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33 Washington Q. 3 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/wingtqurl33 and id is 1 raw text is: Japan's Confused Revolution On September 2, 2009, Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, received his first congratulatory phone call from President Barack Obama. In their discussion, Hatoyama reportedly emphasized that the landslide victory of his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) on August 30 was due in large part to the change theme championed by Obama himself in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.' Hatoyama was not just flattering the U.S. president. At the time of Japan's election, Obama enjoyed 90 percent popularity in Japan-far higher than his support in the United States and about twice Hatoyama's own popularity in most Japanese polls. The Japanese public was fascinated that the American people had elected such an unlikely candidate and rejected the party in power at the ballot box. They themselves had only voted a government out of power twice before in Japanese history: in 1924 and 1947. All other peaceful changes of power were worked out in smoke filled rooms by senior politicians. That was how the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that ruled Japan since 1955 briefly lost power to an eight-party coalition cobbled together in 1993 by Morihiro Hosokawa. Japan has a fundamentally conservative political culture-it does not do bottom-up revolutions. Even the greatest internal regime change in Japanese modern history-the 1868 Meiji Restoration-represented the return of Imperial power after a struggle of one group of elites against another, rather than a popular rebellion from below. Yet, on August 30 it was the Japanese voters who gave the DPJ the biggest landslide in Japanese political history, with the party's ranks Michael J. Green is a senior adviser and Japan Chair at CSIS and is concurrently on the faculty at Georgetown University. He served on the staff of the National Security Council from 2001 through 2005 and was special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asian affairs from January 2004 to December 2005. He is a member of The Washington Quarterly's editorial board and can be reached at mgreen@csis.org. Copyright © 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies The Washington Quarterly 33:1 pp. 3-19 DOI: 10.1080/01636600903418637 THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY * JANUARY 2010

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