Commentary : Victim of an Ethical Generation Gap : Japan: Hosokawa came up the ranks by doing favors, a tradition the outraged voters no longer accept.

Few thought that Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa would keep his job for long. Hosokawa, Japan’s first head of state in 38 years not a standard bearer of the long-reigning Liberal Democratic Party, had obvious problems leading a coalition of seven divergent political parties. Some thought that fierce battling over political and electoral reforms would bring him down; others thought that recent feuds between two coalition giants, Ichiro Ozawa and Masayoshi Takemura, would end his tenure. But these he survived.

To his credit, Hosokawa has completely changed Japan’s election system, led modest but important reforms in campaign finance laws and just announced that his Nihon Shinto Party would merge with the Clean Government Party (Komeito) and with Ozawa’s Shinseito Party. Boosting him further, Hosokawa has been sporting the highest public approval ratings of any prime minister in recent years. Things could not have been much better for this media-savvy leader.

But Hosokawa, often referred to as “Mr. Clean,” may not be so clean after all. Like every other top-ranked politician in Japan, Hosokawa has been climbing the political ladder by exchanging favors for votes and money; by providing government goods or government access to constituents in exchange for their campaign contributions.

The political machines crafted by former Louisiana Gov. Huey Long and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley are not dissimilar from the powerful and enriching machines that former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka built. Although Tanaka’s prime ministerial career ended in 1974 amid allegations of money politics that later erupted into the Lockheed bribery scandal, his machine went on to support former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who resigned over his role in the Recruit scandal, and LDP kingpin Shin Kanemaru, who resigned his Diet post when it was discovered that $50 million in gold bars and cash bearer bonds lay stashed in his home closet. Ozawa, the behind-the-scenes political orchestrator who brought Hosokawa to power, is the latest beneficiary of the Tanaka machine. Huey Long and Kakuei Tanaka may have been superstars of political back-scratching, but Hosokawa is reflective of something different.

Although the Lockheed and Recruit cases registered at extraordinarily high levels on the Richter scale for scandals in Japan, the attention focused on the firms and individuals involved has directed attention away from the real issue: all local, prefectural and national level politicians in Japan, if they wished to keep their jobs, have pursued votes and money in exchange for government favors. Maybe a local contractor gets the permit to build a new train station, or a small delivery company receives a tough to get permit to expand its territory, or any of a million favors are doled out to campaign donors by politicians. Hosokawa does not differ from thousands of elected leaders in Japan who have built their state through a process of mutual collusion between politicians, bureaucrats and favor-seeking firms.

Hosokawa’s problem is that although he grew up in the same political fraternity as most of those in Japan’s Diet, the Japanese people are demanding the kind of transparency into personal and financial affairs that was unthinkable until recent years. The Japanese public was outraged when it learned that securities houses were guaranteeing big companies like Hitachi and Nissan against losses while housewives took real risks in the stock market. They have been further shocked by revelations that Japan’s gangsters, yakuza, have bankrolled politicians, compromised major financial institutions and are well-taken care of by the government. Kanemaru’s gold bars and Hawaii condos as well as the continuing spate of revelations about outright bribes of public officials by construction firms have finally pushed the public beyond their tolerance of “behind the shoji screen corruption.”

Hosokawa has refused to allow his personal finances to be opened to the public, although other LDP leaders in recent years have done so. Hosokawa, riding into office on the wave of political-reform hysteria in Japan, has tragically fallen on his own sword. In contrast to the clean image he promised, Hosokawa reflects the general and broad corruption of Japan’s political system, not a corruption that has recently developed but the kind of publicly accepted and known corruption that has characterized Japanese politics in the entire postwar period. Hosokawa claims that a $1-million loan that he received from the Sagawa Kyubin firm was repaid. If so, then he is one of the only politicians who has repaid such a loan.

The key issue for Japan is that none of its current leaders matured in a clean political system. They are powerful because they built the best political machines, raised the most money and secured the greatest amount of government resources to return to their constituents. No politician has been exempt from this reality. Hosokawa’s departure means one of two things: either the Japanese public is going to have to forgive the past misdeeds of their current leaders or the revolving door of the prime minister’s office is going to be swinging for some time.