Ryōichi Sasakawa
| Ryōichi Sasakawa 笹川 良一 |
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|---|---|
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| Born |
May 4, 1899 Osaka, Japan |
| Died | July 18, 1995 (aged 96) Tokyo, Japan |
| Cause of death | Stroke |
| Occupation | Businessman, Sports administrator |
Ryōichi Sasakawa (笹川 良一 Sasakawa Ryōichi?, May 4, 1899 – July 18, 1995) was a Japanese businessman, politician, and philanthropist. He was born in Minoh, Osaka. In the 1930s and during the Second World War he was active both in finance and in politics, actively supporting the Japanese war effort including raising his own paramilitary units. He was elected to the Japanese parliament during the war. After Japan's defeat he was imprisoned for a time as a suspected war criminal, and then found financial success in various business ventures including motorboat racing and ship building. He supported anticommunist activities, including the World Anti-Communist League. In 1951 he helped found the Nippon Foundation and became its first president. The foundation has done charitable work around the world, for which it and Sasakawa have received many official honors.
In the 1930s, during the Sino-Japanese War, Sasakawa rose to prominence by using wealth gained in rice speculation to build a voluntary flying squad within Japan for the purpose of providing trained pilots in the case of a national emergency. He also built an air defense field, donating it to the army. Once Japan began to coordinate its air power in 1941, Sasakawa dissolved his voluntary flying group and gave all of its facilities and aircraft to the nation. In addition, he used the various mining interests that he had accumulated to support the army by in a more concrete fashion. Sasaka was more interested in supporting the war effort than making a profit, with one biographer noting that "his family records show ... that his mining ventures were not as profitable in wartime as they could have been".
In addition, the 1930s saw Sasakawa take the helm of the Kokusui Taishu-to, or Patriotic Peoples' Party (PPP). This small organization was one of the many right-wing groups that sprang up in Japan in the lead-up to World War II. It was in this connection that he first met Yoshio Kodama, who was at that time a member. In 1935, Sasakawa and twelve other leading members of the PPP were arrested and held for three years on suspicion of having ordered the blackmail of several leading companies, such as Takashimaya, the Hankyu Railway, and Tokyo Life Insurance. Though he was eventually acquitted, the jail time and the subsequent appeals process took a total of 6 years, leading up the opening year of World War II. In the end, the prosecution itself revealed that the charges against him had been based more on perception of the PPP as "dangerous," than on actual evidence of blackmail.
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