Media Persons of the Year: Yasuo Tanaka and Shintaro Ishihara

In a year when national lawmakers were constantly criticized for a failure to empathize with voters, an intractable lack of fiscal common sense and downright stupidity, local politicians ruled, especially these two guys, who, granted, enjoyed an advantage since they were media personalities even before they took office. But, then again, so was Ishihara's predecessor in the Tokyo governor's seat, Yukio Aoyama, and he failed miserably, not only in terms of leadership, but in terms of getting the media on his side.

In terms of political outlook, Ishihara and Tanaka are opposites -- the fiscal and cultural conservative vs. the secular humanist liberal -- but in a way they complement each other, especially when they both appear in the news at the same time. Though primarily novelists, a calling that evokes images of bookish, pale intellectuals, they are closer to what used to be called cosmopolitans in the sense that they're interested in what's going on around them and confident and knowledgeable enough to comment on public matters (though in the Tokyo governor's case, not always responsibly).