Japan has been a one-party oligarchy for a very long time. This may not be a polite thing to say about a democracy and a U.S. ally. But Japan has been ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for the last 54 years, except for a few nanoseconds after the Cold War when the ruling party temporarily lost its grip on power. Because of this stifling consensus among a small political elite, “Japanese democracy” has an oxymoronic connotation and Japanese politics has been one of the most boring topics in the world.
But that may all change on Sunday. According to the polls, the Japanese are likely to give the ruling party the boot. The opposition Democratic Party is expected to capture a two-thirds majority of the lower house of parliament, which would give it control of the entire Diet. In the American context, this would be as if voters kicked out both the Democrats and Republicans and gave a Senate and House majority to the Green Party.
Japan’s opposition party has benefited largely from public dissatisfaction with the status quo. The sclerotic LDP presides over a patronage system that no longer delivers the goods and an economy that has been hit hard by the global recession. In February, the former LDP finance minister gave a drunken press conference in Rome in February, proving what many secretly suspected: the people in charge of the Japanese economy are not in their right minds. Prime Minister Taro Aso, his poll numbers edging ever bottomward, has tried to revive his fortunes by accusing the Democratic Party of insufficient patriotism for not displaying the Japanese flag and even, improbably, cutting up the flag to make their own party symbol. Like the Republican Party of Sarah Palin and John Ensign, the LDP is its own worst enemy.
Japanese support for the Democratic Party is not all protest politics. There is enthusiasm for the opposition’s promise to clean out the Augean stables of Japanese politics. “The party says it will ban corporate political donations, restrict the ability of retired bureaucrats to find lucrative jobs in industries they regulated and ban hereditary seats in parliament,” reports The Washington Post. It is also promising child support payments to cash-strapped families and more social security funding, both popular policies in a country with a rapidly aging population and a catastrophic birth dearth.
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