Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori went to ground in his ancestral homeland, Japan, yesterday after saying he would resign within 48 hours but leaving his specific plans shrouded in mystery.
Fujimori's decision late on Sunday to submit his resignation by letter to the president of Congress, acting far from strident charges at home of government corruption, ends a decade of hardline rule.
His two vice presidents were next in line to succeed him at the helm of a transitional government but one has resigned and the other has only patchy support.
Ministers said they were "indignant" at the abrupt resignation announcement from abroad and quit en masse.
Keeping out of public view in his room in a plush Tokyo hotel has his government and Japan guessing as to his next move.
Main opposition leader Alejandro Toledo said in Madrid he had heard that Fujimori may have requested a Japanese passport, adding that Tokyo would be more comfortable with this than with a request for political asylum.
However, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said it had received no such application and did not know how long Fujimori would stay.
"It's for the Peruvian side to decide how long he will stay, and we haven't heard anything yet," a spokesman said. "He is visiting on a diplomatic passport, so theoretically he will stay until he is done with his diplomatic duties.
"Unless he commits a crime or something, we can't exactly ask him to leave."
Fujimori arrived on Friday, apparently en route home from a meeting of Asia Pacific leaders in Brunei, but stayed on.
"The embassy has told us they are praying for his health to recover," the ministry spokesman said. Japanese officials said they had been told he was staying longer because he had a cold.
Back in Peru, few were willing to lay bets he would return any time soon despite exhortations from both opposition and close supporters for him to return and resign in person.
In 1992, when army generals mounted an unsuccessful coup months after he dissolved a bitterly divided Congress and awarded himself near dictatorial powers to crush leftist rebel violence, he briefly took refuge in the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, according to published reports.
Fujimori has been tight-lipped on whether he planned to seek political asylum in Japan. He issued a statement saying he would not speak to the press before he had submitted his resignation.
Japanese regulations would allow him to apply for residency because his parents were born in Japan. Media reports in Peru -- officially denied -- have even said Fujimori was born there, which would have disqualified him from the presidency.
Fujimori, a supreme political player with inscrutable Oriental cool, is the first to admit his heritage.
"I speak in Spanish but my silences are in Japanese," he once told a senior Western diplomat. His Japanese is thought to be rudimentary.
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