Japan Premier Advocates More ‘Caring’ Nation

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama urged Japan “not to be a powerful country but a caring country” in an inaugural speech Monday that aimed to back away from moves to increase this nation’s military muscle.

Murayama, the Socialist Party chairman who was elected prime minister June 29 in a shotgun marriage with the conservative Liberal Democrats, also reaffirmed the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in language stronger than his party has ever used. The Socialists had long opposed the treaty until a few years ago.

In his address to the lower house of Parliament, Murayama sidestepped the delicate question of whether he believes Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are constitutional. But in separate remarks later Monday, he said he had asked his party to overcome its 50-year opposition to the nation’s military forces and officially recognize them as legal.

Although his party deputy, Wataru Kubo, declared on a weekend news show that the Socialists are ready to make the policy turnabout and change their platform, the party has not formally decided to do so. A decision to overturn a position that has largely defined the Socialists for almost five decades could force several of the leftist members to quit the party.

The military issue is likely to be the focal point of the opposition’s harsh grilling of Murayama in parliamentary questioning that begins Wednesday. It will be the first time he will be forced to explain to his former political allies how he could abandon party principles and join his erstwhile rivals, the Liberal Democrats, in what the press here is calling an “illicit union.”

Murayama, for instance, pledged in his speech that his government would “firmly maintain” the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. But the Socialists had refused to accept that strong phrase when it was allied with the previous coalition government, complained its former prime minister, Tsutomu Hata.

As with most inaugural speeches, Murayama was short on specifics. He pledged to do his best to enact tax reform by year’s end but gave no clue about how to raise the revenue needed to finance more tax cuts. He announced he would draw up a “five-year deregulation plan” but gave no details.

Murayama reaffirmed his government’s intent to finalize legislation that would redraw electoral districts and hold elections under the new blueprint. He said he would sponsor new measures to crack down on political corruption.

He indicated that the government would slow its drive to win a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Key members of the Murayama Cabinet, such as Finance Minister Masayoshi Takemura of the New Party Harbinger, oppose Japan’s membership.

But Murayama’s buzzwords of the day were “a caring government” and “a government you can feel at ease with.” The phrases were interpreted as blows against political rival Ichiro Ozawa’s aim to make Japan a “normal nation” more willing to dispatch military forces to global hot spots in cooperation with the United Nations.