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are shown on television furiously opposing it, even though the exemption will not touch most of them. Yet the plan is to go much further in labour-market reform and give firms the right to fire workers. Sacking permanent employees, still the majority of the labour force, is in effect impossible today. Unpopular as it would be, this reform would have the biggest economic impact of any. Watchdog-whistle politics A duel over Japan's poor corporate governance offers further evidence that Mr Abe is making changes that count. Early this year the government quietly introduced guidelines obliging institutional investors to monitor companies more effectively. In May Yasuhisa Shiozaki, the LDP's most ardent economic reformist, outlined plans for an accompanying corporate-governance code. Future whistle-blowers would fare better than did Michael Woodford, a former president of Olympus, who was sacked in 2011 when he discovered vast fraud at the firm. And independent directors would become near-mandatory. The proportion of Japan Inc owned by foreigners is rising sharply (see chart), helping the reforms along. But Keidanren, Japan's main business lobby, a generous donor to the LDP, detests the changes. Yet they would help usher in something like shareholder capitalism to Japan. The allocation of capital would improve, away from dying, zombie businesses towards innovative, growing ones. Despite his past image as a social conservative intent on maintaining Japan's traditional gender roles, Mr Abe's government is to allow foreign workers to care for children and the elderly in a series of "special economic zones", and so help women climb the career ladder. This has elicited the usual xenophobia, including from the labour minister. Mr Tamura suggested that foreign influences might damage the development of Japanese youngsters. The LDP may also change the tax system to stop penalising working wives. Millions of couples who benefit from the current system will be up in arms. Mr Abe also seems willing to take on powerful vested interests in farming and in health care. Supporters see as among his boldest moves an attempt to overhaul Japan Agriculture (JA), a network of agricultural co-operatives that is one of the LDP's most powerful political supporters. In health care, the government will allow patients to combine private medical care with publicly covered medicine in many more cases, rather than forcing them to forfeit their public coverage when opting for advanced treatments. That should boost advanced health care and lay the ground for increased medical tourism. Mr Abe has also identified a number of special economic zones to experiment with the most ambitious reforms. When ministers and their bureaucrats resist making changes nationwide, Mr Abe threatens to enact them still more radically in the zones, which include Tokyo and Osaka. "If all these measures do not represent meaningful reform,