A few days ago, a man named Koizumi stood up in the Japanese parliament to vote against a bill. The man in question was not Junichiro Koizumi, the most charismatic and long-lasting prime minister of recent times. Rather it was Shinjuro, his 31-year-old son, who was voting against a bill to water down his father’s landmark postal privatisation.

The centrepiece of Koizumi the Elder’s term, postal privatisation aimed to rid the government of one of the world’s biggest financial institutions. The idea was to release some Y350,000bn in postal funds from the state’s grasp in the hope that the private sector would figure out something better to do with it. A large slice of post office funds is recycled into government bonds, making it easier to plug the chronic deficit, or to boost spending. The idea was to rip this financial drip-feed from the state’s arm.

The funny thing about Koizumi the Elder is that although he was wildly popular, the policies he advocated were not. As soon as he left office, in 2006, public support for privatisation, austerity and the market-oriented ideas he had advocated drained away. It became commonplace to blame him for exacerbating the wealth gap.