This conversation has elicited some interesting posts, not least Meg McKean's timely reminder of the dangers of point prediction and the importance of incorporating relevant context into the decision-making calculus. So let's look at some context.

(1) Is it surprising that a center-left party has increased taxes to support social-welfare spending, especially given a huge accumulation of public debt?
No.

(2) Has Prime Minister Noda really chosen a disastrously unpopular policy? Raising taxes is always unpopular in the short run, but the effect on Noda and the DPJ seems if anything relatively mild. Polls earlier in the year showed that a majority of the public reluctantly supported the consumption tax increase in theory, though they quickly opposed specific proposals. The initial Jiji and Asahi cabinet support polls suggest at most a mild tick down in already low and sagging ratings-but as work by Maeda Yukio, Benjamin Nyblade and others has detailed, recent Japanese prime ministers have all suffered rapid losses of popular support. If anything, Noda has done better than his five predecessors. It is also important to note that the alternatives to rasing taxes were not painless, either: allow the deficit to balloon even further out of control, or cut expenditures ever more deeply in the face of increasing pension and medical costs. Construction companies, civil servants and professors in national universities are only some of the many groups that have already felt the sting of the budget knife.

(3) Has the tax increase inflicted a fatal blow on the political prospects of the DPJ and Noda himself? Again, it is hard to predict the outcomes of specific elections, but it is fair to say that the DPJ's prospects were already bleak no matter what Noda did about taxes: continued economic weakness, the real and perceived failures of the first two DPJ Prime Ministers (including Hatoyama's incredibly inept fumbling on Futenma and Kan's response to the 3.11 nuclear crisis), and above all the huge cohort of weak and inexperienced MPs from the DPJ's smashing victory of 2009 combined to present Noda and the DPJ with the likelihood of a huge and perhaps catastrophic loss of seats anyway. Given that reality, the defection of the ever-troublesome Ozawa Ichiro and his followers, many of whom were unlikely to win reelection anyway, was not completely unwelcome. In addition, the fact that the LDP agreed on the substantive need to increase consumption taxes greatly decreased the DPJ's vulnerability on taxes. The big winner in the next election is likely to be smaller parties rather than the LDP-but again, that was true regardless of the tax issue. So when the dust settles after the next election, it is not inconceivable that the DPJ could be back in power as the largest partner in a coalition government. As for Noda's own position, the chances of him holding on for years or coming back as a future prime minister were never great to begin with.

(4) What about the larger political context-what is the perceived problem for which painful tax increases were seen as one of the answers? Noda is responding to a perceived lack of political leadership and prime ministerial direction in Japan. In that context, championing difficult and controversial policies that promise to advantage the public and the long-term well being of the nation at the expense of specific interest groups and short-term political advantage becomes a sign of seriousness. As Hiwatari noted earlier, politicians seek election, office, and policy. Having achieved the first two, prime ministers are more likely to focus on the latter, especially as they near the end of their time in office. More than other politicians, they are likely to care about how history evaluates them, and in the recent Japanese political context that means showing a degree of seriousness and leadership in handling difficult and controversial tasks. This may also help explain Noda's surprisingly tough stance on maritime sovereignty disputes with China and South Korea. Perhaps the emphasis on strong political leadership is wrong-Arend Lijphart makes a good case for the superiority of consenual over majoritarian democracy, and many Japanese observers criticize the DPJ's approach to the bureaucracy as misguided-but that was and is the context in Japan.

(5) Is Noda's decision to increase the consumption tax explicable only in terms of his own ideological predisposition or pressure from the Ministry of Finance? No. In fact, it represents a consensus emerging after a long and public debate between those in both the DPJ and LDP who believed that Japan should first cut spending and invigorate the economy (including the LDP's Nakagawa Hidenao, former prime minister Koizumi's economic guru Takenaka Heizo, and-at least initially-former prime minister Abe) and those, also in both parties, who contended that growth and austerity alone could not possibly bridge the yawning deficit. The key figure here was the veteran "responsible finance" politician Yosano Kaoru, who held a dizzying variety of financial posts in both LDP and DPJ cabinets. In these debates, alternatives such as increasing the income, estate and property taxes or improving tax collection via creation of a genuine taxpayer ID number also received attention, but with limited exceptions, none garnered a consensus. Similar debates also roiled the business and economics communities, but again something like a consensus has emerged that Japan must begin to do something about the deficit. Talk of capital flight and banking failure, once dismissed as inconceivable in Japan, where Japanese citizens and domestic financial institutions hold the vast majority of debt, is beginning to increase. The IMF and OECD have advocated precisely the path taken by Noda: moderate and staged increases in the consumption tax. As for Noda, his accomplishment was not so much to decide to increase the consumption tax, but to respond adroitly to pressures from both the LDP and from the DPJ's back benchers, making the former look opportunistic and giving the latter a chance to have their say and grandstand to their supporters without ultimately blocking passage of the legislation.

(6) But substantively, isn't increasing taxes in a still weak economy risky and even counterprodutive, as Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf have argued? Evaluating the risks and tradeoffs involved requires a separate conversation, but two points relevant to Noda's decision are worth noting: the increases are modest and delayed, even tardy. The 10% rate will be just half that of the UK (and less than half the average in continental Europe), and will not be reached until late 2015-more than six years after the end of the international financial crisis, and more than four years later than the 2.5% increase pushed through by the Cameron-Osborne government in the UK. Noda's approach can hardly be called "austerian." Indeed, most financial experts are convinced that further tax hikes and expenditure cuts will be necessary. Conversely, if Noda's initiative had failed, it is not clear that another prime minister would have had the conviction, skill and power-especially in the face of a divided government and probably an increasingly fractured party system--to increase taxes before a collapse in confidence and cratering of bond prices led to a full-scale banking crisis.