What happened Thursday in the Diet — a vote on a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Naoto Kan in the Lower House — will further deepen people's distrust of lawmakers at home and tarnish Japan's image abroad. The motion did lead, however, to Mr. Kan's vague pledge to resign in the near future, without specifying when. The noisy theater surrounding the motion must have strengthened the impression that Japan's lawmakers are interested only in jockeying for position in a power game.
Lawmakers appeared to have forgotten the sober fact that more than 15,000 people died and some 8,300 others went missing in the March 11 quake and tsunami; that nearly 100,000 people are still staying in temporary shelters, away from their homes; and that people in Fukushima Prefecture live with the fear of exposure to radiation from the nuclear accidents at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Mr. Kan survived the motion by a wide margin — 293 votes were against it and 152 votes for it — but his political base has weakened. He must tackle in earnest the task of alleviating the sufferings of disaster and nuclear crisis victims as well as of carrying out reconstruction of the Tohoku coastal region.