The recent victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the Lower House, just two years after its surprise victory in the Upper House, is only slightly less exciting than the news that the new First Lady of Japan has traveled, in an out-of-body experience, to the planet Venus. This unusual turn of affairs, predicted by authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, C. S. Lewis, Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and Paul Anderson, will not, we can only hope, influence Japan’s foreign affairs in the years ahead. Critics allege that Hatoyama Miyuki’s claim is nothing more than a stunt in which she hopes to attain the high-standing of American political wives like Nancy Reagan, who of course is a devout believer in Astrology, or even former president Jimmy Carter, who saw a UFO while Governor of Georgia (pdf). At the very least she is as “interesting” a figure in politics as Carla Bruni or Sarah Palin. And we shouldn’t let her oddities distract us from the very real and significant participation of women politicians in the DPJ strategy of attacking LDP strongholds. In the end, 54 women won seats in the Lower House.

The DPJ emerged from the late-night 1998 union, no doubt fueled by many Suntory whiskies, of the Democratic Reform Party, the New Fraternity Party, the Democratic Party, and the Good Governance Party. (Why didn’t they go with the much more compelling English name “The Good Fraternity Party”? Now that’s a name American politicians could understand.)

The leader of the DPJ in its period of frenetic activity between 2006 and May of 2009  was Ozawa Ichiro. Elected to the presidency of his party as a reformer, Ozawa was in fact first elected to office as a member of the LDP in 1969. His mentor was Tanaka Kakuei, who became Prime Minister in 1972 on a wave of overwhelming popularity but then was implicated in numerous scandals within a year of taking office. Ozawa survived this crisis and became LDP Secretary General in 1989. As recently as 1999, he was still closely aligned with the leaders of the LDP. This experience proved valuable. More than any member of the DPJ, Ozawa can be credited with the party’s rise, and although he stepped down in May because of allegations of scandal (surprise!), he was a central figure in the election strategy that knocked the LDP out of power for just the second time since the 50s, and will likely assume the new post of Secretary General.

The current leader of the DPJ and the new Prime Minister of Japan (as well as the lucky husband of one of the few women to visit Venus. Venus! Imagine!) is Hatoyama Yukio. Following in the proud, reformist tradition established by Koizumi Jun’ichiro, Hatoyama has awesome hair. Like many graduates of Stanford University (Ph.D. 1976), Hatoyama comes from humble origins: his great-grandfather was Speaker of the House and President of Waseda University; his grandfather was Prime Minister; his father was Foreign Minister; and his mother is considered to be one of the most influential political donors in Japan. (The family even has an English-language scholarly monograph dedicated to them; it’s available on KINDLE!) Hatoyama was only with the LDP for seven years from 1986 to 1993, giving him slightly better credentials as a reformist than Ozawa.

The DPJ has a lot to do. Their new Prime Minister, nicknamed “the Alien” by parliamentary colleagues for his protruding eyes and Stanford-like behavior, needs to answer the question: If women are from Venus, are men in fact from Mars? Will the DPJ adopt an increasingly belligerent tone toward North Korea, Japan’s most urgent international threat? Will Hatoyama champion environmental issues despite American recalcitrance? Will the new government revisit the issue of Article 9 in the constitution or spend its valuable political capital on continuing economic recovery instead? And will Japan establish a consulate on the second planet from the sun in the near future?

People inside and outside of Japan are genuinely excited to see if the DPJ will successfully reform the nation’s political system, shaped by decades of one-party dominance and widespread corruption. Or will the rule of Hatoyama, like the brief period of coalition rule in the 1990s, be nothing but a fleeting, out-of-body experience?

(Thanks to my former student Mathew Mikuni, a Diplomacy and World Affairs and Asian Studies double major who, in a marvelous 2009 senior thesis, taught me everything I know about the DPJ. Except for the inaccurate, snarky, and hypothetical stuff.)

Last time I lived in Japan, the LDP lost control of the Diet, and for a year and a half there was a Socialist Prime Minister in charge of an implausible coalition between the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The Democratic Party of Japan, which just took control of the lower house of the Diet, was formed in the aftermath of that coalition: the more liberal elements of the LDP combined with the more moderate elements of the JSP.¹ This left a more conservative LDP and a more Socialist SDP, and also, as a side effect, left the LDP again in charge of the government, in coalition with the Komeito and other conservative groups. Another side effect: the bushy eyebrows and grandfatherly face of Murayama Tomiichi were immortalized in the “Ton-chan” dolls sold by the JSP; I bought one, thinking that this might be “historic.”²

You could hardly tell from the news reports coming out of Japan at the moment.³ I suppose that I’m not surprised by the lack of respect given to the mid-90s political turmoil: it was inconclusive and sloppy, not the kind of clear-cut “historic” event that makes for banner headlines. But what came out of it was an LDP that was, honestly, destined to fail: instead of representing the middle two-thirds of the Japanese political spectrum, it represented a heavily right-oriented one-third, while the DPJ took a big chunk of what was left. Essentially, the LDP split, probably the natural end to a party that was a coalition to begin with, formed out of a Cold War fear that Japan’s leftist parties might put aside their differences long enough to win control of the Diet. While it took a few elections, and another decade of disappointing economic stagnation, the left wing of the former LDP has overtaken the right wing of the former LDP, and a former member of the LDP is going to be Prime Minister.⁴

Is this “historic“? Well, it depends, of course. If the DP turns out to be more or less just like the LDP, then it’s no more historic than Pepsi™ overtaking Coca-Cola™. If the DP turns out to be a genuinely center-left party which reduces international entanglements while successfully fostering economic development, it could actually be a revival of the Yoshida Doctrine. That might actually be interesting, especially since it could mean a shift away from the normalization discourses we’ve been hearing so much of. I guess it’s a bit too soon to write the new narrative.

1. This is a rough approximation. The faction politics of the LDP did not neatly divide along ideological lines, but some sense of policy alignment was starting to become clearer when the split happened
2. Actually, I bought two: one for me and one for my parents.
3. I want to thank Adam Richards for his tireless political blogging during this election, possibly the best reportage in English this time around.
4. I don’t think anyone’s going to make plush toys out of Hatoyama Yukio, though he’d make a credible daruma.

My copanelists on Saturday were political scientists, and it was a good update for me on what what’s going on with Japan in the last ten years or so. “Normalization” is the name of the game: Japan’s political spectrum and international relations are starting to look a lot less like Yoshida’s vision and a lot more like a pretty normal regional power.

Keiko Hirata from CSU Northridge looked at the basic divisions between political theories at work in Japan. Many political scientists have divided them into four groups: pacifist (isolationists), mercantilists (internationalist), normalists (internationalist) and nationalists (isolationist, sort of). Yoshida’s domestic economic and non-entanglement orientation makes him a mercantilist, but the normalists are the group which seems to be in ascendance at the moment. Though Hirata didn’t talk about this, it seems to me that the nationalists are the group which has made that possible: their extreme views on remilitarization and national identity have made the gradual remilitarization and international engagement of the normalists seem, well, normal.¹ The most interest aspect of the categories as far as I was concerned is that they have widely disparate views of history: The pacifists, of course, emphasize the irresponsibility and horror of WWII; mercantilists emphasize the post-war recovery, seeing the war as a period of national destruction; the normalists take a kind of “dark valley” approach; the nationalists see the early 20th century as a period of healthy growth and cultural pride.

Gaye Christoffersen, one of Soka’s own, presented a surprisingly interesting look at the issue of multilateral maritime security. This has become pretty hot lately, what with the Somali pirate situation, and the multilateral, bottom-up coalition which has been solving the problem out there actually has its roots in the coalition which has taken responsibility for the Malacca Straights. There, the US tried to organize a top-down security system, but failed, while China and Japan led a slower, but more successful, bottom-up group. The punch line to this is that Japan’s Coast Guard has been spearheading things, because it isn’t bound by the Naval SDF’s limitations on the use of force; to equalize things, Japan just last week passed an anti-piracy bill allowing multilateral agreements and the use of force on the high seas. Normalization continues. China’s concerns about Japan’s normalization are a big deal still, but in multilateral/regional situations, they seem to be able to work together.

Hideyuki Sakai talked about “minilateralism,” which apparently is a kind of high-level collusion among a few members used to save multilateral agreements and regimes. Japan, it seems, excels at these kinds of negotiations, especially on environmental issues. Interestingly, in the next session, Tsuneo Akaha talked about international migration and human security issues, and the problem of protecting migrants, especially illegal ones, given legal and economic regimes that criminalize but also exploit their presence. In this case, multi-lateralism is proceeding very slowly, and Japan’s role in the process has not been all that helpful, since it has a very narrow view of migration and migrant rights. That’s not really news, of course, but it does demonstrate something useful about the direction things might still have to go, and the issues on which “bottom-up” and minilateralism aren’t going to be all that effective.

As Tsuneo noted in the discussion period, North Korea was kind of the elephant in the living room through these discussions….

1. I was a little surprised that she didn’t reference the “Overton Window,” but maybe I’ve been reading too much ScienceBlogs lately.

OK, admittedly I am supremely unqualified to write a post about the current prime ministerial vacancy in Japan. I’m a historian who works on the 16th century, not an expert in contemporary politics. And many people have their eyes fixed on the Palin-Biden-Clinton-McCain-Obama slugfest. But this story–Manga-obsessed, Stanford- and SOAS-educated, former Olympic skeetshooter, cement CEO, Catholic, and regular conservative crazy talker Aso Taro is front runner for the job of Prime Minister–is just too interesting to pass by.

Will the man who made Doraemon Japan’s cultural ambassador be king? Too may politicians have entered the race to be sure at this point, but he is at the head of the pack, having previously aimed for the office three times without success and this time apparently claiming the right mix of experience, LDP credentials, and public popularity. Tobias Harris says Aso isn’t the right man for the job, if such a figure even exists, but it seems quite likely that he will end up landing the post (in elections to be held in October or November) according to recent coverage in Japanese newspapers.

Some commentators see recent public discomfort with LDP leadership as a sign that a major political reallignment is imminent, but it just seems hard to imagine. Are the times a-changin’, or will Aso return the government to stability? More importantly, will manga become required reading on unversity entrance exams?

President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believe the occupation of Iraq is failing to achieve a stable or democratic result by citing those who incorrectly believed that creating a liberal democratic state in Japan after WWII was impossible. This is a fairly transparent invocation of the “Galileo Gambit,” pointing out that people have, unsurprisingly, sometimes been wrong about things they felt strongly about and that the people who were right have sometimes been in the minority.

It’s interesting to see the example of Japan coming up again, as it was very commonly cited in the run-up to the Iraq war. John Dower himself, as the article points out, wrote several articles demolishing the idea that Japan was a good analogy to Iraq in this regard.¹ Dower has also argued that Iraq is like Manchuria (with the US in the role of Japan) and more likely to be a quagmire than a shining example of modernity.² The Bush Administration immediately disavowed any endorsement of Dower’s views outside of the citation made by the President, and this kind of historical cherry picking and selective ignorance is all too typical of politicians in general.

It bolsters my complaint from yesterday, though: a better understanding of Asian history generally, and of US involvement in it, would be all to the good, but so often Asia is just a foil, out of context and interesting only insofar as it affects us.

1. November 2002 and March 2003
2. I’ve also made the Manchuria analogy, and it still stands up pretty well, I’m afraid.