An ambitious agenda

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, re-elected president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, calls upon the nation to extend "understanding and cooperation" in his efforts to revive a stagnant economy and pave the way for a "new era".

in Singapore

JAPAN, which reinvented itself under the watchful eyes of the United States after the Second World War, is now being called upon to undertake a similar exercise yet again, with a difference though. Exuding the political zeal of a man who aspires to become a messiah of post-modern values in the limited context of his beleaguered country, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has set an ambitious agenda for this purpose, after being re-elected on September 20 as president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the leader of the country's ruling coalition.

Addressing an extraordinary session of the Diet (Japan's Parliament) on September 26, Koizumi pleaded for cooperation from the legislators and ordinary citizens. He said: "During my time as Prime Minister since April 2001, I have called upon the people of Japan to bear the current pain [caused by a policy of structural reform of the national economy] and look forward to a better tomorrow." Contending that the "buds of reform for the rebirth of Japan are now coming to be seen", Koizumi called upon the Japanese people "not to flinch from change but to embrace the challenge of a new era". For Japan, which is somewhat benignly seen in the West for "embracing defeat" with some definitive determination after the Second World War 58 years ago, the political poignancy of Koizumi's plea to his compatriots to "embrace the challenge of a new era" cannot be exaggerated.

Aware of such comparisons, Koizumi reminded the Diet members that "after the end of the Second World War, Japan lacked virtually every necessity".

However, he said, "Our predecessors grasped the mettle and carved out a path to a new era." He emphasised that today, though Japan may be under stringent economic circumstances, its economic capacity was second only to that of the United States. Koizumi said he would "ask for the understanding and cooperation of the people of Japan" in order to build a "new era".

Now, if the logic of his promise of yet another "new era" is obvious, why should he feel constrained to crave for the "understanding" of the Japanese people? The answer can be traced to his appeal to the people to bear the "pain" of new "structural reforms" against the backdrop of today's stagnant, but not really impoverished, national economy. Koizumi portrayed himself as being in battle against the economic inertia that had accumulated during the boom years and against the perceived state liabilities of staying the course of high government spending, which had corrupted the country's politics.

In any case, it is not easy for the people to grasp the realities of the somewhat concealed economic shortcomings of Japan's current situation as a "fragile superpower", as distinct from the stark devastation that the country suffered by the end of the Second World War. According to experts, the profile of Japan's present travails is made up of such diverse aspects as non-performing assets, the relative failure to "leave to the private sector what it can do", the overall inability to "feel the benefit of Information Technology" to the optimal extent in a highly industrialised society and political corruption in high places.

It was against such a backdrop that Koizumi was, by September-end, hoping to press home the advantages of his re-election as LDP president by calling early general elections so as to try and gain a decisive popular mandate for his unfulfilled "reforms agenda". The general expectation within the regional diplomatic circuit was that the snap poll might be held in November. As a self-confessed political maverick who likes to bask in the reflection of his image as the unconventional leader, he first pushed the "reforms agenda" onto the Japanese political stage at the time of his emergence as the LDP president and Prime Minister in 2001. In a sense, Koizumi is now presenting himself as the only choice before the people - a reformer who could fight the "corrupt" conservatives who are with a vision-deficit.

As for the logistics of a snap general election, Koizumi's calculation is that he should sustain the momentum of his re-election in a regular LDP presidential poll. Some controversial foreign policy initiatives too are close to his heart, and he appears eager to secure the people's approval for these by seeking a fresh mandate. These significant foreign policy moves relate to the law passed recently, at Koizumi's initiative, to deploy Japanese troops on "non-combat duties" in U.S.-occupied Iraq and to pass a relatively new anti-terror law, which would enable Japan to continue "refuelling" the ships of the U.S.-led "coalition" in the Indian Ocean for purposes of the "anti-terror war" in Afghanistan and its neighbourhood.

The dynamics of the latest LDP presidential poll offered the clearest evidence yet, if not conclusive proof, that Koizumi is beginning to succeed in his efforts to marginalise and eliminate factional politics, which has come to characterise the party's functioning. Even during the previous LDP presidential poll, which he won to become the Prime Minister in 2001, he had made no secret of his near-disdain for factionalism. Since then, he has attacked factionalism as both the cause and the consequence of power politics and patronage-distribution, given the LDP's sustained hold on the national government except for a brief period during 1993-94.

The political stakes were, therefore, high in the latest poll. In one sense, however, no one really joined battle with Koizumi in any definitive defence of the system of factions. One of his three challengers - Takao Fujii, a former Transport Minister - belongs to the LDP's largest faction, which is led by former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who lost the presidential poll to Koizumi in 2001. However, Fujii was not formally nominated by the Hashimoto faction to challenge Koizumi. In the event, neither Fujii nor the other two challengers - former Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura and former party policy chief Shizuka Kamei - proved a match for the charismatic Koizumi, though the Prime Minister won just over 60 per cent of the total votes polled.

The tightening of the secrecy of polling, especially at the level of the party primaries in the prefectures, is seen as a factor in a more realistic voting pattern. In 2001, many LDP Diet members were said to have gone by the pattern of primaries-voting in the prefectures, which announced the local results ahead of the balloting by parliamentarians belonging to the party. This time round, an argument making the rounds in political circles was that a sizable number of LDP legislators chose to vote for Koizumi's challengers for the only reason of denying him an overwhelming victory which might make him unstoppable, and not out of any inveterate opposition to him. Another view was that the voting by some LDP activists was also seen as a response to the move by Mikio Aoki, a key leader in the Hashimoto faction, to try and gravitate towards Koizumi ahead of the party poll.

With the nuances of the poll behind, Koizumi quickly gave the LDP hierarchy a face-lift by bringing in a junior leader, Shinzo Abe, as the new secretary-general. The incumbent, Taku Yamasaki, was made vice-president, with the possibility that he might be able to play more than a mere ceremonial role, given his close political ties to the Prime Minister. In the Cabinet reshuffle that followed the elections, Koizumi reaffirmed his "reforms agenda" by retaining persons such as Heizo Takenaka whom the LDP factional leaders wanted removed and by inducting a few others with "reform" credentials. Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi was retained to signal a certain continuity in Japan's external affairs during the run-up to a possible snap general election.

This is not the first time, though, that the idea of "reforms" has reverberated across Japan. Since the 1950s, when post-imperial Japan gradually came to terms with what has come to be known as the Yoshida Doctrine, which placed the country on a course of immense economic endeavour at home under the overall security umbrella of the U.S., "reforms" of one kind or the other have sometimes occupied prime attention. One notable event was the enactment of political reform legislation centred on the electoral system, in January 1994. However, what raises Koizumi's reform stakes now is his sense of urgency to restructure the national economy itself in the context of an attempt to create a "new political culture".