Outspoken Kajiyama says what he thinks
By Brian Williams
TOKYO (Reuters): Seiroku Kajiyama is a pugnacious veteran politician whose outspoken ways, including a shocking comment on American blacks, has often landed him in hot water.
A strong nationalist who believes firmly in Japan's place in the world, Kajiyama's willingness to make swift and drastic reforms of the country's recession-hit economy has made him the financial markets' choice for the post of prime minister.
His suggested reforms include allowing half of Japan's banks to fail if that is what is needed to clean up the country's billions of dollars in bad loans.
Until he entered the economic debate on the side of global markets last year, Kajiyama, 72, was best known abroad for a slur against American blacks.
In 1990, when he was justice minister, he commented after a roundup of foreign prostitutes in Tokyo:
"They (prostitutes) ruin the atmosphere of the neighborhoods they move into... just like in America, where blacks move in, and whites are forced out."
The remark set off a furious backlash around the world. Then prime minister Toshiki Kaifu wrote a letter of apology to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Kajiyama made his own fulsome apology to the American people.
Other apologies followed remarks suggesting Japan faced a hypothetical security threat from armed groups of ethnic Koreans and that some of the "comfort women" forced to provide sexual services to Japan's World War II forces had done so for the money they were paid.
As chief cabinet secretary, Kajiyama was also top government spokesman and endeared himself to journalists by blunt comments that were always guaranteed to make headlines.
In the early days of the 1996 Peru hostage crisis, when left wing guerrillas took over the Japanese embassy in Lima, Kajiyama nearly caused a major diplomatic incident when he said Tokyo and Lima differed on how to handle the affair.
True to his reputation for not liking to back down, Kajiyama refused to withdraw the remarks.
He was also outspoken in his spokesman role when commenting on relations with China at a time when the Taiwan missile crisis was at its height.
He quit the Hashimoto cabinet last August, upset by the prime minister's failure to seek a conservative-conservative alliance with opposition political groups -- a tactic he believed was needed if the LDP was to win voter confidence.
He is the leader of a group within the LDP who want to reach out to opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa, a former senior LDP leader who now heads the Liberal Party.
Kajiyama, almost alone among the LDP leadership, spoke out against Hashimoto's economic policies long before it became fashionable to do so as Japan sunk deeper into recession. Within months of leaving the Hashimoto administration, he was calling for the prime minister to resign to give a new man a chance to reform the economy.
If Kajiyama gets the job, it would be seen as a shift within the ruling party toward traditional, conservative forces determined to ensure Japan remains an economic power, whatever it takes.
Not everyone, however, is certain Kajiyama -- who has also suggested an interest rate rise most economists say would be disastrous -- would take equally aggressive steps in other vital areas such as scaling back the government's role in the economy.