Standing Tall

Japanese political life is usually as exciting as a Noh play. But the events leading up to September’s Diet election had all the thrills of a sumo smackdown. In August, the Diet had voted down one of the most cherished reform projects of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumia plan to privatize the government postal system, which, among other things, is the world’s largest savings bank. Koizumi then made good on a threat many had considered a bluff. He dissolved the Diet’s lower house and called a snap election, positioning the vote as a referendum on whether the people wished to cling to their big-government roots, or press ahead with the frequently painful changes necessary to produce a more modern and competitive economy.

Seeking revenge like so many warlords of Japanese myth and history, Koizumi reserved particular wrath for the 37 lawmakers from his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who had opposed the postal-system bill. He ordered LDP headquarters to withdraw support from those rebels running in the election and personally dispatched a coterie of handpicked, telegenic lieutenantsmany of them women, and collectively nicknamed “the assassins” by the mediato take on the rebels. The Japanese media may have derisively coined such stunts Koizumi gekijo (Koizumi theater), but the electorate, usually apathetic, was enthralled. By casting the whole election as the new LDP versus the old LDP, Koizumi shrewdly cut Japan’s primary opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, out of the picture. The poll results were astonishing. The LDP won 84 new seats for a total of 296 in the 480-seat lower house, the biggest parliamentary majority since 1960.

The vote substantially altered the party composition. Only 17 of the postal rebels (forced to run as either independents or as part of a new party) managed to return to office. Eighty-three of the LDP winners, meanwhile, are first-time Diet members, now routinely referred to in the Japanese press as “Koizumi’s Kids.” While it would be an overstatement to say the LDP is now Koizumi’s machine, its famously fractious factions have been dealt a mortal blow, and it is more aligned behind a single, strong leader than ever before. “We destroyed the old LDP,” said a beaming Koizumi as the returns came in, “and the LDP became like a new party.”

It was what happened next, however, that explains why Koizumi is such a fascinating, contradictory figureand why he is TIME’s Asian Newsmaker for 2005. Sure, postal reform was quickly passed into law. And Koizumi quickly announced plans to turn the country’s eight remaining state-owned public lenders into a single entity, reduce the bureaucracy’s control over government funds, and cut back on subsidies to local governments. But it wasn’t his reformsbold in conception though they may bethat captured the imagination. It was his visit, on Oct. 17, to the tree-shrouded Shinto shrine just across the moat from the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo known as Yasukuni Jinja. Built in 1869, the shrine (whose name means, of all things, “Peaceful Nation”) commemorates the souls of more than 2.5 million of Japan’s war dead. Koizumi defends his visits to the shrinehe has made one each year since taking officeas a personal and religious matter, a way to honor Japan’s fallen, and to make a pledge for peace. Others in Asia see the shrine, and Koizumi’s visits there, as homages to Japan’s warmongering past. And they have reason to.

During Japan’s time as a colonial power, the shrine was a focal point of the country’s native religion, used by political leaders to help justify national conquests. They proclaimed that the souls of those who sacrificed their lives at war for Japan and its Emperor would live forever, venerated as gods, at Yasukuni. Soldiers, pilots and seamen heading into battle would frequently bid farewell to each other by saying, “See you at Yasukuni.” Since 1945, Yasukuni has remained a quiet but potent and enduring symbol for the country’s die-hard nationalists. Since 1959, priests at Yasukuni have quietly enshrined more than 1,000 convicted war criminals, not just Class-A criminals such as Hideki Tojo, the wartime Prime Minister, but also hundreds of military men who personally committed atrocities, ordered them to take place, or refrained from stopping them. At the museum next door, memorabilia from kamikaze pilots, the Burma death railway and other examples of Japan’s wartime history are displayed in unequivocally celebratory style. An exhibit on the “Nanking Incident” of 1937 does not mention the tens of thousands (and perhaps hundreds of thousands) of Chinese citizens the Japanese military slaughtered there in 1937 and 1938. Instead, it says, “The Chinese were soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace.” As a euphemism for atrocity, that summary is hard to beat. And so it is hardly surprising that as Koizumi continues to visit Yasukuni, the protests against him outside Japanespecially in South Korea and Chinabecome more impassioned by the day. Koizumi doesn’t seem to care.

It is that self-confidence that defines the man. Few Prime Ministers have so thoroughly dominated Japanese politics. Before Koizumi took office in 2001, the country had churned through 10 Prime Ministers in 12 years. In the last four and a half years, however, Koizumi has sounded a remarkably consistent message that has both kept him popular at home and elevated hisand Japan’sprofile abroad. Thanks in large part to the efforts of the government he leads, the economy is on a more solid footing than it has been in years, and the nation is riding a long-overdue wave of optimism. Overseas, Koizumi has led the most serious postwar movement yet to transform Japan from a vassal state of the U.S. into a leading player in global politics, one that might one day have a fully functioning military, a revised constitution that renounces pacifism, and a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. In 2005, he cemented his position as one of the most important leaders in the history of postwar Japan, a man whose personal stamp upon his office willfor both better and worsehave a lasting impact long after he steps down next September. On the one hand, his crushing election victory established a mandate for continued economic reform. On the other, his insistence on visiting Yasukuni outraged much of the rest of Asia. Anyone who displays such brio at home and yet produces such anxiety abroad is ready for the history books.

Rarely has a man so nicely matched his hour. A third-generation politician, Koizumi toiled for decades in relative obscurity in the Diet until he unexpectedly vaulted to power in 2001 on a platform that promised sweeping economic reforms. Unfortunately, Koizumi’s record has fallen far short of his grand promises, but that’s largely due to the stiff opposition he has encountered from old-guard LDP members, whose constituencies have long benefited from exactly the kind of pork-barrel programs Koizumi has been trying to do away with. But now, with many of his staunchest opponents finally ousted, Koizumi is trying to make up for lost time, reintroducing a flurry of previously postponed initiatives designed to produce a smaller, more responsive, less wasteful government. Japan needs a man in a hurry. For there is an unspoken desperation throughout political Japan, an understanding that is tacitly acknowledged but almost never uttered: If the country doesn’t vault to a leading geopolitical position soon, it may never do so. Looming across the East China Sea is another nation that has claims to be Asia’s leader, with a self-confidence as big as Koizumi’s. Japan is still the world’s second largest economy, but if current trends hold, China’s will be larger within a generation. And Japan is facing an unprecedented demographic contraction, with its population expected to nearly halve within the next century. So Japanese leaders know they must actto remake their once miraculous economy so that it can perform new wonders, and to establish a prominence in international affairs that guarantees that the waking dragon to the west does not decide to push around its archipelagic neighbor.

To that end, Koizumi has developed a bolder, if not outright confrontational, position with his Asian neighbors. At the same time, he has made a strategic decision to tie his country more tightly than ever to the U.S. as a buffer against the seemingly inexorable rise of China. In February, the Japanese government joined the U.S. in declaring peace in the Taiwan Strait a “common strategic objective”a move highly provocative to China that would have been unfathomable even five years ago. After a postelection cabinet reshuffle in November, Koizumi’s newly appointed Foreign Affairs Minister, Taro Aso, said “Japan should first continue to build strong relations with America and, based on this, deepen relations with other Asian nations.” That same month, the LDP drafted a plan to alter Article 9, the constitutional clause that famously renounces war, while Tokyo announced a sweeping realignment of the Japan-U.S. alliance, one that emphasized greater Japanese involvement in its own defense.

But it is Yasukuninot Japan’s longstanding ties to the U.S.that is straining relations within Asia to a breaking point. The leaders of South Korea and China refused to have formal bilateral meetings with Koizumi at December’s East Asian summit in Kuala Lumpur. At the APEC summit in November, South Korea’s President Roh Moo Hyun told Koizumi the visits to Yasukuni were “totally unacceptable.” Tang Jiaxuan, a Chinese State Council member in charge of diplomacy, said that the issue has made Sino-Japanese relations “the most difficult” since the two nations normalized diplomatic ties in 1972. And Wang Yi, China’s ambassador to Japan, recently told the foreign press in Tokyo that a Japan-China summitwhich has not happened since Koizumi visited Beijing in 2001would only take place after “political obstacles” were overcome. “When it comes to Japan’s top leader paying respects at a place where Class-A war criminals are enshrined,” he said, “it is like pouring salt into an open wound.”

It isn’t just in China and South Korea that the visits are controversial. In June, five former Japanese Prime Ministers asked Koizumi to stop going to the shrine. Only the most conservative of Japan’s five major newspapers have run editorials in favor of the visits. And there is evidence that Koizumi’s stubbornness is now threatening to do irreparable harm to Japan’s long-term interests. “Japan pays nearly 20% of the U.N.’s budget, which [it says] argues strongly for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council,” says Jeff Kingston, a professor of Japanese history at Temple University’s campus in Tokyo. “But China’s Security Council veto can block Japan from membership for as long as it likes. So do you think visiting Yasukuni is advancing Japan’s interests?”

That question can be posed another way: Why on Earth does Koizumi stubbornly keep doing something so unpopular? He himself has never fully explained his motivations, except to say things such as: “I visit Yasukuni Shrine to pledge to the soldiers who were made to fight and to die that the future will hold no wars.” Granted, Koizumi did make annual visits to the shrine a campaign promise in 2001, and some speculate that he fears the wrath of the Japan Association of War Bereaved Families if he stops. But Koizumi is a lame duckhe has repeatedly said he will not try to extend his term when it expires next Septemberand last September’s election proved that Koizumi’s support is broad enough to risk alienating influential domestic constituencies in the name of better international relations. A close Koizumi advisor, who asked not to be identified, claims to be baffled by the visits, considering the political damage they are doing. Only Koizumi knows why he does what he does. Indeed, Hitoshi Tanaka, a former Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister under Koizumi, says that the most striking aspect of the Prime Minister’s diplomacy is how autonomous it is, how much it is based on his own judgments rather than on the advice of those around him.

That confidence in his own judgment has made Koizumi a different kind of Japanese politician. With an unparalleled combination of charisma, media savvy, and the right message for an edgy population concerned about Japan’s diminishing stature in the world, he has driven the political debate into uncharted territory. Somethingor somebodybold was needed to lift the Japanese economy out of its lost decade and recapture the spark that had once lit the most sustained economic miracle the modern world has seen. But Koizumi’s legacy now hangs in the balance. If the same self-confidence, the same belief in his own rightness that helped turn the economy around, ends up alienating Japan’s neighbors for a generation, he will not easily be forgiven. And Japan will yearn once more for a political life of the stately dullness of Noh.