Top bureaucrats who once ran Japan are to be forced to take a back seat under the new PM, writes DAVID McNEILL
EARLIER THIS week a group of middle-aged Japanese men held what some called a bureaucratic wake for the end of an era.
Since the dawn of Japan’s modernisation over a century ago, these top bureaucrats have huddled in the prime minister’s office twice a week to set the government’s agenda. It was they who wrote policy, not the nation’s elected leader or cabinet.
Now those vice-ministerial meetings are due to end. DPJ leader and new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has pledged to pull the plug on bureaucratic power and give control back to elected officials. One outcome will be that Japan’s huge budgets will be centralised and scrutinised, rather than controlled by back-room brokers. Another is that the men who once ran Japan will be forced to take a back seat.
The aim, says Atsuo Ito, a former LDP politician-turned commentator, is to create a cabinet capable of devising and controlling its own policies – little short of a political revolution. Like many, he doubts, however, that the Democrats can pull it off. “It’s not that the DPJ is hugely popular or inspires confidence; it’s just that people are ready for a break.” The Democrats’ stunning victory has been accompanied by dire warnings of major disruption to Japan’s $4.4 trillion (€3 trillion) economy – the world’s second largest – just as it emerges from its worst recession in a generation.
US and Japanese commentators have questioned what some have called Hatoyama’s ‘‘anti-capitalist” credentials, accusing him of trying to import “socialism” into Japan.
Hatoyama says he will redirect about $218 billion toward building what he calls a social “safety net”, including more help for the old, the poor and the childless. The DPJ has promised to abolish expressway tolls, waive school tuition fees, help struggling farmers and boost Japan’s pallid domestic demand. The prime minister insists that funding will come from a ruthless trimming of pork and bureaucratic spending, and a cull of wasteful taxes.
In national defence, the Democrats have also mooted ending Japan’s participation in the hugely costly US-led missile defence programme, and are probing a long-rumoured secret pact with Washington allowing US military forces to transport nuclear weapons through Japanese territory, in defiance of Tokyo’s principles.
A revolt on Japan’s huge contribution to the cost of keeping 50,000 US troops in the country is also threatened. “This is a party that is ready to say ‘No’ to the US,” said one commentator last week.
All this deeply worries conservatives. The LDP, after all, was in power for all but 10 months since the government of John A Costello ruled Ireland in 1954-57. It is the lynchpin in the trio of forces – bureaucratic, economic and political – that engineered Japan’s rise from humiliated second World War pariah state to economic superpower.
Replacing this power with the callow Democrats risks “destroying” Japan, intoned one conservative politician last month.
Critics retort that the LDP has been devoid of new ideas since Japan’s economy crashed in the early 1990s. Nearly two decades of spluttering growth later, the party’s addiction to public works has saddled future taxpayers with public debt variously estimated at between 180 to 200 per cent of GDP. For decades it has kowtowed to bureaucrats, who gobble up taxes, write policy and jealously guard their own turf. Veteran Japan watcher Karel Van Wolferen once described the system as like a wartime planned economy, run in peacetime.
Can the DPJ revolutionise this system? Like many, Ito believes the party is likely to deliver more continuity than disruption. Its origins 12 years ago are in a hybrid of political forces, including LDP refugees, ultra-conservatives and socialists. Like Aso, Hatoyama is the scion of a conservative dynasty and the grandson of a former prime minister. Eventually the party may collapse under the weight of its ideological contradictions. It is likely to strike for the middle ground, suggests Tobias Harris, author of the well respected political blog Observing Japan.
“There is not that much disagreement between the LDP and the DPJ on economic policy,” says Harris, who argues that the global economic crisis has pushed the rivals’ economic agenda closer together. “When is the last time you heard someone talk about neo-liberal policy?” Business-friendly commentators agree that Japan has nothing to fear from a DPJ government and in fact may be better off.
“At the very least [a DPJ government] will shake things up and hopefully be a move towards a more liberal approach,” says Anne Lanigan, head of Enterprise Ireland in Tokyo. She also sees no dramatic changes.
Many observers are also encouraged by the DPJ’s much more ambitious pledges on green technologies and global warming. Hatoyama has promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter before 2020, and to drive an “environmental new deal”, after the economic programme that transformed Depression-era America in the 1930s.
Andrew DeWitt, an energy specialist at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, believes a new government could free Japan’s latent energies. “I think we’re going to see the beginnings of a new Japan.”