It appears that the Diet is not very serious about promoting clean politics, despite the fact that a spate of corruption scandals has forced a number of legislators to resign. The Diet, to be sure, has played a part in unraveling the scandals, but it has done very little to address its real challenge: enacting tough legislation on political reform and ethics.

Investigation is an important function of the Diet, but in the current context of political housecleaning, it is only part of the larger effort to repair the tarnished image of the national legislature. Yet there has been little or no movement toward legislating effective measures against corruption. It is hard to escape the impression that the Diet has been paying lip service to reform.

It is odd that the speaker of the Lower House, Mr. Tamisuke Watanuki, is only now trying to get the ball rolling. He knows there is not much time left -- less than a month -- before the Diet adjourns. Yet he is now calling for basic legislation on political ethics as well as a strengthening of the Political Ethics Council. These belated initiatives, one suspects, may be designed not to establish stricter standards of political ethics so much as to defuse tensions between the ruling and opposition parties in the closing days of the regular Diet session, which opened in January.