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| Taro Aso's LDP and Yukio Hatoyama's DPJ face off in the polls on Sunday [AFP] |
After an almost unbroken five decades of rule by the same party, Japan is poised for what opinion polls say could be a seismic shift in its political landscape.
As voters head to the polls on Sunday, the governing Liberal Democratic party (LDP) faces the distinct possibility of defeat at the hands of an electorate eager for change.
That would be a historic event in post-war Japanese politics.
The LDP has held continuous power, apart from one short break, since it was formed in 1955.
But for months the party has trailed badly in opinion polls, with many Japanese seeing the party as out of touch and lacking direction.
Instead, many of Japan's traditionally risk-averse voters are leaning towards the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), eager for a new direction after half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule.
In the final days before the vote, even senior ministers are talking of voter revolt and of being gracious in defeat.
Part of the LDP's problem is the unpopularity of the prime minister.
Taro Aso has only been in charge since September 2008, but since he took office he has been plagued by a string of gaffs.
Gaffs
He has outraged doctors by accusing them of "lacking common sense"; alienated Japan's large elderly population who he said "just eat and drink and make no effort"; and he has gained a reputation, a little like George Bush, the former US president, of mangling his language.
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| Support for Taro Aso, who took office less than a year ago, has waned [EPA] |
In one case he misread the word for "follow" in a speech, and ended up saying that government policy "stinks".
He has not been helped by the antics of some senior LDP politicians either.
At a G8 summit in Italy earlier this year, Aso's then finance minister appeared to be drunk at a press conference.
Shoichi Nakagawa repeatedly slurred his words and at times seemed to be dozing off as he addressed the media.
Nakagawa said he had been taking medicine for a cold that had made him drowsy, but the damage was done.
Some observers of Japanese politics argue that the LDP has rarely been very popular itself, instead relying on its efficient party machinery and the divided opposition to remain in power.
It is significant that the party's last genuinely popular prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, won support among ordinary Japanese by speaking of "destroying the LDP".
Koizumi was able to appeal to the electorate over the heads of party bosses, but once he left office in 2006, the LDP could not rely on his personal popularity, or increasingly, old style machine politics to convince the public to vote for it.
Steven Reed, a professor of politics at Tokyo's Chuo University, notes that organisations such as powerful farmers' pressure groups used to recommend to their members who to vote for - a factor that carried great weight and usually favoured the LDP.
Now, he says, times have changed.
"The percentage of people who follow the recommendations of their groups has fallen slowly and surely since the mid 1970s," he told Al Jazeera.
"So now getting a recommendation from, for example, farmers' groups, gets less and less votes for the LDP."
Formidable opposition
In addition, the opposition DPJ, under the leadership of Ichiro Ozawa, has become a more formidable foe than previous parties that had opposed the LDP.
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| The DPJ has promised to put Japan on the road to economic recovery [Reuters] |
That has led the ruling party to seek popularity by selecting and then discarding new leaders once they lose public support – with the result that they have now had four in the last four years.
Takeshi Sasaki of Tokyo's Gakushuin University says the LDP's apparently desperate attempts to win electoral support have only added to the impression of weakness and drift.
"The LDP is proud to be a party of governing but in the last four years they failed to impress the people with this capability," he says.
"So their pride in being the governing party is more and more discredited by their performance."
Such weakness comes at a bad time for the Japanese economy.
While the most recent quarterly growth figures show the economy finally pulling out of recession, it has spent the last year suffering enormous damage.
In the first quarter of 2009 alone Japan's GDP fell by 15 per cent compared to the same period in 2008.
Unemployment has continued to rise, up by almost a third in the past year to 5.4 per cent – a figure once unimaginable in a country that used to pride itself in providing life-time employment for workers.
In Japan, which has little in the way of a social safety net, losing one's job can mean a rapid fall into homelessness.
As a result many of Tokyo's parks now have camps of bright blue plastic, the refuge for those who have lost almost everything.
Yoshito Terai, who has been living in a makeshift tent in Shinjuku Chou park in central Tokyo since March, told Al Jazeera the park has, since March, become flooded with "many people who'd been sacked".
"Lots of them came here and it seemed every day there were more and more of them," he says.
"I would even see many people dressed as salarymen. It was shocking."
Economic woes
For those still employed, in what remains the world's second largest economy, such extremes of poverty may seem a long way away.
But even for those with jobs the nature of work is changing. The salaryman who can rely on his company to look after him for life is an increasingly rare figure.
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| Japanese voters have traditionally been risk-averse but look set to usher in change [EPA] |
Today a third of Japan's 55 million workers are non-regular employees.
They are paid less than ordinary staff and they can be sacked much more easily.
Shigemitsu Suzuki used to work at a major Japanese manufacturing company and he paints a depressing picture of the insecurity of such workers.
"If you're working like this, you have constant anxiety," he says.
"I can't imagine myself getting married, having children and I'm realising that there is a whole social class that cannot imagine these things. Even now I can't even imagine what is going to happen to my life in the future and I feel there's nothing I can do about it."
The party that many expect to take over the reins of power, the DPJ, has campaigned on promises to strengthen the social security net.
But expecting too immediate, radical change from the democrats might be unwise.
Like the LDP, it has suffered its share of scandal. Its founder and best known national figure, Ozawa, resigned in May this year, after two of his top aides were arrested in connection with party funding irregularities.
The resignation catapulted Yukio Hatoyama to the party's leadership.
He has promised to take on the country's bureaucracy, a stance that is highly popular in a country where many blame bureaucratic civil servants for stifling attempts at reform.
But if he does win this election, he will face formidable opposition from them.
He will also have to tackle a severely damaged economy.
Despite that, it looks like the Japanese public is ready to take its chances with the DPJ.
The LDP has proved itself capable of adapting and regenerating itself in the past.
But at the moment at least, the past is all it is has to cling to.
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