It is hard to avoid the sad conclusion that Keizo Obuchi, lying near death in a Tokyo hospital, in all likelihood has worked himself to this state over one of the most difficult jobs in the modern political world. For Japan can boast of one of the world's most successful economies, but also one of its most inept polities.
The job of Japanese prime minister may not be one for mere mortals. For this reason, perhaps, even as Mr Obuchi faded, he began receiving praise from around the world for at least nudging Japan, an immovable ship, out of the safe harbour of tradition and into the unsettling waters of economic reform. He has not only been Japan's most successful prime minister of the 1990s, but undoubtedly its hardest working.
He has also been the most pro-American of all recent prime ministers, and the least charismatic. And he knew about charisma: the most dynamic non-Japanese politician of his lifetime, he said, was Robert Kennedy, whom he had met as a young student in America. The private session left an indelible pro-American impression on him.
Though unfailingly patriotic and loyal to the idea of Japan as a pre-eminent culture, he became increasingly convinced that in some respects, the American critique of his country was more right than wrong - and that the enemy of Japan was not Americanisation or globalisation, but Japan's own neurotic tendency to resist change.
Mr Obuchi replied to this with a style of reform that was almost the exact opposite of his predecessor Ryutaro Hashimoto. Handsome, dashing and confrontational, Mr Hashimoto was everything today's media could desire of a political leader. He was also almost wholly ineffective. Mr Obuchi, by contrast, was plain-looking, plain-speaking - and almost terminally boring. But he became remarkably effective at getting the Diet - the national parliament - to move major reform legislation to passage, whether for controversial new defence arrangements with Western allies, or long-needed internal reforms.
Mr Obuchi, then, fashioned himself not as Japan's president, but its majority leader - a small-bore version of Lyndon Johnson, patching, leading, cajoling behind the scenes where, embroiled in the very kinds of negotiations that could not be shown to the public, he has been a star at the difficult art of consensus-building.
