TOKYO -- As sure as night follows day, Japan's next prime minister is expected to be whoever wins the current race to claim the leadership of the broad conservative party that has steered the country through booms and busts for 65 of the last 69 years.
That continuity, though, obscures the fact that the vote on Sept. 27 to select the next president of the Liberal Democratic Party is a very different animal from previous leadership elections. It comes with outgoing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, 67, saying the party is in the "gravest condition since its foundation" in the mid-1950s, awash in a wave of funding scandals.
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