FROM THE EDITOR

This July the International Political Science Association will hold its Twentieth World Congress in Fukuoka, Japan, bringing together some 1,700 political scientists from about 80 countries and regions. As this issue of Japan Echo will be published not long in advance of this event, we thought it would be appropriate to publish a pair of articles about Japan’s domestic politics and foreign policy. For our first article, University of Tokyo Professor Kabashima Ikuo, a member of our editorial board and secretary general of the upcoming IPSA congress, has coauthored a sweeping overview of the postwar political scene, focusing on the long rule of the Liberal Democratic Party. For our second, Keiô University Professor Soeya Yoshihide has written an explanation of the tenor of Japan’s foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

US FORCES REALIGNMENT As we noted in our February issue, the Japanese and US governments have been negotiating about the realignment of US forces in Japan; last October they came out with an interim report, and they had hoped to finalize it by the end of March. In fact, though, it was not until May 1 that the final agreement was reached, at which point an overall picture came into view. The contents, particularly the size of the financial burden Japan will bear, will surely be the object of considerable debate in the period to come.

The biggest issues in the public eye relating to the realignment as outlined in the interim report have been the plan to build a new facility in Okinawa to replace Futenma Air Station and the size of Japan’s share of the costs of relocating US marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam. The two countries have also been talking about moving a US army command post from Washington State to Camp Zama near Tokyo and about closer operational coordination between the US military and Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. But these and other matters relating to the essence of the bilateral security setup have not become the topic of any widespread public discussion so far.

A full three quarters of the US bases in Japan are concentrated in Okinawa, and for decades the people of this small island prefecture have borne a disproportionate share of the burden imposed by the American presence. Futenma Air Station is a particularly troublesome facility, since it is located in a built-up urban area. Back in 1996, Tokyo and Washington agreed that it should be relocated, but local residents of potential new sites resisted proposed plans, and a decade passed with no concrete progress.

Everybody agreed that the facility needed to be moved, but nobody wanted it in their own backyard. Further complications arose from the need to preserve Okinawa’s precious natural environment and from questions about the feasibility of proposed construction plans. The Americans grew impatient with the lack of forward movement, but at the same time they wanted the new facility to be built in a site where local residents accepted it.

Following the release of the interim report last October, the Defense Agency engaged in intensive negotiations with the municipality of Nago in Okinawa, the site on which Tokyo and Washington had agreed. On April 7 Defense Agency Director General Nukaga Fukushirô finally won the consent of Nago’s Mayor Shimabukuro Yoshikazu, having adjusted the plan substantially to meet local safety concerns. And on May 11 Okinawa Prefecture Governor Inamine Keiichi, whose approval is needed for the proposed plan, softened his opposition to it.

The second issue that has provoked public discussion is Japan’s share of the costs involved in moving 8,000 US marines and 9,000 family members from Okinawa to Guam. Washington initially asked Tokyo to pay 75% of a total bill it calculated at $10 billion. To break through the impasse over both the contents of the bill and the percentage to be borne by Japan, Nukaga flew to Washington and met on April 23 with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. According to the agreement between the two defense chiefs, Japan will bear 59% of the cost, providing $6.09 billion in funds, including loans. This represents a massive outlay for a government already struggling with a tremendous national debt, and the administration must now justify it to the public and reveal the specifics.

A REINVIGORATED OPPOSITION A key way in which the Democratic Party of Japan, the top opposition force, can make its presence felt is through spirited debate with ruling party legislators in the National Diet. But early this year the DPJ stumbled badly when it allowed one of its young members in the lower house to direct a serious allegation against a senior Liberal Democrat on the basis of an unsubstantiated piece of e-mail. The party leadership aggravated the problem by failing to deal with it decisively after the e-mail was revealed to be bogus. Public trust in the DPJ plummeted, and the party’s very survival seemed to be at risk. The relative youthfulness of the Democratic contingent in the Diet, including 43-year-old party chief Maehara Seiji, and of the DPJ itself was one of its selling points, but this flap seemed to highlight the party’s youth in the form of immaturity. Maehara initially said he would stay on, but after an extended period of confusion he announced his resignation on March 31.

The victor in the April 7 DPJ presidential election was Ozawa Ichirô, a veteran legislator who was a central figure in the LDP for many years. Ozawa is skilled at formulating sweeping policy visions, and though many see him as a practitioner of strong-arm political tactics, his intimate knowledge of the workings of the LDP and his electoral savvy make him a formidable opponent for the Liberal Democrats. His election as head of the DPJ is also likely to affect the upcoming race within the LDP to select a successor for Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirô, whose term as party president ends this September.

In his recent campaign for the DPJ presidency, Ozawa called for “coexistence,” “a fair country,” and “reinforcement of Asian relations.” He can be expected to offer the public a lucid explanation of these ideas and of concrete policies to achieve them. In the April 23 by-election in Chiba Prefecture for a vacant seat in the lower house of the Diet, the DPJ was able to come up from behind and win. Though the margin was razor-thin, the victory cemented Ozawa’s position within the party, and he now seems certain to be reelected for a full term this September. His goal is to lead the party to power by ousting the LDP, and recent polls show that as much as half of the electorate wishes him success.

Koizumi has now been in office for five years, and presuming that he serves through September, at which point he intends to step down, he will be the third-longest- serving Japanese prime minister since the end of World War II. In the coming months we can expect to see assessments of his record from various angles in the Japanese media, and we intend to introduce a representative selection of these in Japan Echo.

APART FROM POLITICS AThe economic picture these days in Japan is rather mixed. We hear much talk about the widening of income gaps and the growth of poverty, which some blame on the policies of the Koizumi administration. But at the same time, it cannot be denied that the economy has been recording a sustained expansion without relying on fiscal stimulus from the government. Banks have unloaded the bulk of their nonperforming loans, and key indicators like stock prices, capital investment, employment, and consumer spending have all been heading up. Sentiment among business executives has also brightened considerably, and firms that have managed to adjust their business models so as to tap global economic growth are registering steady gains in their performance. In March the Bank of Japan decided that it could end its extraordinary policy of quantitative easing, adopted to counter the prolonged bout of deflation. We include an article on this topic by Nariai Osamu, a member of our editorial board.

In my From the Editor comment last time I noted our intention of introducing a variety of views on the imperial succession. We have selected three articles for the current issue, including one in favor of extending eligibility for succession to the throne to women and female-line descendants and two in favor of maintaining the current restriction to males in the male line of descent. These offer a small sample of the many positions expressed on this sensitive but important matter. (Iwao Sumiko)

© 2006 Japan Echo Inc.