It was a casual conversation overheard as the train pulled into town.
"How's your husband's job these days?"
"Well, his salary isn't going up at all, but at least he's not getting laid off."
Similar comments can be heard all over Japan, as a slumping economy and rising jobless rate -- now a record-high 5.5 percent -- boost fears of worse to come.
Here in the small city of Fukaya, northwest of Tokyo, salaried workers have been hit by downsizing in Japan's struggling electronics industry.
And local farmers have foundered in the face of waves of cheap imports from China, which have halved the price of the sweet and juicy "Fukaya" leeks grown here for more than a century.
Here, then, one might well expect loud outcries against the dose of painful reforms that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has prescribed to cure Japan's long-term economic ills.
But from the fields where Yuji Tsugaya harvests his leeks to the city hall office of Mayor Iemitsu Arai, the message is much the same: Forge ahead with reform; it's Japan's only hope.
"We want him to do it, if he can," said Tsugaya, 42, of Koizumi's battle to root out vested-interest politics from his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and lighten the heavy hand of government in the stagnant economy.
"But so far, the private sector is way out ahead of the government in restructuring," he added.
Skepticism, self-help
Koizumi defeated old-guard rivals in a race to lead the party and the nation last April, propelled to victory by grassroots support for his call to revive the economy, not through old-style pork-barrel policies but with more basic but painful reforms.
Voters around the country share Tsugaya's views -- broad support for what Koizumi says he wants to do and hefty scepticism over whether he can succeed.
A December poll by the Asahi newspaper showed that some 72 percent of voters still back Koizumi, but nearly two-thirds said they saw little or no real progress on the reform front yet.
To be sure, Tsugaya and his 72-year-old father, Toshio, would have preferred, in the short term at least, protection from Chinese competition.
Agricultural co-ops, which have long acted as vote-gathering machines for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), lobbied loud and hard for just such a solution.
Koizumi's unpopular predecessor obliged last April with temporary import curbs on three Chinese farm products in an effort to boost the LDP's faltering fortunes ahead of a July election for parliament's Upper House.
But in a sign that change is afoot, Koizumi's government on Dec. 21 decided against more permanent sanctions in return for Beijing's promise to scrap retaliatory tariffs on Japanese cars, mobile phones and air conditioners.
Echoing Koizumi's mantra of self-help for the economy, Tsugaya said farmers' only real hope was to learn to compete.
"Even safeguards would have only been for four years," he said, as he and Toshio took a break in the field.
"The only thing for us to do is to appeal to consumers on the basis of branding, and things like pitching our products as organic."
Colliding interests
The political clout of farmers like the Tsugayas has long exceeded their shrinking sliver of Japan's population, partly because the electoral map gives rural residents greater influence than urbanites and partly due to the well-organized farm lobby.
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