'Nothing Has Been Solved'.(Naoto Kan)(Interview)

Japan first met him as a young politician with a conscience. In 1996 Naoto Kan, then a leader of a small LDP coalition partner, exposed a scandal in which some 2,000 hemophiliacs had been contaminated with the AIDS virus. Kan was Japan's Health and Welfare minister at the time, and he uncovered the cause of the tragedy when he pressed his agency for documents it had been withholding. Today, Kan leads the country's largest opposition group, the Democratic Party of Japan, which in July engineered a merger with the tiny Liberal Party in an effort to topple the LDP in parliamentary elections expected soon. Can he win? He spoke last week with NEWSWEEK's George Wehrfritz and Hideko Takayama. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Liberal Party leader Ichiro Ozawa favors an expanded Japanese military, and has implied that Tokyo should go nuclear. You oppose both ideas. Why join forces?

KAN: Two reasons. One, it is more effective to create a coalition among the opposition parties to smash and destroy the LDP-led government. The other reason is that we agree with the Liberal Party's basic policies, especially the belief that we must change Japan. When we look at present-day Japan, Ozawa's ideas are considered middle of the road. It shows how Japan has changed. And as far as I know, Ozawa has never insisted Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons.

Your party's popularity rating was something like 2.9 percent a year ago. How will you defeat Prime Minister Koizumi?

We fought three national elections after we formed the current party. Before those elections, our support was in the 6 to 10 percent range, but the results were different. Take the 1998 Upper House election, for example. We won and the LDP experienced a miserable defeat. Whatever the support rate is before the elections, we can wage a good fight.

What is the biggest philosophical difference between yourself and ...