PROFILE:A self-made maverick who seldom lets his principles get in the way of compromise, writes DAVID McNEILL
UNLIKE THE last five prime ministers, who were all offspring of prominent political families, Mr Kan comes from relatively humble beginnings. The only son of a rural factory manager, he ran his own patent office after graduating with a physics degree from a science university. It took him four attempts to reach political office.
A former citizen activist, Mr Kan won a seat to the lower house during a grassroots campaign for stricter environmental laws. He rose to prominence as health minister in the mid-1990s when he took on bureaucrats at his own ministry, forcing them to reveal that they had ignored warnings about HIV-tainted blood, infecting over 1,000 people.
The ministerial cover-up is believed to have fanned Mr Kan’s distrust of Japan’s elite civil servants, who had allowed untreated blood products to be sold for years. His unprecedented investigation and subsequent apology to victims of the scandal, made him the nation’s most popular politician, and a hero to campaigners for more bureaucratic accountability.
In 1996 he was therefore a natural choice to lead the Democratic Party of Japan, a ragbag of socialists, independents and former members of the conservative Liberal Democrats (LDP) who wanted to radically reform Japan’s rusting political infrastructure. He quickly became the face of a new kind of clean, transparent politics – and for many, a welcome contrast to the backroom old guard.
Even after his career was almost derailed by his own scandal when he quit in 2004 for failing to pay state annuities, his reaction endeared him to many voters who had grown weary of watching politicians lie and tough it out. As penance, Mr Kan shaved his head, swapped his salary-man suit for Buddhist robes and went on a lonely traditional pilgrimage to temples in the remote south.
A pacifist who opposed Japan’s dispatch of troops to Iraq and wants Japan to swap an expanded UN role for its ties to the US military, he has seldom let his principles get in the way of a pragmatic compromise.
Just this week he called the US-Japan military alliance the “cornerstone” of Japan’s diplomacy, one indication that he doesn’t intend to rock this particular boat while in office.
That pragmatism, and Mr Kan’s reputation as a tough, sharp-witted and even hot-tempered debater, made him the obvious replacement for Mr Hatoyama, who often seemed to have his head in the clouds. But it remains to be seen if he has the stamina to radically alter Japan’s political system – long the graveyard of prime ministerial careers.