Eisaku Satō
Prime Minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972
Eisaku Satō (佐藤 栄作, Satō Eisaku; 27 March 1901 – 3 June 1975) was a Japanese politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972. He was the third longest-serving and longest-uninterrupted–serving Japanese prime minister. Satō is best remembered for securing the return of Okinawa in 1972, and for winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, which stirred controversy. He was a former elite bureaucrat like his elder brother Nobusuke Kishi and a member of the Yoshida school like Hayato Ikeda. Like his predecessor, he also supported Keynesian economic policies.
Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Satō was a member of the Satō–Kishi–Abe family and the younger brother of prime minister Nobusuke Kishi. Satō graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and joined the Ministry of Railways. After the war, he entered the National Diet in 1949 as a member of the Liberal Party, and served in a series of cabinet positions under Shigeru Yoshida, including posts and telecommunications minister from 1951 to 1952, construction minister from 1952 to 1953, and chief cabinet secretary from 1953 to 1954. Satō later joined the Liberal Democratic Party and became finance minister from 1958 to 1960 under Nobusuke Kishi and international trade and industry minister from 1961 to 1962 under Hayato Ikeda.
In 1964, Satō succeeded Ikeda as LDP president and prime minister.
The public source identifies “Eisaku Satō” as prime Minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Eisaku, Satō and Prime.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q179871. VIAF identifies the subject as 8705505. The Library of Congress control number is n81053948. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1975, 1964 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eisaku Satō” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.