Pesek on Abe: What Happened to Koizumi?

July 13, 2007
By Ken Worsley

On the afternoon of Halloween in 2005, then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi appointed Shinzo Abe as Chief Cabinet Secretary, in a move that all but ensured that Abe would be a strong contender to succeed Koizumi when his term as Party President of the LDP (and thus Prime Minister) ended.

That worked out for Mr Abe, who leveraged his strong stance against North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese nationals into a victory in the party presidential election on September 26 of last year. Really, how could the public not support a man who threw his weight behind such a noble cause?

And thus, the Abe Cabinet was inaugurated with a 71% approval rating, according to the Nikkei. Today, that figure stands at 36%.

Although Abe’s problems are far from being isolated in the realm of his disappointing economic policies (or lack of policy), there is much to be said on this front, and Bloomberg’s William Pesek has nailed much of it down in a recent piece entitled “Where is Koizumi when Japan needs him?”

Towards the beginning, Pesek lays things out:

What voters really should be miffed about was Koizumi’s anointing of Shinzo Abe as his successor. His scandal-ridden and erratic leadership is thwarting much of what the Koizumi era promised to fix. Problems like cross shareholdings between companies and poison pills against mergers are more common now than at the end of Koizumi’s tenure. Japan Inc. is making a comeback.

As the saying goes, you never know what you have until you’ve lost it. It has taken 10 months of Abe to show just how much Koizumi succeeded in shaking up an ossified government.

This columnist was rarely kind to Koizumi, and yet Japan’s economy really could do with a few more years of his stewardship.

And the rest gets into the nuts and bolts, including this prescient paragraph:

At a time when Japan needs to bolster productivity, improve corporate governance, raise its global stature as a financial hub and increase wages, its prime minister is focused on the past. Abe should be planning Japan’s future - not trying to revise history regarding World War II-era sex slaves.

Of course, Abe has talked about these things. He even drew up plans. However, due to a lack of actually saying how any of these goals might be accomplished, they have been roundly derided, and even mocked. As we pointed out on this site in June:

Abe’s economic plan involves increasing the productivity of Japanese workers by 50% in the next five years. Think about that: 50% gains in productivity in five years. Japan’s labor productivity has been unchanged, at the bottom of the OECD for 15 years, and Abe wants to increase it by 50% in the next five years. How? How???

The best first step would be a new Cabinet.

Filed Under Business, Cabinet Office, Economics