TOKYO, Sept 14 (Reuters) – When Taro Kono, Japan’s leading contender to be prime minister, was a senior in high school, he asked his father to send him overseas for university, but was flatly refused.
Instead, the elder Kono, a leading politician in the ruling party, took his son to a U.S. embassy reception in a bid to prove his English was not good enough.
But the move backfired.
“I went around the room telling people enthusiastically, in my 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, he should wait. But that response, and perhaps his son’s audacity, somehow convinced the father, and Kono wound up spending four years at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Now 58, Japan’s popular vaccines minister is fluent in English and hopes to parlay that early combination of self-belief, strategy and stubbornness into becoming leader of the conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and prime minister.
In addition to a resume studded with high-profile portfolios such as foreign affairs and defence, he runs a Twitter feed in two languages and, in a world of staid politicians, speaks bluntly, by contrast with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.
“Kono’s a tight communicator, he’s talking,” said Corey Wallace, a foreign policy specialist at Kanagawa University.
“He’s always out there, giving press conferences on the vaccine rollout and so on,” Wallace added. “Suga looked like he only communicated when he absolutely had to.”
Kono regularly tops opinion polls as voters’ choice for the next prime minister, which will help him with both rank-and-file members in the LDP contest, and young lawmakers worried about keeping their jobs as a general election looms this year.
Image, at which Kono excels, could trump policy, said Airo Hino, a professor of political science at Waseda University.
“Lawmakers are definitely going to pick who they think is better for re-election,” Hino added.
“They’re thinking of election posters, and their faces on them with the LDP president. This is especially true in urban areas, and with the young.”
SOCIAL MEDIA REACH
Kono’s outreach has flourished on social media, where he has garnered 2.4 million followers on Twitter.
The whimsical posts of early this year, featuring memes, his lunch, or a mask with a dinosaur skull, have shifted to promoting the vaccine and highlighting online policy meetings.
That Kono had forged a genuine connection with those who do not usually care about politicians became clear when debate erupted online after he blocked some of those who disagreed with him on Twitter.
But that…
Read More: Self-belief and strategy: Japan’s Taro Kono upends race for next premier