Rising poverty looms large in Japan's election

Rising poverty looms large in Japan's election

By Harumi Ozawa (AFP) – Aug 22, 2009

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — Tomoshi Okuda is a man of faith, not politics. But the Japanese pastor has seen enough new faces on his nightly rounds feeding the homeless to persuade him that something needs to change.

He's not the only one eager for a fresh start. With unemployment rising in the wake of the worst recession in decades, voters appear to be deserting Prime Minister Taro Aso's long-ruling party ahead of an August 30 election.

It's a far cry from the 2005 lower house vote when premier Junichiro Koizumi won by a landslide on a platform of harsh economic reforms. These days many people blame his measures for a growing rich-poor divide.

"I'm watching who will offer the most drastic change to the course of Koizumi's structural reform," Okuda told AFP during his rounds on a rainy evening in Kitakyushu, an industrial city in southwest Japan.

The 45-year-old Baptist pastor hands out bananas and rice meals to people sleeping on the streets, including one 68-year-old woman sheltering from the downpour on a flattened cardboard box in a shopping arcade.

"I want to start working again, but I can't with my broken leg," she said.

Thousands of workers have been laid off in the local area, home to plants run by major firms including Nissan, Toshiba and Canon -- which have all been hit hard by slumping exports and Japan's worst post-war recession.

"In April alone, we saw 69 new faces on the street, three times more than in the same month last year. One young man, only 29, was a temporary worker at a Nissan auto parts factory who was laid off in December," Okuda said.

"Another 27-year-old man lived homeless with his wife, 24, and a four-year-old girl. Her apparently pink shoes were black with dust."

Some people are even believed to have starved to death after being refused welfare benefits. In the latest case here, a 39-year-old man was reportedly found dead with nine yen (9.5 US cents) in his wallet and an unposted note saying "help."

Across the country almost 230,000 temporary workers have lost their jobs since the recession began last year, pushing the jobless rate up to a six-year high of 5.4 percent -- within striking distance of its post-war peak.

Although Japan's economy rebounded in the second quarter of 2009, there has been little sign of a bounce in the polls for Aso, whose Liberal Democratic Party has ruled almost uninterrupted for more than half a century.

"Voters are totally fed up with the one-party LDP rule. Nobody believes in it any more and people are really desperately wanting to see a change," said Noriko Hama, a professor of economics at Doshisha Business School in Kyoto.

The LDP and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) have both pledged to roll back some of Koizumi's reforms, which were aimed at slimming down the public sector and reducing the huge national debt.

Aso has pledged to break away from "excessive market capitalism," while the DPJ wants to boost spending on child support, education, healthcare and employment measures, and restrict the use of temporary job contracts.

The DPJ's agenda mirrors US President Barack Obama's efforts to increase public spending to boost the economy and medical care, said Yoshinobu Yamamoto, professor of politics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

"What the DPJ is trying to do seems similar to the old style of government intervention in the economy," he said.

Japan once took great pride in having an egalitarian society and life-time employment following its rise from the ashes of World War II.

But many people now fear for the future and are relying on handouts or working longer to make ends meet. The number of households on welfare benefits hit a record high of 1.2 million in April, according to the most recent data.

"The LDP and (its coalition partner) New Komeito have been in government for too long, and look what happened. Things are not good," said 66-year-old Tokyo resident Shigeo Utsumi, who wants to work but cannot find a good job.

"It's probably a good idea to let the DPJ take over, at least once. We're heading for disaster if nothing changes."

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