In 1989, the twelfth-floor office suite of media mogul Tokuma Yasuyoshi played host to an unusual guest. Mr. Tokuma, head of Studio Ghibli’s parent company, was one of the great wheelers and dealers of the Japanese media world. He was well-acquainted with a wide variety of power brokers, be they politicians, celebrities, or yakuza. Still, there was something notable in having Uno Sōsuke, the Prime Minister of Japan, essentially living in Mr. Tokuma’s private suite. [1]

While employees worked on distribution deals for movies, books, and CDs on the floors below, the Prime Minister did his best to stay out of sight. (Something made difficult thanks to the highly recognizable streak of white in his otherwise black hair.) The leader of Japan, only weeks into his tenure as PM, was actively trying not to be seen. At that moment, he was embroiled in a major scandal – and all because of a single geisha.

It was the first year of the Heisei era, and Japan’s economic boom years of the Bubble era continued unabated. The idea of a powerful man being involved with a geisha was nothing overly shocking. And yet, when Nakanishi Mitsuko stepped forward to tell of her relationship with Uno, it spelled the end of his promising, decades-long career. Uno Sōsuke would go down as one of the shortest-tenured Prime Ministers in Japanese history, the veritable Liz Truss of his day.

But Nakanishi Mitsuko did more than simply bring low her powerful paramour. By emerging from the shadowy world of the geisha industry, she broke a centuries-old code of silence. From the position of a kept woman, she challenged the mores of her society, in which men cheating on their spouses was the natural assumption. The flurry of discourse that surrounded Prime Minister Uno Sōsuke and Nakanishi Mitsuko shook the power centers of the nation – prompting questions about Japanese society that ring true even today.

Born in Scandal

Uno Sōsuke’s meteoric rise and stunning descent were born of yet another scandal – the largest of its time. The Heisei era had just begun, and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (自由民主党) was already in crisis.

It began in 1988, the year before Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, would pass away and the era would change. In that year, the so-called “Recruit Scandal” had shaken Japan’s belief in its public institutions to the core. Academic Yayama Taro, writing in 1990, explained the depth to which the insider trading scandal impacted Japanese society:

“Like a single match, the Recruit scandal has touched off a conflagration of skepticism that threatens to envelop all things political in Japan. But feeding the flames has been a whole complex of factors: not only the resentments and fears of ordinary citizens whose dreams of home ownership have been shattered by the skyrocketing prices of land… but disgust for the politicians who seem to be the only ones making easy money from stocks and political contributions, and anger at the corruption of top officials in such central government agencies as the Ministries of Education and Labor.” [2]

A landmark series of articles by the Asahi Shimbun revealed that human resources company Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd., had bribed numerous high-level politicians and business leaders with shares of a subsidiary prior to going public. The sums were large enough, and the web of persons involved so far-reaching, that the affair was soon hailed as the worst since the infamous Lockheed Scandal of the mid-’70s.

Uno Sōsuke, Unlikely Prime Minister

As the Recruit Scandal wound its way through endless media coverage and, eventually, the courts, LDP leadership dropped like flies. Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru, already unpopular for initiating Japan’s first consumption tax, resigned. Numerous cabinet members followed. The reputations of other Prime Ministers, past and present, were deeply affected. In 1990, Shinto Hisashi, president of telecommunications giant NTT, was sentenced to two years in jail.

The LDP was in shambles. A new leader was needed, but so many of the party’s top players were implicated in the scandal. The furor around the bribery, the media coverage of which left “the impression… that everyone was on the take”[3], seemed to threaten the LDP’s nearly 4-decade stranglehold on national power. All the LDP could do was promise political funding reform alongside the selection of someone squeaky-clean to lead the party. In effect, this meant someone “whom the Recruit company had considered unimportant to the point of not offering a stock bribe.” [4]

The man for the job, it was decided, was Uno Sōsuke.

From the Gulag to the Prime Minister’s Office

Just who was this unlikely new Prime Minister, selected for both his unimpeachable character and relative obscurity within the party?

Uno Sōsuke (宇野 宗佑) was born in 1922 in Shiga Prefecture, in a town near Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest body of water. He came from a family of wealthy sake brewers notable for their local political power; his recent ancestors had been town elders during the Edo era, and his grandfather had twice been mayor.

It may well be that his family’s prominence in local affairs spurred him to enter government for himself. In 1943, as the Pacific War raged, he entered Kobe College of Commerce (modern Kobe U) with an eye towards becoming a diplomat. Only two months later, however, Uno was called up to the front. He would never return to university.

War Comes for Uno

Following training, Uno spent the remainder of the war as a military accountant in Hamhung, northern Colonial Korea. In August of 1945, the war ended with a total Japanese defeat; the Soviet army entered Korea, and Uno’s regiment was disarmed. He soon found himself in detention, and then on a Soviet ship, bound for Nakhodka – the same port city where Sugihara Chiune, “the Japanese Schindler,” would soon spend a year waiting for repatriation to Japan.

But Uno had worse waiting for him – two years in a Siberian POW camp. The Soviet intendants forced Uno and his fellow prisoners to do hard labor in -35c temperatures; the prisoners suffered from insufficient nutrition and invasions of blood-sucking ticks. Uno tried to keep spirits up by organizing haiku gatherings. During his first New Year’s Eve at the POW camp, he composed the following:

捕虜の顔喜怒失せ白き息かよふ/Human emotions fade From the faces of prisoners White mist on our breath

After a year and eight months, Uno Sōsuke’s ordeal came to an end. One of the millions of Japanese repatriated from the former imperial holdings after the war, he suddenly found himself back in his hometown in Shiga. There, a family connection in the publishing industry helped him get his diary released as “Damoi, Tokio” (“Homeward, Tokyo” in Russian, after what he’d heard Soviet soldiers tell him) – one of the first memoirs of a Japanese military man’s experience in Siberian captivity. The book was a major success, and was Uno’s first claim to fame. [5]

Uno gets Married

In 1949, Uno made his way to Kyoto, to the home of a compatriot from the Siberian internment camp, Hirose. There, he happened to meet his friend’s younger sister, Chiyo. The two prayed together at Kitano Tenmangu shrine, soon falling in love. They were married, and Chiyo changed her name to Uno Hiroko.

In 1951, Uno Sōsuke won his first public office, becoming a part of the Saga Prefectural Assembly. By 1955 he’d risen to prefectural vice-chairman.

It was just around this time that a young baby was born – though not a child of the Uno family. Somewhere out there in Japan, Nakanishi Mitsuko was coming into the world. While Uno Sōsuke was enjoying the first years of his assumed wedded bliss, the woman who would grow up to be a geisha, and with whom Uno would entangle himself, was breathing her first.

The Story of Nakanishi Mitsuko

As to the background of the woman who took down Uno Sosuke, much remains a mystery. While Nakanishi Mitsuko (中西ミツ子) exploded into the public consciousness in 1989, and has maintained some notoriety since, occasionally granting interviews, she emerged from the highly secretive world of “Flower and Willow” (the euphemistic name for the Geisha industry). And given the turbulent effects her decision to go public had on both powerful politicians and those in her one-time industry, it’s not surprising that she’s attempted to live a relatively private life since her revelations.

But, while the usual data points – birth date, hometown – are hard to come by, she has still spoken about many other aspects of her life.

Nakanishi Mitsuko was born in the early post-war years, the youngest of nine children. These were tough times throughout Japan, as the country tried to emerge from the utter devastation of defeat in WWII. Nonetheless, there was a set pattern for the “average” woman in post-war Japan, and Nakanishi bucked almost all of those trends.

She married and had a son. That much is standard – but divorce, still taboo in those days, came not long after. Nakanishi took a job as a law firm “OL,” an “office lady,” which brought home the paltry equivalent of $900 a month. Meanwhile, her ex-husband was moving on. “My ex-husband had remarried and he wanted to raise my child,” she said during a 1989 press conference. “So I made up my mind to get up and do something.” [6]

Into the World of the Geisha

Nakanishi needed a better income if she wanted to maintain custody. But what was a divorced OL to do? She thought back on her training as a young woman in the traditional arts; playing the three-string shamisen, learning utai singing and dance. Traditionally womanly arts, and all associated with the highly skilled – and highly secretive – world of the geisha.

The 1980s were a boom time in the geisha world. Geisha had emerged as highly sought-after companions – skilled dancers, singers, musicians, and conversationalists – during the Edo era. After the economic ruin of the war, the industry had faltered, giving way to cheap, government-sponsored prostitution for the incoming occupation troops. Many geisha houses shuttered; meanwhile, prostitutes servicing the American GIs in the “amusement association” often wore makeup and kimono in the fashion of the geisha before them. When servicemen returned to the US, they brought back the idea of “geesha girls” as prostitutes, conflating the two (related but separate) industries.

As Japan recovered from the war, and entered a period of incredible economic growth, there emerged among the upper class a desire to return to old forms. By the 1980s, when the Bubble Era meant many businessmen had extraneous cash and, more importantly, expense accounts like nothing seen before, the hiring of geisha came back into style. Paying a geisha to appear at business dinners is an extravagance and a status symbol, and the roaring 80s were all about economic status.

This is the era in which Nakanishi Mitsuko entered Tokyo’s Kagurazaka Hanamachi – one of the capital’s most prominent geisha districts. And while Nakanishi had some reservations about the industry – especially the submissiveness it demanded of the women who engaged in it – she says she “made up my mind to just cut it from my thoughts.”

It was in 1985, only a month into her new career, that Nakanishi met one Uno Sōsuke.

No Stranger to Affairs

Uno Sōsuke, it seems, had long enjoyed the company of geisha. Unfortunately, he wasn’t always the most accommodating or kind companion. Following Nakanishi’s public condemnation of her former patron, other erstwhile mistresses came forth, including a geisha who claimed she’d been in a relationship with the politician for a full decade. At the time of the scandal, the Washington Post reported the following:

“A geisha with the professional name Hatsuko who said she maintained an affair with Uno from 1975 to 1984 and received 100,000 yen (about $700) a month throughout most of the period… Hatsuko described Uno as an extremely cold man, and said that when she sought some affection from him on the occasion of their 10th ‘anniversary,’ he replied curtly, ‘We’ve been doing it for 10 years?’ Immediately thereafter Uno ended the relationship, she said.” [7]

Other reports showcased claims from partners going back to 1960 – when Uno was just coming into his political own. Salacious as these stories may seem, their contents were considered par for the course when it came to powerful men. It was fairly standard for a man like Uno to count on his wife to take care of things back home. Meanwhile, he continued to concentrate on his political work, engaging in long-lasting affairs on the side.

Uno’s Rising Star Blazes

Uno’s national-level political ambitions took center stage starting in 1958. After a series of losses, he finally made his way into the Lower House of Parliament in 1960 as a member of the LDP – despite coming in second in terms of overall votes to a Socialist Party nominee. Uno became close with the powerful Takeshita Noboru, who would eventually be his scandal-laden PM predecessor; in 1960, the two visited the Indian subcontinent in order to initialize what would become the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers – Japan’s answer to the U.S. Peace Corps. This began Uno’s long association with foreign affairs.

A decade and a half later, Uno’s star reached new heights with his first cabinet appointment. Named Director General of the Defense Agency by “Shadow Shogun” Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, Uno faced an immediate crisis. On November 9th, 1974, the Japanese gas tanker Yuyo Maru No.10 collided with a Liberian freighter traversing Tokyo Bay. Within hours, a massive explosion rocked the ship; over thirty sailors perished. The fires on the Yuyo Maru burned uncontrollably for weeks, with the coast guard and firefighting vessels unable to calm the blaze. At long last, Uno called up the Maritime Self-Defense Force. MSDF destroyers shelled the Yuyo Maru, with submarines firing torpedoes from below. The burning vessel was sunk to the depths of Tokyo Bay.

Avoiding Corruption in a Corrupt World

Tanaka Kakuei’s time as prime minister met a sudden end just as the Yuyo Maru was coming to rest of the seafloor; implicated in corruption, including using the name of a geisha he was involved with for various financial dealings, Tanaka resigned before yet another woman he was having an affair with could be called to the stand. With the collapse of the Tanaka cabinet, Uno lost his ministry credentials in a blink of an eye. He needed not to have worried, though; there would be plenty more where that came from.

In ’76, Uno joined the Fukuda Takeo cabinet as Director General of Science and Technology Agency. In this capacity, he worked alongside US Trilateral Commission head Gerard C. Smith on issues related to nuclear technology; Smith called Uno “the first Japanese to say things as they are.” Various other cabinet positions would follow over the years.

In the background, Uno reportedly continued to engage in a series of extramarital affairs. Now continually located in Tokyo, he was compared to a feudal samurai lord, forced to live in the capital far away from his home province; his affairs were part and parcel of his lifestyle, distant as it was from his home life. He could scarcely imagine that these affairs, completely normalized as they were, would be his downfall.

A Chance Encounter

In 1985, that lifestyle led him to his first encounter with Nakanishi Mitsuko, then a geisha of the upscale Kagurazaka district. Nakanishi would later describe it as “like a meeting ordained by fate.” For Uno, she was simply the next in a long line of geisha.

“Uno-sensei hit a red light on the Nakasendo. If he’d been any later, we wouldn’t have met. I was already finishing up, so we could easily have missed each other… He was by himself. He kept on staring down at my face.”

Uno took an immediate liking to her.

Uno asked, “You’re a newcomer, right? Do you know who I am?” Nakanishi replied with an honest “no.” She would later recall “That was a funny thing for a geisha to say.” Uno, for a moment at a loss for words, ordered the matron to bring over one of his books to prove his stature. “Hey, old bag, hurry up and bring it over!” His uncouth words, spoken in the rarified air of the geisha, shocked Nakanishi. They were a portent of things to come.

Far from an Ideal Partner

Uno continued to pursue this new geisha who had caught his eye. At last, he finally arranged a meeting to become her danna, her patron – with all the nocturnal activities that could entail. His method of solicitation would become one of the most discussed aspects of the coming scandal. “He grabbed three of my fingers (三本握), saying ‘if we become lovers, I can give you this much.'” Nakanishi assumed this meant ¥3,000,000 per month, a standard allowance for a kept Kagurazaka geisha. Uno actually meant a mere ¥300,000.

That night, she says she denied his request to go to bed together. Eventually, though, she acquiesced to the offer. She’d later say that “in the geisha world it’s hard to say no… I had just gotten divorced and I was not confident in myself.” Their first night came months later at the Hotel New Otani; Uno upset Nakanishi by barking about how “that money must have really helped you.”

Uno continually failed to ingratiate himself to Nakanishi, often acting boorishly. The Washington Post recorded that:

“…at a small New Year’s occasion, Uno humiliated her by gesturing derisively when he was asked by an older geisha if it was true that he and Nakanishi were carrying on a special relationship. Later, when the okaasan of her geisha house sought to entertain Uno by performing a special dance for him, the future prime minister made little attempt to disguise his scorn for the old woman’s efforts.”

(That same okaasan would later back up Nakanishi’s stories of Uno, while simotaneously chiding her for breaking the industry wall of silence. “I understand a bit why she wanted to speak out. But a real geisha never talks.”[6] )

Uno eschewed geisha-danna decorum at almost every turn. He would promise gifts, but Nakanishi says he never gave her any. The final insult came in 1986, when he suddenly broke off their year-long relationship. He claimed that a physician issued him a dokuta-stoppu (“doctor stop”), forbidding him medically from carnal relations. No traditional parting gift was forthcoming, a major taboo in the geisha world. Nakanishi was left in shock.

The entire relationship, the type which is supposed to provide a geisha a comfortable retirement, had reaped Nakanishi perhaps $21,000.

Left Behind, and a Trip to the Middle East

Nakanishi, bereft of a patron and in debt for the expensive, elaborate kimono all geisha must own, left Kagurazaka behind. Her time as a geisha was fairly brief, not lasting much longer than her relationship with Uno Sōsuke. She moved on to other vocations, trying her best to get by. Eventually, lacking anywhere to turn to, she joined a Buddhist nunnery in Kagoshima.

Uno, meanwhile, was about to start his career-making cabinet position as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In 1988, serving under his longtime colleague, Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru, Uno became the first Japanese cabinet-level official to visit Israel; this was an especially notable event, given Japan’s historically cool relations with the Jewish state. In 1972, the two countries briefly came together during the response to the Lod Airport Massacre, in which members of the rouge “Japanese Red Army” had killed 26 people. The 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo, however, put an end to any warm relations between Israel and Japan, the latter of which bought 70% of its oil from Arab states.

Meeting with his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, Uno reportedly urged Israel to pull out of occupied areas in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula. “Japan’s prosperity is a crystalization of its citizen’s sweat and tears,” he told Peres. “We will not be giving a single monetary unit to a country that takes land by military force.”

(Uno, of course, had been a soldier in Imperial Japan’s occupied colony in Korea. Either way, the economic floodgates had already opened – Mitsubishi had already become the first Japanese car company to enter Israel the same year.) [8]

Welcome to the Prime Minister’s Residence, Uno Sōsuke

In 1989, Nakanishi Mitsuko, no longer a geisha, happened to see a familiar face on the news. The media was in a frenzy over discussions of who would be replacing the disgraced Prime Minister Takeshita; then, at long last, the name of Foreign Minister Uno Sōsuke was put forward. Nakanishi was shocked to see Uno’s white shock of hair on the TV screen; how far her former paramour had risen!

It had all happened behind closed doors, as various LDP power brokers searched for a squeaky-clean Prime Minister who could regain the lost trust of the masses. English language media seemed somewhat positive about Uno as a political operative – “Uno, 66, is a voluble, piano-playing veteran politician of considerable intelligence who has earned generally high marks as foreign minister since November 1987,” said the Washington Post. [9] But it was also wondered whether he was simply a caretaker PM, doomed to be ousted when the LDP faced difficult elections in the coming months.

Uno’s new position was just as much of a surprise for Nakanishi as was for the nation. She decided to reach out. She called up his office and managed to get the new Prime Minister on the phone. When she offered his congratulations, his annoyed response was simply “I can’t have you calling me.” [10]

The phone call ended, and Nakanishi felt her hackles rising. Despite reservations, she decided to act; the people of Japan needed to know Uno Sōsuke as she did.

Uno Triggers the Reverse Card

Uno’s sudden rise was seen by many in the political world as a “windfall,” and perhaps an unearned one. He’d leaped over more qualified, hand-picked would-be successors by sheer dint of being a minor player. Some former Soviet internment camp POWs have all the luck, they surely grumbled.

All that luck would last a mere three days. The Uno cabinet launched its running of the country on June 3rd, 1989. On June 6th, Sunday Mainichi broke the story of Nakanishi Mitsuko’s tales of an upjumped, unkind lover. The rumblings of Uno’s downfall could already be heard, even if dimly.

Nakanishi had phoned various newspapers, telling them of how cruelly she felt Nakanishi had treated her, but few had expressed interest in her story. At long last, one paper decided to run an interview with her – the Sunday Mainichi. Its then-editor-in-chief, Torigoe Shuntarō, would later explain his decision to run the story – that Uno’s “three fingers” statement made this a case of prostitution, rather than a mere affair. (In 2016, Torigoe’s attempts to run for governor of Tokyo would be forstalled when his own sex scandal came to light.)

Few outlets picked up on Sunday Mainichi’s scoop. After all, it was thought, how a Prime Minister runs his bedroom had little to do with his running of the state. A general unwritten rule about not covering political sex scandals pervaded; considering the amount of infidelity going on in the Japanese political world, one spurned geisha didn’t seem worth the effort to break that taboo.

An International Incident

Within weeks, this all changed. The impetus came, as it sometimes does with Japanese scandals, when foreign media took notice. The Washington Post began covering Uno’s geisha-related woes, and the now international nature of the story spurred local newspapers to react. What started as a non-story quickly became the biggest media-feeding frenzy in Japan.

Reactions were varied, with some seeing Nakanishi as an angry, jilted lover; others felt that anything “below the belt” should be kept out of political debates. But the lurid details of the controversy left many women in Japan with a supremely bad impression of their new Prime Minister. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to say that “Nakanishi stands as the unlikely symbol of a budding feminist insurgency that is turning the political and social worlds here topsy-turvy.” [6]

“Until now, I’ve kept quiet. I’ve cried all by lonesome,” said Uno in an interview. “But when I saw that man become prime minister, I knew I had to do something. This couldn’t be allowed to stand… People say this is just an issue of ‘the lower half of the body.’ But it’s not. It’s about humanity.”

“The Feminist Geisha”

Nakanishi was candid in her discussions with media outlets, both local and international. She spoke of frustration with women’s subservient roles in Japan, epitomized by her own former position as a geisha; chief among her complaints was the rife cheating culture in Japan, which saw women “putting condoms in their husband’s luggage” when they went on business trips.

Nakanishi’s message rang true; women’s groups began to picket Uno’s public appearances. LDP fixers could see the writing on the wall, and urged their hand-picked PM to avoid giving stump speeches for any of their nominees for the upcoming elections. Uno went into veritable hiding high up in the Tokuma Shoten skyscraper, refusing all calls to respond to the controversies roiling the Tokyo streets below. His wife, however, stood by his side, saying she believed none of the claims against him; “I consider all of it to be mere fabrications.” (「デッチ上げだと思っております。」)

Then came the House of Councillors election, taking place only a month after Nakanishi had gone public. The results were dramatic. Between the unpopular income tax, the aftereffects of the Recruit Scandal, and Uno’s “geisha problem,” the LDP suffered its first national defeat since its formation in 1955. The Socialist Party emerged victorious, led by Doi Takako, the first woman to lead a major Japanese political party. The LDP’s ability to pass legislature would be starkly curtailed.

The very next day, Uno Sōsuke announced his resignation as Prime Minister. He’d held the post for a mere 69 (!) days.

(If you want to understand how easily prime ministers can come and go in Japan, Uno is only the 4th shortest-tenured PM in Japanese history.)

Bidding Farewell to Scandal

Uno retired from politics 1996, by which time he had seen his party continue to be involved in numerous scandals; the LDP finally fell from power entirely for the first time in 1993. He died of lung cancer in 1998 at the age of 75, the first of the Heisei-era prime ministers to pass away.

With Uno out of power, his “geisha problem” faded from the headlines. But for Nakanishi, the ramifications of her coming forward were more permanent. She felt she was unhirable, and languished in depression.

“Wherever I went, I was stared at,” she said in a rare interview at the age of 61. “I couldn’t set foot in Tokyo. My parents were dead, I was divorced, I had nothing to do with my son and nowhere to go. An acquaintance introduced me to a temple in Shiga Prefecture, and I joined as an acolyte.”

Interviewers continued to hound her. She soon found work elsewhere, and eventually became a licensed masseuse. She re-married, but went through a second divorce, swearing off the maritial institution.

Eventually, however, she found peace.

For a time, Nakanishi was the most infamous woman in Japan; she sparked conversations about the role of women in the country, and about the culture of subservience and infidelity. She’d played a major role in bringing down a prime minister.

In 2019, Nakanishi Mitsuko was asked about what her state of mind had been like lo those three decades ago, when she’d prematurely ended Japan’s Uno era:

“My state of mind? It was my life, so rather than regretting not doing something, better to have regrets for actions actually taken. I was deadly serious, but then again, so was Mr. Uno. I couldn’t weigh the pros and cons in that moment. The end results may not have benefited me, but I think there is meaning in what I did all those years ago.” [10]

Sources

[1] Alpert, Steve. (2020). Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man. p.27

[2] Taro, Yayama. (1990). The Recruit Scandal: Learning from the Causes of Corruption. Journal of Japanese Studies, 16(1), 93–114.

[3] White, James W. (1993). The Dynamics of Political Opposition. Postwar Japan as History. (Quoted in Mitchell.)

[4] Mitchell, Richard H. (1996). Political Bribery in Japan. University of Hawaii Press. 124-126.

[5] 蚤野久蔵. (2014). 書斎の漂着本（30) ダモイ・トウキョウ. Bungenkyo.

[6] Blustein, Paul. (July 23, 1989). The Geisha Who Jolted Japan’s Numero Uno. Los Angeles Times.

[7] Blustein, Paul. (June 29, 1989). Geisha Affair Troubles Japan. The Washington Post.

[8] Hiatt, Fred. (May 30, 1988). JAPAN’S FOREIGN MINISTER SCHEDULES FIRST CABINET-LEVEL VISIT TO ISRAEL. The Washington Post.

[9] Hiatt, Fred & Shapiro, Margaret. (June 1, 1989). PARTY CHIEFS PICK FOREIGN MINISTER TO LEAD JAPAN. The Washington Post.

[10] 元木 昌彦. (2019年6月4日). 平成挽歌―いち雑誌編集者の懺悔録（5）. NetLB-NEWS.

(2022.07.31). 宇野宗佑は女性問題のスキャンダルで退陣。愛人の中西ミツ子が指三本の秘密を暴露. アスネタ！

Fukui, Haruhiro. (1989). Japan in 1988: At the End of an Era. Asian Survey, 29(1), 1–11.