Poor Prime Minister Aso is really getting beaten up in the press these days. His approval rating is in the doldrums having fallen to around 31 percent, a number that’s being reported almost gleefully by the mass-komi (as the news media is called here, from “mass communications”). There’s something about Japanese politics that compels people to attack anyone perceived as being a “standing nail” and try to hammer them back into place, and the minute any politician dares try to assume a leadership role the negative energy start flowing. The complaints being leveled against Aso and his cabinet include the PM’s love of fine hotel dining (which he pays for himself), for occasionally misreading kanji characters in his speeches, and for his many slips of the tongue, like when he said that many doctors “lack common sense.” Amazingly, plenty of the anti-Aso comments are coming from his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a phenomenon that’s related to the complex system of internal factions (habatsu) within the larger party: Aso-san lacks support from a strong faction, so few will defend him. The new vogue of “Aso-bashing” might spell good news for the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its leader Ichiro Ozawa.
