Junichiro Koizumi, determined to abandon the prime ministry this fall, has wreaked havoc on “the iron triangle — the alliance of big business, yakunin [Japan’s prestigious but hatred bureaucrats] and the government party. He accepted the argument “the 1950s regime” was superannuated, expansion for expansion’s sake. Instead, without much intellectualization, he bought into the notion Japan’s economy [and society] was too too complex, to be centrally directed, however brilliant and dedicated its bureaucrats.

He hasn’t had it all his way. But the question is a successor. He has gone out of his way not to name one after at least temporarily smashing the old factions with his own popularity, thumbing his nose at bosses, accumulating an unprecedented victory in the last election.

Are we to see Koizumi’s successful feuding as a new form of government? It would end Japan’s version of Westminister, a prime ministers primus enter pares. For he has brought ministers as well as their former bureaucratic co-conspirators to heel. Will a successor be as determined to continue what University of South Carolina Japan scholar Robert Angel calls Koizumi’s “central political executive”?

A great deal more than Koizumi’s economic reforms rides on the answer. It could continue to determine Japan’s foreign policy as America’s most important and steadfast [for all the difficulties] Asian ally. Koizumi has sought to strengthen the alliance by making it more than a slowly rearming Japan hiding under the U.S. nuclear shield. Of course, North Korea has had a little to do with the course changes. Nothing so brings a perception of reality as a missile flying overhead [or the threat of one, pace the European Three and their hopefully changed attitudes toward Iranian nuclear ambitions].

Part and parcel of this new J government form is the relationship with China. For nowhere has the trend toward “the central political executive” been more pronounced than machinations between Koizimui and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the past, its only competitor was the the Japanese government’s most powerful entity, the ministry of finance. But Koizumi’s reform program — while cerebrally supported by Finance’s mandarins, was difficult for them because it essentially called for decentralization of economic decision making [not the least to the central Bank of Japan] for choosing of winners and losers. And who can fault a bureaucracy for not wanting to commit suicide.

Whatever domestic implications — and how Japan will maintain its preeminence in the growing turmoil of globalization — it is foreign policy where the U.S. and the world may be most quickly be impacted. Koizumi has shaken off longstanding Japanese willingness to overlook the nature of the Beijing regime. In no small part, this arose from nostalgia for the China trade which during pre-World War4 II days fueled the economy. If the Japanese military and its puppets were no longer customers, Japanese multinationals have been quick to utilize China’s cheap labor and energy for assembly, now too expensive in Taiwan and South Korea where they had previously migrated. A significant part of the 55 to 75 percent [pick your figure, Chinese statistics as malleable] of China’s exports are produced by multinationals, perhaps a majority Japanese.

But Beijing’s “waving the bloody flag” — resurrecting over and over again the terrible 20s and 30s Japanese depredations against China — as a weapon in backroom economic negotiations has backfired. Koizumi, who once had public reservations about visits to the controversial Yasukuni war memoria because it also honors convicted WWII war criminals has his back up. So, according to the polls, have many Japanese. Tokyo now echoes Rummy’s question: against whom are the Chinese spending disguised billions for their armed forces?

All this has become intertwined. Koizumi chose a non-Chinese specialist as head of the foreign ministry’s China desk, obviously annoyed at what he saw as too much “understanding” and not enough grappling with a strengthening semi-totalitarian regime on his doorstep. The episode adding icing to the cake: the Gainmusho withheld a two-year-old suicide of a foreign office employee in Shanghai, apparently blackmailed by the Chinese in a honeypot scandal. Like so many career diplomats the world over, the Gaimusho has long felt international politics were too nuanced for elected politicians. [That couldn’t be the case at Foggy Bottom, of course!]

In all the glowing accounts of how Beijing has embraced “a peaceful rising”, mistranslations of President Hu Jintao’s “three harmonies”, and general wishful thinking, this Japanese domestic trend is critical. One can only hope Beijing is looking further than the Chinese’ all too familiar contempt for their neighbors.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.