The outlook for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's administration, which previously enjoyed high approval ratings and looked set for continued success, has taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

The downward slide began at the end of January, when Koizumi dismissed Makiko Tanaka as foreign minister. Since then there have been scandals involving Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers Muneo Suzuki and Koichi Kato, revelations about shoddy discipline among bureaucrats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a report that the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries committed a serious blunder in its handling of the mad cow disease problem. Koizumi's failure to display leadership in dealing with these issues has sparked massive criticism from the public.

In the nine months following its inauguration at the end of April 2001, the Koizumi administration enjoyed a record high approval rating of around 80 percent. But after the sacking of Tanaka, it suddenly plummeted to around 50 percent, and has continued to fall in the months since then. At the time of the 30-point drop, I quoted the famous saying by Shojiro Kawashima (1890-1970), a former vice president of the LDP, that "in politics, all is darkness just a step down the road." There have been no signs of a recovery in the rating since that time.

Then the important mayoral election in Yokohama on March 31 produced a startling upset when Hidenobu Takahide, the LDP-backed incumbent who was seeking a fourth term and was considered to be the strongest candidate, was defeated by an independent newcomer, Hiroshi Nakada. In addition to the LDP, Takahide had been recommended by the LDP's two coalition partners, Komeito and the New Conservative Party, as well as by the Social Democratic Party in the opposition camp. So why, despite this wide support, did he lose to a 37-year-old newcomer?

The result of the election shows just how critical the people of Yokohama have become of the LDP and the three-party coalition administration of Prime Minister Koizumi. In addition, the support of the SDP also worked against Takahide, because just before the election, following the scandals involving Suzuki and Kato, there were reports in the media implicating Kiyomi Tsujimoto, a Diet member belonging to the SDP, in a scandal, too.

On a party level, the only ones to come out in support of Nakada were the Democratic Party of Japan (although the DPJ was virtually divided on the issue) and the Liberal Party. Accordingly, it can be concluded that this election was a kind of act of resistance, in which the citizens of Yokohama expressed their distrust of existing parties by voting for an independent.

I myself am a resident of Yokohama, and what I felt after the election was that the people of Yokohama, who a year earlier had had great expectations of the Koizumi administration, were becoming increasingly displeased by and critical of that administration, which since January has bowed to conservative and antireform forces, and the way ruling and opposition parties alike continue to cling to vested interests.

It was an election in which the winds of dissatisfaction blew hard. Was this a phenomenon limited only to the citizens of Yokohama, who are renowned for having an outstanding political sense? Or will the Yokohama election be the beginning of a wider movement in which the nation as a whole, learning from the two-faced facade of the LDP and other existing parties, engages in wise political participation and political monitoring? The dramatic upset in Yokohama can be expected to exert a very great impact on national politics in general.

For the Koizumi administration, which will have been in power for one whole year at the end of this month, the next few weeks are going to be critical. There were warnings of an economic crisis occurring sometime between the settlement of accounts at the end of March and the introduction from April of the payoff system of caps on bank-deposit guarantees in the event of bankruptcy. However, thanks to signs of recovery in the U.S. economy, which had been reeling after the terrorist attacks last September, the Japanese economy also appears to have avoided collapse.

As I stated at the beginning of this article, however, the situation looks grim for Japanese politics and the Koizumi administration. There is likely to be mounting discord among the three coalition partners, especially between the LDP and Komeito. And within the LDP, in relation to the composition of the Koizumi administration, bargaining is going to intensify over the timing of a Cabinet reshuffle and the new lineup. The political situation will probably become increasingly tense toward the end of the current session of the Diet in May.