Tokyo.--August 9, 1989, is a date Toshiki Kaifu and Takako Doi will remember all their lives.
Mr. Kaifu, abruptly raised only a few days earlier from obscurity in the middle ranks of the governing Liberal Democratic Party's smallest major faction, became prime minister of Japan.
Miss Doi, head of the Socialists, the country's biggest opposition party, became both the first woman and the first opposition member ever chosen for prime minister by either house of the Diet, Japan's parliament.
On television and in the next day's papers, it was Miss Doi's personality and the novelty of her symbolic achievement that dominated.
"This day," she promised at one press conference, "is the beginning of the end of the long dominance of Japanese politics by the Liberal Democratic party." A real two-party system, with parties alternating in power, was within reach, she told several other audiences.
The 20 months since that heady day have been long, frustrating and often embarrassing for the leaders of both of Japan's two biggest political parties.
Those frustrations -- and the fact that they run equally deep for both the governing party and its principal opposition -- are a measure of how underdeveloped politics still is in the country that has risen from the ashes of World War II to become the planet's leading symbol of fast-track economic development.
Miss Doi no longer talks of soon throwing the LDP out of power. She is too busy denying never-ending rounds of rumors that she will soon resign as head of a party that has just suffered one of the worst electoral defeats in its history. Her party, sporting a new English name, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, lost hundreds of seats in local legislatures this month, and with them the chance to groom candidates the party will badly need in future elections to the Diet.
Mr. Kaifu has survived in office far longer than most commentators expected on that August day, and his tenure has spanned a stunning resurgence that has seen the LDP recover from scandals and public outrage to win convincing election victories. But survival and victory at the polls have run parallel with a long string of humiliations and almost monthly reminders of deep factional splits and leftover wounds from two years of scandal, which still often immobilize both his party and his government.
It has become an almost routine public event for some senior leader of his party to lament, rather than to celebrate, the likelihood that an LDP prime minister will defy all earlier predictions by serving out his full term, which ends in November.
"The Cabinet of Prime Minister Kaifu will continue even though dissatisfaction with the prime minister is simmering within the party," Michio Wanatabe, head of one of the LDP's most powerful factions, declared last week during an address to a meeting of 200 businessmen and editors.
For both Miss Doi and Mr. Kaifu, the roots of frustration and humiliation lie precisely in the same forces that brought them to their special August day.
Both rose as beneficiaries -- Miss Doi directly and Mr. Kaifu by indirection -- of a wave of voter outrage at Mr. Kaifu's party.
That outrage had melded together anger at the passage of a 3 percent sales tax, disgust at the sums of money politicians had received from insider stock deals with the high-flying Recruit business combine, and farmers' fears that the LDP was starting to cave in to foreign pressure to speed up the opening of Japan's agricultural markets.
In an election that July, it had been that outrage that stripped the LDP of its long-held majority in the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Diet, and opened the way for that house's symbolic gesture of naming Miss Doi as its choice for prime minister.
Those same election results at long last shook the LDP's elderly power brokers enough to make them cast about for a new and cleaner-looking prime minister, who turned out to be Mr. Kaifu.
But the old men who run the LDP factions never liked turning over the most coveted prize in the party's grasp to a man 20 years their junior and based in a virtually powerless faction of the party. Indeed, they chose him precisely because he seemed unlikely to be able to cling long to the office.
From the day of Mr. Kaifu's election, the old-time power brokers made no secret of their determination to seize the first chance to get back to politics as usual, rotating among themselves the prime ministership and the goodies that go with it. The more Mr. Kaifu has succeeded in leading the party to a rising tide of electoral victories, the deeper have been the undercurrents among senior power brokers eager to divide up the spoils.
And instead of a clarifying victory for either side, the 20 months since August 1989 have brought a deepening standoff, both between the parties and within the LDP.
In the critical election, in February 1990, the Socialists increased their seats in the House of Representatives, the Diet's powerful lower chamber, to 135 seats, dramatically up from the previous 83 and only a few short of the record 140 the party held at the peak of its strength in 1967.
But few of those gains came at the expense of the LDP, which lost a few seats but handily retained a powerful majority in the lower house. Instead, the Socialists succeeded in reducing their own allies, a collection of smaller opposition parties that had joined them in a coalition that never managed to put up quite enough candidates to take power even if they had won every contest against the LDP.
At the time, it was still possible to wonder whether the Socialists had, by decimating their own allies, positioned themselves as a single leading opposition that might one day take on the LDP with or without a coalition.
But as the months passed, it became clear that the Socialists were drifting back into the ageless position of a professional opposition, unable to shake off doctrinaire positions and move close enough to the mainstream of Japanese attitudes to claim a share of real power.
As political issues, the Recruit scandal and the 3 percent "consumption tax" faded into history. Searching for new ways to differentiate the Socialists from the LDP, Miss Doi seemed to fall back into the party's old posture of opposing for the sake of opposing.
At a time when polls showed clear majorities of Japanese either favoring or accepting Japan's $13-billion contribution to the Persian Gulf war and relief efforts, Miss Doi threw her party into months of quixotic struggle to defeat it. Then, for lack of much else new to talk about, she carried that same pacifist theme into this month's local elections, where poll results clearly showed voters' concerns having more to do with bus service and the local environment.
For Mr. Kaifu, too, the gulf crisis has been a litmus test of effectiveness. It has found his leadership sometimes feeble and sometimes hopelessly hamstrung by the ceaseless maneuvering of older and more powerful figures within his own party, who miss no chance to trip him up in hope of sooner or later replacing him.
Senior party figures have sometimes scheduled their own trips abroad, seizing publicity by meeting with regional or world leaders Mr. Kaifu himself was scheduled to meet only days or weeks later.
In one of the most complex political chain reactions in recent Japanese memory, the gulf crisis also cost Mr. Kaifu the services of Ichiro Ozawa, the LDP secretary-general and a political operative widely credited with keeping Mr. Kaifu's cabinet from falling apart.
Desperate to get Japan's final $9 billion war contribution through the Diet, Mr. Ozawa cut a deal whereby the LDP would dump its own long-time incumbent as governor of Metropolitan Tokyo in favor of a candidate backed by the Komeito (Clean Government party), a centrist opposition. In exchange, the Komeito provided the votes the LDP needed to get the appropriation through the opposition-controlled upper house.
But Shunichi Suzuki, the 80-year-old Tokyo governor, won over most of the LDP's own Tokyo Diet delegation, spurned personal appeals from Mr. Kaifu to step down and rolled to such an overwhelming victory this month that Mr. Ozawa resigned the LDP leadership in humiliation.
With or without Mr. Ozawa, however, the sense is growing that Mr. Kaifu will linger -- as a lame and wounded duck -- long enough to confound the predictions of August 1989 and complete his term this fall.
The reality, faction boss Watanabe acknowledged in his talk to the editors and businessmen, is that the same party squabbles that disable Mr. Kaifu as a leader also block any firm action by the power brokers who would most love to dump the prime minister. They cannot agree, Mr. Watanabe acknowledged, on who should be next in line for the top job.
What Mr. Watanabe didn't have to say, because it is on the mind of every politically aware Japanese, is that this debilitating internal squabble is further deepened by the prolonged terminal illness of Shintaro Abe, the former foreign minister who was the old-line LDP faction leaders' consensus choice until bad health brought him low more than a year ago. From his hospital bed, Mr. Abe has continued to claim his turn in the LDP's rotation of the prime ministership among factions. Until he gives it up or dies, it will be virtually impossible for the factions to agree on a successor to Mr. Kaifu.
So the faction bosses are reduced to endless maneuvering at each others' and Mr. Kaifu's expense, hoping to seize favorable positions for the struggle they foresee when the prime minister's term ends or Mr. Abe dies, whichever comes first.
Which leaves the world's Number 2 economic power with neither a governing party strong and unified enough to lead nor an opposition capable of exploiting the LDP's infirmities.
John Woodruff is The Sun's Tokyo correspondent.