:: Nihal Singh

Can new govt make Japan young, happy?

S. Nihal Singh

Sept.03 : After the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) landslide victory, everyone in the country and much of the world is asking the question, what next? The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has ruled Japan almost uninterrupted for more than half-a-century and the task before the new rulers is nothing short of reinventing Japan.

The LDP has much to be proud of. It gave the country the economic miracle after its defeat in World War II, becoming the second economic power in the world. But its warts began to show in the early 90s when the economic bubble burst. By then the LDP had become a party of hereditary successions in cosy relationships with corporations and a powerful bureaucracy that made policy and feathered its own nest.

Junichiro Koizumi came as a breath of fresh air because he challenged his party’s cosy arrangements and appealed to the wider electorate. Frustrated, he called a snap election on the issue of privatising the postal service, a traditional milch cow for LDP, to win a landslide in 2005. But he was to leave office two years later and he and his ostensibly rejuvenated party never fulfilled their promise.

Meanwhile, the world economic crisis set off by the US sub-prime regime was hollowing out the LDP, led by a succession of pedigreed politicians beset by scandals, and the DPJ, itself the victim of a mini-scandal, was riding high. Sunday’s result was essentially a vote against the LDP, rather than an enthusiastic endorsement of the DPJ and its policies. It was a vote for change.

The real point is how much change the DPJ can bring about. It has promised to turn the focus away from corporations to the citizen, promising a better social security net, and child allowances to encourage couples to have babies in a shrinking and aging country. It says it will take control of policymaking from the hands of bureaucrats. While retaining the important military links with the United States, it wants a "more equal" relationship and promises to review American military bases. It wants a closer relationship with Asian countries. But it has already modified its more radical stances as it moved closer to power.

It is estimated that a quarter of Japan will be 65 years or older in 2015. There is even a Happiness Realisation Party that wants to double the country’s population by 2030. Indeed, the increasingly greying population will have serious consequences for its pension scheme and competitiveness. Japanese have traditionally shunned large-scale immigration because of the homogeneous nature of their country.

What the DPJ is able to achieve remains to be seen, but an entire era in post-war Japan is over. Unlike in the past, inequalities have grown. Globalisation has also ended the treasured lifetime jobs offered by the country’s corporations, with unemployment having reached the highest figure since the war although still modest by world standards. And, most importantly, the young have changed, with the ideal of backbreaking school and university education leading to a blue-collar job in the bureaucracy no longer the attractive model it was.

The era of the LDP’s pork-barrel rural works to support its main base is over but it is not quite clear what will replace it. For one thing, how will the DPJ raise funds for its generous promises to help young families and the common man? It says it will find money by enforcing administrative efficiency and through cost cuts, promises that are easier to make than to fulfil. And how much credibility will the DPJ have in getting rid of the entrenched system of hereditary politicians when its leader, Yukio Hatoyama, is himself the grandson of a Prime Minister?

The DPJ is a rather new party formed in 1998 by defectors from the LDP, socialists and younger conservatives and will need to reconcile its own differences. An earlier attempt by the Opposition to run a government in Japan lasted barely 11 months. The party is in better shape now and the size of the mandate it has received is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Mr Yukio will face a few crucial tests soon. Japan’s relationship with China has always been a major element in its worldview. It has been traditionally troubled by the wartime record and Chinese manipulation of that past for its own political ends. The explosive growth of Sino-Japanese trade and economic relations has not deterred clouds to form in the relationship, symbolised most often by prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni shrine containing the remains of the war dead, including those of the Japanese condemned by the victors of the war. For the Chinese, such visits, defiantly conducted by Mr Junichiro among others, are signs of militaristic trends.

The DPJ’s approach to China will be softer and friendlier, but that will not preclude tensions and irritations in the future. For one thing, China is set to overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy next year. Besides, China’s growing economic and military power has set alarm bells ringing in Tokyo and new efforts are aimed at ensuring Japan’s relevance to Asia and the world. Curiously, Mr Yukio has illustrated his preference for an East Asia grouping by going back to an Austrian nobleman with part-Japanese ancestry.

Mr Yukio has promised to end the Afghanistan refuelling mission of Japanese naval ships in the Indian Ocean. While his predecessors were toying with the idea of amending the American-imposed constitution to have greater freedom in sending troops abroad, the DPJ’s focus will be more on widening the ambit of Japanese influence in Asia. In any event, the party’s control of both Houses will enable it speedily to push through reforms.

For the moment Japan is revelling in the change, celebrating the end of the old era. The average Japanese does not have great expectations of the DPJ, which will serve as a shock absorber for the inevitable disappointments with the new rulers that lie in the future.