Hashimoto: The paradox of elective feudalism

Japanese caretaker Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto will finally leave office on or around July 30th when the new Liberal Democratic Party president will be elected by the Japanese Diet. Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin offers this brief sketch of what went wrong for a leader of whom much was expected.

HONG KONG (JP): In the end, Ryutaro Hashimoto was a total paradox.

With his slicked down hair, and Elvis Presley sideburns, Hashimoto seemed to offer something new. But he lost his Prime Ministership in large part because he projected something old -- the dour, gray ineffectual image of most of his predecessors.

Hashimoto, adept at the Japanese martial art of kendo, made his name internationally as Minister of International Trade and Industry (MITI) jousting at, and away from, the negotiating table with his U.S. counterpart Mickey Kantor. Yet as the Hashimoto premiership came to an end, after he suffered severe electoral defeat, U.S. Treasury officials had reached a point when they were almost incoherent with suppressed rage at his lackluster leadership of the world's second largest economy.

Hashimoto seemed to be, in January 1996, the perfect replacement for the aging Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama as a politician who would be excellent in a crisis. Hashimoto is being replaced because he helped escalate the post- 1990 slump in Japan's economic fortunes into a full-blown recession -- and then declined to use the word, let alone indulge in necessary crisis management.

Japanese democracy, like that in other Asian nations, is sometimes seen to be merely "elective feudalism". One aspect of this concept is that between one-third and one half of all members of the House of Representatives have inherited their seats from a close relative. Hashimoto inherited his seat, the number four seat in Okayama in western Honshu, upon the death of his father.

Hashimoto, now 60, was 26 years old at the time. Since then, while the boundaries of that constituency have changed, he has been elected altogether 12 times for Okayama. Perhaps elective feudalism helps account for the Hashimoto paradox -- sometimes his demeanor suggested a man who might have achieved far more in a profession of his own choosing, rather than one imposed upon him by primogeniture.

As if to prove this, his younger brother, Daijiro, less constrained by elective feudalism, has been both a well-known journalist, and a highly successful prefectural governor in Shikoku -- as an independent, not as a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Within the LDP, Hashimoto was always part of the mainstream. He was first a member of the faction of the longest-reigning Prime Minister, Eisuke Sato (1964-1972).

Hashimoto then, like many other aspiring politicians, joined the increasingly dominant faction master-minded by the former prime Minister, the late Kakuei Tanaka.

Subsequently, until the present day, he was a leading member, though never the leader, of the successor to the Tanaka faction, led by former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. With this factional backing Hashimoto rose to be Minister of Finance before he was MITI minister.

Hashimoto was considered such a promising leadership talent that he might have tried to become LDP President before September 1995 (when he finally won that position) had it not been for widely circulated rumors of some extra-marital indiscretions.

At first, on becoming Prime Minister on Jan. 11 1996 with his slogan of "reform and creativity", Hashimoto seemed to have everything going for him. He had ideas of his own. He exuded a greater degree of personal dynamism than several immediate predecessors. He mixed easily with foreign leaders, and was never found on the edge of group photos at APEC, ARF or G-7 summits. For a while, he enjoyed high popularity ratings, particularly with female voters.

Some of these attributes never deserted him -- witness his success over the last year in bridging the historical Russo- Japanese divide, and striking up a rapport with Russian President Boris Yeltsin at their informal "tieless" summits.

But as the national and then the regional economic crises enveloped him, Hashimoto lost what had previously seemed to be a sure political touch.

One trouble was that, instead of living up to his "take charge" image, Hashimoto too often paid excessive heed to the bureaucrats, themselves increasingly involved in scandal. Hence the disastrous decision to increase the consumption tax from three to 5 percent in 1997, thereby pushing the economic downturn into a recession.

Hence, too, Hashimoto's pursuit of budgetary austerity (written into a law which will have to be forgotten or suspended by his successors) at a time when budgetary expansion seemed essential.

But once again there was paradox. Hashimoto pushed the overdue "Big Bang" of Japanese financial deregulation -- but couldn't tell the voters that there was a profound banking crisis and what he was going to do to end it.

Hashimoto could not take charge because he had a poor grasp of what ailed Japan -- and so had some of his bureaucratic advisers. Then, finally, like Sato before him, Hashimoto was politically impaled upon the vicissitudes of U.S. policy towards China as President Clinton failed to drop by after visiting Beijing. Undoubtedly, this slight reflected badly upon Hashimoto, and added to his ineffectual image, in some voters' eyes.

Hashimoto ended up appearing remote from reality, as he oscillated over whether or not there should be permanent tax cuts. Hashimoto would probably have been a more effective leader for Japan had he become Prime Minister when everything was going according to plan.

He failed when everything was going awry, both for Japan and the region. Put another way, the same "elective feudalism" which had brought him up, by failing to provide the background necessary to deal with uncertain times, also cast him down.