Obama ‘not in a position to criticise’ Japan’s politics in memoir: analyst
- The former US president wrote in A Promised Land that ex-PM Yukio Hatoyama was ‘awkward’ and Tokyo’s politics was ‘aimless’ during his term
- But a Japanese professor said Obama should consider some of his own policy failures, such as his ‘weak and ineffective’ policies on China
“A pleasant if awkward fellow, Hatoyama was Japan’s fourth prime minister in less than three years and the second since I’d taken office – a symptom of the sclerotic, aimless politics that had plagued Japan for much of the decade,” Obama, 59, wrote in his new book titled A Promised Land.
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Hatoyama became prime minister from the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan when it swept to power in 2009, ending more than half a century of nearly uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
But he stepped down in less than nine months and the DPJ eventually lost its hold on power as the LDP’s Shinzo Abe returned as premier in December 2012 and served until September 2020.
Sometimes dubbed “the alien” for his departures from convention, including rapid policy reversals, Hatoyama, 73, is said to have aroused mistrust in the United States over his botched handling of a bilaterally agreed plan to relocate a key US Marine base within Okinawa prefecture.
After telling Obama to “trust me” over the plan, which faced local opposition, Hatoyama at one point pursued a different approach that defied the Japan-US agreement.
Yoichi Shimada, a professor of international relations at Fukui Prefectural University, suggested that Obama should consider some of his own policy failures before criticising the shortcomings of other nations.
“We know that Japan’s political system has some deficiencies and I would say that most Japanese would welcome friendly advice on what we might do differently or better, but I do not think that Obama is in a position to criticise when his policies on China, for example, were weak and ineffective,” he said.
“I think Abe changed the way Obama thought about Japanese politics,” he said. “Obama probably initially saw Abe as a right-winger, a troublemaker who would stir up problems with China, South Korea and other countries, but step-by-step, Abe showed him that Japan could be a good partner.”
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Ken Kato, a Tokyo-based businessman who is also a member of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said he was “surprised” at the description of domestic politics as being sclerotic and aimless in the decade leading up to Hatoyama’s brief administration.
He concurred, however, with Obama’s assessment of the government under the Democratic Party of Japan, which he said would have angered Washington for its “empty promises”.
In the memoir, Obama also recounted his meeting with then Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko during his first visit to Japan after assuming the presidency, in which he stirred controversy in the United States for having bowed too low.
“Later, I learned that my simple bow to my elderly Japanese hosts had sent conservative commentators into a fit back home,” he said.
“Hearing all this, I pictured the emperor entombed in his ceremonial duties and the empress, with her finely worn, greying beauty and smile brushed with melancholy, and I wondered when exactly such a sizeable portion of the American Right had become so frightened and insecure that they’d completely lost their minds,” he added.
