Head of the Pack

In the chaotic days following the end of World War II, Hiromu Nonaka went to work for the sales department of the Osaka railway. The man who may become Japan’s next Prime Minister impressed his bosses so much that they made him a supervisor. Then one night Nonaka overheard a worker say something so upsetting that he quit his job. Bitter and determined, he returned to his hometown of Sonobe, where he ran for a seat on the town council, beginning a remarkable political career that has taken him to the inner circle of Japan’s political Elite. What had the worker said? “Nonaka-san is flying high in Osaka, but when he returns to Sonobe, he is a burakumin.”

The word means “village people,” but that prosaic definition masks the discomfort still felt by a minority that had been branded an untouchable class during Japan’s samurai era of the 17th century. In those days, the burakumin were social outcasts: the butchers, tanners and waste-handlers who fell to the bottom of the heap in a five-tier caste system. The archaic social structure went the way of the shoguns during Japan’s Meiji transformation in the late 19th century. Yet the burakumin still exist on the fringes of this mostly homogenous society, and fight the age-old battles of discrimination. “It’s still a taboo,” says Hiroshi Kanto, organizer of a burakumin rights group in Kyoto. “It probably always will be.”

It is remarkable, then, that someone could emerge from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks to become the most powerful politician in Japan. How the 75-year-old Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) elder finessed a heritage that could have been a liability offers insight into what motivates him and how he operates. From his first campaign for a seat on the town council of Sonobe, a rural town west of Kyoto, Nonaka did not deny his burakumin ties. He didn’t advertise them, either. Instead, he adroitly brought himself out of the closet, in a pair of speeches early in his national political career. Nobody could “out” Nonaka because he had outed himself.

No one who has identified himself as a burakumin has ever risen as high in the political world as Nonaka, who was chief cabinet secretary under the late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. Before resigning in December, Nonaka served current Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori in the same job. Having distanced himself from the beleaguered Mori, who is expected to be replaced as chief of the ruling LDPand thus, as Prime Ministernext month, Nonaka has positioned himself to replace his former boss. “I can’t think of anyone else but Nonaka who can be the next Prime Minister,” says political analyst Minoru Morita. Party leaders have been promoting his candidacy. Nonaka himself says he isn’t interested, but such denials are routine and don’t necessarily mean much. In Japan, it’s always better to be asked to serve than to aggressively go after the top job. “Nonaka has what a traditional leader requires,” says Shigetada Kishii, a political writer for the Mainichi group of newspapers. “In the Japanese politics of wa (harmony), a leader’s role is as a coordinator.”

Coordination is Nonaka’s stock-in-trade. The son of a rice farmer, he is the consummate power broker, a puppet-master who pulls the strings behind the scenes for the LDP, the party that has run Japan nearly continuously for the past 45 years. Nonaka is an old-fashioned pol, having honed his skills as mayor of small-town Sonobe. He first ran for the town council in 1950, at the age of 25, and was elected mayor eight years later. In 1967, he was elected to the Kyoto prefectural government, and immediately butted heads with the long-time governor, a communist, Torazo Ninagawa. Nonaka succeeded in getting Ninagawa voted out of office in 1978, and shortly thereafter the LDP rewarded him with a seat in the national parliament’s lower house.

In Tokyo, he enhanced his reputation as a calculating dealmaker. His critics describe him as Machiavellian, willing to break bread with anyone if it furthers his cause. In 1998, when Obuchi was having trouble holding together a fragile multi-party coalition, Nonaka approached an arch-enemy, Ichiro Ozawa, whose defection from the LDP in 1993 ushered the party out of power for the only time since its inception in 1955. Nonaka had called Ozawa a “devil” for that insult. But he went to Ozawa, hat in hand, and persuaded him to rejoin Obuchi’s coalition. Once the relationship was cemented, he made sure Ozawa and his policy measures were all but ignored.

Such slick maneuvering makes Nonaka the object of dread. “Most of Nonaka’s political power owes itself to people’s fear of him,” says Morita. For a burakumin to inspire fear in political circles is doubly impressive because it is unthinkable in most other spheres. Even though Japan has laws to protect burakumin, they often endure discrimination in school and in the workplace. In the last government survey in 1993, there were 892,000 burakumin counted in 4,442 districts. (Rights groups say the numbers are much higher, perhaps totaling 3 million.) Yet you won’t read about the burakumin in the Japanese press. You won’t hear the word mentioned on television. You won’t see any prominent businessmen or actors or sports stars standing at the head of a burakumin parade, fighting for their rights. And unless you’ve been paying close attention, you wouldn’t know that Nonaka comes from a burakumin family. Japan’s mainstream media studiously avoid mentioning his background; reporters say they have been warned not to by Nonaka’s aides. Nonaka declined requests to be interviewed for this article, but his brother, Kazumi, reacted angrily last week when asked about his family’s heritage. “It’s entirely beside the point,” he said.

It doesn’t bother other burakumin that Nonaka doesn’t want to be a poster-boy for their cause. After all, they haven’t been his staunchest supporters, either. Burakumin have traditionally backed socialist and communist parties, while the conservative Nonaka staked his early career on chipping away at the communists’ grip on power in Kyoto. “If he becomes Prime Minister,” says Kanto, “it won’t really change much for us. It would be more difficult for him to do things for us, because at the top, he would have to deal with too many other issues.”

But whatever their political leanings, many burakumin would be delighted to see one of their own rise to the top job in the land: it would certainly do more to blunt discrimination than any legislation. And that worker who insulted Nonaka all those years ago may now want to reverse his assessment of the former supervisor. In Sonobe he may be a burakumin; in Tokyo, Hiromu Nonaka is flying high.