WHITE GLOVES AND WARBLERS

Spring is here, and over the past few days the hundred-million-plus folks in Japan have begun to hear the prowling roar of politicians trying to get elected, the office-seekers trolling the neighborhoods in their bannered and ultra-loudspeakered vans, waving out the windows in their white gloves to impart the illusion of unsullied hands.

The politicians are accompanied by as many uguisu (warblers: the bird) (good-looking young women in some kind of uniform who wave and call out the candidate's name over and over endlessly) as their party can afford (a bevy, if it's the LDP), and the racket is unbelievable in the name of democracy, but not many complain as they would if Japan actually were a democracy.

The Japanese don't really have a history of complaining; it is not in their basically gentle and polite nature, so the politicians, whose very name is a metastasis of politeness, walk all over them thus. They walk all over them in office as well, judging by the endless political scandals happening daily all over the nation, like weather. And like weather, no one seems to think there's anything you can do about it but get an umbrella, or a shovel.

When Mexico's PRI party finally fell from power a few years ago, it left Japan's LDP standing embarrassingly alone as the longest-ruling political party in the world. And the LDP is still gerontocratically in charge. This year, though, a number of younger candidates are spryly distancing themselves and running as independents (every single candidate in the Tokyo gubernatorial election is running primarily as an independent! [Fukui Prefecture as well, where 15 of Japan's 51 nuclear reactors are]), because there is change in the air.

These mornings when I go down to the train station, though, it doesn't seem like much is changing: each day's election crew (they take turns) is there waiting unctuously to say good morning even to me, though I can't vote: there are the day-glo-jacket-wearing party functionaries, the uguisu , the loudspeakers and the respective local candidate (folksy if independent, diffident and snooty if LDP); the racket is amazing. Then when I get off at Umeda Station in Osaka, things reach a new state of cacophony, since the many more candidates can park their trucks anywhere and stand atop them on platforms with their waving uguisu and give long, deafening, haranguing speeches (I noticed the roadside traffic decibel counters were turned off this morning) that wash like auto exhaust over the rivers of commuters flowing past in all directions and paying no attention whatever; they've heard it all before a thousand times, and white gloves get dirty fast in the city. If I could vote in Japan (as I could in any other developed nation where I'd lived for so long as a permanent resident), I'd never vote for anyone who made that much noise about their racket.