TOKYO At day's end, it was perhaps one of the few things over which he held no sway, the relentless logic of aging, that made Tsuneo Watanabe, Japan's most powerful media baron, decide to step out of the shadows.
For years, most Japanese had caught only glimpses of the man, usually leaving, late at night, one of his favorite ryotei - the members-only redoubts where Watanabe dined with fellow power brokers and received supplicants.
Reporters would swarm around him as he made his way toward his black sedan, peppering him with questions on the day's topic, and he would oblige them with imperious one-liners that made him the embodiment of the arrogant, ultimate insider.
But Watanabe, now nearly 80 years old, has stepped into the light. He has recently granted long, soul-baring interviews in which he has questioned the rising nationalism he has cultivated so assiduously in the pages of his main newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, which with a circulation of 14 million is the world's largest.
Now, he talks about the need to revisit Japan's wartime history and reflects on his wife's illness and his own, as well as the fresh joys of playing with his new pet hamsters.
Struck by his own sense of mortality but still in the saddle, Watanabe seems ruffled that his power may be waning. He has railed against Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who he says just does not listen to him anymore.
"Before, early on, he used to listen to me sometimes," Watanabe told a television interviewer.
During a two-hour interview at his office, where he presides over the newspaper, Japan's most popular baseball team and the rest of the Yomiuri Media Group's empire, he puffed on one of the three pipes on the coffee table before him.
He was a man in a hurry, in a hurry to change Japan, no less, by forcing it to confront, understand and judge its wartime conduct and to set it on the correct path as his testament to the nation.
"I'll be 80 years old this year," he said. "I have very little time left." His first move was an editorial last June criticizing Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto memorial where 14 Class A war criminals, including the wartime prime minister, Hideki Tojo, are deified.
This was an about-face for The Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative publication that had been moving rightward in recent years and tended to react viscerally against foreign criticism of the Yasukuni visits.
Indeed, Watanabe's Yomiuri was a main force in pushing for the kind of stronger Japan now emerging. Shortly after becoming editor in chief in 1991, Watanabe set up a committee to revise the Constitution, a pacifist document imposed by the United States under General Douglas MacArthur. If MacArthur's Constitution emasculated Japan by forbidding it from having a real military, Watanabe's constitution, published in 1994, restored its manhood.
Now, it seems only a matter of time until Japan completes the process that Watanabe started years ago.
Still, Watanabe seems troubled by some aspects of the nationalist movement he helped engender. The editorial, which reflected his worries about Japan's relations with its Asian neighbors, sent shock waves through the political world. It called for the building of a secular alternative to the shrine and bluntly said the country's prime minister did not understand history.
Nowadays, Watanabe is unsparing in his criticism. Koizumi worships at a shrine that glorifies militarism, said Watanabe, who equates Tojo with Hitler.
"This person Koizumi doesn't know history or philosophy, doesn't study, doesn't have any culture," Watanabe said. "That's why he says stupid things, like, 'What's wrong about worshipping at Yasukuni?' Or, 'China and Korea are the only countries that criticize Yasukuni.' This stems from his ignorance."
Like many of postwar Japan's leaders with wartime experience, Watanabe is a conservative and a realist. He remains suspicious of the irrational and emotional appeals to nationalism used increasingly these days by those who never saw war.
In his high school in Tokyo, he said, military officials visited regularly to instill militarism in the young.
"I once instigated my classmates to boycott the class and shut ourselves in a classroom," he recalled. "We were punished later."
When he entered the army as a private second class, the war was already in its last stage. Japan kept on fighting despite the certainty of defeat. In desperation, the military began dispatching kamikaze pilots, whom the Japanese far right glorifies as willing martyrs for the emperor.
"It's all a lie," he said angrily, "that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, 'Long live the emperor!' They were sheep at a slaughterhouse. Everybody was looking down and tottering. Some were unable to stand up and were carried and pushed into the plane by maintenance soldiers."
After graduating from the University of Tokyo and flirting with communism after the war, Watanabe joined The Yomiuri Shimbun in 1950 and quickly made his mark as a political reporter.
To this day, political reporters in Japan tend to succeed by becoming close to a particular politician, earning scoops while shielding him and becoming insiders.
According to a 2000 biography, "Watanabe Tsuneo, Media and Power," by Akira Uozumi, Watanabe ingratiated himself so much with one Liberal Democratic heavyweight, Banboku Ohno, that he became the gatekeeper at his house and rode in his car.
Politicians seeking favors from Ohno would ask Watanabe to put in a good word. One young politician helped by Watanabe was Yasuhiro Nakasone, the future prime minister. They remain famously close.
Such was Watanabe's power that by the 1980s, and especially after he was made the newspaper's editor in chief in 1991, he helped broker major political deals. In those exclusive ryotei, nationally known politicians prostrated themselves before the shadow shogun.
Ordinary Japanese only became aware of his existence in 1996, when he became the head of the media group's baseball team, the Yomiuri Giants.
"I'm not an ogre or a snake," Watanabe said with a smile, protesting that his one-liners were frequently twisted.
Nowadays, he is expansive, even on his own frailty.
But he is hardly ready for retirement, though. Convinced that Japan will never become a mature country unless it examines its wartime conduct on its own, Watanabe has ordered a yearlong series of articles on the events of six decades ago. Next August, the newspaper will pronounce its verdict.
The series and Watanabe's recent fierce attacks on Koizumi are said to have already shaken Japanese politics, as Koizumi prepares to retire next September. Even though Koizumi won a landslide election a few months ago, attacks against his legacy are rising and allies have begun defying him.
Political analysts see Watanabe's hand, which he does not hide. The series, he said, has started changing the opinions of some politicians. But he is far more ambitious. "I think I can change all of Japan," he said.