To more than 80 percent of Japanese voters, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi looks like a populist reformer. But to the American winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, Koizumi is a "rightwing nationalist."
That was the eyebrow-raising assessment that Herbert P. Bix, author of "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," made of Koizumi in a Op-Ed article published in the New York Times May 29.
Bix put himself into the dwindling ranks of perennial opponents of any change in the philosophy of unarmed pacifism embodied in Article 9 of the Constitution. His comments made it look like he saw a militaristic revival lurking behind almost everything Koizumi says.