Sea Change or More of the Same?

By Bill Lee

The Japanese political landscape was rocked by two recent “bombshell” announcements. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike announced that she was forming a new national party, Kibo no To (Party of Hope), to challenge the Liberal Democratic Party and “reset” Japan. The other shocker was Democratic Party President Seiji Maehara’s announcement that DP candidates in the upcoming Lower House election could run under the Party of Hope flag, thus effectively dissolving the party.

Very media savvy as a result of her TV announcer days, Koike has parlayed her charismatic personality with her willingness to challenge traditional power structures like the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly and attack the Tokyo Olympic cost overruns and slipshod transfer of the Tsukiji fish market to a new location into a dominant position in the Japanese political world. She has been more successful than other female hopefuls like Makiko Tanaka, who irritated bureaucrats and other politicians with her bluntness, Yuko Obuchi, who resigned from the Abe Cabinet over a political funding scandal, and Tomomi Inada, who appeared incompetent and was caught lying in a Defense Ministry cover-up. Renho, the former leader of the DP who made her name as a “waste-buster,” never caught the public’s imagination, perhaps because of her partly non-Japanese origin. But Koike has been in the public eye for some time, and gained voters’ trust with her so far mistake-free stewardship of Japanese government ministries and now the Tokyo metropolitan government.

Allowing DP lawmakers to defect to Koike’s party has effectively finished the DP, with Maehara himself saying that he wanted to merge the DP with the Party of Hope to form a major opposition party and give Japan a two-party political system. The DP’s poll ratings have been dismal, and its prospects in the next Upper House election are embarrassingly bad. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga was probably right in blasting the moves by Maehara and Koike as just political maneuvering without any basis in policy judgments. The LDP of course has a lot of policies, but the problem is that none of them work.

The DP-Party of Hope candidates could take 30 percent or so of the seats in the upcoming election, but would they really constitute an opposition force? A supporter of the contentious security laws, Koike is basically a conservative politician, as are most of the DP lawmakers like former DP deputy president Goshi Hosono who are defecting to her party. Thus what is likely to emerge after the election is one very large conservative bloc comprising the LDP and the Party of Hope and a very splintered real opposition, basically anchored by the Japanese Communist Party and some liberal DP members.

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Photo by Michael Toy via Flickr