On Sept. 2, Yoshihiko Noda was appointed the 95th prime minister of Japan, the sixth man (and they have all been men) to hold the job in five years. To mark this occasion and offer lessons to the new Democratic Party of Japan chief on how not to lead the country, the Community Page asked 10 writers to pick "Japan's most useless postwar prime minister." Here, in chronological order, is the rogues gallery they came up with:
Nobusuke Kishi served as prime minister of Japan from February 1957 to July 1960, leaving a durable legacy of corruption and political mediocrity in his wake. In a very real way, Kishi can be viewed as the grandfather of all useless postwar Japanese prime ministers.
Not the first Japanese prime minister to have ties to the military regime during World War II, Kishi was the only one to be arrested as a Class A war criminal. Released without trial in 1948, Kishi went on to re-enter politics. In 1955, he unified Japan's conservatives under the banner of the Liberal Democratic Party, culminating in his being made prime minister in 1957.
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