Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
The exchange of fire between the North and South Korean militaries that left two ROK Marines dead and at least a dozen wounded, following closely on the heels of revelations regarding a new North Korean uranium reprocessing facility, strengthens hopes that the US and Japan might be able look past Futenma and strengthen their security relationship. The relationship has, of course, had a bit more wind in its sails since the standoff between Japan and China over the maritime collision near the Senkakus.
Can we really draw a straight line from regional instability to closer security cooperation between the US and Japan? Arguably this logic has worked in the past, with North Korean provocations from 1994 onward stirring Japanese policymakers to bolster Japan’s capabilities and launch new bilateral initiatives with the US, ballistic missile defense being perhaps the most notable example. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
The Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer has an op-ed in the IHT in which he argues that despite widespread pessimism among Japanese regarding their country’s future, things may not be so bad. He suggests that the DPJ may well be learning to get along with business elites and bureaucrats, Japan and the US may be rebuilding their relationship after a remarkably bad year for the alliance, and, finally, the Japanese people have not taken to the streets in opposition to their government.
The first two arguments are more or less acceptable, although there is little to praise in how the Kan government prevaricated and ultimately failed to lead on the issue. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto and Wen Jiabao, his Chinese counterpart, have met briefly in Brussels on the sideline of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit, marking an end to the bilateral standoff following the collision between a Chinese trawler and Japanese Coast Guard vessels in the vicinity of the disputed Senkakus.
As expected, Japan and China reiterated the importance of the strategic, reciprocal partnership initiative. High-level talks and cultural exchanges will resume. All in all, it is difficult to say what has changed strategically as a result of the dispute. That China will fiercely resist any perceived change to the status quo in its maritime disputes? Read more…
Auhthor: Tobias Harris, MIT
Having successfully fended off Ozawa Ichirō’s challenge to his leadership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan — indeed, having defeated Ozawa by an unexpectedly large margin, not only winning the vote among Diet members but also receiving the support of 249 of 300 district-level party chapters and sixty percent of the vote among local representatives — Prime Minister Kan Naoto finally has an opportunity to govern. After all, since succeeding Hatoyama Yukio in June Kan has spent much of his time focused on elections, first with the House of Councillors election in July and then the showdown with Ozawa.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that within days of his victory Kan reshuffled his cabinet and the DPJ leadership. I am generally skeptical of the efficacy of cabinet reshuffles. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’ — Enoch Powell
Returning to his familiar role as Ozawa Ichirō’s trusty factotum, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio announced Thursday that he will be supporting Ozawa in a bid to unseat Prime Minister Kan Naoto in next month’s DPJ party leadership election. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
‘I would like to face history with sincerity,’ said Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto in a statement issued on 10 August, the 100th anniversary of Japan’s annexation of Korea. ‘I would like to have courage to squarely confront the facts of history and humility to accept them, as well as to be honest to reflect upon the errors of our own.’
In what is now being referred to as the Kan Statement, the prime minister acknowledged the suffering caused by Japan’s ‘colonial rule’ and apologised to the Republic of Korea, and also pledged to return the remains of Koreans as well as cultural artefacts removed to Japan during the annexation. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
Having read and enjoyed Jacob Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice, it was with considerable interest that I read his article, ‘The Last Yakuza‘ in the World Policy Journal.
Like Corey Wallace, I have no particular expertise with which to assess the role played by the Yakuza in Japanese society. But also like him, I am skeptical about what political outcomes we can actually attribute to organised crime.
Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
In the wake of its defeat the Kan government has made it patently clear that the Hatoyama government’s ‘ratification’ of the 2006 realignment plan was nothing of the sort — it is now saying that it will be impossible to complete negotiations before Okinawan gubernatorial election in November. The government once again is considering alternatives to the V-shaped runways to be built at Henoko bay, and is reluctant to impose a solution on the Okinawan people.
But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, American domestic politics is emerging as a new constraint on implementing the 2006 agreement. Both houses of Congress have voted to cut funding for the construction on Guam that is necessary to prepare the island to receive the 8,000 Marines and their dependants that according to the plan will move from Okinawa to Guam in 2014. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris
During Japan’s 2009 general election campaign, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) ran on a platform calling for a more ‘equal’ relationship with the United States. While the party’s leaders left the meaning of the phrase vague, the general idea was that a DPJ government would be more assertive in defending Japan’s national interests in its dealings with the US, arguing that under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Japan was too submissive when the US came asking for help in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The first test of the DPJ’s new approach to US-Japan relations was the dispute over the US Marine air station at Futenma in Okinawa. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
If there is one lesson that this upper house campaign has taught us, it is a lesson that we all should have already learned: there is no stopping Ozawa Ichirō. Despite what looked like a marvellous coup by Hatoyama Yukio in getting Ozawa to step down as DPJ secretary-general, Ozawa has been a public critic of the Kan government throughout the campaign.
However, is Ozawa’s criticism of the government — he’s been particularly harsh about the Kan government’s comments about raising the consumption tax to 10 per cent, which he argues with plenty of justification that the government has made life more difficult for DPJ candidates — the prelude to Ozawa’s being a thorn in Kan’s side after the election (as Yuka Hayashi suggests in this post at the Wall Street Journal’s Japan Realtime)? Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris
Prime Minister Kan Naoto had his debut on the world stage at the G20 meeting in Toronto this week. While in Toronto he had his first meeting with US President Barack Obama.
As Reuters notes, Kan met with Obama for a half-hour, considerably more time than Hatoyama got when he visited Washington in April (when Hatoyama was infamously described as ‘loopy’). The two leaders apparently discussed their shared love of matcha ice cream, and the Japanese media looked for signs that the two were becoming pals, looking for evidence that the relationship between the US and Japan was back on track after the Hatoyama government ‘strained’ the bilateral relationship. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
The style of politics popular in advanced industrial democracies during the 1990s among center-left leaders keen to reconcile their left-wing parties to the rise of neo-liberalism and the onset of austerity after the 1970s had heretofore failed to surface in Tokyo. But with the ascendancy of Kan Naoto, Third Way politics may get another lease on life in Japan.
In his maiden policy speech as prime minister on 11 June, Kan explicitly spoke of a ‘third way’ to the reconstruction of the Japanese economy. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
The Kan government has formed, having retained eleven ministers from the Hatoyama government (as expected). Among the new faces in Kan’s cabinet of ‘irregular forces’ are Noda Yoshihko (finance), Yamada Masahiko (agriculture), Arai Satoshi (national strategy), Genba Kōichirō (administrative reform), and, perhaps most prominently, Renhō (government revitalisation).
Looking at the transition from the Hatoyama-Ozawa regime to the new DPJ cabinet, Michael Cucek reviews the history of the DPJ’s coming to power and the nature of the Ozawa’s strategy and concludes that under Kan, ‘the DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back.’ 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: 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…
