So I actually just returned to school from a summer spent working in Tokyo, and so I have been following with great interest the returns from the recent Japanese election. As you may have heard if you’ve heard anything, the bare-bones outline is this: the Liberal Democratic Party (neither liberal or democratic, truth be told), after 50 years of almost more-or-less uninterrupted power, lost in a sweeping wave election to the Democratic Party of Japan. While the actual Japanese political situation is too complex to really go into detail here, basically Japan has a relatively stronger bureaucracy and weaker elected government, which led the LDP to build the bureaucracy into a powerful patronage machine which could deliver them election victories due to a generally apathetic population. And while “apathetic” is tossed around a lot, it’s hard to imagine Americans waiting for twenty years of economic stagnation before tossing out the ruling party.
Anyway, that’s more or less the situation. Fairly straightforward. What is, I think, a little more interesting is wondering what practical consequences this will have. While the DPJ has stated its intention to take a second look at the U.S.-Japan alliance, it’s hard to imagine a fundamental transformation of it (though nothing is impossible). It’s an old country, and inherently conservative, and so while American bases are disliked by their neighbors, the status quo is certainly less troublesome than finding a new niche for Japan in the world. It can get kind of crowded and irritating under the American security umbrella, but hey. It’s rainy out there.
There will be more appetite for substantive change in the domestic sector, and the DPJ is certainly proposing some novel ideas, such as subsidies for child raising to address the aging of the population. Their spending plans are fairly ambitious, which might run into trouble due to Japan’s massive indebtedness (though their low financing rate means that the debt is far less burdensome than it might appear at first glance). They are already trying to bring some measure of accountability to the bureacracy, which throws away money as patronage, by means of public shaming, and surely more definitive action will follow their ascent to power. On the other hand, as the New York Times correctly notes, the relative novices of the DPJ simply may lack the institutional expertise necessary for broad governmental reform, as bureaucrats are jealous of their territory and know how to guard it (as true in Japan as at Harvard).
It’s at this point impossible to really say what will happen with any degree of certainty, unsatisfying as that is. Except for one thing, which is that really for the first time since the end of the war, Japan has found itself in interesting times. Which is a significant enough development in and of itself, and anyone with an interest in Asia will likely have an engaging few years ahead of them.