Mr. Fukuda evidently has the support of seventy percent of the 387 Diet members and leads in at least twenty-three prefectures.
Mr. Aso simply overplayed his hand, as the controversial article in this week’s Shukan Gendai — which discusses Aso’s “coup” and his overweening ambition to be prime minister — makes clear, and whatever concerns the prefectural chapters have about Mr. Fukuda’s ascending to the premiership on the back of factional support, those concerns do not seem to be significant enough to lead them to buck the parliamentary LDP.
And so Mr. Fukuda will step into the leadership of a broken party, facing circumstances not unlike his father’s ascendancy in 1976. Fukuda Takeo took over the LDP following the Lockheed scandal that consumed Tanaka Kakuei and in the wake of the LDP’s worst House of Representatives election since the LDP formed, in which official LDP candidates failed to take a majority (the LDP was only able to hold a majority by virtue of conservative independents who ran without the LDP’s endorsement and joined the party after being elected). One of the elder Fukuda’s first acts as prime minister was to create a headquarters for executing party reform of which he was the head. The headquarters ultimately introduced a primary system for the election of party leaders open to all party members.
Fukuda the younger will not have it as easy as his father: there is no magic bullet to solve the LDP’s problems, because there seems to be no easy way to reconcile the party’s rural past with an urban present and future, all while holding together a coalition with Komeito and locking horns with an invigorated DPJ.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s giving few hints as to how he plans to deal with these problems. But I suspect that once in place he could surprise everyone, being a tough, crafty competitor who makes life difficult for rivals and enemies within and without the LDP.
Tobias S. Harris 
In fact the political party maneuvering you describe after the Lockheed scandal did not subside after the fix that Fukuda Takeo established. For a decade after that the concern with \”clean\” candidates continued and ended only after the \”clean\” Miki Takeo became prime minister and arguably did not really end until the death of Tanaka Kakuei. Fukuda was plagued by much more than the Lockheed scandal. He had to contend with the oil crisis of the late seventies which had more serious impact on Japan\’s economy than the rest of the world.
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I didn\’t mean to give the impression that he solved everything, just that son, like father, is stepping into a tumultuous situation — with even fewer options at his disposal.
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Tobias, did you catch Joichi Ito\’s op-ed in the New York Times, calling for a revolution in Japan to end the political stagnation? By now a true You can read it now that the NYT has dropped Times Select. Here is the link:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/opinion/18ito.html?_r=1&oref=sloginA hard hitting quote from Ito here:The heart of the problem is that true multiparty politics should have started in Japan decades ago. Soon the members of our own postwar baby boom will be retiring. The looming crisis of a bankrupt Japan, a overburdened pension system and a corporate ecology of pumped-up old-economy companies will be upon us.
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Correction to my first comment. I think it was Kaifu Michio who was the \”Mr Clean\” who ended the search for a cleaner LDP. Miki Takeo may have been the \”Mr Clean\” who followed the Fukuda Takeo government.
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