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KOIZUMI'S
HOT SUMMER
Stone
soup
By Richard Hanson
In
this series:
It's
August, do you know where your party is?
If
it's my party, I do as I want to
TOKYO - A
universal children's story tells of a weary traveler -
call him Junichiro - arriving in a village on a hot
summer afternoon. Hungry, the man knocks on doors
begging for a morsel of food to eat. None was to be had.
Tired from his long day of walking, the traveler began
gathering stones in the village green. Curious villagers
watched from their windows.
"What are you
doing," one asked?
"Preparing stone soup," the
traveler said.
Baffled, one man asked, "How do
you make stone soup?"
"Well," the traveler said,
"I could use a large pot and some firewood and water."
The man fetched the requested items. By this time, the
villagers were baffled.
"Stone soup? Never heard
of such a thing," declared one fat lady. Slowly, the
traveler heated the water and added the stones he had
gathered.
A woman emerged from her house shaking
her head in doubt. "Stone soup? You should put some
radish in that soup," she said, and fetched the
vegetable. The traveler nodded. Another dared to
approach. "Some carrots and potatoes would go well in
stone soup," came the advice. Producing them for the
pot. Salt too.
One by one villagers came to look
at this stone soup, with offerings for the pot.
At last the traveler rested from his stirring
the mixture in the pot. The villagers looked on as the
traveler dipped a cup into the soup and drank. Others
soon did the same as the summer sun began to set.
"Stone soup," Junichiro the traveler declared.
In his second summer in office, Junichiro
Koizumi, Japan's chief reform soup maker (and prime
minister), has stirred his own pot in village Japan as
the villagers looked on with a mix of rapt curiosity and
some fear.
It has been 15 months since he rose
from a dark-horse candidate to president of the ruling
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). When he took office as
prime minister in April 2001, Koizumi was highly popular
among many groups of voters, women in particular.
People are curious because Japan has survived
for more than a decade on mostly thin economic and
political gruel. People want to tuck in to enjoy a
hearty dish of soup. A fortified misoshiru made
with soybean, Japan's answer to chicken soup, would do
fine. Koizumi, as a divorced bachelor, is not known for
his culinary skills. But ordinary people in Japan do
appreciate a leader who does seem to need a great deal
of help in preparing national soup.
At the risk
of beating the cooking analogy to a froth, Koizumi has
too many chefs in his kitchen stirring the pot. Within
his own party, the prime minister has fought with
factions that oppose reform of practices that favor the
powerful construction and road building industries,
which depend on central government public works
spending. The ingredients being served up are far too
disparate to feed an unruly brood of voters and special
interests.
What Koizumi's admirers fear most is
that he will be ground down by the inevitable political
battles. From that point of view, Koizumi's legislative
record has not been brilliant. Only two major packages
of bills pushed by Koizumi's reform agenda were passed
during the 192-day extended session of parliament.
The most important was to do with Japan's
mammoth post office, which is now on the track to being
privatized. Postal reform has been at the top of
Koizumi's priority ever since he served as the minister
in charge of postal services in the early 1990s. The
other involved reform of the government medical
insurance scheme. These were issues over which the
fiercest battles were fought with members of his own
party.
In his first press conference after the
Diet session closed, the prime minister attempted to
even the perceived score on the legislative record. He
did so by talking directly to his constituency leaving
little room for cross-examination by the assembled
press. Far-reaching reforms were not stalled on the
political rocks, he said.
"Some say that my
calls have been empty, but I've been implementing them
as I said I would," he said. "The Koizumi reforms are
about to take off." On the question of postal reform,
Koizumi announced that he would seek a leader of the
postal corporation from the private sector. As for
health insurance, where patients will be asked to pay 30
percent of the cost up from 20 percent, he said health
care costs would be cut, including ceilings on the costs
of treatment by setting standard fees. Right now the
total cost of treatment and test is calculated when
charging a patient.
Opposition to plans to
privatize four loss-making public highway corporations,
heavily supported by the LDP, buffeted the prime
minister. Koizumi gained points, however, by naming a
well-known staunch critic of the highway lobby, Naoki
Inose, to a seven-member board to discuss privatization
of the highway corporations. Deliberations will be held
in public.
That is the sort of gesture that has
bolstered Koizumi in the popular-support polls, which
plummeted early in the year after a rancorous battle in
the LDP led to the firing of his female foreign
minister, the popular Makiko Tanaka. It is ironic that
the central bad guy in that affair, Dietman Muneo
Suzuki, surfaced again on the last day of the
parliamentary session.
Suzuki was arrested in
April on bribery charges, some involving his influence
over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and public-works
projects in his native Hokkaido. He was rearrested last
week on further charges of bribery and remains at a
detention center assisting the authorities with their
inquiries.
At the press conference, the prime
minister was flexible in heeding warnings about
long-standing government plans regarding government
protection of ordinary bank deposits though an insurance
system if a bank fails. This has already been delayed
from an original to limit protection to only 10 million
yen per depositor per failed bank. An interim step was
implemented in April. The next stage is scheduled to be
enforced next April.
Koizumi has ordered his
administration to take steps to avoid damage to
depositors at potentially bad banks. These are banks
that probably should be allowed to die, but for the
political fact that they tend to be in districts
protected by influential members the LDP.
Koizumi loses nothing in the deal. The prime
minister in fact has long paid little attention to
financial and economic matters, preferring to leave them
to his finance minister. He gives short shrift to such
matters as the timing of implementing tax cuts. He just
wants to do the popular thing.
"There is no need
to be a stickler for a given fiscal year, so long as the
money is accounted for in the future," he told reporters
and the national audience. Koizumi is also very flexible
these days about sticking to a ceiling on the issue of
new government bonds to finance deficit spending. Money
is money. If a 30 trillion yen ceiling needs to be
breached, so be it. Japan's national debt is already too
large for ordinary voters to comprehend, anyway.
There is far more clarity in Koizumi's view of
the possibility of a reshuffle within his cabinet come
this September. The prime minister launched his first
cabinet with the intention of avoiding frequent cabinet
changes. He has so far been true to his word. The only
major replacement was his foreign minister, Makiko
Tanaka. He replaced her with another of his female
cabinet ministers, Yoriko Kawaguchi, who has developed a
good reputation in diplomatic circles.
Koizumi
will agree to obligatory changes in ministers
representing his coalition partners, the New Komeito and
the New Conservative Party. He appears determined,
however, to maintain in the cabinet and in senior party
positions in the LDP people who are on the same
wavelength as is regarding future reform measures within
the government.
This recipe annoys his rivals no
end. Koizumi displays a remarkable disregard for the old
guard of the LDP when it comes to maintaining his hold
on the Prime Minister's Office. This is in tune with his
self-image, cosmetic as it may be at times, of the lone
and hungry weary traveler of the byways and the highways
of politics.
For only he knows the recipe for
stone soup. And the village people seem to like it.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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