日本の政治が変わるチャンス!? |
もちろん民主党に政権交代ということを見越しての発言なんですが。
しかしイギリスよりも良い立場にあるかどうかは微妙ですが(苦笑
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A silver lining for Japan
The economic suffering here has been harsh and long, but at last political change is coming
Bill Emmott in Tokyo
The Guardian, Friday 20 February 2009
In the race to report the worst economic contraction among rich countries this year, Britain is being run close by another island nation: Japan, the world's second biggest economy. Japan is, however, winning the contest for the country with the most shambolic politics - this week its finance minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, resigned after turning up drunk to a press conference after the G7 summit in Rome last weekend. Nevertheless, Japan stands a good chance of being one of the few countries to benefit from the economic crisis.
Many Japanese would find that hard to believe. Unemployment is rising sharply; the big, famous Japanese names such as Toyota, Panasonic and Sony are all making losses; exports are plummeting; and manufacturing output has dropped to a level last seen in 1983. Any Briton who thinks the reason our economy is weak is that we no longer have much manufacturing should come to Japan, for the reason Japan is weak is that it has too much (20% of GDP, compared with 10% in Britain), making precisely the things that everyone has just stopped buying, such as cars and fancy televisions.
So where is the silver lining to all those clouds? It lies in politics, and the sharp kick in the pants that the economic crisis is about to give to the old political elite. A general election must be held by October at the latest, and could be forced much sooner. The same outfit - the Liberal Democratic party, which is actually a conservative group - has run the country for the whole of the past half century, barring nine months in 1993. The LDP survived even the country's stagnation during the 1990s, when Japan's financial crash destroyed its banking system. But, finally, the LDP is running out of road as fast as it long ago ran out of ideas. The prime minister, Taro Aso, has an approval rating that would shame even George Bush.
As a result, the main opposition, the Democratic party of Japan, a centre-left group, is miles ahead in the opinion polls. Its leaders are plotting what they will do when they win power in a manner reminiscent of Labour in 1997, though with a touch of 1979 Thatcher too. The party's secretary-general, Yukio Hatoyama, says that as soon as it wins, the DPJ will outline its policies and fire any bureaucrat who won't support them.
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