For its next prime minister, its first in four decades outside the corrupting embrace of the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan is likely to get a modernist who comes out of a ruling family, a reformer who started out in politics with the LDP, a southern governor (sound familiar?) with contempt for the Tokyo establishment, a 55-year-old member of the post-war generation whose maternal grandfather, Fumimaro Konoe, was his nation's last civilian prime minister before Pearl Harbor.
How long Morihiro Hosokawa can hold his disparate coalition of seven smallish parties together is a matter of intense speculation. What Mr. Hosokawa and his new allies have in common is, first, that they are not LDPs and, second, that their first priority is reform of a system that effectively consigned Japan to one-party rule. Beyond that, their platform is deliberately vague to bridge differences ranging from the Social Democrats on the left to the cluster of conservative parties on the right. Mr. Hosokawa's Japan New Party is one of the latter.
The Liberal Democrats, never to be underestimated, have prepared for going into the opposition by choosing Yohei Kono as their president. He is only one year older than Mr. Hosokawa and, ironically, staged a short-lived revolt against the LDP elders in the 1970s while Mr. Hosokawa remained a loyalist. The LDP will not easily allow its rivals a monopoly on motherhood and political piety.