Word: nonaka
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...Japan. How the 75-year-old Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) elder finessed a heritage that could have been a liability offers insight into what motivates him and how he operates. From his first campaign for a seat on the town council of Sonobe, a rural town west of Kyoto, Nonaka did not deny his burakumin ties. He didn't advertise them, either. Instead, he adroitly brought himself out of the closet, in a pair of speeches early in his national political career. Nobody could "out" Nonaka because he had outed himself...
...identified himself as a burakumin has ever risen as high in the political world as Nonaka, who was chief cabinet secretary under the late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. Before resigning in December, Nonaka served current Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori in the same job. Having distanced himself from the beleaguered Mori, who is expected to be replaced as chief of the ruling LDP?and thus, as Prime Minister?next month, Nonaka has positioned himself to replace his former boss. "I can't think of anyone else but Nonaka who can be the next Prime Minister," says political analyst Minoru Morita. Party...
Coordination is Nonaka's stock-in-trade. The son of a rice farmer, he is the consummate power broker, a puppet-master who pulls the strings behind the scenes for the LDP, the party that has run Japan nearly continuously for the past 45 years. Nonaka is an old-fashioned pol, having honed his skills as mayor of small-town Sonobe. He first ran for the town council in 1950, at the age of 25, and was elected mayor eight years later. In 1967, he was elected to the Kyoto prefectural government, and immediately butted heads with the long-time...
...Tokyo, he enhanced his reputation as a calculating dealmaker. His critics describe him as Machiavellian, willing to break bread with anyone if it furthers his cause. In 1998, when Obuchi was having trouble holding together a fragile multi-party coalition, Nonaka approached an arch-enemy, Ichiro Ozawa, whose defection from the LDP in 1993 ushered the party out of power for the only time since its inception in 1955. Nonaka had called Ozawa a "devil" for that insult. But he went to Ozawa, hat in hand, and persuaded him to rejoin Obuchi's coalition. Once the relationship was cemented...
Such slick maneuvering makes Nonaka the object of dread. "Most of Nonaka's political power owes itself to people's fear of him," says Morita. For a burakumin to inspire fear in political circles is doubly impressive because it is unthinkable in most other spheres. Even though Japan has laws to protect burakumin, they often endure discrimination in school and in the workplace. In the last government survey in 1993, there were 892,000 burakumin counted in 4,442 districts. (Rights groups say the numbers are much higher, perhaps totaling 3 million.) Yet you won't read about the burakumin...