Word: tanaka
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...prefectural building, where Tanaka has his office, two young women desperately try to get a glimpse of the Governor, who is holed up in budget meetings. With a video camera, autograph boards and calligraphy pens, they prowl the halls for four-and-a-half hours, finally catching up to Tanaka eating lunch in the employee cafeteria. What excites them about Tanaka? "It's his intelligence, his perseverance, his warmth," says Ayako Yamada, a housewife who lives a two-hour train ride away. "He is so passionate...
...Inside, more fans are lining up. Public relations is Tanaka's forte, and upon taking the governorship, he moved his office to a ground-floor room where he installed curtain-less plate-glass windows. Outside is a public lounge, with tables, chairs and vending machines. The public is allowed?more than that, they're encouraged?to come and 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...
...Tanaka is not especially handsome: he's short of stature, doughy-faced and displays a conspicuously well-fed belly. While a college student, he won a prestigious literary prize for a novel about Japan's alienated youth, and then turned himself into a peculiarly Japanese breed of writer-pundit-celebrity famous for simply saying outrageous things. This career puts him in a newly popular club of politicians with a single platform: to rock Japan's long-coddled boat. Koizumi and his feisty Foreign Minister, Makiko Tanaka (no relation to the Nagano Governor), are the most visible examples from within...
...There is a lot of talk about destroying things in Japan these days. The ldp. The bureaucracy. The outdated banking system. So Tanaka's experience in Nagano is an instructive parable for the rest of Japan, and in particular, for rebel Prime Minister Koizumi. Can Tanaka show the way in Nagano? Or will he prove to be a flash in the pan, a trifling, inconsequential political buffoon? Sure, he is clever enough to feed the public what it wants to hear. In Nagano, they'd had their fill of pricey public-works projects, so they applauded Tanaka's decision...
...Tanaka's fatal error, which is starting to show, is that he thought public adoration was enough. He forgot that he has to make use of that popularity to bring the recalcitrant bureaucrats on board and to convince his legislative opponents that they'd be fools to stand in the way of a popular Governor. In March, lawmakers brutally destroyed his plan to stop construction of the Shimosuwa dam. There wasn't a thing Tanaka could do about it but grouse. "The general contractors and construction companies think that more highways and bridges will bring on prosperity and recovery...