Which, then? He's the Gorbachev of Japan, some sort of political Elvis, or -- my favorite to come of this counter-productive exercise -- the Thatcher of the Liberal Democrats. With the governing party's grip on power confirmed in elections here Sunday for seats in the national legislature's upper house, will the real Junichiro Koizumi please stand up? Probably not. And if he does, the hugely popular prime minister will turn out to be none of the above. Gorby was plainly in another class altogether, and Thatcher -- well, let's just say the Japanese ought to count themselves fortunate that their man of the moment is no Iron Lady knock-off. The only one of these analogies even vaguely interesting concerns the king: Elvis, you will recall, did a whole lot of shaking but always managed to stay in the same place.
Japan has just completed what are without question the most watched elections of the postwar era. But this is less a measure of their importance than of the world's outsized expectations. It can't be long now before voters here and the many foreign observers who have invested in the Koizumi phenomenon are forced to recognize that change remains someplace off in the middle distance -- and that Japan's current leader is unlikely to be its agent.
In the immediate term this is probably a blessing. Koizumi displays little grasp of Japan's economic problems, and his proposed solutions to them are dangerously deflationary. But this still leaves unanswered the question of just where Japan is -- or isn't -- going.
Though Koizumi's approval ratings have dipped of late, he still managed to use his immense public appeal -- unprecedented in Japanese political history -- to hand the Liberal Democrats a comfortable margin in the Diet's upper house. He thus saved a wheezing, outdated political machine from what looked only a few months ago like certain ruin. It was Koizumi's mission from the moment he took office in April -- no more and no less.
But now what? Sunday's elections do not leave Koizumi with a mandate. They are better understood as another of the popularity contests that have long punctuated Japanese politics. Mandates confer the power to implement change, and that still lies beyond Koizumi's grasp. He has measured up as a clever pol, and that might pass as an accomplishment if Japan didn't need so much more than that now.
Some strange numbers came out a couple of weeks before Sunday's polls, and they measure the moment here well enough.
Asked if they supported Koizumi and his promised reforms, 98 percent of LDP candidates raised their hands. But when queried about some of the most important ideas the prime minister has floated, the percentages turned upside down.
Reform the postal savings system? Can't have that, 86 percent of the ruling party candidates said. Reallocate road taxes away from wasteful boondoggles? Not for me, said 76 percent. The only question the party seems to agree on now is a controversial one that has more to do with the past than either the present or the future. Should the prime minister honor the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine in an official capacity? Nobody had any trouble joining the scrum on this one: More than 90 percent of the LDP ticket said yes.
You see the same thing among voters. As Koizumi's approval rate has drifted down from almost 90 percent to less than 70 percent, the public's true ambivalence has begun to bleed through the thoughtless euphoria of the past few months. While almost 60 percent of voters favor measures to fix the economy, according to a recent newspaper survey, half that percentage support Koizumi's gain-for-pain "structural reforms." There are important lessons in this. "Reform" has by now assumed a totemic significance among the Japanese, a bit like "internationalization" did during the bubble years. Everyone is for it in some notional fashion -- and nobody knows what it means or should mean.
RSS