Biography|Hiroya Masuda — Twelve Years as Governor Began in This Hall

On 9 April 1995 voters in Iwate chose a 43-year-old former Construction Ministry official who had never held elected office.

On 30 April he took the governor's chair in the prefectural hall at 10-1 Uchimaru, Morioka.

The building itself dates from 1965.

It is a twelve-storey block by Yamashita Sekkei, still the landmark of the inner-castle district, and it was already thirty years old when Masuda arrived.

He would occupy it for three full terms, until 29 April 2007.

Iwate is the second-largest prefecture in Japan after Hokkaido, and the largest on Honshu. It was already losing people and factories when he ran.

He campaigned as an independent with backing from Ichiro Ozawa's machine, then governed with the language of a slow-life prefecture rather than a catch-up industrial one.

The hall is where that programme had to be signed: budgets, an industrial-waste tax worked out with Akita and Aomori, and the long argument with Tokyo over how much public works a shrinking prefecture still needed.

He did not stand for a fourth term.

The official prefectural register lists him as the 13th through 15th popularly elected governors, succeeding Iwao Kudo and preceding Takuya Tasso.

A visitor today still comes to the same grey tower.

The governor's office is not a museum, and the current administration works in it.

What you can see from the street is the building in which a Tokyo bureaucrat spent twelve years learning that national ministries and a prefecture do not keep the same clock.

That education is why Shinzo Abe later reached for him when the 2007 cabinet needed someone who could talk about regional disparity without sounding like Kasumigaseki.

Photo: Cabinet Public Relations Office portrait of Masuda, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Hall: Iwate Prefectural Government Office, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.