Word: hosokawa
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...start leveling the regulatory mountain, Hosokawa will first have to evict bureaucrats who thrive in its shelter. The bureaucracy has effectively run Japan for the past four decades, and it battens on its power -- not to mention the plum private-sector jobs that go to many senior government officials when they retire. A recent study by Tokyo Shoko Research, for example, discovered that nearly 1 in 5 construction-company board members is a former bureaucrat...
...advantage Hosokawa has as he attacks the entrenched interests, however, is the sudden extinction of the zoku, the clubs of L.D.P. legislators who shielded specific ministries in return for political favors -- a new road here, a juicy contract there. With the L.D.P. out of power, the zoku ceased to exist. That made it easier for Hosokawa to take on the Agriculture Ministry over the rice issue, and helped prosecutors push ahead with the arrests of various businessmen and officials in the construction industry. Says Princeton's Calder: "This is Japan's perestroika. Hosokawa is short- circuiting the nomenklatura...
...other hand, may get into the lawbooks in a matter of weeks. Most important, the legislation will eliminate the multimember districts in which candidates from the same party ran against each other -- a practice that encouraged contests based on issues of patronage rather than substance. In its place the Hosokawa government proposes a system of 274 representatives elected from single-seat constituencies and 226 chosen by proportional representation from a national list. The electoral reforms will also ban corporate donations to individual politicians, offer a government subsidy of $294 million to political parties for electoral purposes, and create an organization...
...smaller parties, which tended to win seats as the fourth- or fifth-place finisher in multimember districts. Some of the weaker parties may win seats on the proportional list, but probably far fewer than in the past. That has already incensed some of the Social Democratic Party members in Hosokawa's own coalition, and five of them voted against the government plan. "It's over for the Social Democrats," said Masao Kunihiro, an upper-house member of the party. "This new system stamps out minority views...
...office is provoking talk of splits within the L.D.P. as anxious politicians begin shopping for new homes. Socialists are also looking for new patrons, and no one expects the dust to settle until after the next election. "The July election was a curtain closing," says Shusei Tanaka, a close Hosokawa adviser and a Diet member of the Sakigake, a small liberal party that broke from the L.D.P. to join the ruling coalition. "The next election will be a curtain raising. Right now we are setting the stage...