Japan’s politics often a family business

 

YOKOSUKA, Japan, August 25 (AFP): In Japan’s election on Sunday, the two candidates for the prime minister’s post are carrying on a family battle that started in the 1950s when their grandfathers were premiers.
The clash of the political blue bloods – incumbent Taro Aso and his rival Yukio Hatoyama – casts a spotlight on Japan’s rich and powerful clans that have dominated, and some say stifled, post-war politics. About one third of Japan’s parliamentarians are hereditary politicians – often derided as “botchan” or “babies from rich families” – who inherited their districts and fund-raising bodies from a relative, usually their father.
In many areas, politics as a family business has badly hampered the possibility of fresh blood – just ask Katsuhito Yokokume, a 27-year-old candidate for Hatoyama’s opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Yokokume, a lawyer and the son of a truck driver, has campaigned hard in Yokosuka, a port city south of Tokyo, hoping to wrest the seat from Aso’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the August 30 election.
But, even with the DPJ leading in national polls, Yokokume – who criss-crosses the constituency on his bicycle and chats with railway commuters day after day – admits he has been fighting an uphill battle. His opponent is Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of charismatic former premier Junichiro Koizumi, who ruled Japan until 2006.
“Before discussing anything substantial about political pledges, I have to ask voters to remember my face and name in this Koizumi dynasty (area),” said Yokukume, who graduated from a top university in Tokyo on a scholarship. “I raised my hand to run in this constituency because what Mr. Koizumi has done is exactly the opposite of what I want to realise as a politician... I want to change politics to represent the views of ordinary people.”
When the elder Koizumi last year announced he would not contest his Diet seat again, he apologised to supporters for his “blind parental love” – and then urged them to support his 28-year-old son and anointed successor. If elected, the younger Koizumi would be the district’s fourth-generation representative – carrying on what a local assemblyman derided as “a dynasty with a longer history than that of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.”
Yokokume’s hopes were lifted when an independent mayoral candidate in June beat the incumbent supported by Junichiro Koizumi. The Yomiuri Shimbun even reported last Friday, after extensive nationwide polling, that “Koizumi and Yokokume are neck-and-neck” after Yokokume had benefited from a nationwide “tailwind for the DPJ.”
Criticism of the hereditary system has intensified since two recent LDP prime ministers – Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda, respectively the grandson and son of former premiers – unexpectedly quit after just one year in office each. “Since these resignation dramas of the past few years, the public image emerged that second- and third-generation politicians are spineless,” said Tomoaki Iwai, professor of politics at Nihon University.
“But the real problem with hereditary candidates is that they inherit their family members’ political support groups, thus blocking newcomers from entering politics,” the professor said.
Many of Aso’s current and former cabinet members come from political families, including former finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who quit in February after appearing drunk at a media conference. Few politicians epitomise the trend like Aso and Hatoyama, whose paternal grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama became the LDP’s first premier in 1955, taking over from Aso’s grandfather Shigeru Yoshida, who led a forerunner of the LDP. Hatoyama insists he is not a hereditary candidate because he has run in a constituency different from his father’s.
Responding to popular dissatisfaction, the DPJ has banned the entry of new hereditary politicians in this election, and the LDP has promised to do so in the next polls. Both mainstream parties, however, will allow those who inherited their seats in the past to hold onto them.