小泉即將缷任，其任內所推動的改革能否持續，成為各界注目的焦點。但是，很多支持改革的人認為，小泉師法英國柴契爾及美國雷根的改革，己經過時，現在選民期待的是社會民主主義的方向，日本一直都是工業國家中貧富差距最小的國家，他們希望改革能維持日本價值及傳統。


Short-lived legacy in Japan
By Patrick L. Smith International Herald Tribune

Published: September 8, 2006

As Junichiro Koizumi prepares to step down later this month, the fate of the sweeping overhauls he has urged upon this nation is evident: They are likely to come in for overhaul themselves.

Koizumi, widely seen as one of the most politically astute prime ministers in Japan’s postwar history, has pried this nation loose from its moorings. By all accounts, he has fundamentally changed public expectations of government and made the task of remodeling the world’s largest public sector - a dense, intricately structured apparatus with assets of some ¥500 trillion, or $4.4 trillion - politically feasible for the first time.

But the prime minister’s political skill and his exceptional powers of persuasion may prove the undoing of his design. In effect, he has oversold a reform agenda that, with its first results now apparent, is too radical for the electorate, the still-powerful bureaucracy, the mainstream of the governing Liberal Democratic Party and his political opponents in the Diet, Japan’s legislature.

Koizumi and the technocrats around him can point to some important initial successes in what some call the Koizumi Revolution. They have reduced public subsidies, overhauled the long-troubled financial-services sector and divided two of the largest state enterprises - the highway system and the postal service - into a series of separate corporations now slated for privatization.

But a critical flaw is becoming apparent in Koizumi’s plan for a national reinvention. The prime minister has borrowed a neoliberal economic model straight off the shelf from the Britain and America of the 1980s, and many here say it sits awkwardly atop a society that lives by wholly different notions of community and individuality.

"We want to maintain certain values - our own," said Yoshimasa Hayashi, a long-serving Liberal Democratic Party member in the Diet’s upper house. "This requires a shrewd calculation of what should be reformed and what should remain, and I don’t think Koizumi has done this."

What now seems likely to emerge will be closer to German or French social democracy than to the free-market system advocated in the 1980s by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and President Ronald Reagan, the two figures from whom Koizumi has drawn his primary inspiration.

"We’ve learned a lot from Mrs. Thatcher and from America, but we can’t follow exactly their path to reform," said Kaoru Yosano, minister of state for economic and fiscal policy and a key figure in Koizumi’s cabinet. "There’s a limit to our reforms. The market fails sometimes."

Koizumi inherited a system with roots in the 19th century, or perhaps even the 18th, when the Japanese state began assuming responsibility for sustaining economic demand and redistributing wealth from rich to poor and from cities to rural areas.

Over time this produced a public sector so immense that today only specialized bureaucrats have a detailed grasp of all its tentacles. Japan developed what some scholars call a psychology of dependence, one that translated into stiff political resistance to anything more than incremental change.

It was the recession of the 1990s that finally exhausted the system, exposing Japan’s vulnerabilities to global competition and proving stimulus spending to be expensively ineffective. Public-sector debt is now 150 to 210 percent of gross domestic product - the figure is uncertain because Japan’s vast archipelago of public enterprises has never applied consistent accounting standards.

Apart from the highway corporation, which has debts of ¥27.8 trillion, Koizumi’s focus has been on the institutions that finance such profligacy. In addition to Japan Post, with gross assets of almost ¥9 trillion, these include eight financial institutions set up to funnel cheap funds to rural areas and small businesses and to guarantee local government bonds.

Such changes are based on plans for an administrative overhaul that the Tokyo bureaucracy, with no fanfare or publicity, began in the mid-1980s. Together with Heizo Takenaka, a cabinet minister who was the intellectual architect of the overhaul, Koizumi has brought these plans out from the ministries, pushed them beyond the bureaucrats’ intent, put his priorities on the political table and set an ambitious timetable.

In June the government pushed through a law mandating a balanced budget by the 2011 fiscal year - another landmark for the administration. This sets the stage for four years of vigorous innovation after Koizumi’s departure on Sept. 20. But people across the political spectrum, like Yukio Hatoyama, secretary general of the Democratic Party of Japan, the Liberal Democrats’ main opposition, say both the pace and extent of Koizumi’s agenda will undergo a major review.

"Who wants to reinvent Mrs. Thatcher’s England?" Hatoyama said. "It’s yesterday’s thinking, Reform, yes. But voters want some form of social democracy."

Even among voters who supported Koizumi at the polls, there is disquiet over widening income disparities. Increasingly, his agenda is associated with what the Japanese, long accustomed to living in one of most equitable societies in the industrial world, now term "gapitalism."

For the Liberal Democratic Party and the opposition alike, the concept on which key legislative elections will be fought next year is "kyosei," which translates roughly as "mutual dependence" and signifies a society in which community sentiment is preserved, tradition honored and the casualties of change protected.

Koichi Kato, another longtime Liberal Democrat Party member of the Diet, reckons that 60 to 70 percent of the governing party’s membership - the rank and file as well as the Diet members - favor either halting or slowing Koizumi’s changes.

"The LDP has been all about income distribution since it was founded in 1955," said Ikuo Kabashima, a professor in the faculty of law and politics at Tokyo University. "So while we know it as a conservative party, it has always had a strong streak of social democracy running through it."

The point of greatest vulnerability for the Koizumi agenda is the amount of unfinished business his administration will leave behind. Neither the highway corporation nor the postal system, for instance, is ready for privatization, and many politicians say some of the separate companies formed from them - the postal delivery service, for instance - will probably never be transferred to the private sector.

More likely would be an exit by the government from activities where it no longer sees a role for itself - mining, forestry, savings, insurance, and the like - and the consolidation of a still- substantial network of social welfare institutions.

Koizumi is hardly the first Japanese leader to borrow ideas from abroad. Japan has done so at key intervals throughout its modern history, notably after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when it began to build an industrial state, and after 1945, when it began to rebuild a disrupted democracy.

But in each case, whether the import was baseball or parliamentary procedure, Japan transformed it to reflect its own values. This is precisely what the Japanese are likely to do once again in the post-Koizumi era.

"You can’t adopt a system from somewhere else independently of other factors," said Eisuke Sakakibara, a former vice minister of finance who is now director of a research institute at Waseda University. "Despite the influence of America in the postwar period, we are destined to look more like continental Europe than the United States. But the system we have will be our own."