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Horie appears supremely confident of victory. "Of the candidates, I think I'm the most capable politician," he says. "I'm the richest and the youngest. So it's better for the region and for Japan that [voters] choose me, no mistake about it." But winning won't come easy. Wherever Kamei goes, he draws large and adoring crowds, too. Unlike Horie's khakis and t-shirts, Kamei wears a blue suit, light blue shirt and tie and espouses an almost teary-eyed devotion to the constituency that has returned him to office nine times. Kamei dismisses the notion that Koizumi has presided over an economic recovery and disparages the dissolution of parliament as a desperate ploy. He receives rapturous applause. "The current economy only benefits a handful," he says, "and it's not upgrading the quality of life of the entire population. Local economies are drying up while big corporations are killing off the weak in the name of reform. This is not rejuvenation. You cannot call this success."
This message resonates throughout Kamei's district, especially his hometown of Shobara, a tiny village of 21,000 nestled in a remote river valley. Locals proudly mention that it used to take three hours to reach the coast, but because of highway-improvement projects Kamei helped to spearhead, it now takes only an hour-and-a-half. Says Haruo Kawamoto, a 65-year-old mechanic in Shobara: "Kamei has pursued a lot for us aggressively in the past."
Such sentiments highlight the biggest weakness in Koizumi's strategy. Like so many vassals of the samurai who are celebrated in Japanese folklore for gladly marching to death at the order of their lord, many of the assassins are unlikely to defeat the incumbents. Almost without exception, the assassins are glamorous, sophisticated, rich city-slickers parachuting into the poor, rural districts that are most suspicious of flash and that feel most victimized by the reforms Koizumi advocates. Ikeda Takashi, a 61-year-old sushi-restaurant worker from Mihara City says, "Horie? He's just an outsider. Hiroshima's got nothing to do with him. What does he know about us?" Horie acknowledges this view will be tough to overcome but maintains that it is not nearly the hurdle it is made out to be. "Everyone thinks that you have to run where you grow up," he says, "but there is no such law. People vote for politicians who can best understand their region or country."
Koizumi and the LDP are aware that many of the rebels may be returned to office. Still, according to one highly placed Koizumi advisor, as long as the LDP retains a majority, a few losses would be a survivable public embarrassment because Koizumi Theater would have served another strategic purpose: to push the DPJ, the nation's largest opposition party, to the margins.
That would be a sharp reversal for the DPJ, whose members won a solid 177 seats in the last lower-house election in Nov. 2003, sparking much talk that two-party politics had finally arrived in Japan. With the LDP currently riven by an almost religious schism, the looming election would appear to be the DPJ's golden moment to seize power. That's what DPJ president Katsuya Okada says will happen, and he has promised to step down if his party fails to secure a majority. But in a recent poll conducted by the Nikkei Shimbun daily, support for the LDP stood at 46% (up eight percentage points from the previous month) versus only 19% for the DPJ. "The DPJ lacks a grand vision, it got a slow start, and needs to get some momentum," says Jun Iio, professor of government at Tokyo's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
Indeed, by casting the whole election as the new LDP versus the old LDP, postal reform versus anti-reform, to the exclusion of all other issues, Koizumi has managed to cut the DPJ's more subtle message out of the debate. DPJ candidates have had little luck attracting attention to issues besides postal reform, such as their push for changes in pensions, more rigorous limits on public spending, and the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Iraq by the end of the year. While Okada is widely admired for his earnestness and honesty, he may have too much of both for his own political good. Okada has, for example, freely admitted that he supports unpopular measures such as an increase in consumption taxes and funding restrictions that could lead to layoffs for some postal workers. Koizumi has repeatedly rebuffed Okada's challenge to a one-on-one debate. Samejima, the DPJ candidate in Tokyo's hotly contested district 10, admits that he's frustrated: "The LDP's internal opposition has made the DPJ fade out." Not surprisingly, the DPJ's leaders reject the notion that they have been marginalized, noting that they have a history of coming on strong in the final days of an election. Koichiro Gemba, chair of the party's election campaign committee, says: "According to our own surveys, the difference between us and the LDP isn't as big as reported."
If he's wrong and the DPJ loses seats, will it continue to function as an opposition party or will it face mass defections, even disintegration? "How this is all going to play out is entirely unclear," says Norihiko Narita, professor of politics at Surugadai University. According to the Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun, a business newspaper, the election is so hard to forecast that the media are conducting twice as many polls as normal. For now, it appears that even Koizumi is not looking beyond the coming showdown. According to an account in the Asahi Shimbun, an acquaintance recently asked Koizumi what he plans to do after this epic battle is over. His response: "Do you think Nobunaga had a clear plan for himself after Okehazama?"
With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi and Michiko Toyama/Tokyo and Wei Ting Jen/Hiroshima
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