{"id":8408,"date":"2009-09-05T11:38:30","date_gmt":"2009-09-05T15:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=8408"},"modified":"2009-09-06T23:05:26","modified_gmt":"2009-09-07T03:05:26","slug":"wit-life-49-regime-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2009\/09\/05\/wit-life-49-regime-change\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #49: Regime Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

WITLife<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong><\/a>is a periodic series written by professional Interpreter\/Translator\/Writer Stacy Smith<\/a><\/strong> (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03).\u00a0 Recently she\u2019s been watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese and sharing some of the interesting tidbits and trends together <\/em>w<\/em>ith her own observat<\/em>ions.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She is already fodder for late-night comedians, as this week she was the subject of a David Letterman Top-Ten list entitled \u201cSigns the Japanese First Lady is Nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Analysts expect the Democrats to focus at least initially on their ambitious domestic agenda.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Such policies could bring about the start of recovery by lifting Japan\u2019s flagging consumer spending.\u00a0 Hatoyama has expressed a desire to move away from American-style capitalism.<\/p>\n

The party has said it will rein in the powerful central ministries in Tokyo which have run postwar Japan on the Liberal Democrats\u2019 behalf.\u00a0 It plans to wrest away power from ministerial bureaucrats to ensure that spending more closely reflects public needs.\u00a0 However, party\u2019s leaders have not had much to say about how to address productivity, or Japan\u2019s continuing battle with deflation or the overhang of a huge public debt.\u00a0 Due to this, some people have not embraced its platform with much enthusiasm and are not optimistic about the Democrats\u2019 ability to solve looming problems like the growing government debt and a rapidly aging population.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ailing economy a victim of American-led globalization.\u00a0 His party\u2019s campaign manifesto calls for an \u201cequal partnership\u201d with the United States and a \u201creconsidering\u201d of the 50,000-strong American military presence there.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

This week Hatoyama met with new United States ambassador and fellow Stanford graduate John Roos, a California lawyer who was a fund-raiser for\u00a0President Obama, to assure him that the American alliance was the basis of Japanese foreign policy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0regime change.\u00a0 This is of particular concern to \u516c\u52d9\u54e1 (koumuin)\u00a0or civil servants, who are directly affected by government policy.\u00a0 My friend\u2019s 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.\u00a0 A Ministry of Justice official who I interpreted for last year on IVLP proclaimed the occurrence of a \u201cJapanese political revolution,\u201d citing the huge effect it will have on his job and those of other koumuin.\u00a0\u00a0 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).\u00a0 The summer heat and its accompanying bitter political battles are subsiding, and we shall see what the cooler winds of fall bring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Interpreter\/Translator\/Writer Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03).\u00a0 Recently she\u2019s been watching Fujisankei\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,30,18,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articlejournalism","category-japan-trends","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-2bC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8408"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8449,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408\/revisions\/8449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}