So much for that huge “dose of fresh air” from Japan now that Yukio Hatoyama, the former Stanford doctoral student, has become Japan’s first opposition prime minister in nearly 20 years.

Hatoyama was candid enough to admit to his people that his administration will be characterized by a “process of trial and error and there will be some mistakes.”

At a time when the Japanese yen is soaring –a big hurt to exporters like Honda and Nintendo — he appointed the spry Hirohisa Fujii, aged 77, to be Finance Minister — the same position he held 16 years ago when an opposition party held the reins of power for 11 months. Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada,  diffident and unflashy, will ensure that relations with Washington don’t go off the rails.

However, my FAVORITE Japanese politician has also found his way into the new, uh “reform” Cabinet. Shizuka Kamei, leader of the splinter People’s New Party, will be in charge of “postal and financial affairs” –which is like putting Al Capone in charge of the Federal Reserve.

Kamei, 72, is the Japanese leader most like a classic Chicago wardheeler in the days of  “The Boss” Richard J. Daley. (Yes I once covered politics in Chicago.)  Kamei firmly believes in spending goverment largesse on dams, subways, highways and whatever else will give people jobs.  He’s now been put in charge of the agency that was supposed to break up the world’s largest bank — the Japanese Postal Savings system — and get that money flowing into private and commercial accounts where it could be better spent.

Kamei opposed the postal privatization agenda of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the maverick who kept ruling LDP from killing itself off in the mid-1990s, and subsequently left the party in which he had been a powerhouse for decades.

Now he turns up as a Cabinet member in a so-called “reform” government. Of course this is a political “payoff” for supporting of the Democrats in the Japanese parliament. But it bodes ill for the sort of deep and drastic reform the country needs if it is ever to emerge from its financial “black hole.”

Kamei is likely to push the use of postal savings to prop up small and medium industries that have been going broke for years. He has already proposed a three-year debt moratorium, and could conceivably force the postal savings system to issue more “life support” loans to so-called “zombie” firms. These firms are the “living dead” –  no longer economically functional, but still not killed off.

Kokumin, SDP chiefs offered plum posts

Japan needs a healthy dose of entrepreneurship, innovation and new business creation. That can’t happen if so much of its capital is tied up in moribund firms that are kept in business.

The clash between the OLD and NEW Japan will be fought even within Hatoyama’s new cabinet.  Kamei’s first name –Shizuka– can be rendered to mean “quiet.” Kamei, a blustery, barrel- chested old-school pol, is anything but. He would endorse the comments of a famous old Windy City pol who once said, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”

Is Japan?

So the New York Times and some Washington thinktankers are pulling out their worry beads, now that the Japanese have finally ditched the ruling Liberal Democratic Party for the relatively unknown and untested Democrats, who will now form Japan’s next government.

Ohmigod they proclaim! The US-Japan alliance is dead. Oh NO! Change in Asia? Maybe we can’t “count” on our friendship with Japan anymore??

The classic Timesian approach was in full view in a piece earlier this week, full of Beltway background and off-the-record fumbling.

The victory of the Democrats on Sunday means the White House must deal, for the first time in decades, with a Japanese government that is a complete stranger, and one that has expressed blunt criticism of the United States. The party’s leader and presumptive prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, recently spoke out against American-led globalization and called for a greater Japanese focus on Asia.

Well, who WOULDN’T express criticism of American foreign policy during the Bush years? Even our CURRENT President thinks Bush led us into a disaster in Iraq. In fact that’s why he got elected.

What all these Washington “experts” forget to point out is that it was George Bush, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney that “forced” Japan to support an ill-fated Iraqi campaign that the vast majority of the Japanese people vehemently opposed.

Remember when George Bush decided to “take names” and figure which nations of the world were “friends or foes?” The French said “No.” The Germans said “No.” But the Japanese, nervous that they would be left “at sea” in Asia, acted in contravention to their own Constitution to support the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, even though our invasion never received United Nations sanction.

Japan’s support for the Iraqi war — a kneejerk, slavish response by then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi — effectively killed the country’s ability to win the one foreign prize it has long sought: a seat on the UN Security Council. (Remember Japan has been one of the biggest financial backer of that institution, while Washington is usually in arrears in paying its UN debts.)

You don’t get that sort of victory in the UN kowtowing to the Americans…but that’s what Tokyo did because of the Bush’s administration demand that friends “stand up and be counted.”

So the election of Hatoyama and the Democrats allow the two nations to rethink and reconceptualize the nature of their alliance now that the Cold War is dead. And despite the traditional hostility of the Japanese to the Democratic Party, I believe the new government will find a lot to agree with when Obama and Hatoyama finally sit down and meet

Hatoyama, Obama speak by telephone

Japan needs to think about it’s role in the 21st century.  Guess what? So does Washington. There’s plenty of room for mutual progress on a healthy and sustainable, now that Rumsfeld and Cheney are no longer running the world.

There is no reason not to be sympathetic to the plight of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two video “journalists”  working for Current TV whose release from a North Korean gulag was secured by former President Bill Clinton last month to great national acclaim.

No one should wish their worst enemies a night under North Korean guards…

But their commentary /explanation in today’s LA Times of how they were captured only raises again the nagging question: What on earth were they doing there on North Korean soil??

Their explanation of how they were captured once again suggests that these two lacked the proper preparation, knowledge or experience to be tasked for such a risky assignment. While their sympathy for North Korean refugees was perhaps laudable, their decision to knowingly cross the Tumen River border — well known to be ambiguous, not well-marked and full of smuggling routes — suggests, as I have alluded to earlier, a base desire to “touch the soil” in the DPRK even if that had nothing to do with the actual reporting of the story.

Call it a schoolgirl stunt.

As they write:

….We knew our guide was taking us closer to the North Korean side of the river. As he walked, he began making deep, low hooting sounds, which we assumed was his way of making contact with North Korean border guards he knew. The previous night, he had called his associates in North Korea on a black cellphone he kept for that purpose, trying to arrange an interview for us. He was unsuccessful, but he could, he assured us, show us the no-man’s land along the river, where smugglers pay off guards to move human traffic from one country to another.

When we set out, we had no intention of leaving China, but when our guide beckoned for us to follow him beyond the middle of the river, we did, eventually arriving at the riverbank on the North Korean side.

To me this episode also suggests some of the perils of “do it cheap” journalism — the sort of reporting we’ll increasingly see as old-line media die out and the market has not yet found ways to pay experienced hands who know their way around in desolate and foreboding places. Alas, there remain no “barriers to entry” in journalism these days.

I recognize that I’m not being PC here…but I suspect the capture of these two is only the “edge of the wedge,” as increasingly risky and dangerous reporting assignments get taken over by those who really don’t know better.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee: Hostages of the Hermit Kingdom

“Postwar Japanese politics has been, fundamentally, quite cozy and undemanding… While Japan concentrated on its own economic development and the distribution of its newly generated wealth, it left the maintenance of international order to the United States. The government had two relatively painless tasks: to hear the views of the opposition and to allocate budget funds as fairly as possible.”

These words written by Ichiro Ozawa, intellectual founder of the Democratic Party of Japan –which now takes over leadership of the world’s second largest economy after their stunning parliamentary victory on Sunday –aptly sum up the Japanese challenge in the 21st century.

Ozawa’s words, quoted by my former colleague Dan Sneider in today’s Washington Post,  sum up how the Japanese thought of themselves. Essentially, they were great “free riders” in the world — able to export their way to prosperity while dependent on Washington’s security blanket in foreign affairs, never having to really decided for themselves what their future should look like.

The result was a nation frozen in amber for nearly two decades –while the world around them changed.

The next Japanese goverment, to be led by Stanford-educated engineer Yukio Hatoyama, will now be able to begin a true national conversation about how to arrest the nation’s long slide toward irrelevance. Revamping the economy, instilling hope in a “lost generation” of young people, defining an approrpriate foreign policy agenda and reviving the national economy are all huge challenges facing the country. None will be solved overnight.

But this “breath of fresh air,” gives Tokyo a real chance to revive and reinvigorate its alliance with Washington, re-engineer  its connections across Asia and rediscover its potential to generate  economic growth based more on domestic consumption, not just on exports to the US and Europe.

The Obama administration will need to signal early on that it welcomes a productive, cooperative and more equal partnership — in line with Obama’s own preference for multilateralism. This shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

The challenge will be in Tokyo — turning campaign  rhetoric into coherent policy.

The leader of Japan's Democratic Party, Yukio Hatoyama, celebrates in Tokyo on August 30 (Junko Kimura/Getty)

America’s great reset began almost precisely one year ago when the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the election of an African-American Democrat as President signaled a major turning point in the nation’s economic and political affairs

Now America’s great Asian ally begins its own epochal Great Reset.

The Liberal Democratic Party, which held a choke hold on Japan’s political life for more than 50 years, which protected special interests, carved up the spoils of incumbency and never managed to reinvigorate the nation after the collapse of the “Japanese miracle” in 1989, finally collapsed in defeat Sunday, a spent, bloated and demoralized political force. Its demise was long overdue.

The opposition Democratic Party or Minshuto not only toppled the LDP, but seems likely to garner a two-thirds majority in the Lower House  of the parliament, or Diet –enough power to pass bills without the help of the minority.

DPJ Wins 308 Seats To Topple LDP From Power.

This was less a victory for the Democrats than it was the final reckoning against a doddering and bloated political machine, the sort that put old Chicago Mayor Richard J.  Daley to shame. This defeats signaled a massive protest vote by millions of disaffected Japanese who saw the LDP as being simply unable to articulate a future course for a deeply troubled nation that has never really risen up and recovered from the crippling deflation of hte 1990s.

Alas, it is not yet clear that the Democrats, and their party leader Yukio Hatoyama will have the strategic vision and political discipline to lead Japan out of the wilderness, either. On the campaign stump, Hatoyama promised a retreat from “market fundamentalism” –an ironic choice of words in a nation whose economy is heavily managed through government intervention — and a new foreign policy more independent of Washington.

It isn’t clear how much of this Hatoyama really means. The Japanese foreign policy establishment has long been leery of Democrats in America, feeling they are so beholden to labor unions that they will never stand up for Japanese interests.  Yet it was George Bush — not the Democrats — who forced the Japanese to offer logistical support for the U.S. war in Iraq, something the majority of the Japanese people opposed — and despite a pacifist Japanese constitution that expressly forbids war-making. In choosing to go along with Bush, the Japanese were not acting in their own self-interest, but reflecting their slavish devotion to the USA and to the long-held notion that if Japan supports the U.S. military, the U.S. will protect Japan’s economy.

Now the world looks different than it did a year ago.

In principle, Hatoyama could work closely with an Obama administration to recalibrate Tokyo’s troubled relations with China and Korea, and develop the terms for a post- Cold War alliance with Washington on issue ranging from humanitarian relief to climate change.

The last time an opposition won an election in Japan, however, the new government it formed lasted only about 10 months. So it’s too soon to predict how stable the Democratic government will be. The problems they will inherit, however will be profound.

On the eve of the balloting, national unemployment was officially reported at 5.7 percent — a record, but in fact far less than the real number as millions of workers have been reduced to part-time work, or arbeito without benefit of benefits, overtime or job security.  The nation’s birth rate has collapsed, as young women refuse to bear children meaning that Japan is on course to become so old and grey that it will make South Florida look like a hippie commune. And the nation’s debt amount to around 170 percent of yearly economic output

Hatoyama is no magician…and the Democrats mostly lack a coherent policy agenda. But for once the Japanese people have concluded the risk of doing nothing was more perilous than the decision to put the reins of power in the hands untested newcomers.

Let the Reset begin…