Gwynne Dyer: Post-war kamikaze tactics

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's tactics have been so extreme that a member of his own Liberal Democratic Party, Housei Norota, says: "It's like suicide bombing."

Late last month, an LDP member of the Diet (parliament) who had spoken against Koizumi's pet project, and was then pushed into voting for it by his own faction within the party, was even driven to hang himself.

And what is this pet project that causes so much anguish? Post office reform, of course.

Now there's going to be an election about it, and the LDP might lose power in Japan for only the second time in 50 years.

Koizumi pushed the post office reforms through the lower house of the Diet last month by a majority of just five votes, but 51 LDP members either voted against them or abstained.

He was less lucky on Monday in the upper house, where 22 members of his own party voted against the reform project and it was defeated.

So what does he do now? He can't override the upper house, because that takes a two-thirds majority in the lower house, which he obviously doesn't have. He can't call a new election for the upper house because the constitution doesn't let him.

So he dissolves the lower house and commits the country to an election two years ahead of schedule, on September 11, presumably in the hope of getting a two-thirds majority.

Only there isn't any hope of that. The polls suggest that the LDP may even lose its majority to the biggest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). All this over post office reform?

Koizumi was always a maverick within his deeply conformist party, from his 70s rock-star hair to his obvious contempt for the factions that have always dominated the LDP's internal politics.

He is Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister in two decades, but his main purpose in seeking the leadership job in 2001 was to reform the faction-driven, patronage-ridden LDP that has dominated Japanese politics for so long. And if he couldn't do that, he was prepared to kill it.

What has reforming the post office got to do with that? Japan Post is the largest financial institution in the world, with almost $3 trillion in savings and deposits.

It is Japan's biggest savings bank, with 10 times as many branches (25,000) as all seven of Japan's main national banks combined. And 85 per cent of adult Japanese have postal savings accounts.

It also writes 40 per cent of the insurance policies in the world's second-richest country. On the side, it delivers the mail.

More important, it is an indispensable ally of precisely those elements of the LDP whose grip on the party Koizumi is trying to break.

It funnels its customers' immense savings not into high-yielding investments but into government bonds and public works that win LDP politicians popularity in their mainly rural constituencies.

The postmasters and postal employees in rural areas often serve as unofficial campaign staff for LDP members, and the favour is returned. Japan Post employs 400,000 people in a country of 125 million. (India, with eight times the population, has only 600,000.)

Half a century of LDP dominance over Japanese politics has been built on gerrymandering electoral districts in favour of conservative rural areas and then bribing the relatively small number of voters in those districts with jobs, public works and direct gifts of money.

The post office was a key part of this process, so quite a lot of the party's MPs rebelled against Koizumi's reforms.

He has said that none of the rebels in the lower house will be allowed to run for re-election under the LDP banner, so there is a good chance that they will form a new party, perhaps under the leadership of Tokyo's ultra-nationalist mayor, Shintaro Ishihara.

That would split the right-wing vote, perhaps letting the DPJ into power. The LDP could even break up entirely over the next few years.

How much does Koizumi care? A good question, for he had already announced the date of his retirement as leader of the party (September next year) before the crisis, and he always did have a kill-or-cure attitude towards the LDP.

Maybe he's curious to see what real politics and a real alternation of parties in power would do to Japanese society.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.