Another Hereditary Prime Minister Fails
Justin McCurry of the Guardian has written an article that contains a particularly harsh assessment of Hatoyama’s Prime Ministership (and of Japanese politics in general):
Some analysts have speculated that Hatoyama was simply waiting for the right moment to leave a job he had quickly grown to loathe.
He, like his three immediate predecessors Abe, Fukuda and Aso – hereditary politicians all – became prime minister almost by default, and relinquished power with all the genuine grief, at least in public, of a student bidding farewell to his supermarket shelf-stacking duties .
“Hatoyama is typical of the breed of hereditary politicians who take it for granted that they will become leader,” said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.
“Most of them have been indecisive because they never developed the ruthlessness you need to win a power struggle. They want to please everyone, but end up pleasing no one. And the voters are paying the price for electing that kind of leader.” [via JapanSoc]
Finance Minister Naoto Kan is expected to become the next Prime Minister. While Abe, Fukuda, Aso, and Hatoyama were all descendants of Prime Ministers, Kan does not hail from one of the grand political dynasties.
A BBC profile from 2004 mentions Kan as having become a national hero of sorts in 1996 while serving as health minister. Kan forced bureaucrats to release documents about how government failures led to the use of HIV-tainted blood in transfusions. He was a pretty popular leader of the DPJ, but a scandal about his failure to pay into the pension system forced him to resign his leadership position and sidelined his career for a few years. [The article also refers to a sex scandal. I could not find any reliable or informative links offering details on the scandal, but I think that this 1999 article might describe the same scandal.]
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