Author: Satoshi Amako, Waseda University

In September last year, in the lower house general election the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) scored an overwhelming victory, greatly exceeding a majority taking 308 seats. Prime Minister Hatoyama and Secretary-General Ozawa formed the so-called ‘O-bato (小鳩) system’, the books were closed on this hectic change-of-government period, and many people thought that stable government would continue. However, at the beginning of this year the DPJ government began to waver around the issue of the questionable or inappropriate handling of political funds by both Hatoyama and Ozawa.

In addition, the government was shaken badly by the ‘Okinawa Futenma base relocation problem’, Prime Minister Hatoyama’s approval rating fell sharply, and eventually on June 1 the issue was put to rest by  Hatoyama’s and Ozawa’s resignations, and the political situation now enters a new stage with the emergence of the new Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, and an upper house election. Read more…

Author: John Hemmings, RUSI

Four Prime Ministers in four years; this fact has been mentioned in various articles in the wake of Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama’s resignation, and it is a source of puzzlement and frustration within Japan and among its allies and neighbours. What hasn’t been asked is ‘why?’ What is causing this rapid turnover of political masters? Can Japan govern itself under these circumstances, and more importantly, what is the true cost of this rapid turnover of political leadership on Japan itself and on the region?

Despite the different circumstances of each prime ministerial career, there are common links in the fall of all four prime ministers. The most obvious has been public disillusionment, evident in low public approval ratings which herald sudden and hasty departures from office. Read more…

Author: Yoichi Funabashi, Asahi Shumbun

In hindsight, the April 12 conversation between outgoing Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and US President Barack Obama was a watershed.

Seated beside each other at a dinner held during the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, the two leaders talked for about 10 minutes mainly about relocating the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. Obama told Hatoyama he had not made any public comments until then because Hatoyama had said, ‘Trust me,’ when the two met last November. Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale

China’s position in world energy and resource markets has changed dramatically in a remarkably short time. China first became a net oil importer in 1993. The country’s oil imports surpassed 100 million tons in 2004, and the figure is now more than double that, at 204 million metric tons. In a study last year, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) concluded that 64.5 per cent of China’s oil consumption is likely to be met by imports in 2020, due to the growing gap between domestic consumption and production. What is true for oil is true also for a great many of the strategic raw materials that are critical to China’s successful industrial development, not least among them iron ore of which Australia is one of the world’s two largest international suppliers.

Until the late 1980s, imports were a miniscule element in China’s iron ore consumption. Last year imported iron ore, at 630 million tons, comprised 69 per cent of total supplies, up from 44 per cent in 2002 and around 7 per cent in 1985. Over less than two decades, China has become the world’s largest importers of iron ore, accounting for well over half of the global market. Read more…

Author: Andrew Kennedy, ANU

If China’s rise is one of the most important stories of this new century, China’s soaring appetite for energy is one of its most striking subplots. Between 2000 and 2008, China’s demand for energy grew so quickly that it single-handedly accounted for 51 per cent of world demand growth during that span. By 2008, China was consuming 43 per cent of the world’s coal, 19 per cent of its hydroelectric power, and 10 per cent of its oil. If current trends continue, China will overtake the US as the world’s largest energy consumer in the next few years.

China’s soaring energy needs have generated considerable anxiety among Chinese strategists about the country’s ‘energy security’ and its strategic position more broadly. Read more…

Author: Shankaran Nambiar, MIER

Malaysia’s New Economic Model (NEM) serves to address two crucial issues that confront the nation. First, Malaysia for some time now has had its feet caught in the ‘middle income’ trap. It is now keen to graduate to a high income status, joining the likes of Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. The NEM takes this role seriously.

Second, the Malaysian economy has just recovered – and admirably, one might add – from the recent global financial and economic crisis. As if in answer to the lessons of the crisis, the NEM constitutes an attempt at designing a rebalancing strategy. Read more…

Author: Ernie Bower, CSIS, Washington

The prophetic novelist Thomas Wolfe said, ‘you can’t go home again,’ and apparently he was right. In the wee hours of the morning today Presidential Spokesman Robert Gibbs delivered the verdict on the third attempt for President Obama to visit Indonesia, a country where he grew up and a relationship his Administration hopes to enhance in a transformative manner along the lines the Bush Administration changed the paradigm with India.

Gibbs explained the with the Gulf of Mexico still in crisis, the President could not follow through on his planned visit to Indonesia and one of America’s five treaty allies in Asia, Australia. This is the third time – the proverbial third strike – that the President has postponed his trip. Read more…

Author: Ronald I. McKinnon, Stanford University

Nobody disputes that almost three decades of US trade (net saving) deficits have made the global system of finance and trade more accident-prone. Outstanding dollar debts have become huge, and threaten America’s own financial future. Insofar as the principal creditor countries in Asia (Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, China since 2000) are industrial countries relying heavily on exports of manufactures, the transfer of their surplus savings to the saving-deficient US requires that they collectively run large trade surpluses in manufactures. The resulting large American trade deficits have worsened the ‘natural’ decline in the relative size of the American manufacturing sector, and eroded the US industrial base.

One unfortunate consequence of this industrial decline has been an outbreak of protectionism in the United States, which is exacerbated by the conviction that foreigners have somehow been cheating with their exchange rate and other commercial policies. Read more…

Authors: Mahani Zainal Abidin and Steven Wong, ISIS

For all the hype about industrial development, technology and markets, there are not many countries in the world that have experienced rapid development on a sustained basis after the Second World War. Malaysia is one such exception. But now it has reached an inflection point where the country must step up to become an advanced economy with an inclusive society and a mature democracy.

When Malaysia gained independence its main assets were its rubber plantations and tin mines, and much was still owned by foreign companies. Read more…

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA

Japan’s DPJ government has been on the hunt for funds to finance its campaign promises, the flipside of its mission to eliminate wasteful government expenditure. Last November, the first round of the Government Revitalisation Unit’s (GRU) screening process, which examined ministries’ spending requests for the fiscal 2010 budget, was disappointing. It yielded only an extra ¥690 billion in budgetary savings, a mere drop in the ocean of the final fiscal outlay of ¥92.3 trillion.

Accordingly, the DPJ played up other positives, emphasising the GRU’s role in achieving procedural as well as fiscal objectives, such as establishing greater openness, transparency and accountability in the bureaucracy. Read more…

Author: Tim Southphommasane, Monash University

It is a cliché, but one of the great rituals of growing up in a multicultural society is to sit alongside other children in school to compare lunches.

For much of my schooling I never got too much of a chance to make interesting comparisons. I never thought twice about tucking into the stir fried pork or chicken on rice that my mother or father would prepare for my lunch. After all, most of my classmates had something similar. Even at the school canteen, it was possible to order some fried rice—a choice that quickly became more popular than sausage rolls and meat pies. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

Kan Naoto, Hatoyama Yukio’s second finance minister, was the first DPJ member to declare his intention to run in the party election scheduled for Friday — and it seems unlikely, for reasons outlined by Michael Cucek here, that he will be denied the job.

What would be the significance of Kan’s replacing Hatoyama?

Read more…

Author: Anthony Milner, ANU and University of Melbourne

Speaking at the Asialink/Asia Society National Forum last week, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd welcomed ASEAN’s desire to encourage deeper United States and Russian engagement in the evolving regional architecture. Mr. Rudd also noted the suggestion that these states meet with the current members of the East Asia Summit (ASEAN, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand). ‘This is what we are seeking’, he said, ‘engagement in a cooperative institution of all of the key players in the region.’

Does this suggest that Australia will now be giving less attention to advocating their Asia-Pacific vision for the region, and will work more closely with East Asian or Asian regionalism?  The distinction matters. Read more…

Author: Joel S. Wit, John Hopkins University

In 1998, I led a team of American government experts to an underground installation to determine if North Korea was cheating on a 1994 agreement to eliminate its nuclear weapons program. Pyongyang had recently tested a long-range missile, and relations were tense.

For a week, we passed barking guard dogs and shouting soldiers doing their synchronised morning exercises to wander through a maze of tunnels. Read more…

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

It appears that the inevitable has happened: NHK reports that Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio has informed the DPJ leadership that he intends to step down.

Hatoyama, of course, has no one to blame but himself. In the nine months since he took office, he has failed as a manager of his cabinet, as the head of the DPJ, and as the leader of his country. Unable to make up his mind, he groped from blunder to blunder, before finally making a controversial decision on Futenma without doing any of the work to convince a skeptical public of its merits.

Read more…