As Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan spends his final days in office before his party holds an internal vote Monday to choose his successor, it’s easy to be glib. The man was in office only 14 months after all, and whoever replaces him will – hold your giggles – become the country’s seventh prime minister in five years.
But Mr. Kan’s departure deserves longer reflection than the resignation of his predecessor, the oddball Yukio Hatoyama, or any of the other four men who have held the office since Japan’s last memorable leader, Junichiro Koizumi, stepped aside in September of 2006.
As the revolving door at the top illustrates, the problem goes far beyond Mr. Kan and speaks to a crippling illness in Japanese politics, a disease that compounds the already enormous threats to the country’s future. Mr. Kan recognized the harm being done by the vacuum at the top and seemed more determined than any of his recent predecessors to hang on to the office, if only to change the perception that it no longer matters whom the Prime Minister of Japan is. But Japan’s political system, which allows reviled backroom operators to wield enormous power over their putative leaders, coupled with the natural and nuclear disasters that hit the country on March 11, ensured that he never stood a chance of succeeding.
Mr. Kan came to office last summer vowing to tackle the country’s debilitating financial mess (Japan’s debt soared past $11-trillion earlier this year, more than double the size of the country’s annual gross domestic product). But the former finance minister’s bold proposal of increasing revenues by doubling the national sales tax to 10 per cent was defeated – largely due to fierce opposition from within his own Democratic Party of Japan that was led by Ichiro Ozawa, the party’s dark prince of behind-the-scenes politics.
Realizing that he was doomed to be just another short-term leader unless he unified the DPJ behind him, Mr. Kan courted and won a head-to-head battle against Mr. Ozawa last fall. For the first time since Mr. Koizumi, Japan seemed to have a leader who wanted to lead.
Then the world, quite literally, fell apart. Mr. Kan’s government was derided by a largely hostile Japanese establishment (which is largely loyal to the Liberal Democratic Party, which is now in opposition but led the country almost without interruption from 1955 to 2009) for its tentative response to the massive earthquake and tsunami that obliterated entire cities in the northeast of the country and unleashed the still-unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
In truth, there was little any leader could have done to prepare for a once-in-a-millennia tsunami, combined with a nuclear disaster many experts claimed would never happen.
Mr. Kan, after initially looking a little like George W. Bush staring dumbfounded at his children’s book on Sept. 11, 2001, tried his best to lead from the front, even as his government struggled to come to grips with the scale of the crises.
The day after the multiple disasters struck Japan, Mr. Kan took a helicopter trip over crippled Fukushima reactor No. 1, a public relations effort that backfired when the helicopter’s presence was blamed for delaying a key venting of the reactor, which exploded later that day.
Still, he later struck the right note in an emotional address to the nation in which he recalled Japan’s long but ultimately successful rebuilding from the rubble of the Second World War. “We are going to create Japan once again from scratch,” he vowed. But his troubles began in earnest when he followed that up by calling for a government of national unity to deal with the crisis, inviting the LDP to join an emergency coalition, hoping they would agree to shelve the partisan bickering for a less desperate day.
Predictably, the LDP – which along with other opposition parties controls the upper house of parliament, giving them an effective veto over government legislation – rebuffed the offer, choosing instead to let the DPJ drown in the tsunami waters. Inside his own party, Mr. Hatoyama and Mr. Ozawa began plotting to bring him down.
“Common sense would indicate that the clear and pressing need for reconstruction from the disasters should provide a solid basis for collaboration between the ruling and opposition parties for mapping out and implementing recovery plans,” Kiyoaki Aburaki, a senior fellow at the 21st Century Public Policy Institute, wrote in a recent report on Mr. Kan’s last days in office. “The reality is quite different. The DPJ and opposition Liberal Democratic Party only seem capable of criticizing each other and are incapable of having constructive discussions or producing results.”
Despite his coalition overture, it was Mr. Kan and his government who were blamed for the bickering at the top while Japan was in crisis. His cabinet’s popularity plummeted to 15.8 per cent.
Even as he acknowledged that he could no longer justify remaining in office, Mr. Kan tried to change Japan with the time he had left. He spent his final months in office pushing his new conviction that Japan, thrice-scorched, needed to wean itself off nuclear power.
The renewable energy bill, that will force the country’s power companies to buy up any and all domestically produced renewable energy, no matter the cost, may one day prove to be his most important legacy. It passed Tuesday and Mr. Kan’s allies say he plans to leave office by the end of the week.
The DPJ – elected in the hope they could fix Japan’s broken politics – will on Monday choose its third leader and the country’s third prime minister since winning power in August, 2009. The Japanese papers are full of rumours about who is and isn’t likely to run for the top job: The outspoken former foreign minister Seiji Maehara is the front-runner, with Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda, Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda and others also expected to join the contest.
The winner gets 14 months, maybe less, to show that they’re not just another forgettable Japanese prime minister.
Source: theglobeandmail.com