Word: ldp
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...system on the other owners in 1993: "Let Japanese players go to the States. That is good for Japanese baseball because someday they will come back and raise the level of the sport. Japanese baseball is like Japanese politics. One is dominated by the Giants, the other by the ldp. It will take time to liberate them...
...because he was a maverick," says LDP lawmaker Nobuteru Ishihara. "People are suspicious of those who represent vested interests, and the LDP members felt the same...
...LDP has to say that, in public. The party that has had a near-exclusive hold on power since 1955 is in serious trouble after a string of prime ministers - culminating in the comically feeble year-long term of Yoshiro Mori - only dug Japan's heels further into the mud. Facing potentially disastrous parliamentary elections in July, the LDP found Koizumi's wide popular support irresistible, and his face - representing, at least cosmetically, a call for reform - not a little convenient...
...wave of popular support - Koizumi comes in with a 65 percent approval rating - got the rebel this far. But having given Koizumi his shot, the calcified, self-preservationist LDP elders will not be as eager to watch him engineer their downfall. Koizumi, who likes to talk about changing Japanese elections to bypass the LDP machinery, started incurring factional wrath on his first day in office Friday with his old-guard-snubbing cabinet selections...
...watch is on to see whether Koizumi will fail by pragmatism, by cutting too many of the usual wheel-greasing deals with the party elders to try and effect change - or by idealism, by cutting too few. Popular support? The LDP hasn't lasted 46 years by listening to the whims of the Japanese voters, and the Japanese voters didn't keep the LDP in power for 46 years because they were much more eager than their politicians to endure the pain of real reform...