Japan's Lost Leaders.(International Edition; POINT OF VIEW)(Essay)

Visionaries have emerged at critical moments in the country's past--but not this time.

If a Martian landed in the middle of Ginza, Tokyo's upscale shopping district, 20 years ago and said, "Take me to your leader," he would have had many possible destinations. Some Japanese would have taken him to the Imperial Palace to meet the emperor. Others would have veered off toward one of the government offices to meet the bureaucratic barons. Still others might have dragged him off to Tokyo's Capitol Hill to meet a political bigwig, or even up to the financial district to chat with business leaders.

Today, by contrast, most Japanese would be embarrassed by the question and the Martian would go away disappointed. Tokyo is headless. The emperor suffers from stress-related illnesses, government ministries are discredited, Japan's politicians are transparently inept, and the business elite cannot fix what is broken. No one seems to be in charge.

The irony is that Japan has a rich tradition of leadership. Visionaries have often emerged to guide the country forward at critical moments in the past--as in the 19th century, when Japan was threatened with Western imperialism, or in the mid-20th, when it was occupied by a foreign conqueror. Earlier this decade, Junichiro Koizumi strode onto--and then off--the scene as the most popular and successful leader in living memory. Now, however, no such figure can be found on the horizon. Public-approval ratings for Taro Aso, the current prime minister, are near an all-time low. And the opposition is hardly more promising. Until recently, the Democratic Party of Japan looked poised to win power for the first time, but then prosecutors arrested the chief of staff of Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ leader, for corruption. Now it seems the party may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

To make matters worse, there are no other viable alternatives. The left departed the scene in the 1990s, when the Socialists betrayed their supporters by sleeping with the LDP, and the Communists proved their irrelevance by refusing to acknowledge the end of the Cold War. There are, it seems, no real mavericks left in the country--only phony ones who declaim Japan's failings but offer no constructive designs of their own.

Japan is paying a high price for this leadership deficit, and the costs are growing. In the last quarter, its economy shrank by 12 percent, twice the rate of decline in the United States and Europe. At home, the government's loss of 50 million pension records has inspired intense public distrust of the once vaunted bureaucracy. So has the realization that Japan's public debt is now more than twice the size of America's (relative to the overall size of the economy). The best ...