Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last weekend dissolved parliament and set a date for a general election that he hopes will turn his resurgent popularity into a mandate for continuing reform of the world's second-largest economy.
Few doubt that the election, on Nov. 9, will be about anything other than the personalities of the two main party leaders, Koizumi -- "the Lion King" -- of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the bachelor aficionado of Elvis and Wagner, with his long, grey mane -- and Naoto Kan, the tetchy, tennis-playing head of the Democratic Party, nicknamed by some the "Irritable Kan."
And the resolution of this battle could not come at a more crucial time for Japan in its attempts to reinvent itself as a thoroughly modern society. After decades punching below its weight in world affairs, hobbled by a postwar constitution that forbade its armed forces to do anything but adopt a defensive role, Japan under Koizumi has begun at last to emerge from its shell.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
For the first time warships were deployed overseas, during the war in Afghanistan. Japan backed the war against Iraq and has emerged as one of the keys to North Korea's nuclear weapons crisis. But while all of this has earned Koizumi kudos abroad, it is domestic matters that will determine whether he extends his mandate for his faltering reform program.
For the battle between the "Lion King" and the "Irritable Kan" will be fought over the narrowest political space -- over the question of whether Koizumi and his monolithic party are capable of carrying out his much-vaunted reforms that brought him to power on a wave of discontent in 2001.
While Koizumi will ask for more patience, more sacrifices and a broader mandate, Kan will challenge not whether Koizumi has the right intentions, but whether he can carry his promises through from atop one of the country's greatest and most troubling institutions -- the LDP itself.
This is the moot point of the Japanese political landscape: whether the country can be transformed by a party so closely associated with all the political and economic ills of five decades; a powerful political machine whose complacency and sclerosis have been matched only by its in-fighting, self-interest and patronage that have at times put the mafia to shame.
Only once in those five decades has the LDP's grip on effective power been broken -- in 1993 -- in the brief interregnum of reformist prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa, who gave up the fight after less than a year in power, a man to whom some compare Koizumi. It is a comparison Koizumi fosters, working hard on his image as an LDP "outsider."
Koizumi's critics point to his promise to break the LDP's decades-long borrow-and-spend tactics, a promise they say remains unfulfilled in a country with the highest level of debt in the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development. They point too to how he broke his promise to cap spending within only his second year in power.
They will tell you too that Koizumi's image as an outsider is something of a fabrication. Third-generation LDP, he is a veteran of the party's factional struggles and of the kind of political deal-making he rejects.
If Koizumi is an "outsider" it is only as an insider's-kind-of-outsider within the LDP whose consolidation of power either signifies the end of an era of dirty, self-interested politics, or a moving around of the chairs among the traditional elite.
It is in this respect that his distinctly untelegenic opponent has his strongest card. For if Kan can lay claim to anything it is being a real outsider as co-founder of the Democratic Party (Minshuto) and a former health minister who blew the whistle on a cover-up of HIV-tainted blood products.
Kan will argue that little has happened to change the parts of the Japanese landscape that most touch middle-class lives after the lost decade of the 1990s.
Banks -- with a few high-profile exceptions -- remain stuck in a cycle of bad debt and renegotiation, while businesses continue to move factories abroad in search of cheaper workforces.
If Koizumi has enjoyed some economic success, critics say, it has been through a combination of good luck and what many believe has been an artificial weakness of the yen against the dollar.
But if Koizumi has failed to live up to many of his promises, his reputation has been buoyed by his victory last month over opponents in a party opposed to his tight fiscal policies who would have removed him. In winning his party's internal leadership election last month, he has rung the death knell for the old men of the once all-powerful Hashimoto faction.
And while the "Irritable Kan" may be praying for voters to reject the LDP as it did once before, all the evidence is that Koizumi will be given more time to fulfil his promise of a new Japan.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs