Four weeks after former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi was hospitalized with a stroke on April 2, the administration headed by new Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, former secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, appears to be functioning in a business-as-usual manner. In the past month, however, government and LDP leaders have not given a consistent and convincing enough account of what actually happened in the brief runup from Mr. Obuchi's incapacitation to the inauguration of the new Cabinet.
As a result, a reasonable doubt persists about the legitimacy of the stopgap role that Chief Cabinet Secretary Mikio Aoki played between Mr. Obuchi's hospitalization and the formal inauguration of the Mori Cabinet. It was 22 hours later that Mr. Aoki announced Mr. Obuchi's hospitalization at a press conference. The fact is that three hours earlier the comatose Obuchi was receiving emergency treatment in an intensive care unit.
Mr. Aoki said that Obuchi had told him, immediately before falling into a coma, to "take charge temporarily as acting prime minister, depending on the test results." However, he acknowledged later that that was not exactly what he had been told to do. Mr. Aoki has since lost credibility because of his repeated -- and often contradictory -- "modifications." On one occasion, pressed for clarification, he admitted that Mr. Obuchi had only told him to "work everything out."