sukuni war shrine and has been on record as favouring the building of a new national memorial for the war dead to excise Yasukuni as a perennial nettle in Japan's foreign relations, and also how others view the new-yet-old Japan. Mr Aso is much less forthright on these issues. He has been known to be provocatively flippant in his offhand comments. For Asia outside of Japan, all this will matter hugely, and not just for the form. Mr Fukuda's foreign policy sensibilities are good enough a reason for most of Asia to prefer a Fukuda ministry to succeed the Shinzo Abe tenure. The nation's economic health is naturally paramount but the Japanese people understand that real prosperity, missing for over a decade now, will be hard to retrieve and build on if permanent tensions and suspicions remain with a partner-economy as indispensable as China's.

To most Japanese, however, issues such as retirement planning, steady jobs to replace growing contract and part-time employment, cost of health care and urban-rural disparities are still priorities. Foreign relations are important but the leader who can deliver on two domestic imponderables is their man. One is decisive action on the problems named above, as exemplified by the utterly inept handling of pensions. The other is the depth of policy planning to reorganise the economy to prepare for a Japan that will see population decline and impaired economic vigour in a matter of decades.

Mr Aso is the younger and more energetic of the two contenders. Ideas can pour forth, though the quality will matter more. His enthusiasm could be a factor in how the LDP branches and legislators eventually vote. The two men's reform and economic agendas were not made any clearer in a weekend television encounter. Mr Fukuda is by far the safer pair of hands to tackle Japan's medium-term needs, but the succession is by no means settled.