Word: tanaka
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...understand Yasuo Tanaka, you need a piece of slang you won't find in any Japanese-English dictionary. Pero-guri is a phrase Tanaka coined 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...
...would take a special prosecutor to get such details from a pol, but Tanaka is his very own muckraker, and the public can't get enough of him. He's probably the best symbol of a Japan desperate for leaders who are anything but the losers who mismanaged the country for the past decade. Like wavy-haired, bold-talking Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who revels in being nicknamed "weirdo," Tanaka got power by talking Big and talking New. Last September, six weeks before the prefecture's gubernatorial election, the newspaper diarist and award-winning novelist announced he was taking...
...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...
...Nevertheless, Tanaka is now discovering that winning over the voters was the easy part. His pero-pero-ing of the public is 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...
...other words, he isn't likely to turn Japan upside down. True, he did appoint a Cabinet that is younger and includes more women and more non-politicians than usual--notably Japan's first female Foreign Minister, Makiko Tanaka. But it's hard to find a clear pattern: one of his economic advisers favors corporate restructuring and repairing the banking system; another leans to traditional pork-barrel politics. Koizumi's immediate problem is that dramatic reforms take time to implement, and the Japanese public that adores him today will turn on him tomorrow if he doesn't produce results...