Japan’s next prime minister?

WANT TO TAKE BETS on who’s going to be Japan’s next prime minister? I just might put my money on Foreign Minister Aso Taro.

That’s not because of my political acumen or any inside information. I simply picked up the newspaper this morning and saw the advertisement at the bottom of page two. Aso has just released a book, titled Totetsumonai Nihon. (Translation off the top of my head: Japan the Tremendous, though there are several other possibilities.)

Aso has at least one thing in common with current office-holder Abe Shinzo: they’re the grandsons of former prime ministers. Aso’s forebear was Yoshida Shigeru, the head of government from 1946 to 1954 (except for a 17-month period), which encompassed most of the Allied occupation. His father-in-law was the late Suzuki Zenko, prime minister from 1980 to 1982

Naturally, the ad leads with a reference to Yoshida: “When I was a boy, my grandfather Shigeru Yoshida often said to me, ‘The Japanese people have tremendous energy. Japan will most certainly recover in the future. Japan is a tremendous country.’”

Following is my quick and dirty translation of six bulleted points from the book cited in the ad:

• Japan is the time-tested champion of the universal value of peace.
• Japan is a ‘wellspring of moral lessons‘ for Asia.
• The otaku culture is the focus of global attention.
• “Captain Tsubasa” gave rise to (Zinedine) Zidane and (Francesco) Totti.
• The NEETs are not castoffs.
• Japan’s aged population is the healthiest and wealthiest in the world.
• China’s rise is a good thing.

(Quick explanations: Aso uses the word shinise, meaning a long-established shop or enterprise, which I rendered here as ‘time-tested champion’. Captain Tsubasa was a comic about soccer. Tsubasa means wing. NEET is an acronym coined in the UK that refers to people “not currently engaged in employment, education or training”. The expression has caught on in East Asia.)

Finally, printed as if it were a slogan accompanying his photo on the far left is the phrase, “Shouldn’t we try believing in the underlying strength of this country?”

Publishing a book is no guarantee that Aso will take the reins of government—opposition leader Ozawa Ichiro published at least three, and he’s never going to be prime minister (though he did pull the strings behind the scenes for a few years in the mid-90s).

But Abe Shinzo came out with his first book a year before assuming office. The title, Toward a Beautiful Country, became the slogan of his administration. Now one has to wonder if the Liberal Democratic Party is using Aso to hedge its own bets with Abe in case the Upper House election next month goes poorly. (The Democratic Party of Japan, the primary opposition party, is unlikely to take power during the intermediate term absent an LDP catastrophe and the Wizard of Oz returning to offer them a three-for-one deal on a brain, a heart, and courage.)

Considering some of his statements during his political career—not to mention some of the assertions made in the advertisement—an Aso administration would be entertaining, to say the least.

It also, alas, would provide column fodder for the usual torpedoes of the Western media and an outlet for the proliferation of weedpatch bloggers offering uninformed political commentary.