Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW Canberra
Ichiro Ozawa’s trial verdict of ‘not-guilty’ for violating the Political Funds Control Law has now been appealed, placing constraints on his political activities.
Fortunately for him, the DPJ executive, under the leadership of key Ozawa ally, Secretary-General Azuma Koshiishi, had already restored his membership and the executive is not intending to revisit their decision. Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW Canberra
The top two contenders for the presidency of the governing DPJ in Japan (and therefore Japan’s prime ministership) on 29 August are Banri Kaieda and Seiji Maehara. Kaieda represents the combined Ozawa-Hatoyama camps.
Not only is he a member of the Hatoyama group, but he has managed to secure the backing of Ichiro Ozawa. Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW at ADFA
We now know, courtesy of Wikileaks, that the assessment of Japan’s DPJ, at the highest levels of the US government, was that it was ‘completely different’ from the LDP.
At first, this appeared to be the case. It was not just the Futenma debacle, although that was bad enough. Read more…
Author: Amitav Acharya, American University
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ‘new American moment in international relations’ speech, delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC on September 8, 2010, has been widely discussed and debated. Although the speech did not concern Asia only, it does signal important changes in the way the United States looks at Asia, especially its regional architecture.
One unusual aspect of the speech was the amount of space devoted to regions and regional organisations in general. 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: Ryo Sahashi, Kanagawa University
Japanese politics has been all mixed up after the change of ruling party last September. With an emphasis on regional community building and the December 2009 visit of Chief Cabinet Secretary Ozawa, to Beijing, some have speculated that Japan is restructuring its foreign policy radically by retreating gradually from the alliance with the US.
This is far from the truth. Foreign policy under former Prime Minister Hatoyama has actually been a nuanced continuation of past policies. The detail of his policy stance is best characterised as ‘dual hedging.’
Specifically, debates in the Diet and associated policy proposals are centered around economic partnerships within Asia. Read more…
Author: Andrew Levidis, Melbourne University and Kyoto University
Hatoyama Yukio and the Democratic Party of Japan swept to power last year amid ecstatic hopes and extravagant claims of ‘regime change’ that promised to renew Japan and finally bring to a close the ‘post-war’ era. This scion of a great political family might have seemed an improbable leader of the opposition but was seen as a beacon of change into which all the frustrations stemming from years of economic and political malaise were poured. At home he sought to end the dominance of the ailing LDP and break decisively with its post-war legacies.
Abroad, he sought to augur a new era in relations with Asia and China and a new coolness in relations with the United States. Read more…
Author: David Fedman, Stanford University
We are well into the Democratic Party of Japan administration and it is patently clear that Japan’s leadership is taking engagement with its East Asian neighbours seriously. Major missions of DPJ lawmakers to China, high-level cabinet meetings with South Korean counterparts, and northeast Asian trilateral summits have signalled a newfound interest in and commitment to diplomacy and détente in the neighbourhood.
This ‘New Asianism’—to borrow a phrase from Daniel Sneider—was clearly outlined in the DPJ’s pre-election manifesto: ‘the DPJ will make the greatest possible effort to develop relations of mutual trust with China, South Korea and other Asian nations, and to strengthen the bonds of solidarity with Asian countries within the framework of the international community’. 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: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA
What prime minister would try to sell a tax rise to voters one month in advance of a general election? What prime minister would disregard the advice of his party’s chief electoral strategist who had previously delivered stunning victories to his party in two general elections? What prime minister would sacrifice a vital majority in a house of parliament for the sake of his tax-rise policy? The answer? Japan’s Prime Minister Kan. Not only was the timing of the issue mishandled – the election should have been held after the fact, not before it – but Kan’s dithering on the details of the tax rise during the campaign was redolent of Hatoyama’s fumbling of the Futenma base issue.
Kan took his eye off the ball, which was to secure an outright majority in the Upper House. 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: 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: 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?
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.
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Seeking to solidify their Global and Strategic Partnership, Prime Ministers Aso and Singh had issued a Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation in October 2008. The landmark document was only the second instance of such bilateral cooperation entered into by Tokyo, aside from its security arrangement with the US. In keeping with the upgraded schedule of ministerial-level consultations envisaged in the Joint Declaration (and its accompanying Action Plan), over the Golden Week holiday period Defence Minister Kitazawa paid a visit to his counterpart in New Delhi.
Topics of discussion included safety of sea lines of communication, anti-piracy cooperation as well as drawing up a timeline of joint exercises to be conducted by the two countries’ navies. Read more…