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The Unpredicted Reign of Sosuke Uno
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15261 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1989 |
959 Words |
| Author
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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
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