Editing Hayato Ikeda (section)

==Legacy==

Historian Nick Kapur credits Ikeda with stabilizing the "[[1955 System]]" in Japanese politics, after it nearly came apart amid vicious factional infighting within the LDP during the [[Anpo Protests|1960 Security Treaty crisis]].{{sfn|Kapur|2018|p=107}} Ikeda's "low posture" and conciliatory politics helped tame factions within his own party and reduce inter-party conflict with the opposition parties in order to preclude future mass extra-parliamentary street protests. Ikeda helped turn the LDP into a stable, "big tent" party that could win thumping super-majorities at the polls by winning votes from a broad cross-section of interest groups, while also not abusing those super-majorities by ramming through unpopular policies. In particular, Ikeda's renunciation of constitutional revision, long seen as a holy grail by LDP conservatives, set the course for Japan's stable conservative rule under U.S. hegemony for the next several decades, and paved the way for the decline of the opposition Japan Socialist Party.{{sfn|Kapur|2018|pp=80–82}}

Ikeda's Income Doubling Plan also proved to be an astonishing success, helping greatly extend the lifespan of Japan's postwar "[[Japanese economic miracle|economic miracle]]." Although the initial target growth rate of the plan was 7.2% per year, by the mid 1960s Japan's GDP growth rate reached as high as 11.6%, and averaged greater than 10% over the entire decade, with the economy achieving the goal of doubling its size in less than seven years.<ref>{{Cite book|last=McCargo|first=Duncan|year=2013|title=Contemporary Japan|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wy0dBQAAQBAJ|pages=42–43|isbn=9781137284914}}</ref> Perhaps even more importantly, according to Kapur, Ikeda's Income Doubling Plan "enshrined 'economic growthism' as a sort of secular religion of both the Japanese people and their government, bringing about a circumstance in which both the effectiveness of the government and the worth of the populace came to be measured above all by the annual percentage change in GDP."{{sfn|Kapur|2018|pp=106–107}} Similarly, Japanese economist [[Takafusa Nakamura]] concluded that "Ikeda was the single most important figure in Japan's rapid [economic] growth. He will be remembered as the man who pulled together a national consensus for economic growth and who strove unceasingly for the realization of that goal."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Nakamura|first=Takafusa|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=o0K5AAAAIAAJ|title=The Postwar Japanese Economy: Its Development and Structure, 1937–1994|publisher=University of Tokyo Press|year=1995|location=Tokyo|pages=87–88|isbn=9784130470636}}</ref>