Japanese Voters Eye Fresh Start

Japan’s Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) will no longer be calling the shots after 30 August, if opinion polls can be trusted. According to the polls, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) will win next week’s general elections by a landslide, and its leader, Yukio Hatoyama, will become the country’s new prime minister.

Recent surveys conducted by Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second largest daily newspaper, and the Kyodo News agency indicate that the DPJ is set to win more than 300 of the 480 seats up for grabs in the lower house of parliament. The ruling LDP could end up with less than 100 seats, compared to the 300 seats it holds now.

In other words: A sweeping victory for the DPJ and an electoral disaster for the LDP, which has ruled in Japan since 1955 with a short 11-month long interruption in 1993-1994. 

Japan’s electorate, until now it would seem, had always chosen the LDP over the opposition, which it viewed as out of touch with the country’s political realities, characterized by close and eventually unhealthy ties between politics and business, financed by Japan’s banks. 

A (relatively) fresh face

Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ’s (by Japanese standards) youngish candidate for prime minister equipped with a PhD in engineering from Stanford University, is planning to put an end to much of this, or so he claims.

“Hatoyama comes from a political family (he is the grandson of Ichiro Hatoyama, one of the founding fathers of the LDP and prime minister in the 1950s), but he was never really that focused on a political career in the first place. That may give him a free-thinking angle,” Christopher W Hughes, professor of international politics and Japanese studies at the University of Warwick, UK, tells ISN Security Watch.

Japan’s ever-cautious electorate, however, is not necessarily that impressed yet:

"The Japanese people do not expect Hatoyama to change governance in Japan. I think people are just tired of the LDP and will want Hatoyama to focus on economic policies, securing solid economic growth,” Yoichi Tanaka, senior account executive at the software company Omniture INC in Tokyo, tells ISN Security Watch.

Indeed, there is much to fix.

“Fixing the pension system, bringing the economy out of recession, reducing economic inequalities and the public deficit and increasing spending on medical care is what the Japanese electorate wants most from the DPJ,” Paul Midford, associate professor and director of the Japan Program at Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, tells ISN Security Watch, citing recent opinion polls.

For the time being, however, Hatoyama is in the business of promising to hand out goodies to the electorate. The party’s campaign manifesto promises administrative reform and generous social spending, including: reorganizing Japan’s Y207,000 billion ($2,172 billion) budget; paying parents a Y312,000 ($3,273) a year child allowance; increasing pensions; scrapping school fees and road tolls; and cutting taxes for small companies to 11 percent.

How exactly the DPJ is planning to do all of this with a public debt likely to reach 200 percent of GDP this year has yet to be explained plausibly by Hatoyama and his aides.

And when it comes to Japan’s powerful ministerial bureaucracy, Hatoyama’s plans can be summed up in a word: disempowerment.  

Cabinet meeting agendas, Hatoyama promises, would no longer be set by unelected administrative vice ministers, and the era of deeply embedded ‘bureaucrat-led’ government will be brought to an end by posting 100 party Diet members to government ministries and agencies.
 
Further afield

On the foreign policy front, Washington is concerned about Hatoyama’s approach towards the US-Japan security alliance.

For starters, the DPJ is likely to demand a cut in funds Tokyo is providing for the stationing of 50,000 US troops in Japan. Japan currently funds this to the tune of $5 billion annually. (The official name of this program is ‘Host Nation Support’, but to the annoyance of Washington, within Japan it is referred to as the ‘sympathy budget’.) 

Furthermore, Hatoyama proposed a revision of the 1960 Japan-US Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), including provisions for the extradition of criminal suspects belonging to US forces in Japan. There is also said to be some second thoughts about Washington’s realignment plans for US troops in Japan.
  
While in February, Tokyo and Washington agreed to complete the transfer of the US Marine Corps’ Futenma Air Station on Okinawa to the coastal area of Camp Schwab in Nago (Okinawa) by 2014, Hatoyama envisions a relocation outside of Okinawa.

“The DPJ is divided over security, and although Hatoyama might have made a lot of promises to the old socialists about moving away from ties with the US, he will also have to please the right-wingers in the party. We may end up with a default position not that different from the LDP,” says Hughes.

Already Hatoyama revised his party’s past fierce resistance to allow Japanese naval fuel tankers to supply US warships operating in the Indian Ocean and is reconsidering his opposition to continue dispatching destroyers to guard against pirates off the coast of Somalia.

This is all part of waking up to the reality of Japan’s security responsibilities, Richard Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies at MIT in Massachusetts, tells ISN Security Watch:
 
“In opposition, it was easy to assault the LDP at every turn. The DPJ e.g. held up host nation support for a bit, voted against deployment of tankers to the Indian Ocean. They were new.  They were different. They were not the US' lap dog.

But, as the election nears, voters have begun to hear the old, oft-repeated LDP message that only the LDP can govern and maintain the alliance. As folks began to fret about the possibility that the LDP might be right, the DPJ began to tack toward the center, saying that the alliance with the United States should be more ‘equal’, while remaining the ‘centerpiece’ of Japan’s grand strategy," he says. 

DPJ up to the task?

While removing the LDP from power was the DPJ’s top priority for the last two years, Hatoyama will have to get down to ‘real’ business after 30 August, resuming Japan’s economic reform process, from which the LDP under current Prime Minister Taro Aso had all but retreated.

However, there is no consensus within the DPJ on economic reforms in general, and the pending privatization of Japan Post in particular - not least because Hatoyama is leading a party essentially made up of LDP defectors, ex-socialists and various other anti-LDP groups.

However, “At this moment, the really important point is that the DPJ is not the LDP as far as Japan’s electorate is concerned,” Samuels concludes.