The Grooviest Guv

To

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 and fine champagne.

Appointment with Mrs. U. Nap at Park Hyatt. The entire floor must have heard us. Midnight. She goes home to her husband...

Dom Perignon at Roppongi's Kingyo. Head to Chianti at Iikura for an espresso chaser but end up on the roof of the adjacent building, pero-pero guri-guri with the Tokyo Tower in the back. Her screaming fills the air. Pull out moist wipes from the bag and clean up.

In the U.S. it 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 on the hand-picked successor of the Liberal Democratic Party stalwart who had held the office captive for two decades. He ran a campaign of outrage against waste, fraud, the status quo, and the ldp's fruitless effort to end Japan's 10-year-long economic slump. The message was just right, and if nothing else, serial playboy Tanaka wasn't a bore. He won easily.

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.) That's a lesson Prime Minister Koizumi in Tokyo might learn when his honeymoon ends. Promising change in Japan is undeniably popular these days. Making it happen is another thing altogether.

Nagano is best known for the 1998 Winter Olympics held in its capital, a postcard-pretty ski resort of 363,000. The entire prefecture bought into an Olympic pipe dream, convinced that building a luge run and hosting Lycra-clad skaters would somehow translate into a big pot of gold. A bullet-train line was built from Tokyo, hotels went up, airport runways were laid down. In all, nearly $1 billion was spent. But once the Olympic torch was extinguished, Nagano's post-Olympic boom failed to materialize. The city's downtown looks deserted and there's plenty of room at the local inns and hotels. "Now that we have the bullet trains," the Governor says, "people can come from Tokyo and go back home in the same day. They don't need to stay overnight." Added to disappointment was some covered-up dirt: after Nagano officials were accused of having bought off the Olympic committee to get the games, the financial records of the local organizers were consumed in a mysterious fire.

At the prefectural building, where Tanaka has his office, two young women desperately try to get a glimpse of the Governor, who is holed up in budget meetings. With a video camera, autograph boards and calligraphy pens, they prowl the halls for four-and-a-half hours, finally catching up to Tanaka eating lunch in the employee cafeteria. What excites them about Tanaka? "It's his intelligence, his perseverance, his warmth," says Ayako Yamada, a housewife who lives a two-hour train ride away. "He is so passionate."

Inside, more fans are lining up. Public relations is Tanaka's forte, and upon taking the governorship, he moved his office to a ground-floor room where he installed curtain-less plate-glass windows. Outside is a public lounge, with tables, chairs and vending machines. The public is allowed—more than that, they're encouraged—to come and watch Tanaka. Watch him do what? Work, ostensibly, at being Governor. But Tanaka spends most of his day working the crowd. "Politicians usually stay so far away from us," says 19-year-old Shinya Urayama, a college student from Tokyo on a snowboarding holiday who also wanted to view Nagano's second most famous tourist draw. "But, somehow, I don't know how, we feel very close to Tanaka."

Tanaka is not especially handsome: he's short of stature, doughy-faced and displays a conspicuously well-fed belly. While a college student, he won a prestigious literary prize for a novel about Japan's alienated youth, and then turned himself into a peculiarly Japanese breed of writer-pundit-celebrity famous for simply saying outrageous things. This career puts him in a newly popular club of politicians with a single platform: to rock Japan's long-coddled boat. Koizumi and his feisty Foreign Minister, Makiko Tanaka (no relation to the Nagano Governor), are the most visible examples from within the ldp. But outsiders are making inroads too. In March, an independent woman defeated candidates representing Japan's two major parties to become Governor of Chiba prefecture. Last fall, in a special election to fill a seat in the Lower House of the Diet, Japan's parliament, outsider Etsuko Kawada defeated the major party candidates. Governors with an independent streak are starting to stand up to the national government. Nationalist novelist Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo, imposed a controversial local tax on banks last year. Tanaka has found inspiration in all of those moves. "He's revolutionary," says Ikuo Kabashima, a professor of law at the University of Tokyo. "It's not necessarily a question of whether he works within the system with a correct policy. He wants to destroy the existing system and create something new."

There is a lot of talk about destroying things in Japan these days. The ldp. The bureaucracy. The outdated banking system. So Tanaka's experience in Nagano is an instructive parable for the rest of Japan, and in particular, for rebel Prime Minister Koizumi. Can Tanaka show the way in Nagano? Or will he prove to be a flash in the pan, a trifling, inconsequential political buffoon? Sure, he is clever enough to feed the public what it wants to hear. In Nagano, they'd had their fill of pricey public-works projects, so they applauded Tanaka's decision to stop the building of dams.

But Tanaka's fatal error, which is starting to show, is that he thought public adoration was enough. He forgot that he has to make use of that popularity to bring the recalcitrant bureaucrats on board and to convince his legislative opponents that they'd be fools to stand in the way of a popular Governor. In March, lawmakers brutally destroyed his plan to stop construction of the Shimosuwa dam. There wasn't a thing Tanaka could do about it but grouse. "The general contractors and construction companies think that more highways and bridges will bring on prosperity and recovery," he fumes. "But ordinary people are just annoyed."

"He's a genius at getting attention," says Takao Toshikawa, editor of a political newsletter. "But the attention on himself is all he cares about." Minoru Chino, president of a Nagano bank and a Tanaka campaign booster, recently told a national news magazine: "I've got the impression Tanaka is now becoming the Emperor who has no clothes." Even some loyalists are turning heel. "Governor Tanaka is like Mount Fuji," says Yoshitaka Sugihara, an aide who recently quit. "If you see it from a long distance it's very beautiful, but once you climb it, there are lots of rocks and rubbish."

Like all good populists, Tanaka keeps campaigning, performing in his glass cage and pressing the flesh with fans. In March, more than 800 people came out to Takato, a town in the Japan Alps of 7,300, to see him. "They say I'm a dictator," he said, drawing laughter and applause from the adoring crowd, which listened for three hours as he railed against the prefectural legislators, the $13 million of debt the Nagano government has piled up, the dam projects and his attempts to hire more teachers and provide more services for the handicapped. Then he told a story about a bakery run by mentally disabled entrepreneurs. The story provoked tears—though a whole lot were from Tanaka himself.

Tanaka may well fade away and leave little behind but a legacy of chuckles about his pero-guri adventures; in the same way, people may someday remember nothing about Koizumi but his haircut. But don't count either of them out yet, because they are both getting unwitting help from the people who despise them the most. Each time the Establishment pols and government functionaries criticize them, their popularity inches higher. So Tanaka loses the battle over the dams and the budget, but he wins the p.r. war for the hearts and minds of the people. Tanaka figured out his first week in office how to turn an insult to his advantage. During one of his first meetings with bureaucrats in Nagano, an official took Tanaka's name card, and folded it with a sharp crease. In Japan, that's a way of reminding yourself to toss the card in the trash when you get home—an open gesture of disrespect. Tanaka now carries a fat wad of business cards with him and when he hands one out, he's quick to say, "Go ahead, bend it. I like breaking the rules." Tanaka will try to break the status quo—if the status quo doesn't ultimately break him.