EXAMINING JAPAN’S OPPOSITION

On May 16 this year, the Democratic Party of Japan selected a new president to replace Ozawa Ichirô, who had announced his resignation five days earlier to avoid exposing the DPJ to any more criticism over the scandal regarding illicit political donations from Nishimatsu Construction.

There were two candidates in the DPJ race: Hatoyama Yukio, the party’s secretary general, and Okada Katsuya, the vice-president. Hatoyama won 124 votes to Okada’s 95, making him the new leader. Public opinion polls taken before the contest showed Okada to be the more popular of the two, but after Ozawa signaled his support for Hatoyama, the party’s sitting Diet members in the House of Councillors, where Ozawa wields considerable clout, lined up behind the eventual election winner.

The Democrats had watched their support figures fall since March 3, when one of Ozawa’s secretaries was arrested. Public support for the cabinet of Prime Minister Asô Tarô, meanwhile, was on the rise. The political mood changed once again with Ozawa’s resignation and Hatoyama’s election as DPJ president, though. The Asahi Shimbun poll carried out in June found that support for the DPJ was 29%, compared to just 22% for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Support for the Asô cabinet, meanwhile, was even lower, at 19%. Here a contributing factor was the resignation of the LDP’s Hatoyama Kunio (younger brother to Yukio) as minister of internal affairs and communications. Hatoyama had opposed allowing Nishikawa Yoshifumi to stay on as president of Japan Post Holdings; he quit when Prime Minister Asô supported Nishikawa. The public stood behind Hatoyama in this matter, though, due in part to the media’s skewed coverage of the cancelled sale of the Japan Post—managed Kanpo no Yado inns.

The June Asahi Shimbun survey produced particularly dire results for the LDP. In response to the question "If the election were held now, which party would you vote for in the proportional representation districts?" 43% of respondents said the DPJ, while just 23% selected the LDP. This was a climb of more than 10 percentage points in support for the Democrats from the survey carried out before Ozawa announced his resignation.

As of the time of this writing, some media outlets are reporting the possibility that Asô will dissolve the House of Representatives as soon as early July and call a general election for early August. If public opinion stays unchanged, the DPJ will be in a very advantageous position in the contest, and we may well see the birth of the Hatoyama Yukio cabinet. Below I trace the history of the party and introduce Hatoyama’s political background and the role he has played in the Democrats’ development over the years. I will also look at the statements he made upon becoming the new party president, comparing them to his previous positions. And finally, I will touch briefly on the influence still wielded within the DPJ by Ozawa Ichirô.

THE DPJ’S FIRST DECADE The Democratic Party of Japan took form in September 1996 around a core of Diet members from the New Party Sakigake and the right-leaning segment of the Social Democratic Party. In the October 1996 election, the party took 52 seats in the lower house. In December 1997 the New Frontier Party, which had been the main opposition party, disbanded, creating a number of small parties in the process. The DPJ absorbed members from many of these splinters, formally relaunching itself as the new DPJ in April 1998. At this time its lower house contingent had grown to 93 members; it steadily expanded in the years after then. In the June 2000 general election the party won 127 seats in the House of Representatives to become the prime opposition party–a position further cemented when it merged with the Liberal Party and took a total of 177 seats in the November 2003 general election.

This growth trend reversed in September 2005, though, when the Democrats saw their lower house seats shrink to 113. In April the following year Ozawa Ichirô became president. He would preside over a resurgence in the party’s fortunes, namely the July 2007 House of Councillors election, in which the party won 60 fresh seats. This gave the Democrats 109 upper house seats in all, making them the largest party in that Diet chamber. This contest marked the beginning of a fresh phase of public support for the DPJ. Until 2007, with the exception of election seasons, the Democrats had seen support rates for their party languish below 20%. Since the 2007 upper house election, though, these rates have remained above the 20% mark, a sign of heightened popular confidence in the party.

For its first eight years, the party was led by Hatoyama Yukio and Kan Naoto. They served jointly as party chiefs from September 1996 to September 1997; Kan alone was party president from that month until September 1999; the presidency then went back to Hatoyama until December 2002, when Kan once again took the reins. It was not until May 2004 that another politician took this post. Okada Katsuya led the party until September 2005, when he was replaced by Maehara Seiji. Maehara’s presidency lasted until April the following year, when Ozawa took over.

HATOYAMA’S POLITICAL PEDIGREE Hatoyama Yukio, since May this year again the DPJ’s president, was born in 1947 as the eldest son of Hatoyama Iichirô. Here I must stress that this family is one of Japan’s preeminent political clans. Yukio’s great-grandfather, Kazuo, was speaker of the House of Representatives, and his grandfather, Ichirô, was the first president of the LDP and prime minister from 1954 to 1956. Iichirô, after serving as administrative vice-minister of finance, was elected to the House of Councillors; he would later become minister for foreign affairs. Yukio’s younger brother, Kunio, is an LDP member in the House of Representatives who has been minister of education, justice, and internal affairs and communications.

Yukio did not intend to enter politics at first, desiring rather to become a scientific researcher. After earning an engineering degree from the University of Tokyo, he got his PhD in engineering at Stanford University and became an associate professor at Senshû University. It was after all this that he ran for office for the first time, winning a lower house seat in July 1986 as an LDP candidate.

Hatoyama’s political career has seen several key turning points. The first of these came in June 1993, when he left the LDP to help form the New Party Sakigake. Following the July 1993 general election, Sakigake joined the Social Democratic Party of Japan, Japan Renewal Party, Japan New Party, Kômeitô, and Democratic Socialist Party in wresting power away from the LDP and launching the cabinet of Hosokawa Morihiro (1993—94). Hatoyama served as deputy chief cabinet secretary under Hosokawa. In April 1994 Sakigake left the coalition government, but two months later it returned to power in a new coalition with the LDP and SDPJ. It was in July that year that Hatoyama became chief secretary of Sakigake.

The second turning point in his political life came in September 1996, when Hatoyama took the lead in creating the Democratic Party of Japan. The decision had already been made to institute single-seat and proportional- representation districts for the next lower house election, and this new electoral system threatened the end of Sakigake’s presence in the Diet. In August he announced he would leave the party and create a new one. In September, along with Kan Naoto and other key figures, Hatoyama announced the formation of the DPJ. The party took shape around a core of most of Sakigake’s membership and the right-leaning members of the Social Democratic Party. Hatoyama and Kan served as co-presidents of the DPJ for the party’s first year; in September 1997, Hatoyama became secretary general; and in April 1998, when the party relaunched itself, he took the post of deputy secretary general.

In September 1999, Hatoyama beat Kan, then in charge of the DPJ, in a party election to select its next president. Thanks in part to the party’s gains in the general election held in June 2000, he handily won reelection in September that year; he would win the top post once again in September 2002. He lost momentum after this third victory, though. In November 2002 he entered into talks with Liberal Party leader Ozawa Ichirô. When their sudden announcement of a plan to merge their two parties failed to win support within the DPJ, Hatoyama was forced to step down. He made his way back into the executive ranks in September 2005, when he became secretary general under the new president, Maehara Seiji. Hatoyama remained in this post when Ozawa Ichirô took over the presidency in April 2006. It was from this position that he supported Ozawa until replacing him earlier this year, which marked the third major turning point in Hatoyama’s political career.

LOOKING TO THE NEXT ELECTION What, then, are the policy goals of the present DPJ leader? His statements during his campaigning for the DPJ presidency provide a roadmap here, as does his article in the July 2009 Bungei Shunjû, "Môjû Ozawa o kô tsukau" (Ways to Put Ozawa’s Wildness to Use), which spelled out his latest thinking on the issues. One vision he has announced for the future of Japan is a yûai shakai, or "society of fraternity," which he describes as one where "all of its members can find their proper places and truly feel that they are playing valuable roles within it; a society where people perceive the happiness of others as their own." The term yûai (fraternity) is one that his grandfather, Ichirô, originally used in this sense. In September 1996, "positioning the spirit of ‘fraternity’ as a basis of society" was one of the new DPJ’s basic tenets. This language does not convey what sort of policies Hatoyama has in mind to make progress toward this goal, though.

One major domestic policy approach that Hatoyama has consistently championed is to reduce the central government’s authority. He has also been a longtime advocate of a society where citizens themselves, not just government agencies, take on public roles. In terms of specific policy areas, Hatoyama is now focusing on education, medical and nursing care, welfare, and the environment.

There is one area where Hatoyama’s expressed views have changed over time. He came out as a fierce critic of the structural reforms promoted by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirô (2001—6), blasting the "survival of the fittest" situation and economic disparities they brought about in society. His tune was different during his time at the helm of the DPJ beginning in September 1999, though, when he was one of the politicians calling most vigorously for structural reform. In September 2000, for instance, he stated that "there is no way to rebuild the economy other than by reforming Japan’s structures"; arguing the need to slash expenditures and carry out regulatory reform, he urged the government to cut public works spending by 30%.

This year’s contest for the DPJ presidency saw little discussion of foreign policy and security issues. On the subject of Japan’s right to collective self-defense, Hatoyama did state, "We shouldn’t make a blanket statement that nothing can be done, but that doesn’t mean that we can do anything at all," hinting at a more flexible interpretation. It must be said that he has taken a relatively flexible approach to the right to collective self-defense in the past, making this latest statement a continuation of his previous position. During the DPJ election he acknowledged that conditions are not now right to revise Article 9 of the Constitution, despite the fact that he had in the past referred to the need to revise this article to recognize Japan’s Self-Defense Forces as a full-fledged military. Another shift in his policy stance over the years has come on the US military bases located in Japan. In the past he has been in favor of reducing the American military presence in stages: in September 1996 the basic ideals of the newly founded DPJ included the position that security without a permanent foreign armed presence was one option open to Japan. This year, though, Hatoyama has made no particularly bold statement on the US bases or the Japan-US Security Treaty.

Whatever positions Hatoyama does stake out, whether he can reflect them in DPJ policy depends on how effectively he can wield leadership within the party. After his selection as president, he tapped Okada Katsuya, the other candidate for the top post, as the party’s secretary general and named Ozawa Ichirô acting president in charge of election strategy. Kan Naoto and Koshiishi Azuma also retained their seats as acting presidents. During the party’s presidential contest some worried aloud that Hatoyama, having served as secretary general under Ozawa, would end up a mere puppet while Ozawa continued to wield power behind the scenes. Hatoyama has strenuously rejected this claim, but the fact remains that Ozawa is firmly in charge of the practical aspects of preparing the party for the upcoming general election. It is inevitable that the Democrats will increase their numbers in the House of Representatives, and when this happens, Ozawa will certainly enjoy greater influence among the DPJ members in the chamber to match the influence he enjoys among those already in the House of Councillors.

The upshot is that the post-election DPJ will likely see Ozawa in a stronger position across the board. The political system in today’s Japan is moving toward placing greater power in the hands of party chiefs. In this context, Ozawa’s grip on influence within the DPJ makes him an unusual case. The relationship between him and Hatoyama following the election will be a key factor deciding the course Japanese politics will take. (Takenaka Harukata, Associate Professor, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

© 2009 Japan Echo Inc.