Charting a new path in Japan?

THE INEXORABLE ELECTION, as it finally turned out to be, of Mr. Junichiro Koizumi as the new Prime Minister of Japan, a troubled economic superpower, has stirred enormous expectations of reforms. The international community, however, is sceptical whether Japan's highly politicised system of governance can at all be reformed in a quick- fix operation. The reasons are not difficult to trace. Japan's sustained economic slowdown, a matter of intense but differing concerns to the developed bloc and the developing countries, has already brought an unusual sense of urgency to the national political games in Tokyo. An overwhelmingly dismal reality was the near-universal disdain that the outgoing Prime Minister, Mr. Yoshiro Mori, had managed to evoke. He was disliked by many adherents of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the prime ruling outfit, and the general population as also various special interest groups across the country. Devoid of charisma and bereft of bright ideas, Mr. Mori had added to his political woes through a series of largely self- inflicted malapropisms and policy misadventures. For Mr. Koizumi, it is more a challenge than an honour to emerge now as the country's eleventh Prime Minister in thirteen years in an effort to lay the Mori legacy to rest. Yet, if Mr. Koizumi seems to have set the rich and powerful in the political establishment thinking about his alternative agenda of governance, the credit should go to his practised style as a maverick on the prowl.

The rise and fall of Prime Ministers have become so frequent in Tokyo that notions of political instability or even governmental crises seldom impinge on the country's collective consciousness in any indelible fashion. The fundamental political and economic stability of post-imperial Japan as a U.S.-protected state is not in doubt. This is often seen as a ground reality, despite all the vicissitudes of the Tokyo-Washington disputes over trade and monetary policies as also of the bilateral debate on how far the two could fine-tune their security relationship consistent with the perceived need to keep Japan reined in militarily. While the reforms now being proposed by Mr. Koizumi may help raise Japan's international profile too, the immediate markers on his agenda pertain to controversial domestic issues. He wants to purify the degenerate ethos of the LDP by liberating it from its own internal web of factional politics (a matrix which had of course facilitated his own rise to fame in the first place). While this can make or mar his career, the promise to privatise Japan's postal savings network, which is suspected to have symbiotic links with the LDP's power structure, may test the new Prime Minister's mettle as nothing else will. His urge to foster reform-minded new talent (already evident in his gender-friendly Cabinet) will be watched as also the economic recipes that he could conjure up.

Mr. Koizumi's foreign policy test will be no less arduous. With the present Bush administration in Washington seeking to refashion its ties with China on the basis of an ongoing assessment of its long-term strategic intentions, Japan will be increasingly sucked into the vortex of the U.S.' calculations. It is axiomatic that Washington's plans for a national missile defence system and its theatre-specific variants will test Mr. Koizumi's strategic understanding of the global and East Asian scenes. More importantly, he may wish to upgrade a dialogue with the U.S. over Japan's credentials for permanent membership, with teeth, in the United Nations Security Council - a subject that Mr. Bush had recently discussed with Mr. Mori. Of deep interest to India is whether Mr. Koizumi and the new Foreign Minister, Ms. Makiko Tanaka, will appreciate and enhance the idea of Tokyo- Delhi global partnership that Mr. Mori had successfully launched. India is the only country, besides the U.S., with which Japan has mooted such a dialogue.

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