Is Koizumi Too Lucky and Smart to Be a Sucessful Japanese PM?

Is Koizumi Too Lucky and Smart to Be a Sucessful Japanese PM?

Tom Plate

LOS ANGELES -- When Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi recently landed in Tokyo after a quick trip to North Korea, bearing a noteworthy handful of North Korean-born children whose Japanese-national parents had been abducted decades before by Communist agents, he encountered a rather odd reaction. People were unhappy.

One opposition party leader condemned the diplomatic trip as regrettable and mortifying; numerous critics in the Japanese news media deplored the PM's offer of food and other humanitarian assistance as a sellout. In general, the Japanese news media painted their prime minister as being soft as a microwaved marshmallow.

That general judgment, however, did not represent one of the world’s most highly educated and affluent nations at its most sane and sensible.

Certain facts may prove helpful as we hack through decades of torturous relations between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the rest of the world, including Japan, which was the DPRK's colonial occupier for a third of the last century.

First, Pyongyang is not going to roll over like a dead dog to satisfy the Japanese public in particular or Western opinion in general. This hard-bitten, hard-core Stalinist regime will fight for survival to the bitter end. That the PM ventured the trip at all is a mark not only of his political sense that in the long run the effort would receive the warranted support of the Japanese people but also of his steel nerves.

This latter trait is only just beginning to receive proper international attention.

Second, the river of resentment separating North Korea from Japan is so wide, deep and poisoned that the very fact Koizumi returned with anything at all to show for the adventure was far more remarkable than regrettable. North Korean leaders, though not democratically accountable, of course, can no more be seen to be kowtowing to Japanese leaders than vice versa. Thus, public and press expectations of imminent "breakthroughs" must be kept low so as not to make corrosive disappointment all but inevitable.

Third, while the governments of Japan and the United States are publicly entirely as one on the issue of how to handle North Korea, the truth is that in private they are not. In fact, they are of two minds, with Japan secretly leaning toward China's more concessionary views. The North Korean negotiations gap is actually part of larger tensions ­ mainly related to the Bush administration's unvarying tendency to make decisions in the absence of true consultations with allies.

Fourth, Koizumi's gamble - so close to Upper House elections in July - occurred against a backdrop of worldwide concern that the North Korean government has decided to gamble on the rejection of the Bush administration by American voters in November. Pyongyang's putative preference for dealing with a Kerry administration may not be the product of deep thought, however. For one thing, a new president would not want to be seen as soft on North Korea; for another, should a Kerry administration decide to bring back the troops from Iraq quickly, it would have the focus, time, attention and troops to face the North Korean challenge in a more direct way than now enjoyed by the Bush administration. Moreover, there's no guarantee that Bush will lose; and if he wins knowing that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had bet heavily against him, does Pyongyang really think it will get a better aid deal a year from now?

And, finally, the world - and the Japanese, too - might want to stop underestimating Koizumi. This remarkable politician has served the sixth longest term of any postwar prime minister, as the insightful New York-based monthly The Oriental Economist points out. With any luck, he could move up on that list and surpass even the legendary PM Yasuhiro Nakasone.

Koizumi, it appears, has a superb feel for the mood of the Japanese people. At one point, his government's overall approval rating stood at 87 percent; over the last three years in office, it has averaged 58 percent. These are numbers over which George Bush and indeed Tony Blair, the British prime minister, can salivate.

Indeed, by week's end, general public approval of the PM's "regrettable ... mortifying" North Korean foray was hovering around 60 percent. Yet again, the public had proven the news media wrong (happens often in the United States, too, of course). The reasons are obvious. Koizumi has the touch of a winner: The Japanese hostages in Iraq came home unharmed; as yet no Japanese soldier has been killed in Iraq; the economy is looking less sluggish, even hopeful. Sure, this could all unravel in the flash of an Arab muzzle or the nosedive of the American dollar. But the Japanese media, in the past soft on its establishment politicians, now seem to have taken on the role of designated spoiler.

This is a risky business. Japan needs a strong prime minister at this point in its history, and it looks to now has one. Proper media criticism and press fault-finding, yes, the more the better; but why fight good fortune unnecessarily? It's mystifyingly self-destructive.

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Tom Plate is a professor of Communication and policy Studies at UCLA. He is a regular columnist for the The Straits Times -- and is syndicated through UCLA's MEDIA CENTER to papers througout the world, including The Honolulu Advertiser, The Japan Times, The Seattle Times, the San Diego Business Journal, the Korea Times and the Orlando Sentinel. He has been a participant member of the World Economic Forum at Davos, and is a member of the Pacific Council on International policy. The author of five books, he has worked at TIME, the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Mail of London. He established the Asia Pacific Media Network in 1998 and was its director until 2003. He is now founder and director of UCLA's MEDIA CENTER.

For publication and reprint rights, contact the MEDIA INSTITUTE at platecolumn@hotmail.com -- or Tom Plate directly at tplate@ucla.edu.

The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.

Date Posted: 5/28/2004