Japan Times Weekly Digital Reader ジャパン タイムズ ウィークリー ロゴ   Japan Times Weekly Digital Reader
 
UPDATE: Saturday, June 12, 2010      The Japan Times Weekly    2007年12月22日号 (バックナンバー)
 
 News
 Contact us
 Search
Google
WWW を検索
サイト内を検索
 Affiliated sites
 
2007
2007 reveals political parallels between Japan, Britain

By ALEXANDER JACOBY

This year I spent November in Japan, returning to England as Christmas approached. I was startled again by the contrast. Not only between London's still largely historic textures and Tokyo's universal modernity, but between Japan's wooded hills and the treeless hills of England, between rice fields and cornfields. In Tokyo, it had been autumn; at the beginning of December, the leaves in the capital had only just turned red. I arrived home to a wet, leafless London winter. But I saw the similarities too. When I visited Kyoto in mid-November, it was too early for autumn colors. Yet the plaza outside the city's central station was decorated for the alien festival of Christmas, just like the centers of British cities.

That is a matter of globalization; but in fact, the similarities between Japan and Britain have always seemed more persuasive to me than the differences. Our two island nations have developed island cultures in common. In Britain, though only 32 km separate us from France, and though our ancestors were French and German colonists, we see ourselves as somehow separate from the European continent. Likewise, Japan does not feel itself to be part of mainland Asia, for all the visible and abiding influence of China and Korea on its culture and way of life. Britons and Japanese alike organize their lives around small, secular rituals like cups of tea, talk about the weather to avoid talking about their feelings, and so forth.

Moreover, there has been during 2007 an eerie sense of politics in the two countries running in parallel. To begin with, Japan and Britain have had a change of prime minister this year. In fairness, that parallel may be more apparent than real: the true change in Japan happened during 2006. The succession of Gordon Brown to Tony Blair had less in common with the replacement of Shinzo Abe by Yasuo Fukuda than with Abe's emergence to take over from Junichiro Koizumi last year. In both cases, a long-serving, charismatic leader committed to reform and political activism was replaced by someone long assumed to be his predecessor's heir. In both cases, the new prime minister's honeymoon period was quickly over.

Few leaders have plunged so rapidly in popularity as Brown and Abe. But significantly, this decline was a matter of competence rather than ideology. Each leader came to power pledging broadly to uphold the policies of his predecessor. Neither even promised a departure from that predecessor's more controversial policies, such as support for the Iraq war. Each may have assumed -- perhaps rightly -- that such divisive issues would be insignificant in electoral terms provided that he proved a competent administrator.

Neither has done so. In both cases, doubts were crystallized by a vital loss of administrative data. During Abe's premiership it emerged that the government had lost millions of pension records dating back to the 1960s. In a country where an aging population is increasingly anxious about financial security in retirement, this was a critical blow to any claims Abe might have made to administrative competence. He paid the price in the summer's Upper House election, and in his eventual resignation. Brown has yet to be tested in elections for a similar blunder: the loss of the personal details of 25 million British citizens ? almost half the population. Even so, the opposition Conservatives are riding higher in opinion polls than at any time since their heyday during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher.

Curious, though, that the British and Japanese alike should have been more vexed during 2007 by their governments' loss of personal data than by their stealthy accumulation of ever greater amounts of such information. The decision by the Japanese government to photograph and fingerprint foreign nationals entering Japan, including residents, has predictably created little stir among Japanese citizens, who will not be personally affected by the decision ? except for those married to foreigners. But it is astonishing that Brown's determination to press ahead with the introduction of universal identity cards in Britain has not been a more pressing political issue, particularly since it is an infringement of liberty that goes against long-standing British traditions of political thought.

Is it possible that the visible incompetence of governments that cannot protect the personal data they have elicited from their citizens will now lead those citizens to question the wisdom of handing over such data? If 2008 sees a return from a concern with mere administrative ability to an interest in ideological questions, it may yet prove, politically, a happy new year.

The Japan Times Weekly: December 22, 2007
(C) All rights reserved
The Japan Times

Main Page | Japan Times Online | Subscribe | link policy | privacy policy

Copyright  The Japan Times. All rights reserved.