Japan needs an Obama figure- but it's difficult to imagine that really happening since Obama is from America- he's loved here because he's so different and they don't need to take a risk to get behind him. Perhaps if a leader were to come out of Okinawa- the most laid-back part of Japan I know of, and the one least likely to be connected too strongly to Kasumigaseki and all its intrinsic corruption.
It'll change as the demographic of the country changes and they have to start enfranchising Koreans and Chinese. That's when we'll the minorities having some power, and the current strangle-hold will break. Probably the Japanese can't do it on their own.
Headless In Tokyo
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It's hard to overstate just how deep the rot has spread. The biggest problem is that the government still hasn't managed to present a credible plan for reviving the economy. It has passed some modest stimulus measures, and more may be on the way. But what's received the most attention has been Aso's ill-fated $20.5 billion cash-payout plan. Many Japanese have raised objections because they can't see why the checks should be sent to rich recipients as well as less-well-off ones—a problem that was compounded by Aso's constantly shifting explanations of the rationale for the policy.
Meanwhile, the missteps of Japan's leaders have become legend, and are almost impossible to imagine in another advanced democracy. In 2003, for example, one Diet member, Seiichi Ota, actually opined that there was still hope for overcoming the nation's demographic crisis because "gang rape shows the people who do it are still vigorous." One minister in Abe's government referred to women in 2007 as "birth-giving machines." Neither seemed particularly concerned about the fallout.
This points to another source of Japan's problems: its electorate keeps returning dismal politicians to office. The DPJ's Kitagami says the voters still too often fail to hold their politicians accountable. "People are too passive, and that's created a sort of lenient environment where you have incompetent politicians holding power."
Yet change may finally be in the offing—thanks largely to the rise, over the past decade, of the DPJ, which finally won control over the Diet's upper house in July 2007. Many Japanese now believe that simply kicking out the old LDP bums in the upcoming general election will have a galvanizing effect. They concede that the DPJ is hardly an ideal vehicle for renewal. Its head, Ichiro Ozawa, is a former LDP bigwig and unpopular; his party offers little programmatic coherence. And many of its leaders are strikingly inexperienced.
Yet there's a widely shared hope that a victory for the opposition could nonetheless serve as the prelude to a broader cleansing of the political establishment. One particularly important outcome would be a much-needed shift toward a system where political ideas are more important than personal connections—something that's already being fostered by the rise of a real two-party establishment. "It was one thing when you had a closed, hermetic system," says Tobias Harris, author of the blog Observing Japan. "Nowadays you actually need to appeal to people to bring them along. It's not enough to say 'Here's our campaign slogan, here's how we're going to do the budget'." The DPJ's Nakagawa says that previous methods for winning power are changing. "Earlier there were certain opinion leaders in each village, each community. In the old days we could talk to them, and they would influence the vote," he says. "But now people have begun to think for themselves." The machine, in other ways, may finally be breaking down. It's about time; in fact, it's long overdue. For given the many problems Japan now faces, change can't come fast enough.
With Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo
© 2009
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