A very Japanese revolution

摘要

No one ever accused Japan of making itself easy to understand. It has just had its most thrilling general election in decades, possibly ever, a poll called courageously by the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, after a post-office privatisation bill had been rejected in the Diet (parliament) in August. At first, that decision looked suicidal. But the maverick Mr Koizumi's gamble paid off: he won a huge mandate, seemingly for radical change (see pages 23-25). So here comes a new Japan? Look harder, and the fog starts to form. In Sunday's poll, after all, voters restored parliamentary dominance to Mr Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party, the same conservative group that has ruled Japan ever since 1955, bar ten months in 1993-94, and which led the country into the financial crash and economic stagnation from which it has suffered for the past 15 years. The election did enable him to expel from the party 37 rebels who had opposed his reforms, roughly 15% of the LDP'S pre-election strength, so it has made the party better able to bring about change. Yet in giving the revamped LDP its biggest majority in the main (lower) house of the Diet since 1986, the voters also rejected the chief opposition group, the Democratic Party of Japan, whose manifesto actually promised a more liberal and far-reaching set of reforms than did Mr Koizumi. And the LDP'S party rules anyway stipulate that Mr Koizumi has to stand down as its leader, and hence prime minister, in just one year's time.