Media Personality of the Year: Ichiro Suzuki or Junichiro Koizumi

Ichiro's reputation as the most successful Japanese export since karaoke was placed in stark relief by his refusal to acknowledge it. No other major media subject this year generated more videotape and column inches in inverse proportion to his lack of willing participation in their production. It's a point that invites a peculiar kind of scrutiny: Should we congratulate Ichiro on exceeding expectations on the field while successfully keeping us at arm's length off of it? Or should we, as the sports media did, chide him for being so standoffish? If you believe public people should be truly public, then you probably feel that this award should go to our prime minister, who took to self-promotion like a hooligan to Guinness.

Couching his near-future vision of Japan in cute epigrams of tough love and wielding his his inborn amiability like a pro, he used it to render any misgivings about historical amnesia and too-pat economic theories as the grumblings of party poopers who didn't like his style, which, in terms of substance, was better suited for comedy than government. Here, the only difference between Koizumi and his hapless predecessor, Yoshiro Mori, is that Mori never got the joke.