Word: takeshita
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Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita persevered for months, but last week his determination to weather the burgeoning Recruit scandal gave out. The meticulous planner and quintessential clubman of Japanese politics surprised his country by abruptly announcing that he would quit his post "to regain the trust of the people." Yet his departure had been a long time coming, as pressure built for months over what the Japanese call kinken-seiji, or money politics, the well-oiled system by which the nation's leaders attain power...
...Prime Minister clung to his job until a weekend news story reported that Ihei Aoki, his right-hand man, had received a 50 million-yen ($347,222) loan from the Recruit Co. two years ago that apparently found its way into the Takeshita campaign chest. The disclosure flatly contradicted the version of events that Takeshita had laid out before the Japanese Diet in early April. Two days after the Aoki story broke, Takeshita came to the conclusion that he could not keep his job; public disapproval was so strong that his government's popularity rating had plummeted to a mortifying...
...Prime Minister's attempt to invest his disgrace with honor was overshadowed only a few hours later by the news -- long anticipated by many Japanese -- that one of the key players had committed suicide. Aoki, 58, Takeshita's closest political aide for 30 years, slashed his wrist, neck and foot with a razor blade, then hanged himself with a necktie. As the man who had handled Takeshita's political finances, some newspaper commentators speculated, Aoki may have taken his life to shield the Prime Minister from possible criminal prosecution. But Aoki may simply have been following a long- standing Japanese...
...Japanese must also decide whether to turn an unsavory scandal into an opportunity to reform their money-greased political system. That may prove the biggest challenge. Takeshita fell victim to his success at mastering the sometimes seamy rules of the system. In common with other party leaders, Takeshita indirectly received shares of cut-rate stock in Recruit, an aggressive information and real estate conglomerate. In all, Takeshita received more than $1 million in campaign contributions, stocks and secret loans from the company. The money went not to a personal account but to fund campaigns and pay staff salaries...
...much of what Takeshita did was necessarily illegal. But the endless disclosures of wide-scale political financing bordering on corruption eventually shocked a nation that had come to think of itself as a modern, democratic superpower. "The L.D.P. must change," said Hiroko Yoshida, 27, a * department-store clerk. "It can no longer stay as it is after this scandal." Takeshita, who was also in trouble for imposing a consumption tax, was blamed for exposing the dirty side of the nation's politics, then failing to correct...