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The father, Hidesuke Kishi, was a minor government official in a village on the green, indented western tip of Honshu, Japan's main island. His scholarly attainments won him a job with the aristocratic Sato family, and he tutored their eldest daughter, Moyo, in Chinese literature. He was permitted to marry Moyo on condition that he change his name to Sato and, for the remainder of his life, was so much under his wife's thumb that he made little impression on their ten children. The Prime Minister was the second son of Hidesuke and Moyo. In 1958, a quarter-century after the death of his parents, he recalled: "My father was a man of gentle disposition. The fostering of us, the children, was always the job of our strong-minded mother."
Nobusuke was born in Yamaguchi, a pleasant city above the Inland Sea, on Nov. 23, 1896. From childhood he had drummed into him the glories of the Sato family, the Choshu clan and the warrior class. Aristocratic Moyo Sato constantly reminded her son that their ancestors had been charged by the Emperor with guarding Shimonoseki Strait, the gateway to the Inland Sea. Her uncle was a major general who founded the Japanese cavalry; her brothers and sisters married into top families, including the Matsuokas and Yo-shidas. "Never forget you are a samurai," she said. "Never take second place."
As a boy, Nobusuke was frail, and so swarthy that his schoolmates called him "Darky." He was also proud and conceited and "was always picking fights with bigger and older boys," a habit he has not yet outgrown. In middle school, Nobusuke wrote an essay praising the suicide of General Maresuke Nogi, the hero who captured Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War and later disemboweled himself on the death of his beloved Emperor Meiji in 1912. The act had shocked the West and produced a critical editorial in the London Times, but Nobusuke hailed it as an example of virtuous idealism.
At 16, it was Nobusuke's turn to follow his father's footsteps as a yoshi. A marriage was arranged for him with his cousin Yoshiko, the daughter of his father's brother. Although the marriage did not take place for another seven years (Yoshiko was only eleven at the time), Nobusuke resumed his father's name of Kishi and was stricken from the Sato family register.
"The Razor." At Tokyo's Imperial University, Nobusuke Kishi majored in law and graduated with top honors; a friend recalls that he also "drank a lot of sake and knew a great many young Tokyo actresses." In the political arguments that raged at school, young Kishi emerged as a conservative and a fiery nationalist. His hero was Kita Ikki, a right-wing radical who wanted Japan run by a military junta and called for the conquest of Manchuria and Siberia. Kishi was less happy about Ikki's attacks on private property and free enterprise; when some of Ikki's thugs tried to beat up a professor whose opinions they disliked, Kishi withdrew as a disciple.