One year on, the 'Lion Man' is busy fighting off the wolves

He once had superhero appeal. But, beset by rising unemployment and falling public support, the Japanese PM is now battling to survive

Even by the ephemeral standards of popular culture, the cartoon character known as Shishiro had a pitifully short life.

He came into being only last summer, and for a few months. "Lion Man" – as his name roughly translates – was ubiquitous. His furry tail waved from posters and stickers. His cute mane was moulded into plastic dolls and mobile telephone straps.

At the small gift shop in the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in central Tokyo, schoolgirls and housewives queued to buy posters of Lion Man and the real-life hero on whom he was based: the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi.

How much has changed in just 10 months. At the height of the Koizumi boom, the gift shop had hundreds of customers a day. Today it is lucky to see a few dozen. Copies of the Lion Man 2002 calendar lie unsold on a table outside and, although the Koizumi T-shirts have sold out, there are no plans to bring in new stock. As a cartoon superhero, Lion Man is finished; as a politician Mr Koizumi is looking more and more like yesterday's man.

A lot depends on Mr Koizumi, and not only in Japan. It was a year ago today that he was elected president of the LDP, Japan's biggest party. Two days later he became Prime Minister, in the country's biggest political upset in eight years. Mr Koizumi was an outsider, a flamboyant maverick who captured the LDP with the support of ordinary party members.

He was a fearless reformer who made no bones about the pain necessary for economic recovery. And his early approval ratings – close to 90 per cent for weeks on end – made him perhaps the most popular leader in the world.

At home, voters looked to him to stem the tide of rising bankruptcies and unemployment, and end the economic stagnation. Abroad, governments welcomed a man who finally seemed determined to sort out Japan's dangerously debt-stricken banks. But one year on, few of his promises of reform have been fulfilled, and the self-styled Lion Man finds himself fighting off the political wolves. Under Mr Koizumi, unemployment has touched its post-war peak of 5.6 per cent – predictions are it will climb next year.

Politically, he finds himself increasingly isolated within his party, after losing several key supporters. And the crucial approval ratings – yesterday down to 42 per cent – show that he has shed more than half of his public support. What has gone wrong for Mr Koizumi and for Japan, and what hope does he have of winning back his rock-star popularity?

And why should the rest of the world care? The last question is easily answered. As the world's second-largest economy, decisions made by Japanese consumers are felt around the world. At the moment, fearful of unemployment and more bad news ahead, they are spending little and the pinch is being felt all over the world. Even more fearful is the threat – not imminent, but alarmingly easy to imagine – of a major banking collapse, which could spread panic around the world. It is this headache that Mr Koizumi was supposed to cure, but which he has failed pretty much to ease.

In these times, it is easy to forget what a good start he made. Every Japanese prime minister of the past 10 years has mouthed the slogans of reform, but none has achieved as much as Mr Koizumi. His changes began with his Cabinet: instead of divvying up ministries among LDP hacks, he gave jobs to private-sector experts and to genuinely popular politicians such as Makiko Tanaka, who became Japan's first female Foreign Minister. He brought policy changes too, making the first serious challenge to the long-established and discredited Japanese habit of using public spending to buy the country out of recession. He cut public works budgets by 10 per cent, and capped the issue of new government bonds at 30 trillion yen a year. He withdrew government subsidies to bloated, inefficient government corporations.

"Until the end of the year, the Koizumi goods were selling so well," says the man in the LDP souvenir shop. "But this year ... well it's much quieter."

What went wrong? In truth, Mr Koizumi has lost as many battles as he has won. The practices he was attempting to abolish – above all, lavish spending on local building projects in LDP constituencies – might be economically disastrous, but the steady flow of money through the regions had kept the party and its members electable for nearly 50 years. As an outsider without a strong power base, Mr Koizumi was buoyed up only by his popularity, and in the new year this began to drain away.

The turning point came in January when he sacked the adored Madam Tanaka. She had become locked in a feud with a senior LDP backbencher, a conflict so bitter and personal it was inhibiting her work as Foreign Minister. Mr Koizumi's ratings began to slump within days of her dismissal.

A series of further political scandals, and more resignations, undermined the Prime Minister's reputation as the figurehead of a new, clean brand of politics. Among the casualties was Koichi Kato, one of the Mr Koizumi's closest political friends. For the first time, he began to look vulnerable – no longer ahead of the game, but buffeted helplessly by unfolding events. When he has acted decisively, the results have been disastrous – as in his visit on Sunday to an ultra-nationalist shrine in Tokyo, which has enraged South Koreans and their government a few weeks before the two countries co-host the World Cup.

Two things offer hope for Mr Koizumi. The first is entirely negative: for all his mistakes, there is no one else in the LDP remotely close to him in popularity. However numerous his enemies within the party, to jettison him now would be political suicide. The second reason for optimism is the Japanese economy, which shows tentative signs of warming up after 10 years of stagnation.

If Mr Koizumi can last until the autumn, he may find himself receiving the credit for a mild economic recovery. This would give new impetus to his reform programme and offer him another chance to bring about genuinely radical change. If not, then his shelf life may not last beyond the Lion Man 2002 calendars, and the unsold stickers in the souvenir shop.

With hindsight, of course, expectations were unrealistically high. The superficiality of the Koizumi cult should have been the giveaway: for all the excitement about his mane-like hair cut, his taste in music (rock 'n' roll), Mr Koizumi is looking less and less a superhero and more what he is: a conventional man of 60, a little more outspoken than average, who has spent the past three decades in the loyal service of one of the most conservative political parties in the world.

That he is the best Japan has to offer is depressing rather than inspiring. Perhaps it is a sign of how bad things are that Mr Koizumi ever looked so good in the first place.