Japan’s Prime Minister Calls It Quits

Hatoyama is the fourth Japanese prime minister to resign in four years (all of whom hung on in office for only a year or less). Along with him, controversial Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa also resigned, prompted by the ousted PM.
 
Hatoyama’s coalition government was doomed from the beginning, not least because the DPJ’s junior coalition partners (the Social Democratic Party, SDP, and the New People’s Party, both of which were only invited to join the coalition to keep them from blocking lawmaking in the Upper House where the DPJ lacks an absolute majority) supported very little on the DPJ’s policy agenda.

What’s more, the SDP threatened very early on to leave the coalition should Hatoyama decide not to keep his promise to reduce the US military presence on Okinawa. And last week, Hatoyama announced that Japan would stick with the existing 2006 US-Japan base re-location agreement to move the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from densely populated southern to northern Okinawa.

To be sure, Hatoyama should have thought more thoroughly about where to re-locate the US base before announcing a revision to agreement, but at least he tried for a few months not to do what essentially all post-war predecessors did before him: Cave in to Washington’s pressure regarding the US military presence and the burden on Okinawa.

Japan’s mainstream media (including the country’s two biggest newspapers, The Yomiuri Shimbun and The Asahi Shimbun) for its part covered Hatoyama’s difficulties and mishaps with great enthusiasm and the occasional schadenfreude. In fact, publishing daily accounts on Hatoyama’s shrinking public approval rates and obsessively focusing on his problems with the US base re-location issue and inner-party financial scandals left very little space for coverage on what the government has achieved over the last eight months.

Admittedly, that list is not terribly long, but Hatoyama was (as he promised on the election campaign trail) able to exclude the ministerial bureaucracy from cabinet meetings (which over decades stood for much of what was very wrong with Japanese democracy), increase monthly child allowance payments and introduce tuition-free high schools.     

And now what?

The DPJ will present a new Cabinet next Monday and Japan’s current Finance Minister Naoto Kan is the frontrunner to head it as new party boss and prime minister. Kan earned himself a reputation for fearlessness when as health minister he took on the ministerial bureaucracy over an HIV-tainted blood products scandal in the mid-1990s.

And courage is probably what the DPJ needs now with the upcoming Upper House elections scheduled to take place on 11 July. The DPJ’s plan was (or still is) to win an absolute majority in the Upper House to govern without sabotaging coalition partners. This is now most likely an overambitious goal, unless of course the results of all recent Upper House election-related opinion polls turn out to be fully inaccurate.

Should that not be the case (which is likely), Tokyo-based analyst Takeo Toshikawa reckons, the DPJ might choose to look for new (and less trouble-making) coalition partners such as the New Komeito Party to make sure that DPJ-initiated bills make it through the Upper House after 11 July.

Luckily for the DPJ, the Japanese electorate does not have a great deal of attractive alternatives to choose from on 11 July.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the country’s biggest opposition party, is driven by infighting and defections and was incapable of making any sort political capital out of the DPJ’s shrinking popularity and policy failures.

The choice for the Japanese voter on 11 July, it seems, is between the unpopular and the incompetent.