Naviblog focus - upcoming election

* With Katrina taking up a lot of the airwaves and webwaves across media sites recently, there is quite something brewing here in Japan. I'm referring to the recent snap elections called by Prime Minister Koizumi, as a result of his dissolution of the House of Representatives after failing to pass a bill designed to reform Japan's largest piggy bank, the Postal Service.
* The denationalisation (note I didn't say "privatisation") of the Postal Service is the original white horse Koizumi used to storm the fortress of torpitude and kickbacks that forms the Japanese government, and install himself as maverick commander-in-chief. With his popularity, he has been able to stave off criticism on sending troops to Iraq (although they've been confined to a small enclosure guarded by Dutch troops, and restricted to infrastructure work relief in the area). He has been able to stave off criticism on failing to make much progress beyond posturing in the 30 year-old North Korean Japanese kidnapping crisis, that has soured Japanese relations with the bristly northern state just across the Sea of Japan. He has been able to wave away attacks from the old guard by labelling them as "the rebel factions" destined to keep the country impoverished by putting pork barrel public works before economic vitality. He has dismissed the latest coordinated China-Korea offensive on Second World War Japan and some of the most hostile (staged, provoked or spontaneous) demonstrations on the Chinese mainland for a long time. (Note. Interestingly, the bid for Japan to enter the inner circle of the UN Security Council is now history thanks to this manoeuvring)
* And all in all, he's done pretty well, the economy's back on track as the cash made on the Chinese trade boom starts to trickle back into the economy, and he's reforming one of the bastions of post-WW2 national economic strategy: namely, the state-planned economy. But a large hole gapes in the pension system, and Japan's international stance has never been more precarious in the balance.
* The opposition party Minshuto's leader has said this pretty nicely in its manifesto published last week in the Nikkei business daily: "shifting from concrete to people, people, people". But in our media-drenched reality, comments are flying that the two main parties are not that far apart. Although the Minshuto now doesn't agree on denationalising the Postal Service (I imagine to draw in the disaffected voters of the other leftist parties), they focus on a raft of policy changes including constitutional changes, troops out of Iraq by December 05, cuts in "big government" etc., making them out to be the "credible" voice of change. Their greatest asset is the splitting of the ruling party, with all those that voted against the postal service bill banished into two new parties, that are basically leftovers of the "old guard"...
* Who will win will be a conservative decision made by those who care to turn up at the booths on September 11, next Sunday, I imagine mostly elderly and middle-aged voters. In a country where most young poeple don't believe in politics, don't pay their pensions because they'll never get it back, or the need for political involvement beyond celebrities on a talk show, I feel a deep-seated pessimism breeding a refusal by young Japanese to take the present into their hands as citizens. But I guess they've never had to, content to live off the consumer bubble created by their parents' miracle economy.