In 2009, after half a century of nearly unbroken rule, the Liberal Democratic party was finally drummed out of office by a new force in Japanese politics. The Democratic Party of Japan, led by Yukio Hatoyama, promised a new contract with the Japanese public and a new relationship between elected officials and the powerful bureaucracy. Yet when Hatoyama went to Washington the following April, he was shunned.
The ostensible reason was that Hatoyama had displeased Washington by reneging on a deal to build a new US Marine base on Okinawa. However, according to R Taggart Murphy, professor of international political economy at Tokyo’s Tsukuba university, Hatoyama was attempting much more than that: he wanted to regain the sovereignty that Japan had lost when it became a virtual “protectorate” of the US after 1945. “Japan cannot be an ally of the United States — or anyone else — until it is first a sovereign state,” Taggart Murphy writes. In this view, one shared by many on both the Japanese right and the left, Japan remains essentially an occupied nation, subject to a US-written constitution and honeycombed by US military bases. Rather like Hatoyama, he recommends Japan taking responsibility for its own defence and seeking a new accommodation with China.
Taggart Murphy knows his Japanese history. His theories about Japan’s political economy — of which more later — shed interesting light on the country. They can, however, be taken to extreme. In the case of Hatoyama, the author contends that he was brought down by Washington. Certainly, the US was disturbed by Hatoyama, who casually announced in an essay that he wanted to recast Japan’s relationship with the US and China, omitting to mention this sea-change in foreign policy to his allies in the US. But while US diplomats may have schemed against him, to lay his demise squarely at Washington’s door is too much. (To be fair, as well as the Pentagon and Japan-handlers in Washington, the author also blames the LDP, the Japanese bureaucracy, Beijing, Pyongyang and the 2011 earthquake. Only the kitchen sink, it seems, was not in on the conspiracy.)