As Japan heads into the final week of the political annus mirabilis that has been 2010 2009, Hatoyama Yukio, the face of political change as the first leader of a party other than the LDP to win a majority in more than a half century, finds himself under siege.The immediate cause — beyond falling public …
Tag: Japanese politics
Winter of discontent?
December has brought little but bad news for the Hatoyama government, which has now been in office for just over three months.The economy continues to struggle (and deflationary pressure continues to grow), US officials are displeased over the government's decision to delay on Futenma, and polls show the public souring on the new government.Two recent …
Open government
Amidst all the changes introduced by the Hatoyama government since it took office in September, it is easy to forget what may be the most revolutionary change of all: transparent government.The most visible example thus far is the Government Revitalization Unit's comprehensive review of government spending programs, ably chronicled by Michael Cucek here and here. …
Hatoyama restates his government’s mission
The 2009 extraordinary Diet session, the first under the leadership of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's cabinet, opened Monday with a speech by Hatoyama to a Diet populated by an overwhelming majority of parliamentarians from his Democratic Party of Japan. He declared Monday the first day of a "bloodless Heisei Restoration," a transformation without black ships …
The Hatoyama government will delay on defense policy
Busy with the hard work of introducing a new policymaking process, rewriting the 2010 budget from scratch so to make room for the programs promised in the DPJ's election manifesto, and finding a way to extract concessions from the Obama administration on the realignment of US forces in Japan, it is understandable that the Hatoyama …
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Three years of Observing Japan
This week marks the third anniversary of the birth of this blog.Needless to say, Observing Japan has grown in ways that I could hardly have foreseen three years ago when I returned to Japan to work for now-Lower House Member Asao Keiichiro — indeed, it has grown in ways that I could hardly have envisioned …
Ozawa whips the DPJ and the Diet into shape
Speaking at a convention of the Osaka branch of the DPJ, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi spoke succinctly of the role of the DPJ's backbenchers in the new government. Hirano said that not only is it unnecessary for DPJ backbenchers to ask questions in Diet proceedings, but also the DPJ's many first-term Diet members should …
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The end of an era
Nakagawa Shoichi, the finance minister under Aso Taro who, becoming infamous worldwide for his behavior at a G7 meeting in Rome in February, was forced to resign and then lost his seat in the August general election, was found dead at his home in Tokyo's Setagaya ward Sunday morning. Yomiuri notes an absence of external …
The DPJ’s quiet revolution
In a contribution to Foreign Policy's "Think Again" feature, Paul Scalise and Devin Stewart maintain that the DPJ victory will result in "the same old stagnation in Tokyo." While there are points worth considering in their piece — especially on foreign policy and the notion that the DPJ is "anti-capitalist" — on the whole Scalise …
Will the DPJ weather the global rebalancing?
David Brooks's latest column in the New York Times calls for a restoration of "economic values" in the United States, with the aim of making "the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy." Brooks sees a decline in traditional values of restraint behind the rise of consumer spending to ever greater portions of …
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Tobias S. Harris 