Japan plunges onward through the fog with its 'not exactly' reformer, Koizumi

---

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

Junichiro Koizumi has won a new term as president of the Liberal Democrat Party [LDP] and the Japan prime ministry. Coming into office two and a half years ago as a flashy new style politician ø with his permed hair and dandi clothes and pseudo-JFK persona ø Koizumi has not lived up to expectations. His much publicized defiance of the notorious factions of the LDP is more style than substance. His promise to restructure the Japanese economy has been fitful. Still, Japan may be coming out of the decade-long economic malaise [it grew faster in the first quarter than the U.S.]. But yen manipulation to maintain exports is not structural reform. [ItÕs ironic Japan is calling on the Chinese to let their yuan float freely.]

Japan is still largely in the hands of its bureaucrats despite their recent loss of face. The management of the worldÕs second largest economy appears to be coping. Tokyo, for example, has aggressively gone after a a pipeline from RussiaÕs new Western Siberian oilfields to the Pacific. ThatÕs in competition for a similar project the Chinese have been proposing. [The reserves are apparently not adequate for both.] JapanÕs critical oil supply along the long sea route from the Persian Gulf past the Spratly Islands to which the Chinese lay stronger and stronger claims is one of its most critical economic and strategic issues.

Koizumi, too, nationalized one of JapanÕs sick banks, at least in all but name. Using public funds to bale out JapanÕs debt ridden banks was said to be the third rail of Japanese politics. He still has not had the courage to move ahead with privatization of JapanÕs massive postal savings.

It could be Koizumi plans now to move, having survived what no one considered a serious challenge to his LDP leadership, but facing continuing slow but seemingly inevitable growth of opposition conservatives. And the polls seem to indicate his popularity puts him ahead of his rivals in the LDP ø and outside. That he has reappointed the unelected Heizo Takenaka as chief financial minister, and ignored calls from within the LDP to remove him, has encouraged those who see this scenario.

In foreign policy, Koizumi has innovated. But the impetus has been from external forces rather his own ÒvisionÓ, and movement had preceded his arriving in office. The events of 9/11 probably had more effect in Japan than in any other part of the industrial world. Coming on the heels of the 1998 North Korean missile flight over Japan, they demonstrated that the U.S. nuclear defensive shield had holes. [There was a little tiff over American intelligence on North Korean missiles which Tokyo found insufficient. So Tokyo sent up two intelligence satellites.]

Koizumi almost stumbled when he tripped to North Korea, appealed to the dictator Kim Jong Il for a negotiated end to his nuclear weapons program for a massive aid program. Kim, in the notorious way the North Koreans have for incredibly maladroit propaganda, offered to return some Japanese citizens they had abducted over several decades. Their refusal to account for the missing and the Japanese publicÕs fascination with the human aspects of the story turned into an event which hardliners in Japan could, if not capitalize on, at least use to prove their long-held suspicions of their neighbor.

Koizumi is keeping his outspoken defense minister, Shigeru Ishiba, who has called for a ballistics missile defense system, long proposed from Washington and met with some indifference in Japan, warned that Japan had the ÒrightÓ to take preemptive action against North Korean missile deployment, and other statements that a few years ago would have not only brought his dismissal but would have caused a government crisis.

Koizumi, unlike the U.S.Õ North Atlantic Treaty allies [with the exception of Holland, Denmark, Poland Ñ and Britain, of course], has committed to sending troops to Iraq. It would be a new milestone for JapanÕs Self Defense Forces, a term which Koizumi has repeatedly said he wants to discard presumably along with the no-war clause of JapanÕs post-World War II MacArthur Constitution. Japanese public opinion may not be with him, particularly in the face of growing terrorism and the refusal of other countries to contribute forces, at least not without a UN endorsement.

Still whether Koziumi is going to strike out in new directions ø or continue to be JapanÕs non-Hertz reformer ø there is little doubt that a new post-Bubble Japan is emerging, one that may be a greater break with the past than was the 1950 society created under the Occupation. The world outside Japan is volatile and changing rapidly, the kind of external pressure which has always brought on revolutionary changes in the country which despite its continuity, perhaps, more than any of the major societies, has changed more than any other in the last 150 years.