Given the momentous fiscal and social problems Japan was facing even before Fukushima, even foreign residents — who can't vote — may be wondering what on Earth Japan's elected officials are doing to solve the nation's many ills.

"Not very much" is the most likely perception, though this may be less an informed view, and more a cynical assumption colored by decades of watching the Diet — Japan's national legislature — appear to do little more than rubber-stamp legislation prepared behind closed doors by anonymous bureaucrats and party hacks.

When the doings of the Diet do make the news, it has all too often been for tragicomic reasons, whether it is legislators brawling on the Diet floor (the 1950s and '60s), "walking like cows" (the '80s and '90s) or, most recently, simply refusing to perform the basic task most voters expect of them: debating legislation.