Perhaps he won the presidency thanks to his specialized knowledge of voting behavior and public opinion, or maybe it was his casual tweets in conversations with students, his use of mocking buzzwords or his adoption of slang used by his pupils.
Whatever the case, 67-year-old Aiji Tanaka assumed the presidency of Tokyo's Waseda University last month, becoming the institution's first leader selected from the political science and economics department over the past 50 years.
Tanaka envisions raising Waseda into the ranks of the world's top schools, with clear measures he says must be "effective first, and then efficient."