Last week the DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama had written an essay, part of which was adapted into an op-ed published in the NYT, and this prompted some anxiety that a DPJ victory represented a dire anti-American turn. In recent days, Hatoyama has tried to clarify his views and to de-emphasize the degree to which his ideal of yuai implies turning away from or against America. Essentially, Hatoyama had written something designed mainly for domestic consumption concerning Japan’s domestic economic and political model and some Americans inevitably made the mistake of thinking that it primarily had something to do with us. Hatoyama was using the United States and our so-called “market fundamentalism” as foils for his argument in favor of the idea of yuai, which center-left and Christian Democratic politicians elsewhere would probably refer to by the word solidarity. Hatoyama prefers to identify it more literally with the idea of fraternity, but he is making the same point.

What Hatoyama was saying was no more remarkable than it would be if a Frenchman derided the “Anglo-Saxon model.” No doubt someone would treat this as an “anti-American” statement, but this misses that Hatoyama’s purpose in saying it is to oppose his own view to a caricature of an unbridled capitalist system that doesn’t even exist. Ironically, our system is coming more and more to represent Japan’s in all of its state-subsidized, zombified glory at the moment when Hatoyama has been campaigning for the most part on the promise of providing even more subsidies and government guarantees. As for the rest of the op-ed, Hatoyama’s statements that the financial crisis has jeopardized the dollar’s position and that a multipolar order has begun to take shape seem to be rather banal obervations. As Yglesias has mentioned already, Hatoyama’s proposals for regional currency integration and collective security cooperation are reasonable. They are also exactly the things most American policymakers have liked hearing from European politicians about the economic and political integration of Europe. One wonders why being, as our politicians might put it, “whole, free and at peace” is something we would not eventually prefer to see in the region that served as the other main battlefield of the last world war.

All that said, does the DPJ’s rise to power make any difference? When a country is governed by an entrenched bureaucracy and has been subject to one-party rule for decades, it is the safe bet that electoral upheaval will not have major consequences. Dov Zakheim made this bet concerning the future of Japanese policy under the incoming DPJ government, and he might very well be right to take this view. As I said last week, continuity has to be expected in the short term. One should also not exaggerate the degree of difference between the incoming government and its predecessor. Nonetheless, I don’t quite understand why we should think that an opposition party that has never held power before would act as if it has the luxury of playing it safe, ignoring its constituents and trashing most of its campaign promises. Foreign policy will not be Hatoyama’s top priority, and he will be hard-pressed to carry out most of the domestic changes he wants to make, but one way to help ensure that a DPJ government does cause a “sea change” in U.S.-Japan relations is to dismiss past DPJ statements as little more than electoral bluster and fail to prepare for changes that we have every reason to expect will occur.