May His Legacy Go to the Grave With Him

Former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who died in his hospital bed this weekend after a long illness, almost singularly symbolized what has been wrong with the Japanese political system since the end of World War II. The best legacy of Takeshita’s death would be to usher in a new era of Japanese politics in which there would be no more Takeshitas.

Even after public opinion forced him to step down as prime minister in 1989 in the wake of a colossally embarrassing corruption scandal, he remained the country’s back-room kingmaker of politicians and prime ministers. Even after entering the hospital more than a year ago, where he would stay secluded from public view until his death at 76, he was pulling important political strings.

Just two months ago, when a stroke felled his protege, Keizo Obuchi, then prime minister, Takeshita’s hospital room became the focus of the tricky succession problem for more than an hour as a top cabinet officer sought out the kingmaker’s tactical wisdom.

For a very long time, of course, this seamy scene has been the time-honored Japanese way in which political decisions affecting the fate of the nation--and sometimes the region--have been made. This web of influence-peddling, family ties and closet deal-making has got to stop. Sure, it has served the best interests of Takeshita’s dominant Liberal Democratic Party. Yet, in the end, the quasi-feudal system has not served Japan’s best interests and is selling Japan seriously short. Takeshita and his LDP must accept a significant measure of responsibility for the nation’s current economic and political malaise.

Will this debilitating system ever change? This weekend, Japan’s voters will go to the polls to elect a new lower house of the Diet, their governing body. If the polls are correct, they will produce a continuation of the current LDP-led government of Yoshiro Mori--a result not in Japan’s best interests. Mori was the hastily chosen fill-in for the late Obuchi two months ago and is a living demonstration of the failing Takeshita touch. Mori’s main accomplishment to date has been to delight the increasingly aggressive Japanese media with gaffes. And on a policy level, Mori would appear to have no new ideas or even a plausible capacity for the job. It’s hard to find many observers inside Japan or outside who believe that Mori is even remotely the best Japan can do for prime minister. To be sure, predecessor Keizo Obuchi entered office with low expectations and exceeded them. But people who have met both say Mori is no Obuchi. Yet the encrusted tradition of insider Japanese politics is incapable of admitting to a mistake.

The nation’s parliamentary system allows the winning party to choose its party leader as prime minister, so voters have a tougher time removing an individual top office-holder. The LDP will probably win, Mori will most likely remain in the job, and Japan will almost certainly stay in the soup.

But the LDP owes it to Japan to break with settled tradition and dump Mori after the election--or at least after the conclusion of the July G-8 summit of industrialized nations to be hosted by Japan. It is undoubtedly true that Japan is a culture of consensus and that its top leader is more a figurehead than an independent power source, as in the U.S. presidential system. Yet from a worldwide perspective, a nation’s prime minister is the leading symbol of national direction and international stature.

The pessimist’s view--perhaps the realist’s view--is that the Takeshita way of politics won’t go to the grave with him. But the optimist could say that perhaps Japan’s destiny has been written in the remarkable trio of deaths that have hit it in just the last two months--not just Obuchi and Takeshita but the Dowager Empress Nagako, more than a decade after her husband, the Emperor Hirohito. When she passed away last week at the age of 97, more than a few Japanese began to wonder if the old Showa era was finally at an end and change finally was at hand. May it be so.