ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2005, specialists on Japanese politics were salivating with analytic anticipation at the reappearance of political uncertainty within that country’s usually predictable politics. The long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in power almost continually since 1955, was at serious risk of losing its parliamentary majority in elections scheduled for September 11, 2005 (a date not without irony). The party’s electoral difficulties were most immediately the result of its own internal divisions over a proposed reform of the national postal system championed by Prime Minister Koizumi. Koizumi treated the bill as emblematic of his broader efforts at political and economic reform. Yet the specific issue was also a symptom of the much deeper division within the party, a division that might be thought of as being between “continuity” and “change,” “resistance” and “reform,” or, more economically specific, between “pork” and “productivity.”
