Modern Japan Yoshida Shigeru Yoshida Shigeru was quite arguably the biggest key player in Japan's postwar politics. Not only was he the prime minister, as well as the foreign minister for most of the first decade of Japan's postwar period, but he also had a powerful group of political disciples known as the "Yoshida School". It was this group of LDP conservatives who dominated the political arena during the majority of the postwar period, even after Yoshida's fall from power in 1954. Yoshida