Newsletter No. 236
April 9, 2006

 

MAEHARA OUT; OZAWA IN -- THE RE-REBIRTH OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF JAPAN

The big story this past week was the resignation of Seiji Maehara as head of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), and the remarkable rise of Ichiro Ozawa as the new Caudillo of the Democrats.

As for the short Maehara regime, all I can say is: Wow! Could he have crashed and burned any harder? As readers of the Shingetsu Newsletter know, I was never a big Maehara fan, but the guy is much smarter than it appears right now. His inept management of the DPJ came as a complete surprise to me personally.

The fact that he was a divisive leader was predictable. His focus on conservative-oriented security policy was not going to go down well with the liberal wing of the party. I figured that he’d either split the party in two, or else drag the sullen liberal rump of the party along with him as he moved to the Right. In either case, I figured that he would maneuver skillfully.

Yipes! He really bungled it though!

The first thing that told me that he was going wrong were his comments several months ago that he intended to remain leader even if he couldn’t unify party opinion behind him. That’s a very un-Japanese thing to say. What he should have said was that the party would either follow him willingly, or else he would resign. Even if he ended up losing the immediate political battle and had to resign, it would only have added to his glory among his followers, and allowed him to rise again later with even more strength. The way he actually played it, however, will tarnish him for a long while.

Of course, as everyone knows, what utterly destroyed Maehara was the Horie E-mail Scandal, in which his actions were calculated remarkably poorly. Why didn’t he immediately recognize how serious the charges he was making really were? Why didn’t he make sure that his evidence was solid? Why couldn’t he predict that the LDP would play hardball on this? It’s not often that you see such a smart man acting so dumb.

He compounded his mistake by waiting so long to resign and to “take responsibility” for the fiasco. All along during his few months in power, he showed too much open ambition and not enough responsibility and integrity. Above all, that’s what crushed him so completely.

Maehara is still a young man, and may have a second chance in ten or fifteen years when he will be able to blame his miscalculations on his “wild youth”; but for the immediate future at least, he is done and finished.

The second part of the story is almost equally remarkable: The rise of Ichiro Ozawa.

Several years ago, Ozawa seemed doomed to remain in the political wilderness until the end of his career. He may have been the great mover-and-shaker of the 1990s, but his serious political prospects for a major leadership position seemed to be all-but-dead until very recently. He just had too many enemies. He was too distrusted. No one but a few diehard loyalists wanted to touch the man.

Ozawa only entered the DPJ in September 2003, bringing along most of his nearly-insignificant “Liberal Party.” Ironically, this was engineered on the DPJ side by none other than Naoto Kan. In the two-and-a-half years since that merger, Ozawa had kept an unusually low profile, and seemed rather isolated within the party. Even young conservatives like Maehara didn’t want to deal with him so closely.

Ozawa’s sudden emergence to the leadership of the DPJ at this time owes to a combination of luck and skill. He was lucky in the sense that Maehara froze him out of a leadership position and then proceeded to run the party into the ground. Ozawa had been openly complaining about Maehara for months before the disaster. More than that, the argument was made that Maehara’s failure was really rooted in his youth and inexperience. If this is so, then who better than the Old Master to step in and save the party from its self-inflicted defeats?

Naoto Kan had a claim on “Old Master” status as well. Under his leadership in the past, the DPJ had usually done very well in elections. But this is where Ozawa’s skill came in. Ozawa has been quietly laying the groundwork for his rise for months, while Kan, apparently, sort of isolated himself after his defeat in party elections in September. The result was that in the April 7th intra-party elections, Ozawa trounced Kan by 119 votes to 72 votes -- a 47-vote margin.

More surprising is how the different factions within the DPJ lined up. Many conservatives voted for the liberal Kan, and many liberals voted for the conservative Ozawa. I must confess that I don’t really understand why, other than the politics of personality. Most of Maehara’s group and some of Noda’s group voted for Kan. This can probably be explained by their dislike of Ozawa. Less easily explainable is why the bulk of the former Socialists and Social Democratic party members (along with the more natural Hatoyama group) went for the conservative Ozawa. In February, Shingetsu Newsletter No. 196 mentioned that Ozawa and Takahiro Yokomichi were courting each other -- an action that I felt was dangerous for Yokomichi and the supposed leftwing of the party. Now this unholy alliance has captured the leadership seat of the party.

What does this mean for future DPJ policy? That’s not entirely clear.

Ozawa has wisely asked Naoto Kan and Yukio Hatoyama, the party co-founders, to join him in the Number Two and Number Three positions, respectively. This is a much-needed gesture of party unity that is meant to heal some of the rifts in the party caused by Maehara’s much more partisan approach. Incidentally, it is also likely to redound to Ozawa’s own political benefit when fresh leadership elections are held in September. Ozawa is now a shoo-in for those elections as well.

After September, the true face of the Ozawa DPJ will probably become more apparent. Will he continue to utilize the leftwing of the party as his main political base? Or will he gravitate to his more natural allies on the Right? Or will he muddle along some middle path? The choice is his to make.

For Japanese-Islamic relations, it is much too early to predict how the rise of Ozawa will play out. He himself favors a policy like that of Prime Minister Koizumi -- putting stress on the US-Japan security alliance. However, his current political base among DPJ liberals suggests a stronger attraction to Asian policy.

Will this tension lead to new creativity or the unraveling of the party? Time will tell.

In any case, Ichiro Ozawa will now have ample opportunity to display whether or not he really is a “changed man.”