Can Japan be roused from its stupor?
Masahiro Matsumura says it can't keep muddling through on tired ideas
Japan is now confronting challenges at home and abroad that are as serious as any it has had to face since the end of the second world war. Yet the Japanese public is displaying remarkable apathy. The 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 came to power in 2009, with an ambitious programme promising comprehensive administrative reform, no tax increases and a freer hand in Japan's alliance with the US. But the first two DPJ governments ended with those pledges in tatters. Consequently, several dozen legislators defected and formed a new rump opposition party.
The DPJ has now re-elected 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, 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.
Yet the rival LDP, which had governed almost uninterruptedly for several decades until 2009, has proved to be an ineffective opposition party. Unable to overcome popular distrust, it has been incapable of holding the DPJ accountable in the legislature.
In an effort to enhance popular support for the party, the LDP presidential campaign took advantage of a heightened sense of crisis centred 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.
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 and its populist leader, Osaka City mayor Toru Hashimoto. It aspires to be a ruling party, or at least a kingmaker, but has an almost exclusively domestic agenda and suffers from a dearth of talent below Hashimoto.