Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan of the Democratic Party campaigning last month outside a Tokyo train station to maintain his seat in Parliament.
KANAZAWA, Japan — The lesson of Japan’s last major national election was that the nation’s growing hunger for change had seemed to reach a threshold, a craving that became more intense after the Fukushima disaster exposed the failures of a collusive political system that protected the nuclear industry.
Now, just three years after that election and less than two years after the nuclear crisis, voters appear poised to hand power back to the Liberal Democratic Party, which they kicked out in the historic vote in 2009 that ended its virtually uninterrupted hold on power for half a century.
It is still possible that other parties could win enough votes in the lower house election on Sunday to force a coalition government. Polls show up to half of the voters are undecided, itself a sign that the hopes generated three years ago for reform have faded. But forecasts of vote tallies by major newspapers have been unanimous in predicting a resounding victory for the Liberal Democrats, whom many Japanese blame for creating the country’s deep economic and political problems.
News reports regularly feature photos of a smiling Shinzo Abe, a nationalistic former prime minister who, as party chief, now appears likely to get a second chance at running the nation.
Those searching for an answer to how Japan could reinstall its old guard need look no further than the predominantly rural election district that includes Kanazawa, a small city on the frigid Sea of Japan. On a recent evening, about 100 supporters of the local Liberal Democratic candidate braved a hailstorm to gather in a community center surrounded by barren rice paddies.
They sat politely listening in stockinged feet as the candidate, Hiroshi Hase, explained that his party was much more reform-minded than before 2009, when this district voted for the opposition despite the Liberal Democrats’ still-formidable rural vote-gathering machine. Then, after bowing deeply, he laid out a party platform that in some ways sounded unchanged from decades past, emphasizing increased public works spending — the sort of vote-buying move that many Japanese say helped create the nation’s huge debt problems.
When the speech ended, members of the audience stood to yell “Fight!” while punching their fists into the air.
But some people later said they were disappointed at the lack of bold measures to end Japan’s long malaise. Still, Toru Kondo, 49, a furniture maker, said he would vote for the Liberal Democrats to show his disgust with the incumbent Democrats. He voted for the Democrats in the last election in this former Liberal Democratic stronghold, only to feel betrayed by their failure to deliver on promises to end Japan’s long economic and political stagnation.
“Personally, I’m about 51 percent in favor of the Liberal Democratic Party, and 49 percent against it,” he said. “I know the party created Japan’s problems, but it seems the only choice.”
Experts say that sentiment is shared widely across Japan, where disgruntled voters seem determined to punish the Democrats not just for failing to rein in Japan’s powerful central bureaucracies, but also for mishandling the nuclear crisis.
At the same time, most voters have not viewed as credible alternatives a host of new parties that have sprung up with offers of more radical reform. Voters were captivated earlier this year by the brash and decisive young mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, who became for a time Japan’s most popular politician with promises to break the central ministries’ stifling grip.
But even his new party’s fortunes faltered after he decided against running for Parliament, precluding his becoming prime minister, and instead joined forces with Shintaro Ishihara, the octogenarian, ultranationalist former governor of Tokyo. And an antinuclear party that tried to capitalize on Japanese foreboding after the Fukushima disaster made little headway.
Mr. Kondo and more than a dozen other voters said in interviews here that they were leery of supporting yet another untried newcomer. “So long as a third political pole fails to form, the only way to throw out the Democratic Party is to go back to the Liberal Democratic Party,” said Takao Iwami, an author of books on politics.
What exactly that would mean for Japan is somewhat unclear, as the Liberal Democrats follow the well-worn path of trying to focus on what their audiences want to hear, and as the challenges facing Japan shift with China’s ascendance. Despite Mr. Hase’s emphasis on the old-style economics of construction projects, the party is offering at least one important economic change: saying it would tackle the high value of the yen, which has crippled Japanese exports and accelerated an industrial hollowing-out.
And while Mr. Abe, the party leader, is one of the country’s most vocal nationalists, it is unclear how he would handle a dispute with China, Japan’s largest overseas market, over islands in the East China Sea. In his last term as prime minister, Mr. Abe was considered a fence-mender, making Beijing his first official stop after taking office in an effort to end hard feelings over the previous prime minister’s visits to a shrine where war criminals from World War II are honored. But Mr. Abe has campaigned on building a stronger military to check China’s growing assertiveness.
Some experts say the wild swings in public support for the country’s leading parties are at least partly a result of the decades of virtual one-party rule. Large parties, like the Liberal Democrats, have tried to offer something for everyone, rather than offering an ideology to build loyalty.
“We are still seeing the creative destruction of the old postwar, one-party system,” said Gerald L. Curtis, a professor of Japanese politics at Columbia University.
The lack of voter passion has perhaps been captured best by one of the dominant images of the campaign: photos of former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, of the governing party, who is running to maintain his parliamentary seat in a Tokyo suburb. They show him standing on a white box bearing a slogan that is the Japanese equivalent of “no nukes,” appealing desperately to passing commuters who mostly ignore him.
A Political Pendulum in a Disgruntled Japan
This article
A Political Pendulum in a Disgruntled Japan
can be opened in url
http://newsinterpretable.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-political-pendulum-in-disgruntled.html
A Political Pendulum in a Disgruntled Japan
