Bigmouth strikes again

PROFILE TARO ASO:The resignation of his finance minister over a drunken G7 appearance highlighted the Japanese prime minister's woeful lack of judgment. That and his knack for making huge gaffes could spell the end of his career, say some

JAPAN’S embattled prime minister, Taro Aso, has left a long trail of gaffes in a political career that began to disintegrate this week with the resignation of his finance minister. Shoichi Nakagawa’s confused and leery features were beamed across the planet, reflecting the crumbling edifice of the ruling Liberal Democrats (LDP), once one of the world’s most successful political machines.

The TV pictures of the “tired and emotional” finance minister “shamed” Japan and again exposed the awesomely poor judgment of Nakagawa’s boss, 68-year-old Aso, according to the opposition and commentators.

What, they wondered, was Aso thinking of when he appointed a man with a drink problem to steer the world’s second-largest economy through its worst crisis in half a century? The prime minister’s long-time friendship of Nakagawa should not have blinded him to the fact that he just wasn’t up to the job.

It is not the first time Aso’s political compass has malfunctioned. In a country with the highest percentage of pensioners in the world, he has regularly insulted the elderly, with predictable results on his popularity.

Last year, he questioned the wisdom of stumping up for elderly health care. “Why should I pay tax for people who just sit around and do nothing but eat and lounge about drinking?” he moaned.

In truth, Aso’s verbal carpet-bombs have left few untouched. The old, minorities, the overweight, the homeless, political opponents and doctors have all been scorched. The odd attempted surgical strike, such as when he likened the opposition Democrats (DPJ) last year to the Nazi Party, invariably blew up in his face.

Aso’s reputation for nursing one of the worst cases of foot-in-mouth in Japanese politics has long been known. In 1979, while still a novice, he advised against trading with the Chinese who he said “had no money”, failing to foresee how utterly dependent Japan would become on China’s economy three decades later.

In 2001, as economics minister, he urged Japan to become a country where “rich Jews” would want to live. As foreign minister in 2007, it was the turn of Korea and China to feel the lash of that famously loose tongue when he said accusations that Japan enslaved thousands of wartime sex slaves “ lacked objective evidence”.

Usually passed off as verbal bumbling, the string of bon mots has increasingly exposed an underlying philosophy: contempt for the “little people”. Indeed, in one of his more infamous jokes in 1983, he dubbed the nation’s citizens “commoners” while campaigning for re-election.

The philosophy is partly the product of his blue-blooded background. Rich, ambitious and linked via a network of family connections to Japan’s political and actual royalty, Aso seemed born to lead long before he became prime minister last September on his fourth attempt.

Related to Emperor Akihito by marriage, his grandfather, Yoshida, was a key postwar prime minister and Aso’s wife, Chikako, is the daughter of a former prime minister, Zenko Suzuki. His family owns a mining and cement conglomerate, which has persistently dodged allegations that it used slave labour during the second World War. (An investigation forced the government to admit in December that allied POWs had been forced to work at the family’s mine).

Despite his pedigree, the comic-mad, famously convivial businessman was seen as one of the few politicians left in the LDP with the common touch needed to helm it to election victory this year.

Touted as the saviour of the party, which is decomposing messily after half a century of power, he may well go down instead as the man who drove a stake through its ageing heart.

Opinion polls have him languishing near the bottom of Japan’s prime-ministerial league tables, with fewer than one in ten of the public supporting him. Aso must call an election by September, which on current form would almost certainly result in victory for the Democrats. The end of LDP rule would be the equivalent in Japan of a political earthquake.

Aso’s big mouth only partly explains such a monumental fall from favour. Like his predecessors, Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda, who both resigned after just a year in office, he has been unable to make a dent in Japan’s daunting structural problems, including the ageing population and the loss of competitive advantage in key manufacturing industries. Public debt is at least 170 per cent of GDP – the highest in the industrial word – and climbing.

Japan’s voters may have given him the benefit of the doubt had he demonstrated leadership and humility, but he has shown neither.

By turns petulant and defensive, he has been a surprisingly inept communicator, luxuriating in a bon-vivant lifestyle that mocked the growing hardship around him.

Early in his term, weekly magazines revealed that had spent almost every night of the working week at a series of expensive hotels and restaurants. Official expenditure records published in one magazine showed he ran up a food and drink bill of well over €394,000 between 2005 and 2007, leaving behind more than €76,000 at his favourite bar.

Aso’s response was less than contrite: “I won’t change my style,” he said. “Luckily I have money and can afford it,” sounding a disastrously false note in a country headed for recession. He has since repented, reportedly spending most nights in by the fire at his up-market Tokyo home, but the change of heart came too late.

Even before Nakagawa’s performance at the Rome G7, Aso was in trouble. Japan has been hit with surprising force by the global economic crisis, which has sent the country spinning into its worst slump since the mid-1970s oil crisis. Unlike that era, when millions of workers were protected from the worst of the recession by lifetime employment, the nation is now a vastly more insecure place.

His attempt to essentially bribe the public into one more walk up the aisle with the LDP appears to have backfired. A stimulus package of 75 trillion yen (€628 billion), including a handout of 12,000 yen (€100) to every citizen, is opposed by about two-thirds of the electorate. The prospect of another giant stimulus package, coming on top of the G7 debacle, emboldened Naoto Kan, a leader of the DPJ, to call on Thursday for Aso’s resignation.

“You can’t decide anything, and that’s why you lose public support,” Kan said. “Call elections to get the public mandate, or step down immediately.”

The signs are, for now, that the embattled leader will tough it out. But it is one measure of his plummeting stature within the LDP that many local party chapters told the press this week they only “reluctantly” back the prime minister because they see no alternative. Aso did himself few favours among the party faithful by picking a fight this month with the country’s most popular recent leader, Junichiro Koizumi. Koizumi’s angry response, accusing the prime minister of “shooting people” who are trying to help him, was a damaging public mauling and another sign that the once mighty LDP is being pulled apart.

That Aso, of all people, may well be the undertaker at the funeral of the party his grandfather helped build, is surely a legacy he could do without. All political lives end in failure, British politician Enoch Powell once opined. Few look set to implode as spectacularly as Aso’s.

CV TARO ASO

Who is he?Japan's prime minister and famously loose-tongued conservative.

Why is he in the news?

His finance minister, in charge of steering the world’s second-largest economy through its worst crisis since the second World War, turned up tired and emotional at a Rome G7 meeting, torpedoing his own career and probably igniting the fuse on Aso’s political demise.

Most likely to say:"What Japanese war crimes?"

Least likely to say:"Have another drink there minister. It'll do you good."

Essential trivia:Aso is Japan's first Catholic prime minister and therefore part of a once persecuted minority, which still makes up just one per cent of the Japanese population. Earlier this year, he said that the Christians could learn a lot from Japan's work ethic, which "contrasted with that of the Judeo-Christian tradition".