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YUZAWA, Japan (Reuters) – As a child, friends say, Yoshihide Suga, poised to be Japan’s next leader, sled down mountains in winter, ran track and was an avid baseball player. But his abilities didn’t extend into acting.
“He was always a bit stiff,” Masashi Yuri said, showing a photo from his high school play. “So he was only good at playing police, things like that.”
Yuri, 71, who grew up three houses from Suga in Akinomiya, a long, narrow valley so far from central Yuzawa that it took him nearly two hours to get to high school, describes a childhood of trout fishing on the river, playing baseball in they harvested rice paddies until they were covered in mud and scolded by their mothers. And helping with family businesses, in Suga’s case, his father’s strawberry farm.
It is a far cry from the background of most top Japanese politicians, who tend to come from old and wealthy families and pass their seats from generation to generation.
On the contrary, Suga’s family was not poor but there was not much to spare. Because 6-1 / 2-foot snowfall made access to the school difficult, Suga had to board in town during the winter. She didn’t have enough money left to play for the high school baseball club.
He later worked part-time for a university in Tokyo, including transporting vegetables at the giant Tsukiji seafood market.
“They were a little in the middle, maybe a little up,” said Eiji Ito, 72, another childhood friend who now sells rice and onions at a small shop in Akinomiya. When people needed cash, they sold cedars they owned in the mountains, he said.
“They sent his two older sisters to college, so maybe he had no money left.”
There was never any sign that his skinny, big-eared classmate had high ambitions, and Ito said he didn’t study much. Instead, he turned to sports, being chosen for school teams in sumo, baseball, and track and field.
In 1964, when Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics, 15-year-old Suga participated as a support runner when the Olympic torch relay passed through Yuzawa.
“There was no indication that he wanted to be a politician,” said Yuri, who meets with Suga every few months. “In fact, my strongest image of him is playing together until it gets dark, ending up totally covered in mud.”
(Reporting by Elaine Lies and Chris Gallagher on Yuzawa; written by Elaine Lies; edited by William Mallard)
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