The LDP has LOST!

[Ketou]

Economies don't grow if populations don't grow... and if they're looking to stimulate baby-making...economically... than maybe that's a good thing.

A paradigm that needs to change. Consumer based growth is not the way forward anymore and economic growth need not be overly related to population. Although I can't see change happening when the present political system is all self interest.

[Samurai_Jerk]

I think the DPJ - like Obama and the Democrats - will be safe for awhile if the economic cycle goes into a natural upswing. If not, I give them two years at best.

[BO-SENSEI]

If anything, the results of this election will force the LDP to reorganize and make it more attractive to the voters. They have had such a strong grip on controlling Japan for so long, the people in charge got old and out of touch with the people. Even if the DPJ does nothing to improve Japan, it going to atleast force the LDP to improve.

[IkemenTommy]

The DPJ wants to follow Obama's plan of social welfare and many young people look forward to Japan becoming a nanny state. If Japan wants to be less dependent on the US, I say good for them, but then let be 100% not if they need help, please US come to our aid. Let them build up their military and build up their economy, implement radical social reforms, give the Emperor supreme, absolute power.
I really don't have a problem with Japan wanting to be a country less dependent, but what is the overall goal here? Does Japan think that they can still catch up to China? Do they think they can get a permanent seat as a voting member on the UN Security Council? With the declining Birthrate, will Japan start to outsource labor, give permanent Visa, pension plans to hard working guests...I mean citizen? The DPJ said, they want to play a bigger international role, how? Are these changes sincere or is there something bigger lurking on the Horizon?

Japan is already a NEET nanny state..

but I agree, Japan needs some radical changes if they want to continue in existence as one of the world super powers

[IkemenTommy]

I think the DPJ - like Obama and the Democrats - will be safe for awhile if the economic cycle goes into a natural upswing. If not, I give them two years at best.

The yen dipped into the 93JPY today. I guess I was dead wrong.

Well, I am sure Japan will be an entirely different country tomorrow, with the Nikkei jumping to the pre-2008 numbers and the economy rolling once again when I wake up...

[FG Lurker]

A paradigm that needs to change. Consumer based growth is not the way forward anymore and economic growth need not be overly related to population.

I'm no economic genius but this statement seems pretty fucked up to me.

How do you expect economic growth to take place that isn't consumer driven? Someone (or something I suppose) somewhere has to "consume" what is produced otherwise there is no point in producing it.

I'd love for you to expand on your theory a bit.

[Ketou]

I'm no economic genius but this statement seems pretty fucked up to me.

How do you expect economic growth to take place that isn't consumer driven? Someone (or something I suppose) somewhere has to "consume" what is produced otherwise there is no point in producing it.

I'd love for you to expand on your theory a bit.

I suppose my comment was poorly worded. The present 'idea' is that growth can only be effected with an ever increasing expansion of the consumer base. Populate or perish. I was trying to say that this type of consumer ideology is not necessarily true and that economies can still grow without population growth. The idea that we need to continually increase world population in order to sell more, in order to grow, just seems to me to be insane.

[MrUltimateGaijin]

Well, if that's what you hoped for, let's hope you really got what you wanted,
It's .

i wasnt refering to either party, just the fact that the japanese people actually did something about something, as opposed to going through life in neutral (or happily ignorant)

[FG Lurker]

I suppose my comment was poorly worded. The present 'idea' is that growth can only be effected with an ever increasing expansion of the consumer base. Populate or perish. I was trying to say that this type of consumer ideology is not necessarily true and that economies can still grow without population growth. The idea that we need to continually increase world population in order to sell more, in order to grow, just seems to me to be insane.

As I said above, I'm no economic genius. That said (and keeping it simple), there are only two ways you can increase GDP: 1) Inflation 2) More consumption.

Inflation doesn't really do anything as everything goes up in price. You're not making any progress or creating new wealth as money just doesn't go as far as it did before. The GDP number will climb but it is meaningless.

Increasing consumption can only be achieved with either more people or having each person spend more money. The latter works in places like China where large numbers of people are rising up out of poverty, incomes are increasing rapidly, and people have many things they want to buy (cars, TVs, microwaves, etc). It doesn't work well in developed countries as most people already have most of what they need (and most of what they want too.) That leaves increasing the population as the main engine of economic growth for developed economies/countries.

Oh, there is one other way you can increase consumption: Encourage people to spend more by providing cheap credit that nearly anyone can get and in nearly limitless quantities. I think the current economic clusterfuck is showing us the downside of this method.

Perhaps countries shouldn't be aiming for constant growth but that's an entirely different topic.

[Kuang_Grade]

Well, you can always grow GDP through exports as well, which is how Japan and Korea managed to move up to the economic ladder when their domestic consumer base was too small/too poor to propagate fast growth on their own.

[FG Lurker]

Well, you can always grow GDP through exports as well, which is how Japan and Korea managed to move up to the economic ladder when their domestic consumer base was too small/too poor to propagate fast growth on their own.

I was keeping things mostly domestic in nature, but it doesn't really matter as the exported products still get consumed. If there isn't an increase in demand to consume those products then exports won't increase either. It still comes down to the same basic things...

[Taro Toporific]

I agree 100% Greji. I really don't see how people can view the DPJ as being an improvement over the LDP

Meh. Kintaro-ame--it's the same no matter how you cut it.


...

[Mulboyne]

According to Nikkan Sports (Japanese), bureaucrats in Kasumigaseki say that having the DPJ in charge is like having a foreigner take over as boss of a Japanese company.

[nottu]

[Kanchou]

Well, you can grow an economy without positive population growth but it's really hard to do when the population is both shrinking (negative growth) and aging. And negative growth in the population is a problem that literally cannot solve itself without some sort of intervention, and also has a lot of long-term economic effects... the aging of the population will cause the work force to shrink, will put a huge strain on social services, and will cause less consumption in general (except for maybe funerals and adult diapers).

OTOH, making babies creates jobs, causes spending, replenishes the work force, and increases consumption...

[nottu]

[Greji]

but I liked Nakasone - he was the coolest looking Japanese dude that ever got elected.

He did comb his "flip-over" pretty neat in the later years, didn't he.....

[IkemenTommy]

:rofl:

He did comb his "flip-over" pretty neat in the later years, didn't he.....

If you ever search for 7-3 (shichi san) on google image, you'll find him on the top page.

[nottu]

[Mulboyne]

Karel van Wolferen on the election result.

[Mulboyne]

[Mulboyne]

Ian Buruma's take:

Guardian: Re-birth of Japanese democracy

Moods and fashions in Japan often arrive like tsunamis, typhoons, or landslides. After more than 50 years of almost uninterrupted power, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been buried in a general election. Once before, in 1993, change came when a coalition of opposition parties briefly took power, but the LDP still held on to a majority in the Diet's powerful lower house. This time, even that last bastion has fallen. The center-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took more than 300 of 480 seats in the lower house. The LDP rules no more.

The world, fixated on China's rise, was slow to pay attention to this seismic shift in the politics of the globe's second largest economy. Japanese politics has a dull image in the world's press. Most editors, when they cover Japan at all, prefer stories about the zaniness of its popular youth culture, or the wilder shores of Japanese sex.

The main reason for this is, of course, that Japanese politics was dull, at least since the mid-1950s, when the LDP consolidated its monopoly on power. Only real aficionados of arcane moves inside the ruling party could be bothered to follow the ups and downs of factional bosses, many of whom were from established political families, and most of whom relied on shady financing. Corruption scandals erupted from time to time, but these, too, were usually part of intra-party manoeuvres to rein-in politicians who got too big for their boots, or who tried to grab power before their time.

The system worked after a fashion: LDP faction bosses took turns as prime minister, palms were greased by various business interests, more or less capable bureaucrats decided on domestic economic policies, and the United States took care of Japan's security (and much of its foreign policy, too). Some thought this system would last forever.

Indeed, it has often been said, by Japanese as well as foreign commentators, that a de facto one-party state suits the Japanese. Stability, based on soft authoritarianism, is the Asian way, now followed by China. Asians don't like the messy contentiousness of parliamentary democracy. Look what happens when Asians are foolish enough to import such a system, as in South Korea or Taiwan. Instead of civilised debate, they have filibusters and fisticuffs.

But, notwithstanding the occasional bust-ups, Korean and Taiwanese democracies seem remarkably robust. And the argument that Japanese, or other Asians, are culturally averse to political competition is not historically true.

In fact, Japanese history is full of strife and rebellion, and Japan was the first independent Asian country with a multi-party system. Its early postwar democracy was so unruly, with mass demonstrations, militant trade unions, and vigorous left-wing parties, that a deliberate attempt was made to squeeze politics out of the system and impose the boredom of a one-party state.

This happened in the mid-1950s, not for cultural, but for entirely political reasons. Like Italy (perhaps the closest European parallel to Japan), Japan was a front-line state in the Cold War. Domestic conservatives, as well as the US government, worried about the possibility of a left-wing, even Communist takeover.

So a large conservative coalition party (much like the Italian Christian Democrats), funded to some degree by the US, was put in place to marginalise all left-wing opposition. This involved some strong-arm tactics, especially against the unions, but it worked mostly because the middle class settled for an informal deal: increased material prosperity in exchange for political acquiescence. The "LDP state" was based on the promise, given by Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato in 1960, that family incomes would soon be doubled.

Increasingly marginalised, the opposition dwindled to an impotent force, mere window-dressing to a one-party state. But one-party rule breeds complacency, corruption, and political sclerosis. In the last decade or so, the LDP – as well as the once-almighty bureaucracy that ran the system – began to look incompetent.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi gave the LDP a last breath of life by promising to reform it in 2001. Whatever he did was not enough. The patience of Japan's middle-class, rocked by economic crisis, finally cracked.

The victorious DPJ may not immediately set off any political fireworks. Its leader, Yukio Hatoyama, is an uncharismatic scion of yet another established dynasty – his grandfather, Hatoyama Ichiro, took over as prime minister in 1954 from Yoshida Shigeru, who was the grandfather of the last LDP Prime Minister Taro Aso.

The DPJ's aims are excellent: more authority to elected politicians, less bureaucratic meddling, more independence from the US, better relations with Asian neighbors, more power to voters and less to big business, and so on. Whether Hatoyama and his colleagues have the wherewithal to achieve these aims remains an open question.

But it would be wrong to belittle the importance of what has happened. Even if the DPJ fails to implement most of its reforms in short order, the fact that Japanese voters opted for change will invigorate their country's democracy. Even if the system were to become something like Japan's democracy in the 1920s, with two more or less conservative parties competing for power, this would still be preferable to a one-party state. Any opposition is better than none. It keeps the government on its toes.

A firm rejection of the one-party state will also reverberate far beyond Japan's borders. It shows clearly that the desire for political choice is not confined to a few fortunate countries, mostly in the Western world. This is a vital lesson, especially at a time when China's economic success is convincing too many leaders that citizens, especially but not only in Asia, want to be treated like children.

[FG Lurker]

I think it is far too early to read so much into the recent election.

I don't see what just happened as a rejection of Japan's defacto one-party state -- it looks a lot more like a protest vote than anything else. It wasn't that people were voting for the DPJ, they were voting against the LDP and I've heard this repeated quite a few times in conversations with everyday folks that I have had in the past couple of days.

There is certainly a chance that real change will result, but I'd say there is at least an equal chance that absolutely nothing will change (or that proposed changes will terrify the populace) and in a year or two the LDP will be back.

[samuraiwig]

The Economist is pitching an alternative to the idea that this election has seen the dawn of a vibrant 2 party system. They suggest it's more likely that a herd mentality will see large majorities for one party each time, based on prevailing dissatisfaction.

That may prove to be right. As FGL says, this time people voted in protest against the LDP. The DPJ didn't have to formulate detailed policies or stimulate any public debate, they just had to avoid doing anything that would make them seem unelectable. For such a revolutionary election there has been little or no discussion or euphoria on the streets, probably because the result was decided by national nemawashi several weeks ago. Beyond feeling the economic pinch, the electorate as a whole is still not very engaged with many of the important issues that will impact the country 5, 10 or 20 years in the future. This isn't any different to most other developed countries, where people tend to vote with their pocketbook, but do so more readily than the Japanese because they're more comfortable with change for the sake of change.

Ian Buruma is a good writer, but he contradicts himself by saying that a second viable party is a good thing but that a benevolent one-party system is more appropriate in Asia. The LDP model still has some life in it (not that they were entirely benevolent...), just a different acronym for the next 4 years.

[Ketou]

Ian Buruma is a good writer, but he contradicts himself by saying that a second viable party is a good thing but that a benevolent one-party system is more appropriate in Asia. The LDP model still has some life in it (not that they were entirely benevolent...), just a different acronym for the next 4 years.

In a one-party system benevolence is merely the mask of self interest.

[samuraiwig]

In a one-party system benevolence is merely the mask of self interest.

Indeed.

As Buruma says...
"It has often been said, by Japanese as well as foreign commentators, that a de facto one-party state suits the Japanese. Stability, based on soft authoritarianism, is the Asian way."

And 5 paragraphs later...
"But one-party rule breeds complacency, corruption, and political sclerosis. In the last decade or so, the LDP – as well as the once-almighty bureaucracy that ran the system – began to look incompetent."

I have the solution to this conundrum. But I won't tell you what it is unless you give me a fat envelope and 4 years to spend its contents in Ginza kabakura

[omae mona]

II don't see what just happened as a rejection of Japan's defacto one-party state -- it looks a lot more like a protest vote than anything else.

I'm not quite sure I see the difference. Well, maybe I do, but I think the end result is what is important. Namely, the LDP now realizes they have accountability. If they do not work on behalf of the people, they risk being booted out of office. I think this is a pretty fundamental change, and even when they return to power, it will change how they govern.

[Mulboyne]

[quote="samuraiwig"]...As Buruma says...
"It has often been said, by Japanese as well as foreign commentators, that a de facto one-party state suits the Japanese. Stability, based on soft authoritarianism, is the Asian way."

And 5 paragraphs later...
"But one-party rule breeds complacency, corruption, and political sclerosis. In the last decade or so, the LDP –]

I don't think he is contradicting himself there. He doesn't agree with the commentators who argued that soft authoritarianism is the Asian way. He says at the end of his piece that this election result is useful because the rise of China appeared to lend more credence to the fallacy.

[Taro Toporific]

[Kuang_Grade]

although one could skirt this by offering low to zero tolls late at night when traffic is likely pretty light (outside of truck traffic) and keeping the tolls during the day as a 'traffic congestion control device' vs its current structure of revenue collection. Likewise, offer a few toll holidays during big travel weeks, when congestion is already hellish...while it won't help the crowds any, at least folks won't be paying tolls to sit in traffic for hours....they can do that for FREE.