A relative unknown even in Japan, Mori is seen as an “Obuchi clone”–a Liberal Democratic Party stalwart who respects hierarchy and lacks a strategic vision. “I will follow Obuchi’s path,” Mori pledged after being confirmed as prime minister. “I feel like I can hear [Obuchi’s] voice from his bed, saying I trust you, so do it well.” Unlike Obuchi, Mori is a lively orator who “makes things funny so common people can understand,” says Tokuichiro Tamazawa, Japan’s Agriculture minister. Yet he’s tainted by a decade-old stock-for-favors scandal and prone to offensive ethnic slurs and other insults. The LDP hopes he will win the upcoming election. But will he be able to lead Japan out of recession and into the new, global economy?
Mori’s past comments are not too encouraging. After rioting ravaged Los Angeles in 1992, he said that Japan’s large population of Korean workers “could form an army.” Whether he meant the racist comment–or was pandering to anti-foreign voters–is unclear. And this January , he lamented the difficulty of pressing the flesh in his rural district during his first election campaign, where farmers “went inside their homes as if an AIDS patient was coming.” Says one opposition member: “We’ll let him talk and talk and talk. Eventually his tongue will slip.”
Mori wasn’t always a party man. He won election to the Diet as an independent in 1969. Once in office, Mori joined the LDP. At first he was a firebrand. During an election for the LDP’s presidency, Mori criticized one of the contenders so forcefully that the candidate he supported threw him off his campaign truck. “Mori had to walk back,” says Takayoshi Miyagawa, a political analyst. “It was around that time that he learned that politics is teamwork.” Mori was among some 70 people who in the 1980s purchased shares in a company called Recruit Cosmos. When the company was listed on Japan’s over-the-counter market, shareholders reaped huge windfalls. After the cozy deals became public in 1988, Mori, who has acknowledged earning almost $1 million on his holdings, was among 11 Diet members investigated on bribery charges but not indicted. Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita resigned, taking responsibility.
Japan’s new prime minister has much on his plate: fresh diplomatic initiatives with Russia and North Korea, an upcoming G8 summit in Okinawa and elections that must be called by October. Can he handle it? If life really is like rugby, then it’s Mori’s next game that counts.
