The continuance of Junichiro Koizumi's administration beyond the summer seems like a sure bet: Support for his Cabinet is over 80 percent, his e-mail magazine is being read by hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and every time the opposition questions one of his pronouncements, they are deluged with calls from angry citizens.
However, in the last few weeks there has been a lot of head-scratching in the media regarding what seems like a contradiction in public sentiment. According to a survey conducted by the Asahi Shimbun a few weeks ago, 9 percent of the respondents said they do not support any form of structural reform, while another 31 percent said they do not support such reform "if it leads to lower growth and higher unemployment." That leaves 60 percent of the citizens supporting reform to some extent, which is still a high number but significantly less than the 80-plus percent support rate that Koizumi commands. TV Asahi's "News Station" came up with almost the exact same number in its own survey. Fifty-nine percent of the people they interviewed said they supported reform even if it meant some kind of hardship. But, as Hakuo University professor Masayuki Fukuoka pointed out on the show, "Obviously, those people don't think the hardship will affect them."
The prime minister has staked his reputation and, essentially, his career on carrying out structural reform, which means you can't have one without the other. It's a widely held belief that Koizumi stole the idea from the Democratic Party of Japan, who did fairly well with it in last year's Lower House elections. But now that he has commandeered the concept and become a kind of superstar because of it, the media is seriously beginning to wonder if the citizens really understand what the term means. The implication is that they don't.