Looks Are Everything.(Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi)(Brief Article)

In 1992 Japan's long-ruling liberal Democrats handed an important cabinet job to a member with a distinguished lineage. Junichiro Koizumi, then in his early 50s, followed in his grandfather's footsteps to head Japan's Post and Telecommunications Ministry. That was about as traditional as the third-generation LDP man got, however. Soon after assuming office he proposed privatizing his ministry, which oversees a $2.1 trillion postal-savings system that since the 1980s has been the world's largest bank. The plan, which made perfect fiscal sense, went absolutely nowhere. But it cemented Koizumi's reputation as a maverick within the stiff-collared LDP. "Ministers are expected to defend and expand their territory," says Shunji Taoka, senior defense writer for the Asahi Shimbun. "Incredibly, Koizumi was willing to say that his own ministry wasn't necessary."

In the years since then, Koizumi's conviction (some call it stubbornness) has earned him nicknames like "oddball" or "the eccentric," while his passion for opera and penchant for flashy dress have confirmed his place outside the LDP mainstream. One former rival, incoming Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, joked that Koizumi's trademark silver hairdo made him "look like the Lion King." Yet average Japanese grew to appreciate his style and in survey after survey ranked him among the politicians they most wanted to become prime minister. That image landed Koizumi the top job last week, after a groundbreaking primary in which he championed postal privatization, convincingly portrayed himself as the candidate of change and trounced three traditionalist rivals. And that maverick reputation--combined with the LDP's straitened circumstances--also gives him a far better shot at making his unconventional ideas reality this time around.

Already Koizumi's victory has irreversibly altered Japanese politics. He entered the primary as an underdog, mounted a spirited campaign against the LDP's status quo candidate, former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, and won a sweeping victory among rank-and-file party members who, in the main, had supposedly pledged their votes to his rival. With the LDP's famous factions unable to guarantee votes anymore, public opinion, for decades a peripheral force in Japanese politics, is now more powerful than ever. "Most members of the LDP's old school still don't get it," says Columbia University's Japan watcher Gerald Curtis. "Their primary system backfired, and they're totally out of touch."

That new reality promises to give Koizumi the leeway to impose meaningful reform, as long as he continues to appeal to Japanese voters' desire for change. In his first significant act as prime minister, he selected Japan's freshest cabinet in a generation, handing top posts to women and private-sector professionals instead of candidates put forth by LDP heavyweights. He chose the outspoken Tanaka to be Japan's first female foreign minister, handed the economics brief to a Keio University professor with no previous experience in government and tapped the LDP's best-known youngster, 44-year-old Nobuteru Ishihara--son of Tokyo's maverick governor, Shintaro Ishihara- -to oversee administrative reform. Koizumi's "national salvation" government includes just two people from the LDP's mainstream faction. "It's a television cabinet," declared one Japanese commentator. "It plays well to women, youth and members of the private sector."

In fact, in many ways Koizumi's campaigning has just begun: he will likely be kicked out of office in about 90 days unless the LDP and its allies win upper-house elections scheduled for July. Now that he's prime minister, it's his job to lead the shaky ruling coalition past the ballot box--and it's his head if the vote count falls short. LDP chieftains know that, and they know a whole slate of ho-hum candidates are hoping to ride to re-election on the coattails of Koizumi's popularity. They may be willing to tolerate some of his otherwise radical proposals as long as they rejuvenate the party's image enough to survive the polls.

To maintain his hold over the Japanese public, Koizumi may be able to ignore traditional coalition building and present his reform agenda directly to voters. By convincing the public that he is serious about fixing Japan's banks, reining in public spending and restoring the economy to good health, the logic goes, citizens might stand by him amid the worsening recession and rising unemployment. "Like Martin Luther King," says Takashi Inoguchi, a Tokyo University professor who specializes in Japanese politics, "he needs to tell Japan that he has a dream."

Increasingly, Japanese are demanding that kind of vision from their politicians. Populists with personality have turned out to be gold at the ballot box. In Tokyo, where the municipality encompasses the world's largest urban center, outspoken novelist and prominent nationalist Shintaro Ishihara took the governor's job in 1999 by campaigning against big government and runaway public spending. In Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics, voters elected Yasuo Tanaka (no relation to the foreign minister) as governor last October on a pledge to block a controversial dam project. Also a former novelist, he appealed to citizens still reeling from Nagano's Olympian debt hangover. And when he isn't bashing the LDP, he's either ...