Some see a tea party brewing in Japan’s hinterland

IT WAS hardly a “mad-as-hell” moment, but still. On learning on February 6th that he had won a landslide re-election victory as mayor of Nagoya, one of Japan’s biggest industrial cities, Takashi Kawamura put on a pair of black rubber boots while a small group of supporters threw buckets of cold water over his head.

Hours later, with a nod to America’s tax-cutting rebels, Mr Kawamura declared that a kind of tea party had been born in Nagoya. He sat alongside his political ally, Hideaki Omura, who on the same day thrashed his rivals for the governorship of the surrounding prefecture of Aichi, home to Toyota. It was hard to judge how serious they were, not least because, dressed in anoraks, they looked like the Two Ronnies, a 1970s British comedy duo. “This is a citizen’s revolution,” Mr Omura declared.

The national media dismisses the election results as a provincial fuss, saying that voters were simply fed up with Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), along with its main rival, and will back any alternative, however quirky. Yet the vote bodes ill for Mr Kan ahead of April elections for 13 governors, 44 prefectural assemblies and umpteen mayorships and municipal assemblies.

The media may be missing a trick. Nagoya citizens not only gave Mr Kawamura three times the votes of his DPJ rival. Nearly three-quarters of them supported a referendum to dissolve the current Nagoya assembly, an unprecedented revolt.

Should Messrs Kawamura and Omura manage to stuff the new assemblies with their supporters in the spring elections, they could help unleash forces of decentralisation in Japan. Both intend to merge the city and prefectural governments, to create a regional block to draw investment and jobs away from Tokyo and help reshape government to cope with an ageing society. They plan to cut local taxes by 10%, slash salaries for elected officials, and shed overlapping public services.

In Tokyo this is all seen as autocratic. Yet the two men have touched a nerve. Officials in cash-strapped Aichi receive up to ¥28m ($340,000) as a perk on retirement. That compares with ¥20m at Toyota. The prefecture’s debt, meanwhile, stands at ¥585,000 yen a citizen.

The Aichi revolt has echoes in other regions. Toru Hashimoto, governor of Osaka prefecture, Japan’s second-biggest industrial hub, is campaigning on a promise to build a similar megalopolis, though against opposition from local mayors. Other prefectures such as Niigata also think of merging with their capitals. Too many municipal administrations exist, with shaky tax bases, and indeed prefectures too.

Mr Kawamura reckons the movement will come to resemble the alliance of fiefs in western Japan that helped topple the shogunate in the 1860s. Mr Omura, less prone to hyperbole, says that all big Japanese cities are in a struggle to compete with the likes of Shanghai, so why should Tokyo have all the advantages? Competition, he says, takes place not between nations, but rather cities. No wonder Tokyoites want to belittle the movement.