Osaka prefecture, Japan's commercial heartland and second most important region, has just elected as its governor a 38-year-old lawyer and television personality who believes that the country should have nuclear weapons. Equally controversially, Toru Hashimoto, who beat his rivals by a landslide, once said that Japanese men who visited Chinese prostitutes were offering China a form of official development assistance.
The election of the political neophyte Mr Hashimoto, who is more of a television personality than a court lawyer, to be chief executive of a city and region renowned for its hard-headed attitudes, is another sad sign that Japan's political and financial systems are going broke fast.
Yet another sign came when Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, normally as quiet as a mouse, declared in parliament that the global financial crisis was not something that came from the actual condition of Japan. In short, the world's second-biggest economy has nothing to contribute.
There is not much argument about the financial or political bankruptcy. Government debts are the highest of any industrialised country, about 170 per cent of gross national product, and growing year by year. The pension system is in a mess and the ageing population will ensure the strains get greater and greater.
The number of people aged 65 or above has grown from 7 per cent in 1970 to 20 per cent today, and will make up 25 per cent of the population by 2012, and a massive 39.6 per cent by 2050, when Japan's population will have shrunk from 127 million to 95 million.
Any hopes that Japan would use its economic clout to promote global growth are spluttering because of a lack of imagination and political competence. Government decision-making is deadlocked because the Liberal Democratic Party controls the lower house of parliament but the opposition won a majority in the upper house last year. Mr Fukuda can use his big majority in the lower house to overrule an upper house vote, as he did in the decision to resume Japanese refuelling in support of US military operations in the Middle East. But steamrolling decisions takes time, is enervating and, potentially, politically costly.
