Japan Has a Koizumi Hangover

It has been a strange postelection week in Japan.

When they went to the polls Sunday in greater numbers than at any time since the Cold War, voters handed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi one of the most decisive victories in Japan’s political history.

Then they went back to work Monday morning wondering what they’d done, like the sedate businessman who wakes up after drinking too much sake, trying to recall what songs he sang at karaoke the night before.

Just a day after Koizumi’s party won 296 seats in the 480-seat lower house of parliament, polls indicated strong voter unease at having handed him such an unbridled mandate. The Yomiuri newspaper’s survey reported that 63% of voters were concerned that Koizumi’s massive majority meant he would take a “highhanded approach” to governing, a sentiment shared even by 49% of those who voted for him.

Koizumi’s win has turned political assumptions of the last half-century on their head. He ran a campaign based on feisty personality in a country that has preferred its prime ministers bland. He convinced voters that his Liberal Democratic Party, which has held power almost without interruption for 50 years, is actually a party of radical change.

And he won a mandate to dismantle some of the cradle-to-grave social protections that economists argue Japan must shed to regain economic vitality, but which most Japanese are nervous about losing.

“Like everyone, I expected a relatively big win for Koizumi, but this went too far,” said Akira Asada, an economics professor at Kyoto University. “Koizumi and the right-wing elements of the LDP are now free to go as far as they can.”

On the surface, the election gave the country’s spirit -- and wallet -- a boost. The Nikkei stock market accelerated its current run, with its index hitting a four-year high Friday before falling back slightly.

But the stock boom has been driven by foreign investors, whose Japanese stock purchases jumped 175% in value in the week leading up to the vote as it became clear that Koizumi would win. Japanese investors, on the other hand, absorbed the election result, then bought stocks and bonds abroad in even greater amounts.

Those domestic jitters are related to uncertainty about how Koizumi plans to use his huge mandate, observers say. Japan is beset by a host of complex problems, from a low birthrate to high public debt and a festering pension crisis. But Koizumi’s campaign ignored those questions. And the Japanese public showed no appetite for debating how to fix them.

Koizumi’s political genius may have been in sensing this longing for simplicity. His campaign centered on the slogan “Kaikaku” -- reform -- without ever defining it. He was as upbeat as opposition leader Katsuya Okada was glum, speaking of grand possibilities for Japan while Okada saw nothing but icebergs.

Koizumi cast himself as a fearless warrior crusading against a political class stuck in neutral, making it clear he would rather lose and quit politics than carry on as a prime minister shackled by such mediocrity.

“Koizumi was marvelous at giving flavor to politics,” said Takashi Inoguchi, a political science professor at Chuo University whose wife, Kuniko, a former ambassador, won a parliamentary seat as an LDP member. “Eccentrics like Koizumi have been underplayed in the past. But the time has come for Japanese eccentrics to come to center stage.”

“Koizumi looked different from other prime ministers,” said Satomi Nakasone, a 20-year-old student. “He talks in a language people listen to, and has a strong individuality that comedians often mimic, so everybody knows him.

Koizumi brought in votes from unexpected places to the LDP, which picked up 84 new seats in the lower house. He took his rural-based conservative party, built on a base of older voters, and spun it into a mass-media-driven party with urban appeal. In the previous election, the LDP won half the seats for Tokyo. This time it carried all but one.

Exit polls showed that the LDP had successfully wooed voters younger than 30 -- historically a group that, if it showed up at the polls at all, tended to gravitate toward opposition parties.

Indeed, there is a widespread sense that Koizumi was a “sort of magician,” as Asada put it, whose media skills put the nation into a collective trance.

“Ordinary people got confused. Their minds were controlled,” said Kentaro Kirikoshi, 22, a graduate student. “I really wonder if people have realized themselves why they voted for the LDP.”

In all probability, they have the party for four more years. The LDP and its allies control two-thirds of the seats in the lower house, and there is already talk of Koizumi staying on past September 2006, when party rules -- easily amended -- require him to step down.

The extent of Koizumi’s ambitions is unknown. Some wonder whether he will attempt to remove the pacifist clause from Japan’s postwar, U.S.-imposed constitution. And no one knows how he will handle the smoldering tensions with China, a historical rival whose booming market has become crucial to Japan’s long-term economic health.

“We are still not at ease with our past,” said Asada, who contends the Japanese were yearning for a strong leader. “Then along comes this out-and-out narcissist Koizumi, who tells us we can say no to China.

“And instead of reacting like adults, the Japanese people showed self-indulgence. They showed they are ready to identify with this narcissism.”

Hisako Ueno and Naoko Nishiwaki of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.