FROM THE EDITOR

The July 29 election for the House of Councillors was a test of the popular mandate for the reform program of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirô. Thanks to Koizumi’s unprecedented popularity, the Liberal Democratic Party that he leads won big, securing more than half of the contested seats.

Voter turnout was 56.4%, 2.4 points below the figure for the previous upper house election in 1998, despite indications in pre-election polls that interest in the contest was running at a high level. One reason people hesitated to cast votes was probably the dilemma faced by those who support Koizumi but oppose the traditional LDP and do not believe that it has mended its ways in the short time since he took the helm. Such people may have thought that voting for the LDP to show their support for the prime minister could end up strengthening the power of the party they dislike. Another source of hesitation may well have been a sense of ambivalence toward the administration’s reform program, which, as Koizumi constantly reminds people, is bound to produce pain: Even those who understand the need for painful reform as a general matter are liable to be reluctant to accept specific changes that directly hurt themselves or their families.

Many of the voters who went to the polls and cast their ballots for Koizumi’s party did so because they see his program as offering the last chance to revive Japan. If their hopes are disappointed, they will probably turn their backs not just on the Liberal Democrats but on politicians of every stripe.

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MASUZOE WINS A SEAT One notable feature of the upper house election was the large number of celebrity candidates running for the opposition Democratic Party and on other tickets, including the LDP’s. But an unexpectedly large number of them lost; this may be taken as a sign of increased maturity among voters, who have become more interested in politics.

The biggest vote getter on the LDP’s proportional-representation ticket was Masuzoe Yôichi, the prominent political scientist who has served for many years on the editorial board of Japan Echo, writing numerous introductory comments for our sections on politics. Masuzoe captured close to 1.6 million votes, and we are sure he will be a dynamic addition to the national legislature, though we are sorry to lose him from our own board. In his place we have invited two new members onto the board, Kabashima Ikuo of the University of Tokyo and Watanabe Hirotaka of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

HIGH BUT DECLINING SUPPORT Koizumi’s approval ratings in the polls, which for a while were running at stratospheric levels approaching 90%, have been gradually falling as the painful aspects of his reform program become more evident. For now he still has the support of around 70% of the public, but the figure is bound to decline further as the plans for specific reforms are fleshed out against the backdrop of a declining stock market and an increasingly bleak employment picture. Koizumi must somehow maintain a high level of public support despite these negative developments so as to be able to press ahead with his reforms in the face of resistance within his own party, particularly from the powerful Hashimoto faction, which picked up additional seats in the July upper house election.

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Koizumi’s structural reform drive has three main pillars: economic and fiscal reform, administrative reform, and social reform. Below we carry a dialogue between Koizumi and Alvin Toffler in which the prime minister candidly explains some of the thinking behind this drive. We also offer three other articles about the reform program, with an introduction by Kojima Akira.

DIPLOMATIC ISSUES Japanese diplomacy seems to be performing quite poorly these days. The main cause is probably that Minister for Foreign Affairs Tanaka Makiko is not doing her job well enough. One key issue is the longstanding territorial dispute with Russia. Understanding the historical background to this sticky issue is extremely important in seeking a way to get the Russians to return the Northern Territories, the islands off Hokkaidô occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. We have included two articles relating to this matter, one by former Prime Minister Mori Yoshirô and one by Edamura Sumio, a former Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union.

While Tanaka concentrated on personnel matters within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the expense of foreign policy, the Russian government unilaterally granted permission for South Korean boats to fish for saury within Japan’s exclusive economic zone around the four islands of the Northern Territories, and the Koreans have already started fishing there.

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Meanwhile, Prime Minister Koizumi’s declaration that he would visit Yasukuni Shrine on August 15, the anniversary of the end of World War II, provoked a major diplomatic flap with China and South Korea. The planned visit to the shrine, which mainly honors those who died fighting for Japan, was also strongly opposed by many Japanese, including some members of the government, but the prime minister decided to make it anyway, though he moved it up to August 13 with the aim of lessening the negative reaction. We plan to take up this matter in the next issue of Japan Echo, offering some background to explain why Koizumi’s visit to this shrine was so controversial.

Early in July, Koizumi visited the United States, Britain, and France. In his talks with President George W. Bush, the prime minister focused on prospects for an economic recovery in Japan and the issue of climate change—specifically, the handling of the Kyoto Protocol concerning the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which Bush had declared the United States would not ratify. Japan has a special interest in the Kyoto Protocol, having hosted the international conference at which it was adopted in December 1997, namely, the Third Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP3. European countries were hoping for Japan to take an unequivocal position in favor of ratification, but Koizumi instead chose to try to mediate between the U.S. and European positions.

At the COP6 session that resumed in Bonn on July 16, the Japanese delegation, under Koizumi’s instructions, tried to find common ground between the Americans and Europeans. After intense negotiations the participants managed to reach an agreement on rules for implementing the Kyoto accord.

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ROBOTS The mechanical dolls that the Japanese have been producing since the Edo period (1600-1868) may be seen as the forebears of today’s robots. One feature of Japan’s robots is that they have been designed to resemble human beings. I myself have seen robots on production lines that join in the morning calisthenics of the human workers, and I am told that most of these robots have been given individual names. And Sony has come out with a robot dog, Aibo, that is designed to appeal to humans as a pet. Below we carry an article that looks at the Edo heritage of mechanical artisanship and the interesting Japanese propensity to identify emotionally with inanimate devices.

HIS AND HER NAMES The Japanese Constitution guarantees respect for all people as individuals and prohibits discrimination between the sexes. But the present Civil Code requires married couples to share a single family name, and ordinarily they take the husband's; a woman who gets married cannot continue to use her original surname unless her husband agrees to join her in using it.

For some time there has been growing pressure, mainly from women, for the law to be revised so that both husband and wife can keep their original names, though there is also strong resistance from opponents who assert that providing such an option would loosen marital ties. The general public seems to be gradually coming around to the idea; according to the results of a Cabinet Office survey released on August 4, 42.1% favored revising the Civil Code so as to allow both to use their original family names, while 29.4% were opposed. Those in favor outnumbered those opposed for the first time in this official survey, which was previously conducted in 1996. We hope to devote a section to this and related topics involving the changing Japanese family in a future issue of Japan Echo. (Iwao Sumiko)

© 2001 Japan Echo Inc.