Observing Japan: The strange death of the LDP

When the Hosokawa government — with Ozawa Ichiro, then secretary-general of one of the leading parties of the eight-party coalition backing the government — passed electoral reform in 1994, one of the arguments made then and ever since by Japanese politicians (and American political scientists) was that the new mixed single-member district/proportional representation electoral system would produce

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(and I find it odd that Masuzoe, who was a critic of Koizumi's "neo-liberal" reforms, is now the face for continuing those reforms)