As governor of sprawling and struggling Tokyo, the gruff silver-haired Shintaro Ishihara has a huge and a mundane task. Only six nations have economies bigger than this metropolis of 12 million people, which, like Japan itself, is in a financial mess.
Tokyo has a budget deficit equivalent to around £6 billion and is £60 billion in debt. The city's trains are filled to an extremely cramped 183 per cent beyond capacity and Tokyo is fast running out of places to put its rubbish.
Elected 14 months ago with a campaign that promised "the Tokyo that can say No" to domineering central government bureaucrats, he readily acknowledges the depth of the crisis.
Ishihara is also fond of describing his policies to address the malaise as saplings that may not bear fruit for many years.
Since coming to office, he has launched a series of plans without bothering about the consensus-building with bureaucrats and other politicians that usually precedes policy initiatives. The strongly nationalist Ishihara is not a team player.
Though possessing a great deal of personal charm, he can also come across as opinionated, prejudiced and arrogant. And the average Tokyoite loves him for it: opinion polls give him up to a 70 per cent approval rating.
With such mammoth problems facing him, it is perhaps not surprising that the 67-year-old former novelist likes to divert the attention of Tokyoites by expounding on subjects far removed from the banality of city stewardship.
Though a self-proclaimed hawk, the former member of Japan's perennial party of power, the Liberal Democratic Party, is a personal friend of the Dalai Lama. And Ishihara takes every opportunity to remind the world of China's occupation of Tibet, lambasting fellow "friendship city" Beijing for what he calls "socialist imperialism".
Recently he infuriated Beijing by telling reporters that if President Jiang Zemin "starts war to merge with Taiwan, he would be like Hitler". His denial of the 1937 Nanjing massacre also enrages China.
Ishihara is responsible for introducing the rarely-used racist word, sangokujin, into the vocabulary of most foreigners here and even of some young Japanese. He used the word, which literally means "third-country person", but has highly offensive connotations, to refer to foreigners in a speech in April.
It was not the first time the governor had publicly linked non-Japanese and crime and indeed, given that at least one major firm here considers it clever marketing to advertise its reinforced locks as "foreigner-proof", the connection may not lose him much support. But the use of a racist slur outraged many. After the speech, Ishihara was typically dogged in his refusal to apologise, telling reporters: "I truly believe that foreigners will riot and I had simply stated that we should expect them to."
It remains to be seen whether Ishihara's xenophobia will detract from or add to his popularity. While writers in at least two leading dailies have accused him of flirting with fascism, his ratings remain steadfastly high.
Especially popular is the so-called "Ishihara tax", a new 3 per cent levy on the operating profit of big banks in Tokyo. Banks are not popular in Japan. The bank-hating mood has its roots in the use of public money in recent years to rescue financial institutions from the brink of collapse. In the last few years bank profits have increasingly gone to cover bad loans resulting from the banks' profligacy during the bubble era of the 1980s. Consequently, banks' tax contributions to Tokyo have fallen to less than one-thirtieth of their previous levels.
To remedy this Ishihara pushed a measure through the Tokyo metropolitan assembly which taxes banks before they make deductions for bad-loan write-offs. The banks threatened to sue, but backed down.
The Finance Ministry was appalled but massive popular support for the measure ensured that most local Tokyo politicians were forced to approve the plan. Despite charges that he was engaging in dangerous populism, it was a no-lose strategy for Ishihara. He stands to boost Tokyo's coffers by about £1,020 million per year without upsetting regular taxpayers, and his supporters can relish the pleasure of seeing their governor give the banks a black eye.
Ishihara first came to public attention in 1955 when, as a student at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University, he raised the hackles of conservatives with a racy novel called Taiyo no Kisetsu. (It was about a youth with an unconventional lifestyle.) He went on to become a successful novelist, but after he entered parliament in 1968, his fiction output slowed dramatically. However, in 1996 he published a best-seller about his actor brother Yujiro, who died 10 years before and whose memory Ishihara frequently invoked when campaigning to become Tokyo governor.
In 1989, he was co-author of A Japan That Can Say No with the former Sony chairman Akio Morita which argued that Japan should distance itself from the United States. Sticking with the No theme, the former transport minister is currently promoting a "say No to diesel vehicles" campaign to reduce pollution.
As the June 25th national parliamentary elections draw near, many conservative candidates are seeking Ishihara's endorsement. The Japan Times quoted one LDP candidate as saying that after he put Ishihara's face alongside his own on a campaign poster, "people who hadn't supported me until now have been cheering me on".
But what of Ishihara's own future? Many voters would like to see him become prime minister. He will be 70 when his term finishes, but in Japan's somewhat gerontocratic society, advanced age would not rule him out.
However, many other factors would, according to a prominent political analyst. He says of Ishihara: "He lacks two characteristics which are essential to prime ministers. He understands neither compromise nor consensus."