|
 |
 |
|
Japan is not, of course, the U.S., and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is not [with apologies to Sen. Bentsen] Jack Kennedy. But somehow the comparison intrigues this observer. Just as JFK appealed to the widest American public, so Koizumi is the first prime minister in a long time to have a strong popular following. And just as in Kennedy’s case, one finds it hard to locate the basis of that support — beyond a rhetorical flourish that appeals to a country looking for a new ethos.
As in Kennedy’s case, it is hard to figure out just where Koizumi is grounded. He comes out of the old Japanese politics running the country since 1958. He beat out opponents thought to be more powerful using the same old tried and true methods — for all his protestations. And he is young [by Japanese standards] and apparently that chemically curled mop has a great appeal for the young and the ladies.
Like Kennedy, Koizumi has said a lot of PC things called for by the Japanese “critics” [those pompous TV pundits who combine the worst features of our talking heads]. He has even touched the third rail of Japanese politics by suggesting he might tamper with the postal savings system, that arcane Tokyo way of pump-priming that worked so well for so long. The question is how is he going to implement reforms he keeps calling for, painful, as he recently suggested, and difficult to get by his own party.
A test is coming July 29th. The Japanese will choose their upper house where Koizumi’s Liberal Democrats not only do not now hold a majority but where they rely heavily on the Neo-Buddhist Komeito. Komeito, a strange amalgam of religious in a country which is considered not religious, and ward-heeling politics, is dead set against Koizumi’s goals. He wants to tidy up Tokyo’s international act by calling a spade a spade, labeling the Self-Defense Forces military, and seeking more equality with its U.S. treaty ally. He would, he says, bite the bullet and change Japan’s Constitution’s “no war” clause mandated by Douglas MacArthur.
Koizumi intends to pray at Yasukuni Shrine. This is the closest thing to Japan’s WWII war memorial to nine million dead. But because it is was once a state Shinto shrine, the prescribed religion leading Japan into the catastrophe, and the resting place for many war criminals, that small but active minority which expresses guilt for the military’s human rights crimes, opposes it bitterly. And some of the victims of Japan’s wars in Asia — never missing an opportunity “to wave the bloody shirt” for concessions — see it that way. [There is another flap at the moment over a Japanese history text that presents a sugar-coated version of events leading up to the Japanese surrender in 1945.]
The economic reforms are certainly mandatory. But after the long period of super-high growth rates, even though it has taken a decade, I am not sure that many of “the issues” being touted ought to be Koizumi’s highest priority. The Japanese are, in fact, moving — albeit slowly: Foreign participation is being welcomed as never before, one of the old no-no’s. The old uneconomic standby of lifetime employment and bloated personnel is being trimed. [And, of course, there is greater unemployment than at any time since the 1950s.] Japanese markets are opening to foreign goods. [Tokyo and Beijing are now tussling over food imports, striking at the rural foundations of Koizumi’s party, with Tokyo’s trading surpluses narrowing.] The IT handicap is being resolved, if slowly. [Japan Oracle’s sales went up 37 percent, profits 67 percent last year.]
But can Koizumi, despite the polls, set a wider agenda for Japan? It has become clichéd to say that Japan needs another Meiji Revolution when samurai-clerks in a few short years moved Japan from feudalism toward industrialization and modernity in the mid-19th century. Some of us have wondered for years if doubling the national income every decade was enough for a people so energetic — and, yes, so sentimental. What happens to a nation-state that reduces its birth rate to the point of diminishment — and with a population aging more rapidly than any other industrial nation? [Unlike the U.S. and Western Europe, Japan has been unable to integrate immigrants, even a substantial Korean minority so close to Japan’s own culture.]
Is Japan, as an old American friend and often insightful observer predicted a few years ago, going to turn into a rich little nation without much interest in others — except culturally — what I used to call “itsy-bitsy Japan” of the cultural-vulture circuit? Or will Koizumi [or someone else in the Japanese leadership not yet identified] give the world’s second largest economy and the pacesetter since 1905 for Asia’s billions a new role?
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.