Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who famously played up his friendship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan and together strengthened the U.S.-Japan alliance, died at a hospital in Tokyo on Nov. 29. He was 101.

As prime minister from 1982 to 1987, Nakasone pushed through the privatization of Japanese National Railways and other state monopolies. Long known for his right-wing views, he called for revising the Constitution and also became embroiled in international controversy when in 1985 he became the first postwar prime minister to make an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine, which memorializes Japan's war dead along with 14 Class-A war criminals.

He stopped the visits from the following year due to harsh criticism from China and South Korea.

Born in Gunma Prefecture in 1918, Nakasone graduated from the University of Tokyo and served as an Imperial Japanese Navy officer before winning his first term in the Lower House in 1947 from the old Gunma No. 3 district. He would win a Lower House seat a total of 20 times, a postwar record.

Nakasone had a lengthy ministerial resume, heading the former Science and Technology Agency and the old Defense Agency as well as the ministries of transport and trade. He also served in the influential posts of secretary-general and General Council chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Nakasone was deeply involved in promoting nuclear power in Japan, having led the movement to include budgetary funds in 1954 for nuclear plant development.

While he established his own LDP faction in 1966, it never gained a large number of members. But Nakasone effectively established ties with more powerful factions and finally became prime minister in 1982 due in large part to support from the LDP faction led by Kakuei Tanaka, the former prime minister who was embroiled in the Lockheed payoff scandal. Nakasone began to distance himself from Tanaka after he was found guilty of accepting bribes.

Nakasone had argued as prime minister that a thorough accounting of postwar politics was needed and in that vein he pushed for a smaller government by privatizing not only the national railways but also the former state telephone and tobacco monopolies.

But the selling off of what was once state-owned land as well as resort development in various regions triggered a sharp rise in real estate prices, particularly in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

He was also fiercely criticized for breaking a campaign promise and trying to introduce a sales tax. The criticism forced Nakasone to retract the proposal.

Through his friendship with Reagan, Nakasone placed Japan firmly among those allied with the United States during the Cold War. He once said Japan would serve as the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" for the bilateral alliance. As part of the effort to increase defense spending, Nakasone decided to break from the 1-percent of gross national product benchmark that had been used to cap defense spending.

In 1986, Nakasone engineered a double election for the Lower and Upper houses on the same day that gave the LDP a landslide win in the more powerful Lower House and allowed him to extend his term as LDP president. He would become the fifth longest-serving prime minister in the postwar era.

He had so much influence that he was able to anoint Noboru Takeshita as his successor.

Even after stepping down as prime minister, Nakasone continued his diplomatic efforts by meeting with the leaders of various nations.

When the single-seat and proportional representation constituencies were introduced into the Lower House as part of an electoral reform program, Nakasone continued to win seats because he was named in the top position of the proportional representation regional bloc constituency for life.

But Nakasone was finally forced to step down from politics in 2003 after serving for more than half a century when then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi strongly urged him to retire.

However, he pushed constitutional reform until the very end, saying at his 99th birthday party in May 2017 that the pacifist Constitution needed to be amended.