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Letter from Japan:
Get Off Your Bum!
Your country needs you
By PETER McKILLOP
May
26, 2000
Web posted at 12:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 12:30 a.m. EDT
Japan prides itself on being a democracy. As one of the world's most prosperous nations, it does indeed bask in all the basic accoutrements of freedom and liberty. Its citizens go to bed at night secure that there will not be midnight visits by jackbooted police thugs. With cash to burn, there is nothing to stop Japanese from going and doing what they please. The result is one of the world's most eclectic, and often charming, cultures.
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This is a nation that loves to read, to view the latest movies and listen to the trendiest new music. Its citizenry is ready to try almost anything, from climbing Mt. Everest to spending months on national television wearing nothing more than a strategically placed image of an eggplant. The legendary gossip mills of an average office, the hundreds of newspapers and magazines, and the success of the wireless i-mode mobile phone attest to a nation where anything and everything can, and is, said. Why then do many feel that when it comes to the heavy lifting portion of democracy--the election and supervision of the nation's political leaders--that Japan is about as democratic as, say, North Korea?
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Why has one political party--the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)--so completely dominated Japanese politics for the past 50 years? Worse, why has the Japanese electorate allowed its political system to become so gerrymandered that a vast majority of the population are effectively disenfranchised? Why, given a decade of economic turmoil and blatant government mismanagement, do the vast majority of Japanese remain so politically apathetic?
With yet another election just a month away, let me list three possible reasons:
1) Apathy. Most young Japanese are spoiled brats. With nonexistent memories of the horrors suffered during World War II, this most-pampered of Japanese generations is more focused on DVDs than the LDP. Narcissism is the nectar of a land where young Japanese think only of their next trip to Italy or Hawaii, how to download the latest horoscope from their i-mode or whether to put a surfboard or windsurfer on their Honda RAV.
2) Lying. Lying, until recently, has been an accepted cultural norm. This week, the New York Times exposed the government with a report that the nation's economic scorekeeper--the Economic Planning Agency (EPA)--under pressure from the LDP, may have juggled figures to make the economy look better than it fact it is. Few were surprised by the report. Telling a whopper to protect a political party, or company, even an economy, has been accepted and tolerated in Japan for years. There is a certain chivalrous element to all of this: an individual lies is to protect the greater good of the collective. But it also means that most people don't believe what they read in the papers, or what their politicians tell them. The inability to make informed decisions is a fertile breeding ground for political apathy.
3) Corruption. The Liberal Democratic Party has never been far from corruption. The party has been plagued by a series of unseemly scandals dating back to its founding. Recently, Finance Minister and former Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa found himself at the center of new bribery charges. This week, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori admitted that he had attended a wedding where the other prominent guest was one of the nation's most prominent gangsters. Yet charges of corruption, rather than creating shock, outrage and reform, are usually seen as just another weapon used by one political faction against another. The result is yet more political apathy. Cynicism about corrupt politicians runs so deep that the 1999 conviction of one high-ranking LDP politician, Takao Fujinami, did not stop him from announcing he would seek reelection, even though he should be serving time in jail. (The judge has suspended his three-year prison sentence for four years).
An apathetic electorate, numb from decades of lying and misinformation by the LDP, has cost this nation dearly, particularly in the last decade. One can only hope that the sheer frustration of a decade-long economic slide will finally motivate Japan's electorate to take seriously the most important responsibility of democracy--the election of political representatives that represent the mandate of a majority of its citizens. Don't hold your breath.
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