JAPAN : Yasuhiro Nakasone, one of Japan’s longest reigning prime ministers and known for his friendship with Ronald Reagan, has died at the age of 101, a top ruling party official said on Friday.
Nakasone, prime minister from 1982 to 1987, hobnobbed on the world stage with Reagan and Margaret Thatcher while battling with bureaucrats over domestic reforms.
He himself said he failed to achieve a dream of revising the country’s pacifist, postwar constitution to clarify the ambiguous status of the military.
“Revising the constitution takes time. I stressed to the public that it was necessary, but it was not possible to begin the revision quickly,” the straight-talking Nakasone told Reuters in an interview in January 2010.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made loosening the limits of the U.S.-drafted constitution a key goal but revising the charter’s pacifist Article Nine remains contentious.
Known for his “Ron and Yasu” friendship with Reagan, Nakasone made headlines after taking office when he said that in event of a war, he would make Japan an unsinkable “aircraft carrier” for U.S. forces and bottle up the Soviet navy.
Nakasone also broke an unwritten rule on limiting the annual defense budget to 1 percent of gross national product.
In 1983, he became the first Japanese prime minister to officially visit South Korea, mending fences with a country that Japan had brutally colonized from 1910 to 1945.
Nakasone, a former lieutenant in the Imperial Navy who lost his younger brother in World War II, outraged Asian countries when he made an official visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where convicted war criminals are honored along with Japan’s war dead, on the 40th anniversary of Japan’s surrender.
He decided not to repeat the pilgrimage after it sparked riots in China. Nakasone’s outspoken ways sometimes caused problems.
In 1986, he offended blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans living in the United States by saying they brought the average intelligence level of Americans below that of Japan.
