Self-belief and strategy: Japanese Taro Kono renews career for next prime minister

TOKYO, Sept. 14 (Reuters) – When Taro Kono, Japan’s top candidate for prime minister, was a senior in high school, he asked his father to send him to college abroad, but he was he flatly denied.

Instead, former Kono, one of the ruling party’s top politicians, took his son to a reception at the U.S. embassy to prove his English was not good enough.

But the play was reversed.

“I went around the room telling people enthusiastically, with broken English, how I wanted to study abroad, but my father was against it, so I had a problem,” Kono wrote in a recent book.

Everyone said no, I should wait. But that response, and perhaps his son’s audacity, somehow convinced the father, and Kono ended up spending four years at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Now 58, Japan’s popular vaccination minister speaks fluent English and hopes to convey that first combination of self-belief, strategy and stubbornness to become the leader of the first Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Conservative Party. Read more

In addition to a resume full of high-profile portfolios such as foreign affairs and defense, he directs a Twitter feed in two languages ​​and, in a world of stable politicians, speaks bluntly, in contrast to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

“Kono is a close communicator, he’s talking,” said Corey Wallace, a foreign policy specialist at Kanagawa University.

“He’s always there, giving press conferences about vaccine deployment, and so on,” Wallace added. “Suga seemed to only communicate when he absolutely had to.”

Kono regularly leads opinion polls such as the election of voters for the next prime minister, which will help him both with grassroots members of the LDP contest and with young lawmakers concerned about keeping their jobs as general election this year.

The image, in which Kono points out, could transcend politics, said Airo Hino, a professor of political science at Waseda University.

“Lawmakers will definitely choose who they think is best for re-election,” Hino added.

“They are thinking about election posters and with their faces put on the LDP president. This is especially true in urban areas and young people.”

SCOPE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Kono’s spread has thrived on social media, where he has garnered 2.4 million followers on Twitter.

Whimsical publications earlier this year, with memes, their lunch, or a mask with a dinosaur skull, have shifted to promoting the vaccine and highlighting online policy meetings.

That Kono had established a genuine connection with those who don’t usually care about politicians became clear when the online debate erupted after blocking some of those who disagreed with him on Twitter.

But this incident also highlights one of its most important weaknesses, according to analysts.

“He wants you to like him, and you want him to like you, and he wants you to participate, but he has a streak of rage and can be a liability,” Wallace said.

In 2019, when Foreign Minister Kono denounced the South Korean ambassador during a meeting in front of the cameras, telling him he was “extremely rude”.

These memories cause consternation in South Korea, already nervous about the conservative stance that Kono adopted key policies when a cabinet minister.

This contrasts with her father, Yohei Kono, the chief secretary of the cabinet who wrote a historic apology in 1993 for “comforting women,” a euphemism for people forced to work in Japan’s war brothels.

The South Korean media has played its tough stance and some commentators fear that the already forced ties will not improve.

But at home, there is hope that Kono, whose nature is unable to remember the popular Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister from 2001 to 2006, will be able to get things done.

Analysts say most of the blame for Japan’s handling of the pandemic has fallen on Suga, sinking its cabinet, while Kono has built an image of working hard on vaccine implementation.

Japan’s emergency measures were achieved little by little to curb the virus infections that flooded its hospitals, but after a slow start, vaccination rates have risen to just over half. in the United States and other G7 countries.

“He … overcame all the bureaucratic hurdles and excuses that the health ministry made remarkably,” said Kenji Shibuya, former director of the Population Health Institute at King’s College London, which led municipal vaccinations. in Fukushima Prefecture, north of Tokyo, the capital.

“I think he’s the only candidate who can challenge the status quo.”

But first Kono has to win, which means he will have to overcome the deep fears of party elders that would be difficult to control.

“That doesn’t mean Kono is completely against what the party wants to do,” Wallace added. “But he will be his own prime minister, one way or another.”

Additional reports from Ju-min Park and Rocky Swift; Edited by Clarence Fernandez

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