Word: ldp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi vaulted to power on a reformist message, vowing to refashion the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and change Japan. He won unprecedented support and fawning adoration from a public hungry for a new way of doing things. Everyone from economists to housewives seemed to agree that the country needed a good dose of shock therapy. Why then, does reform in Japan seem dead...
...Japanese to get their acts together. His host will be Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who achieved rock-star popularity by promising to do just that, but whose public support vanished this month when he caved in to Japan's troglodytic Old Guard - the bureaucrats and Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) hardliners - robbing the population of the hope of change. At the end of next month, Japan's reform-repellent banks will close their yearly books and reveal whether their assets, many of them shares on the super-depressed stock exchange, are substantial enough for solvency. (There's serious talk...
...Today igusa is, well, straw. The farmers in and around Kagami ply an anachronistic endeavor propped up for decades by protectionism. When Japan was booming, the government thought it could have it all. Farmers, who traditionally voted for the long-ruling LDP, were shielded from competition from imports; Japan's consumers shouldered ridiculous bills for homegrown farm products. Today, thanks to the weak economy and the wrenching opening up of Japan's markets, tatami prices are half what they were 10 years ago. Farmers can't pay off the loans they were once encouraged to take. "Thirty farmers have committed...
...from the bubble period, troubling enough at the time, has grown exponentially with bankruptcies and the decline in the stock market. Kenneth Courtis, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, describes "Himalayas of debt crashing down on the economy." In January, Yoichi Masuzoe, a parliament member from the ruling LDP, gave voice to many unspoken fears when he pronounced, "By the end of March we will have a financial crisis - that is 100% true...
...Even worse than losing that okusan (housewife) support is the perception that Koizumi caved in to the very forces he was elected to oppose. Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) bosses and bureaucrats had been scheming for months to get rid of Tanaka; Koizumi's backpedaling makes him look like a wimp - and a carbon copy of all the losers who preceded him in office. Even more dispiriting is his most recent choice of confidant, none other than his hapless predecessor, the most unpopular Prime Minister Japan has ever had, Yoshiro Mori. "This is the beginning of the betrayal to the nation...