POLITICAL CHANGE on a grand scale has been delivered by Japanese voters who have decisively thrown out the long governing Liberal Democrats and installed the centre left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in power.
This has the potential to transform the country’s political culture into a competitive two-party system for the first time since the second World War, to shake up its domestic social and economic policies and to shift Japan’s foreign policy away from dependence on the United States towards a more balanced relationship with its Asian neighbours.
It is a welcome and hopeful change in the world’s second largest industrial power, although much will depend on how well the relatively inexperienced new leadership delivers on its promises. The DPJ has tripled its parliamentary representation, dislodging many veteran Liberal Democrats and bringing a new generation into politics. It appeals especially to urban middle and working class voters fed up with the LDP’s traditional support for industrial interests and rural pork-barrelling larded by factionalism and corruption.
DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama, himself a former LDP member, promises to increase spending on pensions and child welfare, to revive domestic demand in the economy, to scale back the overweening power of Japan’s central bureaucracy, to emphasise environmental projects and to become more independent of the US. Given that Japan already has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the industrialised world he is heavily constrained. But the mere fact of such a dramatic victory should help him establish realisable priorities and time scales. Elections to the weak upper house of the parliament next year will give voters a chance to make an interim judgment and may reveal whether this change heralds a shift towards a new political constellation of long-term centre-left rule or rather a transition to a more fluid and competitive two-party system.
The international dimension of the change is as important as the domestic one. Mr Hatoyama believes the period of US hegemony is coming to an end. He wants to see more Asian co-operation on economic, political and security affairs. His victory presents quite a different face to the world than the arrogant and historically ill-informed neo-nationalism cultivated by recent LDP leaders which stoked popular anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Korea and Taiwan. There is now potential to repair that damage, even to contemplate a more long-lasting reconciliation which has eluded Asian leaders during the cold war and after it.
This is not to say there will be rapid or radical change in Japan’s present foreign policy positions. Many of them are closely bound up with its political and economic interests. Thus it would be naive to expect a dramatic shift away from the US and towards China. Already Japan has cultivated closer relations with India, Vietnam and Indonesia to balance China’s growing power. The challenge now is to accentuate that change towards greater Asian interdependence without antagonising the Chinese.