Kan presses the reset button

Having successfully fended off Ozawa Ichirō's challenge to his leadership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan — indeed, having defeated Ozawa by an unexpectedly large margin, not only winning the vote among Diet members but also receiving the support of 249 of 300 district-level party chapters and sixty percent of the vote among local representatives — Prime Minister Kan Naoto finally has an opportunity to govern. After all, since succeeding Hatoyama Yukio in June Kan has spent much of his time focused on elections, first with the House of Councillors election in July and then the showdown with Ozawa.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that within days of his victory Kan reshuffled his cabinet and the DPJ leadership. I am generally skeptical of the efficacy of cabinet reshuffles. Doling out cabinet and sub-cabinet posts is, of course, one of the more important tools in a party leader's toolbox as he tries to induce good behavior on the part of backbenchers. But too much turnover at the head of ministries can stymie policy change. Every change of minister comes with a period of inactivity as the minister learns the job; reshuffle too frequently and by the time the minister is ready to lead, he will be on the way out. This problem was characteristic of LDP rule in particular.

During its first year in power, the DPJ avoided a wholesale reshuffle, despite its declining popularity (the usual time for a reshuffle) — even Kan held off when he took over from Hatoyama. However, having secured his control of the DPJ, giving him a two-year term as party leader during which the government will not have to face the electorate if it doesn't want to, I suppose it is only natural that Kan would want to appoint a cabinet of his own making. And the DPJ certainly benefits from more party members getting experience in government, giving that virtually none had any experience of power before the DPJ won last year.

The new cabinet is being billed as a "non-Ozawa" cabinet. No member of Ozawa's group received a cabinet post, although Kaieda Banri, who, while not being a longtime Ozawa associate, supported Ozawa's challenge, was appointed as economy minister. There will be little turnover in the cabinet's most important positions. Sengoku Yoshito stays on as chief cabinet secretary and Noda Yoshihiko will continue to serve as finance minister. With Okada Katsuya's becoming DPJ secretary-general, Maehara Seiji, formerly responsible for transport and Okinawan affairs, will move over to the foreign ministry. Kitazawa Toshimi stays on as defense minister, ensuring a degree of continuity as far as Futenma is concerned. Renhō and Genba Koichirō will stay on the cabinet's administrative reform posts. The cabinet also includes former Shimane governor (and non-MP) Katayama Yoshiro as minister of internal affairs and communications, with an additional portfolio for regional revitalization and Kano Michihiko as agriculture minister (a post he held in 1989 in the Kaifu government).

Kan has presented his new cabinet as a cabinet that will "make good on its promises." That remains to be seen, as the prime minister has a difficult road ahead.

Kan spent his time on the campaign trail talking about "jobs, jobs, jobs." But talking about employment is one thing — doing something about it is a different matter entirely. The rising yen has triggered more hollowing out in the manufacturing sector, as businesses relocate to cheaper countries within the region. A recent METI survey found, for example, that forty percent of manufacturing sector respondents would move factories overseas were the yen to continue to rise. In the immediate aftermath of the DPJ election the Bank of Japan did intervene in foreign exchange markets, which has at least temporarily halted the yen's rise (although Felix Salmon suggests that since the BoJ did not sterilize its intervention this time, it could have anti-deflationary effects).

But as Richard Katz argues in the Financial Times, intervention to weaken the yen is little more than a temporary fix. He notes that a weak yen does nothing to help wean Japan off export-dependent growth, and cannot reverse the long-term trend towards a stronger yen. (And if Japan's is but the first in a series of competitive devaluations with its trading rivals in the Eurozone, it is hard to see what Japan will gain from intervention.)

The problem for Kan is that the path from short term to long term is perilous. In the short term, economic success will depend on the traditional export-led model, meaning that when a survey reveals that Japan's manufacturers will accelerate offshoring if the yen continues to strengthen, a government focused on economic recovery has little choice but to pressure the BoJ to intervene. But over the longer term, Japan needs to revitalize the service sector to produce a more balanced growth model (while trying to put the government's finances on a healthier trajectory).

This objective, easily the overriding purpose of the Kan government and its successors, would be difficult enough in the best of political circumstances. These are not the best of political circumstances.

First, although Kan has a new mandate as DPJ president, he still has work to do consolidating his control of the party. Whether Okada will be able to help him in the post as secretary-general remains to be seen — as Michael Cucek notes, Okada may not be the ideal man for the job, seeing as how his appointment to the post was not uncontested. The main problem within the party may still be Ozawa. While Kan's margin of victory may silence Ozawa for the moment, it remains to be seen how Ozawa will react to Kan's decision to exclude Ozawa's lieutenants from the cabinet and party leadership. I do not expect Ozawa to leave the party, not least because it is far from certain that he would get many to follow him out, especially now that the Kan government has a bit more buoyancy in the polls. Having failed to unseat Kan, Ozawa may recede into the kind of role I thought he might take earlier, that of an elder statesman, periodically declaiming on or critiquing the government's decisions but not actively organizing an intra-party opposition.

But while Ozawa may be less of a problem, Kan will still have to contend with backbenchers unhappy with the direction taken by the government, as Kan implicitly acknowledged by suggesting that he will have a "cabinet of 412" (referring to the number of DPJ legislators). The inclusion of DPJ MPs in policy deliberations is unavoidable as the Kan government tries to revise or scale back the party's promises in the 2009 manifesto, but it need not be cumbersome if the prime minister is able to take control of the policy agenda.

Whether he is able to will depend on the opposition. Kan still has to find a way to coax the opposition parties to support his proposals, without which they will die in parliamentary proceedings. That the Kan's approval ratings have shot up to the same level as when he took over should help him — if he does not squander public support through indecision or inaction. Arguably the only way Kan can succeed is by doing what Koizumi did: appealing to the public directly in order to break the resistance of opposition parties and opponents within his own party. But to bring the public along Kan has to offer something in the first place. The challenge for Kan, then, is to develop an economic program that includes macro- and microeconomic policies, that attacks wasteful spending, includes deregulation and tax reform, and promises something better for the public. If the government is incapable of developing this program internally, Kan should take a page from the playbook of prime ministers past and convene a blue-ribbon advisory council headed by Kan and composed of prominent figures from business, labor, academia, the bureaucracy, and the political opposition. The commission would have to be as much a public relations exercise as a policymaking exercise, regularly issuing statements and drafts that reveal the emerging program and allowing the process to dominate public discussion.

The turn to advisory-group policymaking would be at odds with the DPJ's professed desire for cabinet-led policymaking, but at this point I'm not sure that the Kan government has much choice. I've lost count of the number of "growth strategies" the DPJ-led government has issued over the past year, but whatever the number, it's too many. The public is willing to give Kan and the DPJ another chance, but it is clear that what they have been doing isn't working. 

If Kan is unable to bring the public along with him, the outcome will be easy enough to predict: low public support, opposition obstructionism, and unrest within the DPJ, the same cycle that has brought low every prime minister since Koizumi.

Ozawa's last stand?

"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." — Enoch Powell

Returning to his familiar role as Ozawa Ichirō's trusty factotum, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio announced Thursday that he will be supporting Ozawa in a bid to unseat Prime Minister Kan Naoto in next month's DPJ party leadership election. Ozawa himself has yet to make an official announcement, but much like when Hatoyama was DPJ secretary-general under Ozawa, Ozawa conveyed his intentions to Hatoyama, and Hatoyama revealed them to the public. Naturally Hatoyama's backing Ozawa after earlier indicating his support for Kan is an insult to the prime minister.

I have held off from commenting on the possibility of an Ozawa run at the party leadership and premiership because the idea struck me as patently absurd (for reasons that Michael Cucek captured well here and here).

And yet here we are, with Ozawa on the brink of entering the ring once more. I suppose on the plus side, at least he's competing for a public post, one that would force Ozawa to assume public responsibility instead of hiding out of sight.

There is no shortage of speculation about Ozawa's motives for running, having to do with his tenuous legal position, his desire to reinsert himself into the policymaking process by running, losing, and then bargaining for an important post, or his genuine desire to, in Hatoyama's words, "to risk his life on behalf of the country." I have long since given up trying to read Ozawa's mind and am willing to believe that any, or all, or none of these reasons is the real reason for Ozawa's decision.

Whatever his reasoning, the consequences could be dramatic. The best-case scenario would be that Ozawa is simply unable to muster enough support and goes down to an embarrassing defeat that is a prelude to his departure from politics. It is unclear just how much support from the party's parliamentary caucus Ozawa can count on — for my part, I have always thought that the media has exaggerated the extent to which Ozawa can rely on an "army" of young MPs indebted to him for his assistance. Even more unknowable is the extent of Ozawa's support among the party's rank-and-file members, who will also be voting in the party election. Given the near-universal public disapproval (including DPJ supporters) of Ozawa, it is worth asking whether there are still enough pockets of support for the former party leader to make his candidacy viable.

And if he were, somehow, to defeat Kan and take the premiership? Many seem to think that Ozawa's becoming DPJ leader would be the catalyst for the long-awaited political realignment (although Your Party's Watanabe Yoshimi insists that the DPJ will break regardless of what Ozawa does). It is easy enough to see how Ozawa could trigger the realignment. Remember the "purge" of Ozawa loyalists that marked the transition from Hatoyama to Kan? Presumably the "magistrates" who opposed Ozawa and have occupied important positions under Kan would have little to look forward to under Ozawa, and would have two options outside of the cabinet: build anti-mainstream "factions" within the DPJ to challenge Ozawa, thereby completing the LDP-ization of the DPJ, or leave the party altogether to join with Watanabe or form yet another new political party. 

The reality is that while at another point in his career Ozawa might have been able to deliver a miracle, untwisting the Diet by encouraging members of other parties to defect or hammering out a new governing coalition, there is good reason to believe that Ozawa is out of miracles. As Kan has found as he has tried to coax the opposition parties to cooperate, with the DPJ reeling the opposition parties have the upper hand. The DPJ will pay a steeper price than the opposition parties for inaction, particularly as the economy worsens. Add Ozawa's unpopularity and his notoriety as a living symbol of the bad, old politics and the opposition's advantage grows. And if a Prime Minister Ozawa were the head of a nominally united but fractured DPJ his bargaining power would be undermined even further. Whoever wins the party election will still face a miserable political situation. Having Ozawa as prime minister would only make the DPJ's situation even more difficult.

It is ultimately for that reason that I suspect that Ozawa will provide another demonstration of Enoch Powell's maxim, adding a final defeat to a lengthy political career that has seen its share of defeats along with extraordinary victories, arguably none more extraordinary the DPJ's victory a year ago next Monday. Ozawa simply does not have a compelling case for why he should take charge of the government at this juncture — and I think that the party's voters know it.

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 looked to be a referendum on the leadership of Hatoyama and DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichirō — a referendum that polls suggested that the DPJ would not win — is now an election on the future of Japan, perhaps to an even greater extent than last summer's historic House of Representatives election. If the DPJ can retain control of the upper chamber, it will have three years before it will have to face the voters again in an election, provided that no snap election is called in the meantime. Those are three years that the government can use to make tough political decisions that a government with a shorter time horizon might be less inclined to make, like, say, a consumption tax increase.

And so this election is critical for Japan's future. For the Japanese people, there's not much of a choice. Under the DPJ Japan now has a prime minister who is everything that his predecessor was not: Kan is clearly willing to take a position, stick to it, and make his government follow along. He is devoted to clean politics and dynamic political leadership, and under his watch the DPJ once again looks like a party capable of bringing substantial change to how Japan is governed.

Much of the discussion during the campaign will focus on the government's plans related to the consumption tax and deficit reduction more broadly. But once again this election is less about the competing policies offered by the DPJ, the LDP, and the smaller parties than about how Japan is governed. The choice is between unified DPJ government that will face few institutional checks as it attempts to introduce sustainable growth, sustainable government finances, and sustainable social security and a divided system in which the government will have to cobble together working coalitions in order to pass legislation in the upper house (or use its lower house majority to pass legislation over the upper house's objections).

In other words, voters have to decide whether they're willing to tolerate an "elective dictatorship" for the next three years as the Kan government sets to work implementing the DPJ's modified but still ambitious political program or whether they would prefer that the LDP, Your Party, Komeitō, and the other parties retain a perch from which to challenge the government and retard its progress.

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, Third Way politics may get another lease on life in Japan.

In his maiden policy speech as prime minister on 11 June, Kan explicitly spoke of a "third way" to the reconstruction of the Japanese economy. Rejecting the first way, what he identifies as the ideology of the construction state (shared prosperity through public works), and the second way, "extreme market fundamentalism" focused on supply side reform at the expense of public welfare, Kan proposed a third way that would target the budget deficits that he says have produced ongoing stagnation and eroded confidence in the social security system. In short, he is trying to break what I've described elsewhere as an impossible trinity of deficit reduction, renewed, balanced, and low-carbon-emitting growth, and robust welfare provision.

What follows is a set of policies intended to create a "Strong Economy," "Strong Government Finances," and "Strong Social Security." 

His proposals on the first point are a reiteration of the DPJ's prevailing position on the economy: the need to balance external and domestic demand, to be realized through a combination of intra-Asian trade, tourism, Green technology, and support for families and the elderly.

On the second point, Kan alluded to the specter of Greece — an allusion that will be repeated in other times and places in the coming years — to make the case for aggressively attacking Japan's bloated national debt with efforts to cut wasteful spending and fundamental tax reform, which would undoubtedly include a consumption tax increase. Naturally he appealed to the LDP to cooperate with the government on this issue.

Finally he turned to social security, identifying a secure social security system as critical for economic growth. Effectively he argued that a shaky social security system in an aging society triggers hoarding on the part of middle-aged and senior citizens concerned about their well-being in retirement.

The similarities with the Third Way politics of Blair and Clinton are not accidental. Kan, a veteran of Japan's reformist, pragmatic left, is at once trying to unleash and humanize Japanese capitalism. He praises Koizumi's supply-side reforms for promoting the restructuring of Japanese businesses, but despairs of their impact upon Japanese society in the form of unemployment and persistent deflation.

While Kan arguably speaks more fluently about economic policy than any prime minister since Koizumi — his speech was largely free of the airy fairy rhetoric that characterized Hatoyama's pronouncements — it is difficult to see Kan's Third Way having any more success than the Anglo-American Third Way, which in retrospect seemed to do little more than promote the Casino Capitalism that produced the financial crisis that has arguably wiped out whatever gains were made to the state's role in welfare provision and plunged both countries ever deeper into debt. The point is not that Kan is foolish for trying to reconcile what appear to me at least as irreconcilable political goals: the political environment demands that the government addresses all three, not least the problems in the social security system. Instead, it seems likely that over time Kan will be forced to focus on one goal at the expense of the others — and that the privileged goal will be deficit reduction.

Even without Kan's embrace, it is likely that deficit reduction would become the government's primary goal with Greece serving as "focusing event," with Kan's government full of deficit hawks, and with the finance ministry still a potent force in policymaking. But with Kan himself having embraced the issue in strong terms, there appears to be little doubt that his government will prioritize deficit reduction above all else, to the point of the DPJ's including a pledge to increase the consumption tax in its manifesto for next month's upper house election (perhaps not a bad move politically with a Yomiuri poll showing sixty-six percent support for a consumption tax increase). Kan has also stated that within the month his government will establish 2020 as a goal for restoring the government's primary balance to surplus.

The question, however, is whether deficit reduction will lead to sustainable growth and secure social security spending. For example, I find it difficult to believe that the government will able to promote greater domestic demand, let alone sustain existing domestic demand while taxing consumption at higher levels. Deficit reduction is undoubtedly valuable in its own right, it's just difficult to see how the Kan government will be able to make good on the totality of its economic program. Can the government really cut enough waste and raise enough tax revenue to shrink its deficits while expanding programs to promote economic growth?

I think that the pursuit of deficit reduction will have implications for Japan's foreign and security policies. The first challenge, however, is figuring out exactly what has changed: Yomuiri sees a new realism in the DPJ's latest manifesto (discussed here at Twisting Flowers), but the reality is that apart from the new government's emphasis on rebuilding relations with the US and the call for defense transparency in China, the DPJ is putting in words what it has already been doing since taking power, especially in its focus on stronger bilateral ties with South Korea, Australia, and India. And really, the Hatoyama government was not nearly as soft on China — or as opposed to the US-Japan alliance — as the contemporary wisdom in Washington held.

Moreover, the Kan government's overtures to the US can be overstated: even the formulation of support for the alliance voiced in Kan's address last week was more like former LDP Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo's, in which the alliance is viewed largely in terms of its role in providing stability in Asia, than the vision of the alliance as resting on a foundation of shared values and dedicated to the promotion of democracy in the region. Like Fukuda, Kan recognizes that stable, constructive relations with Japan's neighbors, China most of all, are essential, and that the US-Japan alliance is valuable insofar as it contributes to Japan's Asia policy aims.

But in the Kan government's unflinching support for last month's agreement on Futenma, the new government is clearly interested in bolstering the US pillar of Japan's foreign policy. What I wonder is whether the DPJ's renewed interest in the security relationship is a function of its focus on deficit reduction. As the government looks to reduce spending, DPJ officials may increasingly be coming to the realization that austerity combined with regional uncertainty means that for the foreseeable future Japan will be dependent on US deterrent power. While the new government is quietly hedging against the possibility that the US commitment to Asia might weaken through its focus on bilateral cooperation with regional powers and its growing acceptance of the need to loosen restrictions on arms exports (which would lower the cost of bolstering Japanese's own conventional capabilities), the DPJ clearly accepts that for the foreseeable future it will be necessary to maintain a constructive security partnership with the US, even if the party continues to hope for an "equal" partnership.

It is open to debate whether austerity is leading the Kan government into a more enthusiastic embrace of the US (or even whether the embrace is more or less enthusiastic than the Hatoyama government's or any LDP government's for that matter). The DPJ may simply be free or cheap riding irrespective of concerns about austerity in the future. Or it may sincerely believe that the status quo is more or less the best option for Japan when it comes to coping with the rise of China.

However, I think the proposal to relax the three arms-exporting principles is a sign that the DPJ is sensitive to the costs of defending Japan and, therefore, that while the alliance may provide the most cost-effective means of national defense (provided measures are introduced to lessen the domestic political costs of US bases on Japanese soil), the government should look for ways to reduce the costs of Japan's providing its own defense in due time.

In short, at home and abroad the DPJ is performing balancing acts, pursuing multiple and at times conflicting goals that require flexibility on the part of the government — precisely the reason why Ozawa and other politicians have called for a stronger Westminster-style executive over the past two decades. Whether the government will be up to these challenges even with reform remains to be seen.

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 the new DPJ cabinet, Michael Cucek reviews the history of the DPJ's coming to power and the nature of the Ozawa's strategy and concludes that under Kan, "the DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back."

It is hard to disagree. Indeed, the haste with which Kan Naoto and his "Seven Magistrate" deputies have tried to break with Ozawa — Kan's telling the former secretary-general to keep quiet, new DPJ election chief Azumi Jun's decision to review Ozawa's strategy of running two candidates in three-seat districts — are surely just the beginning of what will be weeks and months of distancing the party from Ozawa. More than that, Kan's emphasis on grassroots politics, the basis for Kan's calling his cabinet a "cabinet of irregulars" (or commandos), stands in marked contrast to Ozawa's courtship of the same interest groups that had long sustained the LDP in power.

What does this "classic" approach mean for the DPJ's plans to build a top-down policymaking process?

Perhaps the biggest change is that under Kan and DPJ secretary-general Edano Yukio the party will undo the concentration of power in the office of the secretary-general that occurred under Ozawa. Most notably the party has accepted the restoration of the policy research council, the primary demand of the reform movement that emerged earlier this year.

The new PRC, however, will look nothing like the LDP's PRC, not least because there is no indication that Kan will roll back the restrictions on contact between backbenchers and bureaucrats that the Hatoyama government promulgated upon taking power. Genba, the minister for public service reform, will serve simultaneously in the cabinet and as the PRC chair. Genba himself said in his first press conference that the "former PRC" is not being restored, that the new PRC will not pose a threat to the government's plans to unify policymaking in the cabinet. Instead it appears, at least based on Genba's remarks, that the PRC will serve as a forum for two-way communication between cabinet and party. As a member of the cabinet, Genba's responsibilities will include explaining the government's policies to backbenchers in addition to facilitating debates about new policies among MPs. The principle of collective responsibility ought to restrain Genba from using his post to challenge the government: as a cabinet minister he is obligated to defend the government's decisions once they have been made.

The new PRC will enable backbenchers, especially first-term backbenchers, to participate in policy debates and perhaps generate new policy ideas — but there is no sense that it marks a return to bottom-up policymaking in which party members wield a veto over every government decision.

In addition to creating a new PRC that is directly linked to the cabinet, the Kan government will keep the new secretary-general closer to the government — literally. Edano may occupy an office within the Kantei. The result would be that the secretary-general would act more like a political adviser to the prime minister than the autonomous strategist that Ozawa had become, and, as Edano said in his initial remarks, would be responsible for defending the government's decision before the voting public. (The Kan-Edano relationship will invariably differ than the Hatoyama-Ozawa relationship not least because Kan will not be overshadowed by his secretary-general in the public's eye.)

The result is that under Kan the DPJ will try to replace a government in which the ruling party had fewer veto players but in which the party's one veto player was at least as powerful as the prime minister with a government in which the party may have more veto player but in which the prime minister is more powerful, more visible to the public, and more capable of controlling party officials. There will be more players involved in policy debates, but my sense is that Kan, with the help of Sengoku Yoshito, the new chief cabinet secretary, will not be reluctant to remind his subordinates of who is in charge of the government.

Of course, the question hanging over this new "un-Ozawa" system is whether Ozawa himself will accept it. Freed of formal responsibilities, Ozawa will now have the time to forge his political loyalists into an Ozawa faction should he want to, which would of course make life difficult for the Kan government. Inevitably the new regime will have to make its peace with Ozawa — or Ozawa will have to restrain himself from intervening in policymaking and political strategy.

Nevertheless, under Kan the DPJ has a prime minister who may be even more devoted to building a Westminster-style system than his predecessor. The DPJ may  have made some necessary concessions to the party's MPs, but the goal remains strengthening the role of the prime minister and the cabinet at the expense of bureaucrats and backbenchers.

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 secretary-general, and Noda Yoshihiko, now the vice finance minister, is said to be the front runner to replace Kan as finance minister.

I would expect, however, that if elected, Kan Naoto will make very few changes to the Hatoyama cabinet, not least because the DPJ has stressed the importance of continuity in office for political appointees (and the prime minister, although it has obviously failed at that). Beyond this principle, one wonders whether the new prime minister will actually need a new cabinet, given that the one task Hatoyama actually succeeded at was selecting a cabinet composed of heavyweights representative of the DPJ's various groups and perspectives. There might be more changes to subcabinet positions, but even there, the DPJ has stressed the importance of cooperation among the political appointees within the ministries.

Hatoyama did not fail because of his cabinet, although Kamei Shizuka and some other cabinet ministers undoubtedly made his life more difficult. It was difficult to see how a reshuffle could have helped Hatoyama, and it is difficult to see how a dramatic overhaul of the cabinet will help Kan.

Obviously Hirano Hirofumi, appointed largely as a Hatoyama confidante, will be out as chief cabinet secretary — he might be the one cabinet member truly deserving of the ax. Otherwise it is far from obvious who should be replaced. And I for one hope that Okada stays on as foreign minister.

UPDATE: After initial indications that the new cabinet would form today, it appears that Kan — with Sengoku Yoshito emerging as the likely chief cabinet secretary — will not form a cabinet before Tuesday. That may be for the best, but I will still be surprised if it looks drastically different from the Hatoyama cabinet.

Regime change?

It seems that in addition to Hatoyama's resigning from the premiership, Ozawa Ichirō will resign as secretary-general of the DPJ.

If Ozawa does resign — together with his lieutenants in various leadership positions within the DPJ with him — and actually manages to retire from politics and not try to run the party from the shadows, the twin resignations of Hatoyama and Ozawa may actually provide the DPJ with an opportunity to reclaim the hope that accompanied the party's victory last year.

That Hatoyama and Ozawa were at the head of the new regime when the DPJ took power was a bit strange. Of course they were among the party's most senior and experienced politicians. There really was no alternative, and no other candidate — aside from Okada — was capable of challenging last year's passing of the torch from Ozawa and Hatoyama (thanks to Maehara Seiji's disastrous tenure as party leader). But these two hereditary politicians whose careers began in the LDP wound up at the head of a parliamentary majority composed largely of newcomers to politics, very few of whom had relatives in politics. The DPJ's promise was less in its policy program, aside from its institutional reforms, than in the new blood it injected into the Japanese political system. But between their corruption scandals and the fact that no one could tell just what Ozawa's role was in policymaking, the DPJ diarchy managed to squander its new majority.

More than Hatoyama's, Ozawa's departure provides the DPJ with a chance to reclaim some of the energy. It will enable a party leadership to abandon Ozawa's courtship of fading interest groups and focus once again on speaking to floating voters. Inevitably the next secretary-general will not overshadow the prime minister, meaning that the secretary-general might actually help the prime minister sell his policies to the public while corralling the party's backbenchers.

At the same time, however, the new secretary-general will not inspire the same fear in the party's backbenchers. The result could be more give and take between the leadership and the rank-and-file — or it could be complete chaos.

Ultimately it will depend on the prime minister, whether Kan, Okada, or someone else entirely. With decisive leadership at the top the policymaking system the DPJ tried to put in place when it took power might work better than it did under Hatoyama.

Hatoyama departs

It appears that the inevitable has happened: NHK reports that Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio has informed the DPJ leadership that he intends to step down.

Hatoyama, of course, has no one to blame but himself. In the nine months since he took office, he has failed as a manager of his cabinet, as the head of the DPJ, and as the leader of his country. Unable to make up his mind, he groped from blunder to blunder, before finally making a controversial decision on Futenma without doing any of the work to convince a skeptical public of its merits.

The good news is that his successor should, to a certain extent, have an opportunity to press the reset button, seeing just how much dissatisfaction with the prime minister was behind growing dissatisfaction with the DPJ. The bad news is that Hatoyama will leave his successor the poison pill of the latest agreement over Futenma, which the public overwhelmingly opposes and which appears to be more or less unimplementable, and with an uphill battle for the House of Councillors next month. And that's without mentioning lingering problems concerning the long-term future of the Japanese economy.

And so the US gets its wish: the "loopy" Hatoyama is gone, having overstayed his welcome and squandered whatever goodwill last year's election earned him. His successor — whoever he is (given that in all likelihood the DPJ will plan for a smooth transition to Kan or Okada) — will have to set to work immediately fixing the DPJ's standing with the public, starting with yet another attempt to fix Futenma in a way that satisfies Okinawans and the general public.  He'll also have to do what Hatoyama failed to do: make Ozawa serve the prime minister, another failure that ultimately doomed Hatoyama. The US, meanwhile, would be wise to give the new prime minister plenty of space this time around.

Hatoyama accommodates the US on Futenma

It may have taken a few months longer than I expected, but it appears that the Hatoyama government may have finally accommodated itself to the 2006 agreement on the realignment of US forces. The US and Japanese governments have reached an understanding regarding the future of Futenma following Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Tokyo.

The latest bilateral agreement largely reaffirms the 2006 roadmap: the Hatoyama government has agreed to the construction of a new runway somewhere in the vicinity of Camp Schwab at Henoko Bay, with the details regarding the precise location and the method of construction to be decided by President Obama's visit to Japan in autumn. The US, meanwhile, agreed to disperse some training activities from Okinawa to elsewhere in Japan. The Hatoyama government has also stated that it will campaign for the inclusion in the Two-Plus-Two statement due 28 May a pledge to return bases in Okinawa to Japanese ownership within ten to fifteen years.

The Hatoyama government's work is by no means complete. Not only will it have to coax prefectural and local officials in Okinawa into not making too much of a fuss, but the government will also have to work to preserve the governing coalition. Fukushima Mizuho, Social Democratic Party chief and consumer affairs minister, replied to the news by asking why the prime minister went ahead with talks with the US without securing the support of the Okinawan people and his own coalition. Whether Fukushima's remarks are the prelude to the SDPJ's pulling out of the coalition remains to be seen. Even more troublesome for the prime minister could be the opposition of Ozawa Ichiro, the secretary-general of his own party. Despite his professions to having no role in policymaking, Ozawa has not refrained from taking a hard line in calling for relocation of Futenma outside of Okinawa entirely. Responding to the latest agreement, Ozawa said it would be "difficult" to secure the acquiescence of the Okinawan people (which, one would think, would be at least partly Ozawa's job as secretary-general).

It is tempting to criticize the Hatoyama government for its supposed "about face" on Futenma. However, from the beginning of this dispute the government has repeatedly stressed that it was keeping all options on the table, including the reaffirmation of the 2006 agreement as it stands. As I've said before, the Hatoyama government was acting in good faith. It genuinely wanted to review the 2006 agreement in the hope of finding something better. Had the US government not reacted so harshly to the Hatoyama government's fairly modest request, and perhaps even signaled its willingness to offer concessions early on this dispute could very well have been contained and even resolved months ago. As it stands, prolonged public exposure gave the Okinawan public time to mobilize, making it that much harder for the Hatoyama government to secure domestic approval for a slightly revised agreement.

While the Hatoyama government may have been genuinely open to the 2006 agreement from the start, one cannot rule out the possibility that Hatoyama has genuinely come to believe that the 2006 agreement is by and large the best option. Given that the prime minister has been rather guarded about his preferences, it is difficult to say. However, Hatoyama has certainly made more frequent use of phrases like "national interest" in recent weeks than he did a mere nine months ago. As the dispute wore on, he became noticeably more inclined to speak of US bases in terms of regional security and deterrence (something Martin Frid noticed). Presumably Hatoyama will be expected to give an honest account of his reasoning to his own party, his party's coalition partners, and local officials in the days to come.

The damage to his government has, of course, already been done, because the damage to the government's reputation had less to do with the substance of the realignment plan — about which the public is divided — than with the government's gross incompetence in its handling of the issue. Despite its persistent efforts to remind the public that all options were on the table, I wonder whether the public will see the government's actions as anything but capitulation after months of dithering. At the very least the government has removed the issue from the front burner, freeing it to direct its (and the public's) attention to other matters before the upper house election expected to be held in July.

What of the US-Japan alliance? Despite the warnings from Washington of the damage that Hatoyama was doing to the alliance by asking for time to consider whether there might be a plan that would satisfy all parties, the reality is that the alliance is more durable than the Cassandras thought. That is at least in part thanks to China's latest maritime mischief and North Korea's torpedoing of the Cheonan. The idea of a desire on the part of the Hatoyama government to replace the US-Japan alliance with a Sino-Japanese entente was always far-fetched, but it seemed more plausible among some in the shadow of the Futenma. 

Indeed, in retrospect the reaction of US officials and commentators to the Hatoyama government's request seems even more overblown given the lack of histrionics in Washington in response to Britain's new coalition government, given that both Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nicholas Clegg have questioned the US-UK "special relationship" in terms not altogether different from the DPJ. (Stephen Walt puts the attitudes of both governments in wider context here.) The difference, of course, is that whereas Britain has to find the right balance between its ties between the US and the European Union, Japan has to navigate between the US and China. It goes without saying that London's relations with Brussels do not cause nearly as much anxiety in Washington as Tokyo's with Beijing. But recognizing the difference does not excuse the overreaction. The Hatoyama government was not the first and will not be the last government of a US ally in Asia to argue with the US while trying to maintain a constructive relationship with China. The sooner Washington recognizes that the better it will be for both the US and its allies.

Meanwhile, this new agreement does not mean that the DPJ is abandoning its belief in a balanced, Asia-centered foreign policy in which the alliance is important but not all-consuming. "Resolving" Futenma is a necessary first step to actually discussing what the alliance should look like as the DPJ continues to pursue closer bilateral ties throughout Asia — and not just or primarily with China.

Why did Hatoyama go after Futenma first?

With little surprise, the Hatoyama government has decided to postpone a decision on the future of Futenma, after alienating both the Okinawan people and the US government with its indecisiveness on the issue. Reuters reports that after months of treating the end of May as the deadline for solving the dispute, the government has announced a new target of November.

The damage has, of course, already been done, now that the government's approval ratings have sunk below twenty percent and with the DPJ's looking certain to fall short of a majority in the House of Councillors in this summer's election. As Michael Cucek suggests, Hatoyama may be holding on to power simply because no DPJ member wants the responsibility for leading the party to near-certain defeat in the election.

When the history of the Hatoyama government is written, the central question that will have to be answered is why it made Futenma the top priority of its government. While the Hatoyama government has been up to other things — some good (calling bureaucrats to justify their programs, liberalizing campaigning practices), some not so good (its ambiguous record on public works) — it is not an exaggeration to say that the government has been mortally wounded by the dispute over Futenma, not because of the government's position per se, but because of its inability to take a position. Arguably it is due to his mishandling of Futenma above any other issue that has led Hatoyama to be branded as a poor leader, for good reason.

It is truly mystifying why the Hatoyama government not only threw itself into the Futenma morass shortly after taking office, but took on the problem without a clear plan of action. The easiest — the wisest — course of action would have been to delay. The relocation was already delayed, thanks to LDP foot-dragging. The transition to a new, inexperienced ruling party offered the perfect excuse for delaying the issue further. At the very least the government could have stalled for time until after the House of Councillors election. And why not? The DPJ was elected last year on a manifesto that was, but for a short (and short on specifics) section on foreign policy, wholly concerned with fixing Japan's economy and society. The government would have good reason for putting Futenma on the shelf for at least its first year.

I can think of a few explanations for why the prime minister acted as he did. 

First, as I've argued before, he may have believed that he would be able to find a solution that would satisfy both Okinawans and the US simply by negotiating one-on-one with Obama. Alternatively, he may have simply thought that the US would be more willing to compromise than it proved to be. We might call this the miscalculation hypothesis. 

Second, perhaps the government wanted to make a clear statement that it marked a departure from LDP rule, and Futenma proved a good, high-profile demonstration case. Given the relatively narrow window between the launch of the government and the campaign for the upper house, perhaps the Hatoyama government reasoned that tackling Futenma was a way of achieving some policy goal that could be presented to voters in a way that other pledges, which will take a longer time to deliver, would not. (This hypothesis is compatible with the first.) 

Third, the DPJ could have been acting on the basis of ideological beliefs. I'm less convinced by this argument, if only because by trying to please all sides the Hatoyama government has elicited almost a total absence of its own beliefs on the issue other than the need to find an alternative site than the one in the 2006 roadmap.

Fourth, I suppose it is possible that during the 2009 general election campaign the DPJ leadership came to believe that the issue had to be resolved immediately, and acted accordingly.

I'm not sure which of these explanations, if any, best captures the government's reasoning. Perhaps there is no clear reason, which would explain why the government wandered into the issue seemingly without a plan. Meanwhile, the Hatoyama government's mishandling of the dispute means that even November could be a difficult target to meet.

This post will likely be the first of several on the fallout of the Futenma dispute.

UPDATE: As can be seen in the comments, I did leave out one obvious explanation: US pressure, both explicit in the form of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's infamous visit to Tokyo shortly after the DPJ took power, and implicit, in the pressure posed by Obama's November visit to Japan, for which the DPJ wanted to have something to offer to the US President.

Media coverage of tension between the US and Japan meant that every comment, every plan, every "promise" reverberated in Japan, so that each step the government took on Futenma was one step deeper into the quagmire.

On the Hatoyama government's troubles

I have an op-ed in Friday's Wall Street Journal Asia on the Hatoyama government's struggles.

You can find it here.

Why Hatoyama is failing on Futenma

Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio returned home to Japan Wednesday after attending the Nuclear summit in Washington hosted by US President Barack Obama. Whatever significance the summit had for Obama's diplomatic agenda, as far as US-Japan relations are concerned nukes were overshadowed by Futenma. Hatoyama's self-imposed deadline of resolving the dispute by May is approaching, and there are few signs that his government will be able to reach a conclusion that satisfies the US and local communities in Okinawa by the end of next month.

Indeed, on the eve of Hatoyama's trip the government announced that it would be holding off on opening working-level talks with the US because it did not yet have a plan to present.

While the press is filled with rumors regarding the various alternative sites under consideration by the Hatoyama government, there is no sign (yet) that the government is coalescing around a single option.

Even if the dispute is resolved favorably (whatever that means), it is safe to say that in terms of the process, the Hatoyama government's approach to Futenma has failed. What explains the Hatoyama government's disastrous performance on the Futenma issue? Why has the government performed so poorly on an issue that has taken on such importance for the government?

The Prime Minister: On Futenma, the buck has to stop with Hatoyama, something that Josh Rogin identifies as a major source of dissatisfaction in Washington. Despite the importance of this issue — despite Hatoyama's willingness to invoke the Japanese set phrase ("I'm risking my political life") to signal this issue's importance for his government — Hatoyama has been wholly absent from this debate. There is no excuse. Even if Hatoyama wanted to respect the policymaking process by letting his cabinet ministers debate the matter, on an issue as thorny as Futenma Hatoyama ought to have been taking the lead. As AEI's Michael Auslin notes in Rogin's piece, there is no sign that Hatoyama has a preference regarding an alternative to the current relocation plan.

I would argue, however, that Hatoyama is indecisive not because his party is unruly or filled with conflicting opinions. Has there ever been a political party in a democracy that did not house differing opinions on important and not-so-important political issues? As I've argued before, I think that the DPJ's divisions are an issue to the extent that Hatoyama has created a void at the head of the government. Hatoyama does not appear to have concrete preferences about any policy area, not just Futenma. He has shown little command of policy specifics, and has not yet moved past speaking in bland generalities.

On Futenma, I also think Hatoyama deserves considerable blame because I think he thought that he could rely on personal diplomacy with Obama in lieu of a concrete alternative plan. His government's audience, however, was not the president but working-level officials in the US who have mastered the details of the current plan and most alternatives over the course of years of negotiations with the Hatoyama government's predecessors. Hatoyama seemed to think that if he could just reach an understanding with Obama, the details would take care of themselves. 

When the Hatoyama government is no more, "Trust Me" may well be the epitaph on its tombstone.

The Cabinet: Perhaps the cabinet doesn't deserve its own heading, seeing as how many of the flaws in cabinet's policymaking process are the result of Hatoyama's vacuousness, but since anonymous officials in Rogin's piece see the "process" as a problem, it is worth addressing this argument.

The cabinet is responsible to the extent that the debate has not been contained within the cabinet committees responsible for addressing the issue. The debate between Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya and Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi has, for example, played out in the pages of the nation's newspapers. The process has been unruly and haphazard, with no apparent logic to how the government considered various alternatives to the 2006 roadmap.

The cabinet — or perhaps more specifically Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi — also deserves the blame for failing to develop a communications strategy on Futenma from the beginning. At various points in time Hirano has interjected to remind ministers and the public that all options (including the status quo) are on the table, that the government is proceeding from a "zero base." What should of happened is that from the beginning the prime minister, the chief cabinet secretary, and other ministers should have stressed its message plainly — particularly to the Okinawan people — and announced its process and criteria for weighing alternatives. It should have set out its own roadmap for deliberations instead of merely setting a deadline.

Again, at least some of the blame for the cabinet's dysfunctions rest with Hatoyama for creating a permissive environment. The dysfunction may also to a certain extent be a consequence of the bumpy transition to a new policymaking process based on cabinet government, in which all ministers are responsible for the government's policies instead of just the policies of their ministries (hence Okada's stressing the importance of unity among ministers). The Futenma problem is the first major test of the new system, and the government's failure should be seen in that light.

Coalition politics: Another argument to account for the dysfunctional government looks to the DPJ's coalition with the Social Democrats and the People's New Party. Hatoyama is indecisive, this argument goes, because he is trying to keep his coalition partners — especially the Social Democrats — in the government.

I am inclined, however, to see the coalition explanation as one of the least significant when it comes to explaining the Hatoyama government's behavior.

First, there is enough dissatisfaction with the 2006 roadmap within the DPJ to suggest that even without the SDPJ being in government the Hatoyama government would still have tried to find an alternative plan. The SDPJ has perhaps complicated the process through its cooperation with activists in Okinawa and its own efforts to find an alternative site, but these activities have had at worst a marginal effect on problems that would have plagued the Hatoyama government even without the SDPJ's involvement.

Second, while some point to the SDPJ's threat of pulling out of the government should the air base stay in Okinawa, there is considerable reason to doubt the SDPJ's ability to follow through on a threat to withdraw from the government. Indeed, SDPJ members themselves have questioned the idea. The fact is that the SDPJ gains little from abandoning its seat inside the Hatoyama cabinet, and party members know it. From the prime minister's perspective, were he to find an alternative plan that the US would accept, it seems doubtful that he would back away from it on the basis of SDPJ grumbling.

The DPJ: What about divisions within the DPJ? Even if Hatoyama can safely ignore the SDPJ, has he been hindered by divisions within his own party? This view is popular in Washington, where it is taken as common knowledge that the DPJ is an incoherent, dysfunctional party. I have never been convinced that the DPJ is any more divided than the LDP was during the height of its power — and I am convinced that it is less divided than the LDP today.

On the Futenma question in particular, it is hard to see how the "divided DPJ" has undermined the government. The DPJ as a whole — like the cabinet — is largely in agreement on the need to develop an alternative plan (this includes "pro-US" DPJ politicians). While there may be some disagreement on the question of whether the alternative site should be inside or outside of Okinawa, I see no reason to believe that Hatoyama's indecision is the result of undue consideration of one view or the other, or that the party's backbenchers would not fall into line if and when the government reaches its conclusion.

To the extent that there is a division between government and party over Futenma, it is the role played by Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro that matters. Throughout the process, Ozawa has spoken out against any plan that keeps the replacement facility in Okinawa, consistent with the party's old "Okinawa Vision" paper that called for moving the base first out of the prefecture, then out of Japan entirely.

But again, it is worth asking what the process would have looked like had Ozawa been on the same page as the government. Has Hatoyama been indecisive because he was too solicitous of Ozawa's opinion? Has Ozawa forced the government to consider alternatives outside of Okinawa that it would not otherwise consider? At this point it is hard to say for sure, but even if Ozawa was on the same page as the government the Hatoyama government would have struggled to develop an alternative.

Ideology: Related to explanations based on party or coalition politics is an explanation based on ideology, that the whole dispute is the result of some kind of reflexive anti-Americanism on the part of the Hatoyama government.

As I see it, this argument is patently false. Were the Hatoyama government acting on the basis of a desire to boot US forces from Japanese shores, there would be no Futenma problem. The government would say "Yankees go home" and that would be the end of the story. That the Hatoyama government is searching so hard for alternatives — including alternatives within Okinawa — is evidence of its desire to maintain a constructive relationship with the US that includes US forces stationed in Japan, not evidence of its desire to undermine the relationship. The Hatoyama government's flailing about is evidence of its good faith in trying to find a solution that will satisfy all parties to the agreement.

Double-edged diplomacy: At the heart of the matter is, of course, the relationship between the central government, the Okinawan prefectural government, and local communities, all in the shadow of the alliance with the US. Beyond Hatoyama's deficiencies and beyond party politics in Tokyo like the complicated game being played between these actors.

Accordingly, even as one criticizes the Hatoyama government's approach to the Futenma problem, it is necessary to acknowledge that the Hatoyama government inherited a mess from the LDP. The LDP's approach to the roadmap was to reach an agreement with the US first, and local communities later. Between 2006 and 2009 very little had been done to secure the ratification of the people of Okinawa, who polls show as overwhelmingly opposed to the current plan. Prefectural and local officials have actively opposed both the current plan and alternative plans that would keep a replacement facility in Okinawa. According to the Okinawa Times, mayors of thirty-four of the prefectures forty-one municipalities will be participating in a mass public meeting on 25 April to oppose relocation inside Okinawa. The Okinawan public feels "betrayed" by the Hatoyama government and will, if anything, increase the pressure on the government.

One can debate the extent to which public anger has been fueled by the DPJ's raising expectations in Okinawa only to dash them once in power, but local concerns would be important regardless of the Hatoyama government's behavior since taking power.

The US government has been equally inflexible when it comes to the 2006 roadmap. To a certain extent, the US bears responsibility for upping the stakes on Futenma. By leaning hard on the Hatoyama government from its first weeks in office — starting with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's blunt message for the new government — Washington trapped the Hatoyama government between its perceived promises to the Okinawan people and its need to be seen as a responsible steward of Japan's most important bilateral relationship. Every action taken by the Hatoyama government thereafter was amplified, plugged into the narrative of the "crisis" in the relationship growing out of the Hatoyama government's understandable desire to revisit the 2006 roadmap.

While there are signs that the US might be willing to compromise if and when the Hatoyama government provides a detailed alternative, the damage has been done. By raising the stakes for the Hatoyama government, the US government made it less likely that it will get what it wants, a quick agreement along the lines of the 2006 agreement that speeds along the process of relocating Marines to Guam.

These arguments suggest that while some tension over Futenma may have been unavoidable, both the Hatoyama government and the Obama administration could have taken steps to minimize the damage to the relationship and the Hatoyama government. Had the Hatoyama government established a coherent, insulated policy review process from the beginning and communicated to the US the modesty of its aims (while trying to lower the expectations of the Okinawan people) and had the US government recognized the Hatoyama government's good faith and given it some room to maneuver domestically, the tension in the US-Japan relationship could have been avoided.

As it stands, the Hatoyama government is trapped. If it accepts the current agreement unchanged after months of posturing, it will undoubtedly face considerable opposition from a public that will ask what it was all for. If it presents a plan featuring an alternative location in Okinawa, it risks outrage in Okinawa and rejection by the US. If anything, the Hatoyama government's best option may be presenting the US with an alternative plan featuring a site outside of Okinawa, which would both appease the Okinawan public and force the US to vote up or down. Would this outcome be perverse? Absolutely, and it would  ikely ensure that the issue would remain on the agenda for months to come. But it seems like the only option open to the Hatoyama government as it tries to escape a trap of its own making.

Can the DPJ legislate a new relationship with the bureaucracy?

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives began debate on the Hatoyama cabinet's bill revising the National Civil Service Law, the first of three cabinet bills intended to introduce political leadership to be considered in the Diet (the others being bills establishing the national strategy bureau and increasing the number of sub-cabinet political appointees).

If passed, the revision will, among other things, introduce a Cabinet Personnel Bureau (CPB) attached to the Cabinet Secretariat. The cabinet will be able to control the promotion of senior civil servants — administrative vice ministers, division chiefs, and section chiefs — with the cabinet selecting senior bureaucrats from a list with an eye towards not just ability but also the willingness to perform, as suggested by Sengoku Yoshito, Hatoyama's administrative reform czar in an interview in Asahi's Globe section. The expectation seems to be that the government would move senior officials laterally, away from their "home" ministries, in the hope of overcoming compartmentalized administration. When asked whether appeals to expertise could render the revision a dead letter, Sengoku questioned whether the Kasumigaseki's level of expertise is as high as assumed, although when pressed he suggested that perhaps the Finance Ministry's budget bureau will enjoy a certain degree of insulation. Another reform included in the bill would enable the CPB to demote officials.

Looking over this plan — which shares certain features with plans for a basic law produced under by the LDP, and which has in fact been criticized by the LDP and YP leader Watanabe Yoshimi for being weaker than the Aso government's plan — it is unclear to me what exactly the government hopes to achieve. Sengoku stresses the importance of overcoming compartmentalization. This plan may be effective to this end, but I wonder whether it raises other problems in its place.

Under the Thatcher government, the British civil service faced a prime minister who intervened aggressively in civil service personnel administration, which had perverse consequences for the civil service. Traditionally, the job of British civil servants was to provide advice and options for ministers as they went about implementing the cabinet's program as outlined in the party's manifesto. Bureaucrats would push back against ministers, they would do their best to dissuade ministers from making poor choices, but ultimately they served political leaders as a matter of professional duty. Under Margaret Thatcher, bureaucrats became more circumspect about the advice they dispensed to political leaders as prospects for promotion became linked to sticking with the government's program, and were more inclined to tell ministers what they wanted to hear instead of offering frank advice. In other words, security in office for civil servants was linked to the quality of service that they provided political leaders. Colin Campbell and Graham Wilson consider the changes that occurred under the Thatcher government to have been so consequential as to have marked the "end of Whitehall."

Accordingly, it is unclear from this legislation how the government intends to ensure that the bureaucracy will provide quality guidance to the government when the bureaucrats will have incentives to please political leaders.

I understand why the Hatoyama government feels obligated to enshrine reform in law, as it gives the government's reform agenda a symbolic permanence that it otherwise lacks. And it it is understandable why in the near term the Hatoyama government wants to be able to control senior-level personnel appointments. It needs to sever whatever links remain between the bureaucracy and the ancien regime. Under LDP rule, after all, the LDP and the bureaucracy developed a symbiotic relationship, in which the party preserved the prerogatives of the bureaucracy while the bureaucracy served as a policymaking staff for the party and cooperated with LDP backbenchers' desires to direct national resources to particularistic ends. To build a new system that DPJ needs to be able to forestall sabotage, shirking, or foot dragging on the part of the bureaucracy.

But I would argue that the most effective reforms to the policymaking process have been those that have limited interaction between bureaucrats and backbenchers, and intra-party reforms that have sharply limited the ability of backbenchers to participate in policymaking. Without being able to play backbenchers off against the cabinet, bureaucrats have already had to accommodate DPJ rule to an extent that few expected.

As for the goal of building a politically neutral civil service that dutifully serves the government of the day, perhaps the only way to build such a civil service is regular changes in ruling party. The British civil service has been described as "politically promiscuous," willing to serve any government even when successive governments have contradictory aims.  If there is not regular alternation in power, the bureaucracy will wind up simply shifting its loyalties to the new long-term ruling party, bending to the interests of the ruling party instead of dispensing guidance with an eye towards national and public interests.

In short, the process of building a new policymaking system will require at least as much change in the minds of actors in the system as change in formal institutions, if not more. As the DPJ comes to see the bureaucracy not as a hostile remnant of the ancien regime but as the source of expert advice, as the bureaucrats come to recognize the legitimacy of a government in power on the basis of a public mandate for its electoral program and come to recognize that there is a realistic chance of a different party with a different program taking power, the system will change to something approximating top-down political leadership. The new system will not come about through bullying the bureaucracy — except perhaps in very rare instances — but through the bureaucracy's recognizing the role it has to play in the new system, and the DPJ's (and whatever ruling party succeeds it) recognizing that no advanced industrial democracy functions without an effective civil service.

Hatoyama is the problem

Watching the shambles that the Hatoyama government has become, I went back into the archives and found the post I wrote on the occasion of Hatoyama Yukio's being selected as DPJ president in May 2009.

Called "The DPJ bets on Hatoyama," I stressed the risk associated with choosing Hatoyama to succeed Ozawa Ichiro, noting in particular Hatoyama's history of indecisive leadership, poor decision-making skills, and over-reliance on those around him for guidance.

The arc of his career also suggests that Hatoyama lacks a certain toughness — not a problem that Ozawa has — which will be indispensable if Hatoyama is to become prime minister and will have to be responsible for keeping the DPJ united, coaxing coalition partners, and overriding a recalcitrant bureaucracy. These tasks would be hard enough for Ozawa. Will Hatoyama be any more adroit?

The answer, it seems, is no.

I don't fault the Hatoyama government for taking on a tough issue like Futenma or postal privatization. After all, signaling changes of course on these policies is a good way to show how Westminster-style reforms can promote cabinet-led policy changes, making elections meaningful. But I fault the Hatoyama government — I fault the prime minister — for failing to exercise the least bit of control over his cabinet and his ruling party, making a total mess of these policies and others and dragging the government's approval ratings into dismal terrain. Taking on the US over Futenma demands finesse, subtlety, a deft hand in cabinet, and a clear media strategy. Not only has Hatoyama failed to keep his ministers on message on Futenma, he has struggled to develop a message in the first place.

Some might argue that the leadership vacuum in the DPJ-led government is a function less of the prime minister's failings than irreconcilable divisions within the DPJ or within the ruling coalition. While it is difficult to say for certain, I would argue that those divisions matter only insofar as Hatoyama has left a vacuum in the highest reaches of his government, which some ministers (i.e. Kamei Shizuka) have exploited from the earliest days of the Hatoyama government. Were Hatoyama capable of exercising his power, he would have an easier time controlling his ministers and pushing back against Ozawa.

Given the extent to which the government's problems rest on Hatoyama's shoulders, I have to ask the same question posed by Michael Cucek: Why do the Seven Magistrates not act? Cucek's logic — that they are hedging, ensuring easy conquest of the party in the wake of an Upper House election defeat, survival in case of victory — is compelling, but it also entails huge risks on their part. As the LDP learned, the public can be particularly fickle when it votes for the Upper House. I can imagine that a big enough defeat for the government could set in motion events that would go beyond a mere leadership change within the DPJ. As such, If Hatoyama cannot find a solution to the Futenma problem that satisfies all actors, I would think that the time would be ripe for a cabinet rebellion.

A new prime minister would still have an uphill battle to score a victory in July, but if he (or she) were to be in a position to lead — to set an agenda and force ministers and party to adhere to it, or at least to debate within clearly delineated bounds — the DPJ's fortunes would likely improve. The party's agenda, after all, isn't the problem. It's leadership. 

For years polls have shown that the value the public wants in its leaders is "the ability to get things done." I am convinced it's why Koizumi Junichiro enjoyed the support he did. And at this point it's the only way the DPJ can save itself.

Building a Westminster system

"Nowadays the members of Parliament, with the exception of the few cabinet members (and a few insurgents), are normally nothing better than well-disciplined 'yes' men," lamented Max Weber in "Politics as a Vocation."

"With us, in the Reichstag, one used at least to take care of one's correspondence on his desk, thus indicating that one was active in the weal of the country. Such gestures are not demanded in England; the member of Parliament must only vote, not commit party treason. He must appear when the whips call him, and do what the cabinet or the leader of the opposition orders."

Essential to the Westminster system — parliamentary cabinet government — is an apparatus linking the cabinet to the ruling party that ensures the cabinet has the votes to smooth the passage of its legislation through the parliament, hence the link between the emergence of cabinet government and the growth of strong, top-down parties in Britain. Even in Britain, this system is not foolproof, as "backbench rebellions" have not been uncommon.

I call attention to this feature of the Westminster system because, of course, the DPJ is keen on growing a similar system on Japanese soil. And few DPJ members are as adamant about reforming how the cabinet and ruling party operate as Ozawa Ichiro, the DPJ's secretary general. Six months into DPJ rule, however, some DPJ members are pushing back against the new system being put into place by Ozawa, having little interest in being "well-disciplined 'yes' men."

The latest example is the party's dismissal of Ubukata Yukio as one of the DPJ's deputy secretaries general after criticizing the party executive for its centralization program and its stifling of debate within the party. As Michael Cucek observes, having been removed from office, Ubukata is going all-out in his campaign against the "Westminsterization" of the DPJ.

Ubukata's insurgency is connected to the push to revive the party's policymaking apparatus, which closed shop when the Hatoyama government took power last September. Ubukata is one of nearly fifty members of a study group that has formed to advocate for a new policymaking body. The intent, it seems, is to create a forum for receiving briefings from the government on current legislation and brainstorm new policies. Coupled with restrictions on the access of backbenchers to bureaucrats, a new policy outfit could be a useful safety valve for the government without unduly undermining the cabinet's ability to formulate policy.

But even with a new policy council within the DPJ, the problems associated with the transition to a Westminster system remain. In truth, Hatoyama, Ozawa, and the other senior leaders of the DPJ face a challenge similar to that faced by William Gladstone and other British politicians who built the Westminster system in the first place. 

During the first half of the nineteenth century, patronage was rampant, as parliamentarians distributed jobs and favors with little regard for party leaders and the cabinet. The result was ineffective government, which, Gladstone and other reformers insisted, was increasingly unsuited the problems facing Britain. Bernard Silberman describes Gladstone in terms that would not be inappropriate for describing Ozawa: "Gladstone was in many respects an étatist who viewed Parliament, but especially the Cabinet, as the necessary source of legislation which would enhance utilitarian and commonsensical economic and social development." According to Silberman, the solution was building a rational, centralized civil service, with admittance based on merit rather than political connections. "Deprived of patronage," he writes, "parliamentary parties were now forced to turn to constructing party organization in order to finally subjugate the backbencher to party discipline."

The DPJ-led government is trying to perform a similar feat, transform the civil service by breaking its ties with the ruling party, and by doing so, centralize the cabinet and ruling party leadership's control of policy (and pork-barrel spending). From the perspective of a backbencher, it is not an especially favorable arrangement. Little wonder that many DPJ members — particularly more senior backbenchers accustomed to the permissiveness of LDP rule — are chafing against the new system. Controlling backbenchers is hard enough in Britain, with its well-established institutions; controlling backbenchers as those very mechanisms are put into place is considerably more difficult.

To a certain extent, the problem is Ozawa. While Ozawa is probably the most enthusiastic advocate of a Westminster system in the DPJ, he may also be the least well suited DPJ member when it comes to inducing backbenchers to accept their fetters. Intimidating first-term Diet members is one thing. Bullying more senior Diet members, including at least one with ministerial experience (Tanaka Makiko), is quite another. Being an effective whip — which Ozawa effectively is — takes more than bullying, especially in the case of more senior members, presumably those most prone to rebellion. It also requires persuasion and timely dispensation of favors and perks. It takes, in other words, subtlety and guile, traits which do not seem to be among Ozawa's strong suits. (For more on the role played by whips and other actors in the Westminster system, I cannot recommend Donald Searing's Westminster's World strongly enough.)

At same time, however, the problem is also structural. After decades of permissive LDP rule, Westminster-style control does look "dictatorial," in the words used by LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu and others to describe the DPJ under Ozawa. (In which case might we describe LDP rule during the glory days of the 1955 system as "anarchic?) I wonder whether the problem is that actors in the Japanese political system — including voters and the media — are simply not able to wrap their heads around the new system being introduced by the DPJ leadership. Not being clear on the goal of a Westminster system — more effective executive power — the system just looks like heavy-handed suppression of speech, not helped by Ozawa's being the one doing the suppressing. Indeed, to a certain extent the DPJ faces a dilemma. In order for Westminster-style politics to take hold among both backbenchers and the public, it needs to deliver policy results. But to deliver results, among other things the party needs to be able to control its members.

Naturally introducing a Westminster system means trading the LDP system's representativeness for the Westminster model's executive effectiveness. There is no perfect system. But the outcome of the current dispute — which may widen to include cabinet ministers — could determine whether the "statists" like Ozawa are able to succeed in building a more top-down policymaking structure or whether they are forced to make concessions to backbenchers that preserve an important role for them in policymaking and the management of party affairs.

There is a point here about institution building. It is not enough for leaders to draft new institutions on paper and then put them into motion. To be durable, institutions require broader legitimacy. To date, the DPJ's leaders have been mostly concerned about putting new institutions into place. The backbencher insurgency suggests, however, that it may be time to focus on cementing the legitimacy of new institutions.