Hatoyama Launches His Administration

On September 16, 2009, Democratic Party of Japan President Hatoyama Yukio took office as the prime minister of Japan, becoming the sixtieth person to serve in the post. For the first time in the post–World War II era, an election has vaulted the top opposition party into a majority in the House of Representatives, allowing it to wrest power away from the incumbents; the DPJ now heads a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party and People’s New Party as its junior partners.

The August 30 general election that brought this about saw the DPJ win 308 seats, far more than the 241 needed for a simple majority in the lower house. The Liberal Democratic Party, meanwhile, lost some 60% of its 300 pre-election seats, a stunning reversal that left it with just 119 members in the chamber and removed it from its position as the largest party in the lower house for the first time since its foundation in 1955. The New Kômeitô, the LDP’s coalition partner, also fared poorly, with its seats dwindling by 10 to just 21. Fifteen years after the introduction of an electoral system including single-seat and proportional-representation districts, intended to promote the development of a two-party political system, control of the National Diet has finally changed hands. The postelection atmosphere has been friendly to the new administration: Public opinion surveys carried out by the major national dailies and other media outlets have all found support rates of around 75% for the Hatoyama cabinet—the second-highest level of support ever, behind only that for Koizumi Jun’ichirô’s LDP cabinet formed in 2001.

Hatoyama has pledged that his new administration will free Japanese politics from its overdependence on the bureaucracy and do away with waste in public budgets. The DPJ’s campaign manifesto also included promises to provide cash benefits to families with children, to reduce public high school tuition to zero, to abolish the discriminatory health insurance scheme for elderly citizens, to stop levying the so-called provisional tax on gasoline, and to progressively eliminate expressway tolls. The new administration has launched a National Policy Unit headed by Deputy Prime Minister Kan Naoto, a former party president, as a command center to oversee these measures and has tapped Sengoku Yoshito to direct the Government Revitalization Unit, another newly created organization, which is tasked with slashing budgetary waste. Some of the largest tasks on the policy agenda are drafting a budget for fiscal 2010 (April 2010–March 2011) and adjusting the supplementary budget already on the books for the current fiscal year. Handling these will be Minister of Finance Fujii Hirohisa, a former Ministry of Finance mandarin who served in the same post in the short-lived non-LDP coalition government of Hosokawa Morihiro (1993–94).

In a discussion session following its first ministerial conference on September 16, the Hatoyama cabinet agreed on two key approaches to the issue of political leadership and the bureaucracy: First, politicians will take responsibility for crafting and deciding upon legislation, and second, bureaucrats will be limited to the supporting role of providing information to politicians and otherwise assisting the policymaking process.

KEY APPOINTEES

Hatoyama has tapped a number of experienced politicians to fill key posts in his cabinet: Okada Katsuya, a former DPJ president, as minister for foreign affairs; Naoshima Masayuki, previously the secretary general of the DPJ’s House of Councillors caucus, as minister of economy, trade, and industry; Maehara Seiji, another former DPJ president, as minister of land, infrastructure, transport, and tourism; and Hirano Hirofumi, a close associate of Prime Minister Hatoyama and deputy DPJ secretary general, as chief cabinet secretary. The Japanese public has particularly high hopes for reform in the area of social security, and Hatoyama has appointed Nagatsuma Akira, who made a name for himself and boosted his party’s popularity with his dogged pursuit of the missing pension records at the Social Insurance Agency, as minister of health, labor, and welfare. Haraguchi Kazuhiro, meanwhile, became minister of internal affairs and communications, an important position for advancing the transfer of power from the national to local governments.

The junior coalition partners gained representation in the cabinet, too, with Kamei Shizuka, head of the PNP, becoming state minister for financial services and postal reform and Fukushima Mizuho, the SDP’s leader, taking charge of consumer affairs, gender equality, and birthrate issues.

Filling the post of DPJ secretary general, meanwhile, is Ozawa Ichirô, the previous DPJ president and architect of the election strategy that brought the party its historic victory. In this position he is expected to play a valuable support role for the new administration in addition to preparing the party for the strategically vital House of Councillors election next summer. Ozawa bolted from the LDP in 1993 and has worked since then at creating a force capable of wresting power away from his former party. This year he finally accomplished this goal, in the process strengthening his hand within the DPJ by gathering a group of about 150 Diet members under his wing, including many of the "Ozawa children," first-term legislators who won their seats under his electoral leadership in the recent election.

Hatoyama named Koshiishi Azuma, chair of the party’s caucus in the House of Councillors, to fill the new post of DPJ acting secretary general. Koshiishi was active in Nikkyôso (Japan Teachers’ Union) before winning a Diet seat as a member of the former Japan Socialist Party; in 2007 he worked with Ozawa to lead the DPJ to its victory in the upper house election, and since then he has ably led the party’s members in that chamber. One of those members, Ishii Hajime, has been selected as chair of the party’s Election Campaign Committee. Another key party post, head of the Corporate and External Organizations Committee, has gone to Hosono Gôshi. Secretary General Ozawa appears to view Hosono as a future leader for the Democrats, and in his new position he will be guiding efforts to win support among the nation’s agricultural, medical, and other industry interest groups that traditionally line up behind the Liberal Democrats.

PROMISES TO KEEP

The inauguration of the new administration brings considerable change to the form of government. The DPJ’s election manifesto included a pledge to assign around 100 Diet members to posts in the ministries and agencies of the central bureaucracy. In connection with this, the party did away with the position of chair of its Policy Research Committee and rolled the functions of its Tax Research Commission into a new tax council within the administration rather than the party. Also coming to a formal end were the regular meetings of the administrative vice-ministers from each ministry, which had been a feature of the policymaking landscape since 1886. In place of these coordination meetings, political appointees in each bureaucratic organ—ministers, senior vice-ministers, and parliamentary secretaries—will meet to make decisions on policy.

The Hatoyama administration will be watched closely in the fields of foreign and security policy, not least because of the inclusion in the coalition of the Social Democrats, whose views in these areas diverge from those of the Democrats. Foreign Minister Okada is a Diet veteran first elected as an LDP member in 1990, before which he was a civil servant in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. He was a member of the Takeshita faction, the LDP’s largest, but in 1993 he joined Ozawa, Hata Tsutomu, and others in leaving the party and seeking to bring about political reform. Okada’s father, Takuya, was a businessman who founded the Aeon Group of retailers. The new foreign minister is known as a clean politician and a serious-minded policy wonk; he is another key figure in the DPJ, having served as party president from 2004 to 2005.

Prior to the general election the DPJ had indicated it would not extend the activities of the Maritime Self-Defense Force vessels now engaged in refueling operations in the Indian Ocean beyond the January 2010 end of their current mission in support of antiterrorism activities by US and other countries’ naval forces. More recently, however, Okada has stressed that the party’s stance is that the mission should not be "simply extended," and that the manifesto did not clearly promise an end to the MSDF operations. On the subject of the US Marine Corps Air Station at Futenma, Okinawa, whose relocation has been the subject of prolonged Japan-US negotiations, Okada stated at a press conference following the first cabinet meeting on September 16 that he would make efforts to ensure the maintenance and enhancement of the Japan-US alliance; he showed flexibility on the Futenma issue, noting that if Japan merely presented its desired results, the talks with the United States could not be called real negotiations.

During the election campaign the Democrats made five main pledges, promising to focus on "the end of wasteful spending," "childrearing and education," "pensions and medical care," "regional sovereignty," and "employment and the economy." As spelled out in the DPJ manifesto, the intent is to revise Japan’s general account and special account budgets, currently totaling more than ¥200 trillion annually, to free up funding for the new programs promised by the party. In fiscal 2010 this funding will come to ¥7.1 trillion, with additional savings in other budget areas allowing this total to rise to ¥16.8 trillion over the four years to fiscal 2013. To help pay for these measures, the party is focusing on slashing subsidies to and expenditures by government- related institutions (a reduction of ¥6.1 trillion) and on finding unused funds ("buried treasure") and drawing revenues from various special accounts (a total of ¥4.3 trillion).

Another priority issue for the new administration is global warming. Prime Minister Hatoyama spoke at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change held in New York on September 22, announcing that Japan would seek to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% from their 1990 levels by the year 2020. He also proposed a "Hatoyama initiative" to offer assistance to developing countries in pursuing similar goals. Industrial interests in Japan are voicing concern about the considerable burden this numerical target will place on them. But it is not a completely unilateral pledge; Hatoyama made it conditional on the participation of all major emitters in the comprehensive framework to follow the Kyoto Protocol period ending in 2012. In any case, Japan has attracted positive attention for its new stance on environmental issues, which places it far ahead of other developed nations in terms of reduction goals. (Editorial Department, Japan Echo Inc.)

© 2009 Japan Echo Inc.