ASIA BUZZ
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	ASIAWEEK
	Intelligence The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek From Our Correspondent Personal perspectives on news around the region

This week's election in Japan was hardly an electoral tipping point. I know, this is very frustrating for all you clever journalists, scholars and democracy missionaries who think in post-Berlin Wall Internet real time. Yes, I know, Japanese voters should toss out those LDP rascals. Yes, it should be their civic duty to rise up in anger and ask what is so "divine" about spending the nation's earned savings on Hokaido highways, used by busy muskrats for whom roadkill is an alien concept. And yes, it's been blatantly obvious that for years, the LDP and their cabal of bankers, businessmen and bureaucrats have been screwing the Japanese public blind.

But it is equally obvious -- much to the chagrin of page-one American newspaper editors -- that the vast majority of Japanese don't care. To the contrary, there is almost something comforting knowing that nothing ever really changes. Sure, there is some periodic anxiety. During the oil crisis, it was over where to get toilet paper. In the go-go '80s, it was how to flag a taxi after spending $5,000 drinking in Ginza. These days it's about wondering whether the assignment to eradicate rodents in the company's Kyushu warehouse is somehow a signal from your boss to start looking for a new job. On second thought, what is wrong about chasing rats? At least I'd be paid, be out of my wife's hair, and after work I'd get to eat grilled internal cow organs washed down by Asahi Super Dry beer watching the Daie Hawks play baseball. Life could be worse.

Japan is a nation with plenty of time -- and money -- on its hands. After all, this is a nation that has squirreled away more money per capita than any nation in the history of our planet. There is no fear here about spending $150 on a melon, or to spend time at a Tokyo 'wifey' club where some poor sod will get the five hours of marital bliss missing at home -- and a good bonk -- for $1,000.

Money and time breeds complacency. And complacency remains the single most powerful force shaping electoral results in Japan today. Foreign journalists are loath to admit this, but the LDP knows otherwise.

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