Party Time in Tokyo
What a New Government Will Mean for Japan’s Future
Article Summary and Author Biography
Japan's August election represented a political revolution. But how effective will the country's new government be in changing economic and foreign policy?
TOBIAS HARRIS is the author of the blog Observing Japan and a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. DOUGLAS TURNER is CEO of DW Turner and a former Japan Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Letter From
Since Yukio Hatoyama became prime minister of Japan, Washington has grown worried that the U.S.-Japanese alliance may be weakening. Can the two countries still find common interests?
Snapshot
In 1960, Japan and the United States signed a security treaty that has proven to be the basis for bilateral relations over the last half century. Now, fifty years later, how can Tokyo and Washington strengthen their relationship?
Last month, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won an overwhelming victory over the country's long dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The result marked only the second time the LDP has lost power since its creation in 1955.
The DPJ was founded in 1998 as an opposition party forged from outcasts of the LDP and the Japan Socialist Party, as well as other smaller parties and a sizable cadre of younger politicians. This unlikely mix had dealt an earlier blow to the LDP in 2007, when it became the largest party in the upper house of the Japanese Diet. Now, with its victory in the general election, it will form a new government and select a prime minister -- in all likelihood, Yukio Hatoyama, who replaced the visionary and forceful Ichiro Ozawa as leader of the party last May.
But despite the DPJ's convincing triumph, many observers in both Japan and the West remain doubtful about its capacity to govern. Some believe that the party's members hold fundamentally contradictory positions; others assert that regardless of the party's intentions it will be unable to control Japan's powerful bureaucracy. Such fears are misplaced, however. Although international reaction since the election has focused on the DPJ's calls to move Japan away from the market reforms of the past several decades, the party's electoral platform hews to the political mainstream.
Specifically, it has pledged to shore up the country's pensions and health systems, protect farmers and small and medium-size businesses (both traditional LDP constituencies), assist the swelling ranks of the working poor and temporary laborers, and provide child allowances. To fund such programs, the party promises to cut wasteful spending -- a side effect of decades of misrule by the LDP and a bloated bureaucracy...
