Ldp

TOKYO -- Like an overage heavyweight on the ropes, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's Liberal Democratic Party is struggling get back the one-two punch that made it the undisputed champion of Japanese politics for 38 straight years.But new blows land every day, and there is no sign the LDP has yet laid a glove on its growing array of opponents since the collapse of the government last week.A newspaper poll published yesterday gave Mr. Miyazawa's Cabinet the lowest approval rating in four decades of Japanese opinion surveys -- 10.4 percent.

TOKYO - An upbeat Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stared down critics calling for his resignation yesterday, declaring he would not be pushed from office nor blown off his reformist course by disappointing results in elections for Japan's Upper House. The 49 seats won by Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party fell short of the 51 he set as his target when the campaign began in June. Although the opposition Democratic Party of Japan gained 12 seats, the conservative-minded LDP and its junior party allies retained their working majority in the Upper House.

TOKYO -- Japan awoke to political uncertainty today for the first time since 1955, after voters in yesterday's election trashed a 38-year-old party structure but created nothing to replace it.Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told reporters at a news conference today that he has not decided whether to resign, and that he faces no deadline until the new parliament meets, perhaps in about two weeks. The constitution requires a meeting of the new parliament within 30 days of the election.Earlier today he had said that the country "cannot permit a gap between prime ministers."

JUNICHIRO Koizumi, the brash reformer, beat the bosses for rank-and-file support to lead the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and become prime minister of Japan. He is an unlikely rebel, a third-generation LDP member of parliament and Cabinet minister. The same may be said of his blunt-speaking foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka, the first woman in the post, the most popular politician in Japan and daughter of a former prime minister and LDP patronage boss. Japan certainly needs economic reforms, bank reforms and drastic reduction in feather-bedded government employment.

The election for the lower house of parliament tomorrow is the most decisive in Japan since 1955, when the Liberal Democratic Party began an unbroken 38 years of one-party government. Whether that era has ended, is perpetuated or is starting to crack will be decided.The LDP is intertwined not only with big business, the bureaucracy, gangsterism and corruption but also with Japan's unparalleled economic growth and personal economic security of the past 38 years. How to throw out the bath water while saving the baby is the Japanese voters' dilemma, and the parties have not made it easy.

When the Japanese voters went to the polls last Sunday, they sent a message. But this change was not the "historic change" that some American analysts perceive; instead it was keeping the status quo.As a result, the new parliament, if anything, will be more conservative on most issues than its predecessor, and the short-term confusion over the future will make the Japanese bureaucracy more powerful than before. For U.S.-Japan relations, there will be no immediate change.True, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)

TOKYO -- Riding a wave of defections from a rival party, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party recaptured control of the lower house of Parliament yesterday after a four-year hiatus.It was a major symbolic victory for Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who can claim much of the credit for rescuing his party from the rout it suffered in 1993, when a rebellion led by a rival divided the party that had ruled Japan since 1955 and tossed the LDP out of power.With Hashimoto's star rising and his approval ratings high 20 months into his tenure, political analysts said he must now use his increased leverage to push through his promised reforms.

TOKYO -- Rebellion among Japan's governing Liberal Democrats spread to the parliament's upper house yesterday, as eight members of that chamber joined 35 lower house representatives in a mass resignation from the splintering party.Yesterday's resignations brought to 53 the number of members of the Diet, Japan's parliament, who have formally left the LDP since last Friday, when former Finance Minister Tsutomu Hata led rebel LDP members in joining opposition parties to pull off a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's Cabinet.

The Japanese voted Sunday for the kind of pro-business government they have long had, but for cleansing it of corruption. Whether that can be done, or whether what disgusts them is the opposite side of the coin they cherish, is not clear.The Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled in majority for 38 years, will go on governing, either as dominant in a coalition or as a minority government. The intense bargaining among parties to produce a government will resemble the bargaining among factions of the LDP that formerly decided such matters.

There cannot be much hope that Japan will agree to overhaul the trade imbalance with the U.S. in talks in Tokyo on June 27-28. Or that the Group of Seven summit in Tokyo on July 7-9 will bring a new trilateral understanding among North America, Europe and Japan.Japan is distracted by a political crisis without precedent in its postwar history. It will go to the summit represented by a prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, who has just been humiliated by a no-confidence vote caused by defectors in his all-powerful but all-tottering Liberal Democratic Party.

WHILE JAPAN'S ruling coalition squeaked through with a narrow victory in the parliamentary elections last month, it barely covers up some deep structural problems that are badly in need of fixes if the country is to keep on course as Asia's most stable democracy and America's chief ally in the Pacific. First, Japan's decade-long recession shows no signs of ending as Japanese consumers, unlike their American counterparts who are bullish about the future, choose to save, rather than spend, their money.

TOKYO -- Politics took a turn to the usual here yesterday as the governing Liberal Democratic Party opted for political expedience and agreed to form a coalition with its archenemy, Ichiro Ozawa, and his Liberal Party.The alliance will strengthen the governing party's sway in Parliament, mollify its restive hard-liners and give it sure support in coming budget debates."I am happy that we have agreed to work together on various policies with strong cooperation in the parliamentary session and on the 1999 budget discussion," said Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who signed the deal with Ozawa after 3 1/2 hours of talks yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- Japanese voters' stunning rebuke of their ruling party Sunday may prod Tokyo to undertake the sweeping economic reforms long demanded by the United States to help lift Asia out of crisis, but the changes must be swift, American analysts said yesterday."

TOKYO -- Riding a wave of defections from a rival party, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party recaptured control of the lower house of Parliament yesterday after a four-year hiatus.It was a major symbolic victory for Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who can claim much of the credit for rescuing his party from the rout it suffered in 1993, when a rebellion led by a rival divided the party that had ruled Japan since 1955 and tossed the LDP out of power.With Hashimoto's star rising and his approval ratings high 20 months into his tenure, political analysts said he must now use his increased leverage to push through his promised reforms.

TOKYO -- A land accustomed to consensus politics has entered an unfamiliar age of high-stakes gambles and head-to-head confrontation.After determined opposition at every step from the ousted Liberal Democratic Party, Morihiro Hosokawa was finally elected prime minister yesterday, but not installed. His seven-party coalition held together better than predicted during the unexpected onslaught.But if the new government's extended birth struggle proves anything, it is that all sides already are much more focused on the next election -- which could come within a year -- than they are on governing the country through its worst recession since World War II.The Liberal Democrats spent their first two days in opposition, after 38 straight years in power, repeatedly testing their muscle and coming up short, never gaining more than their own 224 votes.

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.

JUNICHIRO Koizumi, the brash reformer, beat the bosses for rank-and-file support to lead the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and become prime minister of Japan. He is an unlikely rebel, a third-generation LDP member of parliament and Cabinet minister. The same may be said of his blunt-speaking foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka, the first woman in the post, the most popular politician in Japan and daughter of a former prime minister and LDP patronage boss. Japan certainly needs economic reforms, bank reforms and drastic reduction in feather-bedded government employment.

TOKYO -- A land accustomed to consensus politics has entered an unfamiliar age of high-stakes gambles and head-to-head confrontation.After determined opposition at every step from the ousted Liberal Democratic Party, Morihiro Hosokawa was finally elected prime minister yesterday, but not installed. His seven-party coalition held together better than predicted during the unexpected onslaught.But if the new government's extended birth struggle proves anything, it is that all sides already are much more focused on the next election -- which could come within a year -- than they are on governing the country through its worst recession since World War II.The Liberal Democrats spent their first two days in opposition, after 38 straight years in power, repeatedly testing their muscle and coming up short, never gaining more than their own 224 votes.

TOKYO -- A government of immense ambitions and a minuscule minority seems set to take over Japan in a few weeks with the country wallowing in the depths of its worst postwar recession.The fragile seven-party coalition will replace the Liberal Democratic Party that presided over this country's postwar "economic miracle" and has held power without interruption since Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term as president.The new coalition comes in a rainbow of political colorations ranging from Socialist to Buddhist but centered about two new "reformist" groups only slightly less conservative than the LDP.It promises to take on a long list of jobs the Liberal Democrats couldn't or wouldn't do:* End the long-standing multi-seat districts for the powerful lower house of the Diet, Japan's parliament.

When the Japanese voters went to the polls last Sunday, they sent a message. But this change was not the "historic change" that some American analysts perceive; instead it was keeping the status quo.As a result, the new parliament, if anything, will be more conservative on most issues than its predecessor, and the short-term confusion over the future will make the Japanese bureaucracy more powerful than before. For U.S.-Japan relations, there will be no immediate change.True, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)