Observing Japan

The "losing Japan" narrative

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:23:00 +0000

In different ways, two articles published in Western media outlets this week suggest the emergence of a new narrative concerning Japan in elite circles in the United States. One might call that narrative the "losing Japan" narrative, reminiscent of the idea — propagated by newsman Henry Luce — that the United States, or rather, the Democratic Party "lost" China when the Communists won the Chinese Civil War. This narrative suggests that the United States is "losing" Japan to China, raising a call to arms that unless the US government acts expeditiously it could let the DPJ-led government lead Japan into China's embrace.

The first is the now infamous editorial in the Washington Post on Fujita Yukihisa, the DPJ upper house member best known for his doubts about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Michael Cucek and Paul Jackson have the controversy well-covered.) However egregious Fujita's views, Washington Post's editorial is revealing of the "losing Japan" narrative in a number of ways. Start with the editorial's treatment of the subject. Despite his impressive-sounding titles, Fujita has little or no role in Japanese foreign policymaking under the Hatoyama government. The international department is not a policy shop, and Diet committees are meaningless. Either the Post was ignorant of these facts — in which case the editorial writer, Lee Hockstader according to Fujita, did a poor job — or the Post was aware but wrote a misleading editorial anyway in which Fujita is ludicrously described as a "Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment." It is possible that the Washington Post made an honest mistake, but then one gets to the inferences Hockstader draws from Fujita's thoughts about 9/11:

The only thing novel about Mr. Fujita is that a man so susceptible to the imaginings of the lunatic fringe happens to occupy a notable position in the governing apparatus of a nation that boasts the world's second-largest economy.

We have no reason to believe that Mr. Fujita's views are widely shared in Japan; we suspect that they are not and that many Japanese would be embarrassed by them. His proposal two years ago that Tokyo undertake an independent investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 24 Japanese citizens died, went nowhere. Nonetheless, his views, rooted as they are in profound distrust of the United States, seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Mr. Hatoyama, elected last summer, has called for a more "mature" relationship with Washington and closer ties between Japan and China. Although he has reaffirmed longstanding doctrine that Japan's alliance with the United States remains the cornerstone of its security, his actions and those of the DPJ-led government, raise questions about that commitment. It's a cliche but nonetheless true that the U.S.-Japan alliance has been a critical force for stability in East Asia for decades. That relationship, and its benefits for the region, will be severely tested if Mr. Hatoyama tolerates elements of his own party as reckless and fact-averse as Mr. Fujita.

Again, one can debate whether Fujita can be properly described as having a "notable position in the governing apparatus," but the leaps Hockstader takes from Fujita's position are unjustifiable, leaps that can be detected in the slippery language Hockstader uses. "Fujita's views seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama." Hockstader makes this outrageous charge without providing a shred of evidence beyond Fujita's views. Meanwhile, in the subsequent paragraph he casually dismisses the Hatoyama government's rhetorical commitment to the alliance (and, for that matter, its sizable financial commitment to the reconstruction of Afghanistan) to speak of "actions" that "raise questions." I assume here he means Futenma, although who knows. This phrasing is precisely the kind of attitude that has produced the DPJ's approach to the alliance in the first place, the idea that there is only one way to be in favor of the alliance. Finally, Hockstader basically threatens the Hatoyama government, suggesting that if Fujita is not dispensed with, his government will suffer accordingly in the eyes of official Washington.

Note, finally, that while Hockstader questions the sincerity of the Hatoyama government's commitment to the alliance, he says nothing more about the Hatoyama government's approach to China. The silence is deafening. Note also the scare quotes around mature, as if the DPJ's position that the alliance as it was conducted under the LDP is in need of changes is an absurd idea. The DPJ, he seems to be saying, has a critical approach to the alliance and an uncritical approach to the Sino-Japanese relationship. (This comparison is hardly valid: the US-Japan relationship is complex and has the thorny question of US forces in Japan at the heart of it, while the Sino-Japanese relationship is not nearly as complex and is still progressing by baby steps from the deep freeze it experienced under Koizumi.)

As I read it, the editorial can be summarized as "Hatoyama's party harbors a 9/11 denier, clearly does not take the relationship with the US seriously, and is moving Japan closer to China."

A more serious version of this argument can be found in the Financial Times, where columnist Gideon Rachman argues that the DPJ gives the impression of drifting in China's direction.

He writes:

When Mr Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan took power last August, it broke more than 50 years of almost continuous administration by the Liberal Democratic Party. The DPJ is keen to differentiate itself from the LDP in almost every respect, and foreign policy is no exception. In an interview last week, Katsuya Okada, Japan’s foreign minister, said that the LDP followed US foreign policy “too closely”. “From now onwards,” says Mr Okada, “this will be the age of Asia.” The foreign minister adds that talk of Japan choosing between China and the US is meaningless, and that Japan’s friendship with America will remain “qualitatively different” from its relations with China. But some DPJ party members have called for a policy of “equidistance” between China and the US.

Several things are notable about this paragraph. First, is the DPJ really acting out of a desire to differentiate itself from the LDP? Given that foreign policy plays so little a role in the calculus of voters, I have a hard time believing that the DPJ-led government's foreign policy initiatives are driven by electoral considerations. Second, why do unnamed DPJ party members get equal billing in this paragraph with Okada, who seems to be firmly in control of foreign policy making? Okada provides a decent summary of the government's foreign policy approach, suggesting that the DPJ is not drifting from America, but instead shifting the emphasis of Japan's foreign policy, from a foreign policy in which Asia policy was tailored around the alliance to a foreign policy in which the alliance is tailored to fit Japan's Asia policy. And yet the paragraph ends with unnamed backbenchers and their unspecified equidistant "policy."

Rachman continues by citing Hatoyama's controversial essay in the International Herald Tribune, and Ozawa's grand tour in Beijing and intervention to arrange an audience with the Emperor for Xi Jinping. Rachman is at least careful to admit that "it is probably overdoing it to suggest that Japan is definitively shifting away from its postwar special relationship with the US." But the article conveys the impression that Japan is a prize in the struggle for influence between the US and China — and that the battle for Japan has begun.

There are several problems with this narrative, in both its belligerent Washington Post form and its more circumspect Rachmanite form. The fallacy both articles share is the idea that Asia is sure to be zero-sum, that a country like Japan can only be in the US camp or the China camp. Joining the former camp, Rachman concludes, would entail "[cultivating] warmer relations with other democratic nations in the region, such as India and Australia, in what would be an undeclared policy of 'soft containment' of Chinese power." And yet that is precisely what the Hatoyama government wants to do. Rachman might respond that the time for choosing has not yet arrived, which is true, but it also raises the possibility that another future is possible in which countries like Japan, Australia, and India maintain security ties with the US in order to keep the US engaged even while maintaining constructive political and economic relationships with China, navigating between the two superpowers in order to avoid unmitigated dependence on either one.

The Washington Post is even more unabashed in its embrace of an approach to Asia that does not allow for nuance, which it aired in another editorial on Japan published earlier this year.

The problem with this approach to the region and Japan on the op-ed pages of newspapers well read by policymakers in Washington is that this way of thinking could easily become self-fulfilling prophecy. Rachman may be warning of a possible future, but many in positions of power — with the help of the Washington Post — could come to take what he describes as a given.

A major flaw with the "losing Japan" narrative is that there is remarkably little data upon which to reach firm conclusions, a point acknowledged by Rachman. Think of how little we know about the Hatoyama government's approach to China. Interestingly, both the examples he cites as cases confirming the tilt towards China involve the activities of Ozawa Ichiro, i.e. a figure outside of the government who may not be long for politics. What data points do we have concerning Hatoyama and members of his cabinet? Not many. Hatoyama has made clear that he will not provoke China on historical issues. Beyond that? Unmentioned in both articles is that the Hatoyama government is building upon the "strategic, constructive partnership" concept developed by the Abe government, right down to the continued use of the term. That doesn't sound like a government doing whatever it can do differentiate itself from the LDP.

I'm willing to cut Rachman some slack, because his piece contains numerous caveats and notes of caution. But the Washington Post editorial is another story entirely. By picking a DPJ member whose views would obviously draw opprobrium in the US and then implying that his views represent a "strain" in the DPJ, this editorial is little more than a hatchet job against Japan's ruling party. How this editorial will help reverse what the Post believes is Japan's drift towards China is beyond me.

After all, the last time Japan was a political battleground for a cold war in Asia, the US had considerably more invasive means at its disposal than sharply worded editorials. Accordingly, this narrative may in fact be a product of insecurity about declining US influence, much as insecure Japanese elites fretted that the transition from Bush to Obama would mean the return of Japan passing. The reality, however, is that in the unlikely event that Japan were to reorient itself from the US to China, there would be little the US could do to stop it.

Open diplomacy

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:54:00 +0000

Within a week of the formation of the first Bolshevik government, Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, went to the foreign ministry and forced the staff to open safes containing secret treaties that the Tsarist government had made with the Allied powers over the course of World War I, treaties that for the most part concerned how the Allies would divide up the territorial spoils of war.

"Abolition of secret diplomacy," wrote Trotsky, "is the first essential of an honorable, popular, and really democratic foreign policy."

Lest anyone think this opposition to secret diplomacy was simply a reflection of the new government's opposition to the "propertied minority," the first of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points was a call for "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." (Although, it should be noted, the Fourteen Points were to a certain extent a response to the Bolsheviks.)

On Tuesday the Hatoyama government's expert panel reviewing secret agreements made between the US and Japanese governments from the 1960s onward released its report, confirming the existence of the ongoing agreement that permitted the introduction of US nuclear weapons into Japan for the duration of the cold war despite the three non-nuclear principles that would seem to prohibit precisely that. The panel revealed more than 300 documents, although it seems that some were missing. Naturally the panel drew criticism from recent LDP prime ministers, who had continued to deny the existence of the documents despite their existence having been confirmed by declassified US documents. On the other end of the political spectrum, Fukushima Mizuho, consumer affairs minister and head of the Social Democratic Party, praised the report as "ground-breaking."

My point in linking the Bolshevik government's release of secret treaties to the DPJ's release of secret treaties is not to suggest that the DPJ is somehow dangerously radical or akin to the Bolsheviks. After all, by releasing the documents the Bolsheviks damaged the ongoing war effort and triggered Wilson's efforts to recast the war as something other than a war among empires for territory. To a certain extent, the Hatoyama government is merely rectifying the Japanese side of the historical record, seeing as how the US stopped deploying nuclear weapons overseas at the end of the cold war and confirmed as much nearly a decade ago.

My point rather is that concerns about secret diplomacy are not unprecedented, and that they are naturally linked to broader concerns about how a country is governed. In this sense the Hatoyama government is doing more than historical recordkeeping, but rather it is showing that open government does not stop at water's end. Not content with revealing the many ways in which bureaucrats — under the watch of LDP governments — have wasted taxpayer money, the DPJ wants to show how the LDP conducted foreign relations out of the sight of Japanese voters. It is perhaps easy for the DPJ government to criticize decisions made during the cold war, but then the Hatoyama government would not be the first to question cynical decisions made by governments during the cold war. (Anyone else remember when Condoleeza Rice criticized FDR for abandoning Eastern Europe at Yalta?)

The DPJ has in fact been consistent in its opposition to secret diplomacy conducted by LDP-led governments, right up to the present day. When the DPJ opposed the extension of the Indian Ocean refueling mission after taking control of the upper house in 2007, central to its argument was that the government had not been forthright with information about what exactly the ships were doing there. Who was the fuel going to, and what were those ships doing after being refueled?

More importantly, the same concerns drive the Hatoyama government's approach to the Futenma issue. Lost in the endless amounts of copy written about the dispute is that the Hatoyama government has been animated as much by the process by which the 2006 agreement was reached as by its content. The manifesto upon which the DPJ was elected, after all, promised only a review of the realignment roadmap. It made no promises about what the DPJ would push for instead. As the government has repeatedly stated, it is proceeding from a "zero base" as it conducts its review of the roadmap and possible alternatives. While the negotiation process and the roadmap that resulted were far from secret, the DPJ wanted to review whether LDP governments actually considered all options, skepticism that is not unwarranted given the long history of secret diplomacy with the US.

The Hatoyama government deserves some blame for not being clearer about why it wanted a review in the first place, which enabled some to paint the government as anti-American. But those who see the Futenma dispute in the worst possible light have misinterpreted the Hatoyama government's position. I think that the Hatoyama government is approaching Futenma less as a foreign policy issue than as a domestic policy issue, because a bilateral agreement as complicated the realignment plan involves too many actors within Japan to be simply a bilateral matter for governments in Tokyo and Washington. Indeed, if the 2006 agreement has a flaw it is that the Koizumi government acted without the full approval of Okinawan constituents, which explains at least in part why subsequent LDP governments did little but drag their feet on implementing the agreement.

The Hatoyama government is acting in good faith in trying to find an agreement that will satisfy all parties, not just the US government. Not surprisingly it has found that "double-edged" diplomacy is tricky, if not impossible — little wonder that governments opt to keep their foreign affairs secret. As the May deadline for its review approaches, hints that the government is leaning towards a plan to build a Futenma replacement facility in Okinawa on land instead of offshore has prompted opposition from local governments and the prefectural assembly, from DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro, and from the US itself. The whole process could end in failure, with no one happy with the final outcome, least of all the Hatoyama government.

But whether or not the Hatoyama government succeeds, it is important to recognize that it is acting on the basis of an old idea, that a democratic foreign policy must necessarily be conducted in the sight of the people in whose name it is being conducted. In its pursuit of this aim, the Hatoyama government has also implicitly suggested that an alliance conducted behind closed doors is inappropriate for a more democratic Japan, that the alliance will not endure if it continues to rest upon secret agreements and understandings.

The strange death of the LDP

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:06:00 +0000

When the Hosokawa government — with Ozawa Ichiro, then secretary-general of one of the leading parties of the eight-party coalition backing the government — passed electoral reform in 1994, one of the arguments made then and ever since by Japanese politicians (and American political scientists) was that the new mixed single-member district/proportional representation electoral system would produce a British-style two-party system that would complement the British-style administrative and political reforms desired by Ozawa and other politicians.

In other words, the Japanese political system should favor the existence of a second large party to challenge the DPJ, if not the LDP then an LDP-like successor party. But presumably the LDP should be the favorite to survive in the two-party system. By virtue of its existence — by virtue of its possessing institutional infrastructure, finances, an organizational history — the party presumably has an advantage over any party not yet born, not to mention the various micro-parties that stand virtually no chance of expanding to rival the DPJ.

And yet the LDP appears to be stumbling along to destruction. Matsuda Iwao, an LDP upper house member from Gifu prefecture, recently became the fifth LDP member of that chamber to leave the party since the LDP's defeat last year. (Yomiuri suspects the hand of Ozawa, given Matsuda's membership in Ozawa's Japan Renewal and New Frontier parties during the 1990s.)

The party has failed to articulate a policy agenda to challenge the Hatoyama government's, as suggested by the LDP's four-day boycott of Diet budget proceedings — discussed here and here. Aside from calling for the heads of Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio and demanding a new election, the LDP has apparently nothing to say about the problems facing Japan.

Keidanren, an important financial backer of the LDP (2.7 billion yen in 2008, roughly ten per cent of the party's income that year), has once again decided to suspend its political donations, a serious blow to the LDP given that its public subsidies have also shrank due to the extent of its defeat.

Most seriously, at least for the party's current leadership, Masuzoe Yoichi, the popular former minister for health, labor, and welfare and the one party member that LDP candidates wanted to be seen with in 2009, has stepped up his criticism of party leader Tanigaki Sadakazu and other party executives. He has created a new study group with thirty members — the Economic Strategy Research Group, discussed here — but Masuzoe's power may be less in his numbers than in his ability to discredit the party's leaders every time he opens his mouth. Masuzoe provides a constant reminder of just how little the LDP has done to reform itself since losing last August. Indeed, speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan Monday, Masuzoe identified Tanigaki as a cause of low public approval for the LDP and ann obstacle to party reform, and suggested that his resignation would open the way to reform. He did not rule out the possibility of forming a new party or a total political realignment including current DPJ members (including cabinet member Maehara Seiji).

In recent weeks party leaders have begun discussing dissolving the factions once again, an idea that flared up during the post-election leadership campaign only to die shortly after Tanigaki's victory, but abolishing the factions — or referring to them as mere study groups — is at best a cosmetic change and at worse no change at all. The kind of changes the LDP needs to make are the changes the DPJ made over the decade leading up to its taking power: centralizing control over party administration, policymaking, and electoral strategy in a small group around the party leader, and then developing a coherent policy strategy that actually speaks to the public's concerns.

Why has the LDP failed to reform up to this point — and why is it likely to fail to reform in the future, even if Masuzoe gets his way and forces Tanigaki out?

There is no shortage of plausible explanations. One explanation would suggest that the LDP is failing because it is not designed to exist in opposition. For all the headlines grabbed by LDP reformists over the past decade, perhaps most of the party's members may be simply incapable of saying anything of substance to their constituents. There is no longer any public money to do the talking for them. And presumably they also have less access to the bureaucracy, which might otherwise have been able to provide them with ideas and proposals. This problem may be common to other defeated dominant parties struggling to adapt in opposition.

Another — which I think is important — is the composition of the LDP after its defeat. Namely, it has too many senior (read: former ministers) and hereditary politicians in its ranks and not enough followers, especially of the reformist variety. The LDP members who survived 2009 showed that they can get reelected on the strength of their own names and campaign organizations. They owe little to the party headquarters, and, one would assume, they would be less likely to support efforts to centralize control of the party.

A further explanation might consider the role played by the LDP's policy ideas. In this argument, the LDP's internal organization is not irrelevant — the party's organization, after all, has some control of what's included in the party's platform and more generally what narrative the party tells in public — but the more important factor may be the balance of power among ideological camps within the LDP. As noted, Masuzoe has the popularity, but not the numbers within the party (and I find it odd that Masuzoe, who was a critic of Koizumi's "neo-liberal" reforms, is now the face for continuing those reforms). Similarly, the revisionist conservative wing may also lack the numbers — there was some overlap with the Koizumi Children, after all — and its surviving leaders are intimately associated with the LDP's downfall. That leaves the pragmatists, the party leaders who are at once the most flexible and pragmatic in policy terms and also the most wedded to existing party structures. At the same time, the LDP faces the same dilemmas facing any party in opposition in a (mostly) two-party system. Should it copy the governing party's policies and serve as the well-meaning critic in opposition? Or should it adopt a rejectionist pose and rail about the good old days before the DPJ took power? Koizumi's ambiguous legacy as party leader, not to mention the failures of its last prime ministers, makes the latter option difficult, and the LDP seems simply incapable of adopting the former approach. The result is that attacking Hatoyama and Ozawa on the seiji to kane issue appears to be the default option, the problem being that the public doesn't particularly care about money politics relative to other issues, especially when the LDP is the messenger.

Finally, the LDP may be failing to reform for precisely the reason suggested by Masuzoe: Tanigaki is simply not up to the task, being little more than a placeholder upon whom the faction leaders could agree when the party was in chaos following the electoral defeat. It seems dubious that Tanigaki is the primary cause of frustrated reform, but he is certainly not helping the process along.

In short, while it is easy to assume that organizations do whatever necessary to ensure their survival in their environments, making the changes necessary for survival is easier said than done. It may be the case that the survival imperative of individual LDP politicians is trumping the organizational imperative to survive. The LDP's days appear to be numbered, especially if Masuzoe decides that the party is not worth saving.

Whether Masuzoe could build a second party around his splitists, Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, and whoever they could coax from the DPJ is an open question. Theories about the effect of the electoral system would predict that Masuzoe's bid would be successful, but the LDP's woeful performance post-election suggests that nothing is for certain. Showing up is not enough: the second party actually has to make the right decisions too. Perhaps Masuzoe, helped by his personal popularity, will make the right decisions and be rewarded with public support and numerous prospective candidates from which to choose. Perhaps he might even draw some DPJ members to a new party.

ON this last question, I suspect that despite the mass media's longing for another political realignment, DPJ reformists close to Masuzoe have greater incentives to exercise voice within the DPJ — given that the party is in government — rather than to exit and join Masuzoe in opposition. In other words, I expect that one consequence of Masuzoe's departure from the LDP would be a rebellion within the DPJ to replace Hatoyama led by the party members most likely to join with Masuzoe — potentially a successful rebellion were the emergence of a Masuzoe New Party to make enough Hatoyama allies nervous about the new rival.

If Masuzoe cannot break the DPJ, the result could be an unusual party system, with the DPJ joined by a rump LDP, a rising but struggling reformist party, and the other smaller parties, including its two coalition partners.

What seems certain is that the LDP will be unable to reverse its decline. The party that seemed uniquely suited to governing may simply be unable to survive an extended period in opposition. Even a good showing in the upper house election this summer — by no means guaranteed — could be negated should Komeito, the LDP's erstwhile partner, continue to move closer to the DPJ.

Still before dawn

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:04:00 +0000

In the wake of Koizumi Junichiro's landslide election victory in 2005, the Economist published a survey on Japan under the headline "The Sun Also Rises," complete with a cover photo over the sun shining over Mt. Fuji.

The Economist was hardly alone in proclaiming that the Koizumi era marked the beginning of a new, optimistic era after the woe of the lost decade. If Koizumi was the face of a more politically assertive Japan, Toyota's rise was a symbol that despite economic stagnation, Japan's leading corporations could still compete globally, and in Toyota's case, best all challengers and set the industry's gold standard for production methods.

But just as many of Koizumi's reforms proved illusory once he left office, so too does Toyota's fall — with Toyoda Akio, its president and CEO, being raked over the coals in Washington — suggest that there was far less to the "Japan is back" meme than met the eye. That's not to say that Toyota's achievements weren't real; it's hard to argue with sales figures. But the idea that Toyota could be a twenty-first century national champion, symbol of a vibrant Japan, has been demolished. It seems that Toyota was plagued by the same pathologies that have plagued other industrial sectors and the public sector.

Patrick Cronin, writing at Foreign Policy's website, suggests that the Toyota debacle could be a blow to Japan's soft power. Maybe so, but in some way the scandal may simply reinforce the DPJ's message that the rot — which apparently left no corner of Japanese society untouched — which characterized the latter years of LDP rule needs to be swept away. In short, this scandal reinforces the idea that there are no shortcuts to recovery. As Peter Tasker argued in the Financial Times last week, the idea that Japan could continue to prosper on the back of exporters like Toyota has been punctured, making this scandal an opportunity for the DPJ to make its case that Japan needs to move away from export-led growth.

The DPJ's unheralded realism

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:03:00 +0000

In the latest stop in his regional tour, Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya visited Australia for talks with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

Most of the headlines have focused on the exchange of words over whaling — the polite phrasing seems to be that Okada and Rudd had a "frank discussion", and Rudd has threatened to sue Japan if it does not halt whaling by November — but more important in the long term may be the agreement reached between the two governments to sign an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) in March, which would enable mutual logistical support on peacekeeping and disaster relief missions. The ACSA will be another small step in building an Australia-Japan security relationship following the joint security declaration signed in 2007 back when Abe Shinzo was prime minister.

Writing at The Interpreter (and from the Australian perspective), Graeme Dobell writes of Australia's hedging by building up its relationship with Japan over the span of a decade, noting that "It is not grand enough to be called a strategy. It does not yet have the status or coherence of a policy. Yet it is much more than an inclination or intention. Call it low-level hedging." One could very well say the same of Japan.

Despite the impression in some circles that the Hatoyama government is naive (due perhaps in part to Hatoyama's talk of an East Asian community) — and the irritating habit that some analysts have of dichotomizing Japan's foreign policy choice as being either alliance with the US or partnership with China — the Hatoyama government is deliberately working to improve Japan's bilateral ties throughout the region. In the span of weeks, Prime Minister Hatoyama has visited India to, among others, agree to regular bilateral security talks and Okada has visited South Korea and Australia to discuss how to bolster Japan's relationships with both countries. What was notable about both Okada trips is that he did not hesitate to acknowledge the obstacles to closer bilateral ties even as he expressed his beliefs that the obstacles can be overcome. Before he had his discussion about whaling in Australia, on his visit to South Korea Okada acknowledged in strong terms Japan's wrongdoing when it colonized Korea 1910-1945. In both cases, Okada is clearly trying to address the obstacles forthrightly while remaining focused on the goals of closer bilateral cooperation.

In bilateral relations with India, South Korea, and Australia (not to mention China), the Hatoyama government is building on the work of its LDP predecessors. What's different, however, is that the Hatoyama government is for the most part building its new grand strategy on the sly. Unlike say the Abe government, which used grandiloquent rhetoric about democracy and shared values to announce its bilateral initiatives with Australia and India (and was none too subtle about the links between among these three democracies and the US), the Hatoyama government has been workmanlike in its efforts to improve Japan's bilateral ties. There are few hints that it wants to link its bilateral ties with countries like Australia to its alliance with the US, which would in turn prompt talk of a grand alliance aimed at containing China. Instead, the Hatoyama government may be focusing on new bilateral relations as a hedge against the US. In the event that the US were to turn inward and weaken its commitment to Asia, Japan could use other friends in the region. Even with the US committed to the region, Japan's interests are served by better bilateral ties, which have been underdeveloped for too long.

That there are significant obstacles — Australia's threat of a lawsuit, for one — to overcome in nearly all of Japan's bilateral relationships in the region should not detract from appreciation of the Hatoyama government's efforts to overcome those obstacles. Its foreign policy initiatives may be quiet, but they will have implications for Japan's position in the region for years to come.

A terrible idea from DPJ backbenchers, quickly nixed

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:52:00 +0000

On Wednesday Ubukata Yukio, the deputy secretary-general, Tanaka Makiko, Koizumi Junichiro's controversial foreign minister who joined the DPJ last year, and other DPJ Diet members proposed to Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro that the party establish a new policy research arm to replace the policy research council that closed shop when the DPJ took power in September.

Once again showing that whatever the DPJ-led government's shortcomings, it is entirely serious about centralizing policymaking in the cabinet and neutering the ruling party, both Hatoyama and Ozawa were quick to reject the proposal.

That these backbenchers felt compelled to petition the government for some sort of policy role is a good sign that the Hatoyama government's efforts to change the policymaking process — at least as the ruling party is concerned — are working. Backbenchers, after all, have the most to lose from the shift to the Westminster model. Whereas under LDP rule a fourth-term Diet member like Ubukata could be aspiring to posts in the policy research council that would give him a stake in policymaking, both mid-career and first-term DPJ members have little to do but show up to vote for legislation and go home to their districts to campaign. Unlike LDP backbenchers, there are few channels for them even to try to intervene in order to direct pork-barrel spending to their districts. To a certain extent, their fates as politicians rest in the hands of a government over which they have little or no leverage.

And so it should remain. If the Hatoyama government is to fix any of the problems facing Japan, it will have to be able to formulate policy without having to worry about backbenchers working behind the cabinet's back to develop and advance their own policies. Creating a new policymaking outfit in the party would also give bureaucrats opposed to the government an outlet to leak information that could undermine the cabinet, playing divide and rule among the politicians. And given the Hatoyama cabinet's struggle to keep ministers on message, a DPJ policy shop could only muddle matters further.

Perhaps one day the DPJ might find it useful to create a party think tank that would keep backbenchers occupied and explore new ideas. But for now the new policymaking process is too fragile and restoring a policy role to the party will simply invite trouble.

Credit where credit is due

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:27:00 +0000

Another poll, more bad news for the Hatoyama government.

In Jiji Press's February public opinion poll, the Hatoyama government's disapproval rating surpassed its approval rating for the first time, with the former rising twelve points to nearly 45% and the latter falling eleven to nearly 36%. Disapproval among self-described independents rose thirteen points to roughly 46%. The LDP managed to gain little more than a percentage point in its support.

And yet despite sinking public approval numbers, the government has does not appeared to be fazed. Indeed, in a speech Sunday Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya stressed that the poll numbers had reached a floor and would improve from here.

Whether Okada's optimism is merited or not, the Hatoyama government deserves credit for not panicking in response to slumping public approval. If there was one problem with LDP governments for much of the party's rule — at least in recent years — it was hyper-sensitivity to public opinion. In just the last three years, we watched the process unfold like clockwork. Falling public approval led concerns about the prime minister's weakening "centripetal force" as LDP officials began to question his leadership; intra-party opponents to the prime minister's agenda would intensify their resistance; some party elder (usually Mori Yoshiro) would call for a cabinet reshuffle; and so on until resignation and ultimately a general election in the worst of circumstances.

For the most part, we are not witnessing the same downward spiral unfold under DPJ rule. The Hatoyama government has not panicked in response to newspaper polls, and appears to be carrying on with business as usual, insofar as we can call the work of this government "usual." While there have been murmurs within the DPJ about Ozawa Ichiro's staying on as secretary-general, the prime minister's grip (or perhaps, more properly, the cabinet's grip) on the party appears firm or even firmer than ever, even as the media measures the prime minister's coffin. To a certain extent, the Hatoyama government may not be overreacting to poll numbers because it is focused on the task of implementing its agenda over the course of four years, and believes that the only numbers that matter are the results of the next general election (and to a lesser extent the upcoming upper house election).

But the other reason why the Hatoyama government has not overreacted is because it is not facing the same pressure from its parliamentary majority that its LDP predecessors faced. The DPJ simply deserves credit for keeping its backbenchers in line. By closing the policy research council upon taking office, clamping down on Diet members' leagues, and Ozawa's ordering newly elected members to make getting reelected their primary and only task, a dysfunctional LDP that was able to prevent its prime ministers and cabinets from effectively formulating policy has given way to a passive DPJ that is not standing in the way of its cabinet and prime minister. Of course, much of the credit here goes to Ozawa, who has centralized powers divided within the LDP in his office — and who continues to inspire fear among most DPJ members. Sankei provides an interesting example here: distributing a survey concerning money politics, voting rights for resident foreigners, and other issues to Diet members, only thirty-nine of the DPJ's 421 members in the two houses replied to the survey, a reply rate of only 9%. Naturally Sankei complains in this article about the DPJ's protecting its silence and its members being afraid of Ozawa, but Sankei's displeasure is an illustration of just how successful the DPJ has been at controlling its own members. Contra LDP members who have criticized the DPJ for lacking intraparty democracy, arguably the degree of democracy within the ruling party is inversely correlated with the effectiveness of national democracy as expressed in cabinet government. Allowing backbenchers to do whatever they please — which is what the LDP came to in its final years once the factions were unable to provide even a modicum of intraparty discipline — is a recipe for immobile government.

None of this is to deny that the Hatoyama government is without problems. Concentrating policymaking power in the cabinet is no guarantee that the cabinet will use its power wisely or effectively. But then that's part of democracy too. The newly empowered cabinet will succeed or fail at the polls based on its performance, having no one to blame but itself should it fail to deliver on its promises.

Okada acknowledges past wrongs in Seoul

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:33:00 +0000

The Hatoyama government's campaign to revitalize Japan's bilateral relationships in Asia continues, with Foreign Okada Katsuya's visiting South Korea for the first time as foreign minister for meetings with President Lee and other senior officials.

While Americans are focused on celebrating what is being called the fiftieth anniversary of the US-Japan alliance this year, a more significant anniversary this year may be the 100th anniversary of Japan's annexation of Korea. The South Korean government has expressed its desire for a joint statement that will include a proper statement of remorse by Japan for its actions in Korea from 1910 until 1945.

In a meeting Thursday with Yu Myung-hwan, minster of foreign affairs and trade, Okada unambivalently expressed his understanding for the pain caused to the Korean people by Japan's usurpation of their country, and expressed his desire that the two countries can settle their disputes and build a forward-looking relationship.

Of course, Japan has apologized to South Korea before, and many — not only conservatives — will wonder why Japan has to apologize again. Okada's remarks provide some hint as to why Japan still has work to do on historical reconciliation. Rarely has a Japanese statesman shown that he is apologizing because he has looked at his country's behavior through the eyes of its victims and come to appreciate just how destructive Japan's actions were.

Diametrically opposed to Okada's attitude is that of Japan's revisionist right, which not only thinks Japan did nothing it has to apologize for in Korea or China, but actually denies that the Koreans and Chinese have legitimate grievances against Japan. Consider the arguments made by Tamogami Toshio, the now-retired Air Self-Defense Forces general who has become a prominent conservative spokesman since being driven from the service for his essay denying that Japan was an aggressor. In that essay, not only does Tamogami claim that Japan "advanced into" Korea with the "understanding" of its government (so understanding, in fact, that Korea's ruling dynasty willingly signed a treaty ending its own reign, willingly if one ignores the Korean government's pleas to the Western powers at The Hague to save it from Japan), he claims that under Japanese rule Korea was "prosperous and safe." After all, he writes, Korea's population nearly doubled! The Japanese were in Korea as liberators! ("The people in these areas were released from the oppression they had been subjected to up until then, and their standard of living markedly improved.") Japan built universities in its colonies! It permitted Koreans to fight for Japan!

No mention, of course, of what the Korean people wanted. Did they ask for Japan to develop their country for them? Or to replace the Korean language with Japanese, Korean names with Japanese names? For that matter, did they ask for the privilege of fighting and dying on behalf of the Japanese emperor?

It is for this reason that Okada's almost matter-of-fact statement is significant. It should be simply a matter of fact when a Japanese official acknowledges the tremendous pain caused by his country to its neighbors — and that a not insignificant portion of elite opinion can see little or nothing wrong with Japan's behavior means that there is a great need for more matter-of-fact statements like Okada's, and yes, a joint statement that unambiguously acknowledges Japan's wrongdoing in specific terms (not just the general statements of remorse) while looking to build a new relationship for the future.

As a final note on this matter, I think it is important to take issue with Tamogami's comparison of Japan's behavior in Korea with the behavior of the Western powers in their Asian colonies (the British in India is a favorite example). While the comparison has some merits, it is by no means the best comparison. The best comparison that comes to mind when I think of Japanese rule in Korea is not the British in India but the British in Ireland. After all, how can British rule in India — which was in many ways indirect, even after 1857 — be compared to the brutal domination of an immediate neighbor? Indeed, British rule in Ireland was far more brutal than even Japanese rule in Korea, lasting longer and having ever-more devastating consequences. The Great Potato Famine, for which Tony Blair apologized early in his premiership, was only one of the more monstrous moments in the bloody history of British rule in Ireland. The Irish still curse Oliver Cromwell, nearly four centuries after his invasion of Ireland cemented British rule.

The point of looking to British rule in Ireland is that nations have long memories — even longer memories when the harm done to them was by a close neighbor, nations with shared destinies thanks to geography. On top of the weight of history is the natural resentment felt by small countries at being dominated by their larger neighbors. Why should Japanese expect that Koreans will simply "get over" Japanese rule, which began only a century ago and was brutal in its own right, if not nearly as prolonged or as total as British rule in Ireland? More importantly, what right do Japanese have to tell Koreans (or Chinese) what the appropriate level of remorse is? Japanese leaders need to stop thinking of the rectification of history has simply being a matter of the number of apologies rendered and recognize, as Okada does (and, I think, Prime Minister Hatoyama does), that less important than the number of apologies is seeing history through Korean or Chinese eyes and acknowledging that the humiliation experienced by colonized peoples is not something that can be balanced out by a list of universities established or a tabulation of miles of train tracks built, and, moreover, cannot be expressed in terms of the numbers of victims, as meaningful as those numbers are. As the Irish experience suggests, in some way these wounds never heal completely.

But at least the Hatoyama government is determined to take a big step forward. Building a constructive relationship with South Korea is too important to allow Japan to continue to be held back by the unwillingness of Japanese nationalists to accept any people's love of country but their own as legitimate.

Edano joins the cabinet

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:12:00 +0000

Edano Yukio, one of the few DPJ politicians who was expected to receive a cabinet appointment last year but didn't, will no longer be outside of the government. He will take over responsibility for the Government Revitalization Unit (GRU), which was previously headed by Sengoku Yoshito, who since Kan Naoto moved to the finance ministry last month was also serving as minister responsible for the national strategy office. Sengoku will take sole responsibility for the NSO while Edano heads the GRU.

Coming in the wake of the indictment of three of Ozawa Ichiro's former secretaries, the media is reporting Edano's appointment as another blow to Ozawa, as Edano is marked as an anti-Ozawa partisan, having opposed the DPJ's merger with Ozawa's Liberal Party from the very beginning and continuing to criticize Ozawa in the years following the merger. Indeed, not long ago Edano publicly suggested that if Ozawa could not convince the public to see his side of the story, he would "have to take responsibility" for what he had done (i.e., resign).

Yomiuri wonders whether Edano's appointment — with Ozawa's acquiescence — signals a diminution of Ozawa's power.

That might be reading too much into an appointment that is not altogether surprising. There was considerable surprise back in September that Edano had been left out of the government, suggesting that he was at the top of the list of backbenchers waiting to join the cabinet. The budget review hearings conducted by the GRU last year show that the post is an important one, that needed to be filled by a full-time minister, especially with the government's submitting legislation that will elevate the national strategy office into a full bureau (and give the GRU's hearings legal standing). Sengoku will undoubtedly have his hands full building a bureau whose powers and functions remain a mystery. Perhaps the timing was intended to show that Hatoyama is in charge even as he confirmed Ozawa's staying on as secretary-general, but believe it or not, the story of the Hatoyama government is not entirely or even mostly a story about Ozawa Ichiro.

Ozawa has pressured the government on certain issues and centralized functions in his office so that all requests to the government go through him, but the media's focus on Ozawa has overshadowed the important work the government is doing on building a new policymaking process, a project with which Ozawa is in full agreement (but stories about areas in which the government and the secretary-general are in full agreement apparently make for less interesting copy). In addition to the above-mentioned "political leadership" bill, the cabinet is also set to approve a civil service reform bill that could completely upend the traditional practices of the bureaucracy, doing away with the position of administrative vice-minister, restoring to the cabinet the right to make personnel appointments (and with it, the right to ignore seniority within the ministry and appoint younger officials or civilians to senior posts), and other reforms. These are remarkable changes under consideration — with remarkably little public protest from the bureaucracy — and they deserve more attention than they have received.

How the Hatoyama cabinet manages Ozawa has from the beginning been one of the more important challenges facing the DPJ-led government, but it is by no means the only challenge or the most important challenge. It would be nice if the news media remembered that from time to time and devoted a little less attention to the ongoing drama of Ozawa and a little more attention to what the Hatoyama government is actually doing with the majority the public awarded it last year.

Ozawa diplomacy

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:43:00 +0000

As Ozawa Ichiro waited for the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office to decide whether it would indict him along with his former secretaries, the DPJ secretary-general was busy meeting with Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, who stopped in Japan last week along with Wallace "Chip" Gregson, assistant secretary of defense for Asia-Pacific affairs for discussions with Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya and Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi.

Campbell and Ozawa spoke for an hour last Tuesday, with US Ambassador John Roos also in attendance. Neither revealed much about the meeting, although it seems that Campbell requested that Ozawa visit Washington in May with a large number of DPJ Diet members in tow, just like his December visit to Beijing along with more than 140 DPJ members.

Ozawa's response to what he called a "formal request" is a bit puzzling. At a press conference Monday he said that policy discussions are the job of the government, i.e. if the US government thinks that it can treat with Ozawa in order to find a breakthrough on Futenma it will be disappointed. Instead Ozawa views a Washington trip as necessary to build relations between the DPJ and the Democratic Party — and accordingly he wants a guarantee that a meeting will be scheduled with President Obama. That strikes me as an odd condition considering that Ozawa stated that he will not be going to discuss policy. Why should the president meet with a party official there on party business? LDP officials may have met with the US president when they visited Washington — Abe Shinzo, for example — but if foreign policy is being made by the cabinet, what business does a party official, even the secretary-general, have making a meeting with the president a precondition of his visit?

If Ozawa is serious about not interfering with the Hatoyama government's foreign policy making, he should make a point of having only brief, perfunctory meetings with administration officials, especially considering that sometime around Golden Week the government will presumably have reached a decision regarding the 2006 realignment plan. Indeed, if Ozawa really wanted to help the alliance he would travel with up-and-coming DPJ members whose foreign policy views are in the party mainstream and give US officials a better sense of the party's thinking.

While Ozawa caused considerable distress in Washington with his grand tour to Beijing — to which US officials overreacted to seeing as how symbolic visits by a politician outside of the government, no matter how powerful, will not resolve the thorny issues in the Sino-Japanese relationship — not going to Washington after having been explicitly invited would no doubt be another source of agitation.

But perhaps it would be better off if an Ozawa visit to Washington fell through. Even as Ozawa claims that policy discussions are a matter for the government, his actions undoubtedly have consequences for the government's efforts, as his China trip showed. And once in Washington, would Ozawa be able to control himself and refrain from saying anything that might undermine the government's work?

This might be a good occasion for Prime Minister Hatoyama to exercise his authority and order the secretary-general to stay home to focus on the impending upper house election campaign.

And the US government should probably get out of the habit of maintaining anything but perfunctory ties with ruling party officials outside of the government.

I find the idea of Diet members' diplomacy — giin gaiko, the idea that backbenchers can play an independent role in diplomatic problem solving — a pernicious notion characteristic of LDP rule, the foreign policy equivalent of backbencher policy intervention to secure pork-barrel projects. (not least in the case of Suzuki Muneo, now a DPJ ally as head of his New Party DAICHI). In a Westminster-style political system, foreign policy ought to be the sole province of the cabinet. Backbenchers, no matter how senior, ought to respect that or be reprimanded for interfering with government business. Ozawa has been tightening controls on the role that backbenchers can play in policymaking. Why should he be exempt?

Naturally the Hatoyama government should be doing a better job articulating the national interest and deserves at least some blame for creating a vacuum that has to some extent been filled by Ozawa. But the point remains: the prime minister and his cabinet ministers should think hard about whether they want Ozawa going to Washington at a sensitive moment for the government.

With Ozawa, there's no easy option

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:05:00 +0000

Ozawa Ichiro has escaped indictment by the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office again. Once again, his former secretaries were not quite so lucky, with three, including sitting Diet member Ishikawa Tomohiro, being indicted for political funds violations.

Michael Cucek rightly points to the gross misconduct of the PPO in its Ahab-like pursuit of Ozawa — and perhaps the more egregious campaign by the media to paint Ozawa as the conniving, monstrous puppet master of the Hatoyama government.

But I cannot treat Ozawa's escape from prosecution as a victory for the prime minister and the DPJ, and cannot but wonder whether the DPJ wouldn't be better off without its secretary-general.

If anything, the indictment of three of his former aides even as Ozawa survives with a vote of confidence from the prime minister will continue to be a drag on the government. As in the days when Ozawa was in charge and Hatoyama his secretary-general, Hatoyama sounds like Ozawa's chief apologist, explaining Ozawa's behavior to a skeptical public. Except, of course, Hatoyama is now the prime minister of Japan. Ozawa's presence at the head of the DPJ would be less of a problem for the Hatoyama cabinet if it had been able to dominate the media and dictate the narrative being told about the government. But the Hatoyama government has been so ineffectual in its public relations — not entirely its fault seeing as how certain publications are serving as the LDP's partners in opposition — that everything said or done by the government in relation to Ozawa contributes to the media's narrative of a government under Ozawa's thumb. Instead of reporting on the remarkable changes the Hatoyama government has made to the policymaking process, the media has been able to fixate on the superficial resemblance between the current government and the LDP in its heyday (which Ozawa of course participated in). As I've said before, I'm not convinced that DPJ government with Ozawa wielding outsized influence is worse than LDP government in which an army of backbenchers wielded influence in combination with the bureaucracy that was able to undermine all but the most determined prime ministers — and even determined prime ministers like Koizumi Junichiro did not win every battle with the backbenchers.

What should the Hatoyama government, Ozawa, and the DPJ do going forward? As Hokkaido University's Yamaguchi Jiro — a DPJ sympathizer — notes, the fate of political change and with it the Japanese people's hope for their democracy hang in the balance. He recommends that Ozawa let the trial proceed and let the PPO's evidence (or lack thereof) speak for itself. At the same time, he suggests that Ozawa forthrightly answer every question surrounding doubts about his political funds in the court of public opinion. I wonder whether Ozawa is capable of this. I know that Hatoyama and other DPJ leaders are not capable of making Ozawa do it. At the very least, Ozawa has to restrain himself and at least appear as if he is the prime minister's subordinate, not his equal (or superior).

Meanwhile, the Hatoyama government must fundamentally reconsider how it presents itself to the public via the media. The time of letting the facts speak for themselves has passed, because the facts about the government do not speak for themselves. The government needs begin aggressively making its case. Whether that will entail a new chief cabinet secretary, a media strategy team attached to the prime minister's office, or some other scheme will depend on the government, but the current arrangement is simply not working. And the prime minister needs to start showing some ability to lead, or step down.

No matter how skilled a campaigner he is, no matter how zealous a reformer he is, Ozawa's baggage imperils the government — and more than that, it jeopardizes Japan's political future and provides further impetus to cynicism among the Japanese people. There is no easy answer to the Hatoyama government's dilemma. Fire Ozawa, and it loses a skilled campaigner trusted among party supporters in the provinces. Retain Ozawa, and the prime minister continues to look weak and the media continues to feast upon the Ozawa scandal.

Ultimately, I fear that Hatoyama is simply incapable of solving this dilemma and saving his government.

"Our Far East Partner"

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:46:00 +0000

The title of this post is the name of a propaganda film produced by the US Army sometime after the end of the occupation that I found at the Internet Archive. Makes for interesting viewing as we mark the alliance's fiftieth anniversary.

Professor Hatoyama holds forth

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:08:00 +0000

Before entering politics — the family business — Hatoyama Yukio was a fledging academic, a Stanford-educated engineer. His background as an academic is often on display when he delivers set piece addresses. He has a penchant for abstraction, for drawing upon broad principles and shying away from the nitty gritty details of policy. This tendency is perhaps common to all leaders, but Hatoyama seems to take particular interest in how to frame policies intellectually (see his persistent use of his pet term yuai last year).

Remarkably, Hatoyama only used the term yuai once in his latest address, his policy speech for the new ordinary session of the Japanese Diet. But in this speech Hatoyama once again spent an inordinate time discussing the abstract principles behind his government's policies, in this case the idea of "protecting life." It took nearly half the speech before the prime minister began discussing the specifics of his agenda.

And even then, the policies were discussed less in terms of specific items of legislation than in terms of goals to be achieved at some point in the future. Like his government's growth strategy, it is unclear how the Hatoyama government plans to get from where Japan is today to where it wants Japan to be in ten years. Japan faces serious, immediate problems, most notably continuing deflation. (For a reminder of why deflation is destructive, Brad DeLong recently linked to an old paper of his explaining "why we should fear deflation.") On this question of deflation, Hatoyama simply waved at his government's budgets and said that his government is promoting "strong and comprehensive" economic policies with the Bank of Japan. As the Economist reports, the truth behind the prime minister's statement is more complicated. On this question of deflation, what for most governments would be at the top of the agenda, Hatoyama breezed through it with nary a detail.

As was clear during last year's campaign, the DPJ under Hatoyama is much better on political and administrative reform than on the economy, promising reforms to the administrative and public-service corporations that have been a source for considerable waste through amakudari, writing the national strategy bureau into law, centralizing the cabinet's personnel management, and reorganizing agencies and ministries (perhaps for real this time, unlike the Hashimoto-era reforms that simply created agglomerated superministries). While this section is also short on policy specifics, it is at least rooted in a clear-headed assessments of problems in national administration and a consistent set of proposals to fix them.

The same cannot be said for Hatoyama's remarks on economic reform. Under the heading of "Turning crisis into opportunity — opening frontiers," Hatoyama renews his party's call for an economy and economic growth that serves individuals, instead of enslaving them. What follows is the familiar refrain of green technology as a chance to transform the Japanese economy, coupled with embracing Japan's links with other Asian economies, especially through the promotion of tourism (he speaks of "tourism policy" without stating what that means in detail). Similarly, turning to economically stagnant provincial Japan, he calls for the modernization of Japanese agriculture and the achievement of a fifty-percent rate of self-sufficiency in food production, although the only policy to which he refers is his government's plan for direct income payments to farmers, which could prove beneficial for Japanese agriculture but not without other policies. Hatoyama is a little better when discussing decentralization — he calls for the creation of an equal relationship between central and local governments and describes this year as year zero for the "regional sovereignty revolution," but once again, there are few specifics on how this will translate into legislation.

Compared to these sections on the government's agenda at home, the foreign policy section of the speech provides a useful guide to the Hatoyama government's thinking. This is in part due to the nature of foreign policy, which is more abstract and therefore involves fewer proposals in the form of legislation or regulation. A policy address can actually provide a useful guide to how a government approaches the world.

What does Hatoyama's address tell us about his government's worldview?

First, his government takes the US-Japan alliance seriously to the point of wanting to change it so that it is suitable for twenty-first century challenges. Tellingly, his section on the alliance discusses Futenma briefly — reiterating his promise that his government will have a plan by May, and that any plan has to square with the desires of the Okinawan people — but focuses mostly on transnational challenges, namely climate change, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism (briefly). He does not speak of deterrence or regional public goods. While it would be nice to get some statement on the security cooperation layer of what Hatoyama calls a multi-layered relationship, I understand what the Hatoyama government is trying to do. A US-Japan relationship that focuses on bilateral security cooperation to the exclusion of nearly everything else is inevitably an unequal relationship, a relationship in which the stronger US presses a weaker Japan to take on new roles and acquire new capabilities. A relationship in which the two countries discuss other issues, non-traditional security issues or development for example, is inevitably a more equal relationship.

Second, the Hatoyama government is determined to reorient Japan to Asia. For decades Japan has tried to square its Asia policy with the US-Japan alliance; henceforth Tokyo will have to figure out how the alliance fits in with its Asia policy. This change did not begin with Hatoyama, but it has definitely become more pronounced. What is clear in this speech and other statements by Hatoyama is that Japan is not "America passing" when it comes to China. Just as Japanese concerns about the US government's "Japan passing" were (are?) overwrought, so too are American concerns about the Hatoyama government's cozying up to China. Yes, the Hatoyama government wants a "strategic, reciprocal relationship" with China (a phrase that originated with Abe, by the way), but it also wants better bilateral relationships with South Korea, Russia, India, Australia, and the countries of ASEAN. He wants Japan to have numerous bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral relationships in the region, and he wants his country engaged in tackling transnational problems within the region and around the world. While there are plenty of obstacles standing in the way of realizing these foreign policy goals — not least the limits imposed on the government by the public's desire to see domestic problems fixed — these remarks provide some indication to how Hatoyama's government will act internationally.

With that in mind, this speech is still instructive even though it is short on policy details. Perhaps the most noteworthy lesson from this speech is what it says about the DPJ's political base. In one section Hatoyama discusses the goal of "not allowing individuals to be isolated." To that end his government will protect employment, regulate the use of temporary workers, and enabling women, the young, and the old to participate fully in the economy and make use of their skills. Combined with its advocacy for stagnant regions, there are hints here that the DPJ over time could become the party of outsiders and laborers (whose interests clash to a certain extent). The natural rival for this party would be a Koizumian party, rooted in the middle and upper classes, prosperous urban and suburban districts, and supported by big business. Given that the Koizumians have been virtually driven from the LDP, it is difficult, for the moment, to see the LDP becoming this party. For now, economic insecurity means both parties are competing to speak for the marginalized, but should the economy recover a cleavage of this sort may be likely.

Finally, reading this speech calls to mind another recent prime minister from a prominent political family whose speeches were long on vision and ideas (and phrases in katakana) and short on policy details: Abe Shinzo. Obviously there are major differences between how Hatoyama and Abe see the world — Hatoyama is at least interested in the problems facing the Japanese people today — but like Abe, Hatoyama seems disinclined to dirty his hands with crafting a detailed policy agenda or the messy work of making policy proposals reality (i.e., politics). I cannot help but wonder whether a leader who appears so uninterested in the details of his policies and so unwilling to fight for them can be successful in power.

Upcoming television appearance

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:12:00 +0000

Readers in Japan will be able to catch me live on Sunday evening from 10:10pm, where I will be appearing on NHK BS-1 to debate the future of the US-Japan alliance with Okamoto Yukio, Michael Green, and Magosaki Ukeru.

General information is available here (in Japanese).

On the Nago election

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:23:00 +0000

My thoughts on the election of Inamine Susumu as mayor of Nago City can be found here, in the Wall Street Journal Asia.

Lest we forget

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:54:00 +0000

The US-Japan alliance turned fifty this week, and the allies celebrated by steering the conversation away from Futenma and releasing a 2 + 2 joint statement that reiterated why the alliance matters in the first place.

Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, also gave a press conference Tuesday that makes for interesting reading when it comes to thinking about the challenges the alliance faces going forward.

Campbell stressed that 2010 will be year for discussions within and between the two governments on the future of the alliance. He voiced a greater degree of understanding that the DPJ's early initiatives within the context of the US-Japan relationship are understandable given democratic politics than I think the Obama administration had done previously.

But while Campbell discussed areas of cooperation and the importance of deeper security cooperation, he did not say the US government hopes the outcome of bilateral consultations on security over the coming year will produce. To a certain extent, the US position is the same as it has been for decades and can be summarized in a single word: more. As a superpower that is facing burdens and challenges that will increasingly overwhelm its capabilities, the US needs allies like Japan to share the load now more than yesterday, and tomorrow more than today. More can be greater military spending or new military capabilities, constitution revision or reinterpretation, higher levels of foreign aid, or greater involvement in peacekeeping.

The problem, however, is that, as Brad Glosserman and Robert Madsen note in a Pacific Forum CSIS paper (not yet online), Japan may not be able to provide much more for years to come, if ever. Without substantial economic reform Japan may not be able to commit the material resources the US would prefer — and without serious economic reform the Japanese people will continue to have little or no interest in constitution revision.

In other words, despite the desire on the part of US officials from both parties to "strengthen" the alliance, the Yoshida consensus may continue to hold, in that Japan will continue to provide less security cooperation than the US prefers because its government is focused almost exclusively on economic challenges at home. The difference, however, will be that Japan's economic resources will likely continue to decline; withholding resources from the SDF today is for the sake of directing them into social security (above all) instead of using them to promote economic development as in the 1950s and 1960s. The question is whether the US will be able to live with a Japan that is, as Glosserman and Madsen note, more dependent on the US even as it is able to provide relatively less towards both its own defense and alliance cooperation.

As I've already written, fiscal constraints at home will not be the only factors preventing the realization of an "ever closer" US-Japan alliance. Whatever the latest headlines are concerning China's behavior, the lesson of the Koizumi years is that the Japanese people do not support a policy of unremittingly cold political relations with Beijing — and the lack of support for more military spending suggests that there is little stomach for an arms race. Japan is going to learn to live with a stronger, more confident China, and it will do so in part through closer relations with other countries in Asia.

Finally, while I am confident that the alliance will continue to exist in some form, it is worth considering ("lest we forget") how difficult it is to preserve an alliance aimed at an external enemy to an alliance that is, in Campbell's words, "basically aimed at no specific or particular nation." While some would off record that it is aimed at China, that would entail a discussion of what it means for an alliance to be "aimed" at a country. Given that we do not even know what Japan would do in the event of a war over Taiwan, it is hard to say that US-Japan alliance is "aimed" at China. Instead the alliance is chasing monsters of a smaller, more amorphous nature. Is there an alliance in history that has successfully transitioned from being aimed at some country or coalition to being aimed at "uncertainty" or instead of being against an enemy being for public goods? That's not to say it's impossible, but the Obama and Hatoyama governments have a difficult year ahead of them.

Here's hoping that the two governments approach the task realistically, acknowledge the limits of each country's commitment, and shape their future expectations accordingly. Perhaps it is fitting that the year began with Japan's ordering its refueling ships home from the Indian Ocean, an appropriate reminder of the continuing political and economic limits on Japan's contributions.

Why the Hatoyama government matters

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:37:00 +0000

As the Hatoyama government's approval numbers have faltered and more recently plummeted, as reports about the inappropriately large role being played by Ozawa Ichiro in the government (despite not being a cabinet minister) have grown, as doubts about Hatoyama Yukio's abilities as a leader have deepened, and as the court of public opinion internationally has handed down the verdict that the Hatoyama government is not only embarrassing to Japan but "risky," I have struggled to keep an eye on the big picture. The twenty-four-hour news cycle makes it difficult to do so: our attention spans shortened, we expect immediate results and solutions to problems that have emerged over years and decades and will take nearly as long to solve. Every drop in public opinion polls triggers panic, every note of discord becomes a crisis, and, closer to home for this Bay Stater, every by-election holds the fate of the nation in the balance.

But given that Japan is in the midst of unprecedented political change, it is essential to take a longer view, to not get so bogged down in cabinet bickering or opinion polls and to consider why the DPJ government matters in the first place.

Many analysts — U.S. alliance managers impatient for Japan to play a wider security role regionally and globally, investors hungry for supply-side reforms — implicitly measure the Hatoyama government's successes and failures on the basis of its progress in advancing their policy goals for Japan. (I don't think it would be wrong to say that these groups are nostalgic for the days of Koizumi Junichiro.) Others might measure the government's success in terms of whether it deliveries on its manifesto promises. Still others might look to raw economic indicators. Few analysts, if any (myself included) have articulated what success and failure mean for a DPJ government. We are sailing in uncharted waters. We do not know how to judge this new government. Should it be judged by the above standards? By comparison with the LDP? If so, which LDP? With Koizumi's LDP? With Koizumi's successors? With foreign governments? How do we judge this government?

In the longer term, we will have to judge it on the basis of its policy achievements — ultimately any democratic government will bejudged on whether the voters believe that they are "better off" since the government took power than before — but for now, a mere 100 days into the Hatoyama government, there is but one way to judge the Hatoyama government. Is it restoring the Japanese public's faith in their government?

The "lost" decades did not just erode Japan's prosperity. It also eroded the public's confidence in their elected officials and public servants. Corruption, trillions of yen of wasteful spending, non-responsive institutions, stymied reform, the promise and despair of the LDP during and after the Koizumi years: the combination of these developments was to shred whatever trust the Japanese people had in their leaders. They watched as their institutions struggled to restart the economy, as poverty increased, as public services withered and even vanished from some corners of the country, as pensions vanished. The election of the DPJ was both evidence of the extent of the breakdown of public trust — at last the voters would try another party — but also of the limits of the public's cynicism, as they were willing to see whether another party could do better.

Accordingly, the DPJ's mandate, above administrative reform, above economic reform, above pensions reform, is restoring the Japanese people's trust in their government. The Japanese government has to be made transparent and accountable. The Japanese people deserve to know what their government has done and will be doing in their names. Because few of the problems that Japan faces can be solved without the government's being able to ask for sacrifices from the Japanese people — and the Japanese people will not accept sacrifices, particularly financial sacrifices, unless they can trust the government that is asking for them. How, for example, can Japan build a more robust welfare regime without raising taxes? And how can the government raise taxes if the public does not trust the government to use the public's money wisely and transparently?

The Hatoyama government has to restore public confidence in Japan's political leadership. Reform that weakens the bureaucracy and strengthens the cabinet helps, but it is not enough. The government has to look like a government that can be trusted. None of the problems facing Japan can be solved if the government does not have the trust of the people. And it is for this reason that Ozawa is a problem.

The Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office may well be fighting a spirited battle on behalf of the old guard, as Michael Cucek argues. But to a certain extent that is besides the point. In going all out to defend Ozawa, the Hatoyama government risks looking like anything but a force for greater transparency and accountability in Japanese politics. Even if he manages to survive this latest investigation, Ozawa still ladens the DPJ with his and Japan's recent political past. At some point the Hatoyama government will have to break with Ozawa simply because any government that depends on Ozawa will have to contend with his tendency to secretiveness, his messiah complex, and his political baggage, a terrible combination of qualities.

I recognize that Ozawa is still in some ways indispensable for the DPJ, seeing as how he is able to control the party's backbenchers and manage the party's elections. But it may be worth losing his skills if it helps the DPJ rebuild public trust and pass the reins to a new generation of political leaders with the public confident in the government and some reforms already in place. Because ultimately the Hatoyama government is something of a placeholder, a transitional government from LDP to post-LDP government. The problems facing Japan took years to emerge, and solving them — and adjusting to relative decline — will take just as long or longer to resolve. It will be on Hatoyama's successors to make the greatest progress in fixing them, but whether they will be able to succeed will depend on whether Hatoyama is able to restore the public's trust in government.

That is how we should observe the Hatoyama government. Its policy successes and failures matter. Its budget deficits matters, although I am with Taggart Murphy in wondering whether the Japanese government might have more time than many think when it comes to its indebtedness. But above all, its conduct in the eyes of the Japanese public matters. And on this score, it is simply too early to declare one way or another — although the resolution of this latest Ozawa affair could have considerable significance in determining whether the DPJ is able to rebuild public trust.

The Ozawa saga continues

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:40:00 +0000

Say what you will about Ozawa Ichiro, but he is nothing if not resilient. In the nearly three years since the DPJ took control of the House of Councillors, he has resigned as party president twice, reversing his decision the first time in November 2008, returning as acting president in charge of elections the second time in 2009 and surviving to serve as secretary-general of the DPJ in power. Despite investigations into illicit real estate deals and connections with the construction company Nishimatsu, despite the indictment of his aide, despite being the target of attacks by the LDP and the media, Ozawa has remained, bloodied, perhaps, but undaunted.

Has his long and storied career finally come to an end?

The latest blow to Ozawa is a criminal investigation by the Tokyo prosecutor's office of Ozawa's support group, the Rikuzankai, for failure to report properly a 400 million yen donation that was used to purchase housing for Ozawa's aides. Ishikawa Tomohiro, a former Ozawa secretary now serving as a member of the House of Representatives, may be indicted for his role in the scandal.

As perhaps a sign of the gravity of the situation, the Hatoyama government declined to comment. Unlike last year, when DPJ leaders joined Ozawa in questioning the motives of the prosecutor's office, the Hatoyama government is taking a wait-and-see approach. For his part, Ozawa apologized to the Japanese people for the "misunderstanding" and said that there was no criminal intent in the misreporting of the donation suspected to have come from the Kajima construction company.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Ozawa has begun a tour of the country in anticipation of July's upper house election. Sankei and Yomiuri, which have enthusiastically cataloged Ozawa's political interventions, have both reported that Ozawa is shifting to a "low posture" and question whether it is a function of the deepening investigation or the approaching upper house election.

For that reason, there may be a silver lining to Ozawa's being under investigation and increasingly away from Tokyo on the hustings. Namely with Ozawa preoccupied, the Hatoyama government may find it easier to dispel the notion that it is under Ozawa's thumb and use the forthcoming Diet session to move its agenda instead of having to fend of accusations that Ozawa is the real ruler of the country. Meanwhile, the Ozawa scandal is also keeping the LDP from becoming a more effective opposition party, which is good for the DPJ if not for Japan. Like the Hatoyama scandal before it, the Ozawa scandal seems like an inviting target for the LDP, an easy way to attack the government without having to consider the party's future. Yamamoto Ichita warns his party that the DPJ's mistakes will not be sufficient for the LDP to regain the trust of the public, but I suspect that his warnings will go unheeded.

Of course, that is slight comfort compared to the risk that Ozawa could take the government's support down with him. For now the government and the DPJ have little choice but to hope for the best.

Whatever the reality of Ozawa's role in the policymaking process, he is casting his shadow over the Hatoyama government. Remarkably, the Faustian bargain the DPJ made with Ozawa to merge with his Liberal Party — a deal made when Hatoyama was last the president of the DPJ — continues to dog the DPJ. Ozawa was instrumental in positioning the party to unseat the LDP and take power, but only if it took on Ozawa's baggage: his history as Tanaka Kakuei's lieutenant and a leader of the LDP's largest and most notorious faction, his secretiveness, his tendency to lunge for fleeting opportunities that backfire (cf. the breakdown of the 1993-1994 non-LDP coalition), and his tendency to speak a bit too freely for his own good. The DPJ, for better or worse, knew exactly what it was getting when it joined hands with Ozawa — and it has not been disappointed.

Regardless of how the investigation plays out, it may be time for Ozawa to leave, at least after the upper house election if he survives this latest scandal. As indispensable as he is on the campaign trail, he is hurting the government. If Ozawa is serious about wanting to change Japan for the better, he must ask himself whether the Hatoyama government would be better off with him in retirement — provided that the Tokyo prosecutor's office does not determine the terms of Ozawa's exit from politics.

A new alliance in the making

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:54:00 +0000

Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya has arrived in Hawaii for a Tuesday morning meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Following weeks of bilateral acrimony, the two will discuss negotiations to strengthen bilateral cooperation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the US-Japan mutual security treaty, signed fifty years ago this month.

For the moment it appears that the US will — not without displeasure — set Futenma aside while a defense ministry team considers possible alternatives for building a replacement facility at Henoko bay. In advance of her meeting with Okada, Clinton said, echoing a recent New York Times op-ed by Joseph Nye (more on this in a moment), that the alliance is more important than Futenma, and she and Okada will discuss ways to improve cooperation instead of dwelling on the contentious base issue.

It is about time that the Obama administration stepped back from the brink. The administration ought to have known better. It is one thing to state that the US government understands the Hatoyama government's political constraints; it is another to act on the basis of this recognition and play it cool, recognizing that perhaps there is something unseemly about the US government's leaning heavily on the first Japanese government headed by a party other than the (longtime US client) LDP to abandon a campaign promise within weeks of taking power.

Nye's counsel of patience is well-timed and appropriate — as is his admonition that "a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic" if it comes about through a heavy-handed approach to the Hatoyama government. Also appropriate is his reminder that the bilateral relationship is about China, as it was when Nye was at the Pentagon spearheading the review of the alliance in 1995. "Integrate, but hedge," writes Nye.

The problem, however, is that 2010 is not 1995. Japanese leaders and the Japanese public remain concerned about China's rise, but Japan's economy is far more dependent on China's than it was in 1996 when the US and Japan reaffirmed their security relationship. If anything, the idea of a threatening rise seemed clearer in 1996, when China was menacing Taiwan, than today, with China, its economy growing even as the developed economies struggle to recover from the global financial crisis, continuing to modernize its armed forces. Today China is an indispensable participant in global meetings but also, perhaps, a hegemon in waiting in East Asia. At the same time, the value of the US-Japan alliance as a security relationship may be less valuable today than in 1995. It would only be sensible for Japanese officials to wonder about the value of the US deterrent after what Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong call "the end of influence." As they write in their new book by that title: "As money alters power relations, the United States is not simply becoming dependent — but it is no longer independent, either. That is a major change. And China is no longer helpless and cowed in face of the superpower hegemon; it has got a grip on it. Indeed, while the world peeks in, the two countries are realizing that they have thrown themselves into an intimate economic embrace with, to say the least, very mixed feelings."

The alliance is by no means valueless, but the terms certainly have changed. Japan can no longer afford to be wholly dependent on the alliance as its hedge against a violent turn in China's rise, because the US commitment may be less than ironclad. Even politically, Japan has plenty of reasons to desire good relations not just with China — as it watches the US develop the bilateral relationship described by its current secretary of state as the world's most important — but with other countries in the region that eye China warily even as they profit from its rise. The Futenma feud has, to a certain extent, drawn attention away from the Hatoyama government's other initiatives: the prime minister's multilateral diplomacy, but, more importantly, his visit to India, his government's first negotiations with Russia over the Northern territories (of particular importance to Hatoyama as the grandson of Ichiro, who restored Japan's relations with the Soviet Union in 1956), and the possibility of a rejuvenated partnership with South Korea. Analysts who see Japan's foreign policy decision as a dichotomous choice — the US or China — are missing the reality that Japan prefers to be dependent on neither, or rather prefers good relations with both (a "dual hedge") and moreover close relations with other countries in the region as a hedge against US-China competition and cooperation. It will take time for these diplomatic initiatives to bear fruit, but the Hatoyama government is moving forward with a clear vision. It recognizes the need to enhance Japan's influence in the region, and by signaling a renewed willingness to make amends for Japan's wartime past and a desire to deepen Japan's economic ties within the region (an important theme of the government's new growth strategy), the Hatoyama government is developing an Asia-centered foreign policy.

The question for the US and Japan going forward is what role the alliance can play in this more fluid regional environment. The hope that the US and Japan, along with other democracies, could present a united front tasked with integrating China peacefully has proven unrealistic. Instead the most salient division in the region may be that separating the US and China from the region's middle and small powers. Accordingly, the security relationship will be scaled back (as discussed here), making the dispute over Futenma that much more of a distraction. The future of the US-Japan relationship may be a hard security core linked to the defense of Japan and some form of US forward presence in Japan (in the same way that Singapore has facilitated the US forward presence in the region), looser political and economic cooperation in the region, and closer cooperation on global issues like climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, and the like.

What remains to be answered is how long the US will be willing and able to maintain forces in the region — and how much of the cost of basing them in Japan Tokyo will be willing to bear. The answer to these questions remains to be seen, but in time Ozawa Ichiro's offhand remarks last year about the US forward presence one day being reduced to the Seventh Fleet (and air force elements, as he later added) could prove accurate.

These changes will take years to unfold, and they are not foreordained: exogenous shocks of one form or another could take the region and its major players in different directions than that outlined here.

But the dream of 1996 has passed. The US-Japan relationship will be looser and less security-centered than alliance managers had hoped following the 1996 security declaration, the 1997 guidelines, and the Koizumi government's support for the Bush administration in Western and Central Asia.

Kan will replace Fujii

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:27:00 +0000

As expected, Fujii Hirohisa announced his resignation as finance minister on Wednesday. Hatoyama Yukio wasted no time naming his replacement: Kan Naoto will shift over to the finance ministry, and Sengoku Yoshito will take over for Kan as head of the national strategy bureau while continuing to run the government revitalization unit.

Kan's appointment was to a certain extent obvious. Having been deeply involved in the budgetary process, he is better able than most to defend the budget in Diet debates in the months to come. While Sankei — who else? — sees this move as the latest battle in the struggle between Hatoyama and Ozawa Ichiro for power (seriously, their article uses description of Hatoyama's facial expression — "disinterested" — when he answered a question about Ozawa's role in picking Kan to suggest that Hatoyama's answer that Ozawa wasn't involved masks something), moving Kan to the finance ministry will not hurt Hatoyama politically. Kan is a Hatoyama stalwart, has an independent following among the party's backbenchers, and is one of the few DPJ members with previous ministerial experience. As I suggested yesterday, it does raise questions about the future of the new cabinet organizations created by the Hatoyama government, both of which are now headed by Sengoku, but the role to be played by these bodies was already uncertain, and, as Michael Cucek suggests, might make their work more coherent. As finance minister, Kan may be more of a deputy prime minister than he was when he was actually deputy prime minister. He will be more visible as finance minister, having more opportunities to present the government's policies, and, if Ozawa is in fact wielding undue influence, Kan is in a better position to push back.

That is, unless Kan is occupied fighting the finance ministry's bureaucrats. While Fujii was one of their own number, Kan is very much not. After all, Kan made his name during the mid-1990s when as minister of health he fought his own ministry's bureaucrats over their response to an AIDS-tainted blood scandal. His early involvement — when he was at the peak of his popularity — in the political party being formed by the Hatoyama brothers gave the DPJ a boost during its first years. But by the same token, Kan has not made many friends in Kasumigaseki. While during the campaign he backed away from overheated anti-bureaucrat rhetoric, he remains on uneasy terms with the bureaucracy, including the finance ministry's officials. (Back in October, Kan gave a speech in which he referred to bureaucrats as oobaka/大ばか, which translates literally as great fools but also has some more colorful translations, for mindlessly squandering public money.)

It's possible that Kan's relationship with the ministry will be more antagonistic than Fujii's, but, on the other hand, given that the partnership between the Hatoyama government and the finance ministry is a matter of convenience for both sides — and that the ministry was shifting the DPJ's direction even before Fujii was tapped as finance minister — Kan may be able to maintain the relationship Fujii forged. And if Kan lasts in the job, he will be in a position to introduce lasting changes to the budgeting process, as discussed here.

Meanwhile, it bears asking whether Kan's appointment will have any consequences for the government's economic policies. We got a glimpse at Kan's thinking recently when he debated Takenaka Heizo, Koizumi Junichiro's reform czar, at a meeting of the committee responsible for drafting the government's latest economic strategy. Takenaka advanced his supply-side structural reformism: deregulation, privatization, and tax reform to encourage more investment by the private sector. Kan answered by defending the DPJ's focus on the demand side, stimulating more consumer spending. At the same time, Kan is adamant about cutting wasteful spending. Given Kan's role in drafting the government's economic strategy, his appointment will not make much difference in the outline of fiscal policy over the medium term.

But on other policy areas, Kan's views are less clear. He has stated that it is too soon to debate tax reform, including a consumption tax increase. It is unknown how far he will let the yen's value rise, although in a speech in November, Kan fingered the high yen as a cause of Japan's stagnant growth and said that the government would watch market developments carefully.

In short, the transition from Fujii to Kan will matter more in terms of its political ramifications for the Hatoyama government than for economic policy. Kan was already playing an important role in economic policy. Moving him to the finance ministry gives him more formal power as an economic policymaker.

Finally, it is worth noting just how unusual it is that Kan is now finance minister. Thirty years ago, Kan was first elected to the Diet as a candidate from Eda Saburo's Social Democratic Federation, which split off from the Socialist Party. Today he is the head of the ministry that is the very heart of the Japanese establishment. While it is common to point to DPJ politicians like Hatoyama and Ozawa and conclude that the DPJ is a pale imitation of the LDP, Kan's career shows that the DPJ's victory has brought new politicians with different backgrounds and different concerns from LDP politicians to the fore.

Masuzoe threatens the LDP

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:10:00 +0000

In a press conference at LDP headquarters Tuesday, Masuzoe Yoichi, the upper house member and former cabinet minister who is one of a handful of politicians respected by the public, said that while he will try to do what he can within the LDP, he said that his ultimate aim is a political realignment — and that he would not rule out any possibilities, including leaving the LDP to form his own party.

In the meantime, he is, in the best LDP tradition, forming a study group that will no doubt serve as a focal point for his reform movement.

Masuzoe has, of course, already criticized LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu for his ineffectual leadership. The question, however, is what Masuzoe can do to realize a political realignment.

To do so he would have to be able to draw defectors away from both the LDP and the DPJ. Doing the latter will be difficult: Ozawa Ichiro has enough carrots and sticks at his disposal to ensure that the DPJ's backbenchers won't stray. Seeing as how the backbenchers thus far have little reason to defect for policy reasons, it is hard to see how Masuzoe could entice DPJ defectors. Which leaves the LDP. While Masuzoe is popular with the public and was a welcome presence on "two-shot" campaign posters for LDP candidates last summer, it is unclear just how much support he has within the LDP. He has prided himself on his independence, which has been good for his public image but bad for his ability to organize LDP members in a reform movement.

Given the current circumstances, a Masuzoe movement could wind up as little different from Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, which has been irrelevant since the Hatoyama government took power. And as I've previously discussed, reform within the LDP appears to be at a standstill. Tanigaki welcomed the New Year by calling for the Hatoyama government to resign, dissolve the House of Representatives, and call a snap election. (Seems a bit farcical for the LDP to challenge the DPJ on corruption.)

Reforming the LDP — or, alternatively, building a second major political party — will not be simply a matter of changing the party affiliations of politicians in Tokyo. Ozawa spent the 1990s trying to build a second major party in Tokyo and failed. Masuzoe will have to build a movement from the ground up, recruiting new candidates (preferably ones who are not hereditary politicians), crafting new policies that critique the DPJ's approach to public problems while offer constructive proposals, and genuinely starting a new style of politics. The DPJ itself is trapped between a new style of politics and the old way of politics, as Hatoyama's and Ozawa's scandals suggest. The DPJ's campaign over the summer pointed the way to a new, less personalistic style of politics in which political parties build and maintain national brands and in which national party leaders are capable of disciplining backbenchers and keeping them on message.

The biggest problem for Masuzoe may be policy. In the past I've referred to his way of thinking as "humane reformism." A critic of Koizumi Junichiro's populism, Masuzoe has, like the DPJ, stressed a focus on improving health and welfare services. I have a hard time seeing how the ideas expressed here, for example, are different from the ideas of Nagatsuma Akira's, Masuzoe's successor as minister of health, labor, and welfare. Like other rich democracies, political competition in Japan is increasingly based on valence issues, issues that the public is nearly uniformly opposed to or in favor of, perhaps with the exception of foreign policy. On the issues of greatest concern to voters, the two parties have either already converged or will converge to a narrow range, leaving the parties to compete in terms on issues like corruption, leadership, and the ability to follow through on its proposals. If the DPJ's reforms of the policymaking process stick, this last issue will be crucial. The flip side of the DPJ's introduction of political leadership is that it will be harder to blame the bureaucrats.

Given these constraints, Masuzoe may be better off staying in the LDP, getting it to take his ideas seriously, develop an LDP brand that can challenge the DPJ's on the issues voters are most concerned about, and change how the LDP practices politics so that the LDP can have at least some credibility when it challenges the DPJ on corruption. He is right to look the DPJ, which succeeded in part because it was more top-down and less hereditary than the LDP.

Fujii will depart

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:56:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Fujii Hirohisa, the seventy-seven-year-old finance minister who was hospitalized late last year, indicated that he will in all likelihood resign his post sometime soon. While he is officially waiting for his doctor's advice on his health, Fujii seems determined to resign.

In trying to dissuade Fujii from leaving, Prime Minister Hatoyama said that since Fujii "gave birth to a child" (the budget), he should stay on "to raise it." Fujii, however, insists that he will not be able to handle the strain of budgetary debates, suggesting that he will likely be gone before the ordinary Diet session opens on 18 January. (For those who want some groundless speculation about the reasons for Fujii's departure, Sankei has it all: declaring that it is "difficult to understand" the "suddenness" of the resignation of a seventy-seven-year-old cabinet minister who had to be hospitalized for exhaustion, it turns to Ozawa Ichiro — Sankei's villain of choice — to argue that Ozawa hounded Fujii to exhaustion, and, moreover, that Fujii was about to be hit with a political finance scandal from his days as secretary general of Ozawa's Liberal Party.)

Hatoyama's metaphor is probably not far off the mark. Considering that it seemed unlikely that the government would get its budget done before year's end after it ordered the finance ministry to cease work and decided to start over from scratch, it seems likely that Fujii bears considerable responsibility for completing the budget on schedule — to the detriment of his own health. A recent Foresight magazine article documents the extent to which the finance ministry has become unified with the government, thanks to the employment of Fujii and cabinet office deputy Furukawa Motohisa. The article suggests that there is some surprise in this development, but I must admit that I am not surprised at all. As the DPJ-led government struggles to cut wasteful spending and reform national administration, I expected it would increasingly find an ally in the the finance ministry, which, after all, still possesses useful skills for political leaders even if the political leaders are establishing the country's priorities. For all Foresight's evidence about links between the finance ministry and the government, there are few signs if any that the ministry has been calling the shots. While Fujii has been relatively quiet as finance minister— especially compared to some of his ministerial colleagues — I suspect the finance ministry's willingness to cooperate with the new government has a lot to do with Fujii's influence and experience with the ministry.

For the same reasons that I thought Fujii would make a good finance minister (and why it was wise of Hatoyama to coax him out of retirement and convince him to campaign again last year), his resignation will be a blow to the Hatoyama government. Replacing him will be a challenge. Not only will Hatoyama have to find someone who can control the finance ministry but he will also have to find someone capable of resisting or ignoring the machinations of Kamei Shizuka, which Fujii was able to do. Sankei provides some names of potential successors — Kan Naoto, the deputy prime minister, Sengoku Yoshito, the head of the government revitalization unit, or Noda Yoshihiko, one of two finance vice ministers — but of these three, perhaps only Kan is up to the challenge. Kan does not have Fujii's stature within the ministry, but he has been the DPJ's most eloquent spokesman on changing the budgetary process and is a significant enough figure within the DPJ that he would be equal to the job. The same could not be said for Sengoku or Noda. Of course, appointing Kan as finance minister would spell the end of the national strategy bureau as an important group within the government. Its development delayed, without a leading figure like Kan at its helm the NSB would likely become little more than a research and advisory body for cabinet ministers than a policymaking actor in its own right. While this development may be for the best, it will be a consideration as the Hatoyama government considers how to proceed following Fujii's resignation.

The media will try to spin this development as another blow to the government, but as usual, a bit of perspective is necessary. For once a senior minister is leaving office not because he has said or done something that embarrassed the government or (provided that Sankei's rumor-mongering is just that) because he has been found to have engaged in corruption, but because he is simply not up to the task physically. The Hatoyama government will replace him — not without some difficulty— and soldier on. Hopefully his successor will last longer in the job.

The unrealistic DPJ?

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:42:00 +0000

In the Wall Street Journal, Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini recently warned of the dangers of the Hatoyama government's "unrealistic" policies and advising Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio to follow Barack Obama's lead.

Hatoyama, they tell us, needs to face up to reality. He "needs to become 'Hatobama,' a pragmatist ready to disappoint ideological allies and assuage centrist fears of a policy agenda his country simply can't afford."

They knock Hatoyama and the DPJ for "ambitious" and "contradictory" promises, repeat unquestioningly the Washington line that the DPJ risks undermining the US-Japan alliance (more on this in a moment), and finally worry that the DPJ is too strong, too unhindered and therefore could run up Japan's debt without triggering growth, producing an "an unnecessarily turbulent 2010." Hatoyama needs to become less ideological and more willing to compromise, like Obama.

The central premise of this op-ed is that if Japan struggles, it is because of the unthinking ideology of the DPJ and not because of the intractable problems that years of misrule by the LDP left for the DPJ to solve. There are several critical gaps, however, in this op-ed.

First, aside from suggesting that Hatoyama become more willing to "assuage centrist fears" — whatever those are — they offer few indications as to what the Hatoyama government should be doing. What, if anything, should the government scale back? What should it be doing instead? Japan's national debt is obviously a problem, but, on the other hand, given that the government has managed to run up the national debt to such considerable heights without facing disaster, it seems that Japan is in uncharted waters when it comes to the its debt-GDP ratio.

Second, and related to this last point, Bremmer and Roubini are vague about the consequences of the Hatoyama government's policies. "Unnecessarily turbulent?" What does that mean in real-world terms? More importantly, how much more turbulent could it get compared to 2008-2009? Alternatively, might not turbulence simply be the natural by-product of an electoral victory that even these authors recognize as "historic."

Third, their praise of the American system and its veto points and their recommendation that Hatoyama should act as if he faces a similar environment is strange considering that the DPJ is deliberately trying to move away from a system characterized by a surfeit of veto players, a system that prevented the LDP from introducing reforms that might have reoriented Japan away from its export-led growth model years ago. After years of governments paralyzed by a cumbersome policymaking system, a bit of turbulence may be a small price to pay for a government capable of articulating and implementing policies without having them die by a thousand cuts at the hands of lower-level bureaucrats and parliamentary backbenchers.

Bremmer and Roubini are right to call attention to the contradictions in the DPJ's program, but again, they do not consider that these contradictions are rooted in the contradictory challenges facing the Hatoyama government. As I have discussed in this post and elsewhere, the DPJ faces a trilemma: get the national debt under control, build a more robust social safety net, and develop a new economic growth model rooted in more consumption by Japanese and more investment in sunrise industries, which has heretofore been woefully deficient (with the additional wrinkle of cutting Japan's carbon emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020). In other words, the Hatoyama government isn't just trying to engineer a "recovery": it is trying to, it needs to, construct a new economic model to replace the broken model of growth finally shattered by the global economic crisis. Economic growth alone is not good enough. Had the Japanese people wanted that, they could have returned the LDP to power, which as always promised growth plain and simple.

The problem is not that the Hatoyama government is too ideological, although perhaps on certain issues this complaint has some truth (temporary laborers, for example) — the problem is that the government runs the risk of being mired in these contradictory tasks, unable to deliver satisfactorily on any of them. This is an all-too-real risk, but if the Hatoyama government fails, it will not be on account of a lack of pragmatism.

The same goes for the US-Japan alliance. For all the talk of the DPJ's ideological inflexibility — whether out of conviction or a desire to preserve its coalition with the SDPJ and PNP — the DPJ-led government has proven to be flexible on the Futenma question. Trying to thread the needle between abandoning its promises to the Japanese people outright and saying no for the sake of saying no to the US, the Hatoyama government is trying to develop a constructive alternative to the 2006 agreement. And, meanwhile, when Americans talk of the Hatoyama government's "undermining" the alliance, I cannot help but wonder whether that is a threat or a prediction. If the DPJ damages the alliance, it will be as much the result of the Obama administration's reaction to the Hatoyama government as of the Hatoyama government's actions regarding Futenma.

The point is that both at home and abroad the Hatoyama government has been remarkably open to "pragmatic" solutions to the problems facing Japan. Indeed, if the government's public support has fallen it is because the government has been too yielding, the prime minister too reluctant to commit to a line of policy.

Hatoyama himself is certainly aware of the challenges before him, noting on his return to work Monday that 2010 is a "do-or-die" year for Japan.

Returning to Asia

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:35:00 +0000

To a certain extent, Japan’s political year ended in August when the Democratic Party of Japan defeated the Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide. From the vantage point of December, 100 days into the Hatoyama government, the Aso government and LDP rule already seem distant.

But from another perspective, it is not so easy to draw a line in Japan’s political history.

The DPJ’s victory represents not so much a break as an experiment. Beset with difficulties at home and abroad — naiyu gaikan, in the Japanese — the Japanese public opted to change captains after giving the LDP opportunity after opportunity to right the ship of state. This is not to say that the LDP and the DPJ are interchangeable. The DPJ’s new model of government does mark a departure from the LDP system. Discussion about turmoil within the Hatoyama cabinet or the role of DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro in the government ignores the obvious conclusion that disagreements within the cabinet actually matter under the DPJ — and that it is the influence of one party official that is being debated and not the veritable army of subcommittee chairmen who wielded influence under the LDP. The bureaucracy, far from sabotaging the Hatoyama government, has largely acquiesced to “political leadership.” The transformation of Japanese governance that is well underway is significant and overdue.

The question, however, is what the DPJ-led government is doing with its newfound capabilities. When it comes to policy, the evidence of change is mixed. It is far too early in the new government’s tenure to draw definitive conclusions about its successes and failures, but in both economic and foreign policy it is possible to sketch the Hatoyama government’s achievements and consider the extent to which the new government has parted ways with the LDP.

Foreign policy: I will start with foreign policy because it is foreign policy that has grabbed the headlines for most of the past three months.

In foreign policy, it certainly looks like the DPJ is taking Japan in a new direction. Washington certainly thinks that the Hatoyama government is doing so — an recent article in the Washington Post by John Pomfret says that U.S. officials see Hatoyama Yukio as “mercurial,” “befuddling” analysts, who wonder whether the prime minister is engineering a “significant policy shift” away from the U.S.

There are two questions to consider here. First, is the DPJ shifting from the U.S., and if so, how (and how is its foreign policy approach different from the LDP’s)?

I would answer the first question with a “yes, but.” Talk of a shift implies that there are but two choices for Japan in Asia: siding with the U.S. or siding with China. The reality, however, is that Japan is choosing both (or neither). The DPJ’s foreign policy approach, which will continue to evolve in the New Year, is grounded in the recognition that Japan cannot afford to be overly dependent on either the U.S. or China. Japan is hedging, against the U.S. by ensuring that the country enjoys a constructive political relationship with China, against China by continuing to stress that the U.S.-Japan alliance is, in the words of Kan Naoto, the deputy prime minister, “the most important relationship” for stability in the region and the world. The Futenma question is entangled with this shift. As power within Japan shifts from bureaucrats to politicians — and as Japan shifts from a US-centered foreign policy to a more flexible foreign policy — it is hardly surprising that the new government has raised objections to an agreement foisted on the public by alliance managers. It is unclear to me why Washington is so surprised that the Hatoyama government is doing precisely what the DPJ said it would do: push for a revision of the 2006 agreement. (It is also unclear to me why the DPJ should be more concerned about breaking promises to Washington — if that it is indeed what the Hatoyama government is doing — than about breaking promises made to the Japanese people) The DPJ is showing that its new realism means that it will make decisions on the basis of Japan’s national interests. It will not simply accept decisions made by previous governments or embrace the U.S. line, no matter how strenuously US government officials, senior military officers, and former government officials bemoan the “befuddling” actions of the new government.

“New realism”: perhaps the “new” is not necessary, because the DPJ is following in the footsteps of Meiji oligarchs and Yoshida Shigeru in trying to maximize Japan’s foreign policy options and limit the degree to which it is dependent on others. It is also, incidentally, following in the footsteps of the LDP prime ministers who succeeded Koizumi Junichiro. After Koizumi attempted to center Japan’s foreign policy on the US-Japan alliance, even conservative successors like Abe Shinzo and Aso Taro recognized that they could not afford to alienate China in the way that Koizumi did for the duration of his premiership. Fukuda Yasuo went further than both his predecessor and his successor to acknowledge that in the evolving Asian order Japan could do treat the US-Japan alliance and Japanese foreign policy as interchangeable, but the three prime ministers were consistent in recognizing that Japan needs to expand its freedom of actions in the region.

In this sense, the Hatoyama government is building upon the work of its predecessors. Hatoyama, with his talk of an East Asian Community, may be more enthusiastic in this pursuit than LDP prime ministers, but the thrust is the same: Japan needs to build new relationships and modify its relationship with the US, making it less about security cooperation and more about other forms of cooperation. Regarding the former, while most observers view the Hatoyama government has focused on forging a closer relationship with China, I think we should see its actions as driven by a desire to avoid having to choose between the US and China. Much like other countries in the region that have strong ties with both great powers, the Hatoyama government is trying to develop a “third way” composed of multilateral cooperation among all countries and bilateral ties with countries in the region other than the US and China.

Hatoyama’s recent trip to India is particularly revealing in this regard. Building upon initiatives developed by Abe and Aso, Hatoyama met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss developing the Indo-Japanese global partnership, deepening cooperation on security, and promoting Japanese investment in India. The difference between Hatoyama and Abe, for example, who in 2007 visited India to promote security cooperation with India in the context of a quadrilateral that included the US and Australia, is that Hatoyama is promoting a strictly bilateral relationship. Unlike the Abe government, the Hatoyama government’s approach does not look like the encirclement of China by a “league of democracies.” It is not robed with the rhetoric of “universal values” but rather appears to be driven by the Hatoyama government’s desire to expand its freedom of action. By the same token, the agreement to create an Indo-Japanese two-plus-two by which Indian and Japanese foreign and defense sub-cabinet officials can meet regularly looks different when it is not accompanied by rhetorical volleys aimed at China and is not linked to a wider network of security cooperation among democracies.

The same desire to forge relationships independent of the US and China drives the new government’s approaches to South Korea, ASEAN, Russia, Australia, and others.

Of course, the Hatoyama government — or the DPJ, considering Ozawa’s giant mission to China in December and Ozawa’s leaning on the Imperial Household Agency to arrange an audience with the Emperor for Chinese President Hu Jintao’s likely successor — has symbolically focused attention on the relationship with China that contrasts with the friction in the relationship with the US. But it is worth noting that the Hatoyama government has not moved beyond symbolic gestures in the Sino-Japanese relationship, while focusing on concrete cooperation with other countries in Asia. And as for the US, if US officials were not so short sighted they might recognize that there will likely be benefits for US-Japanese cooperation in the medium and long runs from the Futenma dispute. The DPJ is airing grievances about the alliance that had been muffled around the LDP: that while the US will bear the lion’s share of the burden in the (unlikely) event of war, the Japanese people bear the more immediate costs of hosting US forces in peacetime and that the central government in Tokyo has in turn shifted an unreasonable share of the burden of hosting US forces onto Okinawa. Meanwhile, given that the Hatoyama government is even more determined than the Obama administration to forge a realignment agreement that balances security concerns with the environmental and social concerns of the citizens of Okinawa and Japan more broadly, as well as the DPJ and its coalition partners, it may be worth waiting the extra five months that the Hatoyama government will spend devising an alternative. Furthermore, by saying no to the US, the Hatoyama government may have done more to force a discussion on the form and functions of the alliance than years of LDP rule.

The Japanese people seem to prefer some sort of “Goldilocks consensus” in Japan’s foreign policy. Unease with the Hatoyama government’s handling of US-Japan relations suggests that citizens do not want the government to go too far in saying no to the US, but growing satisfaction with the state of Sino-Japanese relations also suggests that citizens do not want the government to antagonize China. In this year’s Cabinet survey of foreign policy attitudes, the proportion of respondents who view the Sino-Japanese relationship as “satisfactory” rose to 38.5% from 23.7%, while the proportion of respondents who view the relationship as unsatisfactory fell to 55.2% from 71.9%. I think there is value in looking at this improvement in light of a poll conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the waning months of the Koizumi government, in which 77.9% of respondents desired improvement in the relationship. 47.7% of respondents said that cooperation should focus on forging a generally cordial relationship with an eye on the big picture, compared with 20% who thought it should focus on regional and global matters and only 10% who felt it should focus on Japanese sovereign rights. There is little desire to return to the ice age of the Koizumi years.

Despite the impression of US officials, the DPJ-led government, far from being radically out of line with the Japanese public, is virtually at the center of the Japanese political spectrum on foreign policy. That could be a problem for those who believe in a security-centered US-Japan relationship rooted in shared values and implicitly directed at a rising China, but it need not be a problem for US-Japan cooperation as a whole.

Incidentally, the reason we can have this discussion about the DPJ’s foreign policy changes is due to the nature of foreign policy, which is largely interpretive and rooted in symbols and language. Doctrines and declarations, the stuff of foreign policy, can signify change without actually changing anything in reality — which should serve as a note of caution that for all the doctrinal changes associated with the Hatoyama government, the US and Japan still enjoy a close partnership with a durable foundation and very much unlike the relationships between the US and China and Japan and China. Japan’s foreign policy may change perceptibly under the DPJ, but it would be wise for the US to not overreact to change that is in any event driven by forces larger than who governs in Tokyo — and it would behoove the Hatoyama government to be more insistent about reminding the Obama administration about the ways the relationship is not changing (even if the Obama administration is reluctant to listen).

Economic policy: Unlike foreign policy, however, in which a speech or a summit can serve as evidence of change, economic policy is more complicated. For starters, economic policy failures are more immediately felt by citizens — and have more immediate consequences for governments. The costs for getting economic policy wrong are (usually) much more noticeable for citizens than the costs of foreign policy blunders. Inheriting an economy in recession, the Hatoyama government has been particularly sensitive to the need to get economic policy right. After all, as of November Japan’s unemployment rate was 5.2%, only a slight improvement over July’s record 5.7% unemployment.

While it is far too soon to grade the Hatoyama government on its macroeconomic record, the government has provided the latest guide to its economic policy approach in a new economic strategy approved by the cabinet on Wednesday. Readers will recall that during the campaign that DPJ struggled with economic strategy: given the weakness of its proposals in its manifesto, the party was compelled to issue a clarification that attempted to outline the DPJ’s growth strategy.

The basis of the DPJ’s campaign rhetoric — repeated in the introduction to the latest strategy — is that Japan has to shift from a producer-centered economic growth model to a consumer-centered growth model. In other words, it is essential for the government to stimulate consumer spending on foreign and domestic goods and services, providing a better quality of life for Japanese citizens.

The new strategy states that the goal is to create a “problem-solving-style state” that will tackle climate change and the problem of Japan’s aging, shrinking society by promoting “green innovation” and “life innovation,” in the process making Japan into a “model country.” While there are a number of laudable proposals in this strategy — the focus on trade and investment within the Asia-Pacific is particularly noteworthy — the document reads like so many LDP economic strategies before it, flighty rhetoric and ambitious goals without clear proposals for how to achieve them (and like the Abe government, a clear penchant for katakana buzzwords). Similarly, the very idea of a growth strategy suggests that the government can plan the transition from producer-centered to consumer- and innovation-centered growth. I do not see how, with the return of deflation, the government will convince households to spend the cash they have been hoarding, or how the government will promote greater risk-taking and entrepreneurship among young Japanese, in the process remaking the labor market so that workers who fail to secure regular employment upon finishing school are not forever condemned to irregular employment. For that matter, there is little sense of the tradeoffs facing the Hatoyama government. How will it balance the goal of restoring fiscal normalcy with the goal of building a social safety net with the goal of promoting green innovation and other measures to promote economic growth?

The DPJ-led government will have to surmount these challenges in large part because its predecessors failed to do so. It will clearly take time, which, again, is not the DPJ’s fault seeing as how the LDP did little to shift Japan’s economic model after the bubble burst.

Perhaps the one saving grace of the new growth strategy is its focus on Asia. In this sense the division between foreign and economic policy is artificial: like Japan’s governments at other critical turning points, the Hatoyama government recognizes the centrality of economic policy for achieving the country’s foreign policy goals. Without being more open to trade and investment within the region, there is no way that Japan will be able to expand its influence in the region as China continues to grow. That competition need not be zero-sum — but even to reap positive-sum gains Japan will actually have to enter the competition for influence. Bilateral EPAs concluded within the region in recent years are a start, but Japan has more work to do.

As we look ahead to 2010, we should see how this process of reorienting Japan to an Asia that is increasingly the center of the international system. In doing so, the DPJ will not necessarily be forging a new path but will instead be taking bigger steps along a path that the LDP had already started down, a path laid by the changing regional order. The US will remain an important player in Asia, but no longer will it be the region’s indispensable nation. Indeed, the Hatoyama government’s policies should put pressure on the Obama administration to follow through on President Obama’s claim that his is the first “Asia-Pacific” presidency. In 2010 the two allies will have to consider the meaning of their alliance even as they celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. They should not shrink from this task.

There are big changes afoot. While the DPJ and its leader are responsible for some of the content of Japan’s new policies, it is likely that similar debates would have occurred even had the LDP been able to retain power.

There is no guarantee that the DPJ will succeed in either smoothly transitioning to a more independent foreign policy without alienating the US, China, or both, or build a new economic growth model without bankrupting the country or simply failing to promote new industries. But by the end of 2010 we should have a better sense of whether the Hatoyama government will succeed in its bid to return Japan to Asia.

The LDP chooses inertia

observingjapan@gmail.com (Tobias Harris) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:52:00 +0000

In the past week, three LDP members of the House of Councillors have bolted from the party, calling to mind among some LDP members, according to Asahi, the last time the LDP was in opposition (1993-1994). None of the three — Tottori's Tamura Kentaro, Ibaraki's Hasegawa Tamon, and Kagawa's Yamauchi Toshio — have decided to join with the DPJ: Yamauchi has indicated his desire to join the Kaikaku Kurabu (literally the Reform Club, but apparently translated as the Japan Renaissance Party), a micro-party with four upper house members that caucuses with the LDP, and the others will be independents, for now.

For the moment the DPJ is no closer to gaining a majority in the upper house before the election that will likely be held in July.

But the exit of these LDP UH members provides a glimpse into the LDP's struggles to change following its defeat in August.

Political parties, like all complex organizations embedded in fluctuating, unpredictable environments, must achieve some balance between change and inertia. Successful — and long-lived — parties may well be characterized by higher degrees of inertia, changing policies, organizational structure, or party rules only when some external shock requires adaptation. It may be the case, however, that the more successful a party is, the less able it is able to adapt when its external environment changes.

The LDP has been in an almost continuous state of crisis since the late 1980s, starting with the Recruit and Sagawa Kyubin scandals and the Ozawa rebellion that led to the LDP's going into opposition for the first time. Returning to power in 1994 did not dull the sense of crisis in the LDP. We cannot understand the rise of Koizumi Junichiro without appreciating the backdrop of crisis. But returning to power, even in cooperation with a series of coalition partners, strengthened the influence of inertial forces within the LDP even as the external circumstances (stagnant economy, changing demographics, the decline of the countryside, etc.) continued to evolve, demanding that the party change too. The battle between reformists and the old guard, which came to a head in the debate over postal privatization, reflects the competing forces present in all large organizations — and is not dissimilar from the experiences of other political parties.

Having failed to reform in power, the LDP has been given another opportunity to reform out of power. Judging by the departure of the three upper house members, who expressed their dissatisfaction with the party leadership's reform efforts when they notified the party of their decisions, the LDP is still struggling to change in significant ways. Masuzoe Yoichi, the former minister of health, labor, and welfare, has also criticized the party's leadership: in a speech last Tuesday Masuzoe said that the LDP needed a "dictatorial leader exceeding [the DPJ's] Mr. Ozawa." He said that if he were party leader, he would strengthen the party's hands in nominating candidates, bringing new candidates in and preventing them from running in their home districts (like the DPJ, Masuzoe is borrowing from British politics). He stressed that the party does not need to be resuscitated — it needs to be reborn.

New rules for selecting candidates, new leadership institutions, new procedures for choosing leaders, new policies, even a new name: these are the kinds of changes that we should expect political parties to consider in the aftermath of a considerable defeat. And these are precisely the kinds of changes that the LDP under Tanigaki Sadakazu has failed to undertake. Earlier this month, a party committee debated and ultimately rejected a proposal to change the LDP's name. More comprehensive reforms have not been forthcoming. Talk of killing the LDP's factions, which continue to linger on despite having lost much of their power, seems to have ceased. The party has introduced some changes into how it picks its leader: in the party election in September the party's prefectural chapters wielded more votes than in the past, but this change was more a matter of necessity due to the party's vastly reduced Diet caucus than a matter of conviction. Post-election talk of introducing a DPJ-style shadow cabinet that would centralize the party's policymaking functions went nowhere. In its most important functions the party president is no stronger now than before the LDP's defeat. And there are few signs that party has a plan for introducing the changes discussed by Masuzoe or other innovations derived from the DPJ's experience in opposition.

Why has the LDP thus far been so reluctant to change, or even to discuss change?

The LDP's reluctance to introduce institutional and policy changes may not be all that atypical. In fact, in keeping with the importance of inertia for parties and organizations, it may take a series of shocks rather than a single shock for a party to overcome its natural resistance to change. After all, embracing inertia — retrenchment, in a word — can be a rational strategy for a party recovering from a major shock, a means of limiting the extent of post-defeat chaos. Tanigaki's election as LDP president is an effect of this tendency, and has also served to deepen its roots within the party. While Tanigaki had a reputation as a liberal prior to his election, it seems that his devotion to the LDP establishment outweighs even his liberal tendencies. His actions since his election suggest that Tanigaki is a proponent of the old guard's thinking: he has silenced talk of radical reforms, spoken on behalf of the factions, and adopted a political strategy that prioritizes political expediency (calling for Hatoyama to resign immediately and a snap election) over the long-term survival of the LDP. Unlike Masuzoe's position, which stresses the importance of significant reforms as critical for the medium- and long-term survival of the LDP, Tanigaki's position seems to be that returning to power as soon as possible trumps party reform. In other words, had the LDP selected a different leader — Kono Taro, for example — it is likely that the LDP would be debating and embracing different policies than under Tanigaki.

Tanigaki's tendency to retrench rather than reform also reflects the balance of power within the LDP after the general election, which, as I noted the day after the election, is skewed towards older party members who have held numerous cabinet and party leadership posts. The composition of the LDP's members reinforces the power of inertia present in all large organizations.

As Masuzoe's speech last week suggests, leadership is critical — but as the aftermath of the Koizumi government suggests, it is not enough. Without control of the party leadership, the LDP's reformists waned once Koizumi left office. Reformists like Masuzoe will have to remake the party both in Tokyo and at the grassroots. They will have to fight to open the nominating process to new candidates, while at the same time working at party headquarters to centralize party governance much as Ozawa made the DPJ a far more centralized and disciplined party than it had been previously. But it may take more defeats in national and local elections before the reformists are able to build a durable coalition in favor of significant party change. Fortunately for the reformists, given that the LDP's support has remained abysmal even as the Hatoyama government's approval rating has fallen, more defeats (and defections) may be in the offing.

For the moment, however, there may be little the reformists can do other than float proposals for party change and work with party rank-and-file in the hope of building support for reform from the bottom up. Sooner or later, the DPJ will overreach and need another spell in opposition. I hope for Japan's sake that when it does overreach the LDP — or an LDP successor — is ready to govern. As of now, the LDP is still a long way from becoming that party.