Profile of former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara who has died aged 89. Japan's controversial right-wing politician made a decades-long career out of baiting China and offending Japanese liberals. He ridiculed Chinese and Korean residents of Japan, denied the Nanjing massacre, and once denounced the United States as a nation of "bigots". But perhaps his most inflammatory moment came in 2012, when he provoked a major foreign policy crisis with a plan to buy the uninhabited disputed islands that China calls the Diaoyus and Japan refers to as the Senkakus. SHORT PROFILE OF former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara