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The son of a samurai-turned-sakebrewer, Sato was born in the somnolent town of Tabuse, on Honshu's far eastern coast, just 100 miles from the Straits of Tsushima, where in Sato's fifth year Admiral Heihachiro Togo destroyed the Russian fleet. That was the year of Japan's greatest military success, but little of it rubbed off on Eisaku. Sato's older brother, Nobusuke Kishi,* was the star of the family, graduated second in his class at Tokyo University law school (Sato was much lower). In 1941, Kishi became one of the youngest Cabinet ministers in Japanese history when, at 45, he became Hideki Tojo's Minister of Commerce and Industry.
Sato, in the meantime, spent 13 years in Kyushu, Japan's remote and rural southern island, working as a railways bureaucrat. There he learned the trick of office consensus, if only to keep the trains moving. Twice he was sent to China as a railways adviser during the Japanese war there, and during World War II served as director of a motor pool. He also contracted a serious case of typhus, and while recuperating read an article on the passivity of the Asian masses by U.S. Author Pearl Buck that changed his way of thinking. "Reviewing the past of Japan," he says, "I felt there had been something essentially wrong about our approach to government. It was vitally important for me to know just what the masses aspire to and think; very important to live among the masses and seek a new way for Japan."
His chance to act on that belief came in 1947, when Sato was tapped for the Cabinet and supervised Japan's rise from the ashes of American bombing. Then, in 1953, he was accused of accepting a $55,000 bribe from shipowners, and in the uproar that followed, he resigned. Sato maintains to this day that the money was a political contribution and that he merely failed to register it according to the law. He returned to power after his former classmate Hayato Ikeda took over the Liberal Democratic leadership in 1960. Sato became Minister of Olympic Construction, and for his excellent performance won respect and a new shot at power. After Ikeda fell ill with a terminal cancer in November 1964, Sato's long wait was over: he succeeded to both the party presidency and the premiership.
With his skill in the art of ambivalence and his constant concern with consensus, Sato is an irritating leader to the more Westernized of Japan's interi (intellectuals). Today, at 65, he is a ponderous speaker but a man of steadying weight in a nation ready to take off in many directions. He reads "middlebrow" samurai novels (the Japanese equivalent of westerns), and watches with benevolence the careers of his two sons, Ryutaro, 38, an oil-company executive, and Shinji, 34, who works for the Nippon Kokan steel company. To the looks of a Kabuki actor, Sato adds a very calculating eye for his own position and a buoyant sense of balance when it comes to his party.