AS WELL as having the most extreme haircut, the most unlikely taste in music and the highest approval ratings, Junichiro Koizumi appears to be the Japanese Prime Minister least shy about exposing himself to the public gaze.
In the four years since he stormed to power, Japanese have learnt many things that they would never dreamed of asking about their leader.
They know his blood group (A) and the name of his barber (Teruo Nakagomi, the creator of his striking grey perm). They know the historical figure he most admires (Winston Churchill), and his favourite actors (Gary Cooper and Richard Gere, with whom he danced a waltz on a recent visit to Tokyo). They know his favourite music (Phantom of the Opera and Forever Young by a punk band called X Japan).
In a weekly e-mail newsletter, in a book of Koizumi portraits, in a CD of his favourite Elvis songs, the Prime Minister comes across as a man who displays his heart almost embarrassingly on his sleeve. And it is this image of straightforwardness, as much as anything else, that has brought him such extraordinary success.
Tomorrow, five weeks after dissolving the Japanese Diet over a row about the privatisation of the post office, Mr Koizumi will face his second general election — and the polls are predicting a narrow but secure victory for his ruling Liberal Democratic Party. And yet, despite his success and seeming openness, there is much that is mysterious about Mr Koizumi.
For all his affability, he is an isolated man, personally and politically. His warmth and charm coexist with a ruthlessness that allowed to him to cut off completely his youngest son and former wife. And his enthusiasm for Western culture sits alongside a sentimental nationalism that has alienated Japan’s Asian neighbours.
He has become such an institution that it is easy to think of him as having emerged fully formed, like Godzilla rising out of the Pacific. But the key to understanding Junichiro Koizumi lies in his family history. He is the third generation of Koizumis to have served in the Japanese Cabinet; between them the family has 95 years of service in Japan’s Diet. His grandfather, Matajiro, was a scaffolder’s son from Yokohama who went on to become Postal M inister and successfully campaigned for universal suffrage in Japan. Koizumi’s father, Junya, was an orphan who eloped with Matajiro’s daughter, Yoshie. After their reconciliation, the old man adopted him and aided Junya’s career as a politician; he would become Defence Minister.
Among his pet projects was a wartime airport on the southern island of Kyushu from which kamikaze pilots flew to their deaths. His nephew (and Junichiro’s cousin) was a kamikaze pilot who flew his aircraft into a US ship in the last months of the war. As Prime Minister, Koizumi has spoken repeatedly of his reverence for the Japanese who died during the war; in 2001, he wept openly as he walked around a commemorative kamikaze museum.
And he has profoundly damaged Japan’s relationship with China with his repeated visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead, including hanged Class-A war criminals, are enshrined. “His strong feelings over the souls of the dead come from his pure and personal thoughts on the fact that his relative was one of them,” Tetsugoro Iryo’s surviving brother, Katsumasa, said.
Junichiro studied in Tokyo and London and succeeded to his father’s seat in the port of Yokosuka near Tokyo in 1972, three years after his father’s death. In 1977 he married Kayoko Miyamoto, and the couple embarked on what looked like a conventional marriage.
Four years later, for reasons that neither has discussed in detail, and six months into Kayoko’s third pregnancy, they divorced. Custody of their two sons, Kotaro and Shinjiro, went to Koizumi. The youngest boy, Yoshinaga, was brought up by his mother and has never met his father. He was even turned away from his grandmother’s funeral, he told a magazine. Here, at least, are subjects on which Koizumi maintains an uncharacteristic reticence.
Such divorce arrangements are surprisingly common in Japan, but Mr Koizumi’s private life since his divorce is highly unconventional. He has never remarried, and remains extremely close to his unmarried older sister, Nobuko, who brought up his sons and acts as his unofficial private secretary. He has no known girlfriend, and if he has had affairs since 1982 neither he, nor anyone else, talks publicly about them.
Women certainly find him attractive — during the rock star celebrity that he enjoyed when he first came to power, teenage girls queued round the block to buy Koizumi posters. In 1992 tabloid magazines linked his allegedly caddish behaviour to the suicide of a Tokyo geisha. Otherwise, there is a blank. The typical senior Japanese politician rounds off a day in Nagatacho, Japan’s equivalent of Westminster, with an evening in the restaurants of Akasaka (Tokyo’s Soho).
Mr Koizumi, by contrast, retires to his residence, listens to classical music, sleeps for five hours and lies sleeplessly for three more. But it is his isolation that has allowed him to achieve as much as he has. Koizumi has few friends, many enemies and no institutional support base within the Liberal Democratic Party. His survival rests solely on the fact that he has been consistently more popular than his party.
And he has turned this to his advantage by choosing as his antagonists, not the rather feeble opposition Democratic Party of Japan, but anti-reform traditionalists within the LDP itself. “His talent is as a director of dramas,” Makoto Iokibe, a professor of political science, said. “He set up an evil enemy called the ‘forces of resistance’ and took on the role of the underdog fighting the rebels, enacting a thrilling drama for the people.”
Perhaps this is all that voters need to know about Mr Koizumi: that, thanks to him, Japanese politics is finally exciting.
BUT THIS MUCH IS KNOWN
What his enemies say
“He is very different to Hitler but in many ways Mr Koizumi is even worse. Members of the [Liberal Democratic] party are being sent to the political equivalent of the gas chambers” — Shizuka Kamei, LDP arch traditionalist on Koizumi’s decision to expel from the party those who voted against his Postal Privatisation Bill
