Miyazawa Shows No Sign He’ll Throw in Towel

Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa may be down, but he is not yet out.

Defying Japanese newspaper predictions and--apparently--advice from his ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s four chief executives, Miyazawa said in a nationally televised news conference Monday that he will decide himself when and if to resign.

Miyazawa declared that the Liberal Democrats will try to continue leading the government despite suffering an unprecedented setback in Sunday’s election--loss of the majority in the powerful lower house of Parliament, which they had held for the last 38 years.

Talking like a leader with little intention of throwing in the towel, Miyazawa said he will make his decision by the day before the lower house convenes to choose a prime minister. Asked if he would be willing to stand again for prime minister, the 73-year-old answered in the affirmative.

Seiroku Kajiyama, the Liberal Democrats’ secretary general, said he would like to call Parliament into session by early August and conduct the vote for prime minister by mid-August.

Miyazawa’s sudden assertiveness came as a surprise in what may be his 11th hour as Japan’s leader. He is widely described as a “lame duck” after being condemned as a “liar” and branded with a stamp of no-confidence in Parliament on June 18.

Although he came into office in 1991 amid expectations that his 50 years of experience in government and politics would give Japan an activist prime minister making his own policies, Miyazawa has disappointed even his staunchest supporters.

Opinion polls have shown increasing dissatisfaction with his unwillingness to exert leadership. And when he failed to carry out a promise to enact political reform bills in June, his support ratings dropped as low as 9%.

Miyazawa, however, presided over the annual economic summit of advanced industrial democracies July 7-9 in Tokyo and managed to produce results that the participants said they had not expected. And when he began campaigning--in an unusually aggressive manner--for the lower house election, it appeared almost as if he had become a new leader.

He hit hard at the policies of the Socialists, a onetime Marxist party that has been the leading opposition group. And he condemned defectors from his own party for joining the left-leaning party to seek power through a coalition.

Citing the Socialists’ opposition to nuclear power, he warned that any government that included them would eventually bring power shortages to Japan. Pointing to the Socialists’ close ties with Communist North Korea, he declared that Pyongyang’s suspected development of nuclear weapons was a direct threat to Japan.

And noting the Socialists’ insistence that Japan’s armed forces are unconstitutional, he asked voters how they could entrust power over defense budgets to such a coalition partner.

Although the Liberal Democrats suffered their first-ever lower house defeat, they came close enough to a majority to seek a minor-party coalition partner, or even to retain power as a minority government if the opposition itself fails to agree on a coalition.

Japanese media reported that Kajiyama went to Miyazawa’s office Monday with a recommendation that the party’s four major executives join Miyazawa in resigning. But, in addition to declaring that he would make his own decision on that issue, Miyazawa also spoke out indirectly against the four executives for the way they handled political reform bills in the last session of Parliament.

Instead of thrusting the reform proposals on a take-it-or-leave-it basis at the opposition, as the Liberal Democrat executives had done in June, they should have held consultations with the opposition while also debating the issue inside their own party, he said. He added that he would like to use the experience gained from that failure to make another try himself.

Political commentator Minoru Morita noted that “Miyazawa is the kind of person who musters his strength when the situation becomes hopeless.”

But the absence of a resignation announcement triggered a barrage of criticism.

Junichiro Koizumi, Miyazawa’s postal and telecommunications minister, said on a TV debate show that the prime minister should have declared his intent to resign Sunday night as the Liberal Democrats’ defeat became clear during the ballot counting.

But asked who should replace Miyazawa, the minister confessed: “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

In Washington, White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers indicated Monday that the answer wouldn’t matter to the United States. “The United States and Japan have had a long-term stable relationship,” she said. “We don’t expect that that will be affected by a change in government.”