In response to Siegfried Knittel's posting:

>>Perhaps 13 or 14 years ago Ian Buruma wrote an essay
about the the weakness and short incumbency of Japanese prime ministers. His argument: Japanese politician doesn't accept a prime minister for a long time, they all want to be prime minister. And they don't want strong prime minister he wrote , they want politician like Keizo Obuchi who is more a moderator between different groups not a political leader. So Fred Uleman is right when he writes this is not a problem of the DPJ.

If you/Ian Buruma mean that the factions each wanted their turn to occupy the prime ministership, then this might be a valid argument. But it hardly holds at the present time (the factions don't perform this function any more, as Ellis and Robert argue in their book).
Keizo Obuchi might have been a consensus-coordinator, but he was also known as a 'policy vacuum', which did not prove popular with public opinion, hence he would have not been all that popular with his party. Frankly, the Japanese people got sick of prime ministers being produced by factional deals, ignoring popular opinion, hence the attraction of Koizumi, who introduced primary election-type characteristics into the selection of the LDP prime ministership, which went down well with the public and which gave him a popular base.

>>It's the political class who plays this game to come
in
office and to resign when someone ask for it. There are only few politican who didn't play this game Shigeru Yoshida, Eisaku Sato, Yazuhiro Nakasone and Junichiro Koizumi. Naoto Kan is like Koizumi a single minded man.

He doesn't depend on a group which ask him to resign after a year premiership. But he is not so connected with the public like Koizumi, even he wants to win his popularity by his anti-nuclear policy.

Naoto Kan is very different from Koizumi - Koizumi was a leader in the sense of presenting a coherent agenda for (neo-liberal) policy change (not just for postal
privatisation) and bringing in the people (and many in his party) behind him, as he demonstrated brilliantly during the 2005 election. He did not deliver on his entire agenda, which was very ambitious, but he did deliver most of his postal privatisation reforms - his signature tune. In contrast, Kan is all over the place.
He has no coherent policy agenda, although he has announced plenty of policy initiatives (some of them completely unilaterally), and he has failed to bring his party and the public in behind him. In this sense, he has few leadership skills, and absolutely no delivery on any of his major policy initiatives because he has no strategies for delivery (and he's up against a mountain of obstacles, mostly of his own making). He thinks announcing a policy is enough.

>>To change this change game Japanese prime minister
should have a stronger position by law. They should have the right to say what other minister have to do.

This is not how prime ministers in cabinets work.
Moreover, Japan would have to change the constitution to move away from a parliamentary cabinet system to a presidential system if prime ministers were to be given the right to order ministers what to do (although it would be some weird kind of hybrid).

>>The must have the right to formulate the direction
of
the policy. This is what primeminister in other country

like uk can do. Tony Blair was the leader of British government, even when the party was against his Irak policy.

But Tony Blair carried his cabinet - he did not order his cabinet. Going into the Iraq War was a decision of cabinet, not just Blair's. Blair 'ruled' through informal influence as the popular leader who was the secret of the party's electoral success, but constitutionally, the power still lay with cabinet, and he could not have overruled cabinet - although cabinet was weak during his term of office.

>>But the political class doesn't accept this kind of
leadership. I remember some Japanese MPs called Koizumi

an fascist because of this style of leadership.

The person who called Koizumi a fascist was former LDP
Secretary-General Nonaka Hiromu, who had previously
been Chief Cabinet Secretary under PM Obuchi, and who
disliked Koizumi's attack on the vested interests of
the LDP 'old guard' as well as his bypassing the party
(and labelling them 'resistance forces') in trying to
get his reforms through.

>>The Japanese media and the public have the same kind
of
thinking like the political class. It seems a long time

ago when the public wished a longer serving leader who

guarantees political continuity. At first the public
praise every new leader and after a short time they
wish him to hell.

This is because public opinion is fickle and the public
demands instant results and doesn't like choas in
government.

>>If the political class doesn't accept real leadership

and the public only looks for short time results of a
new political leader political continuity and the
necessary control or the bureaucracy will be
impossible.

What is 'real' leadership? Parliamentary cabinet
systems are systems of collective government, not
presidential systems or dictatorships. It sounds like
you would like Japan to become the latter.

Best wishes,

Aurelia George Mulgan
UNSW, Canberra
Australia