asazuke

Well, we’re just a couple of days away from the election that the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party, or jiminto) have been putting off and putting off in the desperate hope that their miserable opinion poll ratings might pick up. Aso, the current prime minister, was supposed to have been picked last October to lead the LDP into a quick election, as he was somewhat more popular than anyone else in the party at the time. He dithered a bit, came out with one inept remark after another, and his approval just went down and down. Like an animal caught in a car’s headlights the LDP just froze and now their rule finally seems to be coming to an end. They were slaughtered in the Tokyo local election last month and now seem to be in for more of the same on a national level. All the opinion polls are predicting a landslide victory for the opposition DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan, or minshuto). Of course, opinion polls have got things pretty seriously wrong in the past…

This is nothing like the Obama campaign in January, though. No tidal waves of enthusiasm – it’s more that people are just fed up. Of course they have many good reasons to be fed up:

• one LDP politician’s funding scandal after another
• the succession of unpopular prime ministers imposed on the country without the courtesy of an election since Koizumi’s resignation
• the amakudari (“descent from heaven”) system where bureaucrats can retire from public service and be seconded to some token position in a company that just happens to be involved in public works… The potential for corruption, along with gross waste of tax money, is obvious.
• millions of pension records that were lost when being transferred from paper to computer some years ago – more bureaucratic bungling
• Even before the Liemann shock, the economy has been slipping down and down and income gaps between the haves and havenots getting wider and wider, largely blamed on ex-PM Koizumi’s reforms. (Raffles’ customers have not been exempt from seeing their incomes fall… 😦 )
• record unemployment, especially for young people, a lot of whom are stuck in temporary work with outsourcing companies
• The LDP seem to have just run out of ideas.

I’m not really that impressed with the minshuto to be honest; they seem to be a bit better than the LDP, have younger members, slightly more enlightened policies and fewer unhealthy links with construction companies… But even so, daft ideas like reducing petrol tax and making motorways free won’t exactly help Japan live up to the commitments to reducing CO2 emissions that must be coming up soon. Still, just changing governments per se must be a healthy development in a democracy, and help to loosen the bureaucrats’ grip on power. Bureaucrat-bashing has become a major theme of late; I rather pity anyone in public service right now, but some head-cutting at the top would probably be a great idea. (They will resist fiercely no doubt.)

Some oddities:

• Bicycles are in: this was started by our own dear Nagoya mayor Takashi Kawamura who regularly used one on the campaign trail.
• This mysterious “happiness party” has suddenly appeared, running candidates in nearly every constituency. It seems to be some religious thing and is being carefully ignored by the media in opinion polls etc.
• The “revolution club” whose representative on TV the other day complained that for the state to aid old people was socialism, and causing the breakdown of family values!

Whatever, we’ll see on Sunday how big the minshuto’s majority is, and after that if anything has really changed…

The “Jiminto” (LDP) ie the party that has ruled Japan pretty much since the war, barring a brief break with Hosokawa’s cabinet, may be looking with horror at the end of their monopoly on power. Under the pathetic Aso, whose grinning face was seen among the high and mighty at the G8 summit, their support in opinion polls just drags along at a low 20something%, and a general election must be called soon, as the current Diet’s mandate expires in September.

After losing the Shizuoka governor’s position to the opposition Minshuto (DPJ) last weekend, the LDP look set to lose their majority in the Tokyo council in the election tomorrow. The Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a raving right-wing nationalist, richly deserves a slap in the face with a wet fish anyway, so although his seat is not at stake at this time he should find it harder to throw his weight around from next week on. 24 hours will tell, and I’ve got my fingers crossed…

The LDP are starting to look desperate, and if they get the drubbing tomorrow that they seem in for then the voices to drop Aso and replace him with someone slightly more electorally appetising will rise even higher than they already are. Overtures to the popular former comedian Higashi Kokubaru, governor of Miyazaki, to be an LDP candidate in the upcoming general election got the resposnse “OK if i can stand for prime minister”… which didn’t go down too well in certain LDP circles, and the more sensible, young and also popular Hashimoto of Osaka is wisely keeping them at more of an arm’s length.

Should be an interesting month or two, anyway.

That was supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse – “may you live in interesting times” –  and you could probably have said for a long time after I got here that Japanese politics were not all that interesting. The Liberal Democratic Party returned election after election, one anonymous prime minister after another, the Diet just a talking shop while the real decisions about the course of Japan Inc. were taken elsewhere… There were a couple of distractions here and there: the Lockheed and Recruit scandals, a brief Socialist government soon given the kiss of death from the LDP, who offered “eyebrows” Murayama a coalition and completely destroyed his party’s electoral appeal, the Japan New Party of Hosokawa, but on the whole as long as the economy went on improving people didn’t really care all that much if the LDP had a boring monopoly on power.

Things started to get more interesting when Koizumi became prime minister. Along with that nasty “cuddles” Takenaka he started trashing “old Japan” and  bringing in a sort of Thatcherization. The pernicious results – ever widening gulf between rich and poor, loss of job security, erosion of social solidarity – are only now coming out, but at the time Koizumi looked like some kind of modernizing hero and at the next general election the LDP got a landslide majority. Dozens of new “Koizumi children” filled the Diet benches. The torch passed to his protege Abe and things started to fall apart. Scandals, a minister’s suicide, general ineptness and an upper house election catastrophe in which the opposition parties got a majority – Abe resigned, followed as PM by Fukuda, who seemed OK but soon resigned too, fed up with trying to get legislation through the hostile upper house.

Now we’ve got the appropriately named Aso, who seems the worst of the lot and has approval ratings of around 15%! There’s been no general election since Koizumi’s landslide; Abe, Fukuda and Aso were chosen by internal processes of the LDP, who know that if they held an election now all those Koizumi children would be out on the street again. Still, by law they’ve got to call an election by Autumn this year so they’re sort of stuck…

At just this moment, miraculously (for the LDP), the public prosecutor finds something fishy with the political donations received by Ozawa, the leader of the biggest opposition Democratic Party. Ah.. just a minute, according to today’s news it seems to be spreading to the LDP too…

(Last week the Far Eastern Economic Review had this to say about the situation here in Japan.)

Quite interesting I’m sorry to say.