Ichiro Ozawa: Reformer at Bay
Edward W. Desmond
Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995


THE LESSON OF CARTHAGE

When Ichiro Ozawa, a longtime Diet member and power broker, published "Blueprint for a New
Japan" two years ago, his main goal was to reverse the country's reluctance to play a larger role in
world affairs. Ozawa, at that time a senior leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP),was
obsessed with Tokyo's refusal to provide on-the-ground support for the US led forces during the
Persian Gulf War, despite repeated requests from Washington. He called the episode a defeat whose
origins could be traced to the "politics of indecision" and the lack of a clear center in Japanese
politics. Unless Japanese politicians revised the rudderless postwar system, Ozawa argued, the
country would go the way of ancient Carthage, whose "belief that wealth alone could sustain a nation
ultimately caused its demise."

Since then, Ozawa's complaints about the failure of Japan's leadership have grown even more acute.
The Kobe earthquake, which left more than 5,500 dead in January, is the most prominent and tragic
example. Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayarna vacillated, unsure of his own powers;
ministries responded with detachment and little coordination; and the military waited for deployment
orders that came too late. In the eyes of the Japanese, the tragedy easily surpassed the Persian Gulf
War as a display of systemic paralysis.

The lack of a sure-handed economic policy is yet another unaddressed crisis. Japan is in its fourth year
of near-zero growth, and the strong yen is driving industry offshore at an unprecedented rate. Banks
face a bad debt burden estimated at as much as $1 trillion, nearly a quarter of GDP. Japan obviously
needs to shed much of its old Japan Inc. thinking and build up the consumer side of the economy
through deregulation and market openings. Most banking experts agree that the banks must be bailed
out. But these policy shifts are too much to expect from Japan's powerful but narrowly focused
bureaucrats.

Before its breakup and defeat in the 1993 general elections, the LDP might have been able to provide
the needed leadership on the economy, if only because it was intertwined with Japan's business sector
and the bureaucracy. But today that so-called iron triangle is fractured. Scandal after scandal has
depleted the credibility of the Liberal Democrats, who are the largest partner in Murayama's coalition.
They are divided among themselves and preoccupied with maneuvering for the next lower house
election, which must take place by mid-1997. Absent a political center, bureaucrats are freer than ever
to pursue narrow agendas, such as trade disputes with the United States or ministry prerogatives. Big
business, despairing of a more rational economic policy, is struggling to cope with the strong yen and
to preserve the shaky social contract promising lifetime employment.

The uneasiness in Japan is a far cry from the mood two years ago, when Morihiro Hosokawa, the
reformist "Mr. Clean," formed the first non-LDP government in 38 years with the help of Ozawa's
breakaway group. In a remarkable eight months, Hosokawa and Ozawa delivered much that had
eluded several previous prime ministers, including electoral reform, a relatively thorough apology for
Japan's actions in World War II, the opening of the rice market, and initial steps toward deregulation.
Hosokawa's popularity ratings hit an all-time high, but he stepped down in the face of alleged financial
irregularities.

Today the reform agenda is in a deep freeze, but there is little doubt voters want it back. The winners
in mayoral elections in Tokyo and Osaka this year are both former television personalities who
campaigned as first-time politicians with strong anti-establishment platforms. The incumbent
Murayama government represents a lull in the effort to reform Japan's political order, to build what
Ozawa calls a "normal" nation. But there is little question that the issues Blueprint posed two years
ago are even more urgent today.

For the moment, and perhaps for good, Ozawa is a reformer at bay. A serious heart attack in 1991
still limits his pace, and a constant hammering in the press, which has never liked the LDP insider, has
pinched his popularity. In June 1994 Ozawa, then the chief strategist of the Tsutomu Hata
government, made a series of tactical mistakes that shattered Hata's brief rule and brought the
Murayama coalition to power. As a result Ozawa is in the political wilderness for the first time in his
life, where he is struggling to preserve the unity of his loose-knit group of ex-LDP followers in the
New Frontier Party, many of whom are sorely tempted to accept LDP offers to return to the fold.
At least until the strong showing of Ozawa's New Frontier Party in upper-house elections in July,
most of Japan's political commentators believed that Ozawa was finished and that the LDP was likely
to prevail in the next lower-house elections.

Even if they are right, Ozawa can claim credit for the leading role in the opening stages of Japan's
efforts to break free of the Cold War mold. He not only identified the issues facing Japan but
masterminded the breakup of the LDP and the coalition government that knocked his old party from
power for the first time in 38 years. He has given form and movement to ideas that will change
Japan, regardless of his own political future.


THE MEIJI PARALLEL

Ozawa is steeped in the lore of the Meiji era, and he sees strong parallels between himself and the
men who overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1867. As a youth, Ozawa was reserved, studious,
and constantly exhorted by his strong-willed mother to live up to Meiji values, a puritanical code of
behavior that stressed modesty and aphorisms like "men don't cry" and "don't complain, don't make
excuses."

Young Ozawa was particularly attracted to the visionaries who overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Even today he maintains that the Meiji era was Japan's finest because his ancestors ventured into the
world and adapted for Japan what they found in industry, education, the military, and politics. Ozawa
devotes a glowing chapter in Blueprint to the accomplishments of Meiji leaders like Toshimichi
Okubo and Hirobumi Ito.

Ozawa shares certain qualities with the men who overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate and launched
the Meiji reforms. Like Ozawa, they were privileged members of the elite, and their desire for radical
change stemmed from practical experience and insights. They were better acquainted than most of
their peers, for example, with Western military technology and its dangerous implications for a
backward Japan. Commodore Matthew Perry's "black ships" were symbolic of that threat. Ozawa's
comparable insight stems from his role as a facilitator in the U.S.-Japan trade talks and the high-
stakes discussion about the Persian Gulf War. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Ozawa argues, the
danger is again systemic senility: the LDP establishment's inability to see beyond narrow issues tied
to particular constituencies, such as protection of rice farmers or careful adherence to the
constitution's pacifist Article Nine. Ozawa's influential Blueprint is a plea for Japan to wake up to the
need for a new system of politics and governance, especially better leadership from politicians.

His prescriptions would be familiar to Americans: a healthy, contentious two-party system;
single-member voting districts; a decisive, strong prime ministership; greater devolution of power to
local government; legislation protecting workers from long hours, as well as sex and age bias and
extensive deregulation. He also argues that Japan should raise its profile in world diplomacy by
supporting UN peacekeeping operations, even those that require sending combat troops abroad. In
sum, he wants to create a Japan that accepts the responsibilities of a great power and invites envy
because of its quality of life. His goal, he writes, is for people to think of a "Japanese dream" in the
same way people the world over understand the American dream.

Ozawa's countrymen regard his recommendations with a mixture of approval and apprehension. His
book sold a remarkable 700,000 copies, and readers were enthralled with his candor about how
politics in Japan actually works. "The government itself, is scattered among many institutions and
interests," he writes, for example. "No overarching institution exists to coordinate and control the
whole.... The cabinet meeting--nominally Japan's supreme decision-making body, is an empty
institution." Others have made similar observations, but coming from a politician of Ozawa's stature
and inside experience, the criticisms suddenly became bedrock, a given reformers could cite without
question.

By the same token, Japanese are well aware of Ozawa's checkered past, and they are not convinced
that he is committed to delivering on a broader social agenda that includes proposals for a shorter
workweek. After all, Ozawa is a classic workaholic, a blue-suited politician who does business in the
smoke-filled restaurants of posh Nagatacho, far from the public eye. His commitment to social goals
does not seem half as convincing as Hosokawa's, if only because the former prime minister has a
casual, tennis-playing lifestyle that charmed the country. More credible is Ozawa's determination to
sharpen the powers of Japan's leaders and push the country onto the world stage, even as a participant
in U.N.-sanctioned military operations. In Japan, those ambitions stir mixed emotions. Rather than
the respected, self-confident reformers of the Meiji era, the Japanese remember the authoritarian
leaders of the 1930's who abused their power and drove the nation to war.

A POLITICAL HOME

Ozawa, currently the secretary-general of the opposition New Frontier Party, has almost
single-handedly shaped the debate about how Japan should change. He is also a figure beset with
contradictions. Ozawa epitomizes what Japan has been-low-profile, cautious, industrious, and
opaquely corrupt. He was a classic backroom LDP manipulator, a chief lieutenant to two of the
LDP'S most corrupt faction bosses, Kakuei Tanaka and Shin Kanemaru. Ozawa served the latter as
his foremost dealmaker and personally made and broke a series of LDP prime ministers. In short,
Ozawa's transformation into crusader for a more open, "normal" political system strikes many of his
countrymen as opportunism or, worse, hypocrisy. Those labels may fit, but Ozawa's close links to the
old bankrupt establishment probably do more to qualify than disqualify him as a reformer.

Like a third of the members of the Diet's lower house, Ozawa, 53, is a second-generation legislator.
His father, Saeki Ozawa, came to prominence in a remarkable rags-to-politics odyssey after the war.
The elder Ozawa started out as the runaway son of a ne'er-do-well farmer, but by the end of his
career he was revered in his local district, in rural Iwate prefecture, and had served in several LDP
cabinets. He is especially remembered for his spirited battles with Japan's socialists over two issues,
the 1960 revision of the US.-Japan Security Treaty and the introduction of single-seat electoral
districts. The LDP won the first battle, but only last year did the Diet finally change the electoral
system, thanks in large part to the efforts of Ozawa's son, Ichiro.

When his father died in 1968, Ozawa was nearly finished with his law studies and wanted to take the
bar exam. His father's coterie in Iwate, however, persuaded him to drop his lawyerly ambitions and
run in his father's place. Ozawa won the seat in the 1969 general election at the age Of 27--at that
time the youngest legislator ever elected to the Diet.

LDP politicians need patrons, and Ozawa sought the favor of Kakuei Tanaka, the self-made
construction magnate with a junior high school education who was rapidly becoming the most
powerful man in Japanese politics. Tanaka pioneered what the Japanese call "money politics"-the
shakedown of business, especially construction companies, for the yen equivalent of millions of
dollars in under-the-table donations. Tanaka's iconoclastic, high-energy leadership attracted Ozawa,
who was not impressed by then-Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. In 1992 Ozawa explained to one of his
biographers, Kensuke Watanabe, the appeal of Tanaka: "My generation was tired of the long-lasting
Sato cabinet. It was probably my father's influence, but I had strong antipathy for politics by
bureaucrats. Sato was called the town's accountant, and for better or worse he was a typical postwar
politician. He was stable but showed no inclination to reform. Tanaka was cheerful and active, a
remarkable contrast with Sato."

Tanaka liked the unassuming, straight-talking young Ozawa, and in later years often said Ozawa was
like a son to him. He arranged his protoge's marriage to Kazuko Fukuda, whose family owns Fukuda
Gumi, a powerful construction company in Niigata. Such unions were the equivalent of
dynasty-building in the Tanaka era: the fusion of construction company money and LDP influence
in public works was unbeatable. Such arrangements also foreshadowed the profound corruption that
hounds the LDP to this day.

AN UNLOVED POLITICIAN

Ozawa represents the core of the LDP power structure, but he is a surprisingly unpopular man, even
in political circles. He is frequently accused of lacking giri (obligation) and ninjo (human feeling),
cardinal virtues among the Japanese. In 1985, for example, Ozawa quit Tanaka's faction when it
became clear the political boss was doomed after his conviction in a lower court on charges of
accepting a 500-million-yen bribe in connection with Japan Airlines' purchase of Lockheed TriStar
airliners. His move made sense, but it was not admired. His friends explain that Ozawa is
uncommonly rational, ready to act on logic rather than worry about others' feelings. Ozawa's lack of
the common touch is partly the result of his privileged political upbringing. Unlike most young LDP
politicians, he did not have to learn to glad-hand to win votes and campaign contributions. Ozawa
rarely visits his Iwate constituency; his wife looks after his political interests there.

As a chief lieutenant to LDP Vice President Shin Kanernaru until his downfall, Ozawa earned a
reputation for arrogance. He is frequently accused of having a dictatorial personality, which, in
translation, means he is impatient, unwillin to wait for a consensus, and dismissive of respect for
senior leaders-all jarring qualities in Japan. He was taken to task, for example, for demanding to
"interview" his much-senior colleagues, Michio Watanabe, Kiichi Miyazawa, and Hiroshi Mitsuzuka,
for the job of prime minister in 1989. They bitterly resented his presum tion.

The public has an uncomfortable sense that Ozawa's past behavior has not been squared with justice.
His close friend and mentor in the party, Kanernaru, was indicted on tax evasion charges in 1993 in
connection with immense contributions from the now-defunct Sagawa Kyubin trucking company.
Kanemaru resigned from the Diet and the party and is currently on trial. Witnesses identified Ozawa
as a party to talks where the illegal deals were allegedly made, but in Diet testimony Ozawa said that
he was too busy bringing drinks and cleaning ashtrays to understand what was going on. Few people
in Japan found this believable, although as of this writing Ozawa has not been charged in connection
with that scandal or any other.

Most of the daily newspapers, especially the liberal,Asahi Shimbun, a national daily based in Tokyo,
are deeply skeptical of Ozawa for these reasons, and they fear that his calls for strong leadership mask
hidden reactionary, nationalistic views. To some extent the papers also mirror the widespread anxiety
that talk of strong leadership still elicits in Japan, where some believe that weak, fragmented power
is the best guarantee for avoiding the excesses of the 1930's.

Ozawa arouses suspicions because there is an ambiguity about his nationalism. Among his closest
friends are politicians who are more or less open apologists for Japan's behavior in World War II.
Where the war is concerned, Ozawa is not full of moral anguish, but he sees the need to make amends
in a practical light. As he said in an interview last year: "From [the rest of Asia's] point of view, Japan
invaded them, and it is natural that they should see it that way. Justice is a term that is used when
many people see something as being just, even if God does not view it that way. Therefore Japan did
not wage a just war."

Thus Ozawa more or less keeps his distance from the apologists among his friends. To an outsider,
Ozawa is clearly a statist, perhaps a Bismarckian, a leader who wants to pursue national interests
within a stable international order. Ozawa was quite at home with US. President George Bush's
concept of a "new world order" and would like to see Japan cast off those aspects of Article Nine
orthodoxy that inhibit the country's ability to play a greater diplomatic and military role in ensuring
global stability.

Nevertheless, the press'unwillingness to accept the new Ozawa at face value has brought out the
intolerant side of his hard-edged personality. He has banned reporters who "misreported" what he
said and has shown little inclination to win over his antagonists-an unwise stance for a politician
trying to demonstrate his commitment to a new, more open brand of politics. To be fair, however,
it is important to note that some of the papers are clearly engaged in a highly partisan campaign. In
one riposte, Ozawa reminded reporters that in the 1930s their newspapers called anyone who rejected
the emperor and military rule a traitor. "Now it is the same," he said. "Anyone whose opinion does
not fit within the media's justice framework, including me, they call an authoritarian or a nationalist
or a right-winger." Ozawa, ever the realist, knows that it is unlikely he would ever be a very effective
prime minister in the face of such suspicion, which is why he continues to stick to his old role as
backroom strategist.


DOMESTIC REFORM

By the time of the Kanemaru scandal in 1992,0zawa was a changed man. He did not turn his back
on his politically dubious past, but he was convinced that government as usual under theLDPwas no
longer good enough for Japan. His epiphany came during the Persian Gulf War. Ozawa, who was the
LDP secretary-general at the time, met repeatedly with American officials who stressed that Japan
must play an active role in the coalition or face the charge that Japan was taking a "free ride" while
the United States paid with the lives of its soldiers. Ozawa was eager to comply, but even his
proposals for a modest on the-ground contribution died in the party and the Diet. Regardless of other
national interests, very few legislators in any party were prepared to risk public wrath by putting
Japanese troops in harm's way or challenging the prevailing interpretation of Article Nine.

Subsequently, Ozawa fought to organize an immense financial contribution of nearly $13 billion for
the war effort. To win its passage, Ozawa made a deal with Komeito, the Buddhist Clean
Government Party, to back its candidate against a five-term LDP incumbent in the 1991 Tokyo
gubernatorial election. The Ozawa-Komeito candidate lost, which led Ozawa to resign his party post,
but the appropriation passed. Two months later Ozawa suffered a serious heart attack.

For Ozawa, the Persian Gulf War revealed that Japan in the 1990's was fundamentally incapable of
acting in its national interest. Narrow minded politicians had put the vital U.S.-Japan relationship at
risk over the Gulf War and Ozawa was determined to avoid a repetition of the crisis. Ozawa's concern
with foreign affairs deepened, and in 1991 he created a semi-secret association of bureaucrats and
academics calling itself the 21st Century Study Group to discuss the issues confronting Japan. Their
papers were the foundation for Blueprint.

The Gulf War also convinced Ozawa that Japan must reform its political scene to encourage decisive
leadership, especially in foreign affairs. The dominance of the LDP and the feckless opposition of the
Social Democrats had corrupted serious politics, turning it into a game of vote-buying and
influence-peddling. "Under the postwar political system, real, forthright debates between political
parties and politicians do not take place," he said in 1993. "Everyone is comfortable with a system
in which you don't engage in serious debate, you don't take responsibility for anything, and you can
be rather vague on most matters. That is the system we have to tear down. The time allowed to Japan
is now running short."

Like many other LDP members, Ozawa believes that the electoral system was a key part of the
problem. Multimember districts for parliamentary elections made it easy for socialists to win a large
share of the Diet seats, which meant that the wide spectrum of conservatives had to band together
to stay in power. In the 1950's Ozawa's father and others in the LDP tried to change the system to
single-member districts, which would have pushed the socialists to the margins and allowed the LDP
to split into two parties. The two conservative camps, so they hoped, would have alternated power
and joined hands in key areas, such as amending offensive aspects of the U.S.-imposed constitution.
But the socialists successfully resisted the effort. The result, throughout the Cold War, was LDP
dominance and a limp, unconstructive socialist opposition that, as Ozawa delights in pointing out, has
long been more or less in the pocket of the LDP.

The multimember districts also tend to encourage corruption. Candidates can win a seat by
patronizing a small segment of the voters in the districtan interest group such as construction
workers, rice farmers, or unionists-so long as that segment can deliver about 15 percent of the vote.
The singlemember district makes winning through patronage more difficult, and in theory should
force the candidate to speak out clearly on national issues. In recent years the return to
single-member districts has been sold to the public largely as an anticorruption measure, but in the
eyes of Ozawa and others it is more important as a means to push the socialists out of politics and
establish a healthy bipolar conservative competition.

In June 1993 Prime Minister Miyazawa, like his predecessor Kaifu, could not obtain sufficient party
support to put through the singlemember districts legislation. Many LDP members silently opposed
the bill because it threatened their own seats. Ozawa and his allies saw an opportunity. They wanted
to be on the right side of the corruption issue, and they were embattled within the party, where the
breakup of the Kanemaru-Takeshita faction had left Ozawa with a rump group. In a momentous
decision, Ozawa and his followers joined the no-confidence vote against Miyazawa, brought down
the government, and left the party.

The bill, in a watered-down version that provides for a mix of seats filled through direct election in
single-member districts and ones filled through proportional representation, was finally pushed
through the Diet by Hosokawa and Ozawa in 1994, and it will provide the basis for the next national
elections for the lower house. These could come as early as this year, but until then it is impossible
to say what effect the new system will have. The country's economic retreat is likely to do more to
trim corruption than the new districts. Whether a more coherent government emerges depends on
many variables, primarily the ability of a single party to post a clear-cut win.

If Ozawa and his New Frontier Party win, Japan will probably see change first where change
encounters the least domestic opposition defense and foreign policy, say. The slowest pace will be
in areas like economic and government deregulation and administrative reform, where Ozawa, if he
is true to his goals in Blueprint, will have to cross swords with his many friends in the bureaucracy
and other interest groups. The reformist's only allies may be trade friction and the steadily sinking
economy, which will force the tempo.


A FOREIGN POLICY THAT STANDS UP

Ozawa may be out in the cold and Japan in disarray, but his views on foreign policy continue to
propel small but steady changes in security and foreign policy. The disintegration of the Social
Democrats, the keepers of Article Nine orthodoxy, has eased the way for some commonsense
adjustments. The Diet late last year approved legislation to permit the use of military planes to rescue
Japanese nationals in crisis situations abroad, for example; earlier this was considered impossible
because of leftist opposition. After 12 years of negotiations, Japan and the United States are close
to working out an agreement on military acquisitions and cross-servicing, similar to those of NATO
allies, that has eluded Japan until now, again because of the left. Deployment of the Japan's
self-defense forces on noncombat U.N. missions is now routine, exciting little public interest, whereas
the 1993 deployment of Japanese troops to Cambodia on a U.N. mission rocked the Miyazawa
government.

The Kobe quake spurred better crisis planning in Tokyo and helped rehabilitate the military as a
respectable part of society. Most Japanese applauded the work of army chemical warfare experts in
cleaning up the subways in the capital after the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack in March. There were no
protests when the experts took part in police raids on the cult's installations. A few years ago, their
presence alongside the police would have been unthinkable.

In the absence of leftist opposition, it is also likely that Japan's Self Defense Agency will be able to
pursue two other high-priority projects, both of which will further the independence of Japanese
defenses. One is a proposed theater missile defense system, a multibillion-dollar effort in collaboration
with the United States, designed to give Japan a measure of protection against missile attack. The
other is a quantum improvement in Japan's defense intelligence capabilities, which are currently highly
dependent on the United States. Japanese defense experts are increasingly uneasy about their reliance
on the United States when it comes to critical subjects like assessing the potential North Korean
nuclear threat. They fear that the Clinton administration's generous settlement with North Korea over
the development and use of nuclear fuel was more a product of Clinton's domestic political weakness
than a hardheaded analysis of Japanese and Korean interests. One key ambition of Japanese defense
planners is a spy satellite, which would help Tokyo draw its own conclusions about regional threats.

This trend in defense and foreign affairs will lead Tokyo to a more articulate, assertive, and
independent stance. Ozawa foreshadowed the change during the mini-crisis last year over North
Korea. Mindful of the Persian Gulf fiasco, the Hata government took politically difficult steps to
ensure it could back at least some tough measures against North Korea, such as cutting off the flow
of money to North Korea from Chosen Soren, a wealthy North Korean support group in Japan.
Ozawa was determined that Japan do its part.

On the other hand, after the mission of former US. President Jimmy Carter put Pyongyang and
Washington on track for a settlement, Ozawa was openly critical of the promise to provide 500,000
tons of heavy oil and two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang's capping of its
potentially threatening nuclear development program. The deal left many issues open to question. "As
long as nuclear inspections are unsettled," he said on a television program, "we should not provide
financial cooperation." Ozawa was in opposition when he made the remark; he might have felt
differently had he been in power. But there is no doubt that he would insist on being a full partner,
and an outspoken one, in dealings with the United States.

Ozawa, or at least the sensibility he represents, underlies the future of U.S.-Japan relations, and his
view of the United States is different from that of the older generation in the LDP. Postwar LDP
leaders lived with a contradiction: they were ready to blindly take Washington's lead on most foreign
policy matters, but they were also deeply committed to Japan's drive for economic primacy. When
the two came into conflict especialy over trade the LDP leadership practiced a kind of yes-and-no
diplomacy that repeatedly poisoned the relationship with the United States.

Ozawa, who places immense importance on continued close security links with the United States and
believes trade friction endangers the alliance, sees no reason to draw out talks and turn them into a
hostile dispute, especially when American negotiators have a point. For someone with Ozawa's
firsthand understanding of politics, it is easy to see the reality-usually some complex set of special
interest group relations-behind the stonewalling by Japanese trade negotiators. Ozawa has been an
invaluable friend to American trade negotiators since 1988, when he settled the talks aimed at opening
up Japanese public construction work to American businesses. Even last year, he was the catalyst for
the breakthrough in cellular phone talks that helped Motorola's business in Japan take off and
dramatically reduced prices. On recent automobile talks, Ozawa would not have engaged in the
damaging grandstanding of Ryutaro Hashimoto, the MITI minister and LDP prime ministerial
hopeful; instead, he would have striven quietly to conclude a deal with the United States while
avoiding guarantees of a market share to US. automakers in Japan.

At the same time, Ozawa is sure to be an outspoken, even critical ally of the United States, not an
unquestioning follower of US. initiatives, as the old LDP leadership was. Ozawa firmly believes that
the alliance is the key to Japan's continued acceptance in the rest of Asia, and more recently he has
stressed that Japan needs the United States to counterbalance an increasingly chauvinistic and
menacing China.

In that sense, Ozawa stands opposed to the "Asia first" arguments that have taken root in some
conservative circles, egged on notably by former LDP legislator Shintaro Ishihara. Ozawa's Japan
would lobby Washington to play a strong role in Asian security while keeping a more constructive,
critical distance than in the past. All the while, Japan will move toward a more independent security
footing to hedge against Washington's possible disengagement in the future.

The brake on Ozawa's drive to make Japan a normal country in foreign and defense policy will come
from the dovish side of the LDP. Leaders like Yohei Kono, president of the LDP,will accept practical
changes but draw the line at reinterpretation of the constitution, increases in defense spending, or
commitment of self-defense forces to U.N. combat operations. Such views reflect popular opinion,
which is deeply conservative when it comes to departing from Japan's head-in-the-sand postwar
ethos.

Mindful of those limits, Ozawa has been careful to stress that Japan should commit its troops only
under U.N. auspices (although he accepts the possibility of Japanese troops seeing military action),
and he remains wary of amending the constitution. He argues, however, that a clause could be added
to Article Nine stating that Japan's forces may participate in U.N. peacekeeping operations. On
Japanese membership in the U.N. Security Council, Ozawa adopts a mischievous position; he likes
to say Japan is not yet ready to assume such a responsibility, a roundabout way of making the point
that Japan's leadership is not mature enough to handle the hard decisions demanded of Security
Council members.

Ozawa's vision for a more active Japanese foreign policy suffers from being boxed in by the U.N.
framework; the U.N.'s record after the Cold War is a disappointment. Yet at the moment, the United
Nations is the only vessel in which Ozawa can place his vision for Japan's broader security. In
Bl