It's already seventeen years since I left Kyoto; howquickly the time has gone. But my way of thinkingabout education, society and politics is stillinfluenced by my having had an education in Kyotounder a liberal system and spent my childhood,teenage and early adult years there, which all meantthat the Socialist Party was the party of leastinterest to me. Insufficient knowledge of thesubject may also have led to misinterpretations inthis piece. But the result of the Kyoto mayoralelection which was held at the height of SocialistParty ‘fever’ was far removed from its ‘great leap’in the Upper House elections and I wonder if oneshouldn't see this as a question mark about whetherthe expectation that its advance would continue,almost as if it had attained the position of theparty of government, was not misplaced.

Actually, I don't think that the electorate necessarilyhad any real idea that even in that Upper Houseelection the Socialist Party might position itselfto replace the Liberal Democratic Party as the partyof government. All that happened was that peopleexpressed their negative opinion of the raison-d’etre of the LiberalDemocratic Party and the unethical activities of itsleaders in the form of votes for the SocialistParty, so that a cynic might say that the SocialistParty had already achieved its ‘great leap’ simplyby living up to its traditional role of being theparty of dissent. Circumstances change when a partybecomes the party of government. While I was pleasedwith a result that had been better than I expected,I worried about a Socialist Party that rushed intoformulating a ‘current line’ and rattled off aseries of new proposals, while already involved withformer General Secretary Ishibashi's withdrawal fromcandidacy at the next election in connection withhis move to the New Socialist Party. Was it, infact, all that well prepared, I wondered. And shouldthe Socialist Party be redefining itself so rapidly?Could it actually reposition itself responsibly?