By Kang Hyun-kyung
Staff reporter
Japan will try to make efforts to keep thorny issues such as territorial claims under control to maintain stronger ties with South Korea, despite the defeat of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the upper house election Sunday, Japan watchers said Monday.
But they were leery of the prospects of Tokyo-Washington relations, saying despite the agreement by both sides regarding a military base, it remains a prickly subject due to a conflict of interest between Okinawans and political leaders.
Katsuhiro Kuroda, Seoul bureau chief of the Japanese Sankei Shimbun newspaper, pointed to the DPJ controlling the powerful lower house, which selects the prime minister, with a majority, and Prime Minister Naoto Kan's policy priority on the economy as the rational for Tokyo's policy toward Seoul.
In an interview with The Korea Times in Seoul last Thursday, three days before the election, Kuroda hinted that for the DPJ, after it took power in the lower house election last August, the first year was a learning period.
"Members of the DPJ learned a lesson from the resignation of former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama in June, nine months after the landslide win," he said.
Kan, a leftist activist-turned-politician, knows that managing its ties with the United States to keep it on the right track is an important job as bolstering relations with Asian nations including South Korea, he said.
Given the DPJ has 308 out of the 480 parliamentary seats in the lower house, which selects the prime minister, Kuroda forecast the upper house election results will unlikely have a major effect on Japan's foreign policy stance overall.
In the elections, the DPJ won 44 out of 121 seats up for grabs, far below Kan's target of 54, while the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won 51. The LDP gained control together with its coalition partners.
"Unlike his predecessor, incumbent Prime Minister Kan put a top priority on fixing the ailing economy featuring deflation and debt burden," Kuroda said.
Japan has had four prime ministers in less than four years.
Analysts comment that changing political leaders almost every year not only has had a negative effect on the economy, but also made Japanese people feel insecure.
"Kan will want to look at foreign policy only after those domestic problems are resolved," added Kuroda who has lived in Seoul for 30 years.
In early June, Hatoyama resigned after his approval rating hit rock bottom primarily for a funding scandal and the discord with the United States over the military base in Okinawa.
The DPJ, which took power after decades of uninterrupted rule by the conservative LDP, regained public support after Prime Minister Kan took office, replacing Hatoyama.
Kan's popularity, however, fell a week before the election after he unveiled plans to raise consumption taxes from the current five percent to 10 percent.
DPJ's supporters, mostly housewives and unionists, were disappointed with this plan, which will add a burden to their household budget. Their turning their back on the ruling party led to the defeat in the upper house election.
"Complaints about the tax plan vary from party to party, but what opponents agree on is that raising consumption taxes was avoidable," Kuroda pointed out.
Before coming up with the tax plan, he went on to say that the Japanese government should have looked into if there has been a waste of taxpayers' money or overlapping public services leading to a waste in the government budget.
"There was a bipartisan consensus on the need to raise consumption taxes in the future, but Kan's plan was unpopular because he went for it without calculating carefully the benefits and weaknesses of other options," the journalist said.
On the foreign policy front, the DPJ put a priority on rebuilding ties with Asian nations, particularly South Korea and China.
Before the DPJ took power last year, Japan's conservative politicians angered Koreans by intermittently making controversial remarks concerning historical affairs to justify Japan's occupation of the country.
Political leaders' visits to the Yasukuni Shrine which houses the remains of war criminals also infuriated Koreans as well as the Chinese.
After last year's landslide win in the lower house election, DPJ leaders unveiled a set of conciliatory gestures regarding those sensitive issues.
In its manifesto, the DPJ emphasized pro-Asia policy and addressed its willingness to improve ties with South Korea and China.
In June, Prime Minister Kan pledged not to visit Yasukuni Shrine during his tenure.
"As Class-A war criminals are enshrined there, an official visit by the prime minster or Cabinet members is problematic. I have no plans to make a visit during my tenure," he was quoted as saying.
Recently, Chief Secretary Yoshito Shengoku expressed a constructive view over war-time compensation for Koreans who were enlisted or conscripted forcibly into the Japanese military during the colonial period.
During a luncheon meeting with foreign correspondents based in Tokyo, the chief secretary was quoted as saying that Japan's response to Koreans was insufficient, hinting at a possible policy shift over the issue.
"The DPJ generally holds the stance that it won't do anything that might aggravate its neighboring countries such as mention the territorial claim over Dokdo or visit Yasukuni Shrine. DPJ members are willing to improve ties with neighboring states," Kurodo said.
"By doing so, the DPJ apparently wants to show that they are different from the LDP in foreign policy."
During the first year after the DPJ took power, U.S.-Japan relations were put to the test as Hatoyama tried to execute his campaign pledge of relocating the U.S. military base out of Okinawa.
Although Okinawans supported the plan as their lives were constantly disturbed by noise, pollution and crime, the pledge was controversial because Japan already reached an agreement with the United States in 2006 that the Futenma military base would be relocated "within Okinawa."
After eight months of dispute with the Obama administration over the relocation of the military base, Hatoyama decided on May 23 to renege on his campaign pledge, honoring the bilateral agreement instead.
The former prime minister said he had no choice but to relocate the military base within Okinawa for national security reasons.
Local political analysts said the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan that killed 46 sailors forced Hatoyama to realize the existing threat of North Korea.
A multinational investigation team concluded that North Korea torpedoed the 1,200-ton warship near the maritime border in the West Sea on March 26.
"When Hatoyama was in power, he showed signs of putting the priority on China over the United States in foreign policy. This led the Japanese public to feel insecure about his leadership," said Kuroda.
During the first phone call with U.S. President Barack Obama, the new Prime Minister Kan said he would stick with his predecessor's agreement to build Futenma near Henoko in Okinawa, following the agreement of 2006.
Although the U.S.-Japan friction over the military base was resolved, Michael J. Green, senior adviser and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said that "the Futenma issue does still have a live fuse."
"Implementation will be possible only if Kan's office does some heavy-lifting to rebuild support in Okinawa. If the November gubernatorial election produces an anti-base governor, Kan would be forced to consider special measures to overrule the prefectural government's opposition," Green said in a recent report available on the CSIS website.
"That would be profoundly distasteful for the former antigovernment activist Kan, but the issue could also split the DPJ and spark realignment if Kan backs down."