The photos and footage of opposition lawmakers trying to prevent a July 25 vote in the Upper House on a Liberal Democratic Party-sponsored bill to send Self-Defense Forces to Iraq were all over the media last week, which is understandable considering how action-packed the Three Stooges-like melee was. Though Liberal Party member Yuko Mori and her slit skirt received the most attention, it was the LDP's Atsushi Onita who exemplified the meaning of the brawl. Onita is a professional wrestler. By protecting Foreign and Defense Affairs Committee Chairman Ryuji Matsumura from the opposition "ruffians," he was finally putting his talents to good use in the service of his party.

The spectacle reinforced an image most people have of the political process: The ruling coalition doing what it pleases and the opposition vainly trying to stop it. The violence was a grand but empty gesture. Similarly, the planned merger announced two weeks ago between the Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Party was met with derision in the press, which simply saw it as another desperate attempt to lay siege to the LDP's impenetrable fortress of public support. But by the end of last weekend, the skepticism had mostly dissipated.

An Asahi Shimbun survey that came out in the middle of last week found that the LDP and the DPJ were neck-and-neck in terms of public support. And in a poll conducted by TV Asahi over the weekend, DPJ chief Naoto Kan rose from third position to second as the politician people most wanted to see as prime minister.