Thirty years have passed since former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was arrested July 27, 1976, on suspicion of having received a bribe of 500 million yen that originated from Lockheed Corp., an American aircraft manufacturer. The Lockheed affair, in which 15 people were indicted, became the largest postwar bribery scandals to implicate political and business leaders.
The scandal surfaced as Japan was riding the crest of a wave of high economic growth. The scandal was a product of the money-powered politics that prevailed in those years. It was characterized by pork-barrel spending and collusion among politicians, bureaucrats and business enterprises.
Over the past three decades, Japan's politics has gone through changes -- especially in the last five years since Mr. Junichiro Koizumi became prime minister. Mr. Koizumi's reform politics pushed deregulation and reduced public-works projects, thus weakening collusive relationships among politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders. He also concentrated a large portion of the power held by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the hands of the prime minister, thereby reducing the roles played by intraparty factions, the erstwhile hotbeds of money politics.