TOKYO: Longtime opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama took office as prime minister on Wednesday, naming a new Cabinet and vowing to rebuild the economy and refocus Japan’s place on the world stage with his largely untested party.
Hatoyama’s victory over the conservatives, who have governed Japan almost nonstop since World War II, marks a major turning point for Japan, which is facing its worst postwar economic slowdown with unemployment at record highs and deflation intensifying. But concerns run deep over whether the new government will be able to deliver.
Hatoyama has promised to cut government waste, rein in the national bureaucracy and restart the economy by putting a freeze on planned tax hikes, removing tolls on highways and focusing policies on consumers, not big business.
He also has pledged to improve Tokyo’s often bumpy ties with its Asian neighbors and forge a foreign policy that is more independent from Washington.
“I am excited by the prospect of changing history,” Hatoyama said. “The battle starts now.” The new prime minister — who is expected to make his diplomatic debut in New York next week at the United Nations — said he wanted to build a relationship of trust with President Barack Obama by exchanging views “frankly.”
“Japan has been largely passive in our relationship, but I would like to be a more active partner,” he said.
Parliament convened a special session on Wednesday to formally select Hatoyama, whose Democrats won a landslide in parliamentary elections last month to take control of the body’s powerful lower house, ousting Prime Minister Taro Aso’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which is conservative and staunchly pro-US. In the parliamentary vote to choose the prime minister, Hatoyama won 327 of the 480 votes in the lower house. He needed a simple majority of 241.
Quickly after his election, Hatoyama named Katsuya Okada as his foreign minister and Hirohisa Fujii as his finance minister. Though Okada has never held a Cabinet post, Fujii was finance minister under a coalition government in 1993-94, the only time in its 55-year history that the Liberal Democrats had previously been ousted from power.
Fujii was also a former bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance — suggesting that the new government won’t be too confrontational with Japan’s powerful ministries.
“It’s good news that Hatoyama picked Fujii as finance minister,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Tokyo Foundation, a think tank.
“He’s experienced. Fujii knows macroeconomic policy.” Hatoyama, who has a doctorate from Stanford University and is the grandson of a conservative prime minister, had a limited pool of seasoned politicians to choose from. His party, created a decade ago, has never held power, and nearly half of its members in the lower house will be serving in their first terms in Parliament.
The inexperienced new government is bound to make some missteps, analysts said.
