July 2009 to July 2010 - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 178

group would likely divide Minshut - again in the future. On the other hand,
evidently coalition politics had become commonplace. Without a majority in
the Upper House, Minshut - was dependent on Kokumin Shint - and the SDP.
The LDP s strategy to undermine the rising popularity of Minshut - was to

stress things like

'

' politics isn ' t gambling. We can ' t trust the nation to a “ trial ”

Minshut - -led government

, playing on its own long experience of being in
power. However, even if Prime Minister As -

'

or Komeito were justi ed in

their critique of some of Minshut - ' s policies, saying that they constituted

fantasies unless there were clari cation about the source of funds to carry

them through, the media were clearly fed-up with the old politics of which the
LDP was representative. As - tried to make the need to raise consumption tax
the cause of disagreement to undermine the feasibility of the proposals by the
opposition. Other LDP members were afraid, it seemed, to use this tactic as
the unpopular tax might back re with an electorate being promised tax cuts

by the opposition. While Ozawa had been the promoter and backroom dealer
for a rise in consumption tax under the Nakasone administration in the late
1980s, trying to e ect a tax hike had cost Nakasone and other prime minis-

ters, including Takeshita Noboru and Hosokawa Morifumi, dearly in the
past. Koizumi had successfully avoided increasing taxes for as long as

ve
years of his tenure in power. In this election, the consumption tax proved the
biggest di erence between the ruling bloc and the opposition parties,

although this position seemed to be reversed less than a year later, as dis-
cussed below. Hatoyama guaranteed that Minshut - would not raise the con-
sumption tax for at least another four years, something that both the SDP
and Kokumin Shint - , although from di erent political perspectives, stressed.

Komeito maintained that there was a need to raise the consumption tax at
some point in the future when the economy had recovered. Discussions in the
media posed few challenges to arguments that welfare standards could be
raised without increasing taxes. This fed into the long-established belief that
Japan is a country with low taxes but which can provide high-quality welfare.
It was against the unpopularity of the LDP that Komeito supporters had to
compete to retain its seats in 2009. Young supporters of Komeito emphasised
the party

s consistent policy agenda and proposals, but Komeito was also seen
as intricately embroiled in the old way of politics that had dominated with the
stronghold of the LDP. Few doubts about how to pay for some of Minshut -

'

' s

promises or the e ect of them were expressed by the media in the euphoria of

seiken k - tai that seemed to have swept the nation. The exception was a couple
of articles that emerged about the impact of abolishing the 1,000-yen toll on
expressways and gasoline tax, explaining how it would raise annual CO 2
emissions in the transportation sector by about 4% from the 249 million tons
recorded in the 2007 fiscal year. Just over three weeks before the election (5

August), 10 organisations, including the Kyoto-based Kiko (Climate) Net-
work, issued a statement asking political parties to retract their pledges on
abolishing the taxes on expressways and gasoline; the organisations that sup-
ported this statement soon numbered 21. Abolishing toll taxes and gasoline