JAPAN'S long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party was headed last night for a shattering defeat, losing about two-thirds of the seats it held before Prime Minister Taro Aso called an election six weeks ago.
The new prime minister will be Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan last night looked to have added 200 seats to the 111 it held when the House of Representatives was dissolved.
Mr Hatoyama, 62-year-old grandson of the LDP's foundation prime minister, Ichiro Hatoyama, has gained a massive mandate to reform Japan's political and economic system.
From its formation in 1955, the conservative party presided over Japan's rise from a post-war shambles to the world's second-largest and most vigorous economy, a unique security alliance with the US, spectacular financial-political scandals, a devastating collapse of its post-bubble economy from the early 1990s, a lengthy but unsatisfactory recovery from 2002 and finally the plunge back into deep recession.
In that time the LDP lost only one election, in 1993, and was out of government for only 11 months.
Yesterday's defeat comes four years after the LDP, led by its last popular and politically effective prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, achieved its largest ever seat gain.
But three years of political disasters starting within months of Mr Koizumi's retirement in September 2006, three more prime ministers and post-war Japan's worst recession have produced a shattering defeat that calls into question the LDP's very survival as a party.
LDP officials were saying even before polling closed last night that 69-year-old Mr Aso would have no alternative but to resign the party leadership to take responsibility.
The first half hour of counting last night was almost enough to restore the DPJ's losses from its 2005 defeat; it had already taken 171 seats to the LDP's 49, with New Komeito, the coalition partner in the last government, holding nine.
Exit polls by the major news organisations put the DPJ's final tally at between 298 and 324 seats.
At the upper end of the scale, Mr Hatoyama's party is poised to secure a "super-majority", two-thirds of the House of Representatives, which would allow it to override any legislative veto from the upper house.
However, that is an academic consideration now because the DPJ and its small-party allies, the Social Democrats and People's New Party, have controlled the upper house since July 2007 - the election that marked the beginning of the end of the LDP era.
The Social Democrats and PNP have done poorly, as have all the smaller parties bar the Communists, and though the DPJ has undertaken to take them into a governing coalition, they will have no serious influence on policy direction.
Defying an approaching typhoon, Japanese voters queued in unusually large numbers for a general election which wreaked cyclonic damage on the LDP.
Although heavy rains along the heavily populated Honshu eastern seaboard discouraged voters in the final hours polling booths were open, the final turnout was expected to approach 70per cent, the highest in almost 20 years.
The dominant issue throughout the campaign was the Aso government's fitness to continue governing, above the DPJ's lightly detailed promises to sweep away the LDP's iron triangle model of close co-operation politicians, public servants and big business, with the bureaucracy leading policy-making.
"I cast my vote to see a change of power in this country, rather than paying attention to details of each party's campaign manifesto," Norihito Inoue, a house wife told Kyodo news agency.
Mr Hatoyama, a founder and early head of the 11-year-old DPJ, was unexpectedly returned to the leadership only in May when Ichiro Ozawa was forced to stand aside following the revelation of illegal funds being accepted by his office.
Mr Ozawa and Mr Hatoyama, an engineer by training and an MP since 1986, were among the MPs who precipitated the LDP's 1993 crisis by quitting the scandal-racked party.
The main architect of the DPJ's astonishing reversal of fortunes since mid-2005, Mr Ozawa is expected to play the dominant figure in the party and a decisive role in the new government's management.
Expected to become the party's secretary general and with well over 100 personal supporters in the expanded party, a clearly annoyed Mr Ozawa, 67, last night refused to answer questions on his future role.
"We are only here to see the results of the vote-counting," he told an NHK TV interviewer.
"This type of question is precisely the problem with the media."
An exit poll by TV Asahi predicted the DPJ would take 315 seats in the 480-seat lower house, while Tokyo Broadcasting System forecast the centre-left opposition party would win 321 seats. Public broadcaster NHK predicted the DPJ would win between 298 and 329 seats, against a range of 84 to 131 seats for the conservative party.
Just before calling the election, Mr Aso had to quell a rebellion that potentially involved a third of the party's MPs. When the party reconvenes, the survivors who have saved their district seats, many angry at Mr Aso and the conduct of the campaign, will confront senior MPs who saved their skins by being placed at the top of LDP party lists, from its share of 180 seats filled by proportional representation.
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