Ichiro Ozawa. is another story. Hata’s comrade in arms in Japan’s stunning political revolution, Ozawa is a pure product of Tokyo’s notorious backroom, money-driven political culture. His first mentor was former Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, otherwise known as the “Don”: he ruled the LDP singlehandedly for 13 years, dispensing favors and cash to loyalists. After scandal felled Tanaka in the late 1970s, Ozawa grew close to a politician named Shin Kanemaru, and the two served at the heart of the largest, richest and most powerful faction within the LDP for more than a decade. Then, four months ago, authorities raided Kanemaru’s office and did find gold bars worth millions of dollars in the old man’s safe. The initial hearing in his trial for tax evasion is July 22-four days after a snap election that could reshape Japanese politics forever-and no one will be too surprised if Kanemaru’s protege is called on to tell what he knows about how his old friend managed to get so rich.
Hata and Ozawa, 57 and 51, respectively, are at the center of Japan’s political earthquake. Last Wednesday they led 42 colleagues out of the LDP, forming a party they say is dedicated to political reform, to rooting out the influence of money and to creating a competitive, two-party system in a nation that has been, effectively, a one-party autocracy for 38 years. Just five days earlier, the group had ensured the downfall of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s government when they voted with the opposition on a no-confidence motion. As the shock of that moment wore off last week, the electorate’s focus fell on the new party Hata and Ozawa formed, and one question loomed above all others: can two men who are products of the old school really be agents of change? Or are they merely opportunists who shrewdly seized the moment when they saw how vulnerable Miyazawa was?
Senior members of the ruling LDP, embittered by the Hata faction’s betrayal, were quick to question the group’s highminded claims. “They say they are reformers, but isn’t it their own nature that has to be reformed?” fumed Yohei Kono, Miyazawa’s chief cabinet secretary. That line of attack-we may be corrupt, but they’re corrupt and they’re traitors besides-may well be the LDP’s main defense as it tries to protect its majority in Japan’s allpowerful lower house on July 18. They are likely to fail, at least in the short run. Scarcely anyone thinks the LDP will emerge with a simple majority of seats; the only question is whether they will come close enough to strike a deal with any of the smaller opposition groups to put them over the top-and most analysts think even that is unlikely.
_B_For real?_b_LDP’s defeat could have profound consequences both inside and outside Japan-but only if the Hata party is for real. An era of genuinely competitive democracy would ultimately put issues on the table that would give average Japanese voters real policy choices for the first time in decades. Clearly implicit in the Hata group’s (so far) vague calls for reforming Japan’s electoral system and giving the urban consumer more of a voice is something truly heretical in Japanese politics: reducing the influence of the country’s cosseted farmers long the financial backbone of the LDP.
Farmers today are vastly overrepresented in Japan’s legislature, If that ever changed, it would, in turn, free the government to allow more low-cost imports, lowering food prices in Japan; it would also pave the way for further reform-say, in land use policy-that could help Japanese workers attain a more comfortable lifestyle. A reform platform, in fact, jibes neatly with much of what Japan’s trading partners have been clamoring for. Along with two new, anti-LDP parties, the new 44-member party formed by Hata and Ozawa (called Shinseito, the New Life Party) is calling for further deregulation of Japanese business’ which would reduce costs to consumers and make Japan an easier market to penetrate. That is a goal the country desperately needs to reach, lest it risk economic isolation from countries fed up with its relentlessly mercantilist trading patterns.
After the election-assuming it can construct a coalition government-the New Life Party’s challenge will be clear: living up to its campaign rhetoric. Skeptics abound, because the two leaders are so closely linked to the status quo. The group is painfully aware of its image problem: at the party’s coming-out ceremony last week, Ozawa was conspicuously absent. He has also refrained from giving interviews to the Japanese media, letting Hata be the very public front man. When pressed on this by a TV anchorwoman last week, Hata got defensive: “Don’t you see it’s a busy time for us?” he snapped. “He’s got a lot to do.”
There is little the two men can do to prove their commitment to change before the election. In effect, they are asking fed-up voters in Japan to make a leap of faith, arguing that only insiders, familiar with just how dirty the political system is, can change it. “The system cannot be changed by anyone from the outside,” Ozawa told NEWSWEEK earlier this year. “Change did not come to the Soviet Union from outside. It came from within.” Ozawa’s allies love the Mikhail Gorbachev analogy, the Soviet leader distrusted by many in the West until, to their astonishment, he let the Berlin wall come down. “Well, we just tore down Japan’s political Berlin wall,” one of Ozawa’s party mates insisted last week. “Now people say Ozawa is dirty because of his association with Kanemaru. They say he cannot be committed to reform. They’ll just have to watch.”
There will be nothing to watch, however, unless Ozawa and Hata can pull together a governing coalition. They may have to form an alliance with the largest opposition party in Japan, the former socialists now known as the Social Democratic Party of Japan. Ozawa and the socialists have had nothing but contempt for each other over the years, but now both see their chance to govern–and to topple the LDP. An alliance would dramatically reshape Japan’s political landscape. The socialists would probably break up, as their hard-core left-wing members split off, leaving two major centrist parties and guaranteeing competitive elections for a long time to come.
Skeptics still counter that the important issue remains: what will those competitive elections be about, and how will they change Japan? Political analysts in Tokyo point out, correctly, that minority parties like the socialists have traditionally been no more enthusiastic about political reform than the LDP. A complicated multiseat constituency system effectively guarantees that a few minority party members are elected from each district. If, as some calling for political reform want, Japan moves to a single-seat system much like that in the United States, a lot of people serving in the Parliament today would ultimately lose. And in this there is no cultural divide between Tokyo and Washington or any other capital: a Japanese politician’s most basic loyalty is to himself and to his continuance in office.
No one has ever gone broke betting against sweeping political reform in Japan, but, still, to do so this time may be to miss the significance of the last two weeks. Whatever their motivation, what Hata’s and Ozawa’s defections did was to provide cover for a lot of younger members of the LDP who seem genuinely committed to changing the system. Less publicized last week, for example, was the defection of a group of LDP legislators known as Sakigake, or the Harbinger Party. They are all young, all in their first or second terms and all wealthy enough to finance their own campaigns. They openly doubt the New Life Party’s commitment to reform, and they also claim that many of their colleagues in the LDP are just waiting to join them, not the Hata group. The LDP’s disarray, similarly, has created a huge opportunity in the coming election for a small, reform-oriented party started just last year. Led by Morihiro Hosokawa, the heir to one of Japan’s most famous samurai families, the so-called Japan New Party is also campaigning on a platform of political reform and bureaucratic decentralization in Japan. Analysts now say the party could win up to 50 seats in the lower house-up from none presently.
The lesson in this for Ozawa and Hata should be obvious. Having started the reform ball rolling, they may not be able to stop it. If a Hata-led government fails to live up to its campaign commitments, it would be as vulnerable to a vote of no confidence as Miyazawa was. “They’d be blown away like a bunch of cherry blossoms,” says Kenichi Ohmae, a business consultant and chairman of a Perot-style citizens’ activist group in Japan. The leaders of the New Life Party surely know that-especially Ozawa. He’s been called a dirty politician and he’s been called an opportunist, but one thing he has never been called is stupid.
title: “Turning Up The Heat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Edward Jackson”
Ichiro Ozawa. is another story. Hata’s comrade in arms in Japan’s stunning political revolution, Ozawa is a pure product of Tokyo’s notorious backroom, money-driven political culture. His first mentor was former Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, otherwise known as the “Don”: he ruled the LDP singlehandedly for 13 years, dispensing favors and cash to loyalists. After scandal felled Tanaka in the late 1970s, Ozawa grew close to a politician named Shin Kanemaru, and the two served at the heart of the largest, richest and most powerful faction within the LDP for more than a decade. Then, four months ago, authorities raided Kanemaru’s office and did find gold bars worth millions of dollars in the old man’s safe. The initial hearing in his trial for tax evasion is July 22-four days after a snap election that could reshape Japanese politics forever-and no one will be too surprised if Kanemaru’s protege is called on to tell what he knows about how his old friend managed to get so rich.
Hata and Ozawa, 57 and 51, respectively, are at the center of Japan’s political earthquake. Last Wednesday they led 42 colleagues out of the LDP, forming a party they say is dedicated to political reform, to rooting out the influence of money and to creating a competitive, two-party system in a nation that has been, effectively, a one-party autocracy for 38 years. Just five days earlier, the group had ensured the downfall of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s government when they voted with the opposition on a no-confidence motion. As the shock of that moment wore off last week, the electorate’s focus fell on the new party Hata and Ozawa formed, and one question loomed above all others: can two men who are products of the old school really be agents of change? Or are they merely opportunists who shrewdly seized the moment when they saw how vulnerable Miyazawa was?
Senior members of the ruling LDP, embittered by the Hata faction’s betrayal, were quick to question the group’s highminded claims. “They say they are reformers, but isn’t it their own nature that has to be reformed?” fumed Yohei Kono, Miyazawa’s chief cabinet secretary. That line of attack-we may be corrupt, but they’re corrupt and they’re traitors besides-may well be the LDP’s main defense as it tries to protect its majority in Japan’s allpowerful lower house on July 18. They are likely to fail, at least in the short run. Scarcely anyone thinks the LDP will emerge with a simple majority of seats; the only question is whether they will come close enough to strike a deal with any of the smaller opposition groups to put them over the top-and most analysts think even that is unlikely.
_B_For real?_b_LDP’s defeat could have profound consequences both inside and outside Japan-but only if the Hata party is for real. An era of genuinely competitive democracy would ultimately put issues on the table that would give average Japanese voters real policy choices for the first time in decades. Clearly implicit in the Hata group’s (so far) vague calls for reforming Japan’s electoral system and giving the urban consumer more of a voice is something truly heretical in Japanese politics: reducing the influence of the country’s cosseted farmers long the financial backbone of the LDP.
Farmers today are vastly overrepresented in Japan’s legislature, If that ever changed, it would, in turn, free the government to allow more low-cost imports, lowering food prices in Japan; it would also pave the way for further reform-say, in land use policy-that could help Japanese workers attain a more comfortable lifestyle. A reform platform, in fact, jibes neatly with much of what Japan’s trading partners have been clamoring for. Along with two new, anti-LDP parties, the new 44-member party formed by Hata and Ozawa (called Shinseito, the New Life Party) is calling for further deregulation of Japanese business’ which would reduce costs to consumers and make Japan an easier market to penetrate. That is a goal the country desperately needs to reach, lest it risk economic isolation from countries fed up with its relentlessly mercantilist trading patterns.
After the election-assuming it can construct a coalition government-the New Life Party’s challenge will be clear: living up to its campaign rhetoric. Skeptics abound, because the two leaders are so closely linked to the status quo. The group is painfully aware of its image problem: at the party’s coming-out ceremony last week, Ozawa was conspicuously absent. He has also refrained from giving interviews to the Japanese media, letting Hata be the very public front man. When pressed on this by a TV anchorwoman last week, Hata got defensive: “Don’t you see it’s a busy time for us?” he snapped. “He’s got a lot to do.”
There is little the two men can do to prove their commitment to change before the election. In effect, they are asking fed-up voters in Japan to make a leap of faith, arguing that only insiders, familiar with just how dirty the political system is, can change it. “The system cannot be changed by anyone from the outside,” Ozawa told NEWSWEEK earlier this year. “Change did not come to the Soviet Union from outside. It came from within.” Ozawa’s allies love the Mikhail Gorbachev analogy, the Soviet leader distrusted by many in the West until, to their astonishment, he let the Berlin wall come down. “Well, we just tore down Japan’s political Berlin wall,” one of Ozawa’s party mates insisted last week. “Now people say Ozawa is dirty because of his association with Kanemaru. They say he cannot be committed to reform. They’ll just have to watch.”
There will be nothing to watch, however, unless Ozawa and Hata can pull together a governing coalition. They may have to form an alliance with the largest opposition party in Japan, the former socialists now known as the Social Democratic Party of Japan. Ozawa and the socialists have had nothing but contempt for each other over the years, but now both see their chance to govern–and to topple the LDP. An alliance would dramatically reshape Japan’s political landscape. The socialists would probably break up, as their hard-core left-wing members split off, leaving two major centrist parties and guaranteeing competitive elections for a long time to come.
Skeptics still counter that the important issue remains: what will those competitive elections be about, and how will they change Japan? Political analysts in Tokyo point out, correctly, that minority parties like the socialists have traditionally been no more enthusiastic about political reform than the LDP. A complicated multiseat constituency system effectively guarantees that a few minority party members are elected from each district. If, as some calling for political reform want, Japan moves to a single-seat system much like that in the United States, a lot of people serving in the Parliament today would ultimately lose. And in this there is no cultural divide between Tokyo and Washington or any other capital: a Japanese politician’s most basic loyalty is to himself and to his continuance in office.
No one has ever gone broke betting against sweeping political reform in Japan, but, still, to do so this time may be to miss the significance of the last two weeks. Whatever their motivation, what Hata’s and Ozawa’s defections did was to provide cover for a lot of younger members of the LDP who seem genuinely committed to changing the system. Less publicized last week, for example, was the defection of a group of LDP legislators known as Sakigake, or the Harbinger Party. They are all young, all in their first or second terms and all wealthy enough to finance their own campaigns. They openly doubt the New Life Party’s commitment to reform, and they also claim that many of their colleagues in the LDP are just waiting to join them, not the Hata group. The LDP’s disarray, similarly, has created a huge opportunity in the coming election for a small, reform-oriented party started just last year. Led by Morihiro Hosokawa, the heir to one of Japan’s most famous samurai families, the so-called Japan New Party is also campaigning on a platform of political reform and bureaucratic decentralization in Japan. Analysts now say the party could win up to 50 seats in the lower house-up from none presently.
The lesson in this for Ozawa and Hata should be obvious. Having started the reform ball rolling, they may not be able to stop it. If a Hata-led government fails to live up to its campaign commitments, it would be as vulnerable to a vote of no confidence as Miyazawa was. “They’d be blown away like a bunch of cherry blossoms,” says Kenichi Ohmae, a business consultant and chairman of a Perot-style citizens’ activist group in Japan. The leaders of the New Life Party surely know that-especially Ozawa. He’s been called a dirty politician and he’s been called an opportunist, but one thing he has never been called is stupid.
title: “Turning Up The Heat” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Douglas Danforth”
Nor to the rest of the troubled area. What looked for a few hours last week like a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy disintegrated yet again into chaos and violence. Shimon Peres, Israel’s patriarch of the peace process, had prodded Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to agree to a truce. In return, Israel would withdraw its tanks from positions they had established outside Palestinian towns and propose a timetable for putting peace talks back on track. Then came the bombing– the Islamic Jihad terror group claimed responsibility–and a fresh round of gun battles between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat, in the agreement he negotiated with Peres, had pledged to make a personal call to end the violence, but it never came; Israelis were left confused and angry. “It’s hard to escape the feeling that we’ve been duped,” said one official.
Arafat remains the key to Israeli policy. Senior policymakers believe that even if the former guerrilla leader didn’t orchestrate the clashes, he has been encouraging them. They suspect that Arafat is stoking the conflict by offering up young martyrs, hoping televised pictures of their deaths will paint Israel as the aggressor and win Palestinians more international support. This might help him draw his allies–including the Russians and some Europeans–into the peacemaking process. If Arafat fails to publicly and directly call for a ceasefire, says one senior Israeli official, “we will increase the pressure on him and his system.” The strategy is dicey: it’s an open question whether an intensified Israeli military campaign would only worsen the cycle of violence–and whether Arafat can really rein in the zealots who are intent on sowing terror in Israel.
One possible target of a pressure campaign: assets of Arafat’s cronies, such as a casino in Jericho largely owned by the Palestinian Authority. Israel rocketed the building already last week. The strategy could also include more personal, diplomatic pressure; President Bill Clinton has invited Arafat and Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Washington for talks. But in a military sense, Arafat himself will be targeted with care. Some Israelis now worry that the lifelong rebel, faced ultimately with the prospect of leading a small, weak, demilitarized state, would rather go down in a blaze of glory. Such an interpretation may be extreme, but it reflects a genuine sense of frustration in Israel, where nobody has a good explanation for the latest round of violence. It was only in August that the two parties seemed very close to a final peace deal. Now the renewed conflict is taking the shape of a guerrilla war, with Palestinian gunmen ambushing Israeli soldiers, who respond with a torrent of firepower.
One battle, fought near Bethlehem a day before the aborted ceasefire, stood out. Palestinians unleashed machine-gun fire on an Israeli position, wounding several soldiers and preventing other troops from reaching their comrades for more than an hour; by the time they did, two of the wounded were dead. In response, Barak summoned his security cabinet to draft a plan of retaliation. Army generals talked about a new, more violent stage in the conflict, and the cabinet chose several targets for air raids on the West Bank and Gaza. “It was clear we were now going to have to step up the level of our response,” a security source told NEWSWEEK. “The plan was to stop with the pinpoint precision attacks and move onto something more serious.”
The specter of intensified Israeli action helped Peres wheedle Arafat into an agreement. “[Arafat’s] interpretation was that Israel might use much more severe weapons in the next phase,” said an official close to the talks. The violence that followed the agreement has left some Israeli officials wondering if Arafat is leading his people or being led. Attacks by Islamic Jihad and the larger Hamas faction are one thing. Neither group is loyal to Arafat and both killed scores of Israelis in suicide attacks over the years, despite Arafat’s opposition. But the gun battles that erupted after truce talks ended were initiated by members of Arafat’s own Fatah faction of the PLO. They include leaders of the Tanzim, an armed group within Fatah, who have directed the clashes and have rejected previous ceasefires.
Without a clear call by Arafat for a ceasefire, Israel will probably revert to the battle plan it drafted last week, which includes provisions for demolishing entire buildings used by Palestinian security forces and armed groups. The Israeli measures will likely draw more Palestinian shooting and suicide bombings in a cycle of violence that feeds on itself. One of the two victims in last week’s bombing was the daughter of prominent Israeli lawmaker Yitzhak Levy. Her name was added to the list of casualties on both sides that is fast approaching 200–most of them Palestinians–and continues to grow. Until the next ceasefire.
title: “Turning Up The Heat” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-21” author: “Helen Morrison”
The attacks began at approximately 9:45 a.m. local time (1:45 a.m. ET). Eyewitnesses saw a ridge overlooking Chamchamal–a Kurdish-held city only about 12 miles from oil-rich Kirkuk–erupt in plumes of smoke after six powerful bombs detonated in succession. While American bombs did hit Kirkuk and Mosul last Friday, those cities are outside the Kurdish area. Today’s barrage, by contrast, landed on the unofficial border that marks off this enclave from Saddam Hussein’s territory.
The explosions shook buildings in the city and sent several residents scrambling for cover. Kurdish military commanders in Chamchamal say a radio tower and bunkers along the ridge were targeted and an ambulance could be seen ferrying away the wounded. Bombs also fell on Kirkuk later in the evening, a 30-minute attack that was punctuated by bright flashes and rumbling explosions.
The bombing this morning, coupled with a noticeable buildup in the number of U.S. Special Forces in the region, indicate that a ground assault on Iraqi frontline positions in the north may be only days away. And Kurdish forces could be joining up with the U.S. military for the attack. High-ranking military officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the party that controls the eastern half of the Kurdish enclave, were seen at a meeting with Special Forces soldiers near the front-line yesterday.
The U.S. goals, however, may be twofold. For the past two days, PUK soldiers and U.S. Special Forces have been building up near the eastern city of Halabja, suggesting that the first joint operation may be directed at another foe–Ansar al Islam, a group of Islamic militants dug into a series of remote mountain villages. The attack wouldn’t be a surprise. Dozens of Tomahawk missiles rained down on the Ansar enclave–thought to hold approximately 750 soldiers, including hardened Afghanistan-trained Arab fighters–on Friday night. Smaller bombing raids followed on Saturday and Sunday morning. But Kurdish officials maintain that a ground assault, preferably with U.S. military aid, would be needed to dislodge Ansar from their mountain stronghold. “We would welcome American ground forces to be rid of these terrorists for good,” says Barham Salih, the PUK prime minister who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Ansar operatives last year.
Ansar, a group that has been linked to Al Qaeda, seems unlikely to give in easily. On Saturday afternoon, an orange and white taxi, carrying two passengers, drove up to Girde Go, a military checkpoint near Halabja. Guards at the checkpoint looked over the driver, a slim man in his mid-30s with a black mustache, and inspected the car, which was leaving Ansar territory. After a quick check, the car was waved on and the driver pulled up next to a crowd waiting at the checkpoint. Most of the crowd comprised displacees from Ansar territory waiting for news about relatives left behind.
Two journalists from Australian television were filming the crowd when the car exploded. “Fire shot up from the car and black pieces flew into the sky,” says Marwan Ali Aziz, 24, a PUK guard at the checkpoint. “I saw one woman with half of her body on fire.” The attack wounded eleven and killed four, including Paul Moran, a cameraman for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Kurdish officials warned today that three more cars loaded with explosives are roaming Suleimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan’s second largest city, looking for Western targets. The weekend attack was a stark reminder of just how vulnerable they are.
