June 22, 1993

The Supreme Court will decide whether ash from municipal incinerators is hazardous waste needing special, costly, treatment. Page A19.

For four decades, Japan Inc. has been supported by a triad consisting of a single political party, a powerful bureaucracy and wealthy business organizations. Now, one leg of the stool, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, is on the verge of splintering and perhaps losing power, ending a period of political stability widely believed to have been conducive to business growth. Reflecting the concern about this, the Tokyo stock market today suffered its sharpest drop this year, with the Nikkei average plummeting 592.11 points, or 3 percent, to 19,212.43. Yen Is Also Weaker The Japanese yen was also pounded in Tokyo trading today, closing at 110.48 yen to the dollar, about 3 yen weaker than it closed on Friday, before legislators approved a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa that will almost certainly drive him from office.

Even as real income rose in all but three of New York's neighborhoods in the 1980's, one of the city's poorest places -- Hunts Point in the Bronx -- grew poorer by 30 percent. On Staten Island, the most suburban borough, the number of foreign-born people increased four times faster than in the city as a whole. And the number of New Yorkers with college degrees increased more than 44 percent. Fleshing out a stark profile, a new portrait of New York City drawn from the 1990 census reveals broad demographic changes along with striking contrasts in neighborhoods that have reinvented themselves to accommodate newcomers.

Robert A. G. Monks, the shareholder activist who shook up the Eastman Kodak Company and Sears, Roebuck & Company, is finding that the public pension funds he led into battle are now forsaking him in his new role as a money manager. Nearly two years ago, Mr. Monks decided that investors could make money from shareholder activism -- the belief that aggressive shareholders can unlock hidden corporate values. So he started a fund named the Lens Fund to test that concept, hoping to raise around $400 million to buy stakes in troubled companies in which management changes could be sought -- and a company's stock price increased. 'Relationship Investing' The concept gained the moniker "relationship investing," and Mr. Monks flew around the country calling on more than 60 pension funds to put their money where his mouth was. But so far, he has not raised a dime. And in a stunning blow, his closest ally in many of his celebrated corporate battles, the California Public Employees Retirement System, an investment behemoth with more than $70 billion in assets, turned Mr. Monks down just last week.

THE bulldozers are scooping out the yellow earth along the Yangtze River in preparation for the world's largest hydroelectric project, a dam that will create a lake 350 miles long, fuel China's industrial revolution and save millions of people from the constant threat of flooding. Or perhaps the project will simply create the world's most colossal mud pie.