After 50 years of self-serving shambolism, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has left Japan in a deep hole. Its only aim seems to be to create an eternal state of emergency from which there will be no easy emergence. What is holding Japan back most is the nature of its politics. There has never been a more futile bunch of time-wasters; they have a stranglehold on the country that they are paid handsomely to maintain.
The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has few options. It is on the precipice of becoming a Japanese Animal Farm where both sides are indistinguishable from each other. Whatever it does it will draw condemnation from a public that is almost completely dissociated and alienated from the realities of government.
The previous DPJ leader came unstuck over Okinawa, and the present one may well be scuppered by tampering with the consumption tax. Even the Japanese public is aware that this tax was a recipe for disaster from the outset of its imposition by the LDP, which foisted it on the populace to further finance its own wastefulness and conniving. The tax is an ill-contrived instrument that even makes food a luxury.
On top of this, Japan's utilities just seem to charge whatever they can get away with in a vicious monopolistic circle. Yet, for years experts have been saying that Japan's biggest problem is the lack of consumer confidence and fear of spending. With so many Japanese trying to save every spare yen they can, how will increasing a failed tax help?
If Prime Minister Naoto Kan wants to achieve anything, first he must apply the consumption tax retroactively to the half-century of political criminals who plundered the country's wealth till there was nothing left. Attacking ordinary people will solve nothing, and all the money that any increased consumption tax creates will fuel future waste at the highest levels.