FEBRUARY 21, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 7

Going Boldly Where No Woman Has Gone Before

	ALSO IN TIME
	Cover: What's Eating Leonardo DiCaprio? Pummeled by his Titanic fame, the painfully self-aware teen heartthrob Leo DiCaprio works hardest at not giving away too much of himself off-screen • The Beach Boy: Leonardo, usually the one who needs rescuing, can't save The Beach • The Real Beach: On the islands off southern Thailand, the idea is to get lost • The Leo Factor: In this Web-only interview, Director Danny Boyle muses on filming The Beach with sun, sand and a superstar Japan: Getting Away With It Obuchi's survival skills rescue him yet again. Too bad they can't do that for the economy • Going Boldly Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Osaka's new governor breaks the mold India: 'His Principle of Peace Was Bogus' In this extended online interview, Gopal Godse, co-conspirator in Gandhi's assassination and brother of the assassin, looks back in anger--and without regret Afghanistan: Destination Unknown The hijack of an Afghan airliner ends in an anticlimax outside London. Now what was that all about?
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No sooner had Fusae Ota become the first woman elected a prefecture governor in Japan than she sought to break another gender barrier: the inner circle of sumo. The 48-year-old career bureaucrat announced in her first post-election press conference last week that she wants to present the Governor's Trophy at next month's sumo tournament in Osaka. Sounds reasonable enough, considering she is now Osaka's governor. But to do so she would have to enter the dohyo ring, which no woman has ever been allowed to do. A sumo association spokesman asked the governor to reconsider out of respect for the sport's tradition, but Ota told the Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper: "Now that I have become the first female governor, I want to question the male-only rule."

Taking on sumo's hoary traditions will add to Ota's feminist credentials among Osaka's women, who were the key force behind her election. Her predecessor, Knock Yokoyama, resigned in December after a sex scandal: the comedian-turned-politician fell from grace after denying accusations that he had forcibly fondled a young campaign aide, then settling a civil lawsuit out of court and later calling his accuser a liar. "His arrogant attitude was too much for women to take," says Mutsuko Katsura, a local politician in Ibaraki, a suburb of Osaka. "Having Ota as governor will make people take all women more seriously."

The national government's ruling coalition of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi shrewdly put up a female candidate to replace Yokoyama, even though Ota isn't from Osaka and has spent much of her career as a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and even though the local branch of Obuchi's Liberal Democratic Party sponsored its own candidate. Opponents branded Ota a carpetbagger, even calling her "Japan's Hillary," after the U.S. First Lady, who is running for the Senate from New York, a state she has never lived in.

But Ota's gender and the electoral machine of one of Obuchi's coalition partners, the New Komei Party, proved formidable. Ota's platform was non-controversial: she vowed to help small and medium-sized businesses in an attempt to revive Osaka's flagging economy, which is dependent on dying industries like steel and textiles. The prefecture has the highest unemployment rate in Japan, 6%.

In the end, Ota may have won because most voters simply didn't care. The 45% turnout was low by Japanese standards, so Ota won with just half the votes that the disgraced Yokoyama collected last year. If the new governor is to expand her support base, she will have to act quickly. A victory in the sumo ring might be the best thing for Ota's image, but her real challenge lies in turning around Osaka's moribund economy.

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