Word: nagano
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...himself to describe the sexual act. More specifically, his sexual acts. It's an onomatopoeic word, the pero coming from the slang pero-pero, which means to lick. The guri comes from guri-guri, which means to grind. The 45-year-old Tanaka is Governor of Japan's mountainous Nagano prefecture, west of Tokyo, but he's also a writer, specializing in autobiographical pero-guri tales, which reveal a predilection for flight attendants, married women and fine champagne...
...Once in office, Tanaka didn't let up. He ignored the entrenched bureaucrats who run things in Nagano, opened the ledger books so the public could see how much his office spends, and announced his intention to cut public-works spending by 15% and stop the construction of expensive dams, museums and highways that, these days, is just about all government in Japan does. Last week he continued his campaign against the status quo by disbanding the traditional and powerful press club that covers his office...
...still going well: housewives continue to adore him and young people think his brashness is kakkoii, or cool. His guri-guri-ing of the political establishment, however, is proving to be a more strenuous task than an assignation with Mrs. U at the Hyatt. The ldp hacks in Nagano have overruled his plan to stop dam construction and rammed through their own budget. (Even though Tanaka is Governor, they still hold the majority power in the prefectural legislature.) That's a lesson Prime Minister Koizumi in Tokyo might learn when his honeymoon ends. Promising change in Japan is undeniably popular...
...Nagano is best known for the 1998 Winter Olympics held in its capital, a postcard-pretty ski resort of 363,000. The entire prefecture bought into an Olympic pipe dream, convinced that building a luge run and hosting Lycra-clad skaters would somehow translate into a big pot of gold. A bullet-train line was built from Tokyo, hotels went up, airport runways were laid down. In all, nearly $1 billion was spent. But once the Olympic torch was extinguished, Nagano's post-Olympic boom failed to materialize. The city's downtown looks deserted and there's plenty of room...
...watch Tanaka. Watch him do what? Work, ostensibly, at being Governor. But Tanaka spends most of his day working the crowd. "Politicians usually stay so far away from us," says 19-year-old Shinya Urayama, a college student from Tokyo on a snowboarding holiday who also wanted to view Nagano's second most famous tourist draw. "But, somehow, I don't know how, we feel very close to Tanaka...