The Koizumi revolution: Japan embraces change, for a change

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

You don’t have to believe in the great men of history theories to appreciate the transformation taken place in Japan. Nor do Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’ talents have to be exaggerated, even though he maneuvered one of postwar Japan’s few landslide electoral victories. Nor, again, does one have to accept as inevitable Koizumi’s proposed reforms — which languished during his long prime ministry — now he has proved his electioneering mettle.

It’s still early on for a deep analysis. But it’s clear this election has brought enormous change to the Japanese scene. But like so many events, as much perception as reality. What’s likely to remain from Koizumi’s triumph is less its tangible legislation for restructuring the economy but rather its “atmospherics”.

After a decade of economic stagnation — and resultant self-doubt brought about in a society where only economic progress was its raison d’etre — Japanese are welcoming change. That’s not a small matter in a civilization which is, generally, archly conservative, where continuity is the hallmark.

A high voter turnout took the gamble Koizumi tossed at them. They voted to return a leader, not a machine as in the past, who had thrown caution to the winds by expelling a sizeable chunk of his own party’s representatives. His already highly diluted proposal to privatize postal savings with its semisecret $3 trillion kitty for financing the old — and once highly successful — Japanese economic machine was the ostensible issue.

But how to explain his support among housewives who supposedly love the old reliable safe postal return on their household savings? Or how to explain his support among urban youth for a government party notoriously linked to rural hayseeds bought with farm subsidies? Or, for that matter, among Japan’s new caste of well-heeled unmarried young women, said to be notoriously apolitical?

As much as anything, the explanation appears to lie with romance engendered by a leadership no longer with the visage of a government bureaucrat. With a host of horrendous problems facing one of the world’s wealthiest and most advanced technological societies, there appears to have been a visceral, if you will, decision to take Koizumi up on his relatively ill defined effort — but an effort, nonetheless — to make significant changes.

Now comes the hard part. If Koizumi sticks to his renewed promise not to violate the unwritten law and gives up leadership next September, the job of remolding Japan passes to other unidentified leadership. Not the least of those problems is helping to produce a new Japanese ethos. It’s no secret muddled Japanese interi [intellectuals] and artists haven’t done much to create a new thesis for who, what, and where Japan ought to be and go. More than a half century after the overthrow of the militarists and annihilation of much of the old Japanese weltenschang, there is no national consensus to replace it.

Koizumi’s repeated controversial visits to the Yasukuni temple, once a pillar of State Shinto and militarism where some of the convicted war criminals are enshrined, is an expression of this void. He says he will continue to go there to pray even though it is a source of friction with former victims of Japanese aggression. There is no reason to believe Koizumi is less cognizant or less contrite than most Japanese of past transgressions. But what probably lies behind his action is the hunger of most Japanese for a deeper meaning to their society and how to express loyalty to its rich traditions.

There is, of course, a plethora of other issues hanging in the balance. There is danger Koizumi’s new Liberal Democrats with their absolute parliamentary majority will either rest on their laurels or run roughshod. The election destroyed, at least temporarily, that monstrosity, the Democratic Party of Japan which many had hoped would become an effective opposition. Maybe under new leadership it will sort out its diametrically ideologically opposed streams.

Not only does Koizumi’s postal legislation have to be implemented — and perhaps strengthened — but social security and pension reform await, a part of meeting the coming demographic catastrophe. [The Japanese population may begin to shrink this year.] Despite the recuperation of Japan’s banks, its government finances are abysmal. The economy, generally, appears to have emerged from a decade-long sleep. But it is still overly dependent on exports — and it will be an early victim of the coming Chinese shake-out, a market on which it has relied heavily recently.

Koizumi’s most radical innovation, his foreign policy initiatives, was hardly discussed in the elections. Emerging threats to Japanese security from North Korea and, possibly, China, have forced Tokyo into a more mutual alliance with the U.S. But its terms are intimately tied to the long awaited regularizing of the Macarthur constitution. A significant if small opposition to its changes, again, is integral to the question of who and what the Japanese are.

Still and all, the die has been cast. The Japanese have chosen change.