Oriental Populist

For years, Japan's political establishment has stamped out national leaders almost as uniformly as Japanese industry turns out transistors. The country's first ten postwar Premiers all reached power in their 60s or 70s, and most were equipped with identical attributes: samurai ancestries, diplomas from Tokyo University, decades of self-effacing service in government bureaucracies. Last week the mold was shattered when the Japanese Diet in a special session elected International Trade and Industry Minister Kakuei Tanaka, 54, the country's eleventh Premier since 1945. A muscular, self-made millionaire (construction, real estate) who has only a grade-school education, Tanaka takes charge of the world's third strongest economy with no reluctance whatsoever in promising "powerful leadership to fit a new era."

Tanaka's accession to power may well mark the end of the reserved and cautious style of national stewardship epitomized by his predecessor, Eisaku Sato, 71. The new Premier's election automatically followed his victory in a hard-fought struggle for leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, whose popularity had eroded in the later years of Sato's 7 1/2-year regime. Sato favored Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda, 67, for party president and Premier, and the L.D.P.'s brusque rejection of his protege at a convention in downtown Tokyo's big Hibiya Hall last week was the final shokku. Sato nearly wept as Fukuda was trounced by the upstart millionaire, 282 to 190, in a second-ballot runoff.

The vote reflected not so much Tanaka's popularity as consternation in the party ranks over the Liberal Democrats' sagging fortunes under Sato. The retiring Premier had hoped that his final years in office would vindicate the policies he and his predecessors had followed for more than two decades. Those policies were based upon total dependence on U.S. leadership in foreign affairs and total devotion to the buildup of Japanese industry at home.

Sato's ambitions were partly dashed last summer, when the Nixon Administration sprang its new economic moves and diplomatic overtures to China on an unprepared Japan. The rest of his hopes faded more gradually, as the Japanese grew increasingly unhappy with the overcrowding, high prices and pollution that they had to endure as the price of their country's economic success.

To Japan's man in the street, Kakuei Tanaka offers an appealing change in style. He is, in fact, a new kind of Japanese politician: a straight-talking, Oriental populist. Almost everything about the man has voter appeal, from his hoarse baritone to his bumper-sticker name (which literally means "Sharp Prosperity Amid Paddies"). Tanaka was born in a rice-belt village, in Niigata prefecture, the son of a horse trader who had a financially fatal weakness for gambling. At 16, young Tanaka quit school and lit out for Tokyo, where for three years he ran errands for a contractor by day and studied the construction business by night. Tanaka's budding business career was briefly sidetracked when the Imperial Army drafted him and sent him to Manchuria. But he contracted pneumonia and was discharged a month before Pearl Harbor--in time to organize a small contracting firm and ride the wartime construction boom to prosperity.

Throaty Style. In 1947 the young contractor (he was then 28) entered Japan's second postwar election and won the first of his ten successive terms in the Diet. He began to command national attention at 39, when he was named Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, his first Cabinet job. Soon after his appointment, he consented during a radio interview to demonstrate his throaty singing style by crooning a ballad in praise of gambling, which is outlawed in Japan. The party's old guard gasped, the newspapers dubbed Tanaka "Minister Without IQ," but the performance drew high ratings from the general public.

Liberal Democrat elders soon found that they could not do without Tanaka's proven talents as a vote getter. As secretary-general of the party during the 1969 elections, Tanaka masterminded the campaign that won the L.D.P. 300 of the 491 seats in the lower house of the Diet. At times, however, Tanaka has been an embarrassment to his party. Even after he took on Cabinet-level responsibilities, Tanaka continued to pursue his wide-ranging building and real estate interests. Though most Japanese politicians retain their business interests, Tanaka has been accused of not always keeping separate his public and private sectors. In 1966 he was forced to step down as party secretary-general because of charges that he was associated with questionable land-speculation deals. Tanaka was never indicted or convicted, but rumors of alleged monetary irregularities have continued to plague him.

As Tanaka tells it, he is "a born peasant." It is true, as his daughter Makiko insists, that stray dogs are the only other creatures up and about in Tokyo's fashionable Mejiro neighborhood each day at 5:30 when Tanaka arises. Still, there is nothing humble about his house: a 24-room mansion surrounded by gardens and the putting green on which Tanaka tries to improve his 18-handicap golf. No other politician in Tokyo has anything to compare with Tanaka's spread, but he protests that he needs the space. "A politician," he says, "is like a machine designed to meet as many people as possible."

Every morning, before he sits down to his regular 8:30 breakfast (bean-paste soup, rice, a raw egg and seaweed), he sees as many as 300 businessmen, politicians and other assorted petitioners. They gather in the public wing of his house and wait to be ushered in for brief audiences with Tanaka. The new Premier's 19-hour days do not permit much leisure; aside from golf, his chief pastime nowadays is the art of calligraphy. He rarely socializes at night, preferring to spend his evenings with his handsome wife Hanako. When he married her at 24, she was already 31. "As I worked hard day and night and Sundays and holidays," Tanaka explained in his autobiography, "I needed a woman like her, not a younger one, for my wife. Since then she has been the finance minister and the keeper of the safe in my household. This has worked well and we both have been very happy."

How will the new Premier deal with the problems that proved so troublesome for his predecessor? The emphasis on consensus in Japan's politics probably rules out radical departures. Moreover, for all of his talk of action (see box, page 24), Tanaka has no record as an innovator, even though he was one of the first Japanese politicians to recognize the country's environmental problems. He is on record with a proposal to disperse Japan's highly concentrated industries and redistribute the population among new villages and towns. Each would be surrounded by green belts and linked by 5,400 miles of new bullet-train railway lines and 6,000 miles of superexpressways.

Nevertheless, Tanaka, like his predecessors, is a proponent of continued economic growth. He is also an ambitious novice in diplomacy whose vague thoughts on foreign policy are couched in uncertain cliches. It remains to be seen whether the new Premier will become as deft at geopolitics as he has been with real estate.

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