LONDON -- "I am resigned to not seeing a visible economic recovery for two or three years," said Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last month. He had just won a resounding election victory despite his tough-love talk about the need for economic pain to pull the country out of its long slump.
His plans scare the conservative leaders of his own Liberal Democratic Party half to death. He scares foreigners, too. "The present prosperity of Japan is built on the sacrifice of those who died in war," he said shortly after his surprise choice as LDP leader last April.
Not only is that historically untrue, but it is rhetoric that the rest of Asia links with the rightwing Japanese nationalists whose only regret about World War II is that they lost it.