Japan's PR-vulnerable public and lightheaded media have done it again. Between them they have got rid of yet another of Japan's better prime ministers. I have no brief for Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's policies. On two key issues I think he was wrong. One was his determination to force through legislation allowing Japan's naval vessels to continue Indian Ocean refueling for U.S. aircraft heading off to bomb more Afghan wedding parties and villages. But no doubt he was inspired by the promise he and his predecessors had made to Washington to assist that conventional wisdom called the "war on terror."
He was also wrong on economic policy. But here too he was a victim of another conventional wisdom — the one that says Tokyo has to cut spending to reduce its fiscal deficit. Like so many in Japan's ruling and media elite he had yet to learn that for Japan with its chronic lack of consumer demand, cutting government spending can easily push the economy into deflationary spirals that increase rather than reduce the government deficit.
Besides, the deficit is not the problem they think it is. But intellectual genius is not a prime ministerial requirement in Japan. One has to flow with the tide, and in both cases the tide was created by people of even less intellectual genius, in particular former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who thought the U.S. intervention in Iraq was wonderful and that the supply side U.S. economic policies introduced by his immature economic acolyte, Heizo Takenaka — and which did Japan such harm — were even more wonderful.