FOR a brief few weeks the millions of Japanese who do not love Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, had reason to hope. The combination of Morihiro Hosokawa and Junichiro Koizumi, two former premiers, entered the race for governor of Tokyo with a resonant campaign cry; to steer Japan rapidly towards zero nuclear power. With Mr Koizumi backing Mr Hosokawa’s candidacy, it seemed possible that he might deliver the biggest blow to Mr Abe and his pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since their return to power in December 2012. But on February 9th those hopes melted away as quickly as the snow which had blanketed Tokyo on the eve of the vote. The race was won handily by Yoichi Masuzoe (pictured right, on the campaign trail with Mr Abe, left), a former health minister backed by the LDP, according to projections from NHK, the national broadcaster.
The result’s chief significance is that it clears the way for Mr Abe to press ahead with switching on some of Japan’s idled nuclear reactors, possibly as early as this summer. The crusade by the ever-popular Mr Koizumi, just under three years on from the 2011 catastrophe at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, had unnerved his former party. In the election for the upper house of parliament in July 2013, Tokyo elected two vehemently anti-nuclear MPs, showing the strength of opposition. Yet the anti-nuclear camp remained divided for the governor’s race. A socialist lawyer, Kenji Utsunomiya, who also opposed a return to nuclear, drew away votes from Mr Hosokawa. Turnout was low, owing to the snow.
Mr Koizumi will hardly give up his campaign. He is now likely to ally with figures who can pack a weightier punch than the elderly Mr Hosokawa, who is descended from a line of feudal lords. Hirohiko Izumida, the governor of Niigata prefecture, for example, is another key foe of nuclear restarts. The LDP itself now contains many more people who question the country’s former reliance on nuclear power than in the past. Yet the Tokyo election shows that the anti-nuclear vote is neither overwhelming in size nor easily mobilised, even by a political superstar.
The LDP reluctantly backed Mr Masuzoe amid a dearth of strong candidates; he had walked out of the party in 2010. During the campaign he emphasised local matters such as social welfare and the hosting of the Olympics in 2020. Yet he starts his governorship of the gleaming megalopolis with the outside world focused on one characteristic; his reputation for misogyny. When Tokyo women called on Twitter for a "sex strike" against men voting for Mr Masuzoe, the media tuned in. More than two decades ago, then a political scientist, he told a magazine that women are unfit for high political office because they menstruate.
While Mr Masuzoe’s comment, exhumed from 1989, met with radical counter-action, the rightwing ravings of Toshio Tamogami, another of the four leading candidates, attracted little censure. Mr Tamogami was sacked in 2008 as the chief of Japan’s air force for writing, among other things, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately tricked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbour. Mr Abe should go once a month to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, he declared during the campaign, until China and South Korea finally get tired of complaining. One of Mr Tamogami’s supporters, Naoki Hyakuta, a member of the board of NHK, this week declared to voters that the Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in late 1937 “never happened”. All in all, not an election to be proud of.
Picture credit: AFP
