Ikeda Hayato
(1899–1965), prime minister of Japan. A finance ministry bureaucrat who served as Japan's prime minister from 1960 to 1964, Ikeda is associated with the high economic growth in Japan of the 1960s, which he helped promote with his celebrated campaign for a doubling of national income in ten years.
A native of Hiroshima Prefecture, Ikeda graduated from Kyoto University in 1925, after which he worked in several prefectural tax offices. He was elected to the Lower House of the Japanese Diet (parliament) in January 1949 as a member of the Democratic Liberal Party (Minshu Jiyuto). Ikeda served as vice minister of finance (1947–1948), minister of finance (1949–1952), and minister of international trade and industry (1950) under Japan's most powerful early postwar politician, Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967). He and Sato Eisaku constituted the core of what was known as the Yoshida school.
Ikeda served in Japan's delegation to the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1951. And he played a critical role in normalizing U.S.-Japanese security relations as Yoshida's special emissary in Washington for talks with Assistant Secretary of State Walter S. Robertson over Japanese rearmament in October 1953.
Further Reading
Ito, Masaya. (1985) Ikeda Hayato. Tokyo: Jiji Tsushinsha.
Waldner, G. W. (1975) "Japanese Foreign Policy and Economic Growth: Ikeda Hayato's Approach to the Liberalization Issue." Ph.D. diss. Princeton University.
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