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After serving three years in Sugamo Prison, Kishi and 18 other "Class" A war-crime suspects" were released without trial. In jail he had read Confucius, exercised, cleaned cells and latrines, despised the craven and selfish behavior of the admirals and generals in prison with him, and thought. Kishi recalls: "I had plenty of time to strip my own soul naked and study it." He says he was "forced to the conclusion that the war had been futile from the start. I became convinced that Japan must never again be involved in war." Finally, "when I found out I was not going to be hanged, I began to think about the rest of my life as a bonus to be wisely spent."
On the day of his release in 1948, while eating his first home meal of raw tuna, Kishi received a phone call from Sugar Magnate Aiichiro Fujiyama, who had cared for the Kishi family during his imprisonment. He offered Kishi the chairman ship of one Fujiyama company and a directorship in another. With his income assured, Kishi looked around him at the new Japan. The good things of the occupation—land reform, abolition of the peerage, parliamentary democracy—were balanced, he thought, by such bad things as inflation, the breakup of the cartels and the wide influence of the Communists, who had been let out of jail at the same time that Tojo and his friends went in.
The government was headed by the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, whose daughter was married to a cousin of Kishi's. The Secretary-General of the Cabinet was Kishi's own brother, Eisaku Sato. Prospects seemed inviting, but there was nothing Kishi could do until he was "de-purged" in 1952. He spent the time working at his industrial jobs and in profitably cultivating his wide acquaintance among businessmen.
His brother finally arranged an interview with Prime Minister Yoshida, but it was not a success. The 74-year-old Yoshida correctly saw the younger Kishi as a potential rival. Kishi regarded Yoshida as a stumbling block in the way of a fusion of all conservative factions in Japan against the Socialists and Communists.
It took Kishi only five years to get to his goal as Prime Minister. He first helped organize a new Democratic Party made up of a dissident segment of Yoshida's Liberals and a group of "progressives." But he was able to overthrow Yoshida only by entering into an alliance with the Socialists—even though his ultimate aim was to create an anti-Socialist force. Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, who succeeded Yoshida, had suffered a stroke, and hung on for two trembling years before resigning. He was followed by Tanzan Ishibashi, who appointed Kishi his Foreign Minister and then fell ill in turn and resigned within 63 days. On Feb. 25, 1957, at the head of a combined Democratic-Liberal Party, Nobusuke Kishi became Prime Minister of Japan.