Lots of great comments on the DPJ, as always. I'd like to respond to a couple (or maybe three). It may be 6.30 in the morning but I'm on my third cup of coffee so this might get a little long.

On the LDP'ization of the DPJ:

This is a line that the Yomiuri have been running with for the last few days: that the DPJ/Noda are giving up on its previous plan of party-led government and going back to relying on bureaucratic expertise/information.
Setting aside the question of whether this is a false dichotomy, there's a rich and informative literature on strategies of bureaucratic delegation in the US. A key point is that:
i) there are different instruments available to politicians to align bureaucratic preferences with their own; ii) these instruments can be divided into ex-ante (i.e. not giving bur. the right to decide in the first place, controlling information flow and so on, and ex-post instruments (firing them if they get out of order, & stunting their careers).

The DPJ's problems stem from the fact that their strategy, thus far, is heavily weighted towards the former. From the electoral campaign, for example: i) increase political appointees within ministries and agencies to "take the lead in drafting, coordinating, and deciding policy"; ii) abolish Vice-Ministerial meetings; iii) establish permanent National Strategy Bureau as advisory body to the Prime Minister's Office;
iv) reduce personnel costs in ministries and agencies by 20 percent; v) remove revolving-door appointments;
vi) greater control over personnel decisions at the Bureau Chief level and above; vii) administer institutions of oversight for post-retirement positions.

Only the last two really slot into the latter category, and I have not seen them applied in any serious way.
This means the DPJ goal has essentially been to make bureaucrats less competent by limiting what they know, and to make it more difficult for politicians to rely on their technical expertise, which is why they are there in the first place. I'd submit it is a strategy doomed to failure. What I'd REALLY like to see Mr. Noda to is: i) centralize all control over Bureau Chief level appointments and above into the PMO, and exercise this control regularly; ii) introduce performance pay for senior bureaucrats, and make those pay decisions in the PMO. I'd be willing to wager this would be a more successful strategy than the current one.

On Cabinet members saying stupid things:

In the face of much evidence to the contrary, I continue to believe that many politicians get into politics because they have strong beliefs about the way their country should be. (Why on earth else would they submit themselves to such a career?) My guess is that on defense, social, economic and other policies every party has a pretty wide distribution of beliefs, and I'm yet to be convinced that the DPJ looks worse on this score than the modern British Labor or Conservative Parties, for example. (i.e. Old vs. New Labor, Old vs.
Cameron-style Green Conservatism.) I'm also sure if you poked politicians anywhere around Europe & the US you could get them to say all sorts of outlandish things about immigration. What makes the difference is that outside Japan they tend to shut up about their points of disagreement, and their more bizarre views, when they are in Cabinet. Politicians in Japan tend not to respect this norm, if we can call it that. The Pacific War is certainly the best case here.

Now, in the LDP I thought I understood why this is:
there was/is a whole parallel power structure in the party that meant no-one had the power to slap others down when they said something unpalatable to the party, or to general sensibilities. I am less sure about the answer for the DPJ. One thought: given they have two different party structures, but produce the same outcome (i.e. recurrent cases of foot in mouth disease), I wonder whether perhaps this is about political culture or something else that is common across the political spectrum? Regardless, solving these other ongoing problems is to my mind mostly about infusing members with a new norm that they can't go out on a limb because the party will get killed in the press. To put it another way, trying to change the will of strong willed people on smoking, the role of religion in politics (Mori), the history of Japan's entry into the Pacific War (Yasukuni) and so on is too hard, so instead we should focus on having them keep their views to themselves. One could think of different mechanisms to try and enforce this norm.

On Ozawa:

Lastly, I'm a broken record on this, but I was a little taken aback by the proposal that Mr. Ozawa has a kind of sickness. He certainly has had a well-known heart problem in his past, but one assumes that this is not what the reference was to. I have not seen Professor Nishikawa's statement but I cannot help but wonder why many commentators continue to argue for a particular version of his motivations, when another set of suppositions can equally explain what gets him up in the morning. Although he still perhaps disagrees with us, Rick Katz kindly had Tak Oka and I put something together about this which is up at the Oriental Economist website:
http://www.orientaleconomist.com/id17.html

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Llewelyn Hughes
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, The Elliott School of International Affairs & Department of Political Science, George Washington University

http://home.gwu.edu/~lhughes/Home.html