JAPAN: Prime Minister Koizumi may well leave his stamp on Japan Post, reports David McNeill in Tokyo
When Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, steps down in September 2006, he will be remembered mainly for dragging Tokyo's relations with its Asian neighbours to their lowest ebb in 30 years.
But, from this week, he may be able to add another achievement to this dubious legacy: privatising what is effectively the world's biggest bank.
The beaming smile beneath Mr Koizumi's trademark floppy curls after the Diet's (parliament) lower house narrowly passed his privatisation bills on Tuesday gave away his relief.
The prime minister had been promising since taking power in 2001 that he would face down the vested interests that protect Japan Post, and that he would quit if he failed.
He certainly picked a big enough target. The post office here boasts $3.2 trillion (€2.7 trillion) in savings and insurance assets - about a quarter of the country's enormous personal wealth. It employs 300,000 people - more than the population of Belfast - and has a staggering 24,700 branches, almost 10 times the number of Japan's seven big national banks. In many villages, it is virtually the only financial institution.
Selling stamps is the least of what it does. For decades, Japan Post's reservoir of cheap money has been ladled into the ministry of finance to fund public works, and help buy the country's enormous public debt in the form of government bonds.
The neo-liberal economists who surround Mr Koizumi say it is the rotting heart of Japan Inc, a bastion of waste and corruption that needs a good dose of the market to cure its ills.
But such views have little obvious support outside the dusty chambers of the Diet. The postal system is safe, popular and efficient, and it enjoys serious political clout, even within the prime minister's own Liberal Democratic Party, which relies on it for money and votes.
Mr Koizumi was able to carry the day - by just five votes - after persuading enough lawmakers that his initiative will shift more money from the public to the private sector, and pay better interest to post-office savers.
Not everyone is convinced. The bill will face a rough ride from upper house lawmakers, who will surely raise the spectre of Japan Rail, which closed hundreds of lines and sacked thousands of employees after it was sold off in the 1980s.
Some blame the fallout from that privatisation for the recent rail crash near Osaka that killed over 100 people.
An unusually biting editorial in yesterday's liberal-left Asahi newspaper was headed: "Can someone explain the need for [ postal] privatisation?"
One way of explaining it might be that Mr Koizumi has failed at much else, including his key promise to cut public debt, estimated at between 150 and 200 per cent of the country's GDP - and still growing.
He has also failed to stop Japan's slow economic decline, seriously overhaul the creaking political system or tackle Tokyo's deteriorating relations with China and Korea.
This underwhelming record underlines again a key, but sometimes forgotten, fact about Japan's political system: Japanese prime ministers have nowhere near the power of their British, American or even Irish counterparts because government here is managed by professional bureaucrats.
Politicians are usually considered mere temporary visitors in their ministries, says long-term Japan-watcher Karel van Wolferen, author of The Enigma of Japanese Power.
"Koizumi is trying to be a prime minister in a political system that has not in our memory, and perhaps never, made room for a genuine functioning prime minister," he writes. Mr Koizumi may at least now say he has bucked expectations and made his mark on history by delivering the dismembered postal system into private hands - even if the main result is closed branches and a longer dole queue.
It is not much of a legacy.