Japanese vote for a change of guard
Posted: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 9:30 AM
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By Arata Yamamoto, NBC News Producer
TOKYO – Sunday's landslide victory for Japan's main opposition, Democratic Party of Japan, or DJP, is being heralded as a new beginning for Japanese politics, squarely putting an end to the near continuous postwar rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The Liberal Democrats only lost power once before in 1994, when a center-left coalition took over the helm of the nation for six months. But that was quickly followed by two years of a pseudo-comeback for the LDP when they combined forces with the polar opposite Socialist Party – but had to give their leader Tomiichi Murayama the front seat to run the nation.
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| Itsuo Inouye / AP |
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Yukio Hatoyama, leader of Japan's main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, speaks with red rosettes attached on victorious candidates' names in the background during the ballot counting for the parliamentary elections in Tokyo on Sunday. |
But Sunday’s election was a particularly stunning defeat for the incumbent party of Prime Minister Taro Aso with an unprecedented voter turnout of 69 percent, overwhelmingly ousting 181 politicians from the Liberal party, including former ministers, and replacing them with 143 freshman opposition candidates.
Still given the entrenched power of the Liberal Democrats, many voters are welcoming the change of party, but tempering their expectations.
"I don' have any high expectations for the Democrats. They're inexperienced and I don't think things will work out so smoothly," said 59-year-old office worker Kazuo Sasaki. "But it’s worth giving them a chance. We need to change the way things are done here."
Yasuhiro Tanaka, 28, agreed. "It was a process of elimination," he said. "There was absolutely no hope with the LDP."
Scion of political family
The leader of the Democrats, Yukio Hatoyama has his own thoughts about his party’s victory. "I believe people's anger directed at today's politics manifested itself into their hope in our party. And from that perspective, we will humbly strive to build a political system that addresses the voice of the public."
A former professor of business administration with a Ph.D from Stanford University in industrial engineering, Hatoyama, who is widely expected to become Japan’s next prime minister, left the LDP during the mid-90s to champion political reforms. But as a politician, he has been faulted by the Japanese media for lacking leadership skills and charisma.
"He's perhaps too nice and too intellectual to be an effective politician. His qualities are: He's very agreeable, balanced and sees two sides of the issue, a go-along get-along personality, and suddenly he has to become harder and sharper," said Professor Jeffery Kingston, who teaches at Temple University in Japan.
But he comes from a distinguished political family. His brother Kunio was most recently a minister within the Aso administration. And, ironically, since he just ousted the LDP, his grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama founded the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955 and served as its first prime minister.
Now, Hatoyama is challenging the very political institution built by his grandfather which led Japan out of its post-war recovery and created the world's second largest economy.
Modern Japanese politics is often characterized by the strength of government bureaucrats, particularly in conceiving and creating the nation's legislation. They were key characters during the great industrial leap of the 1960s, but in recent decades have been blamed for wasteful and bottleneck politics.
"I think it is embarrassing to have become so dependent on bureaucrats, and we will aim to create a political system which does not rely on them," Hatoyama said on election night.
As a departure from the previous party, the Democrats are planning to place as many as 100 of their parliamentarians within the government to monitor and check the budgetary and policy initiatives of the ministry officials.
That said, "DJP's future hangs primarily on economic recovery and that's not going to happen without being on the same page as the bureaucrats and the business people," said Kingston.
But the single biggest change may be that Japan is finally getting a two party political system in which no single political institution will be guaranteed a dominant role in Japanese politics.
"We're at a time of political competition. It’s still a transition period," said Kingston. Nevertheless, "DJP is entering a new era where voters feel they can hold them accountable and they will be scrutinized closely."
