TOKYO: Japan`s new prime minister Naoto Kan was hailed as the humble "son of a salaryman" when he took office a month ago but quickly lost favour with the electorate by bringing up the subject of tax hikes.

Japan`s fifth premier in four years, Kan has put fiscal discipline at the core of his agenda to fix the country`s finances and slash the world`s biggest public debt, which is almost twice the size of the economy.

Whether his tough-love approach pays off will show on Sunday, in an upper house election widely seen as a referendum on his leadership and the 10-month-old centre-left Democratic Party of Japan government.

The 63-year-old one-time leftist activist has vowed to restore the "vigour" of Asia`s biggest economy after two decades of sluggish growth and has pledged to stay in power long enough to make it happen.

"Please give us not just fragile leadership but power to take action," he told voters recently. "Even a great man can`t make things happen in only a year. Gritting my teeth, I want to maintain power for at least five years."

Kan took over last month from Yukio Hatoyama, who had lasted less than nine months in office, brought down by political funding scandals and a damaging dispute with Washington over an unpopular US airbase.

Unlike his predecessor and many other Japanese lawmakers, Kan was not born into a privileged political dynasty but gained his first parliamentary seat through tough campaigning, winning a seat on his fourth try in 1980.

"I`m the son of an ordinary salaryman," he said after taking office. "Young people raised in ordinary families, with ambition and effort, can make it big in the world of politics. Isn`t that what real democracy is all about?"

He was born in Yamaguchi prefecture in the west of the main island of Honshu, the son of a factory manager.

A graduate of applied sciences from the prestigious Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kan once invented a points calculator for the popular game mahjong.

"If all had gone well, I would have become quite rich, even if not quite as rich as Bill Gates," he said in an interview, recounting how he unsuccessfully pitched his prototype to Nintendo and other electronics makers.

"I became a politician because nobody put up money for my invention."

He became a leading civic activist in the 1970s, pushing for pacifist and environmental causes as the protege of a well-known feminist campaigner.

His United Social Democratic Party later disbanded and he launched the Democratic Party of Japan with Hatoyama in 1996.

Kan gained popularity in the mid-1990s when, during a stint as health minister, he revealed government culpability in a scandal over HIV-tainted blood products that infected more than 1,000 people.

When the DPJ took power last year, ending more than half a century of virtual one-party conservative rule, Kan became deputy prime minister.

He also took over as finance minister in January despite admitting he was not an economics expert. He once joked that he struggled to work his way through thick tomes on the subject by Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson.

Not all of Kan`s political career has been plain sailing.

He had to step down during a previous stint as DPJ leader, in 2004, after admitting he had failed to pay full state pension contributions, having earlier attacked ruling party lawmakers for their failure to do so.

In a display of atonement, Kan shaved his head, donned a Buddhist robe and went on a pilgrimage to temples on the island of Shikoku.

He faced another scandal over an affair with a television presenter after a gossip magazine revealed they had spent a night together in a hotel room. He later told the media: "My wife scolded me: `You idiot!`"

Kan managed to save both his political career and his marriage with wife Nobuko, with whom he has two sons.


BDST:0924 HRS, July 10, 2010