For Japan, the Politics of Change : Power: Rebel Ozawa envisions cleaning up corruption, creating an open market. Election is the tough first step.

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.

In his vision, this revolution will clean up corruption, build a two-party system, invigorate policy-making, create true competition and an open market in Japan, give his nation the ability to make its own foreign policy decisions, enlarge Japan’s contributions to the world and even broaden personal freedoms.

But he admits that the first step, a crucial July 18 election, is a struggle.

Indeed, in an interview Monday with a group of Japanese-speaking correspondents, Ozawa wasn’t entirely sure that the Liberal Democrats will lose. Defeating them, he said, is necessary because they have proved incapable of self-reform.

His Shinseito, or Renewal Party, of Liberal Democrat defectors will win at least 50 seats, or 14 more than now, Ozawa said. But he said he is worried that the Socialists, the No. 1 opposition party, could fall to 70 or 80 seats--or about half the total they won three years ago. If so, the opposition may not win enough seats to drive the ruling party from power, Ozawa said.

“If the Socialists can get 100 seats (20% of the total), we will get a majority,” Ozawa said. “We” means the combined seats of seven opposition parties, excluding the Communists.

But driving out the Liberal Democrats is only the first problem, he said.

The Socialists still cling to their insistence that Japan’s armed forces are unconstitutional, offer only limp tolerance for the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, oppose nuclear power development and maintain close relations with Communist North Korea, while treating South Korea coolly. And as long as the Socialists uphold that kind of program, Ozawa said Monday, “we won’t form a coalition with them.”

Without them, however, an opposition coalition will be numerically impossible.

Ozawa, who is nominally second in command of the new party, is equally adamant that “the Liberal Democratic Party is no good. . . . We left the party to seek reform. If we rejoined it, our action would be meaningless.”

That means nobody may be able to patch together a majority coalition. A “minority government”--a prime minister whose Cabinet is supported by parties lacking a majority in the lower house--may appear, he said.

Whatever the outcome, the government that emerges will be unstable, he said.

In his eyes, the interim government would enact an election system to replace multi-seat districts with single-seat constituencies, combined with proportional representation, and strengthen controls of political funds. Then, another election would be called next year.

“One side or the other would emerge with a majority” in that election, he said.

After that, Japan could get down to business on Ozawa’s real agenda--a reformation of Japanese society itself.

Even the mass media, he said, need reform.

“The mass media are part of the Establishment. They are the strongest opponents of reform,” Ozawa said. With “no opinions of their own,” the media merely offer moderate criticism, comfortable in the knowledge that their sniping won’t disrupt ruling party actions, he said. If a new government came into power, the media wouldn’t know what to advocate, he said.

“The old-timers in the Liberal Democratic Party think that the present society is fine,” Ozawa said.

Ozawa said that he and his rebels, however, want to “make our demands in international politics while also assuming our responsibilities. At home, we will remove and ease bureaucratic controls. We will permit competition in the true sense of the word, freedom of expression in its true meaning and freedom of actions. . . . Perhaps we won’t reach the level of free competition that exists in the United States, but certainly a level that is far more liberal with far more freedom than now.”

Asked whether he thinks that the average Japanese wants such a free society, he snapped: “No, I don’t. That’s why I’m trying to raise this problem.”

Many Japanese, he said, “don’t want to change the living style they have now. . . . What they want is to be left alone on these four islands (of Japan). But to maintain (Japan’s) level of living standards or to preserve peace . . . while depending on huge imports of raw materials and huge markets of the world (for Japan’s exports), the only path by which Japan can survive is to put its power together with that of other countries of the world and cooperate.

“Japanese are beginning to understand that they need to associate with foreigners beyond doing business with them. But in their hearts, they really don’t want to change. It’s easier to live in this consensus society built up over thousands of years. It’s more comfortable,” he said.

Both Ozawa’s enemies in the ruling party and many of his new would-be friends in the opposition camp, however, call him an opportunist who is seeking not reform but power.

When he assumed the ruling party’s most important day-to-day post--that of secretary general--at age 47, Ozawa employed a roughshod style of leadership that alienated many of his equals and nearly all of his seniors.

Critics also refuse to forgive Ozawa his tutorage at the feet of the ruling party’s top experts in the school of rough-and-tumble politics--former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and former kingpin Shin Kanemaru, who are now symbols of the “money politics” that Ozawa claims he wants to eradicate.

Indeed, his existence as the “shadow shogun” of the Renewal Party has become the focus of attacks against the new party. In its platform, the party responded by apologizing for having been part of the core of ruling party power.