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Ozawa would-be Japanese PM

TOKYO: Once seen as a top candidate for Japan's premiership, Ichiro Ozawa now looks more like a political orphan in a storm.

After a decade of dominating Japan's political scene with back-room deals, Machiavellian manouevres and high-profile calls for reform, the politician Japanese love to hate seems set on a course of self-destruction.

Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said after a coalition chiefs' meeting on Saturday that Ozawa's repeated threats to bolt the ruling coalition in which his Liberal Party was the smallest partner had damaged mutual trust and that the coalition's two other parties would carry on in an alliance without him.

The outcome was not only a black eye for Obuchi in an election year but appears equally damaging to Ozawa, given that his own party is also set to break up as a result.

"Ozawa's reforms at a deadend," blared a headline in mass circulation daily Asahi Shimbun on Sunday.

A protege of Kakuei Tanaka, the man who built Japan's post-war political regime of pork-barrel spending, personal ties and back-room deals, the pug-faced and often abrasive Ozawa was once seen a shoo-in for the prime minister's post.

He rose rapidly through the ranks of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to become its secretary-general in 1989 - at 47, the second-youngest ever to hold the post.

But a mere three years after guiding the LDP to a decisive electoral victory in 1990, Ozawa and some 40 other MPs broke ranks, setting off shock-waves that ended the LDP's four-decade rule and replaced it with a reform-touting coalition.

That was also the year Ozawa - long an advocate of a Japan that could stride proudly on the world stage - burst into print with his book, "A Blueprint for a New Japan.

The book not only urged that Japan become a "normal nation" in possession of a full-fledged military capable of defending itself but also outlined bold reforms to a bloated government system hobbled by bureaucratic control and weak politicians.

The mastermind for the anti-LDP coalition which took power led by Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, Ozawa preferred to rule from the shadows and in the end many saw his machinations as a key factor behind Hosokawa's downfall in 1994.

When the conservative LDP clawed its way back into power in 1994 with a bizarre partnership with arch-rival Socialists, Ozawa forged an equally unlikely alliance of 10 opposition parties.

But his dreams of building a second big conservative party to rival the LDP were undone by policy spats and personal feuds in 1998. His mega-party unravelled, forcing him to make do with the small, hawkish Liberal Party formed by hard-core supporters.

Then Ozawa and the Liberals were lured in early 1999 into a partnership with a ruling LDP badly in need of numbers after a mauling in a July Upper House election.

Though partly successful in pushing his conservative security agenda in that coalition, Ozawa saw his clout diminished when the bigger, Buddhist-backed New Komeito Party joined the ruling camp last October to give it the Upper House majority it had lacked.

Loathed by many of his former LDP colleagues who still see him as a turncoat, Ozawa tried to use threats of bolting the coalition to bolster his influence.

In the end, Obuchi turned his back on Ozawa before he even had a chance to make good on his threats to leave.

With the Liberals' prospects dim in a Lower House election which must be held later this year, perhaps 20 of the party's 50 lawmakers may refuse to follow Ozawa out of the coalition.

Still, political observers who have watched Ozawa shake up politics for years wonder whether he is really done for, or if the latest fuss is another act in a drama that will widen cracks in the LDP and eventually create the new conservative force long dreamed of by Ozawa.

"If the Liberals' departure (from the coalition) is a trigger for further realignment of the political order, it will be significant," said a commentary in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

"And it is Ozawa who has sown all the seeds."_Reuters