February 4, 1999
Young and idealistic, Yuko Tonomoto dreamed of toppling the ruling party--the symbol, as she saw it, of all that was rotten in Japan. And she thought she knew the way: an American-style media campaign to lift the opposition to power. She had prepared for years. She studied the media from the inside as a magazine writer and a newscaster for two national television networks in Japan. She devoured books on campaigns in the U.S. and Britain. She read Oval Office by Dick Morris, former adviser to U.S. President Bill Clinton, "like a bible." She cultivated political contacts, boned up on policy, even went back to college to study more politics.
And by the summer of 1998, Yuko Tonomoto was right where she wanted to be. The reformist opposition leader, Naoto Kan, had hired her as his media strategist. During the election campaign for parliament's upper house, she worked around the clock, sending him memos, writing speeches, even choosing his suits. On election night she stood by his side, feeding him advice in between television appearances. Benefiting from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's poor economic management and waning popular support, Kan's Democratic Party of Japan won more seats than anyone dreamed possible. The LDP was crushed and the prime minister resigned, although it kept control of the more powerful lower house, which wasn't up for election.
But the picture soon darkened. Tonomoto, 32 years old, was making enemies with her no-holds-barred advice, especially among Kan's older staff members. Her phone rang at all hours with harassing calls, even after she changed her number three times. She had to advise Kan secretly, avoiding his office. Then, in early November, the crisis hit: A weekly magazine accused Kan, 52 and married, of carrying on an affair. The alleged lover: Yuko Tonomoto.
Today, Tonomoto's once-promising career is in a deep freeze. Amid a media feeding frenzy, she has retreated to her tiny office a stone's throw from parliament, to study regional public finance as a graduate student at Hosei University. But she isn't a defeated woman just yet. In the month after the story broke, she wrote a 300-page book denying the affair and passionately defending the profession of media consultant that she has introduced to Japan. Kan, who on January 18 defeated challenger Shigefumi Matsuzawa to stay on as his party's leader, also says the relationship was professional, not romantic.
And now, Tonomoto has spoken for the first time to the foreign media, telling the REVIEW in a three-and-a-half hour interview that she still believes Kan's party has a chance to take power--if it follows her ideas.
The opposition would do well to listen. While some Japanese have dismissed Tonomoto as a pretty face who was in over her head, her book shows rare insight into the way Japanese politics is changing in an era of economic hardship. The LDP may be smiling now at the blow to the reputation of its biggest rival, but the LDP's main weakness--lack of support among the broad mass of Japanese--remains. If opposition strategists can learn to apply the tactics Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair employ, the LDP will have little to chuckle about.
Tonomoto is not the first person to point out that Japan's economic troubles are a golden opportunity for the opposition. Nor is she the first to observe that the opposition must seek support from the large group of unaffiliated voters, most of whom live in cities, to counteract the ruling party's unshakable base among rural voters and beneficiaries of government largesse such as construction companies.
What is new is Tonomoto's insistence that winning a majority requires the sort of media savvy that is common in America and Britain. During her eight brief months on the job, she drilled Kan in the basics of modern image politics: Wear the right clothes; have your sound bites ready; and stick to your core message no matter what you're asked. She battled the party's advertising agency, a giant company accustomed to selling beer and shampoo, and insisted on a grittier message stressing Kan's reformist image and policies. The agency had proposed a glitzy campaign centred around the slogan "Switch."
That might sound like an obvious campaign approach, but it's not--at least not in Japan. Apart from a brief interregnum in 1993-94, the LDP has held power continuously since 1955, and the leadership of Japan has always been decided within the ruling party. Ambitious LDP politicians have considered it a waste of time to appeal to public opinion, focusing instead on making allies within the party. Opposition parties, rather than trying to win power for themselves, have felt satisfied with their own niche in parliament and, like the LDP, relied on organizational muscle: labour unions for left-leaning parties and the Soka Gakkai Buddhist group for the centrist Komeito.
One of the best indications of how the LDP selects its leaders came after the July election, when Ryutaro Hashimoto, the prime minister and LDP president, resigned. Three LDP legislators vied to replace Hashimoto, and every poll showed that one of them, Keizo Obuchi, was by far the least popular. Yet Obuchi won the party election and became prime minister thanks to his support from powerful party insiders such as former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. "Until now there's been no need for politicians to talk to the people," says Tonomoto over a folding table in her cramped quarters. "When a politician becomes prime minister, only then for the first time do you find out what sort of person he is. That's really strange."
For most of the LDP's rule, the economy was growing strongly, so voters had little incentive to try someone else. Rural districts have a disproportionate share of the vote, which helps the LDP. The opposition has long been divided and, for many decades, beholden to socialist ideology. And the LDP is skilful at stealing the opposition's best ideas, something it demonstrated as recently as last autumn when it adopted the Democratic Party's proposal for nationalizing insolvent banks.
It's time for all that to change, says Tonomoto. "What I want to do now is crush that system and create the first prime minister who became prime minister because he was supported by the people." Wearing an all-black outfit, she has a professional demeanour. But peppering her talk with youthful lingo such as "version up," a Japanese-English phrase typically used to describe an updated technology, she betrays her age.
Nowadays, Tonomoto isn't in a position to "version up" much of anything; she and Kan no longer communicate. Still, it is surprising that she got as far as she did. Born to a family of Nagasaki innkeepers, Tonomoto writes in her book that her sense of justice was awakened in high school when she saw teachers meting out corporal punishment to her classmates for little reason. "This is the original reason that I came to think that in Japan there is no democracy," she writes in her book, which has sold nearly 30,000 copies.
When Tonomoto tried to make her way into politics, she ran into the barrier of being a woman. "You're seen merely as the flower of the place," she says. "And the older men, the fossilized ones, get jealous. They're afraid that this young woman is going to steal their work." In retrospect, it's clear that Tonomoto slipped by letting herself be seen meeting Kan alone, including in his hotel room. "As a person engaged in the media-consulting business, to have my relationship with my client become the subject of rumours in this way, even if it was a misunderstanding, was a big failure, a colossal blunder," she writes.
The magazine that published the allegations, Shukan Bunshun, claimed Tonomoto spent the night at Kan's room in the ANA Hotel. Tonomoto says she went there for a late-night meeting, stayed the night at a friend's house, then returned the next morning to resume the meeting.
Tetsuya Chikushi, a prominent television newscaster, says the blitz of negative coverage of the Kan-Tonomoto relationship by weekly magazines and daytime television gossip shows "has to do with our society's prejudice against working women." He explains: "The impression is that Kan used his lover as a consultant. But it's the other way around: In the beginning she was a consultant." And since both parties denied an affair, he says, "nobody knows what really happened."
If it hadn't been for Tonomoto's youth and inexperience in traditional politics, she might not have come up with some of her best ideas. One of them, adapted from the United States, was the use of "focus groups," small but representative samples of the electorate who are asked to give their views of the candidate and his message.
The election successes didn't last, however. Since the autumn, even before the scandal broke, the Democratic Party's poll ratings have been falling. Tonomoto blames that on Kan's reluctance to break with labour unions. When Kan was re-elected party leader, his opponent called for privatization of Japan's huge postal-savings system, effectively the world's largest bank with ¥250 trillion ($2.2 trillion) in deposits. But Kan, fearing the wrath of the postal workers' union, insisted that the post office should remain state-owned. "You have to show to the outside world" the party's independence from unions, says Tonomoto, in an echo of Tony Blair's spin doctor, Peter Mandelson. "Otherwise, it will seem like a lie no matter how much you say that your party is for people without affiliation."
Media consulting is not always a pretty profession, as Tonomoto's idol, Dick Morris, has demonstrated. Aside from a scandal over his liaison with a prostitute, Morris has been blamed for encouraging Clinton's obsession with polling and public opinion. Tonomoto describes herself as a believer in Machiavelli--"the world's first political consultant," she says--and occasionally talks with a cynical edge about the importance of style over substance in politics.
Yet in the next breath, she says media consultants are necessary for the development of democracy in Japan. As she puts it in her book: "When it becomes a matter of course for governments to change in elections--that is the time when media consulting becomes essential. It is the time when Japan changes."
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