High stakes for Koizumi, and Asia, in coming Japanese election

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

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the coming Japanese elections in early September. A complex web of fundamental issues comes together, to be decided in part – as so often in representative government – by personalities and trivia.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has thrown down the gauntlet, inside and outside his ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The immediate issue is defiance by Party members of his push for reorganizing Japan’s postal system. With only a few more weeks of his Party presidency and prime ministry remaining, Koizumi tried to blackmail them into support rather than his calling a feared snap election. The threat backfired.

The election is on with every possibility Koizumi might lose, not only his issue, his Party leadership, but even his Party’s control of the Diet. Since 1955, either alone or in coalition, the LDP has been synonymous [except for a brief period] with government. And his principle opposition, the Democrats, is a cloudy mirror of his LDP conservatives.

But there is a great deal more at stake than just another shuffle in the game of musical chairs among LDP factions characterizing post-World War II Japanese politics:

• The outcome of the debate over the postal system will dictate Japan’s economic structure for years, perhaps decades, to come.

• Koizumi’s bid for voters’ support is about as clear a call for the public interest over political manipulation as comes to representative government.

• Japan’s role in the increasingly dangerous Northeast Asia theater – and indeed the world – is on the block.

When historians look back on 20th century Japan, they could well see 1931-45 of rogue military control as only an interregnum. For despite all the horrendous bloodletting and misery, the argument can be made Japan picked up [after the U.S. Occupation] where it had left off when the whole insidious China misadventure began. A state-capitalist structure designed to minimize consumption and maximize capital plant – “catching up with the West” – was always its core.

By the 1970s, it was clear to many Japanese [and some foreigners] the goal had been met. It was also clear to some an economy as big and complex as Japan’s — second in the world — could no longer be centrally directed, even by a group of government technocrats as brilliant as Japan’s. The cerebral decision to end the system was defied by the visceral pull of the enormous power it gave the bureaucracy.

Too late, defects of what had been the only successful non-European effort to industrialize caught up with the yakunin at Kasumigaseki. The bubble of overinvestment, underconsumption popped. It has taken more than a decade to try to try to pick up the pieces.

Central to a cleanup, however, has been driving a stake in the heart of the vortex sucking up savings to the decision makers. The more than trillion dollars now stowed in postal savings had been used to fund private but publicly subsidized expansion of plant. Make it as good as the West, or better, figure out where and how to sell it afterward had been the rationale.

Koizumi’s supporters see the necessity if Japan is to recover – and to create more economic justice and freedom – to smash this “largest bank in the world”, its contents becoming the source of decision-making by Japanese consumers and corporations. No longer would the government choose winners but increasingly pick losers [the failure to meet the IT software revolution, a good example]. No longer would politicians have a honeypot for corruption and porkbarrel.

But there is a clinker: no longer would housewife savers get a subsidized interest and tax rate, crowding out the private financial sector. That’s why – although early polls showed voters like as always his audacity – solving this torturous issue and Koizumi may go down to defeat.

Allied, too, of course, is Koizumi’s appeal for a new Japanese foreign policy. Getting away from the Macarthur Constitution acceptable to a defeated and demoralized polity, exploiting Japan pacifist idealism, is perhaps even harder. Only North Korea’s, kidnapping ordinary citizens, sending a missile over Japan, and threatening next time to arm it with a nuclear warhead, could begin to dislodge that idyll.

Koizumi’s call for living in the real world – by strengthening what had been a one-way U.S. alliance or demanding a seat at the UN controls as the second largest contributor – grates on many Japanese. Years of mainline anti-anti-Communist media denunciations of U.S. policy around the world [and children indoctrinated by a Stalinist-controlled teachers’ union] still rings in Japanese ears. Nor is it in the Japanese mould to flaunt protocol and political tradition as often as this prime minister has done. But his challenge is, too, in the Japanese tradition of the lone but inspired warrior.

That’s why, for many of us who thought earlier he was a botchan [a fop], we now must concede we are dealing with a statesman – even should he fail.