The Associated Press - Friday, 11 October 1996
Peter Landers, Associated Press Writer

The improbable has begun to happen since Kan, the health minister, took on major drug companies and his own agency's bureaucracy to win compensation for hemophiliacs who received blood products tainted with the AIDS virus.

Kan has zoomed to the top of the political popularity charts and founded a party expected to fare well in Oct. 20 elections. Political pundits call him prime minister material.

In many ways, Kan (pronounced "Kahn") is a symbol of changing times in Japan. More than a dozen major players in postwar Japanese politics have announced their retirement. They're being replaced by politicians born after World War II; Kan turned 50 on Thursday.

While the transition to the younger generation is still beginning, seniority and loyalty to party bosses no longer rule Japan's power game. Popular appeal and a youthful image have been critical to the success of Kan and the co-leader of his Democratic Party, 49-year-old Yukio Hatoyama.

The Kan phenomenon began the night of Jan. 10, when ruling coalition leaders picked him for the health minister post almost as an afterthought.

Within days, he was taking on the entire ministry bureaucracy and drug companies over a scandal in which about 2,000 hemophiliacs became infected with the AIDS virus.

Amazingly, Kan won his struggle. The victims got government compensation. Former drug company presidents, the nation's leading hemophilia specialist, and a top bureaucrat are jailed on negligence charges for failing to keep the HIV-tainted blood products from the market.

It was the first time a government official ever had been charged with negligence in Japan.

"You have similar cases going on everywhere in government," Kan said in an interview. "It's epoch-making that we were able to get hidden information out into the open and translate that into reform."

Kan also personifies the shift to an urban, consumer society: He was born in the small city of Ube in western Japan but moved to Tokyo in high school with his "typical salaryman's family."

And unlike older politicians who saw their mission as revving up the engines of Japan's "economic miracle," Kan's issues are '90s issues: dealing with an aging society, making housing more affordable and bringing a more democratic culture to a nation most familiar with authoritarian rule.

In this election, politicians on all sides are promising to slash the broad powers of unelected bureaucrats, whose bungling is blamed for impeding relief efforts after the January 1995 Kobe earthquake and delaying the nation's economic recovery.

Kan, a patent lawyer by profession, is no recent convert to the struggle.

Unique among top politicians in Japan, he got his start in the early 1970s as a consumer activist, fighting for safer food and more housing space in Tokyo.

Kan lives up to his straight-shooter reputation when asked his chances of becoming prime minister should the election lead to a coalition government of his Democratic Party and one of Japan's two main conservative parties.

"Zero," he says. "It won't happen."

Kan says he doesn't want to repeat the tactical error of Morihiro Hosokawa, a reformer who served as prime minister for eight months in 1993-94 but was forced to quit because he lacked a solid power base.

Analysts say Kan's party could win 70 to 80 seats in the elections for Parliament's more powerful 500-seat lower house, up from 51 now.

It's not clear whether Kan would take a role in the post-election government or go on the attack as an opposition leader. Regardless, he plans to continue as a populist giant-slayer -- that's where his roots are.

Kan likes to tell a story from his freshman year in Parliament, when he was pursuing a medical scandal but couldn't persuade bureaucrats to tell him the members of a key government panel.

"Finally, a fellow comes and turns over the members' list but he says, `Just don't let this get out,'" Kan recalls. A smile lights up his face: "Of course, I immediately made it public."

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