Japan: a new direction

Asia:NZ contributor Vaughan Yarwood looks at the landslide victory by the leftist Democratic Party of Japan in the August 2009 elections. Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia:NZ.

As the results came in for Japan’s 30 August 2009 general elections the world’s news media searched for metaphors to capture the moment. They spoke of a ‘sea-change’, a ‘tsunami’, an ‘earthquake’. Of ‘revolution’ even. It was not that the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), a leftist amalgam of ruling-party defectors, social democrats and socialists, were not expected to do well. But the comprehensiveness with which they swept aside the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — winning more than 300 of the 480-seat lower house in the process — took most people by surprise.

The LDP, which had governed Japan almost without interruption since 1955, was under no illusion that the election would be tough. In recent years it had proved slow to respond to the deep-seated issues facing the country. Since the ‘Lost Decade’ of crippling deflation in the 1990s, Japan’s economic performance has been sluggish, and neither the reforms of the charismatic Junichiro Koizumi nor, more recently, large injections of government money to counter the effects of the global recession have had much impact.

Economic growth of 0.9 per cent in the latest quarter failed to impress analysts, who saw it as the unsustainable effect of government spending. Worryingly, consumer spending fell by 2.2 per cent year-on-year in July — the fastest increase on record — raising fears of renewed deflationary pressure.  Compounding the LDP’s woes was spiraling unemployment which in the closing days of the election campaign reached a record 5.7 per cent. As the ballot opened some 3.6 million Japanese were out of work — over a million more than a year ago.

The LDP, which presided over decades of high growth, full employment and rapidly improving living standards, eventually lost favour with an electorate unimpressed by a continued emphasis on infrastructure projects at a time of national crisis. It is common knowledge that by next year China’s economy will have overtaken that of Japan and almost a third of the country’s population will be pensioners. Voters also wearied of the LDP’s complacency and lack of clear direction — the government went through three leaders in quick succession. For many, the embarrassing gaffes, scandals and indecision that characterised the tenure of the latest incumbent, Taro Aso, were the last straw. Pushed into office by the resignation of Yasuo Fukuda, the conservative 68-year-old Aso had an approval rating at the time of the election of just 20 per cent.

‘I believe that everyone felt a great rage towards the Government’, said DPJ leader and likely new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama (pictured) when the election outcome was known. ‘Everyone was convinced that there had to be a change’. Hatoyama, the wealthy grandson of the founder of Bridgestone Tyres, said that he intended creating ‘a horizontal society bound by human ties, not a vertically-connected society of vested interests’.

In its campaign, the DPJ made much of the government’s failure to deliver improvements in people’s lives, and of its complicity with a pervasive bureaucracy — one responsible for instances of stunning incompetence, including in 2007 the loss of millions of personal-pension records.

What the DPJ trumpeted as seiken kotai — ‘regime change’ — involved more than the introduction of a new policy agenda, however. It struck at the very heart of the country’s political life. As, one after another the LDP’s veteran heavyweights fell, often to telegenic young opponents with little political experience, it became clear that the country was rejecting the entrenched system of patronage and closed-door decision-making in favour of a promised new era of political openness and accountability.

DPJ politician Kazumi Ota epitomises the country’s new direction. Just 24 years old when she became a member of parliament four years ago, Ota exudes youthful vitality. ‘I’m young, I’m a woman and I don’t have shigarami ties’, she declared on the campaign trail, referring to the self-serving relationship between politicians and bureaucrats.

What the DPJ will find harder to shake off is the notorious hereditary politics that for half a century has characterised the country’s power elite. To a greater extent that almost anywhere else, family dynasties control the Japan’s levers of power. Some 10 per cent of the DJP’s candidates ran in seats formerly occupied by family members. For the ruling LDP the figure was an astonishing 30 per cent. Even Shinjiro Koizumi, son of the former leader, (his grandfather and great-grandfather were also parliamentarians) was criticised for contesting his father’s seat.

Nor are the leaders of the two main parties immune to charges of hereditary politics. In the 1950s Aso’s grandfather was succeeded as prime minister by the grandfather of Hatoyama. Aso’s predecessors Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda also had political forebears and both resigned soon after taking office, prompting complaints about the inherent weakness of hereditary politicians. It is a system that, in the opinion of professor Koichi Nakano of Tokyo’s Sophia University, has led to ‘a significant diminishing of the pool of talent’ within the LDP.

It was this perceived vulnerability that led the founder of electronics maker Panasonic to set up the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management to train a new breed of politicians without such family connections.

As with much else, purging politics of heredity will take time. But there are indications that the 2009 elections have already proved significant, as Yukio Hatoyama, a 20-year-old student from Oita, observed. People showed more interest this time around, she said. ‘And having an interest in politics is the first step to building a good country’.

- by Vaughan Yarwood

Agenda For Change

In a notable departure from previous electioneering in Japan, the DPJ set out a clear — if ambitious — policy agenda. If translated into action, it will mark a distinct break from the country’s postwar politics.

The DJP’s socially-oriented policies include funding pre-school education, expanding student scholarships, free treatment for expectant mothers, a child benefit of US$3,300 a year until the age of 15 and the abolition of health insurance payments for people over the age of 75. Hatoyama also intends cracking down on the dubious practice known as amakudari — ‘descent from the heavens’ — in which retiring senior civil servants are handed jobs in industries they previously supervised.

The DJP proposes finding the money for this expensive reversal of the previous government’s neo-liberal policies by cutting government inefficiencies — something notoriously difficult in practice — and by scaling back projects such as Aso’s cherished museum of popular culture.

On the international front, Hatoyama has vowed to continue the tough stance on North Korea. The DJP stresses that the Japan-US alliance remains a priority but that it wants to create a ‘more equal’ relationship, and will review the issue of US bases in Japan.

Hatoyama no doubt will have caused unease in the United States with his declared intention of initiating a shift from diplomacy that takes its cues from Washington to one based on multilateral cooperation. ‘We must view the Asia-Pacific region, where we have increasingly close ties with other countries, as the place where Japan will live as a nation’, he said recently.

- Vaughan Yarwood

Images used under Creative Commons licence