Photo/Illutration Former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara in an interview at his home in Tokyo’s Ota Ward in 2019. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Shintaro Ishihara, an award-winning author, former Cabinet member and hawkish Tokyo governor whose blunt words offended various groups of people, died on Feb. 1. He was 89.

Born in Kobe in 1932, Ishihara gained fame as an author when he won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, in 1955 for “Season of the Sun,” a novel he published when he was attending Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

He later pursued a career in politics and won an Upper House seat in 1968 as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Four years later, he switched to the more powerful Lower House and assumed the posts of transport minister and chief of the Environment Agency.

He ran in the LDP leadership race in 1989 but failed to gain the presidency.

When he marked his 25th year as a lawmaker in 1995, he suddenly announced his retirement from national politics.

But he regained the spotlight at the local level.

He was elected Tokyo governor for the first time in 1999, when he ran as an independent.

Under the slogan of “changing Japan from Tokyo,” Ishihara implemented a host of initiatives, including a bank tax targeting leading financial institutions and a system for limiting diesel vehicle emissions.

However, he also had a habit of making offensive comments. He repeatedly used terms and phrases that infuriated Chinese and Korean people, warned the Self-Defense Forces about possible riots caused by foreigners after a natural disaster, and questioned the value of elderly women in society.

In a lecture in Washington in April 2012, he unveiled the Tokyo metropolitan government’s plan to buy the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea from private ownership. The announcement effectively forced the central government, led by the Democratic Party of Japan, to buy them instead in a bid not to anger China, which also claimed sovereignty over the isles.

The Japan-China feud over the uninhabited islands triggered by Ishihara's move continues to this day.

Despite the constant controversy that Ishihara created, he was repeatedly re-elected Tokyo governor in landslide victories.

But he quit as governor in October 2012 in the middle of his fourth term.

Ishihara became a co-head of the Japan Restoration Party alongside Toru Hashimoto, then the Osaka mayor, with whom he had been close since his days as Tokyo governor.

Ishihara returned to national politics by winning a seat in the Lower House election in December 2012.

But his deteriorating health reduced his political activities, and he said he suffered a mild stroke.

Although he spent decades as a politician, he never gave up writing.

In 1989, he co-authored a book titled “The Japan That Can Say No” with Sony Corp. Chairman Akio Morita, urging Japanese to rethink their country’s relations with the United States.

His younger brother, Yujiro, was a renowned actor. Ishihara’s 1996 book, “My Brother,” sold a million copies.