Michael Auslin: Is Japan a Failed State? Does It Matter?

Michael Auslin is the director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard, 2011).

Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan has just publically written his political obituary. Desperately hoping to avoid a no-confidence vote that seemed to be gaining the support of dozens of members of his own ruling party, Kan promised that he would step down as premier once he had dealt with the nuclear crisis and post-earthquake reconstruction. Of course, such a timeline is open-ended, and a wily politician could probably survive for a while as he claimed that the crisis was not yet solved. But Kan isn’t a wily politician. He’s not even a very good politician, and he has done the political equivalent of committing ritual suicide to atone for the sins of being a failure. Why he thinks this will buy him either time or support from the politicians who sought to overthrow him is lost amidst the general head-shaking going on. The only ones who come out looking worse than Kan are Japan’s opportunistic politicians in both major parties, the ruling Democrats and once-powerful Liberal Democrats. Most pusillanimous of all is former Democratic party kingmaker Ichiro Ozawa, who publically called for Kan’s ouster, stated he would support the no-confidence vote against his own party leader, and then chickened out, abstaining from the vote. Why Ozawa believes he could gain the support of the public is an even bigger mystery than why Mr. Kan thought he could retain it....