JAPAN'S new opposition party was inaugurated yesterday with a live performance of the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
The orchestra and the Beethoven were designed to attract apathetic Japanese voters to their televisions to watch the live presentation of Shinshinto's first convention.
And the big production did at least mark a break with the traditional smoke-filled rooms in which most Japanese political conventions have been held.
But since Beethoven's choral symphony is in itself an end-of-the-year tradition, with the music played by dozens of orchestras up and down Japan, there was no guarantee the new party's opening gambit would succeed.
Shinshinto has been officially translated by the new grouping as the New Frontier Party and it brings together 10 former opposition parties or breakaway groups, none of which could hope to win power on their own.
Party sources stress the New Frontier title does not indicate a yearning for the politics of the late US President John F. Kennedy who first espoused the goal of a new frontier in 1960.
