TOKYO, June 1: Japan's four-year ruling coalition broke up today when two allied parties cut ties with Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), officials said.The break-up leaves the LDP without a majority in the upper house, but it retained its dominance in the more powerful lower house.Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, meeting with Takako Doi, chairwoman of the Social Democratic Party, and Masayoshi Takemura, chairman of new party Sakigake, accepted the two parties' departure from the ruling bloc. SDP chairwoman Takako Doi told Hashimoto her party would quit the ruling camp, party officials said.After the meeting, Hashimoto told reporters: "There was a friendly atmosphere." Asked if there was any friction, he replied, "How could there be?""She has just told (the premier) of our intention," an SDP official said. Hashimoto accepted immediately, LDP officials informed.Masayoshi Takemura, chairman of the minor new party Sakigake, announced it was also leaving, a partyofficial said. The SDP and Sakigake, while holding no cabinet posts in the government, had pledged to support the LDP in Parliament as part of a coalition."Over the past year, the coalition was mainly driven at the LDP's pace and that left it in bad shape," Takemura said. The one-time finance minister also said that sakigake will remake itself as a party focusing on environmental issues as its most important political issue.The LDP holds 261 seats in the 500-seat lower house, the SDP 15 and Sakigake two. In the 252-seat upper house, the LDP has 118 seats, with the SDP holding 21 and three by Sakigake.The lower house is the primary legislative chamber in Japan, the upper house only able to delay legislation, by a maximum of 30 days in the case of budget bills.The SDP has threatened for months to leave the ruling coalition ahead of upper house elections due in July, largely because of the desertion of supporters disaffected by its alliance with the conservative LDP.The departure of the LDP'sallies leaves the party with its first single-party government since general elections in August 1993, when it lost power for the first time in nearly four decades.The LDP returned to power in 1994 in an unwieldy tie-up with its long-time rival SDP, and regained a simple majority in the lower house through defections from the opposition. Half of the upper house seats will be at stake in elections slated for sometime in July.
