Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara is the most transparent politician in Japan, which is good in that transparency is always welcome in matters of public policy and Japanese politics is prominently lacking in it.

Since Ishihara is a celebrity before he's a politician, the media pays special attention to him, and he likes this attention. His regular press conferences are reproduced in the daily newspapers, and you can see them in almost complete form on Tokyo TV station MXTV or the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Web site.

Though his manner tends toward the gruff and patronizing, there's nothing he won't talk about. He addresses criticism and is thorough about explaining his position. Sometimes he's too thorough. Last month, Japan Communist Party members of the Tokyo Assembly held a press conference where they explained an investigation into money spent by Ishihara's son Nobuhiro in his position as an adviser to Tokyo Wonder Site, a project created by the governor to help up-and-coming artists. The JCP pointed out that Tokyo Wonder Site was a "top-down" scheme, meaning that the governor called it into being on his own, without input from the assembly. The budget for the project in 2002, when it was launched, was 55 million yen. This year it was 471 million yen.