What would you say is the reordering going on?
Quite simply, it's the post-cold war reordering that should have happened fifteen years ago but didn't. Instead we've had a somewhat aberrant period of extreme unipolarity.
That's not to say that we're seeing the re-emergence of some kind of nineteeth-century-like multipolar system characterized by armed conflict and zero-sum competition.
Instead, we're seeing the re-emergence of multipolar competition WITHOUT the threat of war. Just look: the threat of great power war is more or less non-existent. While some would like to believe that the US and China could go to war, aside from the Taiwan Straits issue there's no issue that could result in war, and in recent years the US has backed away from providing unconditional support for Taiwan.
In the absence of military competition, however, economic competition is ever more essential, and while it is more or less non-zero sum competition, the competition is no less intense. What's happened is that all those countries who for decades believed in alternate forms of ordering their economies have bought into free-market capitalism in a big way, and are out-competiting the established developed countries. This has resulted in acute fears of international economic competition throughout the developed world: the US, France, Germany, Japan, etc.
As international economic competition has intensified, so has the need for all countries to retool their societies to thrive in that competition, and respond to the rapid change that globalization entails.
That's a very brief summary of what we're seeing, but it will be the fundamental international and domestic policy issue in every country over the next fifty to one-hundred years.
It actually sounds like you're saying that corporate influence is rather limited, that political decisions are not made in the interests of business and that they cannot get away with bad practice. Am I right?
I'm not saying that corporate influence is pervasive or limited; I'm rejecting your pseudo-Marxist argument that the political and bureaucratic elite are the lapdogs for financial and industrial capitalists. It's just not that simple. Yes, Japanese corporations wield considerable power, but to say that the government just serves corporations is puerile. To take an extreme example, how did Koizumi's going to Yasukuni serve Japanese capitalism? Argubably it was profoundly against the interests of Otemachi, who would prefer that Sino-Japanese and Japan-Korean relations were as smooth as possible. You think Japanese corporations want Chinese boycotting them?
So the Kantei and the Diet are not just taking orders from Otemachi, just as in the US the White House and Congress do not just take orders from Wall Street. Japanese corporations have to compete with other interests in seeing that policy decisions favor them. And, increasingly, corporations are finding competition for the ears of government.
And I'm thinking why is he spooning out what can only be described as political spin? You're implying that if 'the people' see something that they dislike, that they have the power to do something? You mean perhaps the ballot box? And a 'real opposition'? Since when did it become real? Because you've arrived?
I would advise you to stop with the ad hominem attacks in the future. It's a highly ineffective form of argumentation, and it just irritates the person with whom you're arguing.
In any case, I don't have any special sources; just read a newspaper. How would you explain Abe's declaring that the LDP won't take money from Japan's megabanks? Or demanding that Honma resign from the Tax Commission in the face of major public disapproval? These are just two recent examples, but if you don't think Japan has changed politically in the past fifteen years, your head is buried in sand. The change is slow, without question, but the public -- and opposition parties -- are watching. The government cannot simply get away with whatever it wants anymore.
And it's not like I'm alone in seeing how Japan has changed.