TOKYO — "Junichiro Koizumi here." For five years, that simple salutation has greeted subscribers to the "Koizumi Cabinet E-Mail Magazine," an experiment in digital politics that saw the prime minister of Japan knocking on 1.6 million inboxes every Thursday morning.
Scrawled by Koizumi himself, and typed into a computer by his staff, the e-mails let everyone know what he'd been up to and what was on his mind. They also offered plenty of unsolicited advice on how people might improve their lives.
The e-mails stop this week.
Koizumi steps down as prime minister Sept. 26, his popularity still high and his preferred successor, Shinzo Abe, certain to succeed him. But Koizumi's musings and obsessions over the span of 249 messages are perhaps the best example of his folksy touch and theatrical impulses that delivered such a shock to Japan's opaque political culture.
His e-mails read like a man thinking aloud. Koizumi expressed surprise at the staggeringly high prices of Japanese apples sold in Shanghai and explained how French President Jacques Chirac gave him a great idea on one of his major preoccupations: boosting tourism to Japan.
He worried about the victims of floods and earthquakes, and revealed former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's advice on how to throw out ceremonial first pitches. Aim high, Giuliani said.
Part blogger, occasional agony aunt and always able to turn a casual observation into a political point, Koizumi began sending the e-mails two months into his first term in 2001 and kept it up every week, holidays excepted. An English version of them became available in March 2004.
He also encouraged subscribers to write back, and they did: 500 to 1,000 e-mail replies a week, according to his office, creating what may be a unique electronic conversation between a leader and a nation.
It was not a completely new idea. Just about every head of government has a website that lauds the leader's accomplishments and lists the ribbons cut, laws passed and dignitaries greeted. They almost universally offer no insight into what's going on at the center of government.
Koizumi's newsletters were clearly self-serving as well. There was plenty of policy talk and there were links to the same kind of spin you'll find on the White House or 10 Downing Street sites. Each e-mail was also titled "Lion Heart," a reference, readers were told, to "the prime minister's lion-like hairstyle and his unbending determination to advance structural reform."
