Extreme right-wing
Japanese nationalist,
millionaire,
philanthropist and indicted
war criminal. In the years before
World War II, Sasakawa, a successful businessman with
yakuza ties, strongly encouraged Japanese aggression abroad. In
1931 he took over the fascist
Patriotic People's Mass Party and turned it into a 15,000-man army of black-shirted soldiers in emulation of
Benito Mussolini, whom he idolized. His army was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in
China and
Malaya during the war.
After the war he was imprisoned for three years as a Class A war criminal by the U.S. occupation forces, but was quietly released when his anti-communist beliefs led certain elements in the American government to regard him as a potentially useful ally in the Cold War.
His tremendous wealth came not only from riches pillaged from China during the war but from his control over one of the three state-sanctioned gambling concessions in Japan. He has been linked to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, played a dominant role in the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, and founded the Asian People's Anti-Communist League. He also founded the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, a Japanese lobbying group which has been described as Sasakawa's bid to win the Nobel prize. He died in the mid-1990s.