BY ROY K. AKAGAWA STAFF WRITER
2010/06/30
A leading American scholar of Japanese politics on Tuesday painted a pessimistic picture of the political situation ahead of the July 11 Upper House election.
Gerald Curtis, a political science professor at Columbia University and visiting professor at Tokyo's Waseda University, predicted the ruling Democratic Party of Japan will fail to win sufficient seats even for a coalition majority in the Upper House.
"If the election were held today, my guess is that the DPJ would win 50 or 51 seats," Curtis told the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
The figure is below the 54 seats that Prime Minister Naoto Kan has set as a minimum goal for his DPJ. It also falls short of the 60 seats the DPJ would need to gain an outright majority in the chamber.
"A single party majority is the best outcome for Japan in my view because it creates a responsible government that voters can hold accountable for its actions in the next election," Curtis said. "That is also the least likely outcome."
Curtis blamed the party's current dire straits on the way in which Kan first broached the possibility of raising the consumption tax rate.
"First, he thought it was politically safe to come out with a dramatic statement about raising the consumption tax rate because the (Liberal Democratic Party) had already proposed an increase to 10 percent," Curtis said. "But all this did was make it look as though he had no ideas of his own and was borrowing those from the LDP."
Curtis said Kan's subsequent wavering on the consumption tax issue had only worsened matters. He said the issue pointed to a potential weakness of Kan, especially in comparison to his predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama.
"Kan has the opposite problem of Hatoyama," Curtis said. "Hatoyama's problem was he could never decide anything. Kan's problem is that he tends to decide things too quickly."
Curtis said Kan raised the issue of a hike in the consumption tax rate without considering how to persuade the public the move was necessary and that voters could trust him to implement policy that would be in the long-term interests of the nation.
Using a term first used by the American economist Joseph Schumpeter of "creative destruction," Curtis said the Japanese political system was now undergoing such change.
"The process of destroying the old to make way for the new is not yet over," Curtis said.
Curtis said Junichiro Koizumi, whose term as prime minister ended in 2006, was the protagonist of the creative destruction process and not its victim like his four successors.
"Koizumi was supremely confident that the old system had to be destroyed and he thought he knew what should replace it," Curtis said.
Curtis suggested there were positive consequences from the change in government engineered last September by the Hatoyama-led DPJ.
The DPJ victory "further undermined the traditional political machine, weakened the entrenched interests and accelerated the collapse of the old type of politics," Curtis said.
Since taking over government, the DPJ has also "put a big dent on the amakudari system, changed the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats" and brought in a new corps of leaders who are learning how to run government, Curtis said.
He said the appointment of DPJ lawmakers to the top positions of central government ministries would have a potential long-term impact on Japanese politics comparable to the purge of Japanese politics during the U.S. occupation of Japan.
Curtis said the changes represented the creative side of the creative destruction of the Japanese political world.
He said his overall pessimism about Japan was mainly due to the fact that political leaders were not addressing a range of pressing issues, from reforming the taxation system to immigration and national security.
Curtis added that in many ways, such as the need for a consumption tax rate hike, the public was ahead of politicians in understanding and accepting the need for change.
"The public is ready to be led, but it has no leaders," Curtis said.
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