When and if Junichiro Koizumi steps down as prime minister in September 2006 as planned after almost five and a half years in office—making him one of the longest-serving prime ministers in Japanese history—there will be a deluge of commentary from the political pundits both in Japan and abroad evaluating his performance. Some will concentrate on his foreign policy, and others will focus on his domestic policy, but they all will have one thing in common.

Every one of them will get it wrong.

You will not see an accurate assessment of Koizumi as prime minister for the simple reason that the pundits will base their judgements on the premise that Koizumi is a political leader in the way that term is understood in the West. He is not, and never has been. The Japanese political commentators should know better (and probably do, but their careers and self-esteem depend on pretending that Japan is run like the other industrialized countries), and few foreign journalists take the time to understand how the Japanese government works, much less try to explain it to their readers.

Japanese prime ministers are not popularly elected nationwide. They are Diet members who represent a local district. They may be members of either the upper or lower house, but in practice they come from the lower house (the upper house has little real power). They are selected by a vote of the Diet members, which means that the party in control of the legislature does the picking. For the most part, the Diet has been controlled by the Liberal Democratic Party since it was formed with the merger of the country’s conservative parties in 1954. The parties of the left have never been popular enough, nor presented an opposition program with enough coherence, to put them in the position of winning enough Diet seats to take over the government.

The LDP has never overcome its origins as an amalgam of smaller parties. Each of these parties formed a faction within the main party, and these factions were led by people who demonstrated their capacity for dealing with the bureaucracy and raising funds. Popular appeal among the electorate was never a factor. Thus, the LDP has been, in effect, its own mini-coalition government over the years. The governing principle for determining Cabinet appointments is known in Japanese as tarai mawashi.This literally means “balancing a spinning washtub”, but in political terms has meant maintaining a monopoly on political power by rotating the choice jobs among all the LDP factions.

Traditionally, the most powerful man in the LDP has not been the prime minister but the head of the largest faction. The prime ministerial washtub was rotated among the high-level faction members, who had prepared for the job by themselves rotating through different Cabinet ministries for years beforehand. The system worked because everyone got a slice of the pie when the ministry portfolios were divvied up among the various factions based on their relative strength. Naming the Cabinet was a balancing act that required considerable negotiation among the factions; the qualifications for a particular post seldom, if ever, were a consideration. For example, the secretary of the treasury in the United States is always someone with a background in the financial or business world. In contrast, the Japanese finance minister is usually someone who is expected to become prime minister someday and has been shipped over to the ministry to learn how it functions internally.

But the law of entropy functions in Japanese politics as it does everywhere else, which meant that the system developed some serious cracks in the 1990s. After the gaffe-ridden administration of Yoshiro Mori (second photo) that lasted only a year from 2000 to 2001, the LDP elders were worried that they just might get thrashed at the next election. In desperation, they opened up the process for selecting the prime minister to include the LDP members at the prefectural level (who were even more worried than the Diet members in Tokyo). As a result they chose as Mori’s successor the maverick Koizumi, a reformer who had run for the post before but whose candidacy was seen as quixotic; he never stood a chance under the old system.

Koizumi was selected because both the party’s rank and file and its leaders were desperate. To his credit, Koizumi realized this and knew that it was his opening to initiate change in the Japanese political system. The leaders, who never liked Koizumi’s reform proposals to begin with, liked them even less when the maverick ignored customary LDP practices to form his own administration. Had the Japanese public itself not been desperate for someone—anyone—who was something more than a skilled bagman who couldn’t speak in public without sucking in a liter of air before every sentence, Koizumi would have been stabbed in the back by several dozen people in his own party, not to mention most of the Japanese bureaucracy.

But I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.