Shintaro Ishihara, the man who stoked China-Japan tensions
Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara will go down in history as the abrasive provocateur who stoked tensions between China and Japan
For a man who seems to take pleasure in provoking, shocking and angering so many sectors of the Japanese public as well as the nation's allies and rivals alike, Shintaro Ishihara always seems to emerge unscathed.
The governor of Tokyo, who on Thursday announced that he would be stepping down to form his own political party and contest an anticipated general election, offends on such a regular basis it is remarkable he continues to be returned by the voters.
No Western politician, for example, could hope to get away with the type of off-the-cuff comments he makes frequently - such as that homosexuality is abnormal, that "old women who live after they lose their reproductive function are useless and committing a sin", and that the massive earthquake that killed about 20,000 people and devastated much of the country's northeast last year was "a punishment from heaven" because the Japanese had become too greedy.
Ishihara is every bit as abrasive when it comes to outsiders. In 2000, he publicly blamed illegal immigrants for the rising tide of crime in Japan. In 1990, he stating in an interview that the Rape of Nanking was fiction, famously claiming, "People say that the Japanese made a holocaust but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie."
And apparently not content with upsetting China, he went on to annoy the French by suggesting that their language should not be recognised as an international tongue on the grounds that it is "a language in which no one can count".
But despite his controversial opinions, the 80-year-old Ishihara - who gained early fame in 1956 for winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize literary award for his book, , before he even graduated from Hitotsubashi University - has been re-elected governor three times since being voted into power in April 1999.
He was first elected a lawmaker in 1968 as a member of the establishment Liberal Democratic Party. He left national politics in 1995.
"Frankly, it is hard to understand why people like him so much," said Noriko Hama, a professor of economics at Kyoto's Doshisha University, adding that it becomes even more incomprehensible when one considers the sheer number of people Ishihara has annoyed.
The man was back in the headlines on Tuesday, Hama pointed out, when a group of people living close to the US Air Force's Yokota Air Base lodged a protest with the governor demanding he retract a comment that a planned lawsuit for damages over excessive noise was "nonsense".
"I think the people who actually support him are those who like everything in their lives to be simple," said Hama. "He appeals to the kind of people who don't want to worry about their lives, who like to be told what they should be thinking and why."
She added that Ishihara has much in common with Toru Hashimoto, Osaka's firebrand governor, for being able to "hypnotise people into intellectual laziness".
"They make it easier for these people … by providing them with the simple answer, by showing emphatic confidence in themselves and by giving no-brain answers," she said. "There are too many Japanese people who find that comforting today."
The issue that Ishihara has managed to stoke into a major international incident is, of course, the dispute over the sovereignty of the islands that Japan calls Senkakus and China calls the Diaoyus.
Japan's territory has long been a preoccupation of the governor, who famously knelt on the reinforced concrete that has been poured on the rocks of Okinotorishima, more than 1,700 kilometres south of Tokyo and which barely protrude above the high tide mark, and kissed the ground. Ishihara managed to have the islands incorporated as part of the Japanese capital, dismissing protests from China and South Korea that they should not be classified as an island because they cannot support human habitation and therefore should not be used to extend Japan's exclusive economic zone into the Pacific.
But it is on the Diaoyu islands where Ishihara has really made his mark. In April, he announced that the Tokyo metropolitan government was in discussions with the family that privately owned three of the five islands and was going ahead with plans to purchase them for Tokyo.
The plan was apparently popular with a domestic audience, as more than 23,400 people contributed 314 million yen (HK$30.6 million) within a matter of weeks of the creation of a fund to purchase the islands.
In the end, Ishihara was outflanked by the national government, which bought the islands for the nation - but if his aim was to bring the low-running issue to the fore, then he was the winner.
Unfortunately, that debate caused large-scale unrest in China, causing Japanese companies and nationals to be targeted by violent mobs, and factories and shops to be looted and destroyed.
Business relations between the two countries have suffered dramatic declines, tourist numbers have plummeted, cultural exchanges are on hold and diplomatic relations are several degrees below frosty.
Not that Ishihara sees to care. At the same hastily arranged press conference on Thursday in which he announced his resignation, he made a point of saying that the island issue "is very important".
"I want to become a Diet member and recommend and prod for the construction" of harbour facilities and a lighthouse on the islands to ensure the safety of local fishermen, he said.
Development of the islands, of course, is the step that the Chinese government has explicitly stated it will not permit.
If Ishihara, perhaps in tandem with Hashimoto, is able to make a successful return to national politics and exert influence over policy, then the road ahead may very well be a rocky one.
But there is still a ray of hope, says Hama.
"If he does make it to the centre of the stage, then he will obviously have to deal with the matter from a realistic standpoint, by talking to China, South Korea and other nations," she said. "Reality will catch up with him and, hopefully, he will be driven into acting in a less simplistic way.
"On the other hand, we could find that he gets under the bigger spotlight and suffers stage fright."
