Word: kasumigaseki
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from four years of stagnation. Yet despite all appearances of revolution, the regime remains the same in the eyes of most Japanese. The nation is ruled not by the parliament or the Prime Minister but rather by a force as faceless as ancient Emperors and as intractable as smog: Kasumigaseki, the district in Tokyo where government bureaucrats have their offices and from which they have colonized the rest of Japan...
...campaigning for next Sunday's parliamentary election, however, Kasumigaseki has come under attack as never before. Every participating political party is demanding deep reforms to curtail the power of the ministries. "Japan's political dynamism is such that if everyone starts saying the same thing, something will happen," says Takeshi Sasaki, a professor of politics at the University of Tokyo. "This election could create a national consensus for reform." Indeed, even Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, whose Liberal Democrats were in cahoots with the bureaucrats for decades, has promised to cut the 22 ministries in half if his party manages...
...fighter jets and tanks. No police report has fully explained the March subway gassing and May's thwarted attack on Shinjuku station. Ikuo Hayashi, a doctor who admitted planting gas on one of the Tokyo trains, was quoted in newspapers as saying the goal was to wipe out the Kasumigaseki section of Tokyo, where many government offices are located. "The attack was launched so that the guru's prophecy could come true," Hayashi reportedly told interrogators...
...unfolded at five other subway stops on three lines. Police arrived within minutes, administered some first aid and spirited thousands to hospitals, where doctors who suspected what had happened administered atropine, a sarin antidote. But for some it was too late. Kazumasa Takahashi, an assistant station manager at the Kasumigaseki stop, overstayed his shift to mop up the mystery liquid and dispose of the package that leaked it. He died a few hours later, and a colleague who helped him perished the next...
...attack were understandably bewildered. Said Kiyo Arai, a 22-year-old government employee who was stricken at the Kodenmacho station: "We're just innocent, ordinary people. It frightens me to think how vulnerable we are." It was not lost on authorities that the three poisoned train lines converge at Kasumigaseki, the hub for top government offices, including the national police. If the trains had continued on schedule, all three would have arrived at that station between 8:09 and 8:14, the apex of rush hour. Said Atsuyuki Sassa, former director general of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office: "This...