Man of the moment

Below I attach my piece about Homer "Yasuo Fukuda" Simpson from this morning's paper. It's written in the assumption that he will defeat Julie "Taro Aso" Walters in Sunday's LDP presidential election, and such assumptions can be very dangerous, of course. But the only thing that could stop Mr Fukuda now would be a full-scale three-in-a-bed, coke'n'tarts sex scandal. I think we can agree that he is not the type. (Aso, on the other hand . . .)

My first assumption was that Fukuda's reluctance was just a pose, a conventional piece of pseudo-humility. Now, though, I'm persuaded by it. I think that he genuinely didn't particularly want to be prime minister. Whether that is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

[Thanks to Camera Otoko, Fi-Wi and Sarah for Homer and Julie.]

Insincere modesty is a convention of Japanese politics, but when Yasuo Fukuda says that he never wanted to be prime minister, it is easy to believe him.

Barring an unlikely upset, Mr Fukuda will soon become the leader of the world’s second richest country, the commander of its armed forces, and George W. Bush’s best friend east of Berlin. But as he travelled around the country this week, campaigning in a party election that he is certain to win, he has come across as a reluctant conscript, hesitantly joining up at a moment of national emergency.

When the prospect first arose, after the physical and mental collapse last week of the outgoing prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Mr Fukuda admitted that he was “rather flustered”. Encouraged by a supporter to “express his personality”, he responded, “I have no personality.” This week, speaking of Mr Abe’s fall, he sounded less excited than apocalyptic. “It is a horrifying thing that in politics darkness is just a step away,” he said. “But I have no choice but to go forward.”

To his supporters, this self-effacement is a strength and Mr Fukuda is the man of the hour – a solid and reliable rock of undemonstrative good sense, just what the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) needs after the humiliating debacle that was Mr Abe’s year in office. But to many others, Mr Fukuda has none of the obvious qualities of a successful prime minister – inadequate experience, no charisma, few ideas and little chance of surviving in his new job more than a few months.

“You need a leader who can encourage and inspire the people with his vision and lead them with his guts,” said Mr Aso, contrasting his own exuberant and cocky manner with that of the solemn Mr Fukuda. “Now is the time for Japan to have a strong leader, a reliable leader to lead the machine … not one who is tempted to be led by that very machine.”

The LDP – and, for the time being, the public – have come to the opposite conclusion. With the party’s biggest factions supporting Mr Fukuda in Sunday’s election to succeed Mr Abe as LDP president, his defeat is almost unimaginable. Since the LDP still commands a majority in the Lower House of the Diet, he will then be automatically voted prime minister next Tuesday. And in one sense, it is a job that he was born for.

Like numerous prime ministers before him, he is the scion of a political dynasty. His father, Takeo Fukuda, served as both foreign minister and prime minister of Japan during the 1970s. His aunt, brother-in-law and nephew have all been MPs, but Fukuda himself did not follow the conventional path of a second generation politician.

For the first seventeen years of his career he served as a conventional Japanese salaryman in a respectable but unglamorous oil company. Next he served as his father’s private secretary for 12 years, and it was not until his father’s death that he took over the constituency at the age of 53.

He has held only one ministerial position, but an important one –chief cabinet secretary, the government’s spokesman and trouble shooter. He was in the job for 1289 days, longer than anyone else before or since and it was then that he acquired his reputation for reliability, steadiness and dry, self-deprecating and sarcastic wit.

He stood in contrast to his boss, the brilliant and mercurial Junichiro Koizumi, the last prime minister but one. Mr Koizumi brandished incendiary slogans, such as “reform Japan, destroy the LDP”. Mr Fukuda’s watchword is less heart-stirring: “Be serious and do your best every day”.

During a visit to the Elvis Presley’s Graceland shrine Mr Koizumi burst spontaneously into song in front of a baffled President Bush. Mr Fukuda, it is fair to assume, will not emulate him - his favourite musician is the late Hungarian composer, and master of atonality, Bela Bartok.

Unlike the passionately pro-American Mr Abe and Mr Koizumi, he also places high priority on good relations with China – and he rejects the idea of praying at the Yasukuni war shrine, which so enraged Japan’s former wartime colonies.

But on economic policy it is much less clear what he stands for. By sheer will, Mr Koizumi oversaw a modest economic recovery by dismantling Japan’s traditional system of government, whereby elected politicians rewarded their voters with injections of cash from central coffers.

But anxieties about the unevenness of the recovery led to a punishing defeat for the LDP in elections to the Diet’s Upper House. Mr Fukuda has promised to address the concerns about the income gap, but not specified how. If he turns the wasteful money tap back on, rural politicians will celebrate, but foreign investors and economists will be appalled.

Even more urgent though is the task of uniting his divided party after its recent humiliations. The opposition controls the upper chamber, and is determined to force a general election in the Lower House early next year. If it succeeds, Mr Fukuda could be a very short lived prime minister, and his hesitation and reluctance now will look in retrospect like simple common sense.

Comments

[Eleanor Goldsmith]

Looks like we've all been barking up the wrong cartoon. Apparently a Chinese blogger in Sapporo has identified Fukuda as resembling another two-dimensional character: Nobita, friend of Doraemon (a "cat-like robot").
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20070925-00000019-scn-cn

More on Doraemon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doraemon