Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
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: Ryokichi Hirono, Seikei University
Aurelia George Mulgan’s recent contribution here repeats much discussion in Japan about the DPJ’s failure to gain a majority in the recent House of Councillors (HOC) elections. But what are the facts and how really should they be interpreted?
First, on a combined SEP and NT basis, DPJ won the largest number of votes, followed by LDP, Mina, Komei, CPJ, SDP, Reform, TN, NNP and Kofuku. Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
The Japanese economy is frozen and faces large challenges (with an externally-led expansion from 2001 to 2006 just saving it from two lost decades of economic growth). Deflation is back due to over capacity and depressed domestic demand – a hangover from the rapid expansion and bubble period in the 1980s – and public debt is close to 200 per cent of GDP and rising.
The structure of the debt (95 per cent of which is domestically held) and the low interest rate being paid on the bonds to finance them means this problem may not be so bad as it looks. 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.
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: 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: 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: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA
Prime Minister Kan’s first policy speech to the Diet on 11 June utilises the core concept in the Hatoyama administration’s New Growth Strategy. Both documents refer to the ‘third way’ as the government’s fundamental approach to revitalising the economy.
The language of the two documents is almost identical. 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: Purnendra Jain, University of Adelaide
Last week, Kan Naoto became Japan’s prime minister following the resignation of Hatoyama Yukio as prime minister and President of the Democratic Party of Japan. Kan has a very different political trajectory from most of his colleagues across political parties in Japan. He is not a hereditary politician; his rise in politics cannot be ascribed to working as a staffer with an eminent politician; and he never stood in any local elections. He is a ‘self-made’ politician. He got elected to the House of Representatives in 1980 after three unsuccessful attempts at a parliamentary seat, in 1976, 1977 and 1979. It took him roughly ten years of hard work and political skill to win at a national election in 1980 through unconventional support organisations.
After graduating in applied physics from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1970, Kan began his political activities organising citizen’s movements focusing on the problems of housing, medical facilities, pollution and environmental protection. 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: 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.