Yuki Hatoyama, left, is already backpedalling on his bold promises. His predecessor Junichiro Koizumi never overcame unease about his market reforms.KOJI SASAHARA
Whoa. Here were headlines and news scrolls you hadn't seen before: "New Era Rises in Japan," declared The Wall Street Journal. "Japanese Vote for Sweeping Change" is how we put it at the Los Angeles Times. The world might look to Japan for cool anime, Harajuku street fashions or the Wii, but its sclerotic politics scarcely send a ripple of interest beyond its own shores. So this past week, when the perennial opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) walloped the mighty Liberal Democrats (LDP), who had governed Japan with only a pause for breath since 1955, the rest of the world took notice. Clearly, something must have happened.
And it didn't seem to be just suits swapping places. The presumptive next prime minister had been caught musing in an eve-of-the-election essay - aimed at his domestic audience but reprinted in an abridged version in the U.S. - about the need to restrain "U.S. political and economic excesses." This was American-educated Yukio Hatoyama, channelling some inner Naomi Klein to take potshots at Japan's postwar big brother. Japan's stagnant economy and social ills were products of "unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism that are void of morals or moderation," he warned.
That shook them up in Washington. U.S. administrations have not had to think hard about Japan since the late 1980s when a far more robust version of the world's second-biggest economy was buying up American icons such as Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach Golf Club. But the threat that Japan might supplant U.S. economic leadership has long dissipated, neutered by 15 years of stagnant growth. Japan still has its corporate behemoths, but nobody in the United States got particularly worked up earlier this year when Toyota surpassed General Motors as the world's largest auto maker. Japan remained the rock of the U.S. presence in Asia, a place to plant forward military bases and a check on Chinese ambitions.
Yet here was Mr. Hatoyama, leader of a party with a record of occasionally trash-talking America, suggesting that Japan's future lay in some future East Asian community of nations. Probably with its own currency one day.
Who were these new kids in town? Were they really a gang of rebels, out to shatter the calcified postwar order? Were the Japanese, too, about to join the exodus from the American age? Or was this just another one of those moments when Japan teases people, hinting that the moment for a radical makeover has at last arrived before slipping back into the familiar comforts of its deeply conservative instincts?
KOIZUMI'S CHALLENGE
If there was a Japanese politician in recent memory prepared to challenge the old order it was Junichiro Koizumi, the Elvis-loving prime minister first elected in 2001. Mr. Koizumi saved the LDP from an earlier demise by effectively running against it. (His first slogan: "Change the LDP, Change Japan.") His aim was to cautiously modernize, loosening famously restrictive labour laws and boosting the foreign investment traditionally viewed with hostility. He did so with a folksy touch, taking politics out of the backrooms and to the people. His approach may have been best chronicled in his personally written weekly prime ministerial e-mails sent to 1.6 million subscribers, in which he combined personal musings on poetry and healthy living with inspirational messages encouraging the Japanese to overcome their aversion to change.
The pinnacle of Mr. Koizumi's power came in his last campaign in 2005, waged in populist overdrive. The election was ostensibly over Mr. Koizumi's plans to privatize Japan's massive postal savings. But the details were complicated, so the election descended into who could shout kaikaku (reform) the loudest, though its meaning was deliberately hazy and even the Japanese Communists proclaimed themselves in favour of it. Mr. Koizumi won going away, smashing those he dismissed as "forces of resistance."
Yet even Mr. Koizumi, for all his popularity, never overcame the deep unease about his market reforms. Many Japanese saw liberalization as opening the door to a society of winners and losers, and their egalitarian instincts balked at the growing sense that Japan was becoming a colder place. The backlash against the inequities of globalization was well under way before Mr. Koizumi left office.
Such is the fate of those who seek to rewrite Japan's social contract. It is little remembered, but Mr. Koizumi's final months in office were marked by a spectacular miscalculation when he proposed breaking the male-only succession to the Chrysanthemum Throne. The idea was swiftly shot down. Even his allies deserted him. The bureaucrats, guardians of the status quo, smiled knowingly. You need more than totemic words like "reform" to mess with 1,500 years of tradition and a link to the Sun Goddess.What is most surprising about this week's shift in Japanese politics is not that the DPJ finally achieved power, but that the LDP held on for so long. The natural governing party gasped to the finish line of Mr. Koizumi's last mandate after chewing up three hapless prime ministerial successors, all selected in a closed party contest, none of whom dared risk office by going to the people for a mandate of their own.
By then, the Japanese were fed up with feeling a shadow of their once-prosperous selves. They wanted their old prosperity back and the LDP was out of ideas, reduced to confessing that the government no longer presided over a "first-class economy." No policy was able to light a fire under sluggish consumer spending, widely seen as the economy's key weakness. Public money that once flowed to cities and towns, providing concert halls, airports and other pork-barrel juices, dried up in the face of a national debt running nearly double GDP.
JAPAN LOST
Everywhere there was a sense that Mr. Koizumi's rawer form of capitalism had undermined the country's core egalitarian values. This was Japan Lost: close-knit families becoming atomized, group Internet suicide pacts among strangers, tens of thousands of teenagers turning into adults without ever leaving their bedrooms. The media's obsession with gruesome crime left people who live on some of the safest streets in the world feeling high anxiety. (Never mind that statistically, they were more likely to be murdered in Norway.) Meanwhile, low birth rates heralded a dark future where a shrinking work force would not sustain pensions in a country for people living some of the longest lives.
This psychological trauma needed a villain and it found one in the winners-and-losers philosophy of go-go American capitalism, long before the Lehman Brothers collapse in Tokyo. You could see it in the popular culture. In 2007, the light sci-fi movie Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust captured the national muttering about foreign "vulture" capital firms buying up Japanese companies at deep discounts. It portrayed Japan as a dismal place where hard times tore families apart and people behaved with that most unacceptable trait: "egotism."
The movie found the source of those troubles. With the help of time travel through a washing machine - really - it traced them to 1990, the end of Japan's bubble era. The bubble is remembered through the prism of a wicked 15-year hangover: giddy days of excess cash and champagne-swilling overconsumption, until a real-estate crash ended the binge. Bubble Fiction was produced by Fuji TV, a media company with an ear to the populist ground, and it laid the blame on mythical villains: foreign bankers and their Japanese collaborators in business and government, who orchestrated the collapse in order to scoop up depreciated assets.
All turned out well in the movie. Thanks to time travel, the evil-doers were exposed, the bubble's popping was averted, and the Japan of 2007 morphed into a prosperous idyll where the country was World Cup soccer champion. Silly fun.
THE RESTORATION?
There are no such home appliance time-travel tricks available to help the next Japanese government restore prosperity. In fact, the DPJ leadership has little if any idea about how to operate Japan's real machinery of government, an opaque power-sharing arrangement built between the LDP, a powerful bureaucracy and corporations over more than half a century. The DPJ has promised to take spending control away from bureaucrats and give it to elected officials. But with so little experience in government, they may end up even more dependent on the bureaucracy.
Mr. Hatoyama has already been backpedalling from his promises, falling back on the governing orthodoxy. He swiftly moved to calm fears of a rupture with Washington over his chippy essay. After speaking with U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday, Mr. Hatoyama told reporters he had reaffirmed that the U.S.-Japanese alliance is the foundation of Japanese foreign policy.
And all that stuff about the evils of "U.S.-led" globalization? It was more nuanced than that, party officials explained, pointing out that free trade is a pillar of their economic program. Mr. Hatoyama told an economic symposium this week that Japan "must not lose sight of the need to liberalize trade and investment."
Of course, it's very early. Mr. Hatoyama doesn't take office until Sept. 16, and his smashing margin of victory should give him four years to develop his rebel credentials. He might indeed become the prime minister who leads Japan out of the postwar order. But much will hinge on whether Japan's conservative public is truly looking for change, or if their "earth-shaking" vote was simply a nostalgic plea to get their old, cushy lifestyle back.
Bruce Wallace is foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times and Tokyo bureau chief, 2004-2008