Next Step : Carving Out a New Politics in Japan : Sunday's pivotal parliamentary election offers the possibility of greater change than the country has seen in four decades. And reform is the byword.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN

July 13, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TOKYO —

In Japan, motion is usually a mirage. When the nation reaches what appears to be an inexorable turning point, it most often goes straight.

But even in a country where change comes so grudgingly, Sunday’s election for the powerful House of Representatives presents a crossroads. When the government of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa fell in June with the suddenness of a rotted timber, the era of unchallenged dominance ended for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)--the incongruously named conservative party that has governed here without interruption since its formation in 1955.

The immediate cause for Miyazawa’s fall was his failure to pass a package of political reform bills that he had pledged to see into law after Shin Kanemaru--until recently the LDP’s most powerful figure--was arrested for tax evasion in March.

But, in fact, the reform issue is just the wedge of a far broader critique leveled against the ruling party by a new generation of critics.

In their eyes, electoral reform is only a means; the end is the creation of a viable moderate opposition that can seize power from the LDP--and challenge many of the tenets of Japanese government policy since World War II.

The critics last week got a boost from President Clinton, who met with several of them in Tokyo, and from a Sankei newspaper poll that showed the LDP’s popularity slipping to just 15%. These new reformers are seeking to capitalize on the vague but palpable sense of disappointment evident in Japan. Despite the country’s spectacular economic growth in the past 40 years and the worldwide triumph of brands like Sony, Toyota and Panasonic, life for typical Japanese families remains less affluent than arduous.

As the memories of post-World War II poverty fade, Japanese families increasingly compare their situation not to a meaner past, but to the softer contemporary life many see on trips to Europe and America. The lingering recession--much like last year’s slowdown in the United States--seems to be crystallizing broader complaints about the quality of life: the crush of commuting, the punishing workweeks, the high costs of housing and food. (The grocery store should be the most radicalizing institution in Japan.)

“Japan has the potential to be a much better country,” says Kenichi Ohmae, a prominent management consultant and author in Tokyo. “We are working too hard. The numbers in the economic statistics are great. But life has not been too great.”

In the widespread Japanese frustration over living standards there is the germ of the same turbulent force that has dominated American politics for the past 20 years: the frustration of middle-class aspirations.

Granted, middle-class economic anxiety isn’t nearly as sharp in Japan as in America. Under government pressure, major companies still guarantee lifetime employment to their workers, a policy that is a cornerstone of Japan’s political stability. (Not many governments anywhere in the world have been voted out of power with unemployment at 2.5%, the current rate in Japan despite the recession.) But recent reports of an impending Nissan auto plant closing and retrenchments (through attrition) at several major employers have sent shivers through many people in Japan, like the first icy wind of an approaching winter.

The people seeking to harvest this discontent offer a new direction for Japanese politics. Dominated for years by the gray and elderly survivors who managed the glacial rise to power through the Liberal Democrats’ rigid seniority system, Japanese politics is now bustling with younger men agitating for a revolt from the center.

Morihiro Hosokawa, a former LDP governor, has formed a reform-minded centrist party called the Japan New Party; management consultant Ohmae has launched a Ross Perot-like citizen’s movement, and two other dissident LDP leaders, Ichiro Ozawa and Tsutomu Hata, formed their own party in late June after leading the internal rebellion that felled Miyazawa.

All of these men are in their 50s--a generation younger than the Liberal Democrats’ top leaders, exemplified by the 73-year-old prime minister.

However they fare in Sunday’s balloting, this new opposition has already rewritten the calculus of Japanese politics.

For the past 40 years, there has seemed no real alternative to the LDP, which, supported by the bureaucracy and business, preached economic expansion and alliance with the United States.

The party’s principal opposition, the Socialist Party, which ferociously fought alliance with the West, has struggled to extricate itself from its ideological roots in Marxism. Since for most Japanese, it has been unthinkable to risk leaving the Western alliance or abandoning capitalism, it has also been unthinkable to remove the Liberal Democrats from power--despite a cascade of influence-peddling scandals that have engulfed a succession of LDP-led governments.

Now, with Cold War disputes obsolete, these new critics are trying to dislodge the LDP around a different axis of issues, calling for decentralization of power away from the central government, political reform, greater opening of Japan’s markets, a more assertive role in international affairs and the rolling back of government policies that raise the cost of living for average Japanese families by favoring business over consumers.

Most of them also talk about demanding a relationship of greater equality with the United States. But paradoxically, to the extent that their arguments succeed they could help smooth U.S.-Japanese relations, because many of the internal reforms they support to improve Japanese living standards are the same as policies the United States has demanded to increase export opportunities for American firms.

Clinton seemed to underscore this point last week by inviting about a dozen opposition figures, including Hata and Hosokawa, to a reception at the U.S. ambasador’s residence in Tokyo during the G-7 summit of seven major industrialized nations and by referring favorably to “the changes now going on in Japan.”

Only the most naive underestimate the task of forming a government not dominated by the Liberal Democrats. In its long tenure, the LDP has put down roots in the society so deep that it is barely recognizable as a political party in the traditional sense.

“I see the LDP as a state organ rather than an individual party; it’s like the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union,” says Takeshi Iwaya, a reform-minded, first-term LDP member of the lower house. The LDP is so interwoven with the postwar Japanese society; it is so much a physical manifestation of the bureaucratic, corporate, economic and social consensus that has ruled Japan for the past 40 years, that its fate is indistinguishable from the state of that consensus itself. To ask whether the LDP could lose power is to ask whether Japan itself can change.

Many eager for that change see the most promising alternative in the coming election as the Japan New Party, or the Nihon Shinto. The New Party was formed only a little over a year ago, and it retains an appealingly amateurish feel. Its office is located in the basement of an apartment building in a quiet, residential Tokyo neighborhood, far from the center of Japanese government in Nagatacho. On a bright, brisk day this spring, the party unveiled its first slate of candidates for the coming House elections.

The press conference felt like a revival meeting. The candidates, most of them young and visibly nervous, sat in two rows at the front of the crowded room: Seventeen men, all but one in a dark blue or gray blazer, and a single woman, in a violet dress. As party officials called their names, each one rose and testified to his or her commitment to reform Japanese politics.

“This is my first experience as a politician,” said one. “But I used to be a secretary to a lower house LDP member. What I saw was a lot of money involved. It is a bitter memory that I hope to use to reform politics.”

Another man in a sporty double-breasted suit said he was a doctor at a clinic that specialized in stress-related illnesses. “I’m just an amateur, but I just can’t sit back and watch the corruption now,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of patients suffering from overwork and stress. Our society is stressed out as a whole.”

When the last candidate had his say, and the press had no more questions, the entire group suddenly stood up and bowed in unison toward the reporters.

Nihon Shinto is the brainchild of Morihiro Hosokawa, who sometimes seems as out of place at his own party’s events as a college president at a fraternity mixer. Hosokawa is a former LDP member who served two terms in the upper house of Parliament, then two terms as governor of Kumamoto prefecture in southern Japan.

He’s a handsome 55-year-old who is laid back in the extreme: During the press conference he sat in the front row as still as a turtle, with his arms folded, his large impassive eyes almost closed and his head leaned forward, as though focusing on something just beyond the last row of reporters.

Many attribute Hosokawa’s placidity to his heritage--he’s the direct descendant of feudal lords who ruled Kumamoto for over 200 years. Once, one of the new party’s volunteers grasped Hosokawa’s hand in a hallway and passionately told him, “My family has been serving the Hosokawa family for 230 years.”

Hosokawa threw together Nihon Shinto in the spring of 1992 just a few weeks before the election for Japan’s less powerful upper house. In a long magazine article, he condemned the Liberal Democrats’ political leadership as “moribund” and declared his intention to provide a new alternative.

He had done little practical planning, but four of the party’s candidates still won at-large seats in the election--including Yuriko Koike, an exuberant former television newscaster; Yoshio Terasawa, an urbane former executive for Nomura Securities’ United States operations, and Hosokawa himself.

The party’s agenda is based largely on Hosokawa’s experiences as a governor. In Japan, local governments have extraordinarily little leeway: the central government’s powerful ministries dominate public works, education, transportation--all major and minor aspects of public policy. If your taxi company wants to add a cab in Kumamoto, you’ll have to get approval from the Transportation Ministry in Tokyo half way across the country.

Hosokawa, like other critics here, blames that centralization for the political system’s endemic corruption, as businesses lean on Parliament members to lean on the bureaucracy for contracts and necessary approvals. His proposed solution is to decentralize power from Tokyo to the prefectures.

But the heart of Hosokawa’s complaint is that the iron triangle of business, the bureaucracy and the Liberal Democrats has controlled Japan for so long that the country has ceased to function as a real democracy. “The root cause of our structural problems . . . is that we haven’t had political change,” Hosokawa told me one day this spring. “For over 50 years, we’ve had a kind of pseudo-democracy in practice here in Japan.”

Today, maybe only about one-fourth of the Japanese people share those sentiments, estimates Terasawa, the former securities executive now in the upper house. But that still offers the New Party a potentially large base of support in the next election, if they can mobilize it. In the June elections for the Tokyo Assembly, the equivalent of a state legislature, the New Party gained dramatically.

For all his regal tranquillity, Hosokawa understands the opportunity in Sunday’s national election. “At the time I started the party I was thinking we should gradually increase our candidates over the next five to 10 years,” he said earlier this year.

“But now I think we should work toward this election as if it were our last chance.”

In the heart of Tokyo’s Roppongi nightclub district, it’s an incongruous sound. But there in Studio One of TV Asahi’s brightly colored complex of buildings is Larry King’s Brooklyn baritone booming through the loudspeakers.

“Next we’ll talk about politics Japan-style. And we’ll meet Japan’s Ross Perot.”

When he hears that introduction, the man seated on the stage to King’s left leans back suddenly and throws out his arms and legs as if an electric current had passed through his chair. “I’m not rich!” cries Kenichi Ohmae, the management consultant who has formed a citizen’s movement to reform Japanese politics.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says King, who is in Asia to tape a week’s worth of programs.

As I had already discovered in conversation with Ohmae, his real objection to comparison with Perot is more fundamental: The American billionaire doesn’t measure up to his standards. “Everyone who knows the man doesn’t respect him,” he says, “and therefore the American public had a nightmare.”

This is the way Ohmae, 50, talks about most subjects. People in Tokyo frequently describe him as un-Japanese, by which they mean two things. One, that he has very strong opinions. Two, that he has a very strong opinion of himself. He actually rather resembles Perot in his Napoleonic level of self-assurance.

Few here, then, thought it out of character when Ohmae last November announced that he was forming something virtually unprecedented in Japan: a nationwide citizen’s political reform movement. Ohmae christened the group the Reform of Heisei (borrowing the name applied to the reigning era of the current Japanese Emperor Akihito) and structured it as a cross between Common Cause and a mutual fund. Supporters can join for about 10,000 yen (about $90 at the current exchange rate).

With the money, the group screened candidates for the election and provided contributions to those it deemed the most committed to fundamental political and economic reform. Last month, Ohmae announced that Heisei had managed to interview 166 candidates and was endorsing 94.

According to several of his confidantes, Ohmae hopes that all the successful candidates the group endorsed will quit their own parties after the election to form a new Heisei Party.

Like Perot, Ohmae had circled the political world for years before stepping in. Trained as a nuclear engineer, he spent two years designing nuclear reactors for Hitachi Manufacturing and then joined McKinsey & Co., one of the world’s leading management firms. Twenty years later, he is chairman of McKinsey’s Japanese operation.

When not advising Japanese companies, Ohmae offered himself as a consultant to the nation, producing a flood of magazine articles and books in both Japanese and English. In Japan, Ohmae has critics who consider him arrogant, dogmatic and more skilled at concocting elegant theories than practical advice for actual managers. But he obviously has many admirers too: According to his publisher, his books have sold close to 2 million copies in the past five years.

In all of these works, Ohmae argues that Japan’s government-directed capitalism has outlived its purpose. While Japan was struggling to catch the West after World War II, he maintains, it made sense for the government to place a heavy hand on industry, block imports, strictly control the use of land and try to regulate internal competition. Now, these same policies amount to “invisible taxes” on the Japanese people, he says.

Ohmae’s solution is a much more radical version of the agenda Hosokawa advances. (It’s not surprising that Hosokawa and Ohmae preach similar ideas because Ohmae was involved in the early planning for the Japan New Party.) Ohmae wants to eviscerate the central government and disperse almost all its power to eleven regions, or doshus.

In Ohmae’s vision, Tokyo would be reduced to worrying about national security, foreign policy and national standards, with the local governments assuming control for education, welfare and economic development.

Riding back to Tokyo on a Japanese bullet train after a meeting of his group in Sendai, a city of almost 1 million, Ohmae spoke with abolitionist fervor about his plans to emancipate the economy from government bondage. Under his scheme, he was asked, what would happen to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance, the cortex of the Japanese bureaucracy. He waved his hand dismissively, as if to suggest they would be swept away.

“We are no longer a developing country,” he said. “We don’t need MITI.”

If Ohmae’s movement ever achieved power, the managers at MITI probably wouldn’t want to be around anyway. In a direct reversal of MITI’s philosophy--close the market to protect producers--Ohmae says he would tear down most of Japan’s barriers to imports, such as its ban on the import of rice, to cut costs for consumers.

Ohmae, who says he doesn’t want to run for office himself, predicts it will take 12 years to elect enough sympathetic legislators to fully achieve these goals. Most people here can’t imagine Japan’s accepting such wrenching changes for a long time beyond that, if ever.

Ohmae’s is really a green-field agenda: It might be more practical if you were just starting a new country. There is probably about as much chance of Japan’s shuttering MITI as there is of its boarding up the Imperial Palace.

But even if Ohmae’s precise proposals are never implemented, the ideas that guide them--decentralization, deregulation, opening markets--are reshaping Japan’s political debate. To varying degrees, all of Japan’s would-be reformers now speak with this vocabulary.

The new Japanese opposition is still searching for its constituency; but with Ohmae’s help, it is acquiring an ideology.

That doesn’t mean the new opposition is acquiring a common purpose.

In Japanese politics, the plot line always follows “Macbeth,” never “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Division is its natural condition. The LDP is less a unified party than a confederation of tribes, each headed by a faction leader constantly trying to outmaneuver his rivals to get into the prime minister’s office. Though they shared the common purpose of unseating Miyazawa, the ranks of the new reformers are just as riven with conflict. Though Hosokawa and Ohmae espouse virtually identical agendas, relations between the two men have cooled for reasons that are obscure.

Meanwhile, most of the professional politicians identifying with the reform cause dismiss both Ohmae and Hosokawa as amateurs. These Parliament members pin their hopes for political realignment on Ichiro Ozawa, 51, and Tsutomu Hata, 57. Before joining the movement to oust Miyazawa, both had been LDP stalwarts: Hata has headed the ministries of finance andagriculture, and Ozawa has held several top posts, including party secretary general.

Ozawa is best known for his support of a more assertive Japanese foreign policy; U.S. officials say he played a crucial role in winning approval for the Japanese financial contribution to the Gulf War. He is also distinguished by his own assertive style of politics. “He speaks his mind like an American politician,” says one prominent Japanese journalist. “But the public perceives him as arrogant.”

In the United States, Hata is remembered for his straight-faced insistence that Japan couldn’t import American beef because Japanese intestines are different; but, in Japan, he’s considered a serious advocate of cleaning up the political system, more so than Ozawa.

Last fall, Hata and Ozawa broke away from the LDP’s largest faction and established their own new faction with 44 members. Almost immediately the two men hinted that they would bolt the LDP to establish a new party.

At the crucial moment in June, Hata and Ozawa delivered 34 votes to the opposition parties and doomed Miyazawa in a non-confidence vote, forcing him to call Sunday’s election. Just days later they quit the LDP and established their own Renewal Party. If the Liberal Democrats lose majority control of the House of Representatives, and the opposition unites behind a coalition government, Hata has been viewed as a possibility for prime minister.

But it wouldn’t be Japanese politics if all reformers were enthusiastic about working with these men. Hata and Ozawa were weaned in the most scandal-tarred LDP faction--the one headed by Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka (who was forced from office by scandal in 1974), then former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, and then Kanemaru, both of whom have also been muddied with scandal. Ozawa is particularly close to the now-disgraced Kanemaru. To place such men in control of a new party, snorts Ohmae, “is really LDP becoming a clone, splitting (itself) into two.”

In an interview earlier this year, Hata scoffed at these critics the way a Boss Tweed might have dismissed the gentleman reformers of the Progressive era. “If we really take action and move,” he says, “they will all have to follow us in whatever action we take.”

If pressed to explain his agenda, Hata will repeat some of the Ohmae-Hosokawa rhetoric about decentralization and raising living standards.

But his tone suggests that he considers such questions more suited to academic lectures: Policy can come later. To Hata, like Ozawa, the real issue is power. None of the opposition parties have any; only he and Ozawa, he argues, have the government experience and political connections to sell a new party to the bureaucracy, business and the public. To dislodge the existing political order, he says, “strong political power is needed.”

But, of course, the LDP would not have remained in office for so long if it did not also understand how to use political power. On one of my last days in Tokyo, I went to see the top aide to one of the party’s senior leaders.

It was an eerie afternoon: Outside the office, a thunderstorm crackled over the city with almost theatrical intensity. I could hear a sound-truck crawling up and down the street, blaring right-wing slogans. My informant sat across from me behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, and calmly insisted that Ozawa was trapped. The public prosecutors investigating the Kanemaru kickback scandal, he said, have accumulated enough incriminating information on Ozawa and other members of his faction to intimidate them from leaving the party.

The deal had already been cut between Takeshita and Justice Minister Masaharu Gotoda, he said: If Ozawa stays put, no one gets arrested. On the other hand, he allowed that as a former LDP secretary general, Ozawa probably has his own stockpile of negative information on party leaders. Still, he concluded, “As far as the balance of power, Gotoda has a relatively stronger hand.”

I listened to all this, uncertain whether I was being granted a peek behind the screen or subjected to an elaborate fantasy. I suspected the former, especially because the friend who accompanied me, a veteran observer of Japanese politics, appeared entirely nonplussed by these revelations.

For now, it appears as though my instructor had miscalculated the relative strengths of the contending parties. But it will take many months to determine who truly rises from the rubble of the Miyazawa government’s collapse.

It was one thing for Ozawa to pull down the temple; it may be another to climb from the ruins himself.

In such an unsentimental political culture, can any of the new insurgents threaten the LDP’s rule?

In the aftershocks of the government’s fall, it is easy to exaggerate the LDP’s vulnerability. Even if it loses its lower-house majority Sunday, the LDP will almost certainly remain the largest single party and thus better positioned to build a coalition government than anyone else. The divisions within the opposition are at least as great as the divisions between the opposition and the LDP; efforts to create a united opposition front for the election have been only partially successful. If an anti-LDP coalition government forms, the Socialists, the largest opposition party, are likely to split themselves between moderates willing to align with Hata and Ozawa and hard-liners for whom the two men are anathema.

Why have all previous challenges to LDP dominance failed? The LDP has been adept at absorbing ideas initially introduced into the political debate by the opposition, such as expanding the welfare state. And it skillfully uses pork-barrel politics, binding to its cause farmers with protection from lower-cost imports; construction companies with preference for public works contracts; banks and securities firms with lax regulation.

One-party domination has not been without broader advantages for Japan. It is a commonplace observation that the Japanese public tolerates the relentless scandals because it knows the politicians leave the important decisions to the elite bureaucrats in the ministries anyway. Under their direction, Japan has built the world’s second-largest economy. It is far from clear that the technocrats would let something so minor as a change in the political control of government deter them from the course they have steered for 40 years.

“If the LDP lost power, nothing would change!” a senior economic bureaucrat thundered at me one day. “The opposition parties have no vision, no agenda. They have complaints, a critique, but . . . in the end, if they wanted to get anything done they would have to come back to us for the ideas.”

That comment might prove especially prophetic if a new government winds up directed by Hata and Ozawa--whose commitment to challenge the bureaucratic-business consensus on domestic policy is, at best, uncertain. But, for all this, Sunday’s election offers the possibility of greater change than Japan has seen in four decades.

People in Japan seem genuinely exhausted by the systemic corruption of a one-party state. In the intelligentsia and parts of the business community, there’s growing impatience that the government hasn’t defined a more energetic Japanese role in international affairs or responded more creatively to the unending economic tensions with the United States and Europe.

Above all, the spreading middle-class frustration over prices and crowds and cramped quarters threatens the LDP’s strongest argument: that it has provided an ever-improving quality of life. Whenever I tried to weigh these two sides of the scale, I came away feeling that none of these factors would be decisive. The real question is more fundamental, at the level not of ideology or even economics but culture.

Change isn’t easy anywhere, even when people are unhappy. It is made infinitely more difficult here by a deference to authority far exceeding that in the West. In school the Japanese are taught to listen, not to question; in business to accept orders until they have accumulated enough seniority to start giving them. The saying shikataganai --it can’t be helped--is practically a national motto.

I didn’t understand how deeply that attitude runs until I went to a luncheon held for Nobutaka Machimura, an LDP member of the lower house, at a hotel outside Sapporo. The gathering was sponsored by a group of Machimura’s women supporters--his koenkai . It was a pleasant, unfocused, afternoon: While snow fell lazily against the long glass windows, the women enjoyed performances of traditional Japanese dance, a raffle, even a turn at karaoke from the candidate.

During the entertainment, I sat at a table in the back of the room, and with the help of a translator, spoke with a group of women. One of the women complained that politicians seemed out of touch with the high cost of maintaining a family in Japan. I suggested that this might be at least partly explained by the fact that all of the ruling party’s 274 members in the lower house are men and asked her if she thought things would improve if more women were elected to office.

No, she said firmly.

Why not?

Because any woman in Parliament who speaks out would just be hammered down anyway, she said. In other words, the obstinacy of sex discrimination in Japan is a good reason not to elect women to office.

As we walked away from the table, my translator, a Japanese woman who had lived in Canada, said to me: “They don’t think they can influence the country’s policy.” She lowered and then raised her hands: “They are so humble and the country is up here.”

When I left Japan many weeks later, the words of the women in Sapporo were still ringing in my ears. But I could also hear the voice of a man who sat next to me at the rally for Ohmae’s movement in Sendai. “I feel that this time the general public can take some sort of action,” he said. “I have always wanted to take part in some way, but I have never seen a chance like this.”

Which of these voices will speak more loudly in the days and weeks ahead? the answer will determine whether a new politics takes root in Japan.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ronald Brownstein, a national political correspondent for The Times, spent three months in Japan earlier this year, studying Japanese politics on a fellowship from the Japan Society, a nonprofit organization based in New York.

Breaking Away

At least four oppo s ition figures are in a position to see their goals advance against the Liberal Democrats in Sunday’s election.

Name: Tsutomu Hata

Title: Co-founder of Shinseito, or Renewal Party, which was launched last month with fellow Liberal Democratic Party defector Ichiro Ozawa.

Age: 57

Personal: Has held various government posts, including minister of finance and agriculture. Member of Japan’s House of Representatives for eight terms. Led the internal rebellion that felled Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s government late last month. Married to Yesuko Hata. Graduated from Seijo University. As a former finance minister, Hata is a veteran of Japan’s trade wars. He is known for his opposition to Washington’s demands that Japan open its markets to U.S. products.

Quote: “Each one of us has a sense of mission--that we must become the core of a new government.”

Name: Kenichi Ohmae

Title: Chairman of McKinsey and Co. of Japan, a management consulting firm. Leader of the Reform of Heisei, a Perot-like citizen’s movement that he launched last year.

Age: 50

Personal: Graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A millionaire, he has written a number of books, including “The Borderless World” in which he predicts that if there are to be economic wars in the 1990s, they will not be fought between the United States and Japan but between regional alliances. He also wants to decentralize the government, giving much of the power to 11 local regions .

Quote: “Japan has the potential to be a much better country. . . . The numbers in the economic statistics are great. But life has not been too great.”

Name: Morihiro Hosokawa

Title: Leader of the new centrist Japan New Party, which he formed last year.

Age: 55

Personal: Born into a family of politicians and is an 18th-generation descendant of feudal lords. Former Liberal Democratic Party governor of the southern prefecture of Kumamoto; former member of Japan’s upper house. Holds bachelor’s degree from Sophia University in Tokyo. Once worked as a reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers. Married to Kayoko Ueda for 21 years.

Quote: “The root cause of our structural problems . . .is that we haven’t had political change. For over 50 years, we’ve had a kind of pseudo-democracy in practice here in Japan.”

Name: Ichiro Ozawa

Title: Co-founder of the Renewal Party.

Age: 51

Personal: Has held several top posts, including former Liberal Democratic Party secretary general. Graduated from Keio University. Is known for his aggressive political style. Played a crucial role in winning approval for the Japanese financial contribution to the Gulf War. Has come under criticism for his early association with former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and former party kingpin Shin Kanemaru, who are now symbols of the “money politics” that Ozawa says he wants to eradicate.

Quote: “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.”

The Race Heats Up

Reform-minded politicians hope to gain enough seats in Sunday’s crucial election to participate in a coalition in the powerful lower house of Parliament. The numbers are approximations of impact based on the current strength of the opposition parties with which the ruling Liberal Democrats might ave to negotiate to form a majority coalition.

Total seats in lower house of Parliament: 511

Largest number of seats LDP ever won (in 1986): 304

Seats LDP won in last election in 1990: 286

Seats LDP held before party rebellion in June: 275. To restore this level, the Liberal Democrats would have to add 48 seats to what they currently hold. Only once have they increased their holdings by that many seats.

Seats needed for a majority: 256. Ruling party would have to add 29 seats to what it currently holds to reach this level.

245. An LDP result in the 255-245 range would force the party to secure the cooperation of the middle-of-the-road Democratic Socialist Party. Such and LDP-led coalition would leave LDP policy virtually unchanged. Rejection by the Democratic Socialists, however, would leave both the conservatives and the opposition with too few seats to form a coalition without help from the Communist Party.

Seats held by the Liberal Democrats going into the election: 215.

214. An LDP result in the 244-215 range would force the party to try to form a coalition with either the Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party or the Japan New Party, a conservative reform group established last year by Morihiro Hosokawa. Moderate political reform, transfer of administrative power from the central government to local governments and a more open market would be likely. Additional defectors from the Liberal Democratic Party, however, would be needed to form an opposition-led coalition.

An LDP total below 214 would open the door to an oppostion-led coalition. It would be firmly pledged to political reform but unified on little else. Instability would be highly likely.

Going Into Election

Seats held by each party.

Liberal Democrats: 227

Socialists: 137

Komei Party (Clean Government): 46

Renewal Party*: 36

New Party Harbinger: 10

Communists: 16

Democratic Socialists: 13

Socialist Democratic Federation: 4

Unaffiliated: 0

Japan New Party: 0