Political Earthquake Hits Japan

This is not my story but Newt gives a good summary of what has happened in Japan in the last week....

Witnessing History in Asia
by Newt Gingrich

In Japan ... a political earthquake. Frustrated Japanese voters tossed out the party that has ruled that country virtually uninterrupted for the past half century.

After 54 years in which the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) was in power for all but one 11-month period in the early 1990s, the combination of economic decay and corruption finally forced enough people to abandon the LDP to form the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) as a serious broad-based competitor.

In this election, the public was clearly eager to send a resounding signal of rejection to the entrenched LDP machine. But the final results were a bigger defeat for the LDP than anticipated.

When all the votes were counted, the DPJ and its allies had a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Japanese parliament. This will give them the opportunity to pass major changes.

There are two challenges facing the newly empowered Democratic Party of Japan, however.

The first challenge is the degree to which the DPJ is really an anti-LDP coalition. The head of the DPJ, for instance, is a grandson of the co-founder of the LDP. It’s not clear yet if the DPJ has a stable majority to implement its agenda.

The second challenge facing the new ruling party in Japan is one we also face here in the United States.

The great stabilizing force in Japanese government has been the permanent bureaucracy. Much like Sacramento, Albany, and Trenton, the key Japanese interest groups and the permanent Japanese bureaucracy combine to overwhelm the popular will as expressed through elected officials.

The LDP clearly failed to reform the bureaucracy. It will be fascinating to watch the DPJ undertake this project of institutional reform.

If they can, we may learn some lessons that can be applied to our local, state and federal government bureaucracies.

No one knows yet how this election will influence Japanese-American ties. The more likely a DPJ victory became, the more their leadership emphasized continuity and cooperation with the United States. Time will tell.