Other shadow shoguns
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- Tōyama Mitsuru (1855–1944), Japanese politician and far-right activist
- Noboru Takeshita (1924–2000), Japanese politician and former Prime Minister
- Tsuneo Watanabe (1926–2024), Japanese journalist and newspaper executive
In Japanese politics, a shadow shogun (闇将軍, yami shōgun) is a person who exercises effective control over an organization without formally serving as its leader. The term is used of politicians and other influential figures.
According to Shirō Nakano, Kakuei Tanaka and his secretary, Shigezō Hayasaka, devised the nickname while watching television. It was adapted from yami bugyō ("shadow magistrate"), with bugyō replaced by shogun as a title more appropriate for a former prime minister. Played by Yorozuya Kinnosuke, the character was a Nagasaki magistrate who punished wrongdoers at night. According to Kichiya Kobayashi, the suggestion to raise the character's rank to shogun came from Hayasaka.
Tanaka was described as a shadow shogun after resigning as prime minister in December 1974. His faction remained the largest in the Liberal Democratic Party under his successor, Takeo Miki, allowing him to retain considerable influence despite his prosecution in the 1976 Lockheed scandal. In a 2015 retrospective, Taichi Sakaiya attributed the fall of the governments of Miki and Takeo Fukuda, and the formation of those of Masayoshi Ōhira and Zenkō Suzuki, to Tanaka's influence. The subsequent government of Yasuhiro Nakasone was nicknamed the "Tanakasone cabinet", combining Tanaka's and Nakasone's names. Sakaiya dated the end of Tanaka's period as a shadow shogun to Noboru Takeshita's break with the Tanaka faction in February 1985, the same month in which Tanaka fell ill.
The theatre company JACROW produced Yami no shōgun ("The Shadow Shogun"), a four-part cycle of plays about Tanaka written and directed by Nobuaki Nakamura. The works premiered between 2016 and 2020. In an interview, Nakamura said that he sought to portray both Tanaka's achievements and his failings. Nakamura received an individual Kinokuniya Theatre Award for 2020 for writing and directing the third instalment of the series. JACROW received the award for a theatre company in 2023 for productions that included the four-part cycle.
The term has also been applied to Ichirō Ozawa. In an excerpt from the preface to his book Yami shōgun, reproduced by Kodansha, Kenya Matsuda characterised Ozawa and Hiromu Nonaka as the "last shadow shoguns" since Tanaka. In a November 2009 commentary in JBpress, Saburō Nagata described Ozawa, then secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Japan, as the effective power behind Yukio Hatoyama's government. Nagata argued that Hatoyama's deference to Ozawa prevented the prime minister's office from exercising effective leadership. The nickname was also used in an announcement on Ozawa's official website for his June 2020 appearance on the Abema programme Cunning Takeyama no Doyō The Night.
After Shinzo Abe resigned as prime minister in 2020, commentary in President Online suggested that he could become a shadow shogun comparable to Tanaka. Following the 2021 Liberal Democratic Party leadership election, political scientist Masato Kamikubo described Abe as a "new shadow shogun" in Diamond Online. Kamikubo argued that Abe had helped secure Fumio Kishida's victory and had gained substantial influence over party and government funding, appointments and patronage through the leadership election and the subsequent allocation of party and cabinet posts.
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