IT’S GETTING to be a national habit. In resigning yesterday Japan’s prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has emulated the speedy departures of his three predecessors, all of them out within a year of taking office. A bitter irony that the man who appeared to have broken the half-century sclerotic hold of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on Japanese politics should depart under a cloud so reminiscent of that party’s ways.
With fewer than one in five supporting him in opinion polls, down from 70 per cent eight months ago, and crucial upper house elections looming next month, pressure from within his own Democratic Party (DPJ) had been increasingly public and his resignation increasingly inevitable. Also departing is the party secretary-general Ichiro Ozawa, a man cut from the old LDP cloth and seen by many as the power behind the throne. He was closely associated with the party’s landmark election victory last year and the funding scandal that has dogged it since.
A reformer, Mr Hatoyama was a critic of US-style globalisation, wanted a somewhat looser relationship with the US and closer relations with China and Korea, and talked of transforming Japan’s construction-driven politics into something closer to a European-style social welfare state. Change was slow coming, however, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was Mr Hatoyama’s clumsy and indecisive u-turn on a campaign pledge to move the hugely unpopular US Futenma Marine Corps airbase off the small island of Okinawa. His volte-face two weeks ago may have pleased the Americans, but it enraged his supporters and the issue will remain a serious thorn in the side of whoever takes over.
The DPJ meets today to select a successor, with fiscally conservative finance minister Naoto Kan, a co-founder of the DPJ and former health minister, likely to get the nod. He briefly became Japan’s most popular politician when he fought bureaucrats in 1996 to expose a scandal over HIV-tainted blood products.
The resignation will certainly feed concerns that political paralysis is preventing Japan from reversing its two-decade economic decline, although Mr Kan’s nomination will probably be viewed kindly by markets. He has opposed a strong yen policy and has pressed for measures such as raising sales tax to cut the public debt which is currently at 200 per cent of GDP. But he will have little time to turn around public opinion ahead of the party’s expected electoral mauling and the loss of the upper house will make governing yet more difficult.