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Japanese Premier's Low Ratings Offer Opening
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Toyota said Tuesday that the 141,127 vehicles it produced in Japan in February was the lowest output figure on record.
Japan's gross national product shrank at an annualized rate of 12.1 percent during the fourth quarter of last year, nearly double the rate of decline in the United States. Government officials are warning that the first quarter of 2009 is likely to be worse, and there is little public confidence that Aso's government can come up with policies to help.
After the fundraising scandal broke March 3, public confidence in Ozawa also plummeted.
Polls showed that 60 percent of voters wanted him to resign as leader of the Democratic Party. Just 13 percent thought he was fit to be prime minister, according to a poll by the Mainichi newspaper. Still, that was three percentage points higher than Aso's perceived fitness for a job he already holds.
Ozawa, 66, has accused government prosecutors of investigating him and his party in "a politically and legally unfair manner" as the election approaches. Polls show that the Democratic Party retains a narrow lead over the LDP.
But the scandal has revived memories of Ozawa's decades as a political deal-maker whose mentors and benefactors were disgraced politicians. There is an abiding link in Japan between construction companies angling for public works contracts and government officials on the take.
"All scandals are connected to public works," said Takayoshi Igarashi, a politics professor at Hosei University in Tokyo.
Ozawa, a gifted political organizer, was for decades a leading member of the ruling party and a protege of two powerful lawmakers, who were indicted on corruption charges. Ozawa quit the LDP in 1993, in part to escape the taint of those associations.
He has since been the key strategist behind the emergence of the Democratic Party, which in 2007 took control of the upper house of parliament.
The Democratic Party will have to decide in the coming weeks whether it can afford the political price of keeping Ozawa as its leader, said Yasunori Sone, a political science professor at Keio University in Tokyo.
"If the party's support starts to go down as a result of Ozawa staying on, there is no way it would commit suicide with him," Sone said.
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.