Word: koizumis
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After years of wandering in the policy wilderness, Japan's financial wizards think they have discovered what's really wrong with Japan's economy. It's deflation. In January, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called falling prices Japan's "most urgent policy task" and declared he was taking all possible steps to curb its ravages. Such posturing drew praise from experts ranging from Japan's economics czar, Heizo Takenaka, to the chairman of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers, R. Glenn Hubbard. Front and center in Koizumi's new war is the Bank of Japan (BOJ), where Governor Masaru...
...exactly the same moment when Okuyama was promoting Japan's multilateralism, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was across town paying his respects at Yasukuni Shrine?a highly controversial memorial to Japan's war dead, including an assortment of convicted war criminals. Although Koizumi later bafflingly claimed that his visit was designed to "reaffirm our antiwar position," most observers declared it a foolishly provocative affront to South Korea and China?the very nations Japan was supposedly reaching out to. By the time the evening news hit the airwaves, the prospect of Japan organizing an international peace coalition was dead...
...spectacle of Japan shooting itself in the foot isn't novel these days. But Koizumi's visit to the shrine raised a bigger question at a time when North Korea's nuclear gambit has threatened the entire North Asian security arrangement: Is Japan spooked enough to start rattling its own sword, one that's been carefully sheathed since its defeat in World War II? The U.S. made Japan demilitarize and democratize, and wrote a new constitution forcing its leadership to "renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation." And yet last December the Japanese destroyer Kirishima set sail...
...nuclear weapons. And the process isn't likely to speed up soon, in part because any dramatic move to create a full-fledged military with significant offensive capabilities would cause a diplomatic furor. Such a move would also require the tacit blessing of China?hardly likely as long as Koizumi continues to indulge in provocations like visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. Further-more, Japan already labors under a government debt that tops 130% of GDP, giving it scant fiscal justification for a military buildup...
...Right now, Japan's gargantuan banking crisis has taken center stage. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and the rest of the Diet squabble endlessly over the various iterations of bank proposals recommended by Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka, while the national media reports with increasing confidence that one or more of the the nation's four megabanks are in danger of imminent collapse. Last week, Takenaka gave the banks a deadline: they have four months to take convincing action aimed at solving their financial crisis or risk being nationalized...