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 Topic: PoliticsThe new items published under this topic are as follows.
Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 05:03 AM
Politics
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he Bank of Japan has announced new measures to boost the economy and tackle deflation.
After an emergency meeting, the bank said it would inject 10 trillion yen ($114bn; £70bn) into the economy by offering banks cheap short-term loans.
It wants to make more money available to encourage banks to increase lending to business and individuals.
But analysts suggested it looked more like a political gesture than a real move to support the economy.
"This must be government pressure... if they were free from pressure, they wouldn't have done anything, because they've been saying their assessment hasn't changed," said Dariusz Kowalczyk, chief investment strategist at SJS Markets.
The Bank of Japan said the move would "firmly support Japan's economic developments toward recovery".
The bank also kept interest rates unchanged at 0.1% at the meeting.
The government welcomed the bank's stimulus move. It has been concerned about the recent return of deflation.
The BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says the government, which came to power in September, is this week working on an additional budget expected to be worth more than 2.7 trillion yen.
In April, the previous government spent 15.4 trillion yen to stimulate the economy, helping it to leave recession in the second quarter of this year.
Falling prices
Seijiro Takeshita, director at Mizuho International, said the amount of extra liquidity that today's move provided was negligible and that it was all about the "announcement effect".
He said the Bank of Japan could be doing more to support the economy - for example making borrowing even cheaper or buying up government bonds.
Last month, the Cabinet Office said in a statement that Japan was in a "mild deflationary situation".
Jonathan Allum, Japan strategist at KBC Securities, told the BBC that the Bank of Japan's action could be a sign that it is taking falling prices more seriously. It has previously been criticised for not acting fast enough to counter falling prices.
"This is the beginning of a process... if they persevere it might be effective but it is a medium to long-term prognosis."
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Posted by: Timmy on Saturday, November 21, 2009 - 08:57 AM
Politics
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Twice a week, Japan’s new minister of financial services is forced to hold two back-to-back news conferences: one for the members of Japan’s exclusive press clubs, the second for other journalists.
He does so because the press club members refused his proposal to open the conferences to nonmembers. Even though the agency provides the rooms for the meetings, the press club demanded that the minister, Shizuka Kamei, hold the second conference in a different room.
Japan’s new government is challenging one of the nation’s most powerful interest groups, the press clubs, a century-old, cartel-like arrangement in which reporters from major news media outlets are stationed inside government offices and enjoy close, constant access to officials. The system has long been criticized as antidemocratic by both foreign and Japanese analysts, who charge that it has produced a relatively spineless press that feels more accountable to its official sources than to the public. In their apparent reluctance to criticize the government, the critics say, the news media fail to serve as an effective check on authority.
The assault on the exclusive access the press clubs’ members have long enjoyed is part of the new government’s drive to end the news media’s cozy ties with authorities, and particularly with Tokyo’s powerful central ministries. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party won a landmark election victory in late August over the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, promises a “grand cleanup of postwar governance.”
Takaaki Hattori, a professor of media studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, said: “The postwar system was all about mutual back-scratching among insiders, including the big media. The change of government could finally bring real journalism, and real democracy.”
But the changes will not come without a fight, as the standoff at the Financial Services Agency shows.
“Japan’s news media are closed,” Mr. Kamei complained recently to the outside journalists. “They think they are the only real journalists, but they are wrong.”
On a recent morning, the contrast between the two news conferences was stark. At the first, for press club members, about 45 mostly male reporters in suits sat in rows of desks like students at a lecture, raising their hands to ask detailed questions about financial policy. Mr. Kamei, who sat on a podium in front of a blue-gray curtain, gave curt answers and even reprimanded reporters for their coverage.
The second was held immediately afterward in Mr. Kamei’s wood-paneled office, where he chatted at length and joked while lounging in a big leather chair. An assistant provided coffee to about 25 Japanese and foreign journalists, including several women and tie-less men, some carrying bicycle helmets. They circled around the minister to ask broad questions on issues from Japan’s aging society to postal reform to his clash with the establishment news media.
While the first news conference was held behind closed doors, the second was posted live on a Web site. To show his displeasure with having to hold two meetings, Mr. Kamei sometimes cuts the first news conference short to spend more time at the second.
Yasumi Iwakami, a freelance magazine and online writer, said Mr. Kamei had to move cautiously for fear of provoking negative coverage from the major news media, which Mr. Iwakami half-jokingly called the fourth side of postwar Japan’s “iron triangle” of Liberal Democrats, bureaucrats and big corporations.
So far, he said, the major news outlets have devoted little or no coverage to the press club fight. “This is Japan’s glasnost,” Mr. Iwakami said, referring to the lifting of censorship under the reform policies of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union.
During his career, Mr. Iwakami, 50, said he had repeatedly been blocked from entering news conferences by press club journalists.
He said the two groups of journalists rarely met at the Financial Services Agency, which holds the back-to-back news conferences on different floors. But during an emergency news conference a few weeks ago that both sides attended, he said the press club journalists ignored the outsiders, refusing to answer their greetings or even look at them.
The agency’s press club is based in the nearby Finance Ministry, though it also has its own room of cubicles in the agency. On a recent afternoon, reporters napped on threadbare couches or typed stories at narrow rows of wooden desks while a young female employee of the ministry copied documents for them.
Shinji Furuta, a reporter for the daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, who recently held the rotating chief secretary position of the club, said that it was not as closed as it seemed. Even before the change in government, he said, it allowed nonmembers to attend news conferences as observers on a case-by-case basis, and even allowed them to ask questions, something other press clubs still prevent such observers from doing.
He also noted that the club had opened up slightly in the past decade by allowing the big American and British financial news agencies to join. But he said the press club wanted to ensure that people posing as journalists did not get in and disrupt proceedings.
“What if someone tried to commit suicide or burn themselves to death at a press conference? Who would take responsibility for that?” Mr. Furuta asked.
Tetsuo Jimbo, the founder of an online media company, Video News Network, praised the new government’s efforts. But he said most news conferences remained closed to outside journalists like himself. He noted that the Democrats had opened the proceedings at only four ministries and major agencies, and had failed to fulfill a campaign promise to open the prime minister’s news conferences.
“The Democrats are fighting vested interests that have been in place since the time of their grandfathers,” Mr. Jimbo said.
Still, there is a widespread feeling here that the press clubs must eventually change. Many younger Japanese journalists at major newspapers say they are unhappy with the system. Government officials also said that the old arrangements would be hard to maintain, since Japan finally appeared to be entering an era when power regularly changes hands between political parties.
“Opening the press conferences was easier than we thought,” said Motoyuki Yufu, director of public relations at the Financial Services Agency. “At some point, this had to happen.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, August 30, 2009 - 04:01 AM
Politics
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As the polls opened on Sunday for Japan’s most important election in decades, the question seemed to be not whether the opposition would defeat the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, but by how big a margin.
Recent polls show that the main opposition Democratic Party is likely to win well over 300 of the 480 seats being contested, giving it the majority needed to choose the next prime minister. Such a victory, which would be driven by voter discontent with Japan’s long economic and political stagnation, would unseat the incumbent Liberal Democrats for only the second time since 1955.
There has even been concern here that the margin of victory could be too big. Some in the media have said a landslide could let the Democrats simply replace the Liberal Democrats as a dominant party, instead of creating the competitive two-party democracy that many had hoped would emerge from this election.
With even Liberal Democrats warning of a new “one-party dictatorship,” the Democratic leader, Yukio Hatoyama, has repeatedly promised that his party would avoid the heavy-handed tactics abhorred in Japan’s consensus-driven political culture.
“We will not force through anything and everything by sheer force of numbers,” Mr. Hatoyama said in a speech on Wednesday.
Still, the tone of conversations on Japan’s talk shows and on the streets is a mixture of thrill and anxiety about the imminent end of more than a half-century of Liberal Democratic rule. It remains unclear if a switch would bring a big change in Japan’s direction, as the two centrist parties are close on most policies.
Rather, the nation has been transfixed by the saga of the governing party’s kingpins fighting for their political lives amid the anti-incumbent sentiment. Tabloids have reveled in reporting on former prime ministers and party power brokers in losing battles against largely unknown opposition candidates, many of them charming younger women widely referred to as “assassins” because of their devastating political effect on their opponents.
One former prime minister, the gaffe-prone Yoshiro Mori, 72, drew the ire of many when he told voters not to be fooled by the “sexiness” of his opponent, a 33-year-old former temporary worker named Mieko Tanaka.
The Liberal Democrats are fighting back by mobilizing their own younger lawmakers, many of them also women, to campaign for older male colleagues.
One is Yuko Obuchi, 35, the daughter of a former prime minister, who is the special minister in charge of improving Japan’s low birthrate and is herself more than eight months pregnant.
On Friday, she campaigned in a working-class Tokyo neighborhood on behalf of Akihiro Ota, the leader of the New Komei Party, a Buddhist party that backs the Liberal Democrats. Mr. Ota, 63, is in a tight race with a woman representing the Democratic Party, Ai Aoki, a cheerful 44-year-old former kindergarten teacher.
Ms. Obuchi stood in front of a crowd of Liberal Democratic supporters and, rubbing her extended belly, began by saying she could give birth at any moment. “I tell my baby not to come out until after Aug. 30, because Mom’s busy till then,” she joked.
She then criticized the Democrats’ promise to raise the birthrate by paying families stipends of $270 per month per child.
“They tell you sweet nothings,” Ms. Obuchi warned, without offering an alternative plan.
Listeners seemed resigned that the party would lose. But they said they wanted to see Ms. Obuchi instead of the unpopular Liberal Democratic leader, Prime Minister Taro Aso, because she gave the party a fresh face.
“The party needs to get rid of its old image,” said Hideo Shiba, 68, who owns a small construction company. “She symbolizes the future of the Liberal Democratic Party.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, July 20, 2009 - 02:44 AM
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With his graying hair and his corporate-standard dark blue suit, which he dutifully wears in Tokyo’s sweltering summer heat, Saburo Toyoda appears an unlikely proponent of change.
But since losing his lifetime job seven years ago, and going through several other jobs that paid less than half his former salary, Mr. Toyoda, a 54-year-old salesman, says he is fed up with Japan’s long malaise. Like many Japanese, he now wants what amounts to a revolution in this politically risk-averse nation: the ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for more than a half-century.
“Things have gotten so bad that you have to ask, ‘Can’t someone else do a better job?’ ” said Mr. Toyoda, one of thousands of middle-aged salarymen who have struggled to adapt to a harsh new era of job insecurity and declining living standards. “It is time for new ideas, and new faces.”
Japan has seen a broad upwelling of such frustration in recent years, and particularly since the beginning of the financial crisis last fall, which brought the unfamiliar sight here of mass layoffs and the unemployed tossed onto the streets. Now, the growing disillusion here seems to have reached a critical but long-elusive threshold: when Japanese voters go to the polls on Aug. 30 to vote in parliamentary elections, they appear almost certain to oust the Liberal Democrats from power for only the second time since 1955.
“Voters are finally being pushed into action because their livelihoods are starting to crumble,” said Masaru Kaneko, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo. “Until now, Japanese were politically apathetic because they could still live comfortably despite the weak economy.”
With the Liberal Democrats looking unresponsive or downright incompetent, more voters now seem willing to give Japan’s untested opposition a shot at finding a way out of the nation’s stubborn economic morass. A poll published Wednesday by Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, showed 30 percent of 1,047 respondents backing the opposition Democratic Party, versus 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. No information on the margin of error was available.
The Liberal Democratic Party has struggled before, such as when voters gave it a second chance under reformist Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in the early 2000s. But Mr. Koizumi’s efforts to shrink government are now seen as having worsened growing social inequalities without reviving growth, and a string of short-lived subsequent governments took the party back to its old pork barrel ways.
“There is a feeling now that Japan is at a dead end and has to change,” said Kazuhisa Kawakami, a political scientist who is vice president of Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. “The Liberal Democratic Party has shown itself to be tired and spent out.”
Behind this brewing voter revolt is a grim new pessimism that has gripped this former industrial juggernaut. Japan’s economic situation has grown increasingly severe in recent years: the nation’s per capita gross domestic product — a measure of economic prosperity — declined from third highest in the world in 1991 to 18th last year, according to the World Bank. Average household income has also fallen from its peak in 1994 to a 19-year low of 5.56 million yen, or about $58,000, in 2007, the Labor Ministry said.
A public opinion survey released Thursday by the government-financed Institute of Statistical Mathematics showed that 57 percent of 3,302 respondents said they expected their lives to get worse, with only 11 percent saying they would get better — almost the mirror opposite of replies to the same survey 30 years ago.
But it was the current global slowdown, threatening the livelihoods of Japanese young and old, that seemed to push people past the breaking point. Japan’s export-dependent economy fell more precipitously than those of other developed countries, contracting at an annualized rate of 15.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, its steepest decline on record.
This has brought widespread pain and dislocation, as companies have laid off about 216,000 temporary and short-term workers since October, according to the Labor Ministry. The sight of hundreds of these newly jobless temporary workers protesting in central Tokyo early this year shocked a country unused to mass layoffs, and raised fears of growing social inequalities.
Anxieties are particularly acute about the future for Japan’s youth. In May, the unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24, not including students, rose to 9 percent, according to the Internal Affairs Ministry, far higher than the 5.2 percent rate for all age groups. And this in a nation that for decades prided itself on having virtually no unemployment.
A national media storm was stirred up earlier this year when companies hurt by the downturn began rescinding job offers made to university seniors, the first time that had happened to any significant degree since the bursting of the real estate bubble in the late 1980s. That left thousands of students to graduate in April without jobs waiting for them — a career-threatening predicament in a country where large companies limit most of their hiring to university seniors.
One was Shiho, a 23-year-old resident of the western city of Kobe who asked that her family name not be used for fear of embarrassment. Last year as a senior in business management, she said, she got a job offer to be a white-collar worker at a large construction company. She said she even went to a training seminar at the company in December, only to have the offer withdrawn in January.
In a desperate scramble to find work before graduating in March, the end of the Japanese academic year, she took the only job she could find, as a uniformed receptionist at a golf course. She said she felt so ashamed that she stopped talking to many of her friends, and ignored their cellphone messages, until she found out that they had also settled for jobs they did not like.
“I feel betrayed,” she said. “I studied for university entrance exams, went to a good university, did everything I was supposed to do, and then this happens.”
She and other young Japanese talk in gloomy terms about the prospects for both their own careers and their nation overall. Many express fear of becoming another “lost generation” of youth like those in the late 1990s, condemned for years to part-time or short-term jobs, or forced to live off their parents.
Shiho said she and her friends believed that it was time for a change in Japan, though she admitted that young Japanese tended not to vote. But if she does vote, she said, it will not be for the Liberal Democrats, whom her parents supported. “If the Democratic Party is ready to try something new, then let’s give them a chance,” she said.
Older Japanese like Mr. Toyoda, the laid-off salaryman, also profess a feeling of betrayal, in their case at losing lifetime job guarantees that were once the norm here. Mr. Toyoda says his problems began in 2002, when he lost his lifetime job at a large electronics company. He said he had held four jobs as a salesman since, and was dismissed last month by his most recent employer.
Mr. Toyoda said he no longer went out drinking after work or traveled for vacation, instead saving the money to pay for his two sons’ university tuitions. Some of his sons’ classmates have had to drop out of college because their fathers were recently laid off.
He said he believed that Japan had no future under the Liberal Democrats, who had turned his country into a nation without hope. “I feel a sense of suffocation,” he said. “I can work. I want to work. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, July 12, 2009 - 12:28 AM
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People in Tokyo are preparing to vote in local polls considered a key test of popularity for Prime Minister Taro Aso.
The polls in the capital come ahead of a general election which must be held by October.
Taro Aso, whose Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has governed for almost all the past half-century, has approval hovering around 20%.
The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is hoping to break the LDP's grip on power.
Voters are deciding who will sit on Tokyo's metropolitan assembly, but the stakes could be higher than that for Mr Aso.
If his LDP does badly, moves to oust him from the leadership could intensify.
In the run up to the vote in Tokyo candidates, wearing white gloves and sashes, toured the streets in vans using loudspeakers to campaign.
But many voters appeared largely indifferent.
Some candidates resorted to making speeches in front of deserted city car parks, their words echoing off the surrounding apartment blocks.
The LDP has governed Japan for the past half century, except for a break of less than a year in the 1990s.
But Mr Aso, who is the fourth prime minister since the last election to the more powerful lower house in 2005, has dismal approval ratings.
The opposition DPJ hopes to take power in the next general election, which must be held by October.
It is promising to break the grip of the bureaucracy on policy making, and increase social welfare measures.
But the opposition's support has been eroded by fund raising scandals.
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Posted by: Timmy on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 - 02:57 AM
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Japan's opposition Democratic Party (DPJ) has won another local election, with a landslide, ahead of general elections that must be held this year.
The city of Chiba, near Tokyo, is the third big municipality win for the DPJ in the past two months after both Nagoya and Saitama.
The Liberal Democratic Party has ruled Japan almost unchallenged for 50 years.
With Japan in the middle of a recession, the LDP has faced criticism for offering weak leadership.
Prime Minister Taro Aso lost a cabinet ally on Friday when Internal Affairs Minister Kunio Hatoyama resigned.
He was the third minister to quit since Mr Aso took office last September.
In the latest election, for mayor of Chiba, the DPJ backed the young, 31-year old Toshihito Kumagai, against the incumbent LDP candidate, 63-year old Kojiro Hayashi.
Public opinion polls have shown the Democrats well ahead of the LDP in the run-up to a general election that must be held by October and that many expect to be held in August.
The latest election win for the Democratic Party had "deepened a sense of crisis" in the ruling coalition ahead of the general election, Jiji Press news agency said.
A Democratic Party victory in the general election would end more than five decades of almost unbroken rule by the conservative LDP.
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, June 01, 2009 - 12:16 AM
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When Tokyo prosecutors arrested an aide to a prominent opposition political leader in March, they touched off a damaging scandal just as the entrenched Liberal Democratic Party seemed to face defeat in coming elections. Many Japanese cried foul, but you would not know that from the coverage by Japan’s big newspapers and television networks.
Instead, they mostly reported at face value a stream of anonymous allegations, some of them thinly veiled leaks from within the investigation, of illegal campaign donations from a construction company to the opposition leader, Ichiro Ozawa. This month, after weeks of such negative publicity, Mr. Ozawa resigned as head of the opposition Democratic Party.
The resignation, too, provoked a rare outpouring of criticism aimed at the powerful prosecutors by Japanese across the political spectrum, and even from some former prosecutors, who seldom criticize their own in public. The complaints range from accusations of political meddling to concerns that the prosecutors may have simply been insensitive to the arrest’s timing.
But just as alarming, say scholars and former prosecutors, has been the failure of the news media to press the prosecutors for answers, particularly at a crucial moment in Japan’s democracy, when the nation may be on the verge of replacing a half-century of Liberal Democratic rule with more competitive two-party politics.
“The mass media are failing to tell the people what is at stake,” said Terumasa Nakanishi, a conservative scholar who teaches international politics at Kyoto University. “Japan could be about to lose its best chance to change governments and break its political paralysis, and the people don’t even know it.”
The arrest seemed to confirm fears among voters that Mr. Ozawa, a veteran political boss, was no cleaner than the Liberal Democrats he was seeking to replace. It also seemed to at least temporarily derail the opposition Democrats ahead of the elections, which must be called by early September. The party’s lead in opinion polls was eroded, though its ratings rebounded slightly after the selection this month of a new leader, Yukio Hatoyama, a Stanford-educated engineer.
Japanese journalists acknowledge that their coverage so far has been harsh on Mr. Ozawa and generally positive toward the investigation, though newspapers have run opinion pieces criticizing the prosecutors. But they bridle at the suggestion that they are just following the prosecutors’ lead, or just repeating information leaked to them.
“The Asahi Shimbun has never run an article based solely on a leak from prosecutors,” the newspaper, one of Japan’s biggest dailies, said in a written reply to questions from The New York Times.
Still, journalists admit that their coverage could raise questions about the Japanese news media’s independence, and not for the first time. Big news organizations here have long been accused of being too cozy with centers of power.
Indeed, scholars say coverage of the Ozawa affair echoes the positive coverage given to earlier arrests of others who dared to challenge the establishment, like the iconoclastic Internet entrepreneur Takafumi Horie.
“The news media should be watchdogs on authority,” said Yasuhiko Tajima, a journalism professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, “but they act more like authority’s guard dogs.”
While news media in the United States and elsewhere face similar criticisms of being too close to government, the problem is more entrenched here. Cozy ties with government agencies are institutionalized in Japan’s so-called press clubs, cartel-like arrangements that give exclusive access to members, usually large domestic news outlets.
Critics have long said this system leads to bland reporting that adheres to the official line. Journalists say they maintain their independence despite the press clubs. But they also say government officials sometimes try to force them to toe the line with threats of losing access to information.
Last month, the Tokyo Shimbun, a smaller daily known for coverage that is often feistier than that in Japan’s large national newspapers, was banned from talking with Tokyo prosecutors for three weeks after printing an investigative story about a governing-party lawmaker who had received donations from the same company linked to Mr. Ozawa.
The newspaper said it was punished simply for reporting something the prosecutors did not want made public. “Crossing the prosecutors is one of the last media taboos,” said Haruyoshi Seguchi, the paper’s chief reporter in the Tokyo prosecutors’ press club.
The news media’s failure to act as a check has allowed prosecutors to act freely without explaining themselves to the public, said Nobuto Hosaka, a member of Parliament for the opposition Social Democratic Party, who has written extensively about the investigation on his blog.
He said he believed Mr. Ozawa was singled out because of the Democratic Party’s campaign pledges to curtail Japan’s powerful bureaucrats, including the prosecutors. (The Tokyo prosecutors office turned down an interview request for this story because The Times is not in its press club.)
Japanese journalists defended their focus on the allegations against Mr. Ozawa, arguing that the public needed to know about a man who at the time was likely to become Japan’s next prime minister. They also say they have written more about Mr. Ozawa because of a pack-like charge among reporters to get scoops on those who are the focus of an investigation.
“There’s a competitive rush to write as much as we can about a scandal,” said Takashi Ichida, who covers the Tokyo prosecutors office for the Asahi Shimbun. But that does not explain why in this case so few Japanese reporters delved deeply into allegations that the company also sent money to Liberal Democratic lawmakers.
The answer, as most Japanese reporters will acknowledge, is that following the prosecutors’ lead was easier than risking their wrath by doing original reporting.
The news media can seem so unrelentingly supportive in their reporting on investigations like that into Mr. Ozawa that even some former prosecutors, who once benefited from such favorable coverage, have begun criticizing them.
“It felt great when I was a prosecutor,” said Norio Munakata, a retired, 36-year veteran Tokyo prosecutor. “But now as a private citizen, I have to say that I feel cheated.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, May 17, 2009 - 02:29 PM
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Japan's opposition Democratic Party has chosen Yukio Hatoyama, the grandson of a former prime minister, as leader ahead of elections later this year.
Mr Hatoyama succeeds Ichiro Ozawa, who stepped down amid a fundraising scandal on 11 May.
The new opposition leader has pledged to cut wasteful spending.
Opinion polls suggest the Democrats are ahead of PM Taro Aso's Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled for some 50 years, with one short break.
Mr Hatoyama, 62, won a swiftly organised election among Democratic Party members of Japan's Diet, or parliament.
Mr Ozawa had been under pressure to resign after a close aide was charged in a fundraising scandal in March.
Tokyo prosecutors alleged Mr Ozawa's political funding organisation received 21 million yen ($216,000; £142,000) in illegal donations from Nishimatsu Construction between 2003-07.
Before the scandal broke, Mr Ozawa had been thought likely to unseat the beleaguered prime minister, Taro Aso, in parliamentary elections.
But opinion polls have suggested his popularity had waned as a result of the scandal.
Mr Hatoyama's party has promised to loosen the bureaucracy's grip on policy making and pursue more assertive diplomacy towards Japan's security ally the United States.
But the BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says Mr Hatoyama may struggle to bring change to Japanese politics, which is dominated by wealthy political dynasties.
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, May 11, 2009 - 02:30 PM
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Ichiro Ozawa, the Japanese opposition leader, announced his resignation on Monday, saying he wanted to prevent a campaign funding scandal involving one of his aides from hurting his party’s chances of unseating the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party.
Mr. Ozawa told a hastily gathered press conference that he will step down as head of Japan’s main opposition Democratic Party, which has seen its lead in public opinion polls shrink as a result of the scandal. The scandal erupted in early March, when prosecutors arrested one of Mr. Ozawa’s aides for allegedly taking bribes from a construction company.
Mr. Ozawa had tried to ride out the controversy, criticizing the prosecutors for what he called a politically motivated investigation, while stopping short of accusing them of helping the unpopular Liberal Democrats. But the scandal appears to have turned Japanese voters off to both parties ahead of a national election that must be held by Sept. 10.
By resigning, Mr. Ozawa, 66, was relinquishing what has been a nearly two-decade personal quest to end the Liberal Democrats’ half-century hold on power. Before the scandal, that goal appeared within his grasp as political stalemate and economic stagnation turned voters against Prime Minister Taro Aso.
“I hope by removing myself, I can remove even the smallest negative points for the party and, above all, help it achieve a changing of governments,” Mr. Ozawa said. “This is in the interest of the Japanese people, and is the mission of the Democratic Party.”
The resignation appears certain to throw Japan’s already murky political situation into further confusion. The scandal has added to the widespread perception here that political paralysis has hindered Japan from responding quickly to the global financial crisis, or coming up with a formula for ending the nation’s longer-term economic decline.
His resignation also leaves a void at the top of Japan’s largest opposition party. While Mr. Ozawa was never seen as a populist or a gifted public speaker, his acumen as a political campaigner and fund-raiser were seen as the glue that held together the Democrats, a broad coalition that ranges from conservatives like Mr. Ozawa to former socialists.
This wide spectrum of views has made it hard for the party to come up with a clear platform with which to challenge the Liberal Democrats. The Democratic Party has called for clipping the wings of the nation’s powerful bureaucrats, protecting consumers over industry and showing more diplomatic independence from Washington, while not going so far as to end the security alliance with the United States.
During the press conference, Mr. Ozawa told reporters he will continue to serve as a legislator, and to work to end the Liberal Democrats’ reign. But with persistent reports of Mr. Ozawa’s failing health, many political analysts have wondered if a resignation will effectively end the career of one of Japan’s most skilled political insiders.
Mr. Ozawa is known as one of the last of Japan’s shadow shoguns, having learned as a young lawmaker from past Japanese prime ministers like Kakuei Tanaka, who invented Japan’s current version of pork-barrel politics. Once anointed as a future leader of the Liberal Democrats, Mr. Ozawa bolted the party in 1993 to help organize the fledgling centrist opposition.
The current scandal proved damaging to Mr. Ozawa partly because it touched on one of his party’s weakest points with voters: the concern that Mr. Ozawa was no cleaner than the Liberal Democrats he was trying to depose. It did not help Mr. Ozawa that after arresting his aide and raiding his office, prosecutors spent weeks leaking damaging accusations about him to the Japanese press.
An opinion poll released Monday by the Yomiuri newspaper showed the opposition’s lead shrinking, with 30 percent of respondents saying they would vote for the Democrats, versus 27 percent for the governing Liberal Democrats, down from much wider margins before the scandal. In the same poll, 71 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Mr. Ozawa’s decision to stay on after his aide’s arrest.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, April 09, 2009 - 11:38 AM
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Steeped in a recession, with a surge in bankruptcies and sentiment among its largest manufacturers at a record low, Japan is expected to announce ¥15 trillion ($150 billion) in extra spending Friday.
The stimulus plan is meant to keep Japan's economy from cracking open, coalition party officials told CNN. It is the biggest-ever supplemental budget to boost the ailing economy.
The officials did not want to be identified because details of the package were under negotiation Thursday.
Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has been hit hard by the global financial slump. Although Japanese banks were spared the brunt of the credit crisis, the drop in exports to the United States has sent the country into its worst recession since World War II.
Prime Minister Taro Aso needs the package to boost Japan's economy and his government's popularity.
"This could help save his life as prime minister," said Satoru Ogasawara, a Tokyo-based economist for Credit Suisse. The Aso government's approval rating fell below 10 percent two months ago, but has been buoyed by the stimulus package and the recent North Korea rocket launch, Ogasawara said.
If approved, the package could add two points to the country's gross domestic product, Ogasawara said. But its long-term impact remains an open question.
"It will help the economy from collapsing from this point ... (but) unless the package improves productivity or increases demand, it will be a short-term fix," Ogasawara said.
Jesper Koll, president and chief executive of TRJ Tantallon Research Japan, said the stimulus package was unlike the ¥12 trillion injections into the economy in the past eight months.
"This is the first designed with real business input, and that's reflected in the package," he said, referring to a series of meetings Aso held with business leaders last month. "That's outside the normal technocratic, bureaucratic fix. ... It isn't just pork-barrel money for the boys."
Koll cites details of the plan -- such as tax breaks for gift-giving and environmentally friendly cars, or measures to increase employment in health care -- as a step forward.
"This goes way beyond grand-standing fiscal policy. It's very specific. For Japan, that's something," he said.
Among the package's highlights:
-- ¥1.9 trillion for unemployment benefits and the promotion of job sharing.
-- ¥3 trillion to boost struggling companies.
-- ¥1.6 trillion to promote green initiatives, such as the purchase of environmentally friendly cars and energy-efficient electronics.
-- ¥2.6 trillion for infrastructure, such as airport runways, train networks and road extensions.
-- ¥1.7 trillion for health and welfare.
The Bank of Japan's quarterly Tankan survey showed sentiment among large manufacturers plunged to minus 58 in March, from minus 24 in December. The previous record low for the survey was minus 57, reached during the oil-shock era of the mid-1970s.
The Tankan survey is a forward-looking and extensive indicator of the state of Japan's economy. It gauges how global exporters in Japan -- such as Toyota and Honda -- feel about the business conditions in which they operate.
The proposed stimulus package sent stocks rising for companies thought to benefit. Sharp, a major manufacturer of solar cells, saw its stock rise more than 7 percent.
Japan markets also were buoyed by surprise data that showed core private-sector machinery orders -- a leading indicator of corporate capital spending -- rose by 1.4 percent in February, the first increase since June.
Overall, the Nikkei is up 22 percent after hitting a 26-year record last month.
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Posted by: Timmy on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 12:28 AM
Politics
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By almost any measure, Katsuhito Yokokume should have at least a fighting chance in the coming parliamentary elections, which could decide Japan's future.
A truck driver's son who graduated from the nation's top university, Mr. Yokokume, an energetic 27-year-old lawyer, is a candidate for the main opposition Democratic Party, which has ridden rising popular discontent with the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party. Yet, on a recent chilly morning of greeting voters with deep bows and handshakes at a train station, he got the same apologetic but blunt rejection he gets every day.
"I'm sorry, but this is Koizumi country," one commuter explained.
He was referring to Junichiro Koizumi, the popular former prime minister whose family has represented this naval port an hour southwest of Tokyo for three generations. In announcing his retirement last autumn, Mr. Koizumi anointed his son, Shinjiro, as successor — making the son's election as a fourth-generation lawmaker all but a foregone conclusion here.
Such family dynasties are common across Japan, the product of more than a half-century of Liberal Democratic Party control that allowed lawmakers to build powerful local political machines and then hand them down to children and grandchildren.
Now, as the party faces its biggest challenge since its founding in 1955, such de facto hereditary control of parliamentary seats is coming under unprecedented criticism here. But it is also showing stubborn resilience.
Such inherited seats have fallen under increasing attack by voters and many political scientists. They say the practice has helped create an inbred version of politics that has contributed to the leadership paralysis gripping this nation, slowing its response to the current financial crisis and Japan's longer economic decline. Political analysts have also thrust into public view the fact that powerful political and business families exert more control than this proudly middle-class society likes to admit.
This has fed a fear of rising social inequalities, and the feeling that unseen barriers are preventing new talent, new ideas — literally, new blood — from entering politics, and from helping Japan find a way out of its morass.
"It takes a blood test to get elected these days," said Sota Kato, a senior fellow at the Tokyo Foundation, a private research organization. "It is a symptom of how Japanese society has lost its postwar dynamism and become more rigid and less democratic."
While second-generation lawmakers are common elsewhere — they make up some 5 percent of the U.S. Congress, Mr. Kato and others said — they are unusually numerous here. Some 40 percent of Liberal Democratic lawmakers are descendants of lawmakers. Of the past seven prime ministers here, all but one were the sons or grandsons of former lawmakers.
The issue was thrust into public view recently by the back-to-back resignations of two prime ministers, Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda, the grandson and son, respectively, of former prime ministers. The fact that both men stepped down so quickly in the face of falling approval ratings was widely criticized here as a weakness of character seen in "botchan," or "brat," politicians.
Despite such public disgust, it is unclear whether this will influence the coming elections, which must be called by early September and which polls show the Liberal Democrats could lose. The opposition Democrats, for one, also have their share of second-generation or higher lawmakers: 20 percent.
Also, as the race in Yokosuka shows, old practices die hard. Often, the families' founding members are still revered in their districts for bringing public works projects that helped raise living standards.
"Sure, we're tired of all these brats," said Keiko Nomura, 53, who owns a shoe shop in Yokosuka. "But Japan still has money, and Japanese basically hate change."
Mr. Koizumi's decision to hand his seat to his son was greeted with disappointment in urban areas, where the criticism of hereditary seats is highest, and where the former prime minister was widely popular for his vows to change the Liberal Democratic Party's entrenched ways.
The younger Mr. Koizumi has kept a low profile since his anointment, and both Koizumis declined to be interviewed.
Despite the fact that Shinjiro Koizumi has yet to announce a political platform, his father's supporters say they are enthusiastic to vote for him. They say he inherited his father's telegenic charisma. Perhaps more significantly, he will also inherit his father's roughly 5,000-member support group, which financed and organized his election campaigns.
"Kids are usually stupid by the third generation, but this one's different," said Kazuhiko Ozawa, a former chairman of the Yokosuka Chamber of Commerce who helped lead the elder Mr. Koizumi's support group.
By contrast, Mr. Yokokume, the son's opponent, runs his quixotic campaign out of a grimy one-room apartment that he shares with two election staff members sent by the Democratic Party. He said his budget was ¥2 million to ¥3 million, or $20,000 to $30,000, far less than what the Koizumi campaign is likely to muster.
Mr. Yokokume said he was hoping to benefit from some kind of negative reaction to hereditary politics. Still, he is reluctant to criticize his opponent directly for fear of offending Japanese sensibilities that frown on self-promoters. Instead, he limits himself to giving his personal narrative of being a self-made success, noting that he was a law major at the prestigious University of Tokyo who passed Japan's highly competitive bar exam.
"I leave it to voters to make the comparison" with the younger Mr. Koizumi, he said, who graduated from the less well known Kanto Gakuin University. Mr. Koizumi also has a master's degree in politics from Columbia University.
But Mr. Yokokume admits that it is hard to battle an opponent who seems invincible and whom Mr. Yokokume said he had never even seen. What keeps him going, he said, is a hope of parlaying even a defeat into an eventual career in politics, and a touch of indignation at hereditary politics.
"Why can't a regular person be a politician?" he asked. "Politics shouldn't be a family business."
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, March 05, 2009 - 04:55 AM
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Japan's opposition leader said Wednesday he will not quit after the arrest of a key aide in a donations scandal that has dealt a major blow to the party's efforts to topple unpopular Prime Minister Taro Aso's government later this year.
Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan and a top contender to become the next prime minister, said no laws were broken and suggested the arrest was politically motivated.
"What my aide has done is perfectly legal," Ozawa said at a news conference a day after the arrest of Takanori Okubo on suspicion of violating regulations on political funding.
"I have nothing to feel guilty about," Ozawa said.
Ozawa said Tuesday's raid of his Tokyo office by prosecutors might be politically motivated, as elections for the lower house of parliament must take place by Sept. 10. Prosecutors on Wednesday also raided Ozawa's local office in northern Iwate prefecture (state).
"This unprecedented probe came as we are in the midst of heading toward the lower house polls. I feel this is an execution of power carried out by authorities in a politically and legally unfair manner."
Tokyo prosecutors allege that Ozawa's political funding organization, Rikuzankai, received 21 million yen ($216,000) in illegal donations between 2003-06 from two political organizations headed by former executives at the scandal-tainted construction firm Nishimatsu Construction Co. Ltd. The two executives were also arrested Tuesday, on suspicion they used their organizations as a cover to funnel corporate donations, which is banned under Japanese political funding laws.
Okubo, 47, is the chief accountant of Rikuzankai.
Ozawa called the arrest of Okubo and the ensuing investigation "extremely unfair."
The arrest was seen as a major setback to Japan's largest opposition party, which is surging in popularity polls and is seen by experts as being in position to oust the country's long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the next general election. The Liberal Democrats have ruled Japan for most of the past 50 years.
Ozawa, once a powerful LDP kingmaker who later defected, has received more public support than Aso in recent voter polls.
In a survey by the Mainichi newspaper last month, some 25 percent of respondents favored Ozawa as Japan's next prime minister, against just 8 percent for Aso.
But Hiroshi Kawahara, political science professor at Tokyo's Waseda University, said the arrest of Ozawa's top aide will have serious repercussions for the opposition party.
"It really marred the image of the party, as many voters see it as the only alternative to the Liberal Democratic Party," Kawahara said.
If convicted, Okubo, who is also accused of faking reports on political funding, could receive up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 1 million yen.
The construction officials face up to three years in prison or fines of up to 500,000 yen for violating laws that ban company donations to political groups.
Company officials were not immediately available for comment.
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Posted by: Timmy on Friday, February 20, 2009 - 12:53 PM
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Mounting troubles threaten the brief administration of Japan's unpopular prime minister, Taro Aso. The bigger question is whether time could also be running out for his Liberal Democratic Party and its half-century monopoly on political power in Japan.
Aso's frequent verbal gaffes have offended just about everyone from doctors to kindergarten mothers. A prominent lawmaker has defected from his party, and a former prime minister publicly rebuked him. Even his scheme to boost economic growth by giving away at least $130 in cash per person has been panned by the public as a cynical vote-winning gesture.
If the party loses upcoming elections, it could mean a drastic redrawing of Japan's political lines, as Liberal Democratic lawmakers defect to create new parties or join the opposition, which has historically been weak and divided. It also raises the possibility of a radical rethinking of Japan's increasingly ineffectual and dysfunctional politics, which have failed to produce the big changes needed to lift a nation that has seemed to slip into slow stagnation.
Political analysts and lawmakers say a defeat could even spell the end of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has appeared outdated with no ideology to bind it together beyond a desire to hold onto power. In its place could emerge new, more modern types of political parties bound together by a shared agenda and principles.
"A defeat could dissolve the Liberal Democrats, create new parties, change the whole political landscape," said Tomoaki Iwai, a politics professor at Nihon University in Tokyo. "The party itself has grown obsolete."
For now, the winner would likely be the largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, which endorses similar policies to the Liberal Democrats and also lacks an ideological core.
The latest blow to the prime minister came Tuesday, when his finance minister resigned after appearing to be in a stupor during a news conference over the weekend at an economic summit in Rome. The minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, who admitted to a glass of wine over lunch, blamed his strange performance, widely replayed on YouTube, on too much cold medicine.
The embarrassing news conference, and Aso's tardiness in seeking Nakagawa's resignation, have shaken a five-month-old administration that is already one of the least popular in postwar Japanese history. This week, panicked members of Aso's own party began calling on him to step aside so the Liberal Democrats can install a new, more appealing leader before the upcoming general election for the lower house of Parliament.
"The prime minister no longer has the ability, trust or integrity to manage the current political crisis," Masazumi Gotoda, a Liberal Democratic lawmaker, told reporters on Wednesday while making a public appeal for Aso to resign.
Even before the minister's resignation, Aso's approval ratings had already dipped into the single digits. An opinion poll published Feb. 10 by a leading newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, showed the Democratic Party of Japan had an approval rating of 28.3 percent, surpassing the Liberal Democrats' 26.8 percent.
A loss in the lower-house election, which must be called by mid-September, would remove the Liberal Democrats from Japan's helm for only the second time since the party's founding in 1955. The party lost power for 11 months in 1993.
But many lawmakers and political analysts say pushing aside Aso could also backfire for the party. Aso would become the third prime minister in less than three years to step down amid dismal approval ratings. That could further damage public confidence in the Liberal Democrats, who are already reeling from recent scandals, including the loss of millions of pension records, which outraged this rapidly aging nation.
"The party is in a dilemma because it could lose either way," said Atsuo Ito, an independent political analyst.
The depth of its predicament has many lawmakers and political analysts wondering if the party is not finally on its last legs.
The Liberal Democratic Party has been one of the longest-ruling political parties in the democratic world, founded to keep Japan firmly in the American camp against the Soviet Union, while focusing on export-led growth and building up the country with infrastructure projects.
But in recent years, the party has increasingly looked like an exhausted relic from the cold war, say political analysts and lawmakers. The party appears stuck in its old ways, promising tens of billions in new public works to combat the current financial downturn, despite sinking Japan deeply into debt building roads to nowhere during its stagnant 1990s.
Recently announced figures for the fourth quarter showed that Japan's economy is deteriorating at its worst pace since the oil crisis of the 1970s.
"The Liberal Democratic Party was not made for exerting strong leadership," said Yoshimi Watanabe, a former minister of administrative reform whose high-profile departure from the party last month kicked up a stir. "But political leadership is exactly what Japan needs now."
Aso's backers point out that this is not the first time that people have predicted the Liberal Democrats' demise, saying that both Aso and the party can still bounce back. They say voters will warm to the cash handouts and other planned stimulus measures like a lowering of highway tolls. They are also counting on Japan's cautious electorate to shy away from actually voting for an untried opposition, though they admit that the Liberal Democrats must also find a new message to woo back voters.
"The Liberal Democrats are a very flexible party, so it will adapt," said Yoshihide Suga, a lawmaker who is deputy chief of the party's election committee.
The last time someone tried to change the Liberal Democrats was a half decade ago, when then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vowed to save the party by destroying it. He broke the grip of the party's powerful internal factions and weakened its embrace of rural voters with steep cuts in public works and the privatization of Japan's huge postal system, a source of jobs. But analysts say Koizumi ended up crippling the party by failing to create an alternative political base.
Since Koizumi's departure in 2006, the party has appeared to drift, sliding back toward its old factional politics and reliance on the bureaucracy. Aso has only added to this sense of lost direction by seeming to flip-flop and contradict himself on crucial issues.
Earlier this month Aso told a parliamentary committee that he had opposed Koizumi's postal privatization plan, despite boasting a few months earlier that he had been the minister in charge of it. Koizumi, who remains a powerful presence here, dismissed Aso's remarks as "laughable."
Aso has also turned off voters by seeming to be out of touch. The wealthy scion of a concrete conglomerate, Aso talks of drinking at posh hotel bars at a time when his constituents face growing layoffs and economic distress. He has also been mocked for his chronic misreading of characters in the written Japanese language.
"There's an unmistakable mood here that it is time to give the Democratic Party a chance," said Iwai of Nihon University. "But the Democrats have no experience running a country, so expectations aren't high there, either."
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Posted by: Timmy on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 - 04:53 AM
Politics
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Japan's Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa will step down, he announced Tuesday. He had come under fire after appearing intoxicated at a weekend news conference at the G-7 meeting in Rome.
Nakagawa's decision followed an announcement by Japan's main opposition party that it would introduce a motion to censure him. It was unclear whether the party would go ahead with its plans. He said he will step down once a budget bill clears the lower house of parliament.
Nakagawa apologized for his behavior during a legislative committee meeting, but denied that it was the result of "heavy drinking," the agency said.
Nakagawa said he had drinks on his flight to Rome and during the G-7 luncheon, but that the real culprit was too much medicine taken because he wasn't feeling well, Kyodo reported. The Group of Seven meeting brought together finance ministers from the world's leading industrialized nations.
In video of the Saturday news conference posted on the BBC Web site, Nakagawa responds slowly to reporters questions, slurring his words. At one point, he closes his eyes.
Members of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, however, weren't buying Nakagawa's story.
"[Nakagawa's] responsibility as a Cabinet member is being questioned," DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa said, according to Kyodo.
"It's not a simple matter of shame," added DPJ Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama. "The damage to the national interest was immeasurable."
Some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party also called for Nakagawa to step down or be fired. But Prime Minister Taro Aso, who met with Nakagawa Monday, supported his finance minister.
"I thank him for having done a lot of work well," Aso told reporters, adding that he had heard Nakagawa had taken sleeping pills prior to the news conference.
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Posted by: Timmy on Saturday, February 07, 2009 - 10:48 AM
Politics
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The Hamada Marine Bridge soars majestically over this small fishing harbor, so much larger than the squid boats anchored below that it seems out of place.
And it is not just the bridge. Two decades of generous public works spending have showered this city of 61,000 mostly graying residents with a highway, a four-lane bypass, a university, a prison, a children's art museum, the Sun Village Hamada sports center, a bright red welcome center, a ski resort and an aquarium featuring three ring-blowing beluga whales.
Nor is this remote port in western Japan unusual. Japan's rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world - totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy - while failing to generate a convincing recovery.
Now, as the Obama administration embarks on a similar path, proposing to spend more than $820 billion to stimulate the sagging American economy, many economists are taking a fresh look at Japan's troubled experience.
While Japan is not exactly comparable to the United States - especially as a late developer with a history of heavy state investment in infrastructure - economists say it can still offer important lessons about the pitfalls, and chances for success, of a stimulus package in an advanced economy.
In a nutshell, Japan's experience suggests that infrastructure spending, while a blunt instrument, can help revive a developed economy, say many economists and one very important U.S. official: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was a young financial attaché in Japan during the collapse and subsequent doldrums. One lesson Geithner has said he took away from that experience is that spending must come in quick, massive doses and be continued until recovery takes firm root.
Moreover, it matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending.
"It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again," said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. "One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future."
In total, Japan spent $6.3 trillion on construction-related public investment from 1991 to September of last year, according to the Cabinet Office. The spending peaked in 1995 and remained high until the early 2000s, when it was cut amid growing concerns about ballooning budget deficits. More recently, the governing Liberal Democratic Party has increased spending again to revive the economy and the party's own flagging popularity.
In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan's Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.
In the United States, it has also led to calls in Congress, particularly by Republicans, not to repeat the errors of Japan's failed economic stimulus. They argue that it makes more sense to cut taxes, and let people decide how to spend their own money, than for the government to decide how to invest public funds. Japan put more emphasis on increased spending than tax cuts during its long slump, but ultimately did reduce taxes to encourage consumer spending, as well.
Economists tend to divide into two camps on the question of Japan's infrastructure spending: those - many of them Americans, like Geithner - who think it did not go far enough, and those - many of them Japanese - who think it was a colossal waste.
Among ordinary Japanese, the spending is widely disparaged for having turned the nation into a public-works-based welfare state by making regional economies dependent on Tokyo for jobs. Much of the blame has fallen on the Liberal Democratic Party, which has long used government spending to grease rural vote-buying machines that help keep the party in power.
But some Western economists who have studied Japan's experience say the stimulus accomplished more than it is now often given credit for. At a minimum, they argue, it saved the economy from an outright, 1930s-style collapse.
Moreover, they say, any direct comparison of Japan and the United States is inevitably misleading, because Japan had spent so much more over the years on infrastructure. Having neglected its roads, bridges, water treatment plants and more over the years, the United States is bound to generate a greater payback for such spending than would Japan.
Beyond that, proponents of Keynesian-style stimulus spending in the United States say that Japan's approach failed to accomplish more not because of waste but because it was never tried wholeheartedly. They argue that instead of making one big push to pump up the economy with economic shock therapy, Japan spread its spending out over several years, diluting the effects.
After years of heavy spending in the first half of the 1990s, economists say, Japan's leaders grew concerned about growing budget deficits and cut back too soon, snuffing out the recovery in its infancy, much as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did to the American economy in 1936. Growth that, by 1996, had reached 3 percent was suffocated by premature spending cuts and tax increases, they say. While spending remained high in the late 1990s, Japan never gave the economy another full-fledged push, these economists say.
They also say that the size of Japan's apparently successful stimulus in the early 1990s suggests that the United States will need to spend far more than the current $820 billion to get results. From 1991 to 1995, Japan spent $2.1 trillion on public works, in an economy roughly half as large as that of the United States, according to the Cabinet Office.
"Stimulus worked in Japan when it was tried," said David Weinstein, a professor of Japanese economics at Columbia University. "Japan's lesson is that, if anything, the current U.S. stimulus will not be enough."
Most Japanese economists have tended to take a bleaker view of their nation's track record, saying that Japan spent more than enough money, but wasted too much of it on roads to nowhere and other unneeded projects.
Ihori, of the University of Tokyo, did a survey of public works in the 1990s, concluding that the spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, he found that the spending actually led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors. He also said job creation was too narrowly focused in the construction industry in rural areas to give much benefit to the overall economy.
He agreed with other critics that the 1990s stimulus failed because too much of it went to roads and bridges, overbuilding this already heavily developed nation. He said the United States appeared to be striking a better balance by investing in new energy and information-technology infrastructure as well as replacing aging infrastructure.
Japan's experience also seems to argue for spending heavily to promote social development. A 1998 report by the Japan Institute for Local Government, a nonprofit policy research group, found that every ¥1 trillion, or $11.1 billion, spent on social services like care for the elderly and monthly pension payments added ¥1.64 trillion in growth. Financing for schools and education delivered an even bigger boost of ¥1.74 trillion, the report found.
But every ¥1 trillion spent on infrastructure projects in the 1990s increased Japan's gross domestic product, a measure of its overall economic size, by only ¥1.37 trillion, mainly by creating jobs and other improvements like reducing travel times. Economists said the finding suggested that while infrastructure spending may yield strong results for developing nations, creating jobs in higher-paying knowledge-based services like health care and education can bring larger benefits to advanced economies like Japan, with its aging population.
"In hindsight, Japan should have built public works that address the problems it faces today, like aging, energy and food sources," said Takehiko Hobo, a professor emeritus of public finance at Shimane University in Matsue, the main city of Shimane. "This obsession with building roads is a holdover from an earlier era."
The fruits of that obsession are apparent across Shimane, a rural prefecture where Hamada is located. Every town seems to have its own art museums, domed athletic centers and government-built tourist attractions like the Nima Sand Museum, a giant hourglass housed in a glass pyramid. The prefecture, with 740,000 residents, even has three commercial airports able to handle jets, including the $250 million Hagi-Iwami Airport, which sits eerily empty, with just two flights per day.
In Hamada, residents say the city's most visible "hakomono," the Japanese equivalent of "white elephant," was the $70 million Marine Bridge, whose 1,006-foot span sat almost completely devoid of traffic on a recent morning. Built in 1999, the bridge links the city to a small, sparsely populated island already connected by a shorter bridge.
"The bridge? It's a dud," said Masahiro Shimada, 70, a retired city official who was fishing near the port. "Maybe we could use it for bungee jumping," he joked.
Koichi Matsuoka, a retired professor of policy at the University of Shimane in Hamada, said useless projects like the Marine Bridge were the reason that years of huge spending had brought few long-term benefits here. While Shimane has had the highest per capita spending on public works in Japan for the last 17 years, thanks to powerful local politicians like Noboru Takeshita, the deceased former prime minister, its per capita annual income of $26,000 ranked it 40th among Japan's 47 prefectures, Matsuoka said.
He said the spending had also left Shimane $11 billion in debt, twice the size of the prefectural government's annual budget.
Still, local officials in Hamada warn that their city's economy will collapse without public works, though they recognize that the spending cannot continue forever. They offered their own lesson to American communities in the Obama era: When you choose public works projects, be sure to get ones with lasting economic impact.
Among Hamada's many public works projects, the biggest benefits had come from the prison, the university and the Aquas aquarium, with its popular whales, they said. These had created hundreds of permanent jobs and attracted students and families with children to live in a city where nearly a third of residents were over 65.
"Roads and bridges are attractive, but they create jobs only during construction," said Shunji Nakamura, chief of the city's industrial policy section. "You need projects with good jobs that will last through a bad economy."
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Posted by: Timmy on Friday, October 24, 2008 - 12:07 AM
Politics
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While much of Japan is grappling with deepening economic turmoil, the country's dapper prime minister has come under fire for enjoying a lavish nightlife.
Since taking the helm a month ago, Taro Aso has spent all but four nights out on the town at fancy bars and eateries, according to reports in leading newspapers.
Aso's haunts include an upscale hotel bar where coffee is poured out at $15 a cup and a ritzy restaurant where the plates of grilled eel start at $175 a serving.
The opposition has seized on Aso's lifestyle, claiming that the 68-year-old political blue blood and scion of a wealthy family is out of touch with the people.
"He won't understand the real concerns of people by going to such places," Susumu Yanase, a lawmaker from the country's largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, said Wednesday.
Aso, who is well-known for enjoying cigars and meticulously tailored suits, has defended his nocturnal habits, saying visits to less-exclusive places would be a security headache for others.
Besides, he said, he is not charging the government for his fun.
"Don't you know bars at hotels are not so expensive?" Aso said Wednesday night. "Fortunately, I've got money, so I'm paying the bills myself."
Still, he is making efforts to develop a common touch. He visited a supermarket in central Tokyo on Sunday to see how shoppers were being affected by price increases.
Since taking office Sept. 24, Aso has been under pressure to lift the popularity of the ailing ruling party before he calls parliamentary elections.
The economy, however, is sputtering. Automakers are cutting production and stocks are nose-diving. The benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average fell 2.46 percent Thursday.
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Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 11:55 AM
Politics
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Taro Aso, an outspoken politician and a former foreign minister, became Japan's new prime minister Wednesday after the powerful lower house of parliament overruled the upper house's choice for a leader.
Aso handily won the vote in the lower house, where his ruling Liberal Democratic Party holds the majority.
The upper house had voted in favor of opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa.
Under Japan's constitution, though, the lower house overrules the upper one when the two cannot reach consensus.
Aso, 68, was officially declared the prime minister after a meeting between representatives from the two bodies.
Soon afterward, he named his new Cabinet.
He succeeds Yasuo Fukuda, who resigned amid plummeting approval ratings after less than a year in office. Fukuda and his Cabinet stepped down ahead of Wednesday's vote.
The new prime minister inherits an office that is expected to confront several pressing challenges immediately.
Foremost among them is the country's sagging economy. Aso advocates an increase in public spending and tax cuts to stimulate the economy.
The party is also expected to call a snap election as early as next month, in hopes that Aso's name-recognition will help the ruling party retain control of Parliament.
But the tactic can backfire, analysts say. The LDP is in the midst of a political crisis. The last two prime ministers, both from the party, resigned after less than a year in office.
Because of the turmoil within the LDP, the opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, senses a shift in political tides. A snap election could see a turn in political power in Parliament, after nearly half a century of continuous control by the LDP.
Aso, a former Olympic sharpshooter, is a Catholic in a country where only one percent of the population is of that faith. And he is also known for his verbal gaffes. He recently likened the opposition party to the Nazis.
Fukuda's popularity plummeted after he introduced a medical plan that raises premiums for people over age 75 and deducts health-care expenses from pension payments.
The government has said the plan is unavoidable in a country with one of the world's largest aging populations. Opposition parties have criticized it for its effect on one of the most vulnerable segments of society.
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In June, Japan's opposition-controlled upper house of parliament approved a motion of no-confidence in Fukuda. It was the first time a chamber of parliament has passed such a censure in the country's post-war history, but the motion was non-binding and largely symbolic.
While no-confidence motions only count in Japan when approved by the LDP-controlled lower house, analysts said it was a stinging rebuke for the prime minister.
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, September 22, 2008 - 04:56 AM
Politics
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Five candidates vied Monday for the presidency of Japan's embattled ruling party, a position that virtually guarantees the winner election as the country's next prime minister.
Former Foreign Minister Taro Aso, a brash straight-talker who has criticized China's military growth and vowed to turn around Japan's sagging economy, was widely expected to clinch the race in the first round.
Lawmakers of the Liberal Democratic Party and its rank and file members were to cast ballots later on Monday. The winner will then be the LDP's candidate for prime minister in a vote in parliament on Wednesday.
In their last campaign appearances Sunday, Aso and four other party candidates pledged to bolster the economy. The party -- which has ruled almost uninterruptedly since 1955 -- is struggling to rebuild public support and jockey for a better position in upcoming parliamentary elections, which reportedly could come as early as October.
"The greatest concern right now is the economy," Aso told a crowd of supporters outside of Tokyo in a drizzling rain. "America is facing a financial crisis ... we must not allow that to bring us down as well."
Political gridlock with the opposition has sent the party into a crisis.
The opposition Democratic Party of Japan has been making big gains and took control of the upper house of parliament in elections in July last year. It has since managed to block many of the main policy initiatives of the ruling party, and helped force out Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, in a span of less than two years.
Democratic Party leader Ichiro Ozawa, who was re-elected as his party's leader on Sunday, is calling strongly for snap elections in the powerful lower house to test the ruling party's mandate.
Polls indicate such calls are resonating with the public and the rising pressure could force the ruling party to comply. The elections do not need to be held until next September, but the prime minister has the power to call them at any time.
The abrupt resignation of Fukuda -- he said earlier this month he felt he could not deal with the opposition's uncooperative strategy -- forced the Liberal Democrats to call the vote for the party presidency.
Aso, who has led from the start, is running against economic minister Kaoru Yosano, young lawmaker Nobuteru Ishihara and two former defense ministers, Shigeru Ishiba and Yuriko Koike, who is also the first woman to run for the post.
Aso is seen as an important departure from the taciturn and often low-key Yasuo Fukuda, who was reluctant to engage the opposition and had trouble connecting with the public.
Aso is a much more colorful character.
He was on Japan's 1976 Olympic shooting team, would be Japan's first Catholic prime minister, and has made much of his love for comic books.
Aso is seen by the public as a straight talker. The party hopes that he will generate more support from both within and outside its ranks, while posing an attractive alternative to Ozawa, who is a deft political dealer and was a former Liberal Democratic Party leader before bolting in the 1990s.
Over the past two weeks, Aso has tried to counter critics who say he is too direct. He has reassured the party's conservative base that he will continue to seek a strong alliance with Washington, which has long been a cornerstone of Japanese foreign policy.
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Though he has in the past described the rise of China as a threat to Japan, he has gone out of his way recently to stress that relations are good and benefit both sides economically, although he has not backed down from his calls for more transparency regarding China's rapid military growth.
A change in leaders in the Liberal Democratic Party is not expected to ease the standoff with Ozawa's Democratic Party of Japan, however.
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Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - 01:26 AM
Politics
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A week after Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's abrupt resignation plunged Japan into political turmoil, the governing Liberal Democratic Party appears caught in a rare free-for-all, with as many as six candidates now vying for party leader and prime minister. But it is a matter of debate here whether it is a true contest or a virtual fracas, staged to build the party's flagging public support.
The flood of new candidates, including a few party veterans, the first-ever female candidate and some young political unknowns, is a startling departure from Japan's usually scripted political successions.
But it appears unlikely to change the outcome of the internal party vote on Sept. 22, which the party's heir apparent, Taro Aso, a hawkish former foreign minister, remains the heavy favorite to win.
The political melee, however, may be offering an unexpected opportunity to the Liberal Democrats, who face the biggest threat yet to their half-century of power in forthcoming national elections.
The appearance of so many candidates has suddenly turned a party vote that customarily had been a dry, backroom affair into a source of intense public excitement. Lawmakers and political analysts say some of that excitement appears likely to rub off on the Liberal Democrats themselves. In fact, the appearance of so few serious rivals to Aso among the slate of new candidates has led to suspicions that the contest is just a clever tactic by a party desperate to draw back disaffected voters.
At the very least, many people say, the party has done nothing to limit the flood of new candidates, who have drowned out coverage of the main opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan, which re-elected Ichiro Ozawa on Monday as its leader in an uncontested race.
"The LDP is using the vote to grab the public's attention," said Yasuhiro Tase, a professor of politics at Waseda University. "People see the LDP on TV all the time, and they get excited. That could help the party win."
The Liberal Democrats need all the help they can get, going up against a newly powerful Democratic Party in national lower house elections at a time when Japan's $4.7 trillion economy appears to be stalling. The party must reassure voters about its ability to steward the nation after the short governments of Fukuda and his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, both of whom resigned after less than a year in office.
While the governing party now enjoys a comfortable margin in the 480-seat lower house, many analysts say it could lose enough seats to relinquish its majority in the chamber. With the opposition Democrats already in control of the upper house, that could help turn the Liberal Democratic Party into a minority party for the first time since its creation in 1955, three years after the American occupation that followed World War II ended.
There has been speculation that the party may try to ride the current wave of public excitement to victory, dissolving Parliament and calling a national election immediately after selecting a new prime minister. That could put the election as soon as November, political analysts say.
The opposition Democrats, afraid of "disappearing from the people's sight," as a party leader, Yukio Hatoyama, put it last week, have been huddling to come up with strategies, but with few obvious results.
The party is desperate to avoid a repeat of the last lower house elections three years ago. It suffered big losses then when voter attention was absorbed by a bitter rift in the Liberal Democratic Party over a plan by Junichiro Koizumi, who was then the prime minister, to privatize the postal system.
In recent days, television has shown Aso visiting rural prefectures, where his message of increased government spending to boost the economy has found strong support. According to an informal newspaper survey by the Yomiuri, Aso has locked up the backing of most the party's prefectural chapters, who hold 141 of the 528 votes to be cast in the party election. The rest are held by Liberal Democratic lawmakers, who get one vote each.
If Aso, an outspoken conservative, does win, there are concerns that he may anger Asian neighbors and even Washington. In recent years, he drew fire for saying that Japanese colonial rule had improved literacy in Korea and Taiwan and for calling the American-led war in Iraq "childish."
Besides Aso, who is 67 and a former Olympic trap and skeet shooter, most attention has gone to Yuriko Koike, 56, a former television anchor and former national security adviser, who is seeking to become Japan's first female prime minister. Koike, who formally announced her candidacy on Monday, said she faced an uphill battle, comparing her political ambitions to Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed bid for the United States presidency.
"Hillary used the term 'glass ceiling,"' Koike told TV Asahi on Sunday. "But in Japan, it's usually an iron plate."
Despite her celebrity-like appeal, Koike is handicapped because she switched parties three times before joining the Liberal Democrats six years ago. Until Monday, she struggled to find the 20 party supporters required under the party's nominating rules.
Most of the other entrants - Shigeru Ishiba, a Washington-leaning former defense minister; Nobuteru Ishihara, son of Tokyo's governor, and Kaoru Yosano, a respected party veteran who favors tax increases to fight Japan's ballooning national deficit - lack the experience or breadth of party support to be serious contenders, lawmakers and analysts said.
In a speech, Yosano, 70, suggested Monday that he challenged Aso to bring more competition to a Liberal Democratic vote that many here had begun criticizing as boringly predictable.
"If things continue like this," Yosano warned, "won't Japanese politics lose appeal, and the LDP fade into obscurity?"
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Posted by: Timmy on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 - 01:22 PM
Politics
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In Japan the man tipped to be the country's next prime minister has offended the main opposition party by apparently likening them to the Nazis.
Taro Aso, the secretary-general of the ruling party, made the comments in a meeting with his opposition counterpart in parliament.
The opposition say that his comments were "unforgivable", but there is some dispute over exactly what Mr Aso said.
He was appointed to the Liberal Democratic Party's key post last week.
Controversial remarks
Mr Aso was holding talks with the opposition when one of their MPs declared that the electorate was shifting its support away from the governing party.
Newspapers here say that irritated Mr Aso, who replied that when people moved away from the party of government, regimes like the Nazis had come to power.
The opposition Democrats were angered by the comparison, saying they feared it could give the impression that if they took office they would embark on oppressive policies.
Mr Aso later told reporters he did not mean to liken them to Nazis.
He was trying to argue that the Democrats' efforts to block the passage of new laws could damage the reputation of politicians and lead to the emergence of forces like the Nazis.
It is not the first time the outspoken politician has made remarks that some consider offensive.
Seven years ago he said Japan should become the kind of country where "rich Jews" would want to live. More recently he made jokes about people with Alzheimer's disease.
But he is also one of Japan's most popular politicians.
The polls suggest one in four Japanese would like him to be prime minister, making him four times more popular than the man in charge at the moment.
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