WIT Life #49: Regime Change
Article/Journalism, Japan Trends, Translating/Interpreting, WIT Life 
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WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Interpreter/Translator/Writer Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03). Recently she’s been watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese and sharing some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
Since my last post there has been a huge shakeup in Japanese politics, with the Democratic Party winning in a landslide election and its leader Yukio Hatoyama poised to become the next Prime Minister. His wife, Miyuki, has even been getting lots of press for her claim to have been abducted by aliens and taken to Venus when she was younger. She is already fodder for late-night comedians, as this week she was the subject of a David Letterman Top-Ten list entitled “Signs the Japanese First Lady is Nuts.”
Analysts expect the Democrats to focus at least initially on their ambitious domestic agenda. The party has pledged to change the postwar paradigm, promising to ease growing social inequality by handing more money and social benefits directly to residents rather than to industry or other interest groups. It has promised to strengthen the social safety net and raise the low birthrate by giving families cash handouts of $270 per month per child and by charging lower gasoline taxes. Such policies could bring about the start of recovery by lifting Japan’s flagging consumer spending. Hatoyama has expressed a desire to move away from American-style capitalism.
The party has said it will rein in the powerful central ministries in Tokyo which have run postwar Japan on the Liberal Democrats’ behalf. It plans to wrest away power from ministerial bureaucrats to ensure that spending more closely reflects public needs. However, party’s leaders have not had much to say about how to address productivity, or Japan’s continuing battle with deflation or the overhang of a huge public debt. Due to this, some people have not embraced its platform with much enthusiasm and are not optimistic about the Democrats’ ability to solve looming problems like the growing government debt and a rapidly aging population.
Standford University-educated Hatoyama caused a bit of a stir with a recent editorial published in The International Herald Tribune and on the Web site of The New York Times that labeled Japan’s ailing economy a victim of American-led globalization. His party’s campaign manifesto calls for an “equal partnership” with the United States and a “reconsidering” of the 50,000-strong American military presence there. For the latter, one issue is the reexamination of an agreement to relocate the Marine Corps airfield at Futenma in Okinawa to another site on this island, though many of its residents want to totally get rid of the base.
This week Hatoyama met with new United States ambassador and fellow Stanford graduate John Roos, a California lawyer who was a fund-raiser for President Obama, to assure him that the American alliance was the basis of Japanese foreign policy. News coverage of their meeting showed them comparing their respective Stanford paraphernelia, and Hatoyama also spoke with Obama on the phone for 12 minutes regarding diplomatic issues.
As for voices on the ground, via email many of my Japanese friends have expressed uncertainty as to how their lives will be personally affected by the regime change. This is of particular concern to 公務員 (koumuin) or civil servants, who are directly affected by government policy. My friend’s husband who works at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) expressed her worry that his scheduled transfer to Vienna next year might not happen as that overseas office is a candidate for closure. A Ministry of Justice official who I interpreted for last year on IVLP proclaimed the occurrence of a “Japanese political revolution,” citing the huge effect it will have on his job and those of other koumuin. My next State Department interpreting assignment begins next week, and I am interested in hearing the read on the political climate from the two participants coming to study R & D and public-private partnerships (they are from a Saitama public research institute and Shizuoka local government). The summer heat and its accompanying bitter political battles are subsiding, and we shall see what the cooler winds of fall bring.
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