The "Computerized Bulldozer"

THE man in charge of Japan's first major exercise in independent diplomacy since the war is a wheeling-dealing real estate speculator and career politician who has almost no experience in international diplomacy. In the 15 years since hard-driving Kakuei Tanaka first reached Cabinet-level posts in Tokyo, he has been abroad only eight times, and then only to Korea, the U.S. and Western Europe. His one previous trip to China came in 1938, when he was shipped off to Manchuria as a young Imperial Army draftee. Tanaka's military career ended several months later when he contracted pneumonia, was shipped home and discharged.

Lack of experience--or of anything else--has never slowed down Kakuei Tanaka. A fast-talking, 160-lb. dynamo popularly known as "the Computerized Bulldozer," he is Japan's youngest (54) postwar Premier and the first to come from outside the narrow university-bred elite that has produced almost all Japanese leaders since World War II. The son of a poor cattle dealer, Tanaka vaulted into the upper reaches of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party after he had made millions in construction and land development. Traditional Japanese diplomats have been heard to grumble that their blunt-spoken new boss is "very un-Japanese." But popular magazines revere him as a reincarnation of Taiko, a peasant-bred warrior who rose to the top samurai rank in the 16th century. To Western journalists in Tokyo, who are used to dealing with faceless and unfathomable bureaucrats, Tanaka is a godsend, the earthy Khrushchev of Japanese politics.

Richard Nixon, who found Eisaku Sato maddeningly vague, emerged smiling from his meetings with Sato's successor at Honolulu, and said that Tanaka "was like a touch of fresh breeze." Observes one of the few Washington officials who know Tanaka well: "He is the kind of guy Nixon likes. He is polite but does not mince words. There is no time wasted on elaborate equivocation."

Tanaka was chosen to replace the retiring Sato last July largely because the Liberal Democratic establishment was willing to gamble that he could turn the party's slowly eroding electoral fortunes around. So far, it has been a good gamble. Tanaka won an astonishing 62% approval rating in a nationwide opinion poll; Sato's last rating was a dismal 19%.

Though even Tanaka's daughter Makiko says, "Father is perfectly empty when it comes to almost anything cultural," voters are enamored of his breezy, folksy style. The Premier holds one or two press conferences a week and sees scores of visitors every day, groaning all the while that the Japanese "must learn the art of coming to the point as fast as possible." Other Premiers have been stiff and unapproachable; Tanaka rattles on to all comers about his favorite movie stars (Gary Cooper, Deborah Kerr), his golf game (he has an 18 handicap), or his impatient manner ("I think like an American"). When a newsman asked the Premier what he had prayed for at a shrine near Nagoya that he and several of his Cabinet Ministers had visited one stifling day after his election, Tanaka said something about "preparing myself spiritually for my new job," then blurted out that "it's always refreshing when one sweats a great deal."

On occasion, Tanaka's frankness verges on the coarse. In his 1966 autobiography, which he hands out to visitors to the sprawling Tokyo mansion where he lives with his wife Hanako, he tells of being offered a geisha to sleep with one night toward the end of the war, during his contractor days. Tanaka chivalrously sent her home because she looked "too fragile," but the memory of the encounter, he writes, grows "increasingly more vivid" with time. At times, Tanaka indulges in sentimentality. On the long flight to Honolulu last month, he dashed off several sayings in Chinese calligraphy, which he has been trying to master. A sample:

Even a hero in his one-thousandth autumn Occasionally must still muster his courage.

Though he is a quick study, Tanaka is not an intellectual. He is known in some quarters as a "wakatta man," for his habit of interrupting anyone speaking to him in mid-sentence by snapping "Wakatta, wakatta"--the Japanese equivalent of the Italian capita, capita (I understand). "He talks too fast and too much," says one sympathetic critic, Chiba University Professor Keihachiro Shimizu. "Perhaps that is his way of attempting to hide his lack of learning and deep ideas. By talking fast he often seems to try to awe his interlocutors. That won't work."

Tanaka has certainly awed Japanese voters. But once the euphoria over the Chinese rapprochement fades, his government will be under pressure to act as well as talk on pressing problems; among them are pollution and a generally drab style of life. For the moment, however, most Japanese are betting that, as Novelist Masaharu Fuji says, perhaps wishfully, Tanaka "might really do something out of the ordinary."

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