Word: ldp
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Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vaulted to power on a reformist message, vowing to refashion the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and change Japan. He won unprecedented support and fawning adoration from a public hungry for a new way of doing things. Everyone from economists to housewives seemed to agree that the country needed a good dose of shock therapy. Why then, does reform in Japan seem dead...
...have to build more roads," he says, explaining that a new road would encourage development at the district's nano-technology research center, an earlier pork-barrel project. Besides, Yamaguchi needs to show the folks back home that he can be as effective as his predecessor, a veteran LDP power broker: "I have to show that even though I am not in the LDP, I can deliver," he says...
...reforms are being nibbled to death, the victims of both local politics, as in Yamaguchi's case, and Japan's powerful factions and their heavyweight constituents. As for highway construction projects, Koizumi actually won approval to privatize the state-run companies that oversee road building. But members of the LDP, pushed by their construction company patrons, demanded assurances that the fate of each of the more than 2,000 proposed projects will be voted on by the Diet, one by one, which means that most of these roads to nowhere will be quid pro quo'd into existence. "This...
...Koizumi's vision was to reorganize the way government is run, muscling up the executive branch and tearing apart the so-called iron triangle of vested interests?the LDP; their financial and vote-getting supporters in agriculture, construction and other industries; and the bureaucrats. Because the LDP has essentially run Japan as a one-party fiefdom since the mid-1950s, real power broking has gone on inside the party, among rival factions and behind closed doors. "The LDP does its real work in the dark," says Taro Kono, a young LDP Lower House member. Under Koizumi's plan, the factions...
...Even worse than losing that okusan (housewife) support is the perception that Koizumi caved in to the very forces he was elected to oppose. Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) bosses and bureaucrats had been scheming for months to get rid of Tanaka; Koizumi's backpedaling makes him look like a wimp - and a carbon copy of all the losers who preceded him in office. Even more dispiriting is his most recent choice of confidant, none other than his hapless predecessor, the most unpopular Prime Minister Japan has ever had, Yoshiro Mori. "This is the beginning of the betrayal to the nation...