Japanese Prime Minister Naoto KAN
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama announced this week that he, his entire cabinet, and the powerful Ichiro Ozawa, Secretary-General of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), would resign. Hatoyama would be succeeded by Finance Minister Naoto Kan, a fiscal conservative who is one of the founders of the DPJ. This move, which comes less than a year after the the party swept to power with promises of change and a break with the past.
The Democrats now face their first major leadership challenge since taking office. While reshuffling the government has been common in post-war Japan, the big difference between the DPJ and the previously ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), is that the LDP has a big well of experienced leaders on which to call. By contrast, the DPJ is relatively young and is having to scramble to suddenly find suitable candidates for a number of key positions.
The political goal for the shake-up seems clear: After eight months of indecision and broken promises, Hatoyama bowed to party pressure to leave in advance of July’s elections for seats in the upper house of the Diet.
Japan is in transition
The choice of the 63-year-old Kan to succeed Hatoyama is not entirely unexpected, but highlights a dilemma in the DPJ leadership. Despite the fact that the DPJ ran on an agenda of reform and wants to represent change, Kan is closely associated with the government apparatus, being one of the founders of the DPJ and its leader on two occasions since the late 1990′s. Another rumored possibility for the post had been free-market supporter Shinji Tarutoko, who heads the House of Representatives Environmental Committee, but who was relatively unknown by establishment politicians. In other words, it seems that the party’s appetite for trying new approaches is muted.
All of the commotion surrounding the Prime Ministerial change is merely a distraction from Japan’s underlying trends: greater involvement on the international stage, including matters of defense and global security, and a pressing need to develop a new social structure that can accommodate Japan’s shrinking population base. The country is struggling to maintain growth in the face of this demographic crisis, and it remains to be seen whether Japan can rein in its debt, which stands at about 200% of the nation’s GDP.
Naoto Kan, the new Japanese Prime Minister, introduced his new Cabinet today (June 8th). Change in the Cabinet was hard to notice, as 11 ministers returned following the shakeup. The only minister to get the sack was Hirotaka Akamatsu, who oversaw the Agricultural Ministry and was widely blamed for mishandling of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease earlier this year in the Miyazaki Prefecture of southern Japan.
Of course, the next test of the DPJ will be the House of Councilors election in July. We have yet to see if they can resurrect the key messages that billowed their sails when the Democrats coasted to victory last year.
Kan has repeated his goal of reigning in the powerful Japanese bureaucracy in favor of elected politicians. This alone could have profound implications to the running of the country, but its effect remains to be seen, because reform in Japan always seems to proceed at a glacial pace.
Although the structure of the Cabinet and the policy direction of Kan seems unchanged, the new Cabinet does reflect one remarkable shift of power: Ichiro Ozawa no longer has the power over the Cabinet that he enjoyed under Hatoyama. This is largely because Ozawa is under a corruption probe that threatens to make the new government look like it is playing dirty, undermining the DPJ’s good-government promises just ahead of a key election.
Kan is taking great care to rid these insiders from the mix, and as a result his initial approval ratings have been remarkably boosted to 60%, well up from outgoing prime minister Hatoyama’s 20% approval rating last week. To keep its squeaky-clean image alive, the new DPJ Secretary-General has already promised a ban on all corporate or organizational donations to political campaigns.