OSAKA – Japan
is now confronting challenges at home and abroad that are as serious as any it
has had to face since World War II’s end. Yet the Japanese public is displaying
remarkable apathy. The country’s two major political parties, the governing
Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) recently
chose their leaders, yet ordinary Japanese responded with a collective shrug.
But Japan’s
political system is unlikely to remain a matter of popular indifference for
much longer.
The DPJ has now reelected incumbent
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda as its president, despite his very low
public-approval rating. With a thin majority in the lower house and a narrow
plurality in the upper house (which has adopted a censure resolution against Noda),
the DPJ on its own is unable to pass fiscal and other legislation essential to
running a government. As a result, the prime minister is barely muddling
through – and only by agreeing with the major opposition parties to dissolve
the lower house. Though he has not specified exactly when he will do so, the
endgame for the DPJ government has begun.
Yet the rival LDP, which had governed
almost uninterruptedly for several decades until 2009, has proven itself to be
an ineffective opposition party. Unable to overcome popular distrust, owing to
its longstanding symbiosis with the bureaucrats and subservience to the US,
the LDP has been incapable of holding the DPJ accountable in the legislature.
Instead, the LDP, having failed to reinvigorate itself and attract allies, has
occasionally taken a buck-passing approach, such as permitting the DPJ to pass
an unpopular but inevitable and necessary increase in the consumption tax.
In an effort to enhance popular
support for the party, the LDP presidential campaign took advantage of a heightened
sense of crisis centered on Japan’s territorial disputes with Russia, South
Korea, and, most recently and alarmingly, China. The party chose as its leader
former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is known as the hardest of hardliners on
nationalist matters, but who is also widely perceived as having acted
irresponsibly when he abruptly gave up his premiership in 2007, after only one
year in office, due to health problems. His comeback has given the country a
rather odd feeling of déjà vu.
So, the Japanese public is now
searching for a party that can take on the tasks of reforming the country,
reviving the economy, and enhancing national security. Neither the DPJ nor the
LDP appears dependable in any of these areas. As a result, the public is paying
increasing attention to the newly created Japan Restoration Party (JRP) and its
populist leader, Osaka City Mayor Toru Hashimoto, a former governor of Osaka
prefecture and the son of a minor Yakuza (mafioso).
The JRP aspires to be a ruling party,
or at least a kingmaker in Japanese politics, but it has an almost exclusively
domestic agenda and suffers from a dearth of talent below Hashimoto. Without a
comprehensive agenda and expertise in foreign and security policy, the party
will most likely stumble badly should it come to power.
It is almost certain that the next
general election will not produce a parliamentary majority for a single party.
Given the parties’ ideological, organizational, and policy disarray, Japan
will enter a period of profound uncertainty, ultimately leading to an
unprecedented political shakeup.
This prospect may seem surprising,
given that Japan
has already lost two decades since its economy’s bubble burst in the early
1990’s. But, after a short-lived non-LDP government, successive coalition
governments until 2009 had the LDP at their core.
Japan’s
hidebound postwar regime has been insulated, externally and internally, by
relatively unchanging geostrategic and economic conditions. The country remains
the world’s largest creditor, and has slowly but steadily eliminated enormous
non-performing loans in its banking sector. Moreover, the Cold War never ended
in East Asia, requiring the preservation of a US-led
security system centered on the US-Japan alliance – an alliance that appears to
presuppose a pliant Japanese political system. In fact, the system’s resilience
in absorbing huge disruptions – the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011
earthquake – is one key reason for its survival.
Thus, Japan
remains broadly credible, at least relative to the US
and the European Union. The yen’s appreciation reflects markets’ assessment
that Japan’s
economic position is stronger than that of the US
and the EU, which are burdened with serious structural problems of their own.
Indeed, with a huge capital surplus and very low interest rates in a time of
creeping deflation, Japan
now has a golden opportunity to invest in public infrastructure, education,
defense, and overseas projects – a burst comparable to the British
Empire in the late nineteenth century.
But Japan
is unable to seize these opportunities, because its political system is
incapable of producing competent leadership. Given rising tensions in Asia,
the question is how long this can last. China’s
rise and America’s
relative decline present not only a danger for Japan,
but also an opportunity – and perhaps the needed momentum boost – for real
reform.
Masahiro Matsumura is Professor of International Politics at St.
Andrew’s University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) in Osaka.