In recent years, scholars, politicians, reporters and news anchors who toe the American line and cooperate with Japan's bureaucrats and the central government have been promoting the Bush administration's economic mantra that completely free and open markets are best. Their dislike of equality is utter and complete. However, if politicians throw the concept of egalitarianism aside and solely pursue freedom, they travel a dangerous road. For today's politics to stand, the two legs of freedom and equality need to be bolstered to achieve harmony and balance. The main thing politicians and political parties should be concerned with now is how to balance freedom and equality.
What follows is a summary of my article "Is This Really OK? Japan's Wealth Gap Society," which appeared in the February issue of the monthly magazine Kagayaki:

"Egalitarianism is one of the most important ideals man has passed down through the ages, both in the East and in the West. But equality in Japan today teeters on the brink. The Koizumi-led LDP-New Komeito coalition followed the US government as the Bush administration exported its wealth gap around the world in the name of globalism. As a result, Japan went through an extreme transfiguration, becoming a society of inequality and gaps in wealth. "After World War II, due to the rapid economic growth of the 1960s,
Japan developed into an egalitarian society of mostly middle class citizens, which was unusual among capitalist countries. The gap between the haves and have-nots has been so small that it was pointless to compare it with the gaps of other capitalist states. But this trend came to a halt in 1982 with the emergence of the Yasuhiro Nakasone Cabinet. Prime Minister Nakasone subordinated Japan to the American Republican Party led by then President Ronald Reagan, as reflected in their chummy 'Ron-Yasu' relationship. "The current Bush administration's stance toward Japan has been to Anglicize its security and diplomatic policies while Americanizing its economy. The Koizumi administration bought into this approach completely and pushed Japan hard in those directions. Koizumi Anglicized Japan's security and diplomacy and brought about American- style structural reform to create a more versatile market system in line with Republican thinking. The logic Koizumi used to push this program was 'free competition and individual responsibility.'
"Free competition brings about winners and losers. Competition means that the strong win and the weak lose. Japanese society is split into a very small band of winners and a whole lot of losers. In today's Japan, that small band of winners has a monopoly on happiness, while the masses of losers have to shoulder the burden of unhappiness and poverty.
"The Koizumi administration obeyed the Bush administration, and as a result it destroyed in five years and five months what Japan had built up for 55 years since World War II ? namely a society of mostly middle class people. What is left is a country with extreme wealth gaps.
"America is such a country. Koizumi's structural reforms ? the Americanizing Revolution, if you will ? changed Japan into a country with the same sort of drastic wealth gaps. The absurdly supportive mass media bears a lot of the responsibility for this. Japan has to stop this Americanization and return to an egalitarian society."

Finding balance and harmony between freedom and equality ? this is the problem for modern politics. Have a bias either for freedom or equality, and society is thrown into confusion. It just won't work.
Focusing on the golden mean is what is important now. END