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A Party & a Half. The real challenge to Sato comes from his own party's endemic factionalism. The Liberal Democrats, themselves a postwar coalition of Japan's conservatives and liberals born in 1955, operate on a system called oyabun-kobun (leader-adherent) that closely resembles the ward-based political structure of American politics in the late 19th century. In his battle to retain the presidency of the party last December, Sato had to meld the miasmic wishes of a dozen cliques in order to stave off the challenge of former Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama. He won with a hefty 119-vote margin. The "black mist" corruption charges raised by the left—charges that, in typically Japanese style, were never substantiated (TIME, Nov. 4)—did little damage to the party's immediate aims.
Still, Japan's political system is far more complicated than the Liberal Democratic Party admits. It has been described by Western observers as "a party and a half" system, with the L.D.P. being the party and the opposition adding up to the half. Japan's Socialists, who control more than 12 million votes, are the nation's second biggest voting bloc, but Party Boss Kozo Sasaki, 65, is a Peking-lining fanatic who is even farther to the left than Communist Party Leader Sanzo Nozaka, 74, who last year struck a course away from Peking and more toward Moscow. Toward the ever-growing center of Japanese politics stands the Social Democratic Party (with 30 seats in the Diet, third in the nation) and the newly arrived Komeito (25 seats).
As the political arm of the Buddhist-backed Soka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), led by piously political Daisaku Ikeda, 38, Komeito attracts the new Japanese: city dwellers who have lost contact with the ward-oriented politics of their rural home towns. Komeito calls for a cleanup in the wheeling and dealing typical of Asian government. Since Japan is fated, for better or worse, to a continuing urban growth and a growing urban malaise, it is mass parties of the Komeito brand that will doubtless dictate Japan's political future.
Cold Alliance. In at least one respect, Sato should get help from the nation's intellectuals, who play an important political role. No longer as ritualistically left-wing as they once were, they influence foreign policy and stimulate public debate, generate national consensus or fragment it through articles in such publications as Chuo Koron (Central Forum), Japan's leading intellectual monthly. At the cutting edge of the intellectuals today is a group known as "the New Realists," men educated for the most part in Britain and the U.S., who bring a hard, analytical view of the world to Japan's foreign policy.