JAPAN: LET THE GAMES BEGIN

RYUTARO HASHIMOTO, WHO BECAME Japan's Prime Minister last Thursday, is not the typical Japanese politician. With his good looks, sideburns and slicked-back hair, he is a sex symbol. He once greeted U.S. trade negotiators wearing a green leather suit. And in a culture in which the supreme recreational passion is golf, Hashimoto likes scaling mountains (he was part of two Everest expeditions) and has practiced kendo, a Japanese style of fencing, on the roof of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry headquarters in downtown Tokyo.

As a vibrant, telegenic figure, a man with a temper and a flair for the provocative gesture, Hashimoto represents a break with the past. But he is also a product of the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan from 1955 to 1993, and the evidence suggests that whatever he may say about reforming Japanese politics or opening up the economy, he is unlikely to promote sweeping change. The real significance of Hashimoto's arrival as Prime Minister is not that he brings a new style but that his elevation sets up a first in Japan: a battle between a savvy, dynamic defender of the status quo and an equally dynamic and hardheaded antagonist of the status quo.

No sooner had the new Prime Minister been installed in office than Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of the opposition New Frontier Party, denounced the ruling coalition as an "illicit cohabitation" and demanded an election for a new Diet, Japan's parliament. The motion was denied, but elections will have to be held by the summer of 1997, although some analysts expect them as soon as this April. How much and how fast Japan transforms itself will be determined by the victor. But regardless of who wins, the campaign will be unlike any Japan has ever seen.

It has been more than four decades since the country witnessed an open battle between genuinely electable leaders whose differences are so plain. For all that time, the process of choosing heads of government has been largely a behind-the-scenes game conducted by LDP bosses more preoccupied with their own power-sharing arrangements than with addressing the needs of ordinary voters. That system was rattled in 1993, when Ozawa, an LDP renegade, engineered the election of Japan's first nonconservative Prime Minister post-1948. But since then, the LDP has regained its influence, and politics has returned to form. Now there is a chance for a real election between two parties with distinct candidates. "This is very good for Japan," says Yasuhiko Torii, president of Tokyo's Keio University, the alma mater of Ozawa and Hashimoto. "Politics is very different. Ozawa and Hashimoto will have to really debate."

And there is much for them to debate. Hashimoto is burdened by a host of problems. The economy has shown negligible growth for four years. More and more, big Japanese companies are shifting factories overseas and idling plants at home. The banking system is teetering at the edge of a bad-loan abyss. Government officials have been swallowed up by one corruption scandal after another. Voters are restless: the last general election was held in 1993, and four different Prime Ministers have held office since then.