What a new Japan might look like

“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.