| | | | |
| April 5, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | Japan NIPPON: Forget the Great Man theory By Bradley Martin Quick, can you name three people who served as Japan's prime minister in the last 20 years? George W Bush probably can't. And it's a good bet very few other non-Japanese can. Never mind, though. In fact it hardly matters who is prime minister. The Great Man theory of history doesn't apply in Japan. I can't remember who replaced Masayoshi Ohira when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1980 - although I covered the story breathlessly as a Tokyo-based correspondent. Why are Japanese prime ministers so unmemorable? This is a good question to bear in mind as we read all the stories out of Tokyo saying that Mikio Aoki, who has taken over due to Keizo Obuchi's stroke, "came out of nowhere". It's not that, as some insist, they are by nature anonymous men, gray and featureless men (although indeed they have all been men, not a woman in the highest office yet). No, meet a Japanese prime minister and talk with him and you'll find him interesting enough, in some cases even fascinating. Rather, the problem is that prime ministers have little power to steer their country, compared with heads of government elsewhere. Japan is a consensus society and all the powerful consituencies are well enough established to have their own more or less autonomous ministries ready to do battle for them if anyone should contemplate a new direction that would threaten their entitlements. A prime minister is hard-pressed to do more than merely preside as things go along in pretty much the same old way. It's not that some don't try. Yasuhiro Nakasone, after a youth as a fiery nationalist, dreamed of having a political era named for him, a la Margaret Thatcher in Britain. In the end he didn't make anywhere near that big a dent in what had come before. Ryutaro Hashimoto had some grand plans when, about to take power, he sat around chatting with foreign reporters over drinks in Osaka during the Apec meeting in 1995. For the life of me, though, I can't remember what those plans were, and I don't think it was the drinks that made them forgettable. Obuchi himself dreamed of fixing the economy. But he chose the same tired old method: the pork barrel. He's spread so much money to construction companies in the prefectures that the government is waist-deep in debt. Obuchi also thought he could improve the ability of the prime minister's office to put together fast and unified responses to crises. In what historians may see as the supreme irony of his term in office, he was getting good grades just last weekend for an unusually quick and helpful response to a Hokkaido volcanic eruption - and then his temporary successor took a full day to let the nation know that Obuchi was comatose. (Special to Asia Times Online) | |||||||||
 |
 |
| Front | China | Southeast Asia | Japan | Koreas | India/Pakistan | Central Asia/Russia | Oceania Business Briefs | Global Economy | Asian Crisis | Media/IT | Editorials | Letters | Search/Archive |
| back to the top ©1999 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd. |
