RSS Feed
Make no mistake about it; Japan is crucially important to the United States and the West.
A Japan that falls in the East like a dying bird could leave the East Asian region with only China to reckon with. By contrast, a healthy and relatively happy Japan is a very good thing not only for the West but for all of Asia as well.
That’s why the West (and the rest) needs to appreciate the monumental and historic significance of the national election in Japan early next month. The vote is symbolically a nationwide referendum on the very future direction of Japan: On whether Japan will, by reforming, be able to grow and remain one of the world’s major powers, or whether it will begin a defeatist slide into the category of the second-rates and the has-beens.
This, to be sure, is not officially how the election is structured.
Technically, it is simply a vote to decide the makeup of the lower house of the Japanese Diet , or congress. But the lower house has more power than the smaller upper house. The lower house gets to determine who becomes and stays as prime minister.
It is the dramatic decision of current Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that has led to this surprise election. Koizumi has been a lifelong member of the gargantuan Liberal Democratic Party (an unwieldy coalition of mostly un-liberal factions that rarely party together), and is a self-styled visionary populist rather than a backroom insider.
Koizumi has made a certain major reform the centerpiece of his government.
His target is the nation’s postal system, which is a lot more than a mere national stamp repository and letter-delivery system; it’s also a national bank, a nationwide insurance company, a source of endless funding for countless pork-barrel projects that help keep rural constituents happy and thus many in the Liberal Democratic Party in power.
For a Japanese politician to campaign for the privatization of a state octopus like the postal system would be akin to a Democratic politician, in America, proposing outlawing labor unions or environmental groups or a Republican leader wanting to curb guns or churches. In China, it would be as if Beijing really did liquidate its own government behemoths , those notorious state-owned enterprises.
When the upper house of the Diet turned down his reform (after the lower house had barely passed it), Koizumi took the rebuff as tantamount to a no-confidence vote, dissolved the lower house, and fashioned the September vote on its reconstitution as a referendum on his government, its policy of reform, and his leadership personally. It is a bold gamble. Despite his continued strong popularity standing in the opinion polls, Koizumi could lose this election, (in no small measure) because of the widespread dislike for his own party, the LDP. The endgame irony might well be that the LDP would take Koizumi down with it , or vice versa.
It was both the gambler and the visionary in him that propelled the career politician to take this plunge. Koizumi was already slated to stand down as the head of the LDP when his term ends in September 2006. If he loses next month, he would still exit the main stage as the longest-running PM of his generation. But should the voters of Japan send a loud-and-clear message to the political elite that the prime minister was right to have laid so much on the line for reform, Japan itself will have sent a message to the world.
It will be a message of change rather than stagnation, of hope rather than trepidation, of a willingness to meet the challenge of our globalized economic world rather than to shrink from it like some scared animal.
I conducted a quick and extraordinarily unscientific opinion poll of some of my sources and friends. Said one veteran and well-respected East Asian diplomat, “Personally, I wish the PM a resounding success.” Commented a well-known British diplomat with long service in Asia, “One hopes he wins in a landslide.”
My own sentiments must be obvious by now.
If the Koizumi privatization plan does move forward, it will be a boon not only to the Japanese economy, but to its political system in particular and to the very idea of democracy in general. The political establishment is opposed in considerable part because the reform would eat away at its privilege, position and options (though some opponents, to be sure, generally think converting the postal system into a series of private-sector enterprises is a bad idea). In a democracy, though, the ultimate yea or nay rests with the people. So what will the Japanese people say come Sunday, Sept. 11?
Whatever they do say will be heard loud and clear around the world. This showdown vote bodes to become one of the most significant and dramatic political benchmarks of the postwar era , and possibly not just for Japan.
Tom Plate is a UCLA professor, former editorial page editor of the
Los Angeles Times
and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Posted in 
