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.

Edano joins the cabinet

Edano Yukio, one of the few DPJ politicians who was expected to receive a cabinet appointment last year but didn't, will no longer be outside of the government. He will take over responsibility for the Government Revitalization Unit (GRU), which was previously headed by Sengoku Yoshito, who since Kan Naoto moved to the finance ministry last month was also serving as minister responsible for the national strategy office. Sengoku will take sole responsibility for the NSO while Edano heads the GRU.

Coming in the wake of the indictment of three of Ozawa Ichiro's former secretaries, the media is reporting Edano's appointment as another blow to Ozawa, as Edano is marked as an anti-Ozawa partisan, having opposed the DPJ's merger with Ozawa's Liberal Party from the very beginning and continuing to criticize Ozawa in the years following the merger. Indeed, not long ago Edano publicly suggested that if Ozawa could not convince the public to see his side of the story, he would "have to take responsibility" for what he had done (i.e., resign).

Yomiuri wonders whether Edano's appointment — with Ozawa's acquiescence — signals a diminution of Ozawa's power.

That might be reading too much into an appointment that is not altogether surprising. There was considerable surprise back in September that Edano had been left out of the government, suggesting that he was at the top of the list of backbenchers waiting to join the cabinet. The budget review hearings conducted by the GRU last year show that the post is an important one, that needed to be filled by a full-time minister, especially with the government's submitting legislation that will elevate the national strategy office into a full bureau (and give the GRU's hearings legal standing). Sengoku will undoubtedly have his hands full building a bureau whose powers and functions remain a mystery. Perhaps the timing was intended to show that Hatoyama is in charge even as he confirmed Ozawa's staying on as secretary-general, but believe it or not, the story of the Hatoyama government is not entirely or even mostly a story about Ozawa Ichiro.

Ozawa has pressured the government on certain issues and centralized functions in his office so that all requests to the government go through him, but the media's focus on Ozawa has overshadowed the important work the government is doing on building a new policymaking process, a project with which Ozawa is in full agreement (but stories about areas in which the government and the secretary-general are in full agreement apparently make for less interesting copy). In addition to the above-mentioned "political leadership" bill, the cabinet is also set to approve a civil service reform bill that could completely upend the traditional practices of the bureaucracy, doing away with the position of administrative vice-minister, restoring to the cabinet the right to make personnel appointments (and with it, the right to ignore seniority within the ministry and appoint younger officials or civilians to senior posts), and other reforms. These are remarkable changes under consideration — with remarkably little public protest from the bureaucracy — and they deserve more attention than they have received.

How the Hatoyama cabinet manages Ozawa has from the beginning been one of the more important challenges facing the DPJ-led government, but it is by no means the only challenge or the most important challenge. It would be nice if the news media remembered that from time to time and devoted a little less attention to the ongoing drama of Ozawa and a little more attention to what the Hatoyama government is actually doing with the majority the public awarded it last year.

Ozawa unconcerned

The campaign for the DPJ's 21 Sept. leadership election will begin in just over one month.

Not surprisingly, no candidate has stepped forward to challenge Ozawa Ichiro in his bid for a third time. Mr. Ozawa has announced that he will not be thinking about the party election until after next week's Obon holiday.

One by one, potential challengers have stepped forward only to back down in the face of overwhelming odds.

In late July, Okada Katsuya, the great, white hope of the anti-Ozawa groups, dropped hints that he was thinking strongly about a bid to return to the helm of the DPJ. He acted quickly, however, to snuff out any talk of his candidacy, declaring he had no great desire to run. Mr. Okada spells out his reasoning in a post at his blog, noting that while he doesn't want to run, he does want a discussion on the party's manifesto for the next general election, which he thinks must be more specific to strengthen the party's position in the general election campaign.

Edano Yukio, a member of the Maehara group, and Noda Yoshihiko, head of a small conservative DPJ faction close to the Maehara group, have stated their desire to oppose Mr. Ozawa in September, but neither man has made his candidacy offical. Both have said that they'll decide later this month; Asahi says that the Maehara group and its satellite prefer Mr. Okada or Mr. Noda to Mr. Edano or Sengoku Yoshito, who hinted at a run for the leadership earlier this summer.

Given that the campaign is shaping up to be the Maehara-Noda bloc versus the rest of the party, Mr. Ozawa can surely rest easy and act magnanimously towards his rivals.