The Japanese Ministry of Finance is not usually the kind of place that goes in for gimmicks. But last week marked a departure. The bureaucrats decided to adorn their website with a “debt clock” – a digital counter designed to dramatize the rising tide of governmental red ink. Green numbers flashing ominously on a black background showed how the country’s long-term debt of some $6.4 trillion is growing by $1600 every second.

Who would have thought that Japanese public finance could be so much fun? Unfortunately, though, the experiment lasted for only a few hours – when its server collapsed under an avalanche of hits from interested users. Evidently plenty of ordinary Japanese citizens have the debt on their minds, too. And small wonder, considering that the total burden now runs to about $51,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. (Altogether the country’s public debt amounts to a whopping 150 percent of GDP).

But the real significance of the ministry’s website fiasco lies elsewhere. After all, Japanese public finance has been a basket case ever since the country’s leaders tried to spend their way out of an economic slump back in the late 1990s. So why has the issue suddenly become so hot?

It’s simple. Everyone in the political class knows that there’s little hope of cleaning up the debt without raising taxes. It’s an open secret that there’s no way the government can get its debt under control without a hike in, say, the national consumption tax. But what a surprise – that’s something no one was willing to say out loud ahead of last month’s parliamentary election. Now that they’ve got the vote behind them, the bureaucratic guardians of the nation’s finances are evidently trying to get everyone focused on fighting the deficit again.

Their sense of timing couldn’t be worse. The election to the upper house of parliament led to a stinging defeat for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democrats and a resounding win for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. The result is a dispiriting sense of drift. Abe may have been a hapless prime minister so far in his term, but he’s at least pledged to continue his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi’s structural reforms and says that he aims to balance the budget by 2011. Now his weakened administration will probably have an even harder time of making that happen. The opposition says it will reduce the debt without raising taxes but its program for doing so remains vague. Neither party has seemed much inclined to embrace Koizumi’s slogan of “no reform without pain.”

That bodes ill. The sense of muddle since the election, coupled with bad economic news from the U.S., has been keeping Tokyo’s stock markets stagnant. The central bank has been hinting at the need to raise interest rates – which could, of course, make it harder to pay off the debt. So keep your eyes on that Finance Ministry website. Where’s a debt counter when you need it?