The strategy worked, delivering 60 percent of rural voters (or 17 of 29 rural seats) to the DPJ in the poll and handing the LDP its worse loss ever (it won only six seats). Now the 65-year-old Ozawa—an LDP veteran himself who quit the ruling party 14 years ago to help form the Japan Renewal Party (now part of the DPJ) —has a shot at putting his campaign talk into action: first through control of the upper house and then, if all goes according to plan, as Japan’s next prime minister.
But then comes the tricky part. It’s far from clear whether Ozawa’s brand of class—or, more accurately, geographic—warfare will work as well in government as it did on the hustings. Ozawa managed to undermine the LDP by attacking it on the one issue that was supposed to be its strong suit: the far-reaching economic reforms undertaken by Abe’s predecessor, the wildly popular Junichiro Koizumi. In order to impose fiscal discipline on Japan, Koizumi had slashed a range of government-spending programs during his tenure, including fat rural subsidies and make-work projects that propped up the country’s depressed and aging hinterlands. These measures proved popular in Japan’s cities—in part because Koizumi did such a good job appealing directly to urban voters. But—not surprisingly—the cuts sparked widespread resentment in rural areas.
Ozawa—a country boy himself, who hails from Iwate in northern Japan—exploited such discontent by denouncing Koizumi cuts on the campaign trail. And he promised to reverse direction by upping subsidies to struggling small-scale farmers. And he pledged to revive the country’s moribund agriculture industry through $8.3 billion in new spending, much of it intended to offset the price of cheap food imports (most of which tend to be less expensive than homegrown produce).
Finding the money for new spending won’t be easy, however. Japan’s economic recovery is far from complete, and with an aging population already straining the social safety net, the government’s coffers are far from full. Ozawa argues he’ll come up with the cash by scrapping the existing subsidy program al-together and building a new system from scratch to re-distribute income to rural Japan. Ozawa has said that this overhaul would save $127 billion by cutting unnecessary spending—more than enough to cover his new programs. Indeed, if actually implemented these reforms could exceed Koizumi’s in scale. But Ozawa has failed to explain what he’d cut. The cash must come from somewhere, and cities could be a natural target.
While the government budget might profit from greater fiscal discipline—it still spends too much on unnecessary ventures like redundant state-run corporations—Ozawa’s strategy carries huge risks. For one thing, his party’s triumph had more to do with Abe’s unpopularity than Ozawa’s own; according to a recent poll in the Asahi Shimbun, 81 percent of the respondents said they thought the DPJ won because voters wanted to punish the LPJ. Only 4 percent credited Ozawa personally for the victory.
For another, his emphasis on rural Japan could seriously hurt him in town. While his approach may have helped edge out the LDP in the upper house, it’s not clear that it would be viable in a national lower-house election. Countryside votes would count for less in such polls (the recent election covered only parts of Japan and was disproportionately rural). And the Japanese tend to behave more conservatively, favoring the status quo, when picking legislators for the much more powerful lower house.
If Ozawa hopes to become Japan’s next prime minister, then, he will have to rethink his strategy. Stressing support for rural Japan as one of several priorities is fine. But to win the top job, he’ll need to present a coherent philosophy for governing the entire country—something he has yet to do.
