Manchukuo section. Throughout the entire section, the source of the content is based solely on Mark Driscoll's books throughout the entire section. The content is not a list of facts, but rather a commentary on Driscoll's personal research, and the sources of the interviews are also based solely on his books. In addition, Dr. Driscoll himself has never been a specialist in historical research, so it is questionable to use his books as the sole source of information. For all these reasons, I consider the article to be very lacking in neutrality. As a solution, I propose to edit the description of Manchuria and to translate and publish, either temporarily or permanently, the Japanese version of the article on Kishi. — Preceding unsigned comment added by KANADE21 (talk • contribs) 13:15, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

While I don't necessarily disagree on Driscoll, it's worth pointing out that this section is by no means "solely" based on Driscoll. 23 out of 36 citations are to Driscoll, which is a lot, but that's 63%, and a number of other sources are also cited. I have already done a lot of work to limit the citations of Driscoll and remove glaring inaccuracies, but we can't simply toss it all out. We need to improve this section, not ditch it entirely. Driscoll does cite Japanese language sources, so if you think something is inaccurate, you need to find another source that says something different. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 03:04, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

One other thing I do to gauge reliabilities of sources: check the book reviews written on those sources. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:51, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

Human experimentation

Nobusuke Kishi was one of the key people who developed the Unit 731! The unit of the infamous Imperial Army group that conducted lethal chemical and biological warfare experiments on Humans.

There is a link to → Category:Japanese biological weapons program - but no mention of it in the text. Does anyone have objections to including this? --91.54.1.233 (talk) 14:31, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Split off National Defense Brotherhood section into own article

The recently added section on the National Defense Brotherhood was far too long and detailed for this page, so I split it off into its own article at National Defense Brotherhood, as per WP:SPLIT and WP:BOLD. There was no way this entire section could remain here as is, given that it was taking up nearly 20% of an already long page to cover just a few months of Kishi's career, and went into a ton of minute detail, not all of which was Kishi-specific. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 23:02, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Proposed changes to lead

I recently made these revisions to the lead, which were reverted by Ash-Gaar. I removed what appears to be a rather obscure nickname ("Monster of Showa"), added an explanation of what his economic role was in Manchukuo, made the description of his release by occupation authorities more concise, and added more info on other initiatives during his premiership besides just the Anpo treaty. What are the objections? — Goszei (talk) 21:44, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

The nickname is well known and important. It is often mentioned in English-language coverage, and is also mentioned the "Overview" section at the beginning of the Japanese wiki page. Having it mentioned here in combination with the explanatory footnote is useful and informative. In addition, you removed numerous crucial details as well as source citations without explanation. For example, it is important to note that "the U.S. government did not charge, try, or convict" Kishi, because people routinely try to say that he was charged or tried as a war criminal, including editing this very page to that effect. You also deleted mention of US support for Kishi's efforts to form the LDP, as well as the fact that the threat from the Socialist party was largely "perceived" rather than actual. You also removed the gloss of the importance of the 1955 System leading to enduring LDP rule, which gets directly to Kishi's own importance. It's fine if you want to add additional details to the lead, but for an article this long and of this importance, which has already undergone significant debates and editing, it would be vastly preferable if you didn't arbitrarily remove details and clarifications that have already been hashed out over many years, especially with no explanation or justification. If anything, this lead needs to be slightly expanded, not extensively trimmed. -- Ash-Gaar (talk) 21:58, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Fair criticisms all. Thank you for incorporating my proposals in your recent improvements. — Goszei (talk) 22:51, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Contradictions regarding release

The lead states Kishi was handpicked by the occupation as a future pro-American leader and that this was the cause for his release, but this is contradicted by the fact that he was purged until the end of he occupation. Even after entering politics, Kishi was critical of the pro-American policy of Shigeru Yoshida and only became noticeably pro-American himself later on. Moreover, his release wasn't unusual, but part of a broader pattern in American policy. — Mispoulet (talk) 10:41, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree that that part of the lead may be a bit overstated and might need some rewriting, but Kishi was released in 1948 (4 years before the end of the occupation), and was praised by American officials at that time for his anti-communism, so in my view the lead is not wildly inaccurate. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 20:52, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Also, that part of the lead is based directly on the paragraph in the article itself about Kishi's American supporters, so someone can check the cited source for more details (Schaller). --Ash-Gaar (talk) 20:54, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

The article text and source say that certain pro-Japanese lobbyists in America regarded him as a potential leader. The lead goes well beyond this. — Mispoulet (talk) 23:01, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

I completely agree with Mispoulet. It is misleading and inconsistent with the sources to say he was released by occupation authorities because he was deemed in 1948 as the "best man to lead Japan". His release was just another part of the Reverse Course, and as the article body states he only emerged as America's man in 1955, after the founding of the LDP. — Goszei (talk) 03:49, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

As mentioned, I agree that it is overstated, so feel free to edit, but if so, please also correct the similar statement in the article body. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 04:58, 29 November 2024 (UTC)