Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
Japan Against Itself
By Ian Buruma
Blueprint for a New Japan
by Ichiro Ozawa, translated by Louisa Rubinfein
Kodansha International, 200 pp., 2,900¥
Writing about the current state of Japanese politics is a bit like grabbing interviews with soldiers in the midst of battle. Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro resigned on April 8 after admitting that he had used a loan of almost one million dollars from a trucking company with gangster connections for political purposes. The situation is so fluid that we do not know which of the present political parties will survive the next general election, to be held some time later this year. Nor is it absolutely certain as I write who the next prime minister will be, though it is likely to be the foreign minister, Hata Tsutomu. There will be splits, new alliances, new parties, and some old parties might disappear altogether. The divisions in today's coalition government run so deep that the different parties in government can really agree on one thing only: that the ancien régime, monopolized by a congeries of conservative factions called the Liberal Democratic Party, had to go.
Review, 6724 words
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