Word: ohira
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira provoked this Circus Maximus by taking a gamble--one most observers thought he would win easily. He dissolved Japan's parliament, the Diet, in September, and called for a new election less than a year after his surprise victory in the last party election. Nothing recent conservative gains in local elections, Ohira saw a chance to buttress his own power with a big victory for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which in recent years has lost the Diet majority it had maintained through the last three decades. Ohira stumped for a tax hike to combat...
...when the voting ended, Ohira's gamble had backfired. Instead of a resounding LDP victory, Ohira's party actually lost a seat, bringing its total in the Diet's lower house to 248. (About 271 seats are necessary to control the key committees in the 511-member House of Representatives.) After the crapshoot, opposition parties in concert controlled as many seats...
...Ohira's blunder shattered the precarious coalition of personal allegiances that cemented the LDP. The party itself in not a unified party at all, but a composite of different factions, groups of Diet members who give loyalty first to one prominent leader, second...
Although in previous elctions faction leaders have made token statements of support for the party leader that cloak their own maneuverings for leverage, this time the top factions heads refused to support Ohira. Instead, they called for his resignation--he complied on November 9. During that week, as Ohira fought to regain power and form a government, the Japanese public got a fascinating glimpse of the depth and breadth of political divisions within the LDP and the potential obstructiveness of the system. As the faction leaders jousted, it became clear that behind their hatred lies an issue...
...Ohira's chief rivals fought to unseat him with a passion fueled by personal enmity and ideological distaste for his alliance with Kakuei Tanaka, the former prime minister unseated after the press revealed the Lockheed airplane company's extensive bribery of government officials to gain contracts. Ohira owes much of his factional strength to Tanaka, who threw his supporters behind Ohira after being indicted in 1973. The bribery charges prohibit Tanaka from playing an active role in the LDP, but he can still play kingmaker, at least until his trial...