Barring some sort of ‘divine wind’, such as an earthquake or coup, Japan will get a new government next week.
Sunday’s national elections will see the Democratic Party of Japan replace the Liberal Democratic Party as the country’s Government.
A new poll yesterday in Tokyo confirmed that the country will see a dramatic switch in the way it is governed from Sunday.
That development is going to give the Asian region, including Australia, some nervous moments while the stability and the nature of the new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) administration is assessed.
When it happens, 54 years of almost unbroken rule by the one party will end, and Governments from around the world, as well as business, will have to deal with a whole new set of players.
Australia, China, Europe and especially China, will all have to rework their links with Japanese political leaders and bureaucrats.
China and Japan have moved closer in the past two years, China and the US have become a bit more distant; Japan and Australia have had solid relations based more on commercial links than anything grander.
In many respects there shouldn’t be too much of a change: all politicians in Japan seem to come from the same mould; a belief in the rightness of the country exporting its head off to all parts of the world and the left wing strain in Japanese politics, seen in the period 1950 to 1980, has all but vanished.
And the DPJ are for all intents and purposes just another version of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
But they do differ in that many are and have been on the outer of LDP politics (many are refugees from it) and have evolved a different approach to important issues in Japan, such as the alliance with the US and the country’s military future.
Opinion polls for months have been pointing to an opposition win.
Now that official campaigning started on August 18, the polls claim the DPJ could win up to 300 of the 480 seats in lower house of Diet.
Yesterday’s poll suggested it could go higher to around 320 seats.
Some polls claim it could be more than 300, but that sounds way too optimistic. Some polls have the level of undecided voters at 15% or more.
A win of 300 seats or more would be a dramatic victory: anything more an absolute landslide.
A total of 1,374 people are candidates in Japan’s fairly complicated voting system.
There are 1,139 people contesting the 300 single-seat constituencies and 888 others in the 180-seat proportional representation section divided into 11 regional blocks, including 653 who are in both sections of the election.
The LDP is fielding a total of 326 candidates while the DPJ, which had 112 seats at the time of the Diet dissolution, is putting up a combined 330.
It is the first time that the Opposition party has fielded more candidates than the ruling party.
An overwhelming victory for the opposition will end a policy deadlock in parliament, where the party and its allies already control the less powerful upper house and can delay legislation.
So what will a DPJ Government mean?
Its leader is Yukio Hatoyama. He came to power when his predecessor was felled by a funding scandal earlier in the year.
The change of Government will happen at a very difficult time for Japan.
The economy is better than it was at the start of the year, but not by much and China, the country’s fastest growing major export market, is not as robust or settled as it looks (See separate story).
There is very little room to move for the new government in terms of spending, and if anything there will be growing pressure to cut deficits and debt by lifting or tightening taxes and cut spending.
But that has so far been ignored by the DPJ.
It says there will be no more debt issuance from the 2010 financial year, starting on April 1 and that seems to be the major policy decision. And it won’t raise taxes.
Government debt and deficits have risen as the recession crunched Japan and the Government of Prime Minister Taro Aso committed itself to spending around $US256 billion in stimulus packages to lessen the impact of the slump.
That will see Japanese Government bond issues rising to around $US400 billion in the year that ends March 31, 2010.
In reaction to the recession and its causes (the subprime mortgage credit crunch that erupted in the US), Mr. Hatoyama has, in the lead up to the campaign, criticised “US-led market fundamentalism” and vowed to shield his nation from the effects of "untrammelled globalisation."
The latter point is a joke as Japan is hooked more than ever into a global business chain and helped invent globalisation with its system of Just In Time resupply of parts and products.
The Financial Times reported Mr Hatoyama earlier this month as saying that with the era of US unilateralism ending and worries about the dollar’s future role growing, Japan should also work towards regional currency union and political integration in an “East Asian Community”, according to an essay Mr Hatoyama wrote in a Japanese magazine.
"In his essay, Mr Hatoyama said the global economy had “damaged traditional economic activities” while market fundamentalism had destroyed “local communities”, citing the decision by Junichiro Koizumi, former LDP prime minister, to privatise Japan’s post office.
He made cle
