Unfinished Business — page 2

Executive Power
From the very beginning of his term in office, Koizumi has been Japan's most independent and "presidential" Prime Minister. Conducting himself as if he were an opposition leader, he routinely rails against his own party, which has held a virtually unbroken monopoly on power for almost 50 years. Thanks to his overwhelming popularity, Koizumi has been able to work outside the LDP's famous, and famously arthritic, faction system, neutralizing it in significant ways. Early on, for example, he broke with tradition and rankled the Old Guard by picking Cabinet members he thought were most qualified for their jobs, rather than filling the posts by quota with members from each faction. Over the past three years, he has similarly built an administration that introduces far more legislation into the Diet than most Prime Ministers before him have. He routinely and unapologetically makes unilateral decisions, whether it's to open a dialogue with North Korea without consulting Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or deciding to keep troops in Iraq without checking with anyone at all. In a country where a secretive ruling élite brokered deals behind closed doors, Koizumi has made the government more open and the executive branch more accountable. The citizenry may be upset that Japanese troops are still in Iraq, but no one doubts where the buck stops.

Unfortunately, it is unclear whether the government will revert to politics as usual as soon as Koizumi leaves office. Sheila Smith, a Japan specialist at Hawaii's East-West Center, gives Koizumi credit for introducing "a whole new vocabulary for the LDP, one that includes responsiveness and transparency. The next person will not be able to retreat from that." At the same time, Smith readily admits that the next PM might not be up to the job. "There aren't many Koizumis out there," she says.

Curiously, this is a situation that Koizumi seems uninterested in remedying. Not only is there no leader with Koizumi's panache waiting in the wings, but virtually every political expert in Japan agrees that Koizumi has made no attempt to groom a generation of young politicians capable of carrying on his good works. "Koizumi may have cut through LDP factional politics," says former LDP lawmaker Raizo Matsuno, "but he's not interested in creating a successor." Take 49-year-old LDP secretary-general Shinzo Abe, Koizumi's heir apparent. Abe is a young, good-looking, impeccably credentialed reformer handpicked by Koizumi to be the party's No. 2 man. He appears on many of the LDP's election posters and has been delegated to take the lead on certain issues, such as the North Korea abductees. But those who know both men say he is far from Koizumi's tight-knit inner circle and could hardly be called a protégé. Many commentators, such as newsletter editor Toshikawa, say that Koizumi brought Abe into the fold not so much to nurture him as to keep him on a short leash. While Abe will doubtless be a powerful force in Japanese politics in the future, it is unclear whether his style will approach anything that could be called Koizumiesque. And though Koizumi has put the LDP faction machine in idle, its engine continues to hum.

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