Japan now faces a long, hot summer of a potentially historic election, which is likely to see the ruling Liberal Democratic Party rudely turfed from power by voters for the first time since it was founded more than 50 years ago. (The 10 months out of power in the 1990s was due to internal splits and defections, not election defeat.)
The difficult question is: what happens next? Today, it is as if Japan is collectively sleepwalking towards a future fraught with impossible problems, with no clue what to do. It will be the ultimate in karaoke politics - the orchestral backing comes from a machine and now a new unknown with no experience of power will step into the spotlight and pretend that he is the star. The trouble for Japan is that he will be the ruler of the country facing those impossible problems.
There will be a phoney interlude until the campaign proper begins on August 18. But a lot about this struggle has been phoney. Right until the moment that the current man with the karaoke microphone dissolved parliament, it was still an open question whether the LDP might tear itself publicly apart before an election.
Party dissidents wanted to prevent Prime Minister Taro Aso calling the election 'early', itself a phoney claim because the life of parliament would have ended in early September anyway. Others wanted to choose a new leader rather than Mr Aso, who would have been the LDP's fourth in three years, none of whom had faced the electorate.
A tearful Mr Aso apologised for his shortcomings, but expressed determination to retain power and said he would put the stalled economy at the top of his list of priorities.
It seems unlikely that the electorate will let him. Mr Aso's personal popularity rating has been about 20 per cent, and this week slipped to 17 per cent. Opinion polls showed the opposition Democratic Party of Japan well ahead, with about 40 per cent of the vote, against 20 per cent or less for the LDP.