Word: hosokawa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other hand, may get into the lawbooks in a matter of weeks. Most important, the legislation will eliminate the multimember districts in which candidates from the same party ran against each other -- a practice that encouraged contests based on issues of patronage rather than substance. In its place the Hosokawa government proposes a system of 274 representatives elected from single-seat constituencies and 226 chosen by proportional representation from a national list. The electoral reforms will also ban corporate donations to individual politicians, offer a government subsidy of $294 million to political parties for electoral purposes, and create an organization...
...smaller parties, which tended to win seats as the fourth- or fifth-place finisher in multimember districts. Some of the weaker parties may win seats on the proportional list, but probably far fewer than in the past. That has already incensed some of the Social Democratic Party members in Hosokawa's own coalition, and five of them voted against the government plan. "It's over for the Social Democrats," said Masao Kunihiro, an upper-house member of the party. "This new system stamps out minority views...
...office is provoking talk of splits within the L.D.P. as anxious politicians begin shopping for new homes. Socialists are also looking for new patrons, and no one expects the dust to settle until after the next election. "The July election was a curtain closing," says Shusei Tanaka, a close Hosokawa adviser and a Diet member of the Sakigake, a small liberal party that broke from the L.D.P. to join the ruling coalition. "The next election will be a curtain raising. Right now we are setting the stage...
...meantime, the political players are working hard on their revised scripts. The major parties are all centrist, but some policy distinctions are becoming clear, even though they cut across current party lines. Within the L.D.P., for example, many endorse the carefully articulated demands of Hosokawa's main strategist and political ally, Ichiro Ozawa, for a more "normal" Japan, meaning a country that can participate readily in military actions mandated by the United Nations or its own allies. Within the Hosokawa coalition, on the other hand, many, including the Prime Minister and chief Cabinet Secretary Masayoshi Takemura, are more at home...
Loss of the "control tower," as the Japanese press has nicknamed Ozawa, would be a sharp blow for the coalition and for Hosokawa, who depends heavily on Ozawa's intimate knowledge of political hardball in the Diet and elsewhere. "Every pot has its perfectly matched lid," says Tomoaki Iwai, a politics professor at Tokiwa University. "It is heaven's dispensation. They are one system...