Ichiro Ozawa, chief of the Democratic Party of Japan, said at a party rally on Jan. 16: "I will fight in the upper house election like my political life depends on it." The objective of the Democrats in this summer's vote is to pull off a political reversal and give the upper house to the opposition parties. This is by no means an easy feat, and yet Ozawa is gambling his political life on it. That's a brave stance to take.
If Prime Minister Ryuzo Abe's coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito Party takes a majority of even just one seat, the prime minister's policies will be protected. But if the coalition takes one seat too few, then heads could roll.
But the Democrats lack unity. The malcontent has not been contained and the union is fragile. The major problem for Ozawa is keeping his party together.
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Prime Minister Abe has already made it clear that he plans to make constitutional revision a key part of his election strategy. It's a big theme that will decide what course Japanese politics takes. The results of the upper house vote will set Japan on some sort of long- term path.
But both camps are vague about certain things. The New Komeito Party, the LDP's faithful ally in the upper house vote, is hazy on the issue of constitutional revision. If Prime Minister Abe wins, then the Japanese people will have given their support to constitutional revision, but New Komeito's stance has been unclear.
Is the party going to remain this vague on the issue while working to re-elect the LDP-Komeito coalition?
On the other side, the Democrats have their own contradictions to deal with. Ozawa has said that his party puts more value on lifestyle issues than constitutional revision. He has said he does not support plans to hold a referendum on amending the Constitution before the upper house vote. But Yukio Hatoyama, secretary-general for the Democrats, has been supporting the coalition's push for a referendum.
Hatoyama is gung-ho about amending the Constitution. The party leadership is heading in different directions on a central political issue. There is no room for vagueness here.
If the ruling coalition really does make constitutional revision the center of its strategy for the upper house election, then the DPJ should band together behind Ozawa and oppose those revisions. *
The wealth gap is the central issue for political battles of 2007.
Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told the Diet during his term as premier that "the fact that a gap is emerging is not a bad thing."
But Japan has to make a major decision about whether it wants to support egalitarianism or not. This coming election will set the basic approach for Japanese politics. The DPJ needs to make a strong statement that opposing the abandonment of the weak is synonymous with egalitarianism.
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