Never in recent memory has a government advisory group engaged in such a bruising battle of words and ideas. Last week, following a stormy debate that caused its chairman to resign, a commission on privatizing debt-ridden highway corporations adopted a final report calling for a drastic cut in toll-road construction and stepped-up debt repayment. What happened there is a far cry from the predictable course of an ordinary advisory panel, where discussions are usually conducted more or less according to a script written by bureaucrats. The commission's seven members -- dubbed the "seven samurai" -- split over the issue, with two of them (including the chairman) pressing for a scheduled expansion of the highway network and the remaining five fighting for a major downsizing.

The divisive debate was symbolic of the ongoing confrontation between vested interests and reform forces in Japan -- a struggle between continuity and change that appears inevitable in a period of historic transition. In this sense, the highway commission was Japan in microcosm: a nation in the throes of rebirth.

The central issue boils down to money -- the gargantuan cost of building a nationwide network of expressways. The two proconstruction members maintained that the program should be carried out in spite of the massive debt owed by four highway operators. The five reformist members argued, however, that it should be drastically curtailed because of the 40 trillion yen debt.