Hidden Nexus by Nick Tanner Read Free Book Online Page B

hadexited the room he'd hoped that such an unholy alliance would come to nothing more than what had been agreed. He knew that in their careers he and Kinjo had played a wily game but never before had he imagined that they would ever have to court the company and support of the Yakuza. Looking back Watanabe was right in his thinking. Looking back Watanabe could pin-point his slide into difficulty to this very meeting.
     
    However for the present he was happily ignorant and according to the evidence of the newspapers the strategy to involve Hatoyama had been particularly effective, substantiated by the reduction in the number of reports from the minions complaining that their rallies were being subjected to harassment and intimidation from the far-right. He had Kinjo to thank and he made a mental note to remind himself to offer Kinjo some kind of bonus-remuneration for his efforts. But still, the vultures circled and his political enemies would be all too pleased to feast on his rotting carcass should he ever give them the chance. This was no time to rest on his laurels.
     
    There was only one item on the agenda for the meeting to come – the possibility of an alliance with the Ryozo group, a faction slightly to the left of his own. This particular alliance was another plan and another gem that had spouted from the seemingly unending fount that gushed from within Kinjo’s scheming and manipulative mind. With the strategy carefully explained to him even Watanabe had recognised that if they were able to clinch such an alliance then he really would be one step away from being unassailable once again.
     
    Watanabe’s life had been full of political scheming, the origins of which stemmed from his desperate need to regain power, and a love-hate relationship with the Matsuzaki faction, the biggest and most powerful faction within Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which itself had governed Japan almost continuously since the second world war.
     
    The Matsuzaki faction basked in its role as puppet-master and king-maker – an oblique aspect of Japanese politics which neatly concealed where the real power rested. Supposedly this lay with the elected Prime Minister and his Cabinet but those who played the system knew that in reality the power lay in the hands of the unaccountable wire-pullers - the faction leaders and modern day Shoguns.
     
    It was this role of ‘Shogun’ that Watanabe coveted, but it was only through a myriad of alliances that he could ever hope to regain such a position now that he was no longer head of the powerful Matzusaki faction.
     
    In a not untypical episode in his political life, two years previously, Watanabe had fought for and lost the chairmanship of the Matsuzaki faction. In the election for Chairman the choice between the candidates was fundamentally simply one of personal chemistry with serious matters of policy tending to become mere side issues in the incessant, internal haggling and wrangling that took place within each and between each and every faction. W hen the Matsuzaki faction failed to return Watanabe, in a fit of pique, he removed himself and his thirty-six followers from the faction and formed his own group. From chairmanship of the ruling party’s most influential faction, from position of ‘Shogun’, he had descended to a situation of relative powerlessness. Sadly, true power was an unfaithful and temporary mistress for him. Sad, too, was that he was hopelessly and addictively smitten. He would do anything to regain his once lofty position – anything at all!
     
    Others recognised that the swings and roundabouts in Watanabe’s political fortune were all too typical for him. Newspapers sympathetic to him insisted that there really was a principled method to his apparent madness, that he saw himself as a historical figure who could modernize Japanese politics by increasing the power and accountability of elected politicians as opposed to the unelected bureaucrats.