COMMENTARY
Languishing economy hasn't pushed Japan off world stage
By Tom Plate
Why is it that the world's second-largest economy and key U.S. ally can't get any respect?
Associated Press
In August, a major U.S. newspaper, as if happy to put down Japan, reported from Tokyo that foreign journalists allegedly were exiting the country because it was so pathetically bogged down in recession and the place just wasn't producing good stories any more.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi talks with President Bush. Koizumi faces a daunting task in bringing change to tradition-bound Japan, but after years of economic troubles, people appear ready for it.
The report was without foundation and fundamentally idiotic. Tokyo remains infested with noisy foreign journalists because Japan continues to generate some of the world's most newsworthy events.
And that's truer than ever these days. Just consider the Japanese-North Korean summit in Pyongyang coming on Tuesday.
There, if all goes as planned (very far from certain when dealing with Pyongyang), Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will seek to melt, at least slightly, the iceberg that has separated North Korea and Japan since the end of World War II, when Japan's 35-year occupation of the Korean Peninsula ended.
This is no shallow public relations gesture to earn domestic political points but a bold diplomatic move. For even if the extraordinary effort fails, the attempt shows steely determination and vision.
In Koizumi, Japan has an uncharacteristic player at the center of its politics. Would any Japanese premier in recent memory (with the exception of the late Keizo Obuchi, insanely workaholic and eager to bury past grudges) have made this overture? Not likely.
Assuming Koizumi plans this as a first step rather than a one-and-out visit, the diplomatic effort could bring a long-awaited degree of security to the scarily overarmed and divided Koreas. That development would infuse the hearts of the Japanese public with the hope that perhaps this guy with the odd hairstyle really is different — maybe he really is the reformer that the country needs to escape its dead-end economic and political malaise.
Clearly that's what the Japanese want. Why else did voters in the prefecture of Nagano earlier this month hand outspoken reformer Gov. Yasuo Tanaka a smashing landslide re-election victory? This was a primal grass-roots scream.
Even so, it won't be easy to get Japan moving again. Not many in the West (certainly not its news media) fully appreciate the intrinsically conservative nature of the Japanese archipelago's culture.
Change is about as welcome in Japan as communists are in the United States.
Just go back a half-century to the plot line of the great Kurosawa film "Ikiru." This is the 1952 masterpiece about a rare bureaucrat dedicated to effecting social change — and that only as his last-ditch effort to find meaning in life before cancer brings it to an end. Then, Japan was still buried in the ashes of its ignominious World War II debacle. Kurosawa's artistic pessimism notwithstanding, Japan did change — and it rolled on to become an economic superpower and technological marvel.
Perhaps this is why the Japanese have a different perspective on their present crisis than does the West. For even if their political establishment were to fail them completely, the resulting slippage to No. 3 in the world ranking of economies (behind Germany) wouldn't seem all that bad — certainly a far cry from what relatively little they had when "Ikiru" was filmed.
No, given what they were — a postwar Third World nation — the Japanese are not nearly as terrified of their economic downturn as are many in the West, worried that a collapse in Japan would take down the rest of us, too. But they are not unworried, either. Their pride as a people cannot be underestimated. And when true change comes, it will be in the Japanese way, not the American way or anyone else's.
And once united for change, the Japanese will be an awesome force.
That's why so much national hope rests on the ability of the cagey Koizumi to unite them. The previous prime minister had single-digit approval ratings; this one has about 40-plus percent on a mediocre day.
This is no fluke: The Japanese people are trying to get a message through to the politicians and the media that it's time to end the vicious and debilitating national sport of Get the Prime Minister. There have been 10 in the past 10 years. That's enough. And this one looks to be a keeper.
Perhaps even the Western news media might find this somehow newsworthy.
Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.
