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 Topic: PoliticsThe new items published under this topic are as follows.
Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, August 29, 2010 - 02:58 AM
Politics
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The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.
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Read full article: 'New Dissent in Japan Is Loudly Anti-Foreign' (7087 bytes more)  
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Posted by: Timmy on Friday, August 27, 2010 - 01:17 PM
Politics
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After just three months in office, Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan faces a challenge from a scandal-tainted power broker within his own party in a leadership race that could hamper the government’s response to a debilitating economic slowdown.
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Read full article: 'In Japan, Party Ex-Leader Will Challenge Premier' (2231 bytes more)
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Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, June 09, 2010 - 03:09 AM
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Japan’s new prime minister named a cabinet on Tuesday aimed at refocusing his governing party on the nation’s huge political and economic problems and making a break with the financial scandals that dogged his predecessor.
In his inaugural news conference, Prime Minister Naoto Kan vowed to regain political momentum for his Democratic Party, which lost public support after his predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama, squandered a historic election mandate with broken promises and indecisive leadership. Mr. Hatoyama was driven to resign last week by plunging approval ratings.
Mr. Kan also promised to tackle problems like poverty and Japan’s growing national debt in creating what he called a “society with the minimum amount of unhappiness.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Kan, 63, Japan’s fifth new prime minister in four years, was officially sworn into office by Emperor Akihito during a ceremony at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
There were also early signs that Japan’s scandal-weary voters were warming to Mr. Kan, a straight-talking former civic activist. Polls have shown a bounce for his party, and T-shirts appeared in Tokyo stores with a twist on an English-language slogan, “Yes We Kan.”
Mr. Kan, a veteran of Japan’s political opposition, kept largely the same lineup as the Hatoyama government, signaling that he would continue the party’s efforts to shake up Japan’s unresponsive political system. But he also added several younger members as he strives to win back voters ahead of parliamentary elections next month.
“This cabinet is youthful and fresh, and filled with people who love to work,” said Yoshito Sengoku, the newly appointed chief cabinet secretary.
One new face is Renho Murata, a 42-year-old half-Japanese, half-Taiwanese former television announcer who won attention last year when she grilled bureaucrats during an inquiry into wasteful spending. Ms. Murata, who usually goes by Renho, was named minister in charge of administrative reform, giving her a leading role in the Democrats’ pledge to rein in the nation’s powerful bureaucracy.
Yoshihiko Noda, 53, a fiscal hawk, was named finance minister, in a sign that the new government will seek to restrain Japan’s ballooning government debt, already twice the size of the nation’s $5 trillion economy.
Mr. Kan kept the previous cabinet’s foreign and defense ministers, who helped negotiate a deal last month to relocate a United States air base on Okinawa. On Tuesday, Mr. Kan reiterated his intention to honor that agreement, while trying to find other ways to reduce the American military burden on the southern island.
Mr. Kan said he would seek to meet with President Obama during a Group of 8 summit meeting later this month in Canada. He appears keen to keep smoother ties with Washington than did his predecessor, at a time when the region also faces increased tensions from the sinking of a South Korean warship in March, apparently by a North Korean torpedo.
Domestic news media attention was also focused on the omission from the new lineup of one face in particular, Ichiro Ozawa, the governing party’s shadowy power broker and its secretary general under Mr. Hatoyama.
A gifted political tactician, Mr. Ozawa is credited with engineering last summer’s landslide election victory, which ended a half-century of virtual one-party rule here. But his backroom deal-making became the focus of a series of financing scandals that undermined Mr. Hatoyama, who was also investigated for misreported political contributions from his mother.
Since his election by Parliament on Friday, Mr. Kan has reshuffled top party posts in an apparent effort to distance himself from Mr. Ozawa. He replaced Mr. Ozawa as secretary general, the party’s No. 2 post, with Yukio Edano, 46, a prominent bureaucracy fighter in the Hatoyama government who has been a critic of Mr. Ozawa’s influence.
“From today, we will no longer accept contributions from corporations and groups,” Mr. Edano told reporters. “We must regain public trust in the Democratic Party.”
Over the weekend, public opinion polls by major newspapers found a larger-than-expected bounce for the Democrats’ approval ratings, which jumped to the mid-30s from around 20 percent after Mr. Kan took over.
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, May 31, 2010 - 05:52 AM
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Japan's socialist party has voted to leave the ruling coalition because of a row over a US base in Okinawa.
The Social Democratic Party (SDP) had opposed PM Yukio Hatoyama's decision not to move the US Futenma airbase off the southern Japanese island.
On Friday Mr Hatoyama fired SDP chief Mizuho Fukushima from her ministerial post over her stance on the issue.
The SDP has few seats in parliament but the coalition deal secured the ruling party a majority in the upper house.
The decision came at a meeting of senior party officials.
"We will leave [the coalition] but we will explore relations with other parties in both houses of parliament," SDP secretary-general Yasumasa Shigeno told journalists.
The ruling Democrats have a large majority in the lower house, which they can use to force legislation through the upper house.
But the SDP's departure will come as a blow to Mr Hatoyama, whose approval ratings have been plummeting.
He also faces his first electoral test in July since last year's election, with polls for the upper house.
Ms Fukushima was fired as consumer affairs minister after she refused to sign off on the Futenma deal.
Mr Hatoyama had said during his election campaign that he would revisit the issue with the US - but then confirmed last week that the existing agreement to relocate the controversial base to the north of the island would stand.
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Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, May 23, 2010 - 10:03 AM
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Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has apologised for not keeping an election promise to move a US military base from Okinawa.
Mr Hatoyama travelled to the island and met local governor Hirokazu Nakaima.
Like many locals, the governor is opposed to the US presence and said the prime minister's decision would be "difficult to accept".
Japan and the US, allies since the end of World War II, say the base is needed to guarantee regional security.
The prime minister promised to move the base off the island during the campaign for last year's election which swept his Democratic Party of Japan to power.
But he said that after holding talks within Japan and with the US, the Futenma base had to remain on Okinawa although it would move to the less populated coastal district of Henoko - in line with a plan announced in 2006.
Humiliating climbdown
He said that the base was needed because the "security environment in East Asia remains fragile", pointing to heightened tensions in the Korean peninsular.
"I apologise to people in Okinawa as I could not keep to my word," the prime minister said.
"I must tell you that your decision is extremely regrettable and very difficult to accept," a grim-faced Mr Nakaima replied.
Outside, demonstrators chanted: "Hatoyama go home."
Last month, nearly 100,000 people staged a protest on the southern island, demanding that the base be removed.
Islanders have been angered by incidents involving US troops based there, including the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Japanese girl and a helicopter crash in 2004.
Other complaints have focused on noise levels and objections to the US military use of Japanese land.
The row has also damaged Tokyo's relationship with the US.
The BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says it is a humiliating climbdown for Mr Hatoyama.
Our correspondent says the search for an alternative location has proved fruitless.
Polls suggest Mr Hatoyama has been losing popularity in recent months and analysts say this decline is likely to be exacerbated by his U-turn over Okinawa.
Elections to the upper house of parliament are due in July.
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Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - 12:32 PM
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Japan's prime minister is in a world of political hurt right now. The latest poll numbers by the country's largest daily newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, showed 24 percent of those polled approve of Yukio Hatoyama's performance, a nine-point drop from a month earlier, while 67 percent disapprove of him.
So when Hatoyama recently opened the doors of his official residence to serve Japanese barbeque to ordinary voters for an event called the "Real Hato Café," his earnest effort to talk to ordinary citizens didn't grab the attention of critic Don Konishi -- but his choice of clothing did.
A multi-colored, throwback to the 1980s fashion disaster, Konishi explained, as he noted the prime minister's red, yellow, green, purple and blue-checked plaid shirt. The critic wrote a public condemnation about the shirt in a national magazine and warned the country that the multi-colored get-up represented what the poll numbers already show: Hatoyama is out of touch.
"This shirt comes from the '80s or '90s. His ideas and philosophy are old. Japan is facing a crisis and we can't overcome it with a prime minister like this."
It's the latest crime in a long fashion rap sheet, said Konishi, as he highlighted other multi-colored shirts, mauve coats, and what Konishi calls the biggest faux pas -- the hearts and pink blazer outfit.
On the day Konishi spoke with CNN, he wore white-rimmed glasses, silver shoes and a small brimmed hat.
"A fashion designer like me can wear this, but not the leader of Japan," he said.
Konishi feels so strongly about Hatoyama because the country felt passionately about the prime minister, who stormed into power last August in a historic wave of voter discontent. The Democratic Party of Japan unseated the Liberal Democratic Party, a ruling party that held power in the country for nearly 50 continuous years.
In office, the prime minister and his wife have been a fascinating new sort of first couple for Japan.
Mrs. Hatoyama, a published author, had previously published a tale in which she wrote that she had lived a previous life and in it, met American actor Tom Cruise. In another public admonition, she told a talk show that she gets energy by "eating the sun." The prime minister, shortly after his election, became a radio sensation when an old song of his -- a lounge tune recorded decades ago called "Take Heart" -- hit the airwaves.
In the early months, the country embraced the quirks of the Hatoyamas. But then frustrating stalemates began to crop up in his administration -- primarily, criticism over Hatoyama's handling of the move of a U.S. base on the island of Okinawa.
Those polled in The Yomiuri Shimbun said he has been wishy-washy on finding a solution for the Okinawans.
The criticism of the shirt may seem catty and unimportant, but it's a bad sign, said Keith Henry, a government affairs consultant at Asia Strategy.
"As a politician, you want to have the focus on policy and your agenda. I think the press and the Japanese people have lost patience with him; patience to the extent that they're no longer paying attention to his policy proposals because no one has faith in his ability to implement them."
"The press and the media are starting to nitpick on, really, things that are irrelevant to the future of the Japanese people but I would expect that to continue. Whether he's not dressing properly, goes to the wrong restaurants, spends too much on dinner, what his wife is wearing. It goes from the politics of policy to the politics of personality. And that doesn't help Japan."
The poll numbers are not lost on the man who is the subject of the study. Hatoyama told reporters: "I take it seriously that my approval ratings are down significantly. But I'm not going to quit."
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Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, May 09, 2010 - 03:46 AM
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Officials from a Japanese island have rejected the prime minister's proposal that they host US troops relocated from an unpopular base in Okinawa.
The move by the mayors of Tokunoshima is a further blow to PM Yukio Hatoyama's effort to deal with the controversial Futenma US marine base.
Earlier this week, he conceded that his election pledge to close the facility completely was "unfeasible".
Okinawa is home to more than half the 47,000 American troops based in Japan.
Mr Hatoyama told the three mayors from Tokunoshima he would be "grateful" if they would accept some of the facilities he wishes to be relocated from Okinawa.
But one of the mayors, Kosuke Ohisa, told him the island was "categorically opposed to the relocation".
When he asked whether he could visit the island to negotiate further, Mr Hatoyama was told: "We cannot meet you."
Poll risk
The prime minister had initially said he wanted to close the Futenma base entirely, and had given himself until the end of May to resolve the issue.
But on Tuesday, he conceded that it was impossible to close it completely on the grounds of national security, prompting angry reactions.
The BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says time is running out for Mr Hatoyama and his options are narrowing.
His apparent dithering could cost him his job, with elections for Japan's upper house of parliament due in July, says our correspondent.
Mr Hatoyama's approval ratings have plummeted in recent weeks and support for his centre-left government has been undermined.
Last month, nearly 100,000 people staged a protest on the southern island, demanding that the Futenma base be removed.
Islanders have been angered by incidents involving US troops based there, including the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Japanese girl and a helicopter crash in 2004.
Other complaints have focused on noise levels and objections to the US military use of Japanese land.
The row has also damaged Tokyo's relationship with the US.
Okinawa is the focal point of the security treaty between the US and Japan which has balanced military power in north-east Asia since World War II.
Under the pact, Japan - which is prevented from maintaining a war-ready army by its constitution - subsidises the US military presence while the US guarantees Japan's security.
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Posted by: Timmy on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 07:30 AM
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What does a political party built on power and patronage, with few philosophical or ideological underpinnings, do when it is defeated and driven into the opposition? In the case of Japan’s once formidable Liberal Democratic Party, it implodes like an old Las Vegas hotel being demolished.
This has led to hand-wringing in the Japanese press that the nation may be headed toward another period of de facto one-party government, only this time with the ascendant Democratic Party in charge. But optimists here say the Liberal Democrats’ decline may be just the first step toward a much bigger political change: the destruction of the old structures of Japan’s stunted democracy and the rise of new, more ideologically coherent parties in a livelier and more competitive political system.
To see how far the Liberal Democrats have fallen, look no further than the party’s cavernous headquarters in central Tokyo. The nine-story building, once the unchallenged seat of political power during much of the Liberal Democrats’ half-century rule of Japan, has fallen eerily quiet and underused since the party’s historic election defeat last summer.
The party has become an empty shell of its former self. Thrust into the role of opposition party for the first time since its creation in 1955 (aside from a brief interlude in 1993), and with its number of lawmakers cut in half by last August’s humiliating defeat, the party appears demoralized, devoid of fresh ideas and threatened by defections. Four lawmakers have indeed defected since the election, and speculation is rife that more will follow. The party’s public approval ratings have never bounced back from the high teens, even as last summer’s victor, the Democratic Party, has suffered a series of money scandals. Earlier this month, the party’s own internal newspaper, the weekly Liberal Democrat, even warned that the party had virtually no hope of survival.
“We haven’t had experience as an opposition party,” said Sadakazu Tanigaki, the Liberal Democratic Party chief and a former finance minister, who sat in a room filled with the unsmiling portraits of past party leaders. “People are running around wondering, ‘What do we do?’ ”
For now, the contrast with the newly incumbent Democrats could not be starker. Despite fund-raising scandals, the Democrats still seem to brim with enthusiasm for their agenda of change, evident in their bustling, overcrowded offices just a block away, on a few floors of a building with a Pentax sign on top.
With the Liberal Democrats in such obvious disarray, some now fear Japan faces the prospect of one-party rule by the Democrats. But many analysts and politicians say they do not expect the Democrats’ hegemony to last long either, because they face many of the same weaknesses as the Liberal Democrats.
“The Democratic Party has the same problem as the Liberal Democratic Party, in that both are broad tents filled with politicians of all ideological stripes,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a professor of politics at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. “So long as Japan lacks modern political parties, it will lack true political competition.”
The Liberal Democrats, Mr. Sasaki and others say, ruled through much of the cold war with a hazily conservative platform built upon the bedrock of a close alliance with the United States, which also became a market for its exports. At the same time, it built up an imposing political machine that redistributed the fruits of Japan’s postwar economic miracle to voters in less developed rural regions.
Without that patronage machine, the party risks flying apart. In that, analysts say, it is more like the PRI in Mexico, which has yet to recover from its battering in 2000 after more than 70 uninterrupted years in power, than like political parties in the United States and Europe.
“We never found a new direction after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Mr. Tanigaki, the party chief, “and we are regretting that now.” The party’s shortcomings have become painfully apparent since its defeat, as it has failed to offer a clear-cut alternative to the Democrats’ vaguely left-leaning plans to offer more aid to families and become more independent from Washington.
Instead, the Liberal Democrats have adopted a short-term strategy of attacking the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, for the funding scandals involving him and the Democrats’ power broker, Ichiro Ozawa. This has brought some support from voters, seen on Sunday when a Liberal Democratic candidate won an election for governor of Nagasaki prefecture. But political analysts and politicians say the approach could backfire if it appeared to lead Japan back into its former political paralysis.
Indeed, there is growing frustration among conservatives at the party’s inability to change. This became apparent last September when Mr. Tanigaki, 65, defeated a younger opponent, Taro Kono, 47, to lead the defeated party. Many younger lawmakers saw this as a move by the party’s old guard to squelch Mr. Kono’s promises to rejuvenate the party by such steps as abolishing its entrenched factions.
Mr. Kono said the Liberal Democrats’ only hope of victory was to reinvent themselves as a truly conservative party, with a clear agenda of small government and close ties with the United States. But he sounds a very pessimistic note about the party’s future, so long as the old guard holds sway.
He said the Liberal Democrats faced their next big test in parliamentary elections in July, when another defeat could prove a death blow.
“People don’t want the old Liberal Democratic Party,” Mr. Kono said. “They want us to come back as a new, healthier party.”
But even if the Democrats win, they may soon face similar problems of internal divisions over policy, especially if they move beyond their current manifesto and into trickier issues like whether to raise taxes or cut social programs to rein in the budget deficits. When that happens, say analysts and politicians, the party could also break apart, paving the way for the radical reshuffling of parties along ideological lines that would complete the political revolution begun last summer.
“After the breakup of the Liberal Democrats, it will be the Democrats’ turn to fight internally and split,” Kotaro Tamura, a Liberal Democratic lawmaker who left in December to join the incumbent Democrats. “That will be a big moment for Japanese democracy.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 05:03 AM
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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
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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
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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
Politics
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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
Politics
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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
Politics
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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
Politics
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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
Politics
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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
Politics
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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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