Is the Mayor of Osaka Japan's One Reformist? KYOTO - The gray-suited world of Japanese politics isn't known as a hotbed of excitement, but insofar as next month's general election is generating any buzz at all it's because of one man: Toru Hashimoto, the plain-talking 43-year-old mayor of Osaka. An outsider with a hard-nosed reform agenda centered on cutting spending, Hashimoto has pioneered a new kind of Japanese populism. Call it the Green Tea Party. After his 2008 landslide election to lead the 8.9 million people of Osaka, Hashimoto set out to do what no Japanese politician is supposed to get away with: rocking the boat. This took the form of a cost-cutting crusade, which pitted Hashimoto against some of the city's sacred cows. He took on Osaka's massive, entrenched teacher's union. He vowed to privatize the subway and cut the city's payroll of 38,000 by half by 2015. He also took his ax to the Osaka Philharmonic and some sacrosanct traditional artists' guilds, withdrawing longstanding subsidies for traditional puppet theater companies that had been coasting on the presumed untouchability of their budgets. Green tea, anyone? It's easy to overstate the parallel with America's super conservatives: Unlike the tax-cut-obsessed Tea Party, Hashimoto - a father of seven - wants to reorient public spending on families with young children. In a country where the privileges of the bureaucratic class are a long-simmering source of resentment, that and his manic drive to reform Osaka - and, eventually, Japan - make him the kind of politician Japanese people are supposed to hate but secretly long for: a populist rabble-rouser who oozes contempt for the status quo. In some ways, the Tea Party parallel is not a happy one for Hashimoto. Just as the American anti-spending zealots were forced to build alliances with more traditional sectors of the right and lost much support in the process, Hashimoto has had to make common cause with the less reputable sections of Japan's hypernationalist right wing. In a move fated to be remembered as either a stroke of Machiavellian genius or an unmitigated disaster - that'll depend on how the election turns out - Hashimoto merged his fledgling national party with that of Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo and anti-Chinese extremist. Hashimoto even allowed the 80-year-old Ishihara to become the party's leader in exchange for having a mostly-free hand in writing its election manifesto. It's a steep price to pay, and it could backfire by alienating Hashimoto's more socially moderate followers. Whatever comes of the Hashimoto boom, though, it already tells a story at odds with long-held certainties about Japan. Though this country is supposed to be utterly incapable of reform, the rise of the Green Tea Party shows that, alongside its ossified civil service, it also counts plenty of people who want more than government-by-bureaucracy. The nuclear disaster that followed the 2011 Tohoku earthquake has crystallized the unacceptability of Japan's old ways; more and more Japanese are willing to take a chance on root-and-branch reform. And today, with or without distasteful allies, Toru Hashimoto is the only game in town.