In Tokyo

IT'S festival time in Japan!

Well, that's what the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) hopes voters will be distracted by, anyway.

The LDP's 12-day election campaign to pick a new party president looks set to become like a “festival” - figuratively speaking, of course - so as to get the media to give the party as much coverage as possible.

Festivals, or omatsuri, are very much part of Japanese culture and every red-blooded Japanese, it is said, loves a good omatsuri.

Unlike traditional festivals which feature lots of food stalls and parades with people carrying portable shrines, the LDP’s “festival” will see the presidential candidates trying to plug their campaign messages on TV, street rallies and town hall meetings all over the country.

Instead of just two or three candidates as is the usual case in the past, this time there are no less than five candidates.

Besides the frontrunner, ex-foreign minister Taro Aso, the candidates include at least three LDP lawmakers who are regulars on television and are guaranteed to draw curious crowds wherever they appear.

This “festival” strategy is reportedly mapped out by the LDP’s PR consultants with the aim, not just to raise the profile of the party and the candidates, to keep the LDP’s closest rival, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), off the air waves.

The DPJ is seen as a serious threat to the ruling party in the next general election. So one way of beating the DPJ, the LDP figures, is to make sure that voters see and hear as little of their rival as possible.

Since Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced his intention to step down on September 1, the LDP has, to be expected, been very much in the headlines.

But whether the party will continue to do so till the end of its election campaign remains to be seen.

Not even the LDP, however, can predict what is going to be in the news.

In the past few days, headlines have been dominated by several scandals – from the sacking of foreign sumo wrestlers accused of smoking marijuana, to new disclosures of tampering of national pension records, to a scam by a company that mixed tainted rice with untainted grain and passed it off as good rice to rice vendors and liquor producers.

All love for a good omatsuri aside, as these scandals continue to snowball, voters might well be distracted by the election. The LDP might well have to come up with just a little bit more to keep the mood festive.