Issue:
February 2025 | Obituary
Tsuneo Watanabe ditched his youthful radicalism, but kept conservative targets in his sights
I read with sadness of the passing of Tsuneo Watanabe, the longtime shogun of the Yomiuri Group, which publishes the Yomiuri Shimbun. He died in December at the age of 98 after a bout of pneumonia. He was so powerful I didn’t think he would ever actually die.
Under Watanabe’s leadership, the Yomiuri became the largest newspaper in the world with a daily circulation of 12 million for its morning edition.
Watanabe was known for his close ties with political leaders, including many in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), especially Yasuhiro Nakasone. His editorial direction often supported conservative policies and advocated for constitutional revision, particularly to Japan's “pacifist” Article 9.
He also became the “owner” of the Yomiuri Giants, a post he was unqualified for, as he did not particularly like baseball and did not even understand the rules. During his regime, he conspired with Seibu Lions owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi to form an ill-advised plan to turn the 12 NPB teams of the Central and Pacific Leagues into one eight-team league, starting with combining the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Orix Blue Wave to form the Orix Buffaloes. This led to the only players strike in the history of Japanese professional baseball. The strike lasted all of two days, but it effectively ripped up the plan to further shrink the number of teams and led to the creation of a new club, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, to restore the 12-team setup.
I knew Watanabe fairly well. In 1968, while I was a student at Sophia University, a professor named Kan Ori who was teaching a Japanese politics class I attended approached me about teaching English to his friend Watanabe, who at the time was one of Japan’s top reporters and was being assigned to take over the Yomiuri's Washington bureau.
As I understood the situation, the Yomiuri Shimbun wanted to buy some land and put up a new building in Otemachi. The government agreed to cooperate only on the condition that Watanabe – who had greatly irked the Eisaku Sato cabinet with constant criticisms in his newspaper columns – be sent out of the country. Hence the D.C. appointment.
I accepted, and for the following year I went to Watanabe’s apartment in San Ban Cho three times a week.
We would retreat to his den, seated on tatami at a low table and surrounded by stacks of books on global government and politics. He would drink tea and talk about the affairs of the day in English, which he was, in fact, quite good at. Occasionally we would be joined by his friend Sam Jameson, the famed correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and later the Los Angeles Times. It was there that I met Yasuhiro Nakasone and a Mr. Kobayashi, his secretary general. They were all regular members of Mr. Watanabe’s benkyokai, a weekly study group that Watanabe had organized for his political associates to discuss politics and play mahjong.
Watanabe was not a typical Japanese conservative. The son of a banker in Tokyo who died prematurely from stomach cancer, he grew up in comfortable circumstances and, as a junior high school student, openly opposed the army and teachers who promoted militarism. In high school, he was called to work in a factory making airplanes which he resisted by making defective parts. Drafted by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945 during the last stages of the war, as a lowly private, he suffered physical abuse at the hands of his superiors.
It was during that time that the military began dispatching kamikaze pilots, whom the Japanese right-wing went on to glorify as willing martyrs for the emperor.
“It’s all a lie that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, ‘Long live the emperor!’” Watanabe would tell me with anger in his voice. “They were sheep at a slaughterhouse. Everybody was looking down and tottering. Some were unable to stand up and were carried and pushed into the plane by maintenance soldiers.” He told me he had hated Japan’s militarism with every fiber of his being.
Soon after the war, in September 1945, he entered Tokyo University and applied for membership of the Youth Communist Federation. He distributed pamphlets, fliers and encouraged people to attend the lectures. By 1947, he was acknowledged as a regular member of the Japanese Communist Party. He belonged to one of the cells in the university and delivered speeches in other universities, which resulted in increasing party members.
But he came to find the movement too dogmatic and in December 1947 submitted his resignation from the JCP. Others say he was booted out for criticizing the movement.
After graduation, he joined the Yomiuri Shimbun, and by the end of the 1950s had become the newspaper’s leading reporter. He had also become more conservative. He was captain of the press club that reported on Bamboku Ono, a leading conservative in the newly formed LDP, and developed a close relationship with Nakasone, a up-and-coming politician (and future prime minister of Japan), whom many Japanese were comparing to a JFK – young, healthy, vigorous, and dressed in tailored suits with designer silk ties.
Watanabe was gruff and blunt. He wore his politics on his sleeve. He hated the emperor and the imperial system, which was an amalgam of state and religion. He blamed the emperor for allowing the war to happen and he told me he thought the imperial palace should be torn down, the grounds paved over and turned into a parking lot.
He was an outspoken opponent of Yasukuni Shrine and thought Shinto was a mumbo-jumbo religion.
I did my best to help Watanabe-san improve his English. As it turned out, however, I was the one who got the education.
It was thanks to Watanabe that I first learned how corrupt politics in Japan was. It was all about money, starting with the prime minister and LDP Party boss Eisaku Sato. “Japanese politics is dirty,” he liked to say. “It’s all about money. Not policy. Only money.”
Watanabe disliked Sato, the elephant-eared prime minister at the time. Sato, the son of a samurai-turned-sake brewer, was the younger brother of Nobusuke Kishi, an American puppet and CIA favorite. Watanabe thought he was corrupt to the core. Indeed, Sato’s tenure at the top was marked by a string of corruption scandals that became known as the Black Mist. Among them, bribes paid by the Kyowa sugar company to LDP politicians for help in obtaining $20 million in loans, Sato’s transportation minister arranging for an express train to stop at his local hometown station, LDP Diet members extorting businessmen for money, the head of the Self-Defense Force using YS-11 aircraft for private use, and the speaker of the lower house dealing in fraudulent bank drafts. And that was just in 1966.
Watanabe described in detail how he thought Sato had secured the prime ministership. In 1964, the former prime minister, Hayato Ikeda, suffering from throat cancer, had been compelled to resign his post because of his failing health. It was decided by party officials that rather than endure a difficult intra-party battle between the leading factions over his successors, it would be better if Ikeda chose the next party president, who would automatically become prime minister under Japan’s parliamentary system. The logical choice was Ichiro Kono, who had organized the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and was close to Ikeda. Ikeda, who was unable to speak because of his illness, wrote down the name of his successor, Kono, on a piece of paper, folded it and handed it to an aide.
“Somewhere along the line,” said Watanabe, “the paper was intercepted, made to disappear, a large amount of money changed hands, and a new piece of paper appeared with Sato’s name on it.”
For a naïve 24-year-old, that was quite a revelation.
Corruption in the Sato regime was a frequent target of Watanabe’s columns. He told me that Sato’s wife had visited his wife with a gift – an envelope full of money - an unsubtle hint that she might suggest to her husband to ease off on his attacks on the Prime Minister’s Office. Watanabe’s wife, a former actress and model, refused. “Sato should commit hara-kiri,” Watanabe said with contempt in his voice.
In November 1966, Sato went on television and told a nationwide audience: “It is regrettable that my administration and party have invited public distrust for lack of moral standards. The main thing is that I, as the responsible person, fully grasp the implications.” On the theory that he could best correct the situation, Sato announced his candidacy for a second term as LDP president. No one doubted that he would win. And so he did in an election held in December.
I introduced Watanabe to friends in Washington D.C. who helped him settle in, and I saw him periodically over the years. He ran a nice interview and story about me in his newspaper for my first book The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, which helped make it a bestseller.
But our relationship went south in 1990, when I wrote a column in the Shukan Asahi exposing the Yomiuri Giants' false attendance reports at their new stadium, Tokyo Dome. The Giants reported a capacity crowd of 56,000 for every home game, but I counted the seats. There were 42,761 seat and standing room for 3,600. I also discovered a sign on the B3 Level of the Dome parking area posted by the Tokyo Fire Department, which read 46,134.
According to Sam Jameson, Watanabe was very angry about that story and told him “I’ll never forgive that son-of-a bitch Bob Whiting for writing that in the Asahi.”
Sam told me: “It was the disloyalty that bothered him.”
So much for truth and objectivity in reporting.
Tsuneo Watanabe, RIP.
Robert Whiting is a best-selling author and journalist who has written several successful books on sport and contemporary Japanese culture, including You Gotta Have Wa (1989), The Meaning of Ichiro (2004), Tokyo Junkie (2021), and Gamblers, Fraudsters, Dreamers & Spies (2024).
