Most of us didn’t see him coming. Nor were we impressed once he arrived. The artificially curled locks, the Elvis fan, the smutty small talk, the somewhat aloof – if not austere — personality even by Japanese standards.
But as Junichiro Koizumi makes his final Washington round this week, preparing his self-imposed departure from Liberal Democrat Party leadership and the premiership, he leaves a revolution behind. That he moved vigorously to pursue a more assertive foreign policy could be charged up to events unfolding before he went on stage. After all, it was not Koizumi’s choice North Korean villains flew a missile unannounced over his country in 1998. That was the death knell for those inside who have pursued pacifism since Japan’s World War II catastrophe. And North Korea’s hostility and China’s military ambitions are answer to those – often exaggerated by the media — in the rest of Asia who have trepidation about a rearmed Japan.
Nor, too, does Koizumi get more than points for presiding over the end of a decade of economic stagnation. Given the incredible Japanese work ethic and organizational abilities one might well have argued — as some of us did — Japan would recover. Perhaps not as late twentieth century economic wunderkind with double-diigit growth, but to retake its place as an equal among other industrial economies. Charles de Gaulle dismissed the Japanese prime minister as a transistor salesman — but no Paris statesman would do it these days when ailing French companies like Renault are more than happy to find Japanese partners.
Koizumui is leaving another inheritance, however, perhaps in the long run much more important. In a very profound way, he has begun the remaking of the Japanese constitutional framework. One has to say “he has begun” for as always in politics, revolutions are consolidated or unmade by the rebels’ successors.
Professor Robert Angel of the University of South Carolina [www.japanconsidered.edu] has captured the flavor and the essence. Angel describes a struggle in Japanese contemporary politics between what he calls “the factionalists” and “the populists”. The factionalists refers to the mysterious — at least largely unknowable to gaijin [outside people] — functioning of the all but one-party system dominating post-World War II Japan. Bitter personal rivalries between “the factions” and their leaders dictated who would lead the Liberal Democrat Party, and, indeed, who would try to lead the country and set out its policies
One must say “try to” because faction leaders not only chose the Party leader and thereby the Prime Minister, but they also chose the ministers. That meant even more than in the British system Japan’s prime minister was only the first among equals. [One of the first and perhaps most important postwar prime ministers under the U.S. Occupation, Yoshida Shigeru was a fanatic Anglophile and built on prewar copying of British parliamentary forms.].
Indeed, since ministers often became puppets of incredibly strong and able bureaucrats, ministries set their own policies, often defying the prime minister. [Often the postwar PMs were themselves former yakunin {bureaucrats}who slid off into LDP politics on retirement from their government careers.] It was this part of the iron triangle — business, the LDP and the bureaucracy — at the heart of the 1950s system.
Koizumi began overturning this cozy arrangement. His popular appeal, and his audacity in defying his own Party [that is the faction leaders] and going to the country over their heads, was a new pattern. Angel says what is being fought over in Koziumi’s succession is not — as Japan’s always PC and left leaning media have it — how and what to do about relations with China. One of the candidates for leadership, Fukuda Yasuo, is being touted by the media as more accommodating toward Beijing than another candidate, Abe Shinzo. Beauty, here too, may well be in the eye of the beholder. Fukuda, himself the son of a former prime minister and finance ministry bureaucrat, was the longest serving cabinet secretary in history, an extremely hot seat in Japanese politics. That could just be an indicator of how he accommodated himself to the former factionalist political game.
Koizumi, again in his role as maverick statesman, unlike his predecessors, is not — at least publicly — naming his successor and has announced he will not reenter the LDP faction from whence he came when he steps down. But what is at issue, is whether his successor, whoever he is, chooses and can continue the Koizumi revolution, further reinforcing the role of the kantei [the prime minister’s office] through a bid for public favor and cultivating the lower echelons of the Party or whether politics will go back to the old intra-Party factions struggle.
A Japanese prime ministry dependent more on popularity and participation — to the extent it can be engendered in a public much like those in the other industrial democracies, concerned with daily livelihood for the most part and not public policy — would probably further Japanese democracy. Koizumi, in a strikingly different attitude from most politicians who won’t let go, is apparently willing to take that chance.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
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 and East-Asia-Intel.com.
