R. Taggart Murphy: With Friends Like Us, Why Would Japan Need Enemies?
[R. Taggart Murphy joined the Graduate School of Business Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in September, 2004.]
Japan has a new prime minister, Naoto Kan, but he comes from the same party—the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)—as Yukio Hatoyama, who resigned last Wednesday. He will almost surely want to continue Hatoyama's policies of strengthening Japan’s political democracy and forging an independent foreign policy that is allied with the United States, but not subordinate to it.
If Kan follows that course, he will undoubtedly displease much of Japan’s establishment, which still identifies with the defeated Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that Hatoyama's party trounced in last year's election. And he may also displease the Obama administration. President Obama and his top aides may not have given the final twist to the knife that Japan’s establishment lodged in Hatoyama’s back. But their fingerprints are nonetheless all over the hilt.
How and why did this happen? We have to go back to the election of August 2009 that swept Hatoyama and the DPJ into office. This was no ordinary handover of power. Rather, DPJ leaders had campaigned on a platform of fundamentally overhauling the way in which Japan is governed. They promised to take key policy decisions out of the hands of an elite corps of bureaucrats and lodge them with politicians answerable to an electorate. On the strength of this pledge, the DPJ defeated a LDP that had, since its inception in 1955, functioned not so much as governors but as power brokers—running interference between the bureaucracy and other key power groups in Japanese society, including business, finance, small shopkeepers, and farmers.
The architect of the DPJ victory was Ichiro Ozawa. Ozawa is a political genius. His combination of tactical mastery of the minutiae of electoral politics with clearly articulated views of what is wrong with his country invites comparison with such similarly transformative figures as Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich. Ozawa had started his career as a key disciple of the formidable Kakuei Tanaka, prime minister from 1972-1974 and mentor of a whole roster of important LDP figures. But in the early ‘90s, in the wake of the collapse of Japan’s so-called bubble economy, Ozawa walked out of the LDP, taking a number of Japan’s brightest young politicians with him to found the Japan Renewal Party—the first of several opposition parties he helped form and lead in an ongoing effort to construct a credible alternative to the LDP.
Ozawa had become convinced that Japan’s economic stagnation—the dimensions of which were then just becoming clear—was not simply a technical problem that could be solved by the right mix of fiscal and monetary policies. Rather, in his view, the inability of the country to extricate itself from its woes stemmed directly from the way in which it was governed. Specifically, Japan needed a political infrastructure capable of changing course—something that bureaucrats, no matter how capable, are congenitally unable to do. He wrote a book in which he called for Japan to become a “normal nation.” By this, he meant that elected officials should actually originate and be accountable for policy rather than simply provide political cover for decisions taken elsewhere. And he also wrote that in the wake of the end of the Cold War, Japan needed to assume responsibility for its own security and its foreign relations rather than relying reflexively on the United States.
In 1993, Ozawa had pried enough discontented legislators out of the LDP to form a coalition that deprived it for the first time since its founding of a parliamentary majority. But he and his allies were insufficiently prepared to exercise power. And the Japanese public was not yet convinced things were bad enough to trust them for long. After they were turned out in 1994, they bided their time, recruiting new figures to their ranks and building alliances throughout the country, carefully picking off one group of erstwhile LDP supporters after another. In 2003, Ozawa and his allies joined forces with the DPJ that had been formed in 1998—Kan and Hatoyama had, respectively, been the DPJ's first two presidents....
Read entire article at The New Republic
Japan has a new prime minister, Naoto Kan, but he comes from the same party—the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)—as Yukio Hatoyama, who resigned last Wednesday. He will almost surely want to continue Hatoyama's policies of strengthening Japan’s political democracy and forging an independent foreign policy that is allied with the United States, but not subordinate to it.
If Kan follows that course, he will undoubtedly displease much of Japan’s establishment, which still identifies with the defeated Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that Hatoyama's party trounced in last year's election. And he may also displease the Obama administration. President Obama and his top aides may not have given the final twist to the knife that Japan’s establishment lodged in Hatoyama’s back. But their fingerprints are nonetheless all over the hilt.
How and why did this happen? We have to go back to the election of August 2009 that swept Hatoyama and the DPJ into office. This was no ordinary handover of power. Rather, DPJ leaders had campaigned on a platform of fundamentally overhauling the way in which Japan is governed. They promised to take key policy decisions out of the hands of an elite corps of bureaucrats and lodge them with politicians answerable to an electorate. On the strength of this pledge, the DPJ defeated a LDP that had, since its inception in 1955, functioned not so much as governors but as power brokers—running interference between the bureaucracy and other key power groups in Japanese society, including business, finance, small shopkeepers, and farmers.
The architect of the DPJ victory was Ichiro Ozawa. Ozawa is a political genius. His combination of tactical mastery of the minutiae of electoral politics with clearly articulated views of what is wrong with his country invites comparison with such similarly transformative figures as Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich. Ozawa had started his career as a key disciple of the formidable Kakuei Tanaka, prime minister from 1972-1974 and mentor of a whole roster of important LDP figures. But in the early ‘90s, in the wake of the collapse of Japan’s so-called bubble economy, Ozawa walked out of the LDP, taking a number of Japan’s brightest young politicians with him to found the Japan Renewal Party—the first of several opposition parties he helped form and lead in an ongoing effort to construct a credible alternative to the LDP.
Ozawa had become convinced that Japan’s economic stagnation—the dimensions of which were then just becoming clear—was not simply a technical problem that could be solved by the right mix of fiscal and monetary policies. Rather, in his view, the inability of the country to extricate itself from its woes stemmed directly from the way in which it was governed. Specifically, Japan needed a political infrastructure capable of changing course—something that bureaucrats, no matter how capable, are congenitally unable to do. He wrote a book in which he called for Japan to become a “normal nation.” By this, he meant that elected officials should actually originate and be accountable for policy rather than simply provide political cover for decisions taken elsewhere. And he also wrote that in the wake of the end of the Cold War, Japan needed to assume responsibility for its own security and its foreign relations rather than relying reflexively on the United States.
In 1993, Ozawa had pried enough discontented legislators out of the LDP to form a coalition that deprived it for the first time since its founding of a parliamentary majority. But he and his allies were insufficiently prepared to exercise power. And the Japanese public was not yet convinced things were bad enough to trust them for long. After they were turned out in 1994, they bided their time, recruiting new figures to their ranks and building alliances throughout the country, carefully picking off one group of erstwhile LDP supporters after another. In 2003, Ozawa and his allies joined forces with the DPJ that had been formed in 1998—Kan and Hatoyama had, respectively, been the DPJ's first two presidents....