NYT : Japan’s Leader Attacked by His Own Party

Japan’s Leader Attacked by His Own Party

By NORIMITSU ONISHI | July 26, 2007

KOCHI, Japan, July 24 — In his campaign for a third term in Japan’s upper house of Parliament, Kohei Tamura has been crisscrossing his district’s verdant mountains, hugging its dark blue coastline and running all the while against the deeply unpopular Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“I don’t get what ‘a beautiful country’ means,” Mr. Tamura said in a recent speech here, citing Mr. Abe’s defining, though vague, slogan about striving to transform Japan into a beautiful country.

“Here in Kochi, we’ve been reduced to worrying about our next meal,” Mr. Tamura said of his economically depressed district in western Japan. “So when he comes to support us with this pie in the sky ‘Japan, a beautiful country’ and says nothing but random things, I feel he’s making fools of us.”

With Mr. Abe’s future as prime minister hanging by a thread, it is not surprising that he has become the target of criticism in campaigns across Japan for Sunday’s election for the upper house of Parliament. But what is surprising is that the attacks are coming from his own Liberal Democratic Party, from politicians like Mr. Tamura, who are distancing themselves from Mr. Abe for their own survival.

News media polls, analysts and even party members themselves are predicting a big defeat for Mr. Abe’s party and a victory for the opposition Democratic Party. Voters in cities and even in Liberal Democratic rural redoubts like Kochi are expected to punish Mr. Abe’s government for mishandling pension records, several scandals and verbal gaffes by his bumbling ministers.

A big defeat could force the resignation of Mr. Abe, who was wildly popular when he became prime minister last September but now has approval ratings below 30 percent. He has been tone-deaf to the economic anxieties of the average Japanese, and has hewed to an ideologically driven agenda of promoting patriotism in schools, revising the pacifist Constitution and pushing an assertive foreign policy.

“We’re going to lose this election,” Katsuei Hirasawa, a veteran Liberal Democratic member of the lower house of Parliament, said in an interview. “But the key is by how much are we going to lose.”

Even a moderate loss could allow Mr. Abe to remain prime minister because there is no obvious successor, Mr. Hirasawa said. But a big loss would undermine the premise under which the Liberal Democrats chose Mr. Abe, who, at 52, was relatively young and inexperienced but popular for his hawkish stance against North Korea and China.

“If we lose the majority by only a little, I don’t think Mr. Abe should be held responsible,” Mr. Hirasawa said. “But if we lose really big, of course, he should. Mr. Abe was chosen because we thought he could lead us to electoral victories with his popularity. So the conclusion will be that Mr. Abe can’t win elections.”

Apparently to stanch such talk from within, party and government leaders said this week that the election would not be a referendum on Mr. Abe’s performance and that he would remain prime minister no matter what the outcome.

Upper house elections are not “elections involving the selection of a prime minister, so whether Prime Minister Abe resigns or not is a separate matter,” Shoichi Nakagawa, a top Liberal Democratic official, said at a news conference.

Under Japanese law, members of the lower house, which the Liberal Democrats control with a huge majority, select the prime minister. Mr. Abe would not have to step down if his party lost the upper house, but prime ministers have traditionally resigned after such losses because they reflect a lack of popular support and would make it difficult to pass laws in Parliament. In such circumstances, lawmakers have preferred turning to another leader.

Mr. Abe had described himself as the heir to political and economic reforms undertaken by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, but he quickly readmitted antireformist lawmakers whom Mr. Koizumi had expelled from the party. His initial approval ratings of 60 percent have declined steadily.

Mr. Abe quickly alienated urban voters seeking change in a system that had long favored rural areas, said Ikuo Kabashima, a professor of politics at the University of Tokyo.

“They saw him as different from Koizumi,” Mr. Kabashima said. “Abe is now more widely seen as an old-fashioned, traditional Liberal Democratic politician.”

While Mr. Koizumi’s economic changes, like reductions in public works, hurt rural areas, he earned rural support with charisma and political skills, Mr. Kabashima said. As the impact of those changes was felt more strongly by an aging, depressed, rural Japan after Mr. Abe took office, he seemed uninterested in the rural economic woes.

“So the situation now is that he has lost support of both urban and rural areas,” Mr. Kabashima said. “Usually, even if the Liberal Democrats lost urban support, they were able to firm up their rural support. That was the Liberal Democrats’ way of doing things until now. If they lose both, they face a big loss.”

Here in Kochi, a rural prefecture in Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, Liberal Democratic victories have been a given.

Until early June, Mr. Tamura, 60, the upper house candidate — whose father and grandfather were also national politicians representing this area — held a double-digit lead over his Democratic Party opponent, Norio Takeuchi, 48. But Mr. Tamura’s lead has faded, and he could lose his seat because of anxiety among voters over the economy, anger over lost pension records and Mr. Abe’s leadership of a cabinet seemingly in disarray, said Masuki Motoki, the Liberal Democrats’ secretary general here.

“This time, it’s not only a headwind, but a hurricane,” Mr. Motoki said, describing the backlash against his party. “Some people are even calling this a tsunami.”

Kimiko Arisawa, 63, a nursing home worker, was visiting a friend’s clothing shop here on Monday. Describing herself as a longtime Liberal Democrat, Ms. Arisawa said that Mr. Abe had disappointed her.

“He says only pretty things, but can’t take care of more basic things,” she said, agreeing with her lawmaker’s criticism of Mr. Abe’s “beautiful country.”

At a rally for Mr. Tamura on Monday evening, Gen Nakatani, a lower house member of the Liberal Democrats, said that Mr. Tamura spoke out for rural Japan and that, of all his party’s candidates, he had “made the most courageous statement.”

After the rally, Mr. Tamura said Mr. Abe enjoyed a good start by improving relations with China and South Korea, which had been damaged under Mr. Koizumi.

“But after that, why things turned out this way, I don’t think anybody understands, to be honest, though there were plenty of scandals and such,” Mr. Tamura said.

Asked whether he regretted so openly criticizing Mr. Abe, Mr. Tamura sounded a little defensive, perhaps because of a reprimand from his party. Mr. Motoki, the party’s secretary general here, said with some relief that Mr. Tamura had stopped attacking Mr. Abe a couple of days earlier in his campaign stops as he sought a six-year term.

But Tuesday morning, as he greeted listeners at a stop in the village of Kitagawa, Mr. Tamura told one elderly woman, “We can’t fill our bellies on a ‘beautiful country.’ ”