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."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.
"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." 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.
These memories stir consternation in South Korea, already nervous about the conservative stance Kono took on key policies when a cabinet minister. But at home there is hope that Kono, whose maverick nature brings to mind the wildly popular Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister from 2001 to 2006, may be able to get things done.
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