The virtues of Kan

Kan Naoto, Hatoyama Yukio's second finance minister, was the first DPJ member to declare his intention to run in the party election scheduled for Friday — and it seems unlikely, for reasons outlined by Michael Cucek here, that he will be denied the job.

What would be the significance of Kan's replacing Hatoyama?

I think that what I wrote when Kan became finance minister is even more apropos for Kan's becoming prime minister: "While it is common to point to DPJ politicians like Hatoyama and Ozawa and conclude that the DPJ is a pale imitation of the LDP, Kan's career shows that the DPJ's victory has brought new politicians with different backgrounds and different concerns from LDP politicians to the fore." Should Kan become prime minister, he will be the first prime minister since Koizumi not directly related (son or grandson) to another prime minister, and the first non-hereditary politician since Mori. He began his career toiling on the margins of Japan's reformist left, a follower of Eda Saburō, who tried and failed to modernize the JSP, and lost three elections before finally winning a seat as a representative of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1980.

Indeed, the political origins of Hatoyama and Kan could not be more different. Not only is Hatoyama the scion of a political dynasty, he seemingly entered politics on a whim — the family thought his brother Kunio would be the politician while Yukio would pursue his academic career. Kan, however, became involved in politics purely out of his convictions, starting as a student activist. Had Kan been interested in pursuing personal ambitions, he could have found better ways to do it than by following a marginal center-left politician.

Accordingly, unlike Hatoyama, he has a core set of beliefs that may in fact be best called social democratic or liberal in the American sense. He is egalitarian, a believer in transparent, clean, and accountable government. He became famous as minister of health during the mid-1990s for taking on his ministry's bureaucrats over an AIDS-tainted blood scandal, which may be an easy position for a politician to take (especially during the "bureaucrat-bashing" 1990s), but nevertheless conformed with the focus of Kan's career in politics. During the months leading up to the election, he became the DPJ's point man on administrative reform, a role he continued to play when the Hatoyama government formed. 

Perhaps it would not be inappropriate to say that his beliefs are something like Eda's, who in 1962 stressed that he wanted Japan to have "the American standard of living, Soviet levels of social protection, British parliamentary democracy, and Japanese pacifism." While these days one would not think to look to the Soviet Union as a model for social protection — Scandinavia would probably be the model today — this mix of policies might best capture Kan's politics, perhaps with the exception of Japanese-style pacifism (more on this momentarily). He certainly made clear last summer that he believes strongly in the necessity of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy in Japan, and as finance minister

Kan has said fairly little over the years about foreign policy and Japan's relations with the US and its neighbors. To the extent that he has talked about foreign policy, for instance on previous occasions that he led the DPJ, his views have been virtually at the center in terms of the spectrum of opinion within the DPJ. He as acknowledged the importance of the alliance and the US forward presence on multiple occasions, but when Koizumi was prime minister, he criticized the government for its slavish subservience to the US and for not balancing the US-Japan relationship with the other "pillars" of Japanese foreign policy, multilateral cooperation at the UN and bilateral and multilateral relations within Asia. He isn't exactly dovish, but he's no hawk either. Accordingly, I would not be surprised if Okada Katsuya either stays on as foreign minister or continues to play an important foreign policy role in another capacity.

However, the details of Kan's policy beliefs may be less important at this juncture than his biography. Given that he is a conviction politician, given his ministerial experience (something that Hatoyama lacked), and given his emphasis on open politics, Kan may be the right man to restore public trust in the DPJ-led government and lead his party to a respectable showing in next month's upper house election. The central task for the Hatoyama government was the restore public faith in government after years of LDP misrule. The central task for a Kan government would be to restore public faith in government after years of LDP misrule — and nine months of Hatoyama misrule. If the public does not trust the government, it is difficult to see how Japan will escape its economic stagnation. As I've said before, if the public cannot trust the government to be honest about its intentions and forthright about how public money is spent, no government will be in a position to ask for something like a consumption tax increase.

Kan certainly has the right biography for this purpose — and having been a cabinet minister before, he should be more capable of managing the cabinet than Hatoyama was, avoiding the self-inflicted wounds that ultimately destroyed the Hatoyama government.

What about that other task facing the new government, the Futenma problem? Kan has said little about it, refusing, it seems, to stray beyond his brief as finance minister. However, it seems unlikely that Kan — or any other DPJ politician — will rush to embrace a plan that is now being written off as unimplementable. Perhaps he will have the backbone to scrap the thing entirely. One way or another, the demise of Hatoyama following his shift on Futenma and the collapse of the coalition with the SDPJ has undoubtedly poisoned the issue. If the Obama administration were smart, it might learn from the mistakes it made last year when the Hatoyama government took office and give the new government time to find its bearings and plan a course of action, whether that course of action is trying to soften up public opinion on some relocation option within Okinawa or searching again for an option outside of Okinawa. If the US is actually serious about resolving the problem, it is not enough to say that Japanese public opinion is simply a problem for the Japanese government to deal with: to insist once again on a plan that cannot win the support of the Japanese public and expect another prime minister to fall on his sword for it would be sheer folly.

Ultimately if Kan is the next prime minister and if the Ozawa regime is truly uprooted, the DPJ will have an opportunity to reclaim some of the goodwill that has been squandered since September.

(Image courtesy of Curzon from Mutantfrog/The Coming Anarchy, based on a whimsical Facebook status update of mine from earlier today)

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.

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.

Washington continues to see Japan slipping away

Writing on the nuclear summit, Al Kamen, who pens a Beltway gossip column in the Washington Post, had the following to say about Hatoyama Yukio:

By far the biggest loser of the extravaganza was the hapless and (in the opinion of some Obama administration officials) increasingly loopy Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. He reportedly requested but got no bilat. The only consolation prize was that he got an "unofficial" meeting during Monday night's working dinner. Maybe somewhere between the main course and dessert?

A rich man's son, Hatoyama has impressed Obama administration officials with his unreliability on a major issue dividing Japan and the United States: the future of a Marine Corps air station in Okinawa. Hatoyama promised Obama twice that he'd solve the issue. According to a long-standing agreement with Japan, the Futenma air base is supposed to be moved to an isolated part of Okinawa. (It now sits in the middle of a city of more than 80,000.)

But Hatoyama's party, the Democratic Party of Japan, said it wanted to reexamine the agreement and to propose a different plan. It is supposed to do that by May. So far, nothing has come in over the transom. Uh, Yukio, you're supposed to be an ally, remember? Saved you countless billions with that expensive U.S. nuclear umbrella? Still buy Toyotas and such?

Ignoring the snide and demeaning comments about Hatoyama's being "increasingly loopy" and "a rich man's son" (what does this have to do with anything?) or the comment suggesting that the "expensive U.S. nuclear umbrella" and US consumers' purchases of Toyotas are acts of charity, Kamen managed to sweep aside all the complexity of the Futenma dispute in the course of a few paragraphs.

This item may be another sign of what I referred to last month as the "losing Japan" narrative. Due to Hatoyama's "loopiness," the US is losing an important ally and increasingly finding it necessary to "bow" to China (see the first paragraph of the column). Naturally media outlets inside Japan have already reported on Kamen's comments, with the subtext that Hatoyama is embarrassing Japan abroad even as the US and China move closer together.

For the record, Mr. Kamen: Japan is a sovereign, democratic nation allied to the United States, not a vassal. However poorly Hatoyama has managed the problem, he is trying to balance the concerns of his country's most important ally with the concerns of the voters who elected him. He certainly deserves better than to be denigrated in this fashion.

UPDATE: I have changed the name of this post to reflect the fact that Kamen's column reflects not just a narrative popular at the Washington Post — although the Post has thus far been its main mouthpiece — but a narrative increasingly popular in Washington and in the Obama administration.

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.

Ozawa will stay home

On a visit to Tokyo in February, Kurt Campbell, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, met with embattled DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro and extended an invitation to visit Washington. Ozawa said he would visit on the condition that he be able to meet with President Barack Obama. At the time I suggested that since Ozawa's visit could undermine the Hatoyama government's tortuous process of reviewing the 2006 agreement on the realignment of US Forces in Japan, he should keep his Washington meetings as perfunctory as possible — and also wrote that "perhaps it would be better off if an Ozawa visit to Washington fell through."

The visit has in fact fallen through: on Wednesday it became clear that Ozawa would not be going to Washington during the Golden Week holidays and will instead be going sometime after this summer's Upper House election. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, a number of DPJ officials suggested that by going to Washington Ozawa would raise the specter of "dual diplomacy." Asahi similarly suggested that the trip has been postponed so as to not cast a shadow over the Hatoyama government's ongoing effort to find a solution to the Futenma problem.

While some will fret that Ozawa's not going to Washington after having taken such a high-visibility trip to Beijing last year sends a signal that the DPJ is more interested in good relations with China than with the US, it would be a mistake to interpret the decision to postpone in this light. If anything, it should suggest that perhaps too much value was attributed to Ozawa's trip to China in the first place.

I remain convinced that it is an unqualified good that Ozawa will not be in a position to intervene in diplomacy over Futenma at a critical moment for the Hatoyama government. Any expectation in Washington that Ozawa holds the key to solving the impasse over Futenma rests on a distorted impression of Ozawa's power within the DPJ-led government, an especially distorted impression now that the one thing the public is largely in agreement on is the desirability of Ozawa's being removed as secretary-general and that Ozawa has been forced to tolerate criticism from DPJ members. Indeed, reminiscent of the idea in American politics that power in a presidential administration depends on physical proximity to the Oval Office, Asahi suggests that a "new troika" may be forming, composed of Hatoyama, Finance Minister Kan Naoto, and reform czar Sengoku Yoshito, as the latter two now have offices in the Prime Minister's residence.

The solution to the Futenma dispute will ultimately depend on the prime minister and his cabinet, which is why Watanabe Kozo, a senior DPJ legislator, suggested that Hatoyama would have to step down in the event that he fails to resolve the dispute by the end of May. The real risks of Ozawa's further complicating the process is not worth the trivial symbolic benefits that would come from Ozawa's trip.

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.

The "losing Japan" narrative

In different ways, two articles published in Western media outlets this week suggest the emergence of a new narrative concerning Japan in elite circles in the United States. One might call that narrative the "losing Japan" narrative, reminiscent of the idea — propagated by newsman Henry Luce — that the United States, or rather, the Democratic Party "lost" China when the Communists won the Chinese Civil War. This narrative suggests that the United States is "losing" Japan to China, raising a call to arms that unless the US government acts expeditiously it could let the DPJ-led government lead Japan into China's embrace.

The first is the now infamous editorial in the Washington Post on Fujita Yukihisa, the DPJ upper house member best known for his doubts about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Michael Cucek and Paul Jackson have the controversy well-covered.) However egregious Fujita's views, Washington Post's editorial is revealing of the "losing Japan" narrative in a number of ways. Start with the editorial's treatment of the subject. Despite his impressive-sounding titles, Fujita has little or no role in Japanese foreign policymaking under the Hatoyama government. The international department is not a policy shop, and Diet committees are meaningless. Either the Post was ignorant of these facts — in which case the editorial writer, Lee Hockstader according to Fujita, did a poor job — or the Post was aware but wrote a misleading editorial anyway in which Fujita is ludicrously described as a "Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment." It is possible that the Washington Post made an honest mistake, but then one gets to the inferences Hockstader draws from Fujita's thoughts about 9/11:

The only thing novel about Mr. Fujita is that a man so susceptible to the imaginings of the lunatic fringe happens to occupy a notable position in the governing apparatus of a nation that boasts the world's second-largest economy.

We have no reason to believe that Mr. Fujita's views are widely shared in Japan; we suspect that they are not and that many Japanese would be embarrassed by them. His proposal two years ago that Tokyo undertake an independent investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 24 Japanese citizens died, went nowhere. Nonetheless, his views, rooted as they are in profound distrust of the United States, seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Mr. Hatoyama, elected last summer, has called for a more "mature" relationship with Washington and closer ties between Japan and China. Although he has reaffirmed longstanding doctrine that Japan's alliance with the United States remains the cornerstone of its security, his actions and those of the DPJ-led government, raise questions about that commitment. It's a cliche but nonetheless true that the U.S.-Japan alliance has been a critical force for stability in East Asia for decades. That relationship, and its benefits for the region, will be severely tested if Mr. Hatoyama tolerates elements of his own party as reckless and fact-averse as Mr. Fujita.

Again, one can debate whether Fujita can be properly described as having a "notable position in the governing apparatus," but the leaps Hockstader takes from Fujita's position are unjustifiable, leaps that can be detected in the slippery language Hockstader uses. "Fujita's views seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama." Hockstader makes this outrageous charge without providing a shred of evidence beyond Fujita's views. Meanwhile, in the subsequent paragraph he casually dismisses the Hatoyama government's rhetorical commitment to the alliance (and, for that matter, its sizable financial commitment to the reconstruction of Afghanistan) to speak of "actions" that "raise questions." I assume here he means Futenma, although who knows. This phrasing is precisely the kind of attitude that has produced the DPJ's approach to the alliance in the first place, the idea that there is only one way to be in favor of the alliance. Finally, Hockstader basically threatens the Hatoyama government, suggesting that if Fujita is not dispensed with, his government will suffer accordingly in the eyes of official Washington.

Note, finally, that while Hockstader questions the sincerity of the Hatoyama government's commitment to the alliance, he says nothing more about the Hatoyama government's approach to China. The silence is deafening. Note also the scare quotes around mature, as if the DPJ's position that the alliance as it was conducted under the LDP is in need of changes is an absurd idea. The DPJ, he seems to be saying, has a critical approach to the alliance and an uncritical approach to the Sino-Japanese relationship. (This comparison is hardly valid: the US-Japan relationship is complex and has the thorny question of US forces in Japan at the heart of it, while the Sino-Japanese relationship is not nearly as complex and is still progressing by baby steps from the deep freeze it experienced under Koizumi.)

As I read it, the editorial can be summarized as "Hatoyama's party harbors a 9/11 denier, clearly does not take the relationship with the US seriously, and is moving Japan closer to China."

A more serious version of this argument can be found in the Financial Times, where columnist Gideon Rachman argues that the DPJ gives the impression of drifting in China's direction.

He writes:

When Mr Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan took power last August, it broke more than 50 years of almost continuous administration by the Liberal Democratic Party. The DPJ is keen to differentiate itself from the LDP in almost every respect, and foreign policy is no exception. In an interview last week, Katsuya Okada, Japan’s foreign minister, said that the LDP followed US foreign policy “too closely”. “From now onwards,” says Mr Okada, “this will be the age of Asia.” The foreign minister adds that talk of Japan choosing between China and the US is meaningless, and that Japan’s friendship with America will remain “qualitatively different” from its relations with China. But some DPJ party members have called for a policy of “equidistance” between China and the US.

Several things are notable about this paragraph. First, is the DPJ really acting out of a desire to differentiate itself from the LDP? Given that foreign policy plays so little a role in the calculus of voters, I have a hard time believing that the DPJ-led government's foreign policy initiatives are driven by electoral considerations. Second, why do unnamed DPJ party members get equal billing in this paragraph with Okada, who seems to be firmly in control of foreign policy making? Okada provides a decent summary of the government's foreign policy approach, suggesting that the DPJ is not drifting from America, but instead shifting the emphasis of Japan's foreign policy, from a foreign policy in which Asia policy was tailored around the alliance to a foreign policy in which the alliance is tailored to fit Japan's Asia policy. And yet the paragraph ends with unnamed backbenchers and their unspecified equidistant "policy."

Rachman continues by citing Hatoyama's controversial essay in the International Herald Tribune, and Ozawa's grand tour in Beijing and intervention to arrange an audience with the Emperor for Xi Jinping. Rachman is at least careful to admit that "it is probably overdoing it to suggest that Japan is definitively shifting away from its postwar special relationship with the US." But the article conveys the impression that Japan is a prize in the struggle for influence between the US and China — and that the battle for Japan has begun.

There are several problems with this narrative, in both its belligerent Washington Post form and its more circumspect Rachmanite form. The fallacy both articles share is the idea that Asia is sure to be zero-sum, that a country like Japan can only be in the US camp or the China camp. Joining the former camp, Rachman concludes, would entail "[cultivating] warmer relations with other democratic nations in the region, such as India and Australia, in what would be an undeclared policy of 'soft containment' of Chinese power." And yet that is precisely what the Hatoyama government wants to do. Rachman might respond that the time for choosing has not yet arrived, which is true, but it also raises the possibility that another future is possible in which countries like Japan, Australia, and India maintain security ties with the US in order to keep the US engaged even while maintaining constructive political and economic relationships with China, navigating between the two superpowers in order to avoid unmitigated dependence on either one.

The Washington Post is even more unabashed in its embrace of an approach to Asia that does not allow for nuance, which it aired in another editorial on Japan published earlier this year.

The problem with this approach to the region and Japan on the op-ed pages of newspapers well read by policymakers in Washington is that this way of thinking could easily become self-fulfilling prophecy. Rachman may be warning of a possible future, but many in positions of power — with the help of the Washington Post — could come to take what he describes as a given.

A major flaw with the "losing Japan" narrative is that there is remarkably little data upon which to reach firm conclusions, a point acknowledged by Rachman. Think of how little we know about the Hatoyama government's approach to China. Interestingly, both the examples he cites as cases confirming the tilt towards China involve the activities of Ozawa Ichiro, i.e. a figure outside of the government who may not be long for politics. What data points do we have concerning Hatoyama and members of his cabinet? Not many. Hatoyama has made clear that he will not provoke China on historical issues. Beyond that? Unmentioned in both articles is that the Hatoyama government is building upon the "strategic, constructive partnership" concept developed by the Abe government, right down to the continued use of the term. That doesn't sound like a government doing whatever it can do differentiate itself from the LDP.

I'm willing to cut Rachman some slack, because his piece contains numerous caveats and notes of caution. But the Washington Post editorial is another story entirely. By picking a DPJ member whose views would obviously draw opprobrium in the US and then implying that his views represent a "strain" in the DPJ, this editorial is little more than a hatchet job against Japan's ruling party. How this editorial will help reverse what the Post believes is Japan's drift towards China is beyond me.

After all, the last time Japan was a political battleground for a cold war in Asia, the US had  considerably more invasive means at its disposal than sharply worded editorials.  Accordingly, this narrative may in fact be a product of insecurity about declining US influence, much as insecure Japanese elites fretted that the transition from Bush to Obama would mean the return of Japan passing. The reality, however, is that in the unlikely event that Japan were to reorient itself from the US to China, there would be little the US could do to stop it.

The DPJ's unheralded realism

In the latest stop in his regional tour, Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya visited Australia for talks with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

Most of the headlines have focused on the exchange of words over whaling — the polite phrasing seems to be that Okada and Rudd had a "frank discussion", and Rudd has threatened to sue Japan if it does not halt whaling by November — but more important in the long term may be the agreement reached between the two governments to sign an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) in March, which would enable mutual logistical support on peacekeeping and disaster relief missions. The ACSA will be another small step in building an Australia-Japan security relationship following the joint security declaration signed in 2007 back when Abe Shinzo was prime minister.

Writing at The Interpreter (and from the Australian perspective), Graeme Dobell writes of Australia's hedging by building up its relationship with Japan over the span of a decade, noting that "It is not grand enough to be called a strategy. It does not yet have the status or coherence of a policy. Yet it is much more than an inclination or intention. Call it low-level hedging." One could very well say the same of Japan.

Despite the impression in some circles that the Hatoyama government is naive (due perhaps in part to Hatoyama's talk of an East Asian community) — and the irritating habit that some analysts have of dichotomizing Japan's foreign policy choice as being either alliance with the US or partnership with China — the Hatoyama government is deliberately working to improve Japan's bilateral ties throughout the region. In the span of weeks, Prime Minister Hatoyama has visited India to, among others, agree to regular bilateral security talks and Okada has visited South Korea and Australia to discuss how to bolster Japan's relationships with both countries. What was notable about both Okada trips is that he did not hesitate to acknowledge the obstacles to closer bilateral ties even as he expressed his beliefs that the obstacles can be overcome. Before he had his discussion about whaling in Australia, on his visit to South Korea Okada acknowledged in strong terms Japan's wrongdoing when it colonized Korea 1910-1945. In both cases, Okada is clearly trying to address the obstacles forthrightly while remaining focused on the goals of closer bilateral cooperation.

In bilateral relations with India, South Korea, and Australia (not to mention China), the Hatoyama government is building on the work of its LDP predecessors. What's different, however, is that the Hatoyama government is for the most part building its new grand strategy on the sly. Unlike say the Abe government, which used grandiloquent rhetoric about democracy and shared values to announce its bilateral initiatives with Australia and India (and was none too subtle about the links between among these three democracies and the US), the Hatoyama government has been workmanlike in its efforts to improve Japan's bilateral ties. There are few hints that it wants to link its bilateral ties with countries like Australia to its alliance with the US, which would in turn prompt talk of a grand alliance aimed at containing China. Instead, the Hatoyama government may be focusing on new bilateral relations as a hedge against the US. In the event that the US were to turn inward and weaken its commitment to Asia, Japan could use other friends in the region. Even with the US committed to the region, Japan's interests are served by better bilateral ties, which have been underdeveloped for too long.

That there are significant obstacles — Australia's threat of a lawsuit, for one — to overcome in nearly all of Japan's bilateral relationships in the region should not detract from appreciation of the Hatoyama government's efforts to overcome those obstacles. Its foreign policy initiatives may be quiet, but they will have implications for Japan's position in the region for years to come.

A terrible idea from DPJ backbenchers, quickly nixed

On Wednesday Ubukata Yukio, the deputy secretary-general, Tanaka Makiko, Koizumi Junichiro's controversial foreign minister who joined the DPJ last year, and other DPJ Diet members proposed to Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and DPJ secretary-general Ozawa Ichiro that the party establish a new policy research arm to replace the policy research council that closed shop when the DPJ took power in September.

Once again showing that whatever the DPJ-led government's shortcomings, it is entirely serious about centralizing policymaking in the cabinet and neutering the ruling party, both Hatoyama and Ozawa were quick to reject the proposal.

That these backbenchers felt compelled to petition the government for some sort of policy role is a good sign that the Hatoyama government's efforts to change the policymaking process — at least as the ruling party is concerned — are working. Backbenchers, after all, have the most to lose from the shift to the Westminster model. Whereas under LDP rule a fourth-term Diet member like Ubukata could be aspiring to posts in the policy research council that would give him a stake in policymaking, both mid-career and first-term DPJ members have little to do but show up to vote for legislation and go home to their districts to campaign. Unlike LDP backbenchers, there are few channels for them even to try to intervene in order to direct pork-barrel spending to their districts. To a certain extent, their fates as politicians rest in the hands of a government over which they have little or no leverage.

And so it should remain. If the Hatoyama government is to fix any of the problems facing Japan, it will have to be able to formulate policy without having to worry about backbenchers working behind the cabinet's back to develop and advance their own policies. Creating a new policymaking outfit in the party would also give bureaucrats opposed to the government an outlet to leak information that could undermine the cabinet, playing divide and rule among the politicians. And given the Hatoyama cabinet's struggle to keep ministers on message, a DPJ policy shop could only muddle matters further.

Perhaps one day the DPJ might find it useful to create a party think tank that would keep backbenchers occupied and explore new ideas. But for now the new policymaking process is too fragile and restoring a policy role to the party will simply invite trouble.

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 diplomacy

As Ozawa Ichiro waited for the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office to decide whether it would indict him along with his former secretaries, the DPJ secretary-general was busy meeting with Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, who stopped in Japan last week along with Wallace "Chip" Gregson, assistant secretary of defense for Asia-Pacific affairs for discussions with Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya and Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi.

Campbell and Ozawa spoke for an hour last Tuesday, with US Ambassador John Roos also in attendance. Neither revealed much about the meeting, although it seems that Campbell requested that Ozawa visit Washington in May with a large number of DPJ Diet members in tow, just like his December visit to Beijing along with more than 140 DPJ members.

Ozawa's response to what he called a "formal request" is a bit puzzling. At a press conference Monday he said that policy discussions are the job of the government, i.e. if the US government thinks that it can treat with Ozawa in order to find a breakthrough on Futenma it will be disappointed. Instead Ozawa views a Washington trip as necessary to build relations between the DPJ and the Democratic Party — and accordingly he wants a guarantee that a meeting will be scheduled with President Obama. That strikes me as an odd condition considering that Ozawa stated that he will not be going to discuss policy. Why should the president meet with a party official there on party business? LDP officials may have met with the US president when they visited Washington — Abe Shinzo, for example — but if foreign policy is being made by the cabinet, what business does a party official, even the secretary-general, have making a meeting with the president a precondition of his visit?

If Ozawa is serious about not interfering with the Hatoyama government's foreign policy making, he should make a point of having only brief, perfunctory meetings with administration officials, especially considering that sometime around Golden Week the government will presumably have reached a decision regarding the 2006 realignment plan. Indeed, if Ozawa really wanted to help the alliance he would travel with up-and-coming DPJ members whose foreign policy views are in the party mainstream and give US officials a better sense of the party's thinking.

While Ozawa caused considerable distress in Washington with his grand tour to Beijing — to which US officials overreacted to seeing as how symbolic visits by a politician outside of the government, no matter how powerful, will not resolve the thorny issues in the Sino-Japanese relationship — not going to Washington after having been explicitly invited would no doubt be another source of agitation.

But perhaps it would be better off if an Ozawa visit to Washington fell through. Even as Ozawa claims that policy discussions are a matter for the government, his actions undoubtedly have consequences for the government's efforts, as his China trip showed. And once in Washington, would Ozawa be able to control himself and refrain from saying anything that might undermine the government's work?

This might be a good occasion for Prime Minister Hatoyama to exercise his authority and order the secretary-general to stay home to focus on the impending upper house election campaign.

And the US government should probably get out of the habit of maintaining anything but perfunctory ties with ruling party officials outside of the government.

I find the idea of Diet members' diplomacy — giin gaiko, the idea that backbenchers can play an independent role in diplomatic problem solving — a pernicious notion characteristic of LDP rule, the foreign policy equivalent of backbencher policy intervention to secure pork-barrel projects. (not least in the case of Suzuki Muneo, now a DPJ ally as head of his New Party DAICHI). In a Westminster-style political system, foreign policy ought to be the sole province of the cabinet. Backbenchers, no matter how senior, ought to respect that or be reprimanded for interfering with government business. Ozawa has been tightening controls on the role that backbenchers can play in policymaking. Why should he be exempt?

Naturally the Hatoyama government should be doing a better job articulating the national interest and deserves at least some blame for creating a vacuum that has to some extent been filled by Ozawa. But the point remains: the prime minister and his cabinet ministers should think hard about whether they want Ozawa going to Washington at a sensitive moment for the government.

With Ozawa, there's no easy option

Ozawa Ichiro has escaped indictment by the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office again. Once again, his former secretaries were not quite so lucky, with three, including sitting Diet member Ishikawa Tomohiro, being indicted for political funds violations.

Michael Cucek rightly points to the gross misconduct of the PPO in its Ahab-like pursuit of Ozawa — and perhaps the more egregious campaign by the media to paint Ozawa as the conniving, monstrous puppet master of the Hatoyama government.

But I cannot treat Ozawa's escape from prosecution as a victory for the prime minister and the DPJ, and cannot but wonder whether the DPJ wouldn't be better off without its secretary-general.

If anything, the indictment of three of his former aides even as Ozawa survives with a vote of confidence from the prime minister will continue to be a drag on the government. As in the days when Ozawa was in charge and Hatoyama his secretary-general, Hatoyama sounds like Ozawa's chief apologist, explaining Ozawa's behavior to a skeptical public. Except, of course, Hatoyama is now the prime minister of Japan. Ozawa's presence at the head of the DPJ would be less of a problem for the Hatoyama cabinet if it had been able to dominate the media and dictate the narrative being told about the government. But the Hatoyama government has been so ineffectual in its public relations — not entirely its fault seeing as how certain publications are serving as the LDP's partners in opposition — that everything said or done by the government in relation to Ozawa contributes to the media's narrative of a government under Ozawa's thumb. Instead of reporting on the remarkable changes the Hatoyama government has made to the policymaking process, the media has been able to fixate on the superficial resemblance between the current government and the LDP in its heyday (which Ozawa of course participated in). As I've said before, I'm not convinced that DPJ government with Ozawa wielding outsized influence is worse than LDP government in which an army of backbenchers wielded influence in combination with the bureaucracy that was able to undermine all but the most determined prime ministers — and even determined prime ministers like Koizumi Junichiro did not win every battle with the backbenchers.

What should the Hatoyama government, Ozawa, and the DPJ do going forward? As Hokkaido University's Yamaguchi Jiro — a DPJ sympathizer — notes, the fate of political change and with it the Japanese people's hope for their democracy hang in the balance. He recommends that Ozawa let the trial proceed and let the PPO's evidence (or lack thereof) speak for itself. At the same time, he suggests that Ozawa forthrightly answer every question surrounding doubts about his political funds in the court of public opinion. I wonder whether Ozawa is capable of this. I know that Hatoyama and other DPJ leaders are not capable of making Ozawa do it. At the very least, Ozawa has to restrain himself and at least appear as if he is the prime minister's subordinate, not his equal (or superior).

Meanwhile, the Hatoyama government must fundamentally reconsider how it presents itself to the public via the media. The time of letting the facts speak for themselves has passed, because the facts about the government do not speak for themselves. The government needs begin aggressively making its case. Whether that will entail a new chief cabinet secretary, a media strategy team attached to the prime minister's office, or some other scheme will depend on the government, but the current arrangement is simply not working. And the prime minister needs to start showing some ability to lead, or step down.

No matter how skilled a campaigner he is, no matter how zealous a reformer he is, Ozawa's baggage imperils the government — and more than that, it jeopardizes Japan's political future and provides further impetus to cynicism among the Japanese people. There is no easy answer to the Hatoyama government's dilemma. Fire Ozawa, and it loses a skilled campaigner trusted among party supporters in the provinces. Retain Ozawa, and the prime minister continues to look weak and the media continues to feast upon the Ozawa scandal.

Ultimately, I fear that Hatoyama is simply incapable of solving this dilemma and saving his government.

Professor Hatoyama holds forth

Before entering politics — the family business — Hatoyama Yukio was a fledging academic, a Stanford-educated engineer. His background as an academic is often on display when he delivers set piece addresses. He has a penchant for abstraction, for drawing upon broad principles and shying away from the nitty gritty details of policy. This tendency is perhaps common to all leaders, but Hatoyama seems to take particular interest in how to frame policies intellectually (see his persistent use of his pet term yuai last year).

Remarkably, Hatoyama only used the term yuai once in his latest address, his policy speech for the new ordinary session of the Japanese Diet. But in this speech Hatoyama once again spent an inordinate time discussing the abstract principles behind his government's policies, in this case the idea of "protecting life." It took nearly half the speech before the prime minister began discussing the specifics of his agenda.

And even then, the policies were discussed less in terms of specific items of legislation than in terms of goals to be achieved at some point in the future. Like his government's growth strategy, it is unclear how the Hatoyama government plans to get from where Japan is today to where it wants Japan to be in ten years. Japan faces serious, immediate problems, most notably continuing deflation. (For a reminder of why deflation is destructive, Brad DeLong recently linked to an old paper of his explaining "why we should fear deflation.") On this question of deflation, Hatoyama simply waved at his government's budgets and said that his government is promoting "strong and comprehensive" economic policies with the Bank of Japan. As the Economist reports, the truth behind the prime minister's statement is more complicated. On this question of deflation, what for most governments would be at the top of the agenda, Hatoyama breezed through it with nary a detail.

As was clear during last year's campaign, the DPJ under Hatoyama is much better on political and administrative reform than on the economy, promising reforms to the administrative and public-service corporations that have been a source for considerable waste through amakudari, writing the national strategy bureau into law, centralizing the cabinet's personnel management, and reorganizing agencies and ministries (perhaps for real this time, unlike the Hashimoto-era reforms that simply created agglomerated superministries). While this section is also short on policy specifics, it is at least rooted in a clear-headed assessments of problems in national administration and a consistent set of proposals to fix them.

The same cannot be said for Hatoyama's remarks on economic reform. Under the heading of "Turning crisis into opportunity — opening frontiers," Hatoyama renews his party's call for an economy and economic growth that serves individuals, instead of enslaving them. What follows is the familiar refrain of green technology as a chance to transform the Japanese economy, coupled with embracing Japan's links with other Asian economies, especially through the promotion of tourism (he speaks of "tourism policy" without stating what that means in detail). Similarly, turning to economically stagnant provincial Japan, he calls for the modernization of Japanese agriculture and the achievement of a fifty-percent rate of self-sufficiency in food production, although the only policy to which he refers is his government's plan for direct income payments to farmers, which could prove beneficial for Japanese agriculture but not without other policies. Hatoyama is a little better when discussing decentralization — he calls for the creation of an equal relationship between central and local governments and describes this year as year zero for the "regional sovereignty revolution," but once again, there are few specifics on how this will translate into legislation.

Compared to these sections on the government's agenda at home, the foreign policy section of the speech provides a useful guide to the Hatoyama government's thinking. This is in part due to the nature of foreign policy, which is more abstract and therefore involves fewer proposals in the form of legislation or regulation. A policy address can actually provide a useful guide to how a government approaches the world.

What does Hatoyama's address tell us about his government's worldview?

First, his government takes the US-Japan alliance seriously to the point of wanting to change it so that it is suitable for twenty-first century challenges. Tellingly, his section on the alliance discusses Futenma briefly — reiterating his promise that his government will have a plan by May, and that any plan has to square with the desires of the Okinawan people — but focuses mostly on transnational challenges, namely climate change, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism (briefly). He does not speak of deterrence or regional public goods. While it would be nice to get some statement on the security cooperation layer of what Hatoyama calls a multi-layered relationship, I understand what the Hatoyama government is trying to do. A US-Japan relationship that focuses on bilateral security cooperation to the exclusion of nearly everything else is inevitably an unequal relationship, a relationship in which the stronger US presses a weaker Japan to take on new roles and acquire new capabilities. A relationship in which the two countries discuss other issues, non-traditional security issues or development for example, is inevitably a more equal relationship.

Second, the Hatoyama government is determined to reorient Japan to Asia. For decades Japan has tried to square its Asia policy with the US-Japan alliance; henceforth Tokyo will have to figure out how the alliance fits in with its Asia policy. This change did not begin with Hatoyama, but it has definitely become more pronounced. What is clear in this speech and other statements by Hatoyama is that Japan is not "America passing" when it comes to China. Just as Japanese concerns about the US government's "Japan passing" were (are?) overwrought, so too are American concerns about the Hatoyama government's cozying up to China. Yes, the Hatoyama government wants a "strategic, reciprocal relationship" with China (a phrase that originated with Abe, by the way), but it also wants better bilateral relationships with South Korea, Russia, India, Australia, and the countries of ASEAN. He wants Japan to have numerous bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral relationships in the region, and he wants his country engaged in tackling transnational problems within the region and around the world. While there are plenty of obstacles standing in the way of realizing these foreign policy goals — not least the limits imposed on the government by the public's desire to see domestic problems fixed — these remarks provide some indication to how Hatoyama's government will act internationally.

With that in mind, this speech is still instructive even though it is short on policy details. Perhaps the most noteworthy lesson from this speech is what it says about the DPJ's political base. In one section Hatoyama discusses the goal of "not allowing individuals to be isolated." To that end his government will protect employment, regulate the use of temporary workers, and enabling women, the young, and the old to participate fully in the economy and make use of their skills. Combined with its advocacy for stagnant regions, there are hints here that the DPJ over time could become the party of outsiders and laborers (whose interests clash to a certain extent). The natural rival for this party would be a Koizumian party, rooted in the middle and upper classes, prosperous urban and suburban districts, and supported by big business. Given that the Koizumians have been virtually driven from the LDP, it is difficult, for the moment, to see the LDP becoming this party. For now, economic insecurity means both parties are competing to speak for the marginalized, but should the economy recover a cleavage of this sort may be likely.

Finally, reading this speech calls to mind another recent prime minister from a prominent political family whose speeches were long on vision and ideas (and phrases in katakana) and short on policy details: Abe Shinzo. Obviously there are major differences between how Hatoyama and Abe see the world — Hatoyama is at least interested in the problems facing the Japanese people today — but like Abe, Hatoyama seems disinclined to dirty his hands with crafting a detailed policy agenda or the messy work of making policy proposals reality (i.e., politics). I cannot help but wonder whether a leader who appears so uninterested in the details of his policies and so unwilling to fight for them can be successful in power.

Why the Hatoyama government matters

As the Hatoyama government's approval numbers have faltered and more recently plummeted, as reports about the inappropriately large role being played by Ozawa Ichiro in the government (despite not being a cabinet minister) have grown, as doubts about Hatoyama Yukio's abilities as a leader have deepened, and as the court of public opinion internationally has handed down the verdict that the Hatoyama government is not only embarrassing to Japan but "risky," I have struggled to keep an eye on the big picture. The twenty-four-hour news cycle makes it difficult to do so: our attention spans shortened, we expect immediate results and solutions to problems that have emerged over years and decades and will take nearly as long to solve. Every drop in public opinion polls triggers panic, every note of discord becomes a crisis, and, closer to home for this Bay Stater, every by-election holds the fate of the nation in the balance.

But given that Japan is in the midst of unprecedented political change, it is essential to take a longer view, to not get so bogged down in cabinet bickering or opinion polls and to consider why the DPJ government matters in the first place.

Many analysts — U.S. alliance managers impatient for Japan to play a wider security role regionally and globally, investors hungry for supply-side reforms — implicitly measure the Hatoyama government's successes and failures on the basis of its progress in advancing their policy goals for Japan. (I don't think it would be wrong to say that these groups are nostalgic for the days of Koizumi Junichiro.) Others might measure the government's success in terms of whether it deliveries on its manifesto promises. Still others might look to raw economic indicators. Few analysts, if any (myself included) have articulated what success and failure mean for a DPJ government. We are sailing in uncharted waters. We do not know how to judge this new government. Should it be judged by the above standards? By comparison with the LDP? If so, which LDP? With Koizumi's LDP? With Koizumi's successors? With foreign governments? How do we judge this government?

In the longer term, we will have to judge it on the basis of its policy achievements — ultimately any democratic government will bejudged on whether the voters believe that they are "better off" since the government took power than before — but for now, a mere 100 days into the Hatoyama government, there is but one way to judge the Hatoyama government. Is it restoring the Japanese public's faith in their government?

The "lost" decades did not just erode Japan's prosperity. It also eroded the public's confidence in their elected officials and public servants. Corruption, trillions of yen of wasteful spending, non-responsive institutions, stymied reform, the promise and despair of the LDP during and after the Koizumi years: the combination of these developments was to shred whatever trust the Japanese people had in their leaders. They watched as their institutions struggled to restart the economy, as poverty increased, as public services withered and even vanished from some corners of the country, as pensions vanished. The election of the DPJ was both evidence of the extent of the breakdown of public trust — at last the voters would try another party — but also of the limits of the public's cynicism, as they were willing to see whether another party could do better.

Accordingly, the DPJ's mandate, above administrative reform, above economic reform, above pensions reform, is restoring the Japanese people's trust in their government. The Japanese government has to be made transparent and accountable. The Japanese people deserve to know what their government has done and will be doing in their names. Because few of the problems that Japan faces can be solved without the government's being able to ask for sacrifices from the Japanese people — and the Japanese people will not accept sacrifices, particularly financial sacrifices, unless they can trust the government that is asking for them. How, for example, can Japan build a more robust welfare regime without raising taxes? And how can the government raise taxes if the public does not trust the government to use the public's money wisely and transparently?

The Hatoyama government has to restore public confidence in Japan's political leadership. Reform that weakens the bureaucracy and strengthens the cabinet helps, but it is not enough. The government has to look like a government that can be trusted. None of the problems facing Japan can be solved if the government does not have the trust of the people. And it is for this reason that Ozawa is a problem.

The Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office may well be fighting a spirited battle on behalf of the old guard, as Michael Cucek argues. But to a certain extent that is besides the point. In going all out to defend Ozawa, the Hatoyama government risks looking like anything but a force for greater transparency and accountability in Japanese politics. Even if he manages to survive this latest investigation, Ozawa still ladens the DPJ with his and Japan's recent political past. At some point the Hatoyama government will have to break with Ozawa simply because any government that depends on Ozawa will have to contend with his tendency to secretiveness, his messiah complex, and his political baggage, a terrible combination of qualities.

I recognize that Ozawa is still in some ways indispensable for the DPJ, seeing as how he is able to control the party's backbenchers and manage the party's elections. But it may be worth losing his skills if it helps the DPJ rebuild public trust and pass the reins to a new generation of political leaders with the public confident in the government and some reforms already in place. Because ultimately the Hatoyama government is something of a placeholder, a transitional government from LDP to post-LDP government. The problems facing Japan took years to emerge, and solving them — and adjusting to relative decline — will take just as long or longer to resolve. It will be on Hatoyama's successors to make the greatest progress in fixing them, but whether they will be able to succeed will depend on whether Hatoyama is able to restore the public's trust in government.

That is how we should observe the Hatoyama government. Its policy successes and failures matter. Its budget deficits matters, although I am with Taggart Murphy in wondering whether the Japanese government might have more time than many think when it comes to its indebtedness. But above all, its conduct in the eyes of the Japanese public matters. And on this score, it is simply too early to declare one way or another — although the resolution of this latest Ozawa affair could have considerable significance in determining whether the DPJ is able to rebuild public trust.