Get Used to the Name Yukio Hatoyama in Japan

Japan will hold a national election on Sunday. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Taro Aso will be turfed out and replaced by the Democratic Party of Japan, led by Yukio Hatoyama.

Get used to that name. Hatoyama could become a very important person in our lives. The past three prime ministers of Japan have been ineffective, so Hatoyama harks back to Junichiro Koizumi, who was PM for five years at the start of this decade, to be his John Howard hate figure.

Koizumi was a successful reformer and moderniser of the Japanese economy. One of his reforms was to partially deregulate employment in the Japanese manufacturing sector. Hatoyama denounces this as "survival of the fittest" policy.

Sound familiar?

Moreover, while he doesn't explicitly mention Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Rudd's hero), Hatoyama says that instead of the neo-liberalism of Koizumi, he will promote a "society of fraternity".

In Hatoyama's words, this is a society in which "all of its members can find their proper places and truly feel that they are playing valuable roles within it; a society where people perceive the happiness of others as their own".

But wait, there's more in the Hatoyama-Rudd similarity. Hatoyama's new ideology, at least at the declarative level, is fairly recent. A decade ago Hatoyama was a champion of the kind of structural reform he now denounces, just as Rudd once promoted his primary economic commitment as that of a fiscal conservative.

However, let us not be too precious about all this. Successful politicians are pragmatists. The labels, if not necessarily the underlying policies, change pretty flexibly.

For all that, this will be a historic Japanese election, possibly the most important since the mid-1950s. In all that time the ruling LDP has only been out of office for one short stint, when an LDP defector, Morihiro Hosokawa, led a brief reform government for eight months in 1993.

I interviewed Hosokawa a few times and liked him a great deal. It's easy to underestimate what he achieved. (The mere fact he consented to be interviewed by foreign journalists was astonishing enough: Japanese prime ministers don't do that very often.)

But his government was short term and although it introduced some structural changes, it didn't ultimately disrupt much the long rule of the LDP, or its pork barrel, patronage-based style.

This election could be different because it could produce a genuine two-party system for Japan.

Yoichi Funabashi, Japan's most important and distinguished journalist, argued in an important recent essay in Asahi Shimbun that it is terribly important that the DPJ win as a centre-left party.

This election will be different from the one that produced Hosokawa's coalition government because the DPJ will probably win a majority in its own right.

Funabashi wants the DPJ to become a conventional centre-left party and the LDP to become a conventional centre-right party. Then the two sides could from time to time rotate in office as their fortunes waxed and waned electorally.

Funabashi's vision would have great advantages for Japan. A regular two-party system with periodic changes in the ruling party would produce a much more transparent politics. Corruption would be much harder to sustain because malefactors would know that their opponents would soon have possession of the government's books.

Will a Hatoyama victory produce that? First, we have to realise that Hatoyama is an LDP defector. As the elections have come closer his policy commitments have become vaguer and more flexible. This is what you do when you're winning in the lead-up to an election.

Some of the liberal commitments which define Hatoyama are truly harmless, such as allowing married women to keep their maiden names if they wish.

On economic policy it is true that he denounces neo-liberal capitalism, sometimes using other terms, and that he has promised some pro-poor redistribution of income, which would be no bad thing.

But Japan's public debt is 170per cent of its gross domestic product. Although its economy is recovering, Hatoyama's real room to move on economic policy is pretty limited.

This is all the more so because he will face an upper-house election next year. If he's frightened voters by then with any strange policies he will suffer a backlash and never be able to get any legislation passed.

The Japanese system often produces legislative gridlock between the two houses of parliament.

Hatoyama's first task will be to show that a non-LDP government is competent, reliable and trustworthy, a bit like Labor coming back to power after 12 years in the wilderness, although Hatoyama's task in this respect is much greater than was Rudd's.

It's in foreign and national security policy that the greatest international concerns reside.

The DPJ is a strange amalgam of a party. It contains people who think there should be no US-Japan alliance and people who think Japan should not only have an alliance but be free to engage in all the normal collective security actions of any nation.

Above all it contains a lot of people who are unfamiliar with alliance structures, with the practice of the US-Japan alliance and with the intimate co-operation between Tokyo and Canberra which has been customary now for many years.

If we can take our national gaze off China for a second, one of Canberra's biggest tasks in the next few months will be to forge a deep friendship with the leading figures, and indeed the next generation as well, of the Hatoyama government. The same is true for Washington.

It is easy to underestimate and ignore Japan. It is still our biggest export market. We have still made vastly much more of our living from Japan than we ever have from China. It is the essential great democracy of the Pacific. It is a natural balance to China. It is the indispensable part of the US forward position in Asia which underwrites Australian security. It also routinely co-operates with Australia on diplomatic issues in the region.

But because it is a reasonable, undramatic and democratic nation, and because its leaders seldom speak English, it doesn't get 1percent of the attention it should.

One of the few, but most serious, mistakes Rudd has made in foreign policy was to visit China before he visited Japan.

The rule for Canberra is the same as the rule for Washington: do at least as much for Japan as you do for China, but do it for Japan first.