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Japan's prime minister Yukio Hatoyama resigns
｛日本の鳩山由紀夫総理大臣が辞任｝

Yukio Hatoyama steps down over failure to honour election promises including relocation of Okinawa's US air base
｛鳩山由紀夫総理大臣、’沖縄の米空軍基地移設等の選挙公約’を果たせなかったとして辞任｝
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 June 2010 07.47 BST
Article history

{{Japan's prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has announced he will resign.}
{Photograph}: Brian Snyder/Reuters}

Japan's prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, today said he would resign just eight months after he took office, after failing to honour election promises to bring sweeping change to domestic policy and fundamentally alter the country's relations with the US.

The world's second biggest economy faces yet another period of uncertainty after Hatoyama, whose Democratic party won by a landslide last year, became Japan's fourth prime minister in as many years to step down after a year or less in power.

In a further blow to the Democrats five weeks before upper house elections, Ichiro Ozawa, the architect of last year's election victory, will also step down amid a political funding scandal.

"Since last year's elections, I tried to change politics so that the people of Japan would be the main characters," Hatoyama said in a nationally televised address to party members.

Although he has had some success in shifting power from bureaucrats to politicians, Hatoyama conceded that he had failed to win public support for his administration's handling of the economy and, crucially, his recent decision on the fate of a US military base on the southern island of Okinawa.

"That was mainly because of my failings," he said, his eyes filling with tears. "The public has refused to hear me."

His fate was in effect sealed by his decision last week to renege on a campaign promise to move a US marine airbase off Okinawa – a move he hoped would demonstrate his determination to end Japan's subservience to Washington's foreign policy.

In the end, US intransigence and the lack of a viable alternative site forced him to accept a 2006 agreement to move the base from its city centre location to an offshore site on the island's northern coast.

His change of heart enraged politicians and residents on Okinawa, who accused him of betrayal, and sent his public support ratings below 17%, compared with over 70% when he took office last September.

Hatoyama, 63, said the importance of maintaining a strong US alliance in the face of a rising China and instability on the Korean peninsula had forced him to cave in to Washington's demands.

"There was no choice but to keep the base on Okinawa," he said, while attempting to sell the deal to a disgruntled electorate and his coalition partners. "I sincerely hope people will understand the agonising choice I had to make. I knew we had to maintain a trusting relationship with the US at any cost."

Although Hatoyama's resignation came sooner than expected, Japanese voters will find themselves in familiar territory, as another ruling party scrambles to appoint a new leader.

Media reports said the Democrats would choose Hatoyama's successor on Friday. The acknowledged frontrunner is the finance minister, Naoto Kan, who earned a reputation for toughness when he took on bureaucrats over an HIV-tainted blood products scandal as Liberal Democratic party health minister in the mid-1990s.

Other possible successors include the foreign minister, Katsuya Okada, and Seiji Maehara, the transport minister.

Kan, 63, has called on the Bank of Japan to do more to fight deflation and is less resistant than Hatoyama to raising the 5% sales tax to pay for ballooning health and welfare costs.

If elected, he will quickly come under pressure to send a strong message to investors over how he intends to rein in Japan's huge public debt – now approaching 200% of GDP – and fund the government's ambitious public spending commitments.

But analysts expected the turmoil to delay key announcements on economic policy. "Hatoyama's resignation may cause delays in the scheduled releases this month of the government's growth strategies and fiscal discipline targets," said Hirokata Kusaba, an economist at Mizuho Research Institute.

"Whoever replaces Hatoyama would need to work them out before an upper house election, or else disappoint voters. Things could not get any worse after Hatoyama quits, given the current deadlock in many important issues."

The potential unraveling of Japan's centre-left experiment comes less than a year after the Democrats ended more than half a century of almost uninterrupted rule by the conservative LDP.

The government can at least take comfort in the fact that the LDP, riven by infighting and defections, is unlikely to mount a strong challenge in July's upper house elections.

Although they have a comfortable majority in the lower house, the Democrats needed to form a coalition with the People's New party and the left-wing Social Democratic party to secure a majority in the upper house and smoothe the passage of key legislation.

The coalition began to crumble last week when Hatoyama sacked the Social Democrats' leader, Mizuho Fukushima, after she refused to sign off on the US air base deal.

Her party's subsequent decision to leave the government prompted senior figures in Hatoyama's party to pressure him to resign and give the Democrats a fighting chance next month.

Ozawa, widely regarded as the most powerful figure in the government, will resign as the party's secretary general. Hatoyama said he had asked Ozawa, who has been embroiled in a fundraising scandal for more than a year, to quit in order to establish a "fresh and clean" party.

"Our politics must break with money. We must become completely clean in order to revitalise our party."