AsiaFile

Once again our friends at The Wall Street Journal find it impossible to leave their ideology out of their front page coverage of Japan. This ideology proposes that “of course,” Japan is a free market like ours and is becoming more and more like ours by the minute…
The ideological “spin” is manifest in the story headlined Koizumi’s Success Charts the Path To Japan’s Future….which ledes by reporting,

“Five years after he took over as prime minister of a moribund nation, Junichiro Koizumi is preparing to leave behind him a different Japan. An economic has-been that mourned its waning international influence has been transformed into a surprise revival story — sprouting skyscrapers and shopping centers — while becoming Washington’s most reliable ally in Asia.”

Hogwash.

Japan’s “revival” is puny at best. Last quarter’s GDP growth in Japan was a staggering 0.2 percent. After more than a decade of negative growth, the best Japan could muster in the last five years was growth approaching three percent, in a single year. Today’s Japan’s GDP is 25 percent LOWER than it was in 1997; America’s is 50 percent HIGHER. Great “revival.”

It is true that Koizumi, as a charismatic media-savvy politician, has been able to get more done as a chief executive than his bland, babbling predecessors. But few of Koizumi’s “reforms” are so entrenched that they can’t be undone; and most of the “reforms” are so half-hearted as to be mostly meaningless.

Koizumi promised to cut wasteful roadbuilding. After a public and very nasty fight, the Japanese Highway Construction will end up building as much national highway now as when Koizumi took office.

Koizumi demanded that the Japanese Postal Service, the largest financial institution, with $13 trillion of household assets be privatized. That will happen — in 2017– IF Koizumi’s successors don’t change course, which they likely will.

And while yes, it is true, the amount of bad debt being carried by the nation’s banks is down sharply…in part because the government got more aggressive in pushing bailouts and restructurings… the banks still don’t EARN hardly any profits from their normal operations. Last year’s headline profits reflected the effects of big write offs, and the ability to free up money being held back in loan-loss reserves.

Koizumi has been doggedly loyal in support of the Bush administration and its dangerous, unilateralist policies in Iraq. He violated his nation’s own Constitution by sending troops to Iraq and was lucky enough that none of them got killed…and most Japanese disapprove of such military involvement abroad.

His nation remains a long way from reaching consensus that changing Article Nine and renouncing its pacifism is a good thing. And Koizumi has put Japanese relations with South Korea and China in the worst shape they’ve ever been in.

Surely Koizumi has saved his once-moribund Liberal Democratic Party to fight another day –by pretending to rail against it while defenstrating any potential opponents. But lasting and systemic change will demand far more seismic changes in the psyche of the nation’s politicians and the body politic.