You could be forgiven for thinking that the sole purpose of Post-War democracy in Japan has been to belie the received wisdom in the West that a week is a long time in politics. In Japan, politics works to a different time-table and at a far more leisurely, indeed, languorous pace. After 54 years of almost one party rule by the Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), many – both within and without the country – had given-up hope that a functioning democracy was possible in a country overly fond of bureaucracy and its attendant pork barrelling.
Last week’s general election victory by the country’s main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), however, has gone some way to lift the torpor and, it is hoped, reinvigorate its flagging political scene.
Having only tasted power for a brief period in 1993-94, opposition parties in Japan were until this week ever the bridesmaids. Yet if this most recent incarnation of LDP opposition hadn’t managed to wrest power from the ruling elite, it’s unlikely they ever would. The time was propitious and the country is ripe for change. What with the world economic down-turn, a record unemployment rate of 5.7%, a Prime Minister – Taro Aso – whose linguistic infelicities compare unfavourably with Bush’s malapropisms, and a refractory upper house dominated by the DPJ, the governing party had found itself in an almost untenable position.
Given their first opportunity after four years and as many Prime Ministers, the Japanese public has registered its discontent in no uncertain terms. A healthy lower house majority of 296 to 113 for the LDP has been reversed by the electorate, with the DPJ now enjoying a 307 to 119 majority. It only remains for the incoming Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, to find a few obliging coalition parties to ensure the necessary two thirds majority in the Diet that will enable the new incumbent to effect the changes outlined in his election manifesto.
What this reform will be remains to be seen. His election mantra was a familiar one – that of ‘change’. But there is little doubt that Hatoyama has his sights set on some of the sacred cows of Japan’s political machinery, not least the nation's powerful bureaucrats and apparatchiks. The practise of levering superannuated civil servants into well remunerated jobs in industry rankles with the electorate and is top of Hatoyama’s reform agenda. He has also announced his discomfort with what he terms the 'excesses of US-style capitalism' and it is believed he wants to redraw the parameters of the country’s relationship with America; a move that is believed to signal his intention of orienting the country more towards its Eastern neighbours.
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