The leading candidates in Japan's parliamentary election are clashing over everything from the economy to sending troops to Iraq, thrusting party platforms into a rare spotlight as the two-week campaign began Tuesday.
In bygone eras, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party could usually count on victory without detailed pledges. But with the bloc split over economic reforms and the opposition hawking comprehensive alternatives, party policies have assumed a sharper focus for the September 11 election.
"This is a new trend in Japanese politics. People are increasingly voting on the policies of individual parties," said Masaaki Kanno, a political economist at JP Morgan in Tokyo. "Now the manifestos of the different parties have become very clear."
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi helped splinter the campaign along policy lines by purging his Liberal Democratic Party of opponents to his postal privatisation plan. Campaigning officially began Tuesday, and Koizumi is now billing the vote as a referendum on his reforms. More than 1,130 candidates were expected to register to run for the powerful lower house of parliament's 480 seats.
The Democratic Party, Japan's biggest opposition group, has countered with its own policy platform, while the New Komeito Party, the LDP's junior coalition partner, has distanced itself from Koizumi over his visits to Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni war shrine.
Koizumi and the heads of five other parties sparred over those differences Monday in a nationally televised debate touching on Japan's dispatch of troops to Iraq, troubled relations with China, and Koizumi's support for changes to Japan's constitutional limits on military action.
But at the centre was Koizumi's plan to split up and sell off Japan Post's delivery, savings and insurance systems. The prime minister depicted himself as a reformer and challenged others to make good on promises to change the way Japan does business.
"Many people say they support efforts to cut wasteful spending and promote administrative reforms," Koizumi said. "Then how come only the postal sector cannot be privatised?"
Democratic Party head Katsuya Okada argued that the government must tackle other reforms such as revamping the country's ailing national pension system, raising the consumption tax and cutting the budget.
"The prime minister doesn't understand how the public feels at all. He's too aloof from the population," he said. "I feel great embarrassment that he's the prime minister of Japan. This is not an attitude that a prime minister should take."
Parties in the upcoming elections are circling around distinctive policies to maintain unity and win support.
The Democratic Party, among other ideas, plans to cut government spending by $91.5 billion by 2008, in part by reducing government employees' pay by 20 percent, abolishing lawmakers' pensions, and scrapping Japan's pensions agency.
It will also pull the country's non-combat troops from the US-led reconstruction effort in Iraq by December if voted into government.
The campaign opens as support appears to be strengthening for Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party.
The Yomiuri newspaper published a poll Sunday showing the LDP had more than double the support of the Democrats.
But a poll by the Asahi newspaper over the weekend showed support rising for the Democrats.
