Success for Ozawa is measured in terms of wielding power, so he must have in mind a scenario where, once again, he can return to government. There are certainly some parallels with the events of 1993.

First, Ozawa has picked an issue that he knows has some traction with the electorate. In 1993 it was electoral reform; this time it is the consumption tax hike, which a majority of Japanese oppose. He will also take up the popular anti-nuclear cause.

Second, his new group does not have enough members to make the DPJ lose its majority in the Lower House (it needs a minimum of 55 votes, and it only has 38), or to bring on a vote of no-confidence in the Noda cabinet by itself (for this it needs 51 votes). But it certainly has sufficient numbers to make this threat real by linking up with its minor party allies — the New Party Kizuna (9 votes) and New Party Mother Earth/Real DPJ (3 votes) and Tax Cuts Japan (1 vote). If joined by other opposition parties such as the LDP and Komeito, and a few other DPJ defectors, the no-confidence vote might be successful, precipitating a dissolution of the house and a general election.

Third, having destroyed the DPJ government, the Ozawa breakaway group could team up with coalition partners to form a new government. Some of these minor party Diet representatives in the Lower House are already formally members of Ozawa’s new ‘party in waiting’, the Shinseiken, which may adapt its formal title to Shinseito. Another regional party in Nagoya, the ‘Aichi is Top of Japan’ party led by Aichi Governor Hideaki Omura, is another possible coalition partner if it successfully elects candidates to the Lower House in the next general election.

But it is on the coalition hurdle that Ozawa’s best-case scenario may fall down. While he is open to coalitions with others, no party with any serious electoral prospects has any desire to form a coalition with him. Tokyo Governor Ishihara stated that he ‘wouldn’t be caught dead linking up with him’ and has also put aside the idea of forming a national party for the time being. Key personnel in the Osaka Ishin no Kai have also been negative about a possible alliance with Ozawa. This means that Ozawa cannot ride either of these populist waves back into government.

Ozawa has another serious problem too — money. When Ozawa left the LDP in 1993, according to one report, to those 40 or so loyalists who followed him out of the LDP, he ‘promptly distributed $50,000 a head in used notes’. Given Ozawa’s reputed lack of funds, he may not be in a position to distribute such largesse this time. This might explain why he had to resort to psychological pressure on the members of his group to leave the DPJ.

Ozawa is desperate to get his hands on some of the DPJ’s party subsidies to help his new party in the next election. This would only be possible if the DPJ split and the Ozawa-led group took its share of party money. In the lead-up to Ozawa’s departure, some of his followers expressed their desire for a dissolution of the DPJ and creation of two new parties, one to succeed the DPJ and the other formed by Ozawa and his followers. This would give the new Ozawa party access to subsidies, amounting to ¥16.5 billion for this year. However, Noda will oppose this strongly.

According to the Political Party Subsidy Law, when a party breaks up it is treated as a case of either ‘secession’ or ‘division’. In the case of secession, because the members are leaving the party of their own free will, there is no ‘distribution of assets’. But when it is a case of division, a distribution of assets is undertaken in some way or another. When Tsutomu Hata broke away from Ozawa’s New Frontier Party (NFP) and formed the Sun Party in 1996, the Hata side requested that the Ozawa side treat it as a case of ‘division of the party’, and asked for a share of NFP’s party subsidy, a request that was flatly denied. At the time, former head of the DPJ’s secretariat, Atsuo Ito, was serving as the head of the Sun Party’s secretariat and he has bitter memories of ‘having to manage the party without receiving any political party subsidies whatsoever’.

The Ozawa side treated the Conservative Party in a similar manner (as a secession), and refused to share the former Liberal Party’s political party subsidy. Moreover, at the dissolution of the Liberal Party, formerly led by Ozawa, reports indicated that ‘the subsidy of around ¥1.5 billion yen was deposited into his individual account or a political fund management group that he established’. As Ito comments, ‘it seems that money disappeared every time Ozawa’s parties were dissolved’.

Ozawa’s departure from the DPJ may not be such a good move in other respects. In 1993 there was an electorate hungry for political reform in the wake of a succession of ‘money politics’ scandals. Ozawa was able to convert this political groundswell for reform into votes for his Renewal Party in the 1993 Lower House elections. In 2012, whilst a majority of Japanese oppose the consumption tax increase according to public opinion polls, their expectations of a new Ozawa party are very low. The Asahi revealed that as many as 78 per cent of voters do not expect much from such a party. A former Ozawa ally who left the LDP with Ozawa in 1993, Hirohisa Fujii, who was a key player in the Noda government’s consumption tax legislation, observed that ‘When we bolted from the LDP, the people rejoiced … but there’s no one crying now … Things are different from 20 years ago’. Moreover, Ozawa also carries the legal baggage of his unresolved court case, currently under appeal.

Ozawa’s departure from the DPJ may be a precursor to his being consigned to the political periphery, although he can still make trouble, which is his forte, whether in or out of the DPJ.

Aurelia George Mulgan is Professor at the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra.