Going Nowhere Fast

Pri

me Minister Junichiro Koizumi vaulted to power on a reformist message, vowing to refashion the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and change Japan. He won unprecedented support and fawning adoration from a public hungry for a new way of doing things. Everyone from economists to housewives seemed to agree that the country needed a good dose of shock therapy. Why then, does reform in Japan seem dead?

Consider Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, an independent Diet member elected in 2000 on a reformist platform. Instead of blasting his name from a noisy sound truck, he had shown a populist touch by riding a bicycle door-to-door soliciting votes. Now a $628 million, 68-km highway is on the drawing board, slated to slice through his home district, creating hundreds of jobs and funneling millions of dollars into rural Hyogo prefecture. It's one of thousands of wasteful highway projects—known as roads to nowhere—that are gradually transforming Japan into a giant parking lot, causing the national deficit to spiral and propping up inefficient, bloated construction companies. This is exactly the sort of scheme Japan needs to curtail if it is going to get its economy back in shape. Reformist Yamaguchi, however, now that he is in office, supports the highway. "Of course I am lobbying the Ministry of Transportation that we have to build more roads," he says, explaining that a new road would encourage development at the district's nano-technology research center, an earlier pork-barrel project. Besides, Yamaguchi needs to show the folks back home that he can be as effective as his predecessor, a veteran LDP power broker: "I have to show that even though I am not in the LDP, I can deliver," he says.

It's a rationalization repeated at least 353 times over—that's the number of legislators in the two houses of Japan's parliament. Koizumi's reforms are being nibbled to death, the victims of both local politics, as in Yamaguchi's case, and Japan's powerful factions and their heavyweight constituents. As for highway construction projects, Koizumi actually won approval to privatize the state-run companies that oversee road building. But members of the LDP, pushed by their construction company patrons, demanded assurances that the fate of each of the more than 2,000 proposed projects will be voted on by the Diet, one by one, which means that most of these roads to nowhere will be quid pro quo'd into existence. "This is his most critical moment," says political analyst Minoru Morita. "He has to compromise with his opponents in order to survive." But every compromise amounts to a nail in the coffin of his once-ambitious reform program.

Koizumi's vision was to reorganize the way government is run, muscling up the executive branch and tearing apart the so-called iron triangle of vested interests—the LDP; their financial and vote-getting supporters in agriculture, construction and other industries; and the bureaucrats. Because the LDP has essentially run Japan as a one-party fiefdom since the mid-1950s, real power broking has gone on inside the party, among rival factions and behind closed doors. "The LDP does its real work in the dark," says Taro Kono, a young LDP Lower House member. Under Koizumi's plan, the factions' grip on power was imperiled. Traditionally, Prime Ministers followed factions' wish lists for ministerial appointments; the largest group got the most positions. Koizumi ignored that, a move that particularly irritated the most powerful faction, headed by former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. As a result, the factions, supportive as they are of lucrative local projects and pricey bank bailouts, have fought back and continue trying to cement the loyalty of Diet members by promising to keep the gravy train running. Koizumi himself, though once a member of the second largest faction, has always been a lone operator. Never good at building parliamentary alliances, he lacks the power base to vote-trade his agenda through the Diet, leaving him in the position of so many of Japan's mavericks: isolated and increasingly irrelevant.

Japan's economic crisis was once an abstraction: numbers on a chart reflecting decreasing bank reserves and increasing bad debt. The crisis is real now, very real, as everyone from the Prime Minister to the cram-school student knows. It's too bad that the country's co-opted and callous career politicians are still managing to keep their politics local and their aspirations factional, ignoring the fact that roads to nowhere will indeed get Japan nowhere.