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"The wrong man for Japan" by The Financial Times, August 29 2010
If Dante’s version of hell had nine circles of suffering, then Japan’s version of politics must have at least nine circles of farce. After only three months in the job, Naoto Kan – the third prime minister in a year – is being challenged for the leadership of his party. The grizzled pretender for the job of leading Japan from its deflationary funk is Ichiro Ozawa, a man more used to operating from the shadows than in the international spotlight. If Mr Ozawa, who recently referred to Americans as “single-celled organisms”, becomes prime minister, he will be Japan’s most interesting prime minister since Junichiro Koizumi left office in 2006. He would also be a disaster.
Mr Ozawa, doubtless a multi-celled organism, has some interesting ideas. He was one of the first to suggest that Japan become a “normal nation”, throwing off its postwar legacy of leaving its defence in US hands. In the 1990s, Washington championed him as a political and economic reformer, but has cooled on him more recently. The last US ambassador to Tokyo could not even arrange to meet him when he was leading a revolt against a Japanese mission to refuel US ships operating near Afghanistan. Mr Ozawa has also advocated friendlier ties with China, yet is openly contemptuous of that country’s one-party system.
More than his confusing foreign policy stance, Mr Ozawa is unfit to be prime minister because of his domestic record. Though strategically brilliant, he is quixotic and destructive. He was instrumental in bringing down the long-ruling Liberal Democratic party in the early 1990s and again last year. On the first occasion, he went on to undermine the coalition, paving the way for the LDP to return to power after a short absence. This time, he may repeat the trick. If, as some predict, his leadership challenge splits the Democratic Party of Japan, the LDP could sneak back into office.
The Japanese public dislikes him. In a recent poll, 79 per cent of respondents said they did not want him returning to an important party post. (He quit as secretary-general in part because of an alleged funding scandal.) Yet so out of touch are Japan’s politicians that he may win anyway. With support from around half his party’s MPs, Mr Ozawa has a good chance of defeating Mr Kan in the leadership contest on September 14. If the DPJ makes him its head, and hence prime minister, it will have betrayed its promise to bring Japan a new kind of politics. If it goes on to surrender power, it will only have itself to blame.
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