Young blades wait in the
wings to take over Japan
By Tony Boyd, Tokyo
Sakie Fukushima, who is said to be Japan's most
powerful woman, has not voted in a national election for
eight years.
The vice-president and partner of international
headhunters Korn Ferry says she is disillusioned with
Japanese politics and the arrogance of leading figures in
the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
"They have the boldness to believe that Japanese people
are stupid," she says. "I am willing to vote, but I don't
want to compromise just for the sake of voting."
She says the Government's failure to confront the
financial system crisis when it emerged four years ago
was a typical example of the arrogance of politicians and
their reliance on the poor advice of bureaucrats.
"We are also at fault because we believed what the
politicians said about the banks and left it to them to fix
the problem."
Fukushima, who is one of an estimated 40 million
Japanese, or 40 per cent of the electorate, who did not
vote at the national election in July, said she held some
hope of change in the political system because of the
emergence of a new breed of politicians.
"I am concentrating more on people who have overseas
experience of democratic values, people who feel not just
completely the interests of Japan, but have a more
balanced view," she says.
"I have some friends who are aggressive politicians who
have been elected in the last three or four years, aged in
their early 40s, and we are expecting them to lead the
change."
Fukushima did not name any of the new breed of
politicians, but a handful came to the fore during the
recent intense negotiations in the Diet over the terms of
Japan's ¥60 trillion ($800 billion) bank rescue package.
Leading the list of young politicians is Nobuteru Ishihara,
41, a former television journalist whose father is Shintaro
Ishihara, a former Diet member who became famous with
the ultra-nationalist book, A Japan That Can Say No.
The LDP's Ishihara was a member of the Diet finance
committee that thrashed out a the bank nationalisation
plan which is now going full steam with the government
takeover of the Long Term Credit Bank and Nippon
Credit Bank.
During an eight-week process of drawing up the half
dozen bank rescue bills passed by the Parliament in
October, Ishihara participated in television debates in
which he was openly critical of the Prime Minister, Keizo
Obuchi, and the Finance Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa.
"I would say Prime Minister Obuchi is responsible for
allowing the financial controversy to stretch out for such a
long time," he said once.
During one television debate, a politician from the
Democratic Party of Japan, Katsuya Okada, asked:
"What if we nationalise LTCB?" Ishihara said he would
look into it.
Another young turk who played a leading role in
developing the financial bills was Yukio Edano, 34, a
lawyer and member of the Democratic Party of Japan.
Edano told the Asahi Shimbun that he and other young
politicians shared a sense of urgency about confronting
the banking crisis. He said they deliberately bypassed the
Ministry of Finance, which later failed in a bid to save
LTCB from its inevitable insolvency, by trying to engineer
a merger with Sumitomo Trust and Banking. MoF also
failed in a bid to save Nippon Credit Bank by trying to
engineer a merger with Chuo Trust and Banking.
Two other politicians who had their fingerprints on the
bank rescue deal were Yasuhisa Shiozaki, 47, a former
Bank of Japan official educated at Tokyo and Harvard
universities, and Motohisa Furukawa, 32, a former MoF
official educated at Tokyo and Columbia universities.
Shiozaki, who is a member of the LDP, showed his
commitment to reform and transparency when he pushed
for banks to make provision against 20 per cent of their
category two problem loans.
There is an estimated ¥60 trillion of category two
problem loans in the balance sheets of the major banks,
and had Shiozaki's recommendation been accepted, half
a dozen banks would have faced insolvency.
In the end, Shiozaki's recommendation was not adopted
but, based on this month's sudden nationalisation of
NCB, a similar line of thinking is pervading the Financial
Supervisory Authority.
The younger breed of politicians in Japan is more focused
on policy issues than the sorts of political manoeuvring
which has characterised Japanese politics for decades
and is engulfing the LDP as it merges with the Opposition
Liberal Party.
Ishihara, for example, is a strong supporter of a changing
of the guard in the LDP, having energetically backed
Junichiro Koizumi in the July ballot for the presidency of
the LDP which Obuchi won.
Koizumi, who at 57 is relatively young by Japanese
standards, supports radical reform of the bureaucracy
and the privatisation of the MoF's perennial honey pot,
the Postal Savings System.
Before the vote for the LDP presidency, a group of 36
young LDP politicians issued a statement urging fellow
party members to vote with their hearts. Their ranks were
dominated by politicians from urban electorates who
know their seats are the most vulnerable if the LDP does
not change.
That election was a watershed in the history of the LDP,
according to Professor Peter Drysdale, executive
director of the Australia-Japan Research Centre. "The
LDP Party election in July was a totally new phenomenon
that signalled a change in the political system," he says.
"Never in the future will we have LDP politicians making
leadership changes behind closed doors."
Although Drysdale admits the Obuchi Government has
"neutered" itself since taking power, the rise of young
politicians in the ruling party and the Opposition holds out
hope to people like Sakie Fukushima that Japan will have
a brighter future
afr.com.au
|
