Word: hatoyamas
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...Ichiro's grandson Yukio is taking a shot. In a major turning point for modern Japan, Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections last year, tossing out the staunchly pro-U.S. Liberal Democrats, who had reigned almost interrupted since 1955. Hatoyama, 63, with an engineering Ph.D. from Stanford University, followed his granddaddy into the Prime Minister's post and immediately set about changing Japan's economy, government - and relationship with the U.S. "It was always in response to what the U.S. had to say that Japan followed," Hatoyama told TIME...
...from clear what, precisely, Hatoyama means by "more equal," but there's little doubt that his government policy has completely altered the tenor of relations between the U.S. and its closest ally in Asia. Twenty years ago, Tokyo and Washington routinely sparred, most often over trade, but in the past decade the two nations seemed to become closer than ever. Japan backed America's antiterror campaign, for example, by marshaling refueling missions in the Indian Ocean to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Japan was looking more American at home as well. Under Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister from...
...Hatoyama has thrown those policies in reverse. Critical of what he has called U.S.-led "market fundamentalism," Hatoyama has rejected Koizumi's now unpopular market reforms and is steering the economy toward something akin to a European-style welfare state with a wider government-funded social safety net. Though Hatoyama has continued to stress the crucial nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance and his friendly relationship with President Barack Obama - "We have come to call each other Barack and Yukio," he said during Obama's November visit to Tokyo - he has also backed away from policies that Washington views...
...home, Hatoyama's ideas have struck a chord with those who want their country to chart a new course. For decades - ever since its defeat in World War II, in fact - Japan has struggled to define its role in the world. Though in many respects a political and economic power in its own right, Japan has remained reliant on the U.S. for its own security. (Japan's postwar constitution renounces the use of force in international disputes.) The stabilizing presence of the U.S. military in Asia is as crucial as ever to Japan, which shares the same neighborhood...
...Japanese public's desire for change goes far beyond the realm of foreign relations. They ushered Hatoyama into office to breathe new life into an ossified political system that proved incapable of reversing the slow-motion decline of Japan's economy and global influence, a phenomenon the Japanese call "Japan passing." Thirty years ago, Japan was much like the China of today, an up-and-coming global power with an economy that was the envy of the world. Japanese companies such as Sony, Toyota and Honda shoved aside their competition from the West. By the late 1980s, Americans came...