This result reveals that Ozawa does indeed command loyalty from his 150 faction members and those of Hatoyama, something that outsiders before the vote murmured was ‘unlikely’. Ozawa in his role as destroyer now looms large over Japan’s political landscape; with three party political transitions under his belt, it is possible that he may go for a fourth.
In selecting former Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada as the DPJ’s new Secretary-General, Kan has reinforced his commitment to enable the DPJ to ‘escape from Ozawa’. This post could have gone to an Ozawa supporter or even to Ozawa himself in time, and the fact that it didn’t undermines Kan’s conciliatory statement after the Tuesday poll that ‘there are no sides now’.
What Kan seems to be doing is staying true to the DPJ dream that enthralled the nation in August 2009, when the DPJ was swept to power by a headstrong and empowered electorate. New politics, an end to overt pork barrel, and the evolution of a new kind of politician that could make as well as implement policy were the drivers of that DPJ dream result. The electorate loved it so much that they punished their new favourites in this year’s July half upper house election for not delivering on those promises.
New politics, not the DPJ, is now the focus of Japan’s jaded yet feisty voters. The symbolic marginalization of Ozawa will satisfy many in the electorate, but it is only one step towards remodeling politics in Japan. Ozawa may yet spit the dummy and march with a good number of his supporters– though probably not the full 150 – into the political unknown, forging opportunistic alliances with the disillusioned young guns of the declining LDP and fusing the shards of the myriad new parties that have escaped the seismic danger zone of the major parties.
And Kan may encourage this show of contempt on Ozawa’s part, in the hope that a post-Ozawa DPJ can be forged from the slivers of hope that survive the next electoral quake.
The July poll conveyed the degree to which the tectonic plates underpinning Japanese politics today are moving. Exit polls revealed that as many as one third of the electorate now self-identified as floating voters, with allegiance to no party. High numbers of affiliated voters defected from their declared party of choice to the enemy, and an improbably high number of voters stated their preference for a new, and as yet non-existent, coalition of political forces to deliver the kind of politics they wanted to see. This is no longer about the LDP or the DPJ, it is about transforming the landscape of politics in Japan.
In this sense, we are still witnessing the aftershocks of the first political realignment in 1993, when the LDP was forced from power by a vengeful and merciless Ozawa. The ‘big one’ may still lay ahead, not just for Tokyo but for how politics in Japan are delivered, and by whom.
Rikki Kersten is Professor of Modern Japanese Political History at the Australian National University.