JAPAN : Science Agency Head Inherited Iron Will From Famed Father

Japan’s first female astronaut lifted off Friday, but the Science and Technology Agency chief she calls from the cosmos is just as conspicuous.

The chief is also a woman--and, it turns out, the most popular member of Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s new Cabinet.

Makiko Tanaka, 50, was elected to the lower house of Parliament just last July. Last week, however, she became director general of the science agency in a stratospheric promotion. The public seems to approve: In a poll this week by the respected Asahi Shimbun newspaper, a plurality of those surveyed named Tanaka as the Cabinet’s most prominent member.

Tanaka is fond of saying she was “just a housewife” until her election, in which she ran as an independent, later switching to the Liberal Democratic Party. But she was never simply a housewife, nor is she just any rookie legislator.

She is the only child of the late Kakuei Tanaka, Japan’s legendary former prime minister known as both the incarnation of political corruption and an unforgettably dynamic leader. Disgraced in a bribery scandal, he faded from politics after suffering a stroke in 1985, but the Tanaka support base has remained solid.

His daughter inherited her father’s supporters. She also took on his iron will and energy, street smarts and ineffable quality of political glamour, analysts say. Like her father, whose common touch endeared him to the public, Tanaka says she intends to champion the interests of society’s have-nots--the “weak upon whom the political light doesn’t shine,” she has called them.

Her key interests are education, welfare and health care--interests shaped in part when she nursed her father through his long illness before he died in December. But her supporters talk her up as a future foreign minister--she studied at an American high school and is fluent in English and Spanish--or dream she can become Japan’s first female prime minister.

“She is gifted with political power and instincts, and is well-trained because she comes from a political family,” said Kuniko Inoguchi, a political science professor. “Her potential is enormous.”

Tanaka’s husband, Naoki, is also a lower house member, and the couple have three children. Yet it was the close, sometimes tempestuous relationship between father and daughter that most shaped Tanaka.

A Tokyo native born Jan. 14, 1944, Tanaka studied politics at her father’s feet. She debuted on the world political stage at 13, at a party for the Burmese telecommunications minister when her father held a similar post.

After that, she traveled with him around the world, attending international conferences and meeting VIPs, from Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos to the Rockefeller family.

Kakuei Tanaka clearly had plans for his daughter beyond tending the hearth. He proudly introduced her as “my fighting cock of a daughter” and ordered his wife, Hana, not to waste time teaching Makiko such duties as how to make miso soup.

The battles between the strong-willed father and daughter became known as “title matches.” In one of the more infamous ones, Kakuei Tanaka slapped Makiko across the face when she announced that she wanted to study at a U.S. high school. Without shedding a tear, she gritted her teeth and stopped talking to him for six months. She won: He relented. She attended a Quaker high school in Philadelphia and graduated in 1963 before going on to the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo.

Some say Tanaka is the Cabinet’s token woman. Others say the science agency has no real power, although Japan’s nuclear energy program has put it in the spotlight. But no one denies Tanaka’s political calling--least of all she. “Politics to me is like water to a fish, air to a bird,” she told journalists last year. “Politics was an irresistible force surging inside of me.”