Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more — and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed or mattered so much.
Japan faces the biggest challenge since World War II, after an earthquake, a tsunami, and a deepening nuclear crisis struck in rapid, bewildering succession. The disasters require nationwide mobilisation for search, rescue and resettlement and a scramble to jury-rig solutions in uncharted nuclear territory, with crises at multiple reactors posing a daunting array of problems. Japan’s leaders need to draw on skills they are woefully untrained for: improvisation; clear, timely and reassuring public communication; and cooperation with multiple powerful bureaucracies.
Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of its foreign policy to the United States and its handling of domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their role as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been eviscerated, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has foundered. Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Naoto Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.
The absence of a strong leader capable of rallying the nation has never been more obvious than in the management of the efforts to contain the growing nuclear crisis. “In the past, bureaucrats would have been issuing orders without even consulting with politicians,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University. “Now the bureaucrats are no longer involved. There is a leadership vacuum.”
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
