Adding salt to its wounds, it was reported recently that the Democratic Party of Japan paid 129 million yen to the American public relations firm Fleischmann-Hillard to buff its image in 2004. Though it might have helped in last year's Upper House election, the company's strategy didn't seem to work so well at last month's general election, which the DPJ lost big time to the Liberal Democratic Party.

The LDP itself spent 2.7 billion yen for PR services in 2004, but before you say "worth every penny," think carefully about what it was that won this election for them. It wasn't Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's one-note message of postal reform, but rather a combination of the so-called Koizumi Theater made up of media-propelled candidates and the peculiar arithmetic used to determine winners in national polls. As economics Professor Masaru Kaneko said on at least one TV talk show last week, the LDP attracted the kind of people who usually don't vote by fielding the kind of people who usually don't run.

What you get is the kind of lawmakers who usually don't make laws. This is not an anomaly. Anyone who pays attention to the political situation in Japan understands that the National Assembly doesn't guide the country's policies. The politicians are led by the bureaucracy, which writes the bills that get passed and then implements them, and that includes Koizumi's beloved postal privatization plan. The job of national politicians is to make sure their constituents get something out of this arrangement. In return the politicians can get re-elected and enjoy a career.