The various newspapers are reporting that according to exit polls, the DPJ won somewhere between forty-three and fifty-one seats, falling short of the total needed to preserve control of the upper house.Once again the Diet is "twisted," barring the formation of a new coalition that enables the DPJ to retake control of the upper house.Adamu …
Category: Observing Japan Blog
Is Ozawa back?
If there is one lesson that this upper house campaign has taught us, it is a lesson that we all should have already learned: there is no stopping Ozawa Ichirō. Despite what looked like a marvelous coup by Hatoyama Yukio in getting Ozawa to step down as DPJ secretary-general, Ozawa has been a public critic …
Facing constraints in the alliance
Prime Minister Kan Naoto had his debut on the world stage at the G20 meeting in Toronto this week. While in Toronto he had his first meeting with US President Barack Obama.As Reuters notes, Kan met with Obama for a half-hour, considerably more time than Hatoyama got when he visited Washington in April (when Hatoyama …
The meaning of the Upper House election
On Thursday campaigning for the House of Councillors election scheduled for 11 July begins, as 440 candidates vie for 121 seats. (Michael Cucek has the breakdown here.)The significance of this election has been thrown into clear relief since Kan Naoto took over from Hatoyama Yukio as prime minister and head of the DPJ. What once …
Mr. Kan’s Third Way
The Third Way has, belatedly, arrived in Japan.The style of politics popular in advanced industrial democracies during the 1990s among center-left leaders keen to reconcile their left-wing parties to the rise of neo-liberalism and the onset of austerity after the 1970s had heretofore failed to surface in Tokyo. But with the ascendancy of Kan Naoto, …
The Kan system
The Kan government has formed, having retained eleven ministers from the Hatoyama government (as expected). Among the new faces in Kan's cabinet of "irregular forces" are Noda Yoshihko (finance), Yamada Masahiko (agriculture), Arai Satoshi (national strategy), Genba Kōichirō (administrative reform), and, perhaps most prominently, Renhō (government revitalization).Looking at the transition from the Hatoyama-Ozawa regime to …
It’s Kan!
Kan Naoto has been elected head of the DPJ and is line to become Japan's ninety-fourth prime minister this afternoon. He received 291 votes to Tarutoko Shinji's 129.(Image by Kenji-Baptiste OIKAWA and used under a Creative Commons license)
Meet the new cabinet, (mostly the) same as the old cabinet?
As Japan waits for the DPJ's Diet members to choose a new party leader and then for the Diet to confirm the new prime minister, the media is speculating about the new lineup for the cabinet and the party leadership.Among other items of speculation, Sengoku Yoshito is supposedly the front runner to succeed Ozawa as …
Continue reading Meet the new cabinet, (mostly the) same as the old cabinet?
The virtues of Kan
Kan Naoto, Hatoyama Yukio's second finance minister, was the first DPJ member to declare his intention to run in the party election scheduled for Friday — and it seems unlikely, for reasons outlined by Michael Cucek here, that he will be denied the job.What would be the significance of Kan's replacing Hatoyama?I think that what …
Tobias S. Harris 