A new era dawns?

On the brink of today's LDP election, the government dissolved the "Building a beautiful country" planning group that was to be the vanguard of Mr. Abe's campaign to leave the "postwar regime" behind. The Abe revolution is over.

But what will replace it?

As LDP members vote today, I think that my assessment is correct: an Aso insurgency has not materialized. While Mr. Aso may get a few more defections from among Diet members than initially expected after the factions threw their weight behind Mr. Fukuda, it seems that Mr. Fukuda still enjoys the support of more than two-thirds of Diet members, and the early returns are strongly in Mr. Fukuda's favor — Asahi reports that he has already secured 61 votes to Mr. Aso's 44. Even if Mr. Aso were to sweep up the remaining prefectural chapters (and receive all three votes from each), his victory would be relatively small, winning fewer than two-thirds of the prefectural vote, not nearly high enough to embarrass the faction heads and Mr. Fukuda.

Now to governing. It is unclear what the rise of Mr. Fukuda, the awkward, impolitic reluctant politician — he has actually said that he doesn't really want the job — who apparently resembles Homer Simpson and wears glasses that haven't been style since the 1970s, if ever, presages. To take up Devin Stewart's post asking whether "it's 1975," the emergence of Mr. Fukuda might suggest to some that Japan is going back to the future politically (given the role of the factions in Mr. Fukuda's candidacy).

But for Japan, the US (the subject of Stewart's post), and for Europe, there is no going back to 1975. I view this question from a "Tofflerian" perspective (Future Shock and The Third Wave in particular). The crisis faced by the industrial democracies in the 1970s was effectively the end of industrial society — the end of plans, the end of confidence in the ability of technocratic elites to control reality. Whatever the superficial resemblance of current events to the 1970s, it is only that. The challenge of the present in Japan, the US, and throughout Europe is to build a new order for the post-industrial age. The problem is probably most acute for Japan, which has been slow to de-centralize, is more hierarchical than the other post-industrial democracies, and has had a relatively higher share of its population engaged in agriculture. Of course, in cultural terms, Japan is probably leading the way into the future as its cities grow and urban culture evolves (and influences the rest of the world).

The challenge for Mr. Fukuda, and for his successors for years to come, is to build political and economic institutions for an urban, post-industrial Japan: an education system that prepares children for work other than that in large, hierarchical organizations; trade policy, especially in agriculture, that acknowledges that Japan will not be self-sufficient and thus puts consumer interests ahead of producer interests; a pension system in which the burden for supporting retirees shifts from the private sector to the government. The list goes on and on. Japan is in dire need of institutions befitting an urban society.

Mr. Koizumi understood that without change the LDP would be unfit to lead Japan into a new era. Does Mr. Fukuda recognize this, and is he prepared to do something about it?

Aging China

Curzon at Coming Anarchy has an interesting post discussing a Daily Torygraph Telegraph article about the demographics and the global balance of power.

He discusses the widely known graying of Japan, and then shifts his focus to the equally dramatic but less well-known graying of China, concluding, "...If you look at the demographic realities, China isn’t going to be the superpower of the 21st century, but an aging country with an enormous population and an inefficient industrial economy that is barely rich enough to pay the pensions of all the oldies running around."

And forget the pensions. How about all the only children who are going to be slaving away to support aging parents? And what about all the young men with no women to marry? A bunch of angry young men with little or no prospect of marriage has to be one of the most unsettling demographics in China today, more than the aging. Think about China's swelling cities, packed with young, single men who may or may not have work, whose living circumstances undoubtedly lead them to congregate with other young men (either physically or virtually). Now that sounds like trouble, although whether it will be trouble for the CCP or China's neighbors (or both) remains to be decided.

China's demographics, included the problem of managing urbanization at the rate China's cities are growing, are among the many reasons why I am relatively sanguine about China as a regional power. Juggling several dozen time bombs at home, the CCP is hardly in a position to opt for too much mischief in its near abroad. That's not to say China's neighbors, and the US, should not be cautious about China's intentions, but they also should not rush to assume the worst.

Demographics and political change

The Japan Times has a brief article about the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' latest survey of Japan's population, conducted in October of last year.

The survey found that Japan's population held steady at roughly 127 million people, but there was considerable change in the populations of Japan's prefectures, a continuation of the shift of Japan's population away from sparsely populated, rural Japan to densely populated prefectures, particularly Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures.

If one looks at the top and bottom five prefectures in this survey, and looks at the relative numbers of LDP and DPJ candidates those prefectures send to the Diet, several things stand out.

First, the top five, with the latest growth figure (relative to the previous year), population and population density per square kilometer:

Aichi +.74 7,043,235 1,366

Tokyo +.66 12,059,237 5,514

Shiga +.61 1,342,811 334

Okinawa +.5 1,318,281 580

Kanagawa +.43 8,489,932 3,515

And the bottom (from fifth lowest growth rate to the worst):

Shimane -.77 761,499 114

Nagasaki -.83 1,516,536 371

Kochi -.86 813,980 115

Aomori -.98 1,475,635 154

Akita -1.02 1,189,215 102

In 2005, the top five growers elected a total of eighty-one LDP candidates -- between constituency and block elections -- and twenty-one DPJ candidates, comprising respectively 27% and 18% of each party's caucus in the Lower House. The bottom five elected twenty-one LDP candidates and five DPJ candiates, comprising approximately 7% and 4% of each party's caucus.

The greater weight of the densely populated, growing prefectures is by no means surprising -- but among the eighty-one LDP candidates elected in the top five in the 2005 landslide, forty-two of them were elected for the first time in either 2003 or 2005. They are, in short, Koizumi's children, beneficiaries of Koizumi's popularity throughout Japan, helping the LDP grow outside of its traditional rural base. (Note that in the shrinking bottom five, of the twenty-one LDP candidates elected in 2005, only five were running for the first or second time.)

So the question is, what will happen to the LDP in the next election, when LDP candidates first elected due to Koizumi's coattails face the voters again, this time with Abe instead of Koizumi at the head of the party? Will voters in growing prefectures be as eager to elect LDP candidates without a vigorous reformer at the helm of the party?

Another interesting question is at what point will the growing population disparities lead to pressure for a new round of redistricting (or even a new mechanism for redistricting).

These numbers do not suggest the LDP's doom; it is well placed, in the short term, to contest and win in urban Japan. But over the medium to long term, can the LDP shift its policy bias away from protecting rural constituencies to legislating towards the interest of urban workers and consumers? If Koizumi couldn't do it, is there anyone in the LDP who can?