Japan's rightward drift provokes fight-back from unlikely court jester

Tokyo Letter:Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and in Japan the man of the hour is a rubber-faced comedian. Hikari Ota became famous as the dim half of a comedy duo that performed the improvised slapstick so popular on Japanese TV, but he has recently morphed into a sort of Shakespearian court jester, kneeing power in the groin and warning that Japan's leaders are steering the nation to disaster.

In his weekly show, If I Became Prime Minister, Ota, in the title role, gleefully lays into political taboos like a child with a rubber hammer - suggesting that Japan cut off ties with America, kick out the US military presence, X-rate prime ministerial speeches to protect the ears of sensitive children and put Tokyo's pampered bureaucrats on the minimum wage.

In a country where political satire is generally shunned, the prime-time show carries the shock of the new and has made the host into a cult hero, a status that has grown following a series of startlingly impassioned speeches to camera. Temples bulging, Ota literally goes red in the face as he rails against what he calls Japan's rightward drift.

The signs are all around, he says: prime minister Shinzo Abe (currently on a visit to Europe) has unambiguously declared his intention to scrap the war-renouncing article 9 of the Japanese constitution, written in 1947 under US occupation and a document that Ota calls "a world treasure". Abe has made the phrase "beautiful Japan" his political slogan and said young people should love their country.

As a prelude, his party, the ruling Liberal Democrats (LDP) last month reformed the 1947 education law to stress the teaching of patriotism in schools. And yesterday, Japan's defence agency was formally upgraded to a ministry, "the most important change in Japan's national security system since the agency and the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) were established in 1954", said the Asahi newspaper.

The significance of this upgrade to the SDF ban on overseas deployment for military purposes confuses many, but not Ota. In a peppery exchange with former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba on last week's show, the comedian said the obvious purpose is to move the SDF closer to a Pentagon-style model and deepen Japan's military alliance with America. "The upgrade won't change anything," insisted Ishiba. "So why make it then?" asked Ota.

Ota's goofy, irreverent passion resonates with those who fear that after six decades of basking in a warm pacifist bubble, Japan's aversion to military affairs is coming to an end. Many cite the "unconstitutional" dispatch of the SDF to Iraq - supposedly on a humanitarian mission - and the constant sabre-rattling from Abe's office about the threat of North Korea.

The government has further alarmed Ota's acolytes by ordering NHK - Japan's equivalent of RTÉ - to broadcast more information about Pyongyang's abductions of Japanese citizens, effectively making it, they say, an agent of state propaganda.

The linchpin of the pacifism that Ota has staked so much to protect is the constitution, which binds the SDF to its current role. As the Asahi wrote: "The SDF is quite different in nature from ordinary military forces. Its capabilities are used exclusively for the nation's defence and contribution to the world. These basic characteristics . . . must not be changed."

All well and good, say Abe's supporters, but the world has changed, with a growing worldwide terrorist threat, a fast-rising China and now a possibly nuclear-armed North Korea. Japan can no longer hide behind the coat-tails of Washington. "With 60 years past, there are provisions within the constitution that no longer befit the reality of the day," Abe said recently.

So far at least, Abe has not turned into the right-wing ogre Ota and others feared: instead he has donned the mantle of a sensible moderate. He has helped repair bridges with China and South Korea that had been badly damaged by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, and maintained that he will move ahead with constitutional change when he has built a consensus.

But Ota fears that consensus-building is merely a cover for the sort of intellectual bullying that often passes for debate in Japan, where people are expected to fall into line once a political decision has been made. So he has decided to intervene in what so far has been a fairly impoverished national discussion. "I respect comedians who say we shouldn't poke our nose into politics," he told the New York Timeslast year, "[ but] I want to poke my nose into everything."

The comedian's intervention climaxed last week with a debate on the new Defence Agency status where he was at his vein- bulging best, going toe-to-toe with the hawkish Ishiba. Ota appeared to be winning the motion that article 9 should be given official status of a world treasure, but was upstaged by a tearful second World War veteran who said he would not hesitate to send his grandson to fight a war today. "It's my national duty," said the veteran.

Ota lost the vote by one point.