Japan's Beavis to America's Butthead

Koizumi was re-elected in a landslide. That's not the similarity here, since our president didn't actually win the first election. But check this out. It's deja retardovision. I'll highlight some key points.

Less than a week after voters delivered Junichiro Koizumi one of the most stunning landslide victories in Japan's electoral history, the public is concerned it may have given the prime minister too much power.

While most editorial writers have been encouraging Mr Koizumi to use his two-thirds majority to push on decisively with reform, more than 60 per cent of voters are worried he may abuse his new-found power, according to a recent poll.

Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Tokyo's Temple university, said voters had been taken aback by the way the relatively new single-seat constituency system had amplified the effects of a swing. Until the early 1990s, the system was conducted entirely on a proportional representation basis.

Mr Koizumi's charisma had drawn floating voters to the Liberal Democratic party camp, he said. That had led to a virtual clean-sweep of the big cities by the LDP, whose traditional strength has been in rural Japan.

The prime minister is viewed by the public as having authoritarian tendencies, largely because of his refusal to brook dissent over postal privatisation. His unusual step of driving dissenters from the LDP thrilled the electorate, but frightened it at the same time.

Throughout the postwar period, factions within the LDP have acted like an opposition, pulling back leaders from extreme positions through consensus building.

"Now it's a big danger. It's like before the war when we had Hideki Tojo," said Takayoshi Miyagawa, a veteran political analyst, referring to Japan's wartime prime minister. "If you don't agree, you're out."

Karulu Rovu-san is at work here too.