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The Unpredicted Reign of Sosuke Uno
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15261 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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8 / 1989 |
959 Words |
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Tetsuya Kataoka
Tetsuya Kataoka is a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University. |
After a monthlong search, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has found a successor to Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who stepped down in June to atone for the Recruit scandal. Japan's new ruler is Sosuke Uno, 66, Takeshita's foreign minister and a member of the Nakasone faction. The LDP had to dig deep down in the ranks to come up with a man free of Recruit taint, and Uno is about as middling in his political accomplishments as in his appearance.
Born into a sake-brewing merchant family in Western Japan, Uno was a soldier in Korea when the war ended. He was interned in a POW camp in Siberia for two years, an experience he has written a book about. In fact Uno has written several books (including a history), is a rather accomplished painter, plays piano and harmonica, and is a black belt in kendo. A professional politician since 1951, he was elected to the Diet in 1960 as a member of a faction that Nakasone has since inherited.
This fact suggests that Uno shares Nakasone's nationalist visions. Nevertheless, although he has served as cabinet minister in five bureaucracies, including Defense, MITI, and Foreign Affairs, he is the first postwar conservative prime minister without a faction of his own. That is, he has never had an ambition to be No. 1, preferring instead to be alone and independent.
Clearly, the prime ministership was dropped in his lap by the party, which had first begged Masayoshi Ito to take the post. A maverick with a Man of La Mancha inclination, Ito demanded that all LDP leaders who took Recruit stocks or cash--Takeshita, Abe, Nakasone, Miyazawa (all faction captains), among others--quit politics and retire. Ito, too, was a man without his own faction or power base, and it stood to reason that without a drastic shift in the balance of power in his favor he would be unable to implement the reforms now being deliberated by a party commission. That would be the minimum performance expected of him. But Ito's demarche proved to be counterproductive, perhaps because it was a bit too daring. All the LDP leaders coalesced around Takeshita to refuse Ito's condition.
When they gave up on Ito, a subtle shift in the party's mood became discernible. By then the procurator's office in the Justice Ministry had announced that it was winding up all investigations into the politicians' involvement in the scandal. It has previously arrested two figures, one from the ruling party and one from an opposition group--as if to show even-handedness. The other parliamentary members were safe. It began to
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