The following is an exchange with Paul Sracic, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Rigelhaupt Pre-Law Center at Youngstown State University in Ohio. (Posted with his consent. and yes, that Ohio.) Your thoughts are welcome.

Jun Okumura

Paul: I was just reading Michael Cucek's Shisaku blog post about the joint news conference between the leaders of the 11 parties, and noticed that Prime Minister Noda had written on his card that the theme for the DPJ was "Do we go forward?" As you probably know, "forward" was President Obama's slogan this year.
I remember in the last lower house election I was struck by how much some of the DPJ signs looked like those used in the Obama campaign in 2008. Do you think the DPJ is consciously following the American Democrats this year? After all, it worked out well in 2009. If the Prime Minister mentions Ohio in one of his campaign speeches, we will know for sure!

Me: "Move backward" obviously means going back to the old LDP way of doing things, whatever that is. That's an easy and obvious association to make. The Obama campaign's slogan cannot refer to moving back as a general (and negative) proposition because the Democrats are part of the past too. My tentative
answer: If the DPJ was inspired by the Obama campaign, it certainly gave its own slogan a situation-appropriate, significantly different tweak.

Paul: Actually, even the move backwards part is consistent with the Obama campaign, since he always accused Romney of "wanting to take us back to the [Bush] policies that got us into this [economic] mess."