For once the clichés are appropriate. The landslide election victory won by the center-left Democratic Party of Japan is historic. After an almost solid run of 54 years in power, the Liberal Democratic Party has been sent packing by a Japanese public desperate for change and fed up with its backroom power broking — it has changed prime ministers time after time without a general election.
But the result signals far more than a change of government or policy. It represents a seismic shift in Japanese political culture. Japan has long been a relatively static, corporatist society with a profound respect for tradition — so profound as to keep the LDP in power all these years. People accepted their place in the system and individualism was frowned upon. At the apex of the system was an economic and political establishment that worked hand in glove — big business, the LDP and government bureaucracy.
It is too easy to claim that the economic crisis has blown the stagnation away. Indeed, the election comes just when Japan is emerging from the slump; the economy was up 0.9 percent in the second quarter of the year and in July industrial output increased 1.9 percent, although it still has a long way to go; the July figure remains 20 percent lower than the same period last year. But Japan had an economic crisis long before the rest of the world.
Cheaper labor costs elsewhere, especially in China, started to rob it of its competitive edge well over a decade ago — resulting in lower exports (particularly electronics), production lines being moved abroad, rising unemployment and with it, an end to the cherished assumption that a job was for life. What the downturn has done is to demonstrate the LDP’s inability to protect the country from the ravages of the crisis. Politically arrogant, it has been exposed as economically inept as well.
In choosing opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama to be the next prime minister, Japan’s aging electorate — the country has the highest proportion of the population over 65 years of age and lowest under 15 in the world — has voted for hope. He has promised change on a scale that even US President Barack Obama would not have dared offer and they trust that he can deliver at least some of it. He promises to turn the economy around, cut the bureaucrats’ power and provide massively increased welfare benefits, including substantial child payments and free schooling, as well as a cornucopia of public works to provide more jobs. Other changes include a distancing from the US and a reaching out to the country’s neighbors, especially China.
The latter should not be difficult. But on spending, voices are asking whether he can deliver, given that public debt — the world’s largest — is already running at twice gross domestic product.
This is not the time to predict failure. The new government has not even been appointed. The only advice is that it should not try to do everything at once. It should be one issue at a time. If Hatoyama can succeed with just two or three of his economic policies, the Japanese, having shown that they are no longer prepared to be subservient to tradition, will probably be highly pleased.
