Word: tanaka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...early fall breeze swept over Peking airport, lifting the first Rising Sun flag to fly there since 1945. As Japan's Premier Kakuei Tanaka stepped out of his DC-8, a Chinese band struck up the solemn Japanese anthem Kimigayo (The Reign of Our Emperor), then switched to the Communist Chinese anthem March of the Volunteers, the staccato marching song that Mao Tse-tung's Red Army sang during its wars with Emperor Hirohito's plundering troops in the 1930s and '40s. It was a moving beginning to a historic meeting that would end a century...
Though even Tanaka's daughter Makiko says, "Father is perfectly empty when it comes to almost anything cultural," voters are enamored of his breezy, folksy style. The Premier holds one or two press conferences a week and sees scores of visitors every day, groaning all the while that the Japanese "must learn the art of coming to the point as fast as possible." Other Premiers have been stiff and unapproachable; Tanaka rattles on to all comers about his favorite movie stars (Gary Cooper, Deborah Kerr), his golf game (he has an 18 handicap), or his impatient manner ("I think...
...occasion, Tanaka's frankness verges on the coarse. In his 1966 autobiography, which he hands out to visitors to the sprawling Tokyo mansion where he lives with his wife Hanako, he tells of being offered a geisha to sleep with one night toward the end of the war, during his contractor days. Tanaka chivalrously sent her home because she looked "too fragile," but the memory of the encounter, he writes, grows "increasingly more vivid" with time. At times, Tanaka indulges in sentimentality. On the long flight to Honolulu last month, he dashed off several sayings in Chinese calligraphy, which...
Though he is a quick study, Tanaka is not an intellectual. He is known in some quarters as a "wakatta man," for his habit of interrupting anyone speaking to him in mid-sentence by snapping "Wakatta, wakatta"-the Japanese equivalent of the Italian capita, capita (I understand). "He talks too fast and too much," says one sympathetic critic, Chiba University Professor Keihachiro Shimizu. "Perhaps that is his way of attempting to hide his lack of learning and deep ideas. By talking fast he often seems to try to awe his interlocutors. That won't work...
...Tanaka has certainly awed Japanese voters. But once the euphoria over the Chinese rapprochement fades, his government will be under pressure to act as well as talk on pressing problems; among them are pollution and a generally drab style of life. For the moment, however, most Japanese are betting that, as Novelist Masaharu Fuji says, perhaps wishfully, Tanaka "might really do something out of the ordinary...