Every few political cycles or so, western nations tend to experience periods of sudden, sustained change where a hitherto ossified political order is suddenly replaced by vigorous movements personified by leaders who, while not necessarily young in age, become avatars of change. Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Sebastian Kurz, Beppe Grillo, Jeremy Corbyn Rodrigo Duterte, Jacinda Ardern and yes, even Donald Trump. Other generations (especially the 1990s) saw equally outsized personages as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul I, Francois Mitterand, and Mikhail Gorbachev.
This periodic, seismic upheaval seems to have passed Asia by. With the exception of current Chinese president Xi Jinping the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seemed somehow devoid of the kind of leadership which galvanizes nations to undertake fundamental, positive shifts in governance and policy.
The frustrating part of this Asian leadership drought is that there have been charismatic, visionary statesmen peppered throughout the last decades -- Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysia’s Tunku Abdul Rahman, and China’s Deng Xiaoping but the long years of the region’s economic expansion seems to have thrown up generation after generation of bland, risk-adverse technocrats with strong academic credentials from first rank global universities, but who have come to regard the proposal and execution of bold policies as anathema. To them, governance is defined as staying in power, manufacturing consent and churning out bland, unadventurous policies whilst largely ignoring mounting fundamental issues. Moreover, their ability to execute even the blandest and unimaginative policies deliver nothing better than mixed results.
That’s why Junichiro Koizumi, who stepped down as Japan's prime minister in 2006 has earned a reputation as a popular reformer of the unreformable. During his five-year tenure Japan's governing apparatus was transformed, its economy began to emerge from long years of degenerative decline, and its dealings with the world were energized and emboldened.
Both Koizumi's rise to power, and what he did with it, offers a lesson to those in charge today as to how change can be effected from within even seemingly monolithic party structures. It's also a tutorial about knowing when to leave the stage before one's act becomes stale and to ensure that one's ideas live on long after the understudy takes over.
His triumphs derive from the wars he waged against the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP); yet, as the heir to a political dynasty (his father was a Minister of Defence), he built his career at the heart of that party. He used his personal popularity to shatter the faction-based system that had controlled Japan's prime ministers, their leaders redolent of the daimyo who’d lorded over provinces prior to the Meiji Restoration. He yearned to raise Japan's standing in the world; yet persisted in making annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine where the souls of Japan's war dead are venerated, acts which while damaging much of Japan's standing with its neighbours, allowed eventual successor Shinzo Abe to position Japan as America’s staunchest ally in Asia, willing to stand up to other nations and a vital counter balance to an increasingly aggressive China.
When Koizumi won the party presidency, and thus the premiership, in April 2001, the LDP had ruled for all but 11 months of the previous 46 years. Or, rather, it had shared power with the heads of big business and the bureaucrats at the main ministries. This “iron triangle” had cosseted business, channelling money into industries that, as part of the bargain, guaranteed a lifetime's work and a comfortable retirement for their employees. And Japan thrived. Indeed, in the four decades after the second world war it became arguably the world's greatest success story.
But the success was built on foundation of sand. By the time Koizumi came to office, scandals, corruption and a lack of accountability had thoroughly discredited a system hijacked by interest-groups, the LDP prominent among them. Factions within the party were vehicles for political patronage, and they had enfeebled successive governments, most of them led by antique prime ministers who would serve a brief and ineffectual term, then vanish back into obscurity. The system had proved incapable of dealing with the slump that followed the property and stockmarket collapse of 1990, leaving Japan's banks with piles of bad loans.
Successive governments had responded by ramping up the spending on public works. That may have staved off a more vicious deflation, but the spending was adding alarmingly to the country's public debt, just as Japan's population was starting to shrink, and so too its tax revenues. Making matters worse, the public-works spending that was smothering the country in concrete merely reinforced the unsavoury links between the LDP's hacks and their supporters in the construction industries. At the same time it entrenched the powers of the bureaucracy, making change all that much harder.
The system's inadequacy at home was matched by a feebleness abroad. After Japan's defeat in the second world war, America foisted on it a pacifist constitution that limited its forces to the role of self-defence and forbade it to send them abroad. Though the definition of “self-defence” had been gradually stretched, Japan seemed unable to shoulder international responsibilities except through its generous aid budget, or even to protect its own direct interests.
All in all, Japan was in a parlous state in 2001. The post-war success story had become a wretched tale featuring a “lost decade” for the economy, years of falling prices, insolvent banks, corrupt politics at home, disrespect and ingratitude abroad.
1. Lionheart
Bidding for the party leadership in 2001, Koizumi came with a reputation for pushing change. He was a vocal critic of the faction system, and obsessed with the need to break up the post-office savings system. But he faced Ryutaro Hashimoto, who had served once already as prime minister and who headed the LDP's most powerful and conservative faction, thus looking like a shoo-in.
Koizumi whooped him, however, by boldly breaking the mold of a party system long grown rigid. An assiduous student of history and American political culture, he used a mastery of television and the popular press to make a direct appeal to the grassroots constituencies. It had never happened before. The elders abhorred Mr Koizumi's calls for painful change (“Reform with no sacred cows”) and his attacks upon the party (“Change the LDP, change Japan”). His directness (he did not use the courtly Japanese that many politicians adopted, speaking in short, Twitter-like sentences un-elliptically clear in meaning), his wavy-maned flamboyance (he looked more like a classical orchestra conductor with his Beethoven-like locks than a dour political hack) and his use of the modern media seemed like a running insult to their way of doing things. In a sea of dark suited, unmemorable clones he wore grey, with jaunty green or other bright-colored ties. Soon, though, it was clear that the Koizumi phenomenon was also good for the party. In the elections for the upper house in July 2001, the LDP had its best result in a decade.
By Japan's standards, the prime minister's agenda was nothing short of radical. Within the government, cabinet posts were to be allocated by merit and no longer by faction. Spending on public works was to be slashed, and government borrowing capped. The highway corporation, a vast source of pork-barrel spending, was to be broken up. Local governments were to be given more power, but also more responsibility. As for the banks, they would have to acknowledge the full extent of their bad loans and then sort them out themselves to get the economy going again.
Above all, Mr Koizumi going to privatise Japan Post. This ambition --- once shared by his grandfather, who had been postal minister--may seem curious to Western ears, but one which is fairly common in Asia.. Yet as well as delivering the mail, Japan's postal system was also the world's biggest bank, with ¥320 trillion ($2.8 trillion) in savings (then) and life-insurance accounts funnelled towards favoured public-works projects and a collection of public financial bodies and their clients. Like the highway agency, it lay at the heart of the dismal relationship between Japan's politicians, bureaucrats and interest-groups. To break it up would do much for the distortions running through the economy. The public to whom Mr Koizumi appealed seemed to understand his mission. He swiftly gained the nickname "Lionheart", as much for his unruly mane as his drive for change.
From the start, though, Koizumi met resistance. The road-building lobby and backers within the LDP stymied change, restoring highway projects that had been axed. Attempts to privatise the postal system fared no better. Worse, too little was being done about the banks' bad loans, and the stockmarket was becoming alarmed. The further the stockmarket fell, the greater the threat of insolvency to the banks, which treated the value of their shareholdings as capital. As a sense of crisis grew in 2001-02, Mr Koizumi looked like yet another in the line of leaders who had delivered little and would be destined to fade into the background as a historical footnote.
A change in fortune came in 2003. That year Heizo Takenaka, an economist brought in by Mr Koizumi to mastermind domestic reforms, made progress with the banks. He toughened their supervision and forced them and their regulators to face up to their awful state. At last, a vehicle was created to take on banks' bad loans, long in advance of Barack Obama’s TARP. The stockmarket turned.
In the autumn of 2003 Koizumi crushed a challenge to his party leadership and won a general election handsomely enough, despite the revival of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). A new cabinet appeared to give a sense of purpose. Much of Mr Koizumi's first cabinet had been inherited. However, his second was of his own making. Out went the 81-year-old finance minister and in came a number of young reformists, such as Nobuteru Ishihara, who took charge of the notorious land and transport ministry. Shinzo Abe, a young ally with impeccable political pedigree, was made the party's secretary-general.
2. Economic Hope
The recovery that had begun tentatively in 2002 looked more assured as firms began investing again. As companies' profits revived, the banks' bad loans began to fall. Having stood at over 8% of GDP at their nadir in March 2002, they were under 2% when Koizumi left office -- a drop, said Takenaka, that he had expected to take ten years. The biggest banks repaid public money and started once more to provide credit to the economy, thus lay the foundation for future growth. It was one of the main accomplishments of the Koizumi era.
In other endeavours, though, the government had challenges. Hardened operators quickly outmanoeuvred the neophytes brought in to push through privatisation—Naoki Inose, a writer, for the highway corporation, and Mr Takenaka for the post office. Bold proposals were diluted. Though agreement was reached for the highway agency to be split into six, it was to remain in public ownership. As for Japan Post, rather than abolishing its savings and insurance functions altogether, they would continue as separate operations, and privatisation would be deferred to 2017. And despite these large concessions, in August 2005, after a nasty fight, the parliament's upper house narrowly voted the postal plan down.
It was a defining moment, one that Mr Koizumi greeted with a bold relish seldom seen in supposedly cautious Asian leaders. He called a snap general election (a tactic Shinzo Abe has learned well). The DPJ was on the run: though reformist, it had chosen -- disastrously as it turned out -- to oppose postal privatisation on tactical grounds. But the election was a challenge to the old guard in the LDP too. Mr Koizumi expelled 37 lower-house rebels who had voted against privatisation, and put up allies to run against them. The fight, he told the country, was about a single issue of reform: privatising the post office. The two-thirds majority returned for the LDP and its ruling coalition vindicated him.
His authority now unchallenged, the postal and highway bills quickly sailed through the new parliament. Even if the post office was ultimately never privatised, Koizumi had at a stroke destroyed the country's most powerful political machine, and virtually put an end to pork-barrel politics. He also moved to “normalise” foreign and security policy, challenging the limits placed on Japan by its post-war pacifist constitution by sending refuelling tankers to the Indian Ocean and troops to Iraq. He riled China and South Korea by visiting Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine, where among the millions of Japanese war dead who are commemorated are the souls of a number of war criminals.
The abolition of multi-member constituencies in the mid-1990s and the introduction of public financing of political parties have, for instance, hastened the decline of money politics and factions. Abe himself left his faction, as his mentor did -- an inconceivable move when faction bosses were kingmakers not long ago.
Another change is the way authority was accrued to the prime minister's office within government, and to the secretary-general within the ruling party, a position now in the gift of the prime minister. It meant, first, that political advancement hangs more on showing loyalty to the leadership than to your faction. Crucially, it encourages party and government to agree on policy. For example, agreement was reached in July, 2006 on a fiscal blueprint that was meant to set the country's finances to rights. The plan envisaged swingeing spending cuts of up to ¥13 trillion a year by 2011.
Yet a new enigma emerged. Although the election had put reform at the centre of politics, and although Mr Koizumi was at the top of his form, he swiftly lost interest in fresh fights, say his colleagues. Early in 2006 the committee he had put in charge of road reform voted to build 9,000km (5,600 miles) of expressways that had first been proposed in the late 1990s. The total cost to the taxpayer will be ¥3 trillion. But barely a squeak came from the prime minister.
Koizumi was term limited as party president and thus had to step down as such and thus prime minister. He could have chosen to exert influence behind the scenes, yet withdrew almost entirely from public life, choosing to devote himself to music (he has eclectic tastes, preferring everything from classical music to heavy metal) and haute cuisine --- not to mention a private life.
3. L'etat, c'est moi.
Koizumi's reforming drive did not initially outlast him. Though it was a mark of change that his successor was Shinzo Abe, a man of only 51 years then, Abe was compelled to step down after an inept and gaffe-strewn year complicated by health issues. The LDP then wandered through a death spiral of bland and incapable leaders till an opposition victory tossed them out of power for three years. Despite calls throughout occasional calls for Koizumi to return (which he resisted) the LDP did eventually turn back to Abe and he lead them back to power after the DPJ imploded.
Abe’s second term has been far more Koizumi-like in approach and boldness. His infamous “Three Arrows” of economic reform constituting Abenomics are largely repackaged Koizumi reform proposals based on further deregulation and tax reform to promote growth. Just like his mentor did with then President George W. Bush (though with less subtlety), Abe has rushed to support Donald Trump, determined to position Japan as the American surrogate in Asia. This would in turn insulate Abe from accusations of nationalism and a desire for his nation to rearm as he works towards reforming Japan’s pacifist constitution, another Koizumi trope.
It seems clear in retrospect that Koizumi instinctively knew that he could only push the system so far, and that the inherently conservative Japanese people would (and could) only travel a limited distance down the road of reform under his leadership. He then elected to take the long view, relying on protégés like Abe and current Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike (she was his Environment Minister and Abe’s first term Defence Minister) who share essentially the same philosophical approaches to domestic and foreign policy. Most importantly to Koizumi personally, is the quiet rise of his son, Shinjiro, to prominence as both the elected member of his old Kanagawa constituency and a potential prime minister with the same youthful appeal to voters as Trudeau and Macron. Instinctively, the elder Koizumi realized that running a nation is much like running a marathon and that one’s vision must outlive one’s time in the sun, yet another difference between him and many Asian leaders of today who are tempted to see themselves as indispensable.
Just like his rise and attainment of power required a combination of planning, luck and timing, leaving at the right moment ensured that Koizumi's hold on the public imagination remained strong. One sign of his enduring popularity is his "role" as the protagonist in a satirical anime and manga about global politics and mahjong (!) that reinforces the perception of the man as a heroic figure.
It's an enviable legacy worthy of emulation.
