Page 2 of 2 The people
speak; Abe's not listening
By Hisane Masaki
of small parties and conservatives
in the DPJ. Some analysts say the results of
Sunday's election could lead to a new wave of
realignments in Japanese politics.
The
first major legislative test for the Abe
government is likely to come during an
extraordinary Diet session expected to convene
this autumn. The 2001 Anti-Terrorism Special
Measures Law is to expire on November 1. The Abe
government plans to extend the law to keep ships
deployed in the Indian Ocean to fuel US-led
coalition vessels supplying
operations in Afghanistan. When the law was
extended last October for a year, the DPJ, along
with smaller opposition parties, voted against the
move.
Insecurity and
distrust His young, fresh image, telegenic
appearance and hardline stance toward North Korea
over the Stalinist state's nuclear development and
past abductions of Japanese citizens swept Abe to
power last September, replacing his flamboyant and
popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi. But Abe
has always been at risk of suffering by
comparison. Abe has also faced what the opposition
camp and critics refer to as the negative legacy
of Koizumi's market-friendly reforms: the
perceived widening of the gap between rich and
poor.
Unlike Koizumi, whose combative
style earned him the nicknames of "Lion Heart" and
"Maverick" and helped him keep high popularity,
Abe never roars, putting on a stiff upper lip.
But Abe's soft-spokenness largely masks,
at least in the eyes of many Japanese, the fact
that he is a diehard ultraconservative,
nationalist and hawk in his own right. Still, Abe
won praise for quickly mending ties with Beijing
and Seoul, which had plunged to their lowest
points in many years because of Koizumi's repeated
visits to Tokyo's war-related Yasukuni Shrine.
Abe is the youngest Japanese prime
minister since the end of World War II and the
first premier born after the war. Naming his
administration the "nation-building cabinet", Abe
has said he wants to create a "beautiful" Japan.
He has said he wants the nation to revive family
values, be proud of its identity and display
leadership in international affairs. He has
advocated a more assertive foreign policy and
called for a "departure from the postwar regime"
by revising the pacifist constitution, among other
things. The constitutional revision would allow
the country to take a higher profile militarily on
the global stage.
During his first three
months in office, Abe succeeded in enacting his
short-term priority bills in the Diet. One of
these revised the Fundamental Law of Education to
instill patriotism among students. It was the
first revision of the basic education law since it
took effect in 1947, replacing the Imperial
Rescript on Education, a symbol of the nation's
prewar education system.
Another set of
bills enacted upgraded the status of the Defense
Agency to a full ministry in January, more than
five decades after the agency's inception. In an
historic step toward revising the postwar
constitution, the LDP-led coalition also pushed
through a bill in May setting the rules for a
national referendum required for any future
constitutional changes.
Abe enjoyed high
public approval ratings of about 70% in a number
of opinion polls soon after taking office. Many
LDP lawmakers and candidates hoped Abe would lead
them to a victory in the Upper House election. But
because of the pension record-keeping fiasco,
political-funds scandals and gaffes by cabinet
ministers, public support for the Abe cabinet soon
began to nosedive and it plunged below 30%, a
figure widely considered to be a crisis level,
immediately before Sunday's election.
The
pension issue has particularly angered many
Japanese, at a time when they are increasingly
concerned about the nation's creaking
social-security system amid the rapid aging of
society. The Social Insurance Agency, under the
jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health, Labor and
Welfare, has been found to have about 50 million
unidentified pension premium-payment records. This
means many retirees could get short-changed.
In one of the most recent blows to Abe and
his coalition, Fumio Kyuma, the gaffe-prone
defense minister, resigned this month after
causing widespread outrage with remarks that were
widely taken as justifying the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in the
closing days of World War II. Kyuma said in a
speech that the A-bomb attacks "could not be
helped".
Scandal-tainted farm minister
Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide in May.
Matsuoka's successor, Norihiko Akagi, has also
come under fire over a similar scandal involving
political funds. Last December, administrative
reform minister Genichiro Sata left the cabinet
over a funds scandal. In January, Health, Labor
and Welfare Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa came under
fire for describing women as "birth-giving
machines".
The prime minister has faced a
barrage of criticism from the public as well as
opposition parties for failing to properly handle
these scandals and exert strong leadership in
addressing them. In the eyes of many Japanese, Abe
seems to be taking the scandals less than
seriously and is intent on shielding his political
allies.
In the final days of the election
campaign, LDP leaders, including Abe, warned that
if the ruling camp lost its majority in the Upper
House, Japan would return to the "lost decade" of
the 1990s, characterized by political turmoil and
economic doldrums. In a desperate bid to rally
support, the LDP leaders also warned that the
coalition's defeat would only benefit North Korea.
But these warnings fell on deaf ears. Public
insecurity about future pension payments and
distrust in politics proved much stronger than Abe
and his coalition initially thought.
Many
Japanese feel that Abe, a political blue-blood
nicknamed the "Prince" for his good looks, is out
of touch with the concerns of ordinary Japanese
citizens about bread-and-butter issues. Meanwhile,
the DPJ won on a campaign slogan "People's
everyday lives should come first."
Hisane Masaki is a Tokyo-based
journalist, commentator and scholar on
international politics and economy. Masaki's
e-mail address is yiu45535@nifty.com.
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