Exit Koizumi, Japan's Relentless Jedi Knight

TOKYO

In Japan, the wa surrounds you. You can feel it in the priciest sushi bars and lowliest noodle parlors. Call it the particular Japanese way of looking at the world; of harmony, of collectiveness with a do-not-rock-the-boat spirit. In the mythology of "Star Wars" movies, the wa is like the Force. To mess with the wa is a cardinal sin.

Junichiro Koizumi messed with the wa .

But perhaps the most surprising thing about the man who will exit the political stage next week as Japan's most important postwar prime minister is that when he messed with the wa , most Japanese discovered a shocking truth: Maybe the wa needed to be messed with.

In his 5 1/2 years in office, Japan's modern samurai took his light saber to practically every national taboo. He cut through the country's notorious bureaucratic fat, forcing passage of legislation to reduce government payrolls and curb the wasteful spending that had left post-bubble Japan saddled with bridges to nowhere and highways dead-ending in unpopulated grasslands. Where his predecessors had used pork-barrel spending in vain attempts to drag the nation out of its decade-long recession, Koizumi instead turned to market forces -- delivering what is now on track to become Japan's longest period of economic growth since the end of World War II.

When China's looming emergence as a superpower began to cast a long shadow over Japan -- a country many Asia experts dismissed a few years ago as rising only in its irrelevance -- Koizumi charted a new course for a bolder nation. He dispatched non-combat troops to Iraq in Japan's largest military-related operation in six decades, launched Tokyo's first independent spy satellites and fortified the U.S.-Japan alliance to counter Beijing's spreading influence.

He did so with a flair that the Japanese had never before seen in a politician. Yukio Okamoto, Koizumi's former senior adviser on the Middle East, recalled the prime minister's 2003 address to the nation announcing what was then an unpopular decision to dispatch Japan's Self Defense Forces to Iraq. Foreign Ministry bureaucrats had prepared a defensive, almost apologetic speech for Koizumi. But the prime minister tossed it aside and went on live with an impromptu, highly personal discourse of his own.

"Those of us standing around Mr. Koizumi just smiled; it wasn't his words as much as his self-assured body language that convinced the Japanese public," Okamoto told me. "In that sense, Koizumi was able to do more than past prime ministers who just followed public opinion. He influenced it. In other words, he was a leader."

In a country long governed by consensus politics and glacial change, Koizumi's most significant achievement was smashing the body politic itself. He took aim at his own ruling Liberal Democratic Party -- a misnomer for a group of conservative dinosaurs who have ruled Japan for most of the past six decades through backroom agreements and a yakuza-like devotion to a few party bosses. Though Koizumi, 64, sometimes looked like a goof on the world stage -- especially while serenading President Bush with Elvis songs and traipsing around Graceland like a wide-eyed groupie -- he was a ruthless political strategist at home. He slew the reform-resistant LDP bosses like so many Darth Vaders by unceremoniously ejecting them from the party. In the process, he cleared a path for change.

"Koizumi was almost cruel in his political style," said Ichita Yamamoto, part of a new generation of younger LDP legislators. "But that's what we needed -- an unyielding leader beholden to no one."

But mixed in with the new sense of optimism Koizumi brought to the country was a precarious reinvention of Japanese nationalism. He flirted with the Dark Side of the wa , creating a new Japan unfettered by war guilt. His administration backed the new history textbooks' whitewashing of imperial atrocities, and repeatedly did not condemn political statements casting past aggressions in the light of national self-preservation. Koizumi's annual visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine honoring military dead -- including World War II criminals -- sparked outcries in the countries that suffered most from Japan's wartime actions. The repeat visits created a schism in Tokyo's diplomatic ties with Beijing and Seoul that has left Japan largely friendless in its own neighborhood.