The Emperor's Same Old Clothes.(Junichiro Koizumi, newly elected Prime Minister;)(Liberal Democratic Party in Japan)(Brief Article)

When I covered Japan as a correspondent in the 1980s and 1990s, I used to like listening to the old Liberal Democrats out on the stump, or when they swilled cheap sake with the party faithful in local political clubs. Their spiel was three-fourths bunkum, of course. But these were seasoned pols, and they knew the way into the hearts and minds of their constituents. At bottom there was something cruel in these scenes, for your average LDP candidate was nothing if not a master manipulator. But they were also mirrors. A Liberal Democrat peddling snake oil in the prefectures could teach you something about the Japanese--about the hopes they harbored, about what they wanted their nation and themselves to be.

This brings us to Junichiro Koizumi and his elevation last week as Japan's new prime minister. With an approval rating of about 65 percent, he has clearly tapped into the popular imagination as no Liberal Democrat has for many years. But does this mean that new hopes among the politics-weary Japanese are now to be translated into new realities? I question that, even as I wish it were so.

In his blunt campaign speeches and his iconoclastic personal style, Koizumi could hardly advertise his desire for change more effectively. Indeed, following his progress as a political pilgrim, one sometimes wondered whether the emphasis on imagery hadn't transformed him into more of a symbol than a living, breathing aspirant to high office with ideas to apply. And this is just the point about Koizumi. To borrow an old Madison Avenue phrase, what precisely does he have on offer--sizzle or steak?

In the early postwar years, when the Japanese wrestled with that imported notion called demokurashii, they recognized the need to develop an assertiveness of character that would replace the old, ingrained passivity. Democracy demanded what the intellectuals of the day called "a new democratic human type." Making citizens out of subjects, then, was understood as a psychological project; it had to begin with the political revolution within.

This sliver of history explains much about Koizumi's appeal, it seems to me. The Japanese are still struggling to create their democratic human type, and to many Koizumi is the notion made flesh. He is the light suit in the lineup of navy blue. The relaxed manner, the candid opinions, the poised good looks, the acknowledged taste for Viagra and rock music: if you asked me to sum up this man in a single word, I would ask for two-- "popular aspiration."

Those politicians who have traded on a similar appeal, however, could not do so within the structure of the ruling party. Morihiro Hosokawa, scion of samurai and an LDP man of many years' standing, broke from the party, formed his own--and, in 1993, turned the Liberal Democrats out of power for the first time in 38 years. Naoto Kan rose from the ranks of grass-roots activists to form the Democratic Party of Japan, which gains ground against the LDP in every election it contests. "Is Koizumi going to be another Hosokawa," asks Ken Courtis, a strategist who thinks big thoughts for Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, "or is he going to effect change?" There are two questions here, and the first is easy. Koizumi already is ...