JAPAN:The resignation of a gaffe-prone minister does not augur well for Japan's new cabinet
HOW LONG will Japan's government last? Even in a country notorious for throwing up politically impotent, short-lived prime ministers, Taro Aso comes to office amid unusually low expectations. His cabinet begins its first full week of work today with approval ratings below 50 per cent, considered the minimal threshold for new administrations.
The cabinet already has its first resignation. New transport minister Nariaki Nakayama was forced to quit yesterday after calling the country's main teachers' union "a cancer" that had to be destroyed. Earlier, he dropped a cluster bomb on the country's tourist drive by saying that "ethnically homogenous" Japan "doesn't like foreigners".
Media pundits wonder who will score next on the gaffe-o-meter. As the mass weekly Shukan Shincho points out this week, Aso himself is a leading contender. In a mocking four-page compendium of his most infamous verbal faux pas, the magazine adds heft to claims that Japan's new leader is the George W Bush of Asian politics.
While minister of economics in 2001, Aso urged Japan to become a country where "rich Jews" would want to live.
As internal affairs minister in 2005, he exhumed discredited wartime theories of racial purity when he waxed lyrical about the country's uniqueness as "one nation, one civilisation, one language, one culture and one race".
In 2006, he suggested that Japan - the world's only A-bomb victim - should go nuclear, before backtracking under a hail of flak. Last year, he angered Korea and China by saying accusations that Japan enslaved thousands of wartime sex slaves "lacked objective evidence". He has consistently defended Japan's colonial rule of Korea and Taiwan.
Inevitably, these statements are passed off as "gaffes" when they might better be described as expressions of Aso's political id.
Like his predecessor Shinzo Abe, he comes from a tradition of strong conservatism and recites its articles of faith: revise Japan "pacifist" constitution; develop a more independent military and foreign policy; deal more aggressively with China; and rarely, if ever, admit to Japanese crimes during the second World War.
Aso has consistently dodged questions about his family's war record and allegations of using slave labour. Aso Mining - the forerunner of Aso Cement which he ran in the 1970s - employed as many as 12,000 Korean conscripts and 300 Allied POWs, according to local historians.
The future prime minister says it has nothing to do with him. "I was five or six when the war ended," said the 67-year-old prime minister last week.
But while head of the firm, Aso commissioned a book celebrating its centenary, arguing that Japan fought a morally just war.
The book claims that the nation was lured into attacking Pearl Harbour - the start of the Pacific war - by the United States, the same version of history propagated by Japanese ultra-nationalists. Only Japan's staunch alliance with the US has saved Aso from an embarrassing Washington inquisition on these claims.
Aso makes no secret of his desire to advance the conservative cause. But he has learned from the humiliating experience of Abe, who fell on his sword last year after ignoring bread-and-butter issues to pursue a similar agenda.
Few voters cared, and they responded by handing parliament's upper house to Abe's Democrat (DPJ) rivals, stalling the ruling Liberal Democrats' (LDP) entire legislative programme.
Aso has since proposed a Japanese version of "compassionate conservatism", coupling the nationalist task of transforming Japan's cold war architecture for the 21st century with a renewed emphasis on what he calls the LDP mainstream's "politics of tolerance and patience".
"I believe in the Abe cabinet's advancement of constitutional revision, education reform and resolute foreign and defence policy - all part of the work of reimagining the state," he wrote this year. "But . . . if we do not stop growing inequality, and . . . work co-operatively for economic policy that unifies Japanese society, we will not become a conservatism that opens the way to the future."
In practice, that means a return to pump-and-spend policies, adding to the nation's 800 trillion yen (about €5.2 trillion) in public debt - the worst in the developed world. And that policy was announced well before the hurricane of bad economic news struck Japan's shores last week.
Even if the new prime minister does not engage in nostalgic fantasies for Japan's ugly past, as the New York Times dubbed them this week, he has his work cut out.
Not surprisingly, commentators are already lining up to bang nails into Aso's political coffin. Many are even ready to speculate on the end of the LDP's half-century rule, talk that has accelerated since the inauguration of his cabinet, a nepotistic selection of neo-conservatives that includes the offspring of no fewer than three former prime ministers.
Aso himself is the grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, one of Japan's most famous postwar leaders, and his wife, Chikako, is the daughter of another.
"If this is the best they can do they should just leave office now," says Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Tokyo's Sophia University.
"[The cabinet] shows that Japan is more of an elective aristocracy than a democracy. It would be healthier if the LDP were kicked out of power and reinvented themselves."
The liberal Asahi newspaper agrees, noting the complete exhaustion of the LDP. Even the conservative Yomiuri, a ever-loyal LDP supporter, warns that "second-generation and third-generation lawmakers are becoming synonymous with weakness". For Aso, those are worrying signs indeed.