The odd couple

NATSUO YAMAGUCHI is the leader of Japan’s junior coalition party, New Komeito. He likes to boast that Komeito acts like an “opposition party within the ruling party”, reining in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, when it really counts. It has meant friction over virtually every significant policy since the coalition took office in late 2012. After not a little spousal abuse, the LDP may now be looking at ways to dump its unlikely partner. The wonder, indeed, is that this mismatched political pairing has endured so long.

Relations hit a low point over Mr Abe’s visit in December to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, a memorial to Japan’s war dead controversial for its honouring of 14 high-ranking war criminals. Mr Yamaguchi quickly added his party’s voice to the outcry at home and abroad. Soon afterwards, LDP officials lashed out at New Komeito’s refusal to force party members in Nago, a city in Okinawa prefecture, to vote for an LDP-backed candidate in a critical local election on January 19th. He lost. Had he won, the relocation of Futenma, a key American marine base at the centre of years of political wrangling, would have been made much easier, boosting Mr Abe.