Michita Sakata (; 18 July 1916 – 13 January 2004) was a Japanese politician and member of the House of Representatives of Japan. Throughout his career, he served as the Minister of Education, Head of the Defense Agency, Minister of Justice, Minister of Health and Welfare, and Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Sakata's prolific career spanned over 40 years, beginning in 1946 and ending in his retirement in 1990, being reelected 16 times to the House of Representatives. He is most known for his role in the suppression of the 1968-69 Japanese university protests as Minister of Education, as well as for his tenure as the Director of the Defense Agency, when he helped write the National Defense Program Outline and set guidelines for US-Japan cooperation.
Early life
Sakata was born in 1916 in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto, Japan, to a land-owning family. His parents were Michio and Youko Sakata, and he hailed from a political family background. Both his grandfather and his father were members of the Rikken Seiyūkai and active in local and national politics (Michio Sakata, Michita's father, was the mayor of Kumamoto for some time). He attended Yatsushiro Middle School and Seijou High School (after failing the entrance examinations for a prestigious school in Kumamoto, Sakata moved to Tokyo to attend Seijou, where he was allowed to pursue his interests in the humanities and arts further). He then went on to study German studies at Tokyo Imperial University. Having graduated from university in 1942, Sakata began to work for Mitsujiro Ishii, the Minister of Commerce. However, in 1946, at the age of 29, he ran for the House of Representatives in Kumamoto and won.
Ministry of Education politician
Having been elected to the Diet, Sakata began work on educational problems. He worked for the Policy Affairs Research Council and was chairman of the Education System Research Council (ESRC) twice during the 1960s. During the 1968-69 Japanese university protests, Sakata, as chairman of the ESRC, launched an investigation into the causes of the student unrest. From September to November 1968, Sakata and the ESRC gathered information from people involved, concluding in the creation of a document recommending radical change to university structure. In November, Prime Minister Eisaku Satō appointed Sakata to the position of Minister of Education. Following the siege of the University of Tokyo and the end of the protests, Sakata and Satō toured the university, bringing widespread media attention to Sakata as the Minister of Education (Sakata, in reality, had no involvement with the siege). In the following year, Sakata worked to push the Act on Temporary Measures Concerning University Management through the National Diet, curbing student activism greatly.
Following the student unrest, Sakata worked as Minister of Education to address the problem at its core. Sakata worked to form a clique of young politicians within the Diet – the Education zoku. In a statement made at the Educational Committee of the House of Representatives in 1970, Sakata announced a plan to open the University of the Air by 1973. Sakata and his clique were firm supporters of the radical proposals of the Central Council for Education. However, before the Council could publish their report in 1971, Sakata was replaced as Minister of Education by Takami Saburo, a move that provided a decisive blow to the Council.