In the years since then, Koizumi’s conviction (some call it stubbornness) has earned him nicknames like “oddball” or “the eccentric,” while his passion for opera and penchant for flashy dress have confirmed his place outside the LDP mainstream. One former rival, incoming Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, joked that Koizumi’s trademark silver hairdo made him “look like the Lion King.” Yet average Japanese grew to appreciate his style and in survey after survey ranked him among the politicians they most wanted to become prime minister. That image landed Koizumi the top job last week, after a groundbreaking primary in which he championed postal privatization, convincingly portrayed himself as the candidate of change and trounced three traditionalist rivals. And that maverick reputation–combined with the LDP’s straitened circumstances–also gives him a far better shot at making his unconventional ideas reality this time around.
Already Koizumi’s victory has irreversibly altered Japanese politics. He entered the primary as an underdog, mounted a spirited campaign against the LDP’s status quo candidate, former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, and won a sweeping victory among rank-and-file party members who, in the main, had supposedly pledged their votes to his rival. With the LDP’s famous factions unable to guarantee votes anymore, public opinion, for decades a peripheral force in Japanese politics, is now more powerful than ever. “Most members of the LDP’s old school still don’t get it,” says Columbia University’s Japan watcher Gerald Curtis. “Their primary system backfired, and they’re totally out of touch.”
That new reality promises to give Koizumi the leeway to impose meaningful reform, as long as he continues to appeal to Japanese voters’ desire for change. In his first significant act as prime minister, he selected Japan’s freshest cabinet in a generation, handing top posts to women and private-sector professionals instead of candidates put forth by LDP heavyweights. He chose the outspoken Tanaka to be Japan’s first female foreign minister, handed the economics brief to a Keio University professor with no previous experience in government and tapped the LDP’s best-known youngster, 44-year-old Nobuteru Ishihara–son of Tokyo’s maverick governor, Shintaro Ishihara–to oversee administrative reform. Koizumi’s “national salvation” government includes just two people from the LDP’s mainstream faction. “It’s a television cabinet,” declared one Japanese commentator. “It plays well to women, youth and members of the private sector.”
In fact, in many ways Koizumi’s campaigning has just begun: he will likely be kicked out of office in about 90 days unless the LDP and its allies win upper-house elections scheduled for July. Now that he’s prime minister, it’s his job to lead the shaky ruling coalition past the ballot box–and it’s his head if the vote count falls short. LDP chieftains know that, and they know a whole slate of ho-hum candidates are hoping to ride to re-election on the coattails of Koizumi’s popularity. They may be willing to tolerate some of his otherwise radical proposals as long as they rejuvenate the party’s image enough to survive the polls.
To maintain his hold over the Japanese public, Koizumi may be able to ignore traditional coalition building and present his reform agenda directly to voters. By convincing the public that he is serious about fixing Japan’s banks, reining in public spending and restoring the economy to good health, the logic goes, citizens might stand by him amid the worsening recession and rising unemployment. “Like Martin Luther King,” says Takashi Inoguchi, a Tokyo University professor who specializes in Japanese politics, “he needs to tell Japan that he has a dream.”
Increasingly, Japanese are demanding that kind of vision from their politicians. Populists with personality have turned out to be gold at the ballot box. In Tokyo, where the municipality encompasses the world’s largest urban center, outspoken novelist and prominent nationalist Shintaro Ishihara took the governor’s job in 1999 by campaigning against big government and runaway public spending. In Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics, voters elected Yasuo Tanaka (no relation to the foreign minister) as governor last October on a pledge to block a controversial dam project. Also a former novelist, he appealed to citizens still reeling from Nagano’s Olympian debt hangover. And when he isn’t bashing the LDP, he’s either out womanizing or writing about it in his monthly magazine column, “Tokyo Sex Diary.”
Other than Tanaka, Koizumi is the ruling party’s most vibrant personality. The man Japanese know best for his outlandish hairdo (permed, says his beautician, four times a year) enjoys a reputation that transcends his party membership. He’s routinely seen at stage shows or films, and he reputedly likes to shop off the rack for his own suits. At karaoke bars he’s fond of crooning hits by the defunct heavy-metal band X Japan. “Junichiro Koizumi gives an impression of being cool, liberal and kind of a hero in these turbulent times,” says Kuniko Inoguchi, a political scientist at Sophia University. “His look is ‘Cool Japan,’ which is kind of like ‘Cool Britannia’.” (He also advocates raising the profile of Japan’s military and has promised to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, the symbolic resting place for Japanese war dead, on the anniversary of the end of World War II–maverick positions that worry some of Japan’s neighbors.)
At the same time, Koizumi’s success does not depend entirely upon image. The structural reforms he advocates are serious and have largely been accepted by LDP moderates and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. Banks will be a major focus of his efforts. He is expected to push for a prompt write-down of bad loans, even though it means more bankruptcies and higher unemployment. And because Koizumi isn’t in the LDP mainstream, he owes few favors to industries–primarily construction–that face significant downsizing, which should allow him to push for changes other politicians might not be able to stomach.
Reforming the postal system looks as difficult as ever. For decades, Japanese savings have gone into postal accounts, a vast repository allocated by politicians to prop up pet industries. The result: low returns on investment, irrational capital allocation and the crowding out of commercial banks. The winners in the old system are companies that, thanks to cheap money, can avoid necessary restructuring. The losers are depositors who get almost no return on their savings. Koizumi has pledged to privatize the system by the end of 2003, which will be painful. By rationalizing Japan’s financial system, he will increase corporate failures, push unemployment higher and risk a new recession.
But at least Koizumi speaks candidly about the impact of structural reform–including that near-term dislocation. During the primary, for example, he declared negative growth “unavoidable,” prompting each of his rivals to attack his position. “He’s the first Japanese leader who is not promising a rose garden,” says Jesper Koll, chief economist at Merrill Lynch in Tokyo.
More important, average Japanese claim to be far more willing to hear such hard truths than ever before. One example: the popularity of Nissan Motor Co.’s Brazil-born cost-cutter, Carlos Ghosn. When he took the helm two years ago, Japanese feared he would gut the company. Now that his factory closures and staff reductions have returned Nissan to profitability, Ghosn is a hero among ordinary Japanese and leading businessmen alike. For many citizens, today’s biggest fear is stagnation, not change. Says Curtis: “Koizumi will win popular support by making Japanese people feel pain.”
Still, many in the LDP are not convinced of that logic, and sooner or later Koizumi must disarm his many enemies in the old guard. Cynics, most of whom think the LDP incapable of reform, believe Koizumi’s rise is mere political Kabuki. In their view, party bosses have allowed him into power for the singular purpose of carrying the coalition through the July elections, after which they will install their own man. Many party members think a showdown is inevitable. “Koizumi may try to confront the old LDP powers,” says Yoshimi Watanabe, a midranking lawmaker who supports the new prime minister. “If that happens, Japan will have its political ‘big bang,’ and it will be Armageddon for the LDP.”
People power could render Koizumi untouchable in such a battle. But public support alone won’t arm him to fight effectively inside the party or, for that matter, in the Diet when key legislation hangs in the balance. That takes compromise and coalition building–two skills antithetical to the new prime minister’s personality. “He thinks he has to attack to smash the bad guys,” says Masaya Ito, a political pundit sympathetic to Koizumi, “but Japanese politics doesn’t work that way.” Adds Taoka, the Asahi writer: “Public opinion is like a thermonuclear weapon, powerful but very difficult to use.”
The world will know soon enough if Japan’s new leader can handle his own party. By election time, most analysts agree, it will be clear whether he warrants a chapter in modern Japanese history or a footnote. But his friends and colleagues already know Koizumi is different. One of them, now a senior corporate executive, remembers how folks back home used to joke about their eccentric Diet man. “Koizumi didn’t even build one bridge for his hometown, and he never brought anyone wreaths or condolence money,” he says. That makes him an oxymoron in the LDP–a politician without a pork barrel. And it may also make him the man for these very different times.
