> Why has the DPJ proved so incompetent in government?

1. Both Hatoyama and Kan made fatal mistakes. The former's idealism made him run straight into the minefield that is Futenma, whereas the latter made a beginners mistake in talking about a tax hike two weeks before the Upper House election. There is a good chance that without Kan's blunder (he has a knack for messing up the timing of such important announcements, the stress test is only the most recent example of that trend), the DPJ would have been able to avoid a nejire. And as we all know, a nejire can make every Prime Minister look very bad, because the opposition parties in the Upper House will simply block almost every move the government attempts to take. The DPJ had done exactly that under Ozawa from 2007 until 2009 as well.

2. With very few notable exceptions (Ozawa, Kano, etc.; and even Ozawa has spent most of his long career working in party positions) hardly any figure within the DPJ current leadership has extensive experience in running the government for obvious reasons. The DPJ has many policy experts, but it simply lacks the experience of how to run the government efficiently (even though Sengoku has done a good job in working with the various ministries). Combine that with arguably unrealistic expectations by an electorate expecting the DPJ to clean up the mountain of issues the LDP had left behind, preferably within a year or so, and you have a recipe for a voter backlash (this is quite similar to the situation of US president Obama, it seems to me).

3. Policy and the Ozawa factor II: Leaving aside the obvious seiji to kane problem, the DPJ in its entity has not been able to switch gears and alter its election manifesto. The manifesto of course was in many aspects based on Ozawa's ideas and hence it promised almost everything to everybody. This of course is very (traditional) LDP-like, because it was designed to catch-all including portions of the LDP's once mighty soshiki-hyou. Talk (or in this case, ink) of course is cheap, but once once in government, the DPJ had to worry how to finance those promises and this led to a rift between Ozawa (who cares about elections first and the budget later) and people like Kan, Okada and Noda who realized that they could not finance all those promises. Of course, the question of financing led to Kan's untimely remarks about the tax hike.

> Second question (linked to the first). Is there a
realistic prospect
> of the DPJ improving its competence?
> Why/why not?

That will depend on Kan's successor. If that person is better dealing with the media, has a better sense of timing, and is more apt at selecting the right people for the right positions, things should improve.

> DPJ raise the question of whether a party which is
not centred in
> either a coherent ideology/policy principles or has a
history that
> attracts loyalty can succeed for long (anywhere, not
just in Japan)

I have never found the idea of a party's ideologically coherence to be particularly convincing, because the LDP is the best example that an ideologically entirely incoherent party can succeed. Also, regardless of which country you look at, major parties tend to be ideologically incoherent. This doesn't strike me as an DPJ-exclusive problem, but rather a common feature of most, if not all major parties. The key is how party leadership deals with those different opinions.

Best,
Chris

Chris Winkler, PhD
Senior Research Fellow
German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ)