William J. Holstein

Japan’s Hatoyama--I Told You So
J
JUNE 2--In this blog post on the website of the Overseas Press Club, http://opcofamerica.org/blogs/blog/american-media-goes-crazy-over-japan-again, last December 5, I predicted that the Japanese government of Yukio Hatoyama would be short-lived. Despite all the hype in the American media, he did not really represent a fundamental break in Japan's post-war order.

Well, he has stepped down after about eight months, as dutifully reported by today's New York Times, among others. Strange, but they did not acknowledge that they dramatically misrepresented his election in the first place.

And a front page piece by Martin Fackler, inexplicably written with a Seoul dateline, wrote that the departure of Japan's fourth prime minister in four years is "likely to cause renewed soul-searching about Japan's inability to produce an effective leader and to feed concerns that political paralysis is preventing Japan from reversing a nearly two-decade-long economic decline."

This is filled with more misconceptions.

First, there is almost no connection between a Japanese prime minister and the Japanese economy. A prime minister in the Japanese system has just a fraction of the power that an American president does. The real decisions are made by the people who run Japan's powerful ministries in cooperation with industry leaders in the Keidanren and elsewhere. These elites actually like "political paralysis' because it means the politicians cannot threaten their power.

Secondly, Japan has not suffered a two-decade-long decline. Their economy is growing and is not in recession. Japan's wealth now stands at about $14 to $15 trillion, a mirror image of a bankrupt America.

The article thus makes the same mistakes that the American media has made for decades: if Japan cannot elect a strong leader who is capable of "reforming" Japan, then the economy is going to suffer. That's just melarkey, and the New York Times should know better than to recycle discredited arguments.