Shintaro Ishihara, the man who stepped down recently as Tokyo governor after nearly 14 years on the job, is not your typical Japanese politician. Described variously as right-wing and often brutally frank, but also witty and even charming at times, Ishihara reminds us of some of the things that Japanese politicians ought to be but seldom are.
Compared to Japanese prime ministers, who come and go every year (at least since 2007), Ishihara, even at 80, shows no signs of slowing down.
Before becoming Tokyo governor in 1999, he had served 25 years in the Lower House of parliament, but still wants to run for a parliamentary seat in the next general election.
Being the top honcho in Tokyo has been no mean feat.
Japan’s capital city has an estimated gross domestic product of 89.7 trillion yen (2008), the largest among the world’s cities, or only slightly less than that of neighbouring South Korea.
But such facts seem to be lost on the Japanese media, which are intent only on examining Ishihara’s track record as governor, focusing especially on the minuses.
To be sure, the pluses are many too.
For instance, Ishihara introduced tough emission standards for diesel engine vehicles, built more runways for Tokyo’s Haneda Airport allowing for more international flights, and wiped out traffic-clogging illegal parking on the streets of Tokyo.
He also rerouted the annual Tokyo Marathon race through the capital’s most visible tourist attractions, earning kudos from the tourist industry and the runners themselves.
But a bank he created in 2005 to help cash-strapped small firms incurred losses of over 100 billion yen, requiring 40 billion yen in taxpayers’ money in additional capital, and now languishes with only one branch.
Such faults aside however, Ishihara offers lessons in politics that Japanese politicians could do well to study, if not emulate.
His forthrightness stands out.
He has no qualms criticising China or the United States in public, but he inevitably reserves his harshest criticism for his own country.
When he announced his resignation last month, he let loose a torrent of complaints against Japan’s central bureaucracy, especially its obstruction of local projects using red tape, that made a lot of sense.
He also complained about how the national government’s budget is like an overgrown maze of ordinary and special accounts that only Finance Ministry bureaucrats can successfully navigate, making attempts by politicians and others to ferret out wasteful government expenditure a Herculean task.
Faced with a similar situation in the Tokyo metropolitan government, Ishihara’s solution had been to bring in third-party external auditors to clean up the accounting mess.
He wonders why the central government refuses to bring in external auditors but insists on relying only on its own Board of Audit to do the job. The latter’s job is to review government spending annually but it is staffed by bureaucrats, making the task of checking on their colleagues in other departments a rather tricky business.
Ishihara also often articulates what other politicians fear to do.
Most famous of all was his call to his countrymen to stand up to the United States in a famous collection of essays that he penned in 1989 entitled “The Japan That Can Say No".
However, he denies being anti-US, only that he dislikes the way Washington forces itself on other countries. There is also no beating about the bush for Ishihara. He gets quickly to the crux of an issue, even if his solutions are not always orthodox.
He leaves office with what some would call a blot on his career, having been instrumental in plunging Japan-China ties to their lowest through his attempt to buy the disputed Senkaku islands (or Diaoyu to the Chinese).
His aim, he said, was to protect the islands from the Chinese, seeing that the Noda administration was doing nothing.
Ishihara’s move forced the Noda administration to buy the islands from their private owner, to prevent the governor from creating more mischief such as by going ashore.
The purchase unfortunately sparked off a serious diplomatic row with China that caused an economic fallout as well, as Chinese protesters called for a nationwide boycott of Japanese cars and other products.
In hindsight, however, Ishihara deserves credit for drawing attention to Beijing’s territorial ambitions.
Incidentally, the man that the media readily brands as “anti-China” insists he is only “anti-Communist”.
Ishihara once told an interviewer that he loves Chinese culture and that one of his favourite Chinese is the late Deng Xiaoping, the father of China’s economic reforms.
His other favourite Chinese, the popular writer hastened to add, is Ximen Qing, the corrupt and lustful main character in "The Golden Lotus", a classic Chinese work of fiction often considered pornographic.
Unfortunately, Japan seems to be resigned to living with a political culture that has no place for men like Ishihara in the national leadership.
Prime ministers in Japan these days are often chosen on the basis of how well liked they are, both among their political colleagues and among voters, and the outcome of factional politics.
Japanese culture routinely exhibits a dislike for powerful politicians.
In Western society, where assertiveness, frankness and the ability to get things done are hardly qualities that are frowned upon, a politician of Ishihara’s ilk is no more than par for the course.
Here in Japan, however, he is unfortunately considered a maverick.
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