The mythmaker

Jim Frederick
TIME Magazine
The most difficult aspect of reporting on Koizumi was confronting the fixed, immutable and monolithic "Koizumi Myth." What started as a campaign plank -- "Koizumi is a reformer and a rebel who is destroying the LDP and reinvigorating Japan" -- somehow became received wisdom.

After decades of stultifyingly boring politics, everybody, it seems, so desperately wanted this narrative to be true that, eventually, it simply was.

Even after it became clear that Koizumi was never going to deliver on many of his promises (meaningful highway reform, imperial succession, constitutional revision, etc.), the Koizumi Myth was virtually impossible to dislodge.