BLOWING IN THE WIND

by Philip J Cunningham

Is Japan changing for real? To get a better sense of how Japan is and isn't changing with the urbane Yukio Hatoyama at the helm, in the wake of the Democratic Party of Japan’s stunning electoral victory over the entrenched Liberal Democratic, consider these news stories from around the Japanese archipelago.

First, zoom in on the half-unfinished Yamba Dam in rural Gunma, to see how a multi-billion dollar boondoggle can be stopped dead in its tracks. The LDP, incumbents of a half-century standing, have made an art of pouring money, largely in the form of cement, to rural constituencies scattered around the archipelago, rewarding electoral loyalty while denuding and desecrating the environment with dams, bridges and highways to nowhere.

Hatoyama, in power for little more than a week, suspended the dam project. If there is truly change in the air, it is in the realm of cutbacks on pork-barrel spending. The controversial supplementary budget, a last-dash effort inked by the LDP as it was sinking into obscurity, has been scrapped and the overall budget has been massively trimmed.

Now pull back from the rice fields and hills of Gunma and zoom in on the shimmering Tokyo megalopolis, the largest concentration of human beings on earth, with some 40 million people clustered within a 40 kilometer radius. Not too much green here, but not too many roads to nowhere either; instead a vast, vibrant, complex inter-connected living, breathing super-organism with an arterial system of asphalt and iron; electricity and light, a steady flow of trains and automobiles, but what, no international airport?

Only far-away Narita.

The LDP during the height of its power operated much as an authoritarian communist party might have done in the same era. A swath of isolated rice farms in Chiba was decreed to be the new Tokyo International Airport, even though the project was bitterly opposed by Narita locals from the start, and has been inconveniencing travelers ever since. Situated an incomprehensible 60 kilometers outside of city center, it's an airport only big-time investors in infrastructure and social engineers hoping to discourage the hoi polloi from traveling, could love. in effect banishing the gateway of Tokyo to Chiba.

It was the sort of inconvenience to which one could only sigh "shoganai" as it could not be helped, at least not while the LDP remained in power. Long after violent clashes ceased, Narita remained an armed, barb-wired camp, subjecting visitors to intimidating, but largely theatrical, Star War trooper controls.

Then the LDP loses power and within weeks the DPJ’s Land and Transport Minister, Seiji Maehara, makes a bold proposal, suggesting that homely Haneda Airport, located on Tokyo Bay, snugly close to downtown, be the new hub. What? Move the gateway of Tokyo to Tokyo itself? What an idea! And why not?

Narita, like its patron party the LDP, has too long enjoyed a monopoly at the expense of others. But it has been failing on its own terms as well; it's inconvenience has not discouraged Japan's stoic traveling set from spending yen overseas, but it has stemmed the inflow of tourists and their cash. Foreigners, especially those in need of connecting flights, or on urgent business, bridle at the thought of over-nighting in Narita or detouring through the rice paddies of Chiba on bus and on over-priced trains.

One only need to consider the new airports in Inchon, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to see how Japan isolates itself, with Narita looking more and more a relic of the 1970's sorry domestic politics.

Maehara's bold bid did not go unopposed, however, and he back-tracked the next day after Chiba governor Kensaku Morita (a former actor, he goes by his stage name) made veiled threats during a sputtering televised performance full of innuendo, suggesting the old guard won't give up without a fight.

Zoom away from the troubled waters of Tokyo Bay and zoom in on distant Okinawa, which bears the brunt of the US military footprint in Japan, not just because it is an excellent staging ground for Pacific Ocean policing, but because the better-connected politicians of Japan proper never really took to the sight of uniformed gaijin walking the streets of their prefectures. The result? Outlying Okinawa long ago got stuck with rather more than its share of US bases, partly a legacy of LDP politicking.

The DPJ owes it to the under-represented voices of dissent in Okinawa to re-examine decades of back-room deals, but here, again, Hatoyama, soon to meet Obama, must tread gingerly, lest the game of base allocation become a bitter contest of musical chairs with the US military.

A quick leap the length of Japan up to its northernmost extremity followed by a zoom in on some windswept islets suggests that the new government, like the LDP, is haunted by the past, despite its intelligent core leadership and early moves to improve relations with China and Korea.

Land and Transport Minister Maehara, still reeling from the backlash from his Haneda air hub comments, escaped the heat by flying north to the chilly Southern Kuriles, where he staged a nationalistic photo op courtesy of the brashly patriotic Coast Guard, publicly pining for the return of the Russian-held islands. Gazing at the hazy outline of the distant isles, Maehara, born in 1962, said he was "nostalgic" for the old days before the Kuriles were "illegally occupied" by Russia.

Nostalgic for what? The 1940's? The good old days when these desolate, rocky isles were used to stage a brilliant sneak attack on Pearl Harbor? If a bunch of rocks can evoke such passion, imagine the bouts of nostalgia a Japanese nationalist might experience at the sight of former territories such as Korea and Taiwan?

Yet another indication that the sweeping change of power in Japan has failed to sweep away all the cobwebs of the political realm comes from the Wakayama coastal town of Taiji, famous for its unnecessary and unnecessarily brutal whaling and dolphin kills.

No less a luminary than the new foreign minister Okada has unwisely chosen to defend Taiji's defenseless slaughter of marine mammals by using the "culture" argument, which is to say, anything Japanese do that the international community disapproves of is okay, if it can be trumped up as a facet of Japanese culture.

This evokes the ghosts of the LDP past and hints of a Thermidor to come. "Culture" has been used by old school politicians to defend everything from keeping out Thai rice to refusing Russians entry to public baths, from creating structural impediments to foreign products and services, to refusing the full palette of human rights to Japanese of Chinese and Korean descent and resident foreigners.

Hiding behind the culture curtain is a willful act of obfuscation. It is a slippery slope of an argument, popular with tyrants and Taliban alike, and not a promising start for the leading diplomat of the new, reform-minded ruling party.

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TIME FOR CHANGE

(from the Bangkok Post)
Time for change the Japanese can really believe in
Writer: PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
Published: 15/09/2009 at 12:00 AM

Japan has a new prime minister and a new ruling party. Prime ministers come and go in Tokyo on almost an annual basis, 50 of them in the post-war period alone, so the change of guard at the top of a huge, humming, well-oiled bureaucratic machine might not seem like news. But Hatoyama's ascension to power might be significant, if the long impotent opposition, now crystalised as the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), takes the helm long enough to steer Japan, Inc in a new direction.

Yukio Hatoyama, who was born on Sept 11, 1947, is nicknamed "The Alien" by his fellow party members for his quirky appearance and different way of thinking.

The DPJ's Hatoyama - like his predecessors in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso - is a political blueblood and financially secure. He is a member of the elite, which as Japanese like to see it, puts him a cut above the average man.

Like his elite predecessors, the new prime minister has strong personal links to America, not so much in terms of old-time family links with the Bushes or through party hacks on the CIA payroll or through verbal compliance with US fundamentalisms, but rather in meritocratic terms; he earned an advanced graduate degree at Stanford. He knows America but it's not the old boy network all over again. Much has been made of Mr Hatoyama's stated position that Japan needs to adjust its relationship with the US, setting off alarm bells in the corridors of entrenched power in Washington and Tokyo.

But that's just the old guard reasserting itself. What's wrong with some adjustments in a critical bilateral relationship that has been shaped by heavy-handed demands on one side and sneaky non-compliance on the other? Isn't it time to change, time to rejuvenate and re-define the bilateral relationship rather than relying on anachronistic and ossified patron-client links?

It is not as if the US-Japan security treaty is up for grabs, though it can and should be discussed and improved where necessary. After half a century of one-party rule in Japan, a fresh approach to foreign policy and collective security is not really an option, it's a necessity.

The Liberal Democratic Party, born of the ashes of WWII, branded with the imprint of US Occupation, has always been an odd hybrid, neither particularly liberal nor democratic, but an opportunistic mish-mash that was fine-tuned into a winning political machine.

Even if the US was uniformly enlightened in its Japan policy, which is hardly the case, being forced to rely on the Godzilla-like LDP as the main conduit for the conduct of bilateral relations has led to mutations and destructive distortions over the years.

One need only look at recent headlines to see how the LDP's past has continued to haunt the present, whether it be glorifying the lost cause of the last war at Yasukuni Shrine, or the vestiges of anti-communism in foreign policy and anti-labour practices, or the not-so-subtle intimidation of progressives by organised crime and rightwing groups for hire that are themselves relics of US occupation days.

More recently, a bungling obsession with North Korea continues to invoke unfinished business of Japan's historic annexation of its neighbour and what later became America's Korean war.

Then there's the LDP's almost military mindset when it comes to promoting big business and coddling modern-day zaibatsu, all the while building bridges to nowhere and churning out endless pork-barrel spending to nourish a rural elite/big business electoral juggernaut.

It's time for a change, all right, and the DPJ has seized the mantle of electoral legitimacy. The only question is whether the much-needed change will come about or will it be stalled, co-opted and buried by attack campaigns from the right, in concert with passive-aggressive non-compliance from powerful vested interests.

Prime Minister Hatoyama would be wise to take note of how US President Obama, who started out with so much promise, and such a huge mandate for change, only to end up tacking to the right and frittering much of his mandate away, betraying his own reform-minded base in the hopes of placating Wall Street, the Pentagon and America's implacable right wing. Mr Hatoyama and the DPJ face a comparable test, and early indications suggest they too will compromise and bend and revive existing patronage patterns, perhaps until the day that they are not recognisably different from the "fat cats" and the complacent ruling party that they have ostensibly replaced.

For change to have any real meaning, it has to exit the realm of rhetoric and enter the realm of action.

If the DPJ, with Mr Hatoyama at the helm, and former LDP stalwart Ozawa Ichiro navigating at his side, keep their promise to help Japan become a more normal nation - less dependent on the whims of US foreign policy, less beholden to Japan's own elite with its malignant, murky roots in the last world war, and more responsive to ordinary citizens and taxpayers, then Japan is indeed entering a period of change that people can believe in.

If, instead, however, the new government avoids friction by continuing along the beaten-down path created by the LDP, and in doing so sustains the unholy marriage between big business and an entrenched bureaucracy and concommitantly inflates its own military reach while hiding in the shade of the US security umbrella, then the demise of the LDP has been greatly exaggerated.

Even if they stick to their professed ideals, the new ruling team may still succumb to the inertia and stagnation that characterise Japan's body politic today, failing not only to fulfil the promises they made while not in power, but putting themselves out of power again.

In which case DPJ rule will prove not only brief, but may be one day understood not so much as a change in the power structure, but as a short-lived victory for some frustrated, veteran pols of the LDP reform wing, who will give Japan the illusion of change before deftly steering things back to the status quo of big business, big-bureaucracy as usual.

(first published in the Bangkok Post)

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