Unfinished Business

Yasuko Imatomi feels like she has heard this song before, and she's not singing along anymore. The 41-year-old Tokyo homemaker has been a longtime supporter of Japan's dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and until fairly recently she counted herself as a fan of its silver-maned, silver-tongued leader, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. But here in the city's Shibuya neighborhood, as Koizumi and other party members begin campaigning for the July 11 Upper House election, Imatomi is a lot more cynical than she was three years ago when Koizumi first took office. As "Jun-chan" and company promise, yet again, to enact broad structural...