The Democratic Party of Japan swept to power last year by promising to "normalise" Japan's political system. After six months in office, this reform is faltering and with it Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's credibility.
Following Britain's Westminster model, the DPJ wanted to concentrate power in the cabinet, subordinating the bureaucracy and ruling party backbenchers to political leadership. The two major parties would in the future contest elections on the basis of detailed policy manifestoes that the victorious party the would try to implement through the cabinet's control of the budget process and the drafting of legislation.
To a certain extent the DPJ has already made important changes to the policy-making process. In the Hatoyama government, the cabinet is responsible for setting policy priorities. While this process has been discordant, key policy questions are being debated by political leaders in the open, instead of being settled by bureaucrats and ruling-party elites behind closed doors. The cabinet also played an important role in drafting a budget that included proposals from the DPJ's manifesto, most notably a program providing child allowances to families.
In addition, under the leadership of Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa the DPJ has concentrated power in Mr Ozawa's office. Under the LDP backbenchers, Mr Ozawa had ample opportunities to participate in the policy-making process, and responsibility for electoral strategy and parliamentary affairs was distributed among several offices, but under the DPJ he is the dominant if not the sole actor in all of these areas. The result is that he has an outsized role in policy debates despite not having a position in the government.
However, six months into the Hatoyama government, the DPJ faces opposition on both fronts. A recent poll by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper asked respondents to identify sources of anxiety about the DPJ. At the top of the list was "Ozawa's influence being too strong", followed by "Hatoyama's lacking leadership abilities".
In other words, Mr Hatoyama, far from appearing to be the referee of policy debates, appears to have no control of his own government and appears to be overshadowed by Mr Ozawa.
The public's concerns are echoed within the DPJ, where in February a movement emerged among backbenchers to create a new organisation within the party to enable legislators to participate in the policy-making process. One member of that movement, Yukio Ubukata, a DPJ deputy secretary-general, openly criticised Mr Ozawa's leadership. Mr Ubukata was fired for his challenge to Mr Ozawa, only to be reinstated in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
The question is whether opposition to Mr Hatoyama's and Mr Ozawa's leadership is a function of principled opposition to Westminster-style reforms or opposition to the perceived failings of the two leaders, both of whom have been mired in scandals that have undermined support for the government and the ruling party. Perhaps it is impossible to disentangle the two: The campaign to create top-down leadership may be so strongly associated with the two most visible advocates for the new regime that as go the reforms, so go their reputations - and vice versa.
At the same time, however, it is unclear what the alternative to stronger cabinet leadership is. The DPJ backbenchers pushing for a new policy research outfit are not calling for a return to LDP-style governance, in which bureaucrats and backbenchers hammered out policies among themselves. And even if they were, the party's policy-making role would be strictly curtailed simply by the government's new restrictions on the interactions between bureaucrats and legislators.
The public itself does not seem interested in a return to old-style LDP rule. If anything, the public is dismayed the Hatoyama government has been so indecisive and the Prime Minister so incapable of setting the agenda and forcing others to follow. The public doesn't have change fatigue: it is desperately waiting for changes that all too many Japanese believe haven't come yet. The Hatoyama government has failed to convince the Japanese people that the reforms it is putting in place now will lead to something better down the road.
That's not to say that Japan is doomed to ineffectual government and stagnation, but it may take significant shake-ups in both the DPJ and the LDP -and perhaps even a political realignment - before the reforms introduced by the Hatoyama government take root. And in the meantime, Mr Hatoyama and Mr Ozawa must bear the blame for undermining the implementation of reforms that both have done much to advance during their careers. Those reforms are critical if the government is to tackle the challenges of reversing demographic decline, restarting the Japanese economy, and adjusting Japan's foreign policy in response to China's rise.
