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.

On Japan's leadership problem

My latest contribution to the Far Eastern Economic Review Online looks at Japan's leadership deficit.

It's available here.

"It's the institutions" (Noah Smith)

Hi! First, of course, to introduce myself. My name is Noah Smith, and I'm an economics PhD student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (specialty: urban economics and macroeconomics). Between college and graduate school I lived in Osaka, Japan for 2.5 years, from 2003-2006, where I worked as an editor and also a research assistant at Osaka University in Suita. I've been interested in Japanese politics, economics, and society for a while now, so I was happy when Tobias asked me to be a guest contributor.

Tobias's primary focus is on Japan's electoral politics and foreign policy, two areas about which I know relatively little. Like Tobias and many here, I'm eagerly awaiting the shape of a Japanese political "realignment" that I think must be coming soon; the pressure is building inexorably. But I think there's a big question that should be on our minds: If and when that realignment occurs, how will the victors — the DPJ or some new party or coalition — use their mandate to change Japan?

That is the question I want to try to answer.

True political revolutions bring not just a change in the style of management, but reforms to the institutions that shape the day-to-day workings of a society. Economists have long studied the importance of institutions in developing countries (see Dani Rodrik and Daron Acemoglu for example), but I see no reason why they should not be of crucial importance in rich countries as well. If we look at Japan's history, we find that its periods of greatest advancement — the Meiji and Taisho periods, in particular — involved big, sweeping changes to the institutions that governed Japan's economy and society. Those changes befell not just the institutions most commonly studied by economists — the electoral system, courts, public schools, and the bureaucracy — but social institutions like religions and the family. And, of course, it included the military, an institution whose importance would grow to encompass nearly all of Japanese life during the 1930s, only to vanish almost completely after World War II.

Today, Japan faces the problems of the twenty-first century with institutions that, in large part, were developed in the nineteenth and early and mid twentieth centuries. As challenges shift, institutions must keep up — but, as economists often note, institutions are "sticky." They don't like to change. Which is why the coming post-LDP political realignment is such an important moment: it will give Japan's leaders what is probably a once-in-a-generation opportunity to revamp many of Japan's institutions.

How should Japan's institutions change?

Effective institutions are a mix of what worked in the past and what seems wise for the future. Japan needs a political system that gives people more confidence in the leaders they elect and the parties to which those leaders belong. It needs a court system that is more participatory, and that elevates the rule of law above informal patronage- and status-based relationships. It needs a bureaucracy less corrupted by conflicts of interest. It needs universities that are more independently funded and more focused on research and undergraduate education. It needs religious organizations to take more active roles in building communities and providing social services like child care. It needs families that have enough time to spend together, where fathers are not separated from their wives and children by the demands of work.

If the party and leaders who take power after Japan's "realignment" can make these changes, I think Japan will be one of the world's leading nations in the twenty-first century, as it was in the twentieth.

Of course, that's just my opinion and my guess. But in the end, opinions and guesses are the driving force behind political change. I hope that mine, combined with what modest expertise I possess, can add to the discussion here at Observing Japan.

- Noah Smith

Waiting for Obama

A new LDP club has formed that some have described as "capable of inciting the overthrow of the government." The group, known as the "Association for the implementation of a new presidential election [for the LDP]," was instigated by Yamamoto Ichita and is a response to the freefall in the LDP's public approval. They will compile three proposals to present in October: (1) a plan for greater transparency in the LDP; (2) a method of cultivating new leaders; and (3) a primary system for LDP presidential elections, to ensure more "dramatic" elections. (A glance at their prospectus — read below — shows not surprisingly that this is in part a response to the US Democratic Party primaries and the interest they attracted worldwide. They must realize, of course, that the candidates make the primaries interesting and not vice versa.)

The group, according to Mr. Yamamoto, has thirty-five members. Mr. Yamamoto also provides the group's prospectus, which is instructive in considering where the prime minister and the LDP stand at the end of the extraordinary Diet session:

The Liberal Democratic Party is on the verge of its greatest crisis since the formation of the party. Not only has an image been established of a "party clinging to established rights and interests," but opposition to the new eldercare system, anger at the vanishing pensions problem, and the recurrence of wasted tax revenue scandals have caused the public's "loss of confidence in the LDP" to raise to levels never seen before. In particular, in last year's House of Councillors election the governing parties lost their majority because "let's give the DPJ a chance" syndrome [I love this phrase] was not just in the cities, but spread to rural areas. Unless we find "ways to bring the party back from the dead," there is a strong possibility that in the next general election we will fall into opposition.

The prospectus then goes on to offer proposals for making "dramatic LDP presidential elections," starting with a proposal to lift the requirement that candidates must have twenty endorsements (which, they argue correctly, makes for faction-centered elections). The prospectus explicitly points to the example of South Korea's 2002 presidential election and the "Obama boom" in the 2008 Democratic primaries as ways in which parties revived their public fortunes through dramatic campaigns. The rest of the prospectus contemplates way to run a primary campaign process that will maximize public interest and revive the LDP.

Call it the Obama plan. The whole group seems organized for the purpose of finding the LDP's Barack Obama (or the LDP's Kimura Takuya in the TV drama "Change" — the prospectus cites both examples), a young, charismatic star who will somehow transform the party. (Speaking of Kimu Taku, in the July issue of Voice, Tahara Soichiro and Takenaka Heizo discuss a dream cabinet for executing reform. Their prime minister? Kimu Taku. Funny, but sad, so very sad.)

If Japan has a Barack Obama, chances are he's not already in the LDP, serving time on PARC and Diet committees. Chances are he's stayed away from politics altogether. And even if the LDP has a young, charismatic reformist waiting to take the reigns, it is unlikely that he (or she) could fix the party. The faction chiefs and zoku giin would swallow the new leader alive, either through constant warnings about the danger of taking one risk or another, or through outright opposition with the help of the bureaucracy. A pretty face and a silver tongue will not save Japan, and will not save the LDP.

Nevertheless, however unlikely the idea that reform of the system for electing LDP presidents will rescue the party, this could be the beginning of a move to push out Prime Minister Fukuda. If enough LDP members go home for the summer and hear from their constituents about the need to replace Mr. Fukuda before the next election, they might be drawn to Mr. Yamamoto's scheme — or if not his specific scheme, then the underlying idea that the party can rejuvenate itself through a leadership election.

Abe's better half in the FT

David Pilling talks with Abe Akie in this weekend's Lunch with the FT, an exchange that apparently took place back in April before the Abes traveled to Washington, DC.

The interesting thing I find in Pilling's article is the little glimmers of a genuine personality that appear. While that is basically the point of Pilling's interview — the awkward fit of Akie into the role of political wife and first lady — she evidently obliged: "Just then, Akie’s stomach rumbles loudly. To her credit, Akie acknowledges the gurgling and bursts into laughter. She does not cover her mouth with her hand."

But there are only traces of the prime minister himself in the interview. "One problem, she says, is that her husband became prime minister earlier than expected. 'He did not have to fight for this position, to struggle for it. He felt he lacked the preparation to be prime minister.'"

I guess there is something to be said for the old LDP way of choosing its leaders. At least they had to serve time as the head of a ministry or two, learning about how policy is made. To be a wunderkind one actually has to be impressive.

Abe's rise suggests that Japan may not be immune from the dynamic that is making the 2008 crop of candidates for the US presidency one of the least experienced ever, as argued by Matt Bai in the New York Times Magazine. After considering that perhaps less experience could make for a better leader, Bai comes down on the side of experience:

Experience is what prepares presidents to stand by their convictions even when experts urge them not to, like Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act, or Harry Truman’s integrating the Armed Services. It is also what enables presidents to recognize when compromise — even odious compromise — is the last, best option, as Bill Clinton did on welfare reform. Lacking that kind of expertise, George W. Bush never did seem to master the balance between principle and pragmatism, the veteran politician’s art of when to build bridges and when to burn them. Whoever gets the nominations next year will want to study Bush’s experience closely — if only because they may not be able to count on their own.

Constructing modern Japan

Every social scientist must struggle with the question of human agency. Are human societies the product of grand social forces or are they the product of the decisions of individuals — Carlyle's heroes?

The question is particularly important for Japan, which was pushed on to a drastically different path in the late nineteenth century when confronted with the encroachment of imperial powers into Asia. But was Japan's modernization the result of powerful impersonal forces — the international system, economics, Japanese culture — or was it driven by the decisions of the elites who forged the new system?

This is the swamp into which MIT's Richard Samuels waded in Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan. Samuels, in essence, "brings the individual back in" to a discussion of the winding roads followed by late-developing Japan and Italy during the 150 years of their existence as modern states. And he succeeds admirably — in the process explaining in rich detail how Prime Ministers Yoshida and Kishi, building upon the prewar past, designed, for better or worse, the Japan we see today (the Japan that their heirs are struggling to bring into the twenty-first century).

As Samuels suggests in his introduction, the comparative analysis of Japan and Italy strikes many as counterintuitive, perhaps because Italy needed Fascists to make the trains run on time. But beyond the superficial dissimilarities — including the widespread stereotype that Italy has dynamic leaders and poor followers, while Japan has faceless leaders and obedient followers — he finds that despite facing similar conditions, constraints, and opportunities as Gerschenkronian late developers, each made drastically different decisions about governance of the economy and society, liberalism, foreign relations, and, in the postwar period, how to rebuild their states and reconstitute their political systems under the American aegis.

There is far too much in Machiavelli's Children to do it justice in this space, and, as such, this is my latest book recommendation. (NB: I will henceforth give book recommendations on a monthly basis, or else whenever I feel like it; recommending one every week was too grueling.)