Analysts say Nonaka, left, holds the key to Prime Minister Obuchi's future. KYODO NEWS

Though it's cozy and the coffee is always freshly ground, the Three Oceans Garden cafe near Route 9 outside Kyoto is hardly the kind of establishment where Japan's most powerful politician would hang out. Yet it's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka's favorite spot. Wearing a casual sweater and sometimes his wife's sandals, he frequently wanders through the back door on weekends and makes his way from table to table, chatting with customers. He's a local himself, and this has been his way of unwinding since he first became a town councillor in the area more than two decades ago. Marvels Masako Kuroki, who runs the cafe with her husband: "He hasn't changed at all."

That down-home style worked magic for Nonaka during the long years he spent in local politics. Outspoken and blunt, he stuck out in a culture where direct personal attacks are seen as a breach of etiquette. But his brand of plain talk and small-town smarts has proven just as effective in Nagatacho, Tokyo's political power center. As the postwar generation of leaders fades from the scene, this farmer's son has emerged as the top playmaker in Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's government. Nicknamed the "Shadow Control Tower," he is widely believed to have more clout in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party than the Prime Minister himself. He may also be the man to decide how long Obuchi keeps his job. "Nonaka really is the key man in this administration," says Shigenori Okazaki, a political analyst at Warburg Dillon Read in Tokyo. "What he says becomes fact."

Nonaka downplays the idea that he is Japan's latest shadow shogun. "I'm a day laborer," he recently told the monthly Shokun. "I just say what is on my mind." But this Working Joe's pronouncements carry a lot of weight these days. He is a critical backer for several important pieces of legislation that are likely to be approved in parliament this year or early next. At the top of the agenda: tax cuts to revive consumer spending and new guidelines for United States-Japan security cooperation. But his rise to the top has also caused some concern. An unusually freewheeling LDP-opposition debate over Japan's banking crisis earlier this year had raised expectations among many Japanese that the country's one-sided political culture was opening up. Despite his candor, Nonaka has a penchant for old-fashioned backroom wheeling and dealing that looks like a retrograde step to many. "The lack of transparency is increasing public distrust in politics," laments Yukio Hatoyama, an influential member of the opposition Democratic Party.

Too bad, because Nonaka is in the saddle for now. The 73-year-old pol won his spurs as former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto's top troubleshooter. Nonaka really started to show his stuff last summer, when the LDP locked horns with the opposition over a package of bills to repair Japan's wobbly banks. Popular opposition leader Naoto Kan, head of the Democratic Party, scored points with Japanese voters by accusing the government of coddling the banks. Lacking a majority in the upper house, the LDP was forced to bargain. The debate raged for weeks until Nonaka brokered a compromise and forced dissenters in the LDP's ranks to sign on. (Kan's popularity faded soon after when he was caught in a hotel room with an attractive female "media adviser." He issued a Clintonesque denial, saying: "There was no inappropriate behavior.")

Nonaka clinched his reputation last month, when he talked the Liberal Party headed by Ichiro Ozawa into joining an LDP-led coalition. Ozawa had split from the LDP in 1993, pushing the party out of power for the first time in four decades. Nonaka and Ozawa have never gotten along. Nonaka once called the Liberal Party leader a "devil" and was still reviling him just months ago. But the Chief Cabinet Secretary, alarmed at the LDP's weakness during the banking debate, put his enmity aside and sat down in August with Ozawa in a Tokyo hotel room and started to negotiate.

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