Japan Premier’s Race Shapes Up as Three-for-All

Just when it seemed the dogfight in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party over choosing a new prime minister could not get fiercer or more chaotic, it has.

A three-way race to replace Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto now appears probable, with Japanese news media reporting late Friday that Health Minister Junichiro Koizumi, 55, will challenge the two older, establishment candidates.

The front-runner in this race has been Foreign Minister Keizo Obuchi, 61; the favorite of the financial markets has been Seiroku Kajiyama, 72, a fiery conservative.

But some of the Liberal Democratic Party’s five factions are internally divided over which candidate to back, and all three contenders are reportedly attracting supporters across factional lines.

The new prime minister will be chosen by secret ballot July 24, three days later than originally planned, to allow the candidates more time to explain their policies and garner support.

The situation has gotten so confusing that even Japanese media, which are usually able to report the script for political developments days or weeks ahead, have declared this contest impossible to call.

The tumult prompted Yomiuri, Japan’s largest newspaper, to declare that even the obscure, secretive, old-style factional politics were clearer by comparison.

“The system has lost its old transparency,” Yomiuri said in a front-page “editor’s notebook” published Friday. “Let’s stop making clumsy predictions.”

Some younger lawmakers are terrified that picking an old-style politician like Obuchi in the old-style way may prove the kiss of death with an electorate that has just voted for change. They have been defying their elders and demanding an open, public debate on who best can rescue the world’s second-largest economy from financial crisis. They want to dump the tradition in which faction bosses picked prime ministers in negotiations in smoke-filled back-rooms.

Some of them have prodded Koizumi to enter the prime minister’s race, believing that he, as a relatively younger reformer, is the only one who can save the ruling party from defeat in the next election by the telegenic Naoto Kan, head of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

Courting support, Kajiyama and Obuchi each announced proposals at news conferences for revitalizing the economy with permanent tax cuts, slashing the public work force and increasing public spending.

Despite Friday’s developments, there is a deep fear here that whoever emerges from this murky process will merely be the leader of a caretaker government that may not last even a year, unless it pulls off an economic miracle. Some cynics have even joked about Japan getting a “beach Cabinet” that might not survive past summer.

By Japanese standards, current events are so raucous as to be shocking.

The power brawl erupted when Hashimoto abruptly resigned Monday after his party suffered a rout in upper house parliamentary elections.

On Thursday, there were angry shouts and demands from the floor at a Liberal Democratic Party meeting--the kind of gathering that usually rubber-stamps decisions hammered out earlier in private. This forced the leadership to agree to postpone the date for choosing a new leader.

The leader of the LDP will be chosen by a majority vote of 431 national lawmakers and prefectural representatives.

If a three-way race means no candidate wins an absolute majority, a runoff vote between the top two finishers will take place.

The victor will automatically be chosen as prime minister by the lower house of parliament because the LDP still controls a comfortable majority in that more powerful chamber.

Despite Koizumi’s expected entry into the race, conventional wisdom still favors Obuchi--not least because the bland foreign minister is favored by the most powerful of Japanese political kingmakers, former prime minister Noboru Takeshita.

Obuchi detractors have deemed him a “Takeshita puppet” who has no vision of his own. But others say he has the most vital quality for a Japanese politician: the ability to listen and to bring about compromise between those with clashing views.

“The traditional Japanese view is that history is not built on heroes” as it is in the West, said Takashi Kiuchi, research director at the Long Term Credit Bank of Japan and an astute political observer. “A leader must be a good listener, and Mr. Hashimoto’s failure, by one version, is that he is not.”

Kajiyama is favored by the financial markets as the candidate most likely to endorse far-reaching economic reforms.

The yen leaped in value against the dollar Thursday on news that he would become a candidate. But most political observers agree that he has made too many enemies to win the prime minister’s post.

Obuchi supporters would like to see Kajiyama as finance minister, but the former chief Cabinet secretary is said to be uninterested in that job.

As for Koizumi, he has been an advocate of privatizing Japan’s massive postal savings and insurance program. But that “radical” stance worries party elders, who fear that it would alienate the postmasters and other traditional LDP constituents, said Hiroshi Takaku, a parliament-watcher at the Japan Center for International Exchange.

To some degree, the contest will be a test of strength for Takeshita and the other party bosses.

In theory, the five LDP factions are supposed to have been abolished and turned into policy study groups as part of the political reforms of the mid-1990s. But while their influence is fading, they have not died off.

Still, what is unusual in this race is that factional bosses appear unable or unwilling to deliver their members’ votes as a bloc to a would-be prime minister in exchange for a share of the new Cabinet posts.