How do they sleep while their beds are burning?
The 1987 incendiary hit song of the Australian band Midnight Oil wasn’t about Japan. It was about the plight of Australia’s aborigines. But watching what’s going on in Japan right now, in the country’s parliament, and in its leading political party, the Liberal Democrats, the song’s question seems only too appropriate. Hapless Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s approval rating has plunged to 9 percent from an already abysmal 19 percent a month ago, the second lowest ever for a Japanese prime minister since the Asahi Shimbun started taking such polls in 1946. The only score lower than Mori’s was Noboru Takeshita’s in 1989 at the height of the Recruit shares-for-political-favors scandal. But here’s what Junichiro Koizumi, de facto leader of the Mori faction within the LDP and a leading candidate to succeed Mori, had to say on Sunday: “The situation is serious. [But] there is nothing we can do right now,” were his memorable words. While the can’t-do-nothin’ Koizumi (who, incredibly, is favored
