Word: ldp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After Japan's momentous election on Aug. 30, when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) hammered the long-serving Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), both American and Japanese commentators picked up on a remark by Prime Minister - in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama that there needed to be more "balance" in the U.S.-Japan relationship, read an article in which Hatoyama criticized the U.S. and wondered about the solidity of the alliance between Tokyo and Washington. Then Hatoyama called U.S. President Barack Obama and told him that of course - of course! - the alliance was the bedrock of Japanese foreign policy, and everyone relaxed...
Yukio Hatoyama knows that change in Japan doesn't come easily. On Wednesday, Sept. 15, he became the country's 60th Prime Minister and only the fourth since 1955 from a party other than the long-ensconced Liberal Democrats (LDP). At his first presser since officially assuming the post, he asked the Japanese people for patience. "Through trial and error, we may make mistakes," he said. "But I would like the Japanese people to be gentle with us." He continued, "This is an encounter with the unknown, and we're embarking on a trip that we've never experienced...
...Okumura, a senior advisor at the think tank Eurasia Group and a former government official: "It's Hatoyama's Cabinet, and Ozawa's party. I don't think Ozawa will meddle on the policy side. He has his dream job - another crack at sticking the knife into the LDP heart without the distasteful job of being accountable to the media." Gerald Curtis, a Japanese-politics expert and professor at Columbia University, says the Hatoyama Administration is a game changer in Japanese politics - and that Ozawa's objective has changed as well. The key question, he says: "Does Hatoyama as Prime...
Modern Japan is not known for embracing radical change. But in elections to the lower house of Japan's parliament on Aug. 30, voters swept out of power the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had ruled Japan for all but 11 months of the past half-century. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won 308 of the 480 Diet seats at stake...
...Yukio Hatoyama, who will be voted in as Prime Minister later this month, said the election represented "the first-ever proper change in government in the history of our constitutional politics." He leads a party cobbled together from groups united in not much more than their opposition to the LDP; it has no obvious coherent ideology of its own. Though there are a number of old heads in the party--its éminence grise, former LDP minister Ichiro Ozawa, has been a player in Japanese politics for 30 years--no fewer than 46% of its Diet members will be first...