Japan Politics

Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and nine other Japanese politicians received a total of $685,000 in donations from groups linked to a bribery scandal, a national newspaper said Thursday. Without citing its sources, the Mainichi Shimbun said Hashimoto's two political organizations received $41,000 between 1990 and 1993 from the groups, which are linked to a nursing home developer who is accused of bribing Health Ministry officials.

Pedigree matters in a country where politics is often a family business. Take a look at the top echelon of Japanese politics: Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is the son of a prime minister. His predecessor was the grandson of a prime minister. So was the man he defeated to win his party's leadership last fall. And when he looks across the aisle in parliament, he sees yet another second-generation politician leading the opposition. They are just the tip of Japan's hereditary iceberg.

What does a prominent Japanese business leader do when he wants his government to revise a law that damages his overseas corporate interests? He might be expected to petition representatives in Parliament or seek the aid of powerful bureaucrats. But in this age of economic interdependence, a new lobbying service is available to reform-minded Japanese: the U.S. Trade Representative's Office in Washington. Akio Morita, chairman of Sony Corp., discovered this last year.

As Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi marks his first anniversary in office today, the once-dashing figure who stormed into power with 80% popularity ratings, an open style and a sense of promise reminiscent of the early Kennedy years finds himself more and more beleaguered on all sides. The continued confusion has implications well beyond Nagatacho, Japan's political center.

Two centrist opposition leaders who hold the votes to determine who will run Japan's next government informed the country's perennial leaders, the Liberal Democrats, today that they will side with five opposition parties to form an opposition-led coalition. Barring any unpredictable 11th-hour snags, the development appeared to ensure the end of the Liberal Democrats' 38-year rule of Japan.

Underscoring a continuing disintegration of Japan's once all-powerful Liberal Democratic Party, the leader of the party's third-largest faction said Sunday he will bolt the party to pursue the post of prime minister. Former Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe, 70, said he and his followers will establish a new party today to seek a partnership with parties in the ruling coalition.

Ichiro Ozawa, Japan's most controversial politician--hailed for his strategic vision but reviled for his autocratic style--announced Monday that he will step out from the shadows and run for president of the nation's major opposition party. Ozawa's announcement electrified the Japanese political world and raised hopes that his dynamic leadership and daring policy positions will invigorate the nation's moribund politics and restart a sweeping reform process.

What's this? A party at the helm of Japan controlling only 14% of the seats in the lower house of Parliament? Radical left-wingers supporting a coalition with the old conservative stalwarts? Or, most unlikely of all, a Cabinet in which three potential prime ministers hold down the most important posts under a Socialist?

The maneuvering to form a new government in Japan suddenly took a turn to the right Monday as the Liberal Democratic Party moved to accept political reforms that it rejected in June. Two new conservative opposition groups, which hold the decisive votes in determining whether Japan will be led by a coalition headed by the Liberal Democrats or by a multi-party opposition government, responded by postponing plans to finalize a deal with the other opposition groups.

Takako Doi, the first woman to lead a major Japanese political party, resigned Friday as head of the Socialists after a frustrating string of political defeats. As chairwoman of Japan's largest opposition party, the charismatic Doi led the Socialists to unprecedented election victories two years ago and was even seen by some as a serious contender for prime minister.

After decades of scandals, insider dealings and official arrogance, Japan last year enacted a national information disclosure law designed to open bureaucrats' shadowy corridors of power to greater public scrutiny. A year later, Atsuko Nomura, head of an Osaka group called the Right to Know Network, is roundly disappointed. Requests for information have been put off, ignored or answered with a fraction of what her group has asked for. Bureaucrats are dismissive.

He calls himself Japan's first "lawmaker with blue eyes," and he has a mission: to end racial discrimination in this long-homogenous culture. Marutei Tsurunen, a 61-year-old naturalized Japanese citizen of Finnish heritage, took his seat in parliament last week amid lots of media attention and a pledge to fight social bias using his new platform as the first Westerner to serve in the Diet. Twenty years ago, the idea of a Caucasian lawmaker in Japan would have been unthinkable.

This land of stalwart samurai and knife-wielding ninja is getting positively teary-eyed. The spigots opened a few days ago, before Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka was fired Tuesday for squabbling with political rivals. As the pressure mounted, the nation's top diplomat, a woman so tough she's been called "an untamed stallion," cried in public. The next day, archrival Muneo Suzuki, a conservative lawmaker credited with helping engineer her downfall, shed a few of his own tears.

She's been called erratic, spoiled, a liar, the ice queen and a loose cannon. During the last seven months, she's insulted the emperor, the prime minister, her own political party, bureaucrats and voters. A quick glance at the polls, however, suggests why Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka still has a job. Despite nonstop controversy and a growing chorus of powerful critics, her approval rating among ordinary Japanese is 70%.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was reanointed president of his ruling party, winning a full two-year term and setting the stage for the popular leader's real battle to implement painful reforms. Koizumi's biggest immediate headache, though, was a diplomatic one mostly of his own making. He must decide soon whether to go ahead with a proposed visit to a Shinto shrine for war dead where war criminals are also enshrined, a move that would outrage China and South Korea.

The Japanese government secured a clear victory in elections Sunday, bolstering Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's ambitions to upend the status quo and attack this nation's deeply rooted economic, political and social problems. "We did better than I expected," a weary, unshaven Koizumi said in a television interview a few hours after the polls closed. "Now my role is to implement reform."

Ichiro Ozawa, the strategist of a rebellion that is threatening to deprive Japan's Liberal Democratic Party of its 38-year grasp on power, confesses that he isn't sure who Japan's next prime minister may be. But the 51-year-old rebel insists that the ruling party split he instigated--stripping it of a majority in the powerful lower house of Parliament--is the beginning of a long-term revolution he intends to carry out.

One is a brilliant policy strategist and ace at brute-power politics who criticizes Japan's consensus decision-making as "collective irresponsibility." He says Japan must become a "normal nation" by ending its free ride on American security policies and by more actively cooperating with such global ventures as U.N. peacekeeping operations. For such views, Ichiro Ozawa of the Renewal Party is praised as a visionary and condemned as a dangerous autocrat.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi survived the first test of his popularity as his fellow party members rode his coattails to victory in Tokyo's municipal election. Koizumi, whose public support ratings stand near 90%, took office in April with promises to rid politics of its old guard and push reforms that would kick-start the sluggish economy.

She's declared war on bureaucrats, slighted Washington, offended Moscow and faced down accusers who consider her crass, arrogant, erratic and a disgrace to women. And that's just her first month. Whether or not you like her style, Japan's first female foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka, has been shaking up the country's politics ever since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi asked her in late April to manage Japan's diplomacy.