The Great Farm Revolt; Japan's opposition leader edged out Abe by appealing to rural voters. But such us-vs.-them tactics won't help him govern.(Ichiro Ozawa, Shinzo Abe)

Byline: Akiko Kashiwagi

To understand Ichiro Ozawa--whose Democratic Party of Japan thumped Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party in upper-house elections last week--it helps to consider where he kicked off his campaign: in Shinjoson, a small farming community of just over 1,100 nestled away in mountainous western Japan. Ozawa's message, which he declared that day and then trumpeted ceaselessly during the following weeks, was clear: only his party cares about the nation's forgotten countryside. "We will rebuild rural Japan, home to us Japanese," he promised. "That's where everything begins."

The strategy worked, delivering 60 percent of rural voters (or 17 of 29 rural seats) to the DPJ in the poll and handing the LDP its worse loss ever (it won only six seats). Now the 65-year-old Ozawa--an LDP veteran himself who quit the ruling party 14 years ago to help form the Japan Renewal Party (now part of the DPJ) --has a shot at putting his campaign talk into action: first through control of the upper house and then, if all goes according to plan, as Japan's next prime minister.

But then comes the tricky part. It's far from clear whether Ozawa's brand of class--or, more accurately, geographic--warfare will work as well in government as it did on the hustings. Ozawa managed to undermine the LDP by attacking it on the one issue that was supposed to be its strong suit: the far-reaching economic reforms undertaken by Abe's predecessor, the wildly popular Junichiro Koizumi. In order to impose fiscal discipline on Japan, Koizumi had slashed a range of government-spending programs during his tenure, including fat rural subsidies and make-work projects that propped up the country's depressed and aging hinterlands. These measures proved popular in Japan's cities--in part because Koizumi did such a good job appealing directly to urban voters. But--not surprisingly--the cuts sparked widespread resentment in rural areas.

Ozawa--a country boy himself, who hails from Iwate in northern Japan--exploited such discontent by denouncing Koizumi cuts on the campaign trail. And he promised to reverse direction by upping subsidies to struggling small-scale farmers. And he pledged to revive the country's moribund agriculture industry through $8.3 billion in new spending, much of it intended to ...