Visionless politicians and irresponsible analysts

On the 24th of this month, the Liberal Democratic Party will elect a new LDP president to replace the current president Yoshiro Mori. At present, candidates for this position in Nagata-cho are Ryutaro Hashimoto, Junichiro Koizumi, Taro Aso, and Shizuka Kamei. The newly elected president will probably be elected as the next prime minister.

Prime Minister Mori made a formal visit to Washington last month and promised President Bush that all bad debts will be written off during the next six months. However, who would believe the opinion of a person who will no longer be prime minister within a month? The more the Financial Times and Washington Post report on Japanese politics, the harder Japanese politics becomes to understand, and thus, stock prices keep falling.

"There is no other prime minister like Mori who has had such a negative impact on the market," claims a political analyst whose office is in Kamiya-chou. He continues, "the government needs to carry out structural reform and deregulation. The biggest obstacle now is the existence of the LDP itself." We, however, simply cannot swallow this so-called "structural reform" theory, as analysts never speak of its details. As much as we have a negative impression of politicians who speak with no vision, we also consider analysts and intellectuals who have no detailed plans quite irresponsible.

How should consensus-building politics be evaluated?

Regardless of who should be the next prime minister, the project that the government should carry out is obvious. Which project needs priority now? Some analysts claim it is a strategy against asset deflation. In the 1980's, Japanese financial institutions expanded loan activity with land and real estate as the bond. After the bubble economy burst, however, land and real estate values dramatically dropped, resulting in huge bad assets. In short, financial institutions wish to temporarily heighten the value of land and real estate in order to deal with these bad assets. They need political measures for this, and they continue to emphasize that any structural reform and deregulation will be meaningless unless such measures are issued.

Who, then, should implement such a political policy and how? Most of the analysts wish for a politician with a clear idea who pushes his/her own policy. A politician like Ichiro Ozawa first comes to mind, although he will not have a chance for a while, as at present he is the leader of a small political party.

In Japan (rather, in Nagata-cho), regardless of how much criticism is received from overseas newspapers, diet members become popular if they are adept at gaining consensus in organizations and groups. For example, what diet members like Mikio Aoki, Hiromu Nonaka, Muneo Suzuki, and Makoto Koga have in common is not a political concept; they are all well aware of the weaknesses of others, and can offer help when needed. In other words, they consider human relationships to be key, and the "conference room" for these people to express their true feelings will always be a "high-class Japanese restaurant."

Since the war, it has been rare that a politician who puts priority on adjusting the relationships between organizations or between people ends up being the prime minister. In Nagata-cho, however, no case can be solved without politicians of that sort.

Whoever the next prime minister will be, someone who is skilful in adjusting and maintaining relationships between people will hold an important position in the LDP executive. If there exists a leader who can work with such a person, this leader will show true leadership. On the other hand, it will be a tragedy if a consensus-builder takes the leadership; we still remember that internationally increased distrust towards Japan when Zenko Suzuki in the early 80's and Noboru Takeshita in the late 80's took the leadership.