Japan could be on the verge of a political earthquake – if only everyone follows the script, writes DAVID McNEILLin Tokyo
IS JAPAN set for an electoral earthquake? This year, politicians from one of history’s most successful political machines, the ruling Liberal Democrats (LDP) will finally begin looking for alternative employment.
Out goes a party that has run Japan since before Brian Cowen was born. In comes Ichiro Ozawa: a legendary political scrapper nicknamed “The Destroyer”, who inaugurates the country’s first two-party system, revolutionises government, and sends most of the US troops in Japan packing.
So goes one version of the script. But like all good dramas this one has a plot twist. Just as he seems set finally to drive a stake through the LDP’s sclerotic heart, Ozawa has been skewered by a bribery scandal. Critics say that he is fatally infected with the corruption that has long poisoned Japanese politics.
Ozawa supporters insist the scandal has been cooked up in a last-ditch attempt by the old order to protect itself. “This is a sign we’re getting close,” says one Democratic Party of Japan (DJP) insider.
Even if they win, nobody knows what a Democrat government will look like. The party is a ragbag of political refugees from the last big bang in Japanese politics, when the LDP lost power for 10 months in the mid-1990s. The likely scenario is for a quick DPJ collapse, or a merger with a rebooted LDP – akin to rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Ozawa, himself a defector from the ruling party, played a key role then in creating the first non-LDP administration since 1955 – an unstable hybrid of liberals and conservatives that quickly disintegrated. A hate figure among the old guard, opponents say he is a power-hungry opportunist. “His ultimate political goal is to dismantle the LDP government,” not rescue Japan, says the right-leaning Sankei newspaper.
The DPJ promises to redirect about 10 per cent of the national budget – about $210 billion – toward building what it calls a social “safety net”, with more help for the old, the poor and the childless: a €190 monthly children’s allowance is one of its big initiatives to boost the nation’s plummeting birthrate.
Worryingly for Washington, it may also shake up the half-century US-Japan alliance. Ozawa threw the cat among the pigeons in January, when he said that Japan hosts “too many” American troops – most of the 47,000 US military personnel in the country could go home.
His comments could signal the start of a major realignment of Japanese thinking on what veteran Japan observer Karel Van Wolferen calls the country’s “vassal-like relationship” with the US. “Ozawa might be enough of a switch to make Washington sit up and stop taking Tokyo for granted.” Or not: some DPJ ministers are known to be much closer to the LDP line, creating the prospect of a showdown before the new government even gets off the ground.
That’s one reason why the defence issue will probably be shelved, says Tobias Harris, author of the blog Observing Japan. “However unsatisfying the relationship is now, there are too many things broken for them to get around to fixing this yet.” Virtually everyone agrees that “broken” is the right adjective.
Japan is snared in its worst economic crisis since the second World War. Chronic structural problems, including an ageing population and huge public debt – 180 per cent of GDP – have added to what one commentator calls “the stench of decay”.
The LDP is powerless to stop this vertiginous decline. The system its leaders helped forge in the 1950s, welding political and economic power to the nation’s powerful bureaucracy, is crumbling. National policy is a witches’ brew of competing factional interests that has left the country rudderless and drifting.
The ruling party’s addiction to public works spending – about $70 billion over the next decade – is widely viewed as catastrophically wasteful.
Understandably then, the Democrats’ plan to tame the bureaucracy has set pulses racing. In his book Ozawa-shugi (Ozawa-ism), published after he took control of the party in 2006, Ozawa laid out his programme: moving authority for budgets and policy back to the cabinet, uniting his government around a binding manifesto and speaking with one unified voice. If he succeeds, it amounts to little less than a political revolution.
“The idea is to create a system where the government thinks and the bureaucrats assist, not the other way around,” says Mari Miura, a political science professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University.
Ozawa is certainly close. His party won a landslide election in the July 2007 upper house election and faces an LDP leader in Taro Aso wallowing in single-digit approval ratings.
But there’s no telling how badly the emerging scandal has damaged his chances.
In mid-March, Ozawa’s top political secretary was indicted on charges alleging he violated laws governing the use of political funds. Prosecutors claim Takanori Okubo cooked the books of the DPJ’s political funding organisation to hide $360,000 in donations from a construction firm.
Okubo denies the charges, which some say are politically motivated. “It is entirely predictable,” says Van Wolferen. The establishment is “silently co-operating to try to take him down. It is like antibodies around a dangerous pathogen”.
But for many voters, Okubo’s indictment is a grim sign that they might be trading Tweedledum for Tweedledee. An Asahi newspaper survey published after the scandal emerged said 70 per cent of respondents “could not see any significant policy difference between the LDP and DPJ”.
So far at least, Ozawa is holding firm. “It’s my lifetime dream and my last task as a politician” to bring down the LDP, he tearfully told the party last week.
Now the country waits to see if he finally takes the role he once seemed born to play.