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By Mariko Katsumura and Sakura Murakami
TOKYO (Reuters) - Shigeru Ishiba, the newly elected Liberal Democratic Party leader poised to become Japan's new prime minister, often appears in photos with a furrowed brow, but his expression immediately clears when he talks about one of his true loves – plastic models.
His office is stacked ceiling-high with books on politics and history, but the 67-year-old is often referred to in Japanese media as an "otaku", or someone obsessive about the mundane. In his case, trains, plastic miniature models, and ramen noodles.
"It's like bringing a dream to reality," Ishiba said of the process of making plastic models in a TV interview during his brief stint as defence minister in 2007-2008.
He insists that the plastic figurines and models he adores and which fill the nooks and crannies of his office are also instrumental to his diplomacy.
He showed a plastic model of a United States P3 patrol plane when he met a U.S. ambassador and stayed up all night assembling a Russian aircraft carrier when the Russian Minister of Defense visited Japan, according to an interview in 2017.
"Whenever an American ambassador, minister, or fleet commander comes to Japan, I find out what ship he was on and leave that (plastic model) with him. Then he would say, 'That's the ship I was on,' and it would make him really happy," he said in a separate interview with Abema Times.
Ishiba's passion also extends to trains - the full-size versions - which he has gushed about on his Instagram account.
He claims to have taken a sleeper train between Tokyo and his constituency in Tottori in western Japan more than 1,000 times.
"The super express! Their shining interior...and unprecedented style..." he said as he reminisced about the first time he got on the Hikari bullet train in a separate video on Instagram. "The excitement I had will never fade. It was wonderful."
Now tasked with quelling public anger over rising living costs and a scandal-plagued party, while navigating security tensions in East Asia, Ishiba may not have much time for another organisation he leads – the "Ramen Parliamentary Group" set up by more than 50 LDP members in 2022.
In a recent video on his YouTube channel, Ishiba mused about the percentage of imported ingredients that make ramen and spoke at length about how noodles made with imported and home-grown wheat tastes different.
He was a big fan of Chicken Ramen before moving on to Nissin Foods' Demae Iccho. He remembers eating Demae Iccho around the time he was studying for his high school entrance exams.
"These instant noodles and cup noodles, it just overlaps with key moments in my life," Ishiba said.
(Reporting by Mariko Katsumura and Sakura Murakami; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
