William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and author of "Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan's Lost Decades."
As Fumio Kishida prepares to assume the Japanese premiership, analysts and pundits are already asking the wrong questions.
Sure, what Kishida does with the job matters greatly. The question of how he will get things done is plenty relevant, too. These dynamics will help provide answers to why the Liberal Democratic Party turned to Kishida at this most precarious of moments with COVID-19 variants imperiling global growth.
Yet it is the when of the matter that deserves our attention.
When might this new government prove it can avoid the one-year disease that seeped back into Japanese politics, courtesy of Yoshihide Suga coming and going in a blur? When will Kishida, 64, lay out a credible testing, contract-tracing and COVID vaccine booster plan to ensure Japan is not back in state-of-emergency limbo 30 days from now? When will Tokyo get back to the business of remaking the economy, not just administering more fiscal and monetary booster shots?
Remember that after Shinzo Abe's return to power in late 2012, pundits said just wait until he takes majorities in both houses of parliament and shakes up the system. Over time, though, the question of when became a punchline.
As Kishida tries his hand at avoiding the 12-months-and-done curse, another when might provide some clarity -- and urgency. It is the year 2011.
That 12-month period is most closely associated with the record March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But it also is remembered for another seismic event: China surpassing Japan's gross domestic product.
The idea of mighty Japan trailing upstart China carries many caveats. Not least of which the extent to which Japan's per capita income outpaces China. In nominal terms, the International Monetary Fund lists Japan's at roughly 3.7 times China's.
Even so, the psychological blow of China topping Japan shook Nagatacho, Tokyo's Capitol Hill, in profound ways. Just as it did the rest of the globe. Back in 2011, observers began warning that we were now living in "China years," the economic equivalent of dogs aging seven years for every one human year. The idea was that China's scale was speeding up change in ways that global institutions and technological norms could not keep pace.
Unfortunately, since retaking power in 2012, the LDP has acted as if pre-China timelines still apply. Rather than remaking Japan Inc. for a China-dominated future, Abe and Suga did the bare minimum. Both slow-walked efforts to modernize labor markets, reduce bureaucracy, catalyze new waves of innovation and level the gender playing field.
The Abe-Suga clock was attuned more to 1985 than 2025. Its emphasis on Bank of Japan easing over supply-side upgrades might have worked in an earlier era. Increased fiscal spending might have raised wages and increased competitiveness if not for the arrival of a giant, lower-cost upstart that does not play by international rules.
Shinzo Abe gestures during a news conference as Yoshihide Suga stands next to him in May 2020: the Abe-Suga clock was attuned more to 1985 than 2025. © Reuters For those keeping score, the Abe-Suga continuum confronted a fast shifting and deeply unconventional economic landscape with conventional tools, prodding the BOJ to pump yen into every asset it could find.
During that time, President Xi Jinping pumped trillions of dollars into schemes to dominate semiconductors, renewable energy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robots and self-driving vehicles by 2025.
Caveats abound here, too. Tokyo is not punching its economy in the face like Xi's government. Beijing's chaotic "common prosperity" crackdown on Big Tech is something that no one understands. Yet Kishida, a former bank clerk from Hiroshima, is already pledging tens of trillions of yen in new spending. His plans for moves to raise Japan's competitive game are still a bit murky.
Even so, regulatory bedlam in Beijing is an opportunity to remind investors that Japan is the stable adult in the room as Asia emerges from the pandemic.
In fact, investors may be well ahead of Tokyo, where the Nikkei Stock Average is near 30-year highs. The buying binge is, in part, a bet that Japan's next government will roll up its sleeves and increase competitiveness. This means that even before Kishida can lead the LDP to victory in a general election, perhaps in November, the clock is already ticking.
Tokyo stock bulls will be asking when the reform drive will kick in. Kishida must act fast to name a credible economic team to lead the change. He also must in short order put out a clear timeline for steps to: make labor markets more productive and meritocratic; tweak tax incentives in the direction of startups; devise energy policies that push Japan to carbon neutrality in short order and create new high-paying jobs; add teeth to efforts to empower the female workforce.
Kishida should call President Joe Biden and say Japan needs a big favor: getting the U.S. back into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Since January, Biden mystified many by not rejoining a U.S.-led trade deal that Donald Trump exited, creating an opening for China to try to step into the group, defeating CPTPP's whole purpose.
Prodding Biden back into the grouping -- and growing its ranks to include South Korea, India and Indonesia -- is the kind of win Tokyo needs. Such wins and greater success beating COVID could ensure Kishida sticks about for more than 12 months, and remind China that Japan's next 10 years will be infinitely more productive than the last 10.