A friend of mine is good friends an ex-DPJ junior minister (no names, I'm afraid) and their take on this is not that it is any kind of consolidation but that these two election losses should pave the way to a clearing out of the remaining first and second wave DPJ leaders - i.e. the old school ones who are are mainly ex-LDP etc., and the rise of the third wave - of leaders who do not have connections to the LDP and have come up largely through the DPJ itself. This may take a while, however and the damage that could be done in the meantime by an LDP more able to act on its own volition especially to Japan-China-Korea relations, is potentially immense. And no-one I know here thinks of Komeito as a check on the LDP, at least not in any progressive sense...

David Murakami Wood.

JSPS Invitation Fellow, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan Visiting Fellow, Meiji University, Tokyo

Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies, Department of Sociology, Queen's University, Canada.