Tanaka was strongly associated with the construction industry, and the late-20th-century LDP doctrine of the doken kokka ('construction state') owes much to his leadership. Widespread corruption is nothing new in the LDP, but uniquely among its leaders, Tanaka positively embraced it, pulling himself out of poverty and right to the top of the country using every disreputable trick possible, and then using similar tactics to do what fit his (arguably peculiar) idea of 'best' for Japan and Niigata. There are still, however, a couple of exceptions to this general rule, and the most flamboyant of these concerns a man from Niigata named Tanaka Kakuei, one of the very few postwar PMs without any form of family background in politics. Most of these fungible prime ministers' policy platforms have been forgettable in themselves, too, seen as little more than background noise while the so-called postwar economic miracle busied itself spreading the gospel of the electric rice cooker to each corner of the archipelago. The stories of Queen Himiko, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Emperor Meiji have given way to a procession of Liberal Democratic Party figures in suits, the sort of people most would have trouble getting the right way round even if they had studied politics. Japan's postwar leaders have, for the most part, been rather forgettable.
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