TOKYO - Following in the footsteps of his
German counterpart Gerhard Schroeder, Japanese
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took a
make-or-break political gamble - and in an equally
unorthodox manner - in a desperate bid to save his
reform drive from the jaws of death.
The
political fortunes of the leaders of the world's
number two and three economies, as well as the
fate of their reform programs, are at stake in the
elections they called for next month. The
elections will be held only a week apart.
Apart from their similarities in political
style shown in recent weeks, however, Koizumi and
Schroeder have adopted sharply contrasting foreign
policies on the two interwoven issues of Iraq and
relations with the United States - their
countries' most important ally during the Cold
War. It can be easily imagined that
President George W Bush has a strong desire to see
the staunchly pro-US Koizumi survive the upcoming
vote. Not Schroeder - to say the least.
Schroeder can find an ally in Japan over
Iraq and the US: Katsuya Okada, leader of the main
opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) now
challenging Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP). Like Schroeder, Okada is critical of what
is widely perceived as Bush's unilateralism. The
DPJ leader condemns Koizumi's foreign policy as
just following big brother US and calls for the
withdrawal of Japanese troops from Iraq by the end
of this year.
The big
gamble Koizumi took a political gamble by
dissolving the Lower House of the diet, Japan's
parliament, on August 8, only hours after the
postal privatization bills, the centerpiece of his
reform program, were voted down by the Upper House
by a vote of 125 to 108. Although Koizumi's LDP
and its coalition partner, New Komeito party,
together hold a majority in the Upper House, a
larger number of LDP lawmakers than the party
leadership had expected voted against the bills.
Koizumi cannot dissolve the Upper House, so he
uses the election as both a means to cleanse the
party of dissidents and to revitalize his reforms.
The Upper House rejection of the bills
followed weeks of fierce internal feuding within
the LDP between supporters of his reform programs
and what he calls "old-guard conservatives" or
"resistance forces". The bills had been passed by
the Lower House, the more powerful of the two diet
chambers, on July 5, on the strength of the
LDP-led coalition's majority, but by a narrow
margin of only five votes because of a revolt by
about three dozen LDP lawmakers.
Koizumi,
who had claimed that the killing of the postal
bills would be tantamount to a no-confidence vote
against him, was quick to carry out his threat to
dissolve the Lower House for a snap general
election to seek a new mandate for reform
programs, especially his pet project to privatize
Japan Post, effectively the world's largest
financial institution with about US$3 trillion in
assets. Koizumi vowed to step down if the LDP-New
Komeito coalition failed to secure a majority in
the Upper House.
When he dissolved the
Lower House, Koizumi came under a barrage of
criticisms, even from within his LDP, that
dissolving the Lower House on the grounds of
government-sponsored bills being voted down in the
Upper House was an unconstitutional act. Koizumi
brushed away the charge.
In the general
election set for September 11, all 480 seats are
up for grabs. The LDP has 212 seats going into the
vote, excluding the 37 seats held by dissenters,
and New Komeito party has 34 seats. The LDP and
New Komeito party have a combined 246 seats, only
five seats more than the 241 required for a
majority. The DPJ has 175 seats going into the
election.
Koizumi seems to have wind in
his sails. Since he dissolved the Lower House,
public support for him has been rising sharply,
according to public opinion polls by Japanese
newspapers. But there are still three weeks to go
before the vote and public opinion is volatile.
Autumn winds could suddenly blow in the opposite
direction.
Foreign policies
issues In stark contrast with the German
leader, Koizumi has been one of the world's
staunchest supporters - along with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair - of Bush's anti-terrorism
campaign, launched in the wake of the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center in New York and the Pentagon, and of his
Iraq war.
The Koizumi government enacted
two new controversial laws to enable the
Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to assist US-led
military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under
the first law, enacted in October 2001, only weeks
after September 11, SDF naval vessels were sent to
the Indian Ocean to support US-led operations in
Afghanistan, where the Islamic fundamentalist
Taliban regime had been ousted from power.
Under the second law, enacted in August
2003, the Koizumi government at the end of that
year dispatched several hundred ground troops to
Samawah, southern Iraq, on a humanitarian and
reconstruction mission. In December 2004, the
government extended the SDF dispatch to Iraq by
another year, until the end of this year. The
decision came despite strong objections from
opposition parties and amid growing concerns about
the safety of the Japanese troops. Opinion polls,
conducted by news media when the extension was
decided, showed that a majority of Japanese were
against the decision.
Japan and the US are
now moving to strengthen security and defense ties
based on the bilateral security treaty, including
the development and deployment of a
missile-defense system to counter the threats of
missile attacks from North Korea, which has an
estimated 200 or so Rodong missiles capable of
striking almost all of Japanese territory.
The two countries are expected to reach an
agreement later this year on the realignment of US
military bases in Japan. The Bush administration
is reviewing the role of these bases as part of
its military's worldwide "transformation". The
role the US expects Japan to play will be that of
a "power projection hub" to ensure stability in an
"arc of instability", an area stretching from
Northeast Asia to the Middle East via Southeast
Asia and South Asia.
China, a rapidly
ascending military and economic power, is alarmed
by the US military transformation now underway.
There are suspicions in China that the real US
motives for the sweeping overhaul of its
military's global posture might be what some call
the "soft containment" of China.
The state
of Japan-US relations is now one of the best in
history, backed by a personal friendship between
Koizumi and Bush. Their chemistry seems good. In
stark contrast, Japan's relations with Asian
neighbors, especially China and South Korea, have
been in recent months at their lowest points.
Japan has seen relations with China and
South Korea strained seriously by such issues as
Koizumi's repeated visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni
Shrine, territorial disputes and Tokyo's bid for a
permanent seat on the United Nations Security
Council. China and South Korea regard the shrine,
where some class-A Japanese war criminals,
including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, are
enshrined with the 2.4 million war dead, as a
symbol of Japan's militaristic past. Japan's
public opinion is split down the middle over
Koizumi's visits to the shrine.
Many
experts in Japan take Koizumi to task for the
current stalemate in ties with the two Asian
neighbors, with some even accusing the US-first
prime minister of lacking a clear Asia policy.
DPJ's foreign policies All Japanese
political parties have made public their
manifestoes, or policy platforms, for the
September 11 general election.
In its
manifesto, the LDP puts strengthening Japan-US
alliance first. Improving ties with China and
South Korea comes next. In a significant
difference with the LDP, the DPJ puts Asia policy
first and then Japan-US relations. "It is one of
Japan's top priority foreign-policy tasks to
rebuild relations with China," the DPJ manifesto
says. The manifesto also indirectly criticizes
Koizumi for lacking a relationship of trust with
top Chinese leaders and calls for the construction
of a state-run alternative facility to Yasukuni
Shrine to honor the war dead, an idea strongly
supported by South Korea but balked at by Koizumi.
Regarding ties with the US, the DPJ's
policy platform does not use the word "strengthen"
as the LDP manifesto does but instead says it
wants to see an "evolution" of the bilateral ties
and calls for a review of bilateral arrangements,
including that of the Status of Forces Agreement
(SOFA) within three years.
The SOFA, which
sets the legal status of American service members
stationed in Japan, has been criticized by many in
Japan as an unfair arrangement in recent years,
especially since the 1995 gang rape of an
elementary school girl by three American soldiers
in Okinawa. But the Japanese government has been
negative about any review of the arrangement out
of political consideration to the US.
Former DPJ leader Naoto Kan once advocated
withdrawal of US Marines to US territories such as
Guam and Hawaii from the southernmost Japanese
island of Okinawa - where the bulk of more than
40,000 American service members deployed in Japan,
mostly Marines, are stationed.
On Iraq,
the DPJ's manifesto stipulates that the SDF troops
should be pulled out by the end of this year, when
the current, one-year mandate of their deployment
in that country is to expire. Since the Iraq war,
the DPJ has claimed that there was no "legitimate
reason" for launching the war and that Japanese
troops' participation in the US-led multinational
forces was in breach of the war-renouncing,
post-war Japanese constitution.
But the
DPJ is not opposed to other relations with the US.
In July last year, DPJ leader Okada visited the
US. It was his first overseas trip since taking
the helm of the opposition party, apparently
reflecting his recognition of the importance of
Japan-US relations should the DPJ take power.
Okada's apparent favorite in the US presidential
election in November was Republican President
Bush's challenger John F Kerry, who is a Democrat.
Okada participated in the Democratic Party
convention in Boston during his US trip for talks
with Kerry's staff, although he also held talks
with some Bush administration officials later.
Differences between Koizumi and
Okada The political backgrounds of Koizumi
and Okada may help explain their foreign-policy
differences.
Former prime minister Takeo
Fukuda, Koizumi's mentor, effectively inherited
the LDP faction founded by Nobusuke Kishi, who
served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960. The
LDP faction Fukuda once led is now chaired by
former prime minister Yoshiro Mori and called the
Mori faction. Koizumi had belonged to the faction,
but left it, albeit nominally, after becoming
prime minister.
Kishi was a hawkish
politician and one of the staunchest US allies. He
served as commerce and industry minister in the
Tojo government. After Japan's defeat in World War
II, Kishi was arrested as a suspected class-A war
criminal, although he was indemnified and released
later. He stepped down after railroading revisions
to the 1952 Japan-US security treaty through the
diet in 1960 amid raucous diet debate and
tumultuous demonstrations across the country,
mainly by leftist students and labor unionists.
In the largest anti-government protests after
the war, some protesters stormed the diet building
and clashed with riot police. A female University
of Tokyo student died in the protest. The
revisions were aimed at correcting what was widely
perceived as the unequal nature of the treaty in
favor of the US, and the protests were more
against Kishi himself for his high-handed handling
of the revision issue than against the specific
contents of the revised treaty.
DPJ leader
Okada had belonged to the LDP faction led then by
former prime minister Noboru Takeshita before
leaving the party along with Ichiro Ozawa, now
deputy DPJ leader, and others in 1993 to form a
now-defunct new party. Their departure from the
LDP led to the party's devastating defeat that
year in the general election and its first loss of
power since its 1955 founding. The Takeshita
faction was a successor to the LDP faction founded
by former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, who
reopened Japan's diplomatic relations with China
in 1972 and is still revered in China as a
"benefactor who dug a well for water-thirsty
people".
Traditionally, the faction
inherited by Kishi, Fukuda and others, including
current leader Mori has been the most hawkish of
all LDP factions and also pro-US, while the
faction inherited by Tanaka, Takeshita and two
other former prime ministers - Keizo Obuchi and
Ryutaro Hashimoto - has been pro-China.
There is much more to it. Koizumi served
as a secretary to Fukuda before being first
elected to the diet. Tanaka and Fukuda were
implacable political rivals within the LDP. Their
power struggle driven by strong personal animosity
was so fierce that it is still remembered as
"kaku-fuku war".
Concerns among
conservatives Despite its campaign
rhetoric, the DPJ will become more realistic if it
takes power. It is common sense in Japanese
political circles that any prime minister would
not survive long without the backing of the US
administration.
Former prime minister
Tomiichi Murayama's demarche is a good example.
When he became the first socialist Japanese prime
minister in nearly five decades in the mid-1990s,
Murayama made an about-face in his socialist
party's security policy and declared that his
government would accept the existence of the SDF
and maintain the Japan-US security alliance.
Before Murayama became prime minister, the
socialist party had insisted that the SDF was
unconstitutional and that the Japan-US security
alliance be scrapped.
The socialist party
had been the biggest opposition party for decades
after the end of World War II but it is now in
danger of extinction due to loss of support. Many
former socialist party members now belong to the
DPJ.
To be sure, the DPJ may just be
engaged in the tactic of playing up policy
differences with the LDP in hopes of boosting its
prospects in the upcoming general election. But
concerns about the DPJ's foreign policy are
growing in Japan, especially among conservatives.
The conservative Japanese daily Yomiuri
voiced concerns about the DJP's foreign policy. In
an editorial on August 20, the paper said: "We
wonder if there is no risk of the Japan-US
alliance being shaken by the DPJ's stance. The DPJ
needs to give a clearer explanation (about its
stance)."
The Washington Post has thrown
its support behind Koizumi. It said in an
editorial on August 15 that Koizumi's defeat would
be "awkward" for the US. "Not only is the main
opposition party in Japan muddled on economics,
but it is critical of the prime minister's pro-US
foreign policy and promises to withdraw Japanese
troops from Iraq," the paper said.
"An
election that endorsed those policies would be
troubling, as would one that allowed a weakened
LDP to remain in office in exchange for ditching
Mr Koizumi. With luck, Mr Koizumi will convince
the voters that his stand on reform is worth
backing. He has a month to make his case."
In an apparent attempt to dispel domestic
concerns about his foreign policy ahead of the
September 11 vote by emphasizing the importance he
attaches to ties with the US, Okada said on August
16 that he will choose the US as the destination
for his first overseas trip if he becomes the next
prime minister. But at the same time Okada made it
clear that he would convey a message to Bush: his
DPJ government has no intention of budging on the
issue of pulling SDF personnel out of Iraq at the
end of this year.
Hisane Masaki
is a Tokyo-based scholar, journalist and
commentator on international politics and economy.
Masaki's e-mail address is yiu45535@nifty.com
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