Author: Michael Cucek, Shisaku, Tokyo
Yesterday Japan’s political kingmaker, Ozawa Ichiro, was found not guilty of violating the Political Funds Control Act.
In a confusing decision reminiscent of the Scottish practice of allowing rulings of not only ‘Guilty’ and ‘Not Guilty’ but also ‘Not Proven’, the Tokyo District Court on 26 April found Ichiro Ozawa not guilty of conspiring to violate the Political Funds Control Act, while maintaining that Ozawa did allow the filing of misleading political fund account reports in his name. Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW, Canberra
The political trench warfare in Japan over increasing the consumption tax has taken on the appearance of a ‘final battle’ between Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and party strongman Ichiro Ozawa.
Noda and Ozawa are said to be playing a game of ‘Russian roulette’, but the reality is much more akin to brinksmanship, where only one victor can emerge. Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA
Prime Minister Kan Naoto has successfully eliminated one major obstacle to Japan’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in his recent cabinet reshuffle. Kan has removed Trade Minister Ohata Akihiro and replaced him with Banri Kaieda. Not only is Kaieda’s vocal support for the TPP in line with Kan’s position, but also removed is Ohata’s opposition to opening up the Japanese agricultural sector, which was undercutting Kan’s leadership.
With Banri Kaieda at the helm of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Prime Minister Kan’s government has more chance of a breakthrough on Japanese trade policy, particularly with respect to opening Japan’s agricultural markets. Read more…
Author: Michael Cucek, MIT
On October 4, the Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution released its second determination, mandating that Ozawa Ichiro, the former leader and secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), be indicted for crimes related to a land deal carried out by his political fundraising organisation, the Rikuzankai. In particular, the committee determined that there was sufficient evidence pointing to Ozawa having directed his subordinates to file misleading and incomplete financial reports with oversight officials.
The now inevitable indictment of Ozawa will not have an immediate impact on the surface. Ozawa will retain his Diet seat and will continue to serve as a full member with all the duties and privileges of office. Read more…
Author: Haruko Satoh, CSIS
Kan Naoto’s re-election as leader of the ruling DPJ has given him the mandate to continue as prime minister. Most Japanese welcomed this outcome. They are dismayed by the state of national politics and the country’s inability to produce stable leadership since Koizumi Junichiro left office in 2006. Kan is the fifth prime minister since then.
But the path of political renewal in Japan is not over yet. For Kan’s re-election to become truly meaningful and restore the public sense that the change of power last August was the right choice, Kan needs to cast off the legacies of the 1955-regime of left-right tension within his party. 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: Rikki Kersten, ANU
On September 14 the DPJ emerged from its leadership contest between Naoto Kan and Ichiro Ozawa a divided party. This means that Japan’s voters will not see resolution of or even progress on crucial policy problems, including resolving the Futenma base relocation issue, rejuvenating the US-Japan relationship, managing the China relationship and the North Korea wildcard, balancing economic stimulus with fiscal austerity, and discussing the tax reform that Japan has to have. If Ozawa escapes indictment for a funding scandal next month, we can expect the next disruptive phase of Japan’s political realignment to begin.
While Kan won 721 to Ozawa’s 491 voting points, this was due to a pro-Kan surge amongst the party rank and file across the nation. The parliamentary party was split right down the middle, with Kan garnering support from 209 party members and Ozawa winning votes from 200 members. Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA
On September 14, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) faces a choice between two leaders from the same party who represent radically different ideals and policies. The repercussions of this choice will be felt throughout Japan in terms of the trajectory in which its political system develops and the course in which its economy tracks in the medium term.
The differences in the policies of the two candidates – Prime Minister Kan and former DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro – are clear. Ozawa supports a continuation of the DPJ’s big spending policies under the slogan of ‘putting people’s lives first’ and is hammering the DPJ’s anti-bureaucracy and decentralisation themes. In this respect he is staying true to the DPJ’s original 2009 manifesto. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
Ichiro Ozawa has been subject to a good deal of criticism over the past few days and for reasons not limited to his penchant for Kakuei Tanaka-style, traditionalist pork barrel politics. What Ozawa’s critics fail to understand though is that Japanese politics does not yet have a modernising centre that can hold.
Certainly, there are modernising reformers strewn across the political aisle. Yet neither party’s modernisers have the votes within their own party to guide reform policy through the Diet, and cross-aisle cooperation among modernisers is an idea whose time has not yet arrived. Read more…
Author: Andrew Levidis, Melbourne University and Kyoto University
There has always been an element of incongruity between Ozawa’s great political conception and his actual performance. His decision to challenge Prime Minister Kan Naoto for the presidency of the DPJ reflects the grimness that has crept into Japanese politics, disfiguring those who seek real reform, and an almost metaphysical need by Ozawa to defend his legacy and previous ambitions.
His challenge can be seen as a metaphor for what has gone wrong with the DPJ since its moment of triumph, and Ozawa’s last fateful chance to redeem himself and his party. Read more…
Author: Michael Cucek, MIT
Japan is a parliamentary democracy, but somehow the country is suddenly in the midst of a presidential election. There are two candidates, each with a distinct ideological cant and consequent distinct set of policy prescriptions. Both have their core supporters leaving the pair battling, quite publicly, for the allegiance of undecided voters. Unlike battles of the old days, where intra-party clashes were solved with promises of Cabinet and party posts or even exchanges of cash, the successful candidate in this election will likely have to charm the voters capable of putting him over the 50 per cent line. To capture these hearts and minds, both candidates are taking to the airwaves and the streets.
On the one side of the ledger is Ozawa Ichiro. Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, UNSW@ADFA
Japanese politics is heading for a showdown on 14th September when the ruling Democratic Party of Japan decides its next leader and prime minister. The contenders are the present incumbent, Prime Minister Kan Naoto, and the secretary-general in the previous Hatoyama administration, Ozawa Ichirō. If Ozawa is successful, Japan will have had three prime ministers in a little over three months.
The media have been waiting breathlessly for Ozawa’s decision on whether or not he would run for the DPJ leadership. 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
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, 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…
