Party politics seems as natural to many of us today as government itself, but imagine how it looked to the uninitiated 150 years ago.

"A perplexing institution was representative government," wrote Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901), Japan's great popularizer of Western civilization. In England in 1862 as part of an official delegation, Fukuzawa took in "the mother of parliaments," and wrote: "I learned that there were different political parties — the Liberal and the Conservative — who were always 'fighting' against each other in the government."

Strange "fighting" it must have seemed to a born samurai. The reformers of the Meiji Era (1868-1912) wanted no part of it. "The government must always take a fixed course," said Prime Minister Kiyotaka Kuroda in 1889. "It must stand above and outside the political parties and cleave to the path of supreme fairness and justice."