Japanese Prime Minister Hata’s Status Gets Boost After Resignation : Asia: He is seen as leader willing to sacrifice himself. Added stature may help him regain job.

Japan’s outgoing Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata, the “nice guy” who coalition leaders hoped could end bickering in their ranks by the sheer force of his cheerful personality, emerged from his resignation Saturday with heightened status as a leader willing to sacrifice himself for a greater goal.

The new stature might even help him win his job back when maneuvering to patch together a new coalition begins in earnest this week.

Facing a parliamentary no-confidence motion he could not defeat, Hata could have fought back by calling a general election in which his own Renewal Party stood to score the biggest gain.

Instead, Hata gave up the premiership and even risked allowing the Liberal Democratic Party to regain a slice of the power it lost last summer after ruling Japan for 38 years.

Unless the rebellious Socialists return to the coalition, no government can be formed without the Liberal Democrats.

Meanwhile, other nations kept a watchful eye on events in Tokyo. Hata’s resignation adds another element of uncertainty to world financial markets, which were riled last week as the dollar plunged to a post-World War II low against the Japanese yen--sparking a global selloff in stocks and bonds.

The dollar’s weakness has been blamed in part on the stalled negotiations between the United States and Japan to reduce Japan’s huge trade surplus. With Japan again leaderless, global investors fear that there is no prospect for progress in the trade talks, and thus the dollar may be forced lower.

Two days before Hata resigned, Minoru Morita, a respected political commentator, predicted that if the prime minister called a general election for July, Hata’s party would increase its strength in Parliament by at least 50%. His major adversaries, the Liberal Democrats and the Socialists, by contrast, would suffer setbacks, Morita predicted.

Hata confessed to Japanese reporters that he had thought of allowing a vote on the Liberal Democrats’ no-confidence motion and ordering a general election after its expected passage.

But more important, he said, was preserving electoral reform won only after a five-year struggle, avoiding more than a month of political vacuum and not sending another leader with shaky credentials to an economic summit of advanced industrial democracies. The Group of Seven is to meet next month in Naples, Italy.

Hata’s resignation Saturday wiped out the no-confidence motion and the possibility of an election that would have been held under the old system of multi-seat districts that, critics say, promote pork-barrel politics. Redistricting into single-seat constituencies has not yet been carried out.

“Look at the record of my 25 years in politics,” he said at his resignation news conference. “I have never acted for individual benefit. I have always thought of the country.”

No one contradicted him.

Significantly, Socialist Chairman Tomiichi Murayama, whose help the coalition needs to regain a majority, praised him. No criticism at all was made of anything he had done during his brief two months in office.

Indeed, in submitting their no-confidence motion, the Liberal Democrats complained only about the meager 37% of lower-house seats left to the coalition after its biggest member, the Socialists, walked out April 12, hours after helping elect Hata prime minister.

On Thursday, when Hata offered to quit to meet a Socialist demand for a face-saving reason for their rejoining the coalition, he presumed that he had the Socialists’ support in a new election for prime minister.

But Friday, the Socialists reneged on earlier promises and declared that they would not support Hata again.

New names started appearing on the dartboard of possibilities for Japan’s seventh prime minister in five years.

Among them were Socialist Chairman Murayama and Masayoshi Takemura, head of the splinter New Party Harbinger who served as chief Cabinet secretary in the eight-month Cabinet of former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa.

Hata, who said he would “entrust my future to Parliament,” remained near the center of the board. Near the edge was Yohei Kono, the Liberal Democrats’ president.

Takemura suggested that Socialist leader Murayama become prime minister and that a new Cabinet be built around the Socialists, instead of Hata’s Renewal Party whose deputy, Ichiro Ozawa, is an archenemy of Takemura.

Koichi Kato, a rising star in the Liberal Democratic Party, said Kono, his party’s chief, “would be best” but named both Murayama and Takemura as leaders whom the Liberal Democrats could support in an LDP-Socialist-Harbinger coalition.

Murayama rejected any attempt to form a coalition “at this time” with the Socialists’ traditional enemy, the LDP, saying his party would first try to work out terms of a new alliance with the coalition.

When Kono handed him a copy of a Liberal Democrat coalition platform Saturday afternoon, the Socialist leader replied only, “I’ll read it carefully.”

Hata said he was resigning in hopes that a new Cabinet, united on policy and fortified with a strong base, could be formed. But there was no guarantee of such a government emerging.

Although the new single-seat electoral system is expected to force an amalgamation of Japan’s myriad parties, so far the old political structure has been splintering, not regrouping.

There are now 15 different parties and groups in Parliament, and unity is reported badly frayed within the Liberal Democrats and the Socialists.

More splits could occur in the effort to build a new coalition.

Commentators have compared the idea of blending the Socialists and the conservative Liberal Democrats into a coalition with trying to mix oil and water.

And if the Socialists rejoin the coalition, they would remain at odds with its other parties over tax reform.

A return of international tensions over how to deal with suspected North Korean development of nuclear weapons almost certainly would stir a fight between the Socialists, who oppose sanctions and insist on dialogue, and the rest of the alliance.

So far, the turmoil that has forced out two prime ministers in the last three months appears to have taken its biggest toll on U.S.-Japan economic relations.

Times staff writer Tom Petruno in Los Angeles contributed to this report.