We’re wrapping up our look at the Hatoyama political dynasty with some time on Hatoyama Iichiro (arguably Japan’s most reluctant politican) and his two sons Kunio and Yukio. Plus some thoughts on the legacy of the Hatoyama family and on dynastic electoral politics more generally.
Sources
Itoh, Mayumi. The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership Through the Generations.
Itoh, Mayumi. “Hatoyama Kunio and Political Leadership in Japan: A Political Case Study.” Asian Survey 39, No 5 (1999)
Calder, Kent E. “Kanyro vs Shomin: Contrasting Dynamics of Conservative Leadership in Postwar Japan.” in Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan, ed. Terry Edward MacDougall
Ishibashi, Michihiro, and Steven R. Reed. “Second-Generation Diet Members and Democracy in Japan: Hereditary Seats.” Asian Survey 32, No 4 (April, 1992).
Images
Transcript
There’s one quote that, more than anything else, I think sums up well the relationship between the third generation leader of the Hatoyama family, Hatoyama Iichiro, and politics: which was, of course, by his time the family business. I found this particular little story in Ito Mayumi’s fascinating book The Hatoyama Dynasty–fascinating primarily because frankly, a good chunk of what Ito writes is simply trying to pump up the Hatoyama family’s reputation, which makes the inclusion of this little story all the more fascinating.
Hatoyama Iichiro would, himself, have two sons: Hatoyama Yukio (born in 1947), and Hatoyama Kunio (born in 1948).
When his younger son Kunio said he wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps in politics (Yukio would eventually do the same, but later in life), apparently their father could not hold himself back from a harsh reply. Supposedly, he tried to forbid Kunio from pursuing politics, and said to him, “if you want to go into politics, you must be a bad person.”
Kunio, somewhat nonplussed, replied, “Then my grandfather must have been a very bad person”–a fair observation, given that Hatoyama Ichiro had not only gone into politics but been successful enough at it to help found the LDP and become Prime Minister.
Hatoyama Iichiro’s response to this slander of his own father was a cool, “didn’t you know that?”
Now: there is, as they say, a lot to unpack here, but I think it serves as a very good introduction to Hatoyama Iichiro as a character, so to speak.
His grandfather, Hatoyama Kazuo, was a reluctant politician who was just as, if not more focused on the law as he was his own political career. His father Ichiro felt very differently, and had thrown himself into a political career as fast as he possibly could–remember, the only reason he didn’t immediately run for his own father’s seat in the Diet was that he wasn’t old enough yet when his father died.
Hatoyama Iichiro, however, shared neither his grandfather’s ambivalence to politics nor his father’s apparent fascination with it. He absolutely hated the entire scene.
Which put him in a complicated spot, to put it mildly. Hatoyama Iichiro was born in 1918 in the family mansion–the so-called Otowa Palace, now Hatoyama Hall, a museum to his family’s political accomplishments. He grew up in the shadow of his father’s political career, and with the expectation placed upon him that he’d take over for his father when the time came–after all, he was the only son alongside five sisters, and at that point Japanese women could not even vote for national elections, let alone stand for them.
Yet Hatoyama Iichiro did not want to go into politics at all. He was always pretty clear about some of his reasons for feeling that way: chiefly a perception that politicians were more interested in their own power and in horse-trading with each other to their advantage and to the advantage of their districts than they were in the national interest broadly considered. Reading between the lines, it sounds like there might also be some parental baggage there–indeed, one does not hear stories about Hatoyama Ichiro being a warm or present father for his son in the way that Hatoyama Kazuo was for his. But that’s only ever been alluded to, never spelled out directly.
Regardless, we know that Hatoyama Iichiro rejected any mention of going into politics; upon his graduation (from where else but the Tokyo Imperial University School of Law), he decided to join a different wing of public service, the bureaucracy.
Now, Japan’s governmental bureaucracy is not what you’re probably thinking of when you hear the phrase “government bureaucracy”; especially at this time, it was an extremely high prestige branch of public service.
It was also a branch of public service that, especially starting in the 1930s and 1940s, positioned itself as in a sense existing in opposition to the political parties.
Japan’s bureaucrats were selected by a theoretically meritocratic system that pulled from the most elite schools in the country (especially Tokyo Imperial University)–the idea was for the best and brightest in the country to be helping formulate and implement policy for the good of the nation.
There are, of course, plenty of arguments to be made against such an approach: Japanese bureaucrats were also notoriously haughty and viewed themselves as above (and better than) the broad masses they supposedly served. And their lifetime appointments meant there was not much of a meaningful check on abuses of authority–the main check against that was a sense of moral obligation around service, which at least personally I don’t see being terribly effective to be honest.
Regardless, Japan’s bureaucrats did not have a terribly high opinion of politicians, whom they accused of being obsessed with winning elections rather than doing the right thing. More than a few bureaucrats aligned themselves with the military against the political parties in the leadup to the Second World War: in a certain sense, this made Hatoyama Iichiro’s career choice a sort of youthful rebellion.
Still, one should not get the impression that his choice was made impetuously, particularly given that he chose a career in the Ministry of Finance–one of the most prestigious branches of the bureaucracy, given its obvious importance to the financial security and stability of the nation.
Barring his brief interlude as a sailor in World War II–during which, after going missing following the bombing of the massive Japanese base on Truk, he was presumed dead for a time–Hatoyama Iichiro would stay in the bureaucracy until 1974. After working in the Ministry of Finance’s budget bureau (responsible, as the name would imply, for setting up the national budget), he would move over to the equally prestigious Ministry of International Trade and Industry for a time–this particular branch of the bureaucracy has since been eliminated in administrative reforms, but once upon a time it was responsible for setting national economic strategy and policy, making it extremely important.
He would then return to the Ministry of Finance, eventually capping out as the administrative vice minister of finance in 1972. So, a pretty high level job in a pretty high prestige field.
But this is not a series about the bureaucracy but about politics, and so we’re gonna move past the three decades of service Hatoyama Iichiro gave as a bureaucrat to his surprising decision, in June of 1974, to retire as a bureaucrat at the age of 55 and, astonishingly, to run for office.
What could lead a man who hated politics to do this, you might wonder? There’s a few different potential answers, but one of the first and most obvious is, of course, family pressure.
His parents hadn’t ever stopped Hatoyama Iichiro from going into the bureaucracy, but they weren’t exactly thrilled either. Hatoyama Ichiro had, not once but twice, offered to set his son up to succeed him–taking his name off the ballot and endorsing his son as a successor in his district, which would virtually guarantee him a win.
Both times, the son refused, but one has to imagine that being pressured by your father to go into politics is not something you just ‘get over.’
His mom did it too; particularly once Hatoyama Ichiro died in 1959, the now widowed Hatoyama Kaoru continued to push her son toward a career in politics as a matter of family legacy. That’s not really much of a surprise, mind you; remember, she’d been chosen as Ichiro’s wife by Hatoyama Kazuo’s wife Hatoyama Haruko, who had thrown herself into the role of politician’s wife and had pushed her own eldest son into politics as a matter of family legacy.
Iichiro’s own wife was from a solidly non-political family: Hatoyama Yasuko, born in 1922, was the daughter of Ishibashi Shojiro, the founder of the Bridgestone tire company. The two got married in 1941, right after Iichiro’s graduation from Tokyo Imperial University, but by the 1970s, she too (probably with her mother-in-law’s encouragement) was pushing him towards politics.
Even his own son got in on this. Hatoyama Yukio, the elder of the two, was in the 1970s throwing himself into pursuing engineering, but his younger son Kunio was already deeply enmeshed in the same Liberal Democratic Party his grandfather had helped found. At this point, Kunio had yet to run for office, but was already working in the LDP as a senior aide to its president (who was also the Prime Minister, given the party’s electoral dominance), Tanaka Kakuei.
And Tanaka really wanted Hatoyama Iichiro to run–he claimed because Hatoyama would be a valuable conservative voice at a time where the political left appeared resurgent, the socialists having picked up 28 seats in the most recent general election in 1972.
Frankly, it’s pretty clear in retrospect that the actual reason Tanaka wanted Iichiro to run was to create the appearance that Iichiro–who was both the son of a prestigious father and a fastidious bureaucrat at a time when the bureaucracy had an image as incorruptible public servants–endorsed him. Tanaka, after all, was a deeply corrupt man; see our episodes on the Lockheed Scandal for more on that.
It’s also worth noting that Kent Calder, in his study of the Japanese bureaucracy, uncovered a few things about Hatoyama and Tanaka’s relationship. First, Tanaka had gone to bat for Hatoyama a few times when the latter was still working at the finance ministry–suggesting that at least a part of Hatoyama’s career advancement was because Tanaka had pushed for his rise.
Hatoyama may have felt some indebtedness to Tanaka for his own career as a result, and been willing to do something he otherwise wouldn’t as a result.
We also can’t discount the role of legacy in the decision. He’d rejected his father’s entreaties to go into politics at the time, but they do seem to have weighed on him. For example, he remarked to an aide after winning his first election that, “it took time, but my father would be pleased.”
Still, he remained pretty ambivalent about politics even as he entered the field. Iichiro chose to run, not for the House of Representatives but for the Diet’s other house–the house of councilors, once upon a time appointed by the emperor but ever since the 1947 constitution elected just like the lower house. Because of its formerly privileged position, today the House of Councilors enjoys substantially less power than the House of Representatives–it has no role in selecting the Prime Minister, for example, and the House of Representatives can pass bills without the House of Councilors if no vote is held on them within 30 days.
That said, Iichiro preferred that job for two reasons. First, House of Councilors seats follow the pattern of the US Senate and are only up for election every six years. In the House of Representatives you have to spend a lot more time campaigning; there’s an election at least every four years, and possibly more if the PM dissolves the House and calls for new elections. Second, the House of Councilors includes some seats that are elected nationwide–he could thus avoid running for a specific district, an idea he detested because he viewed districts as creating a ‘narrowminded’ approach instead of a wholistic, national one.
I think it’s fair to say that Hatoyama Iichiro was not a born politician. Here is an actual excerpt from a real interview he gave on the campaign trail: “I detest politics. I get goose bumps when I think of elections. I do not like elections and campaign speeches. One cannot do this unless he likes it. I did not want to run. I was hoping that someone else would run…I was obliged to run only because so few people wanted to run.”
Scintillating stuff, isn’t it? Indeed, Hatoyama Iichiro did have an image as a competent public servant–but also as shy and poorly suited to the wheeling and dealing of politics, not to mention the constant suspicion that he was only getting by because of his by this point almost aristocratic family pedigree.
As for his platform, well, there were only two real pieces to it. First, he said he wanted to protect against the socialists taking control of the House of Councilors–which they did have a shot of doing, because the LDP was polling quite poorly given both Tanaka Kakuei’s ongoing political issues and the economic downturn of the early 1970s caused by the 1973 oil crisis. Second, he wanted to redenominate the yen: in other words, to revalue it so that 100 yen was now 1 yen–he believed this would stimulate the economy.
I am not an expert on macroeconomics and am willing to believe he knew the field better than I do, but I have to admit that I’ve never heard of redenomination being used as a form of economic stimulus. Not that it mattered; the policy was deeply unpopular and never got anywhere near becoming reality.
He won primarily–at least it seems to me–off of name recognition, and because (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) his mother and wife campaigned extremely hard for him. Hatoyama Kaoru in particular went in hard to get her son elected, all the more impressive because she was 85 at the time. She hosted parties at Otowa Palace that functionally served as campaign rallies, and directed her not insubstantial social influence behind her son. Hatoyama Yasuko, meanwhile, funded her husband’s campaign using her family’s substantial wealth as the founders of Bridgestone.
We can also, once again, see the hand of Tanaka Kakuei in his victory: Tanaka used his sway with Buddhist religious communities he’d helped secure grants for to direct crucial votes towards Hatoyama, a classic example of the political tit for tat he was such a master of.
And this was enough to get him into office–not unimpressive, given that in 1974 the LDP as a whole performed pretty badly in the House of Councilors elections, dropping 11 seats and just barely hanging on to a majority.
Still, one can’t help but feel like Hatoyama Iichiro really stumbled into the job, and I have to admit the events of the next few years don’t exactly do much to dispel that image.
The 74 house of councilors elections were held in July; by December, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei was forced out of office thanks to his absolute boatload of scandals.
He was replaced by Miki Takeo, jokingly nicknamed “Mr Clean” for his scandal-free reputation. Miki, very concerned with recoving the LDP’s reputation after the whole Tanaka mess, tried to balance his cabinet between the various factions of the LDP–subgroupings within the party that were lightly ideological but primarily driven by ties of personal patronage and loyalty.
Many of these had been inherited from factions in the pre-unification Liberal and Democratic Partys–Hatoyama Iichiro joined the Shinjukai, one of several factions that had splintered out of his father’s original supporters, this one led by Nakasone Yasuhiro. Nakasone’s faction was not one of the stronger ones at the time, but Miki’s whole “unity cabinet” thing meant he wanted to give out postings even to the weaker factions.
And Miki settled on Hatoyama Iichiro as his pick, specifically for the role of Finance Minister. Which yes, ok, makes sense given his background–there was some grumbling in the party, because LDP jobs are often handed out based on seniority and Hatoyama literally had just gotten into office, but it was hard to argue he wasn’t qualified for the job.
But Miki only made it in office until 1976, and his replacement as PM Fukuda Takeo decided to not only keep Hatoyama Iichiro in the cabinet but to move him from the Finance Ministry to the Foreign Ministry–a move he hoped would shore up his own popularity and cultivate Hatoyama as a potential political ally. After all, Hatoyama Iichiro had a reputation as a stellar bureaucrat and one hell of a family name–both sources of light that Fukuda could (he hoped) bask in himself.
Fukuda and Iichiro’s relationship went back; Fukuda was also an ex-finance bureaucrat, and seems to have viewed Iichiro as a protege to cultivate. But the choice of Hatoyama for foreign minister was an absolutely foolish one. He had no background in foreign policy, and at any rate was such a softspoken and nonconfrontational guy that he didn’t exactly do great around highpowered diplomatic types.
The foreign ministry was also ministerial work on hard mode, because it was politically one of the weakest sectors of the bureaucracy. Most other major bureaucratic branches–like the finance ministry, for example–had constituencies of politicians who, because of the districts they operated out of, had a vested interest in that bureaucracy’s affairs. For example, a politician whose district included a lot of banks or major industrial hubs might care a lot about finance policy and how it effected economic growth in their district. Foreign affairs had no such constituency–it wasn’t really tied to any given politician’s electoral odds in the same way. Which in turn meant it didn’t have much political sway or ability to actually influence policy.
None of this was solely Hatoyama Iichiro’s fault, of course–how could it be? But frankly, he simply was not equipped to handle it well. He was not the kind of politician who brought enough clout on his own to bolster the Foreign Affairs Ministry, nor was he a particularly adept diplomat: his combination of earnestness and softspokenness was simply not suited to the task before him.
In particular, he proved utterly unable to handle negotiations with the United States around economic issues–by the late 1970s, the US/Japan relationship had become pretty tense around trade specifically, with American politicians responding to pressure from domestic companies by condemning Japanese trade practices.
And while it’s a bit of an aside to what we’re talking about, it is also worth noting that technically Japan did skirt some agreed rules around free trade by, for example, engaging in price collusion targeting US firms. But also, those American firms refused to do much in the way of innovating to combat that economic challenge.
But that’s neither here nor there. The reality is that this was a very delicate negotiation, and Hatoyama Iichiro was not the guy for it. He bungled the conversation badly when American diplomats from the Carter administration came calling, asking Hatoyama for some action on Japan’s part to redress the trade imbalance between the two countries. Hatoyama dithered in response (presumably a cover for the fact that he didn’t feel he had enough pull to do what the Americans wanted), and the result was that eventually the Carter administration simply acted without Japanese input–revaluing the yen to increase the prices of Japanese goods in the US.
Hatoyama similarly bungled negotiations around new international norms regarding the laws of the sea–he was unable to resolve a dispute around the borders of Japan’s exclusive economic zone with the Soviet Union.
All told, his tenure as foreign minister lasted slightly less than a year, from December 1976 to November, 1977 (Prime Minister Fukuda would last another year before resigning himself).
Three years later, Iiichiro was put forward by former Prime Minister Fukuda as a potential candidate for the very important job of governor of Tokyo–obviously a very influential gig given how central Tokyo is to, well, basically everything. Fukuda clearly hoped to maintain his influence in the party with a friendly face in one of the more important domestic roles in the country.
However, Iichiro did not get the endorsement of Tanaka Kakuei, and it was Tanaka’s chosen candidate (Suzuki Shunichi), who ended up winning out.
And this was more or less the end of Hatoyama Iichiro’s political career. He remained in the House of Councilors until 1992 (and thanks to the every six year nature of elections, only ever had to campaign three times to do so), at which point he finally did retire at the age of 73.
However, he never really took a leading role in politics–even when the leader of his faction of the LDP, Nakasone Yasuhiro, served as PM for five years in the 1980s, Hatoyama Iichiro’s name never came up again as a potential minister or cabinet member. He would die in December, 1993 a bit over a year after retiring, just a few weeks after his 75th birthday.
It’s hard to escape the sense, frankly, that Hatoyama Iichiro was not really suited for politics. He was by all accounts an absolutely tremendous financial bureaucrat, but unlike many other alumni of the Finance Ministry–Ikeda Hayato, Sato Eisaku, and Fukuda Takeo, all of whom became Prime Minister eventually (and the first two of whom are among the most important in postwar Japanese history), Iichiro just didn’t have good political instincts.
I think it’s hard to say it better than Hirano Minoru, a journalist with Kyodo News (the Japanese equivalent of the Associated Press) who was on the Foreign Ministry beat for 10 years in the 70s. He described Hatoyama Iichiro as a demoralizing presence for the foreign ministry, and said that the most memorable thing about his tenure was a series of puns around his name (Hatoyama literally means “dove mountain” in Japanese, which does lend itself naturally to jokes about his pushover personality).
At least in politics, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Hatoyama Iichiro got where he did based primarily on his name. Which is not to suggest he was incompetent–outside of the specific area of his tenure as foreign minister, which frankly I don’t think he was a good choice for.
But he did well as Finance Minister, and arguably was set up to fail as foreign minister. One of his secretaries said the following in a later interview: “Mr. Hatoyama did everything he had to do as foreign minister. The [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] officials appreciated him because he knew how to get the budget. Yet his overall evaluation was low because the expectations were too high (given his prestigious background), despite the extremely difficult international political environment. It was also because of the lack of self-promotion on his part. He was not the type of person to say, ‘I did this myself.’”
Honestly, I think he was a very competent guy, just not well suited for a job in politics. For example, in the 70s and 80s, it was fairly common for politicians to go out drinking together in the more fashionable neighborhoods of Tokyo near Nagatacho (where the Diet building itself is located). Akasaka was apparently a big destination–honestly, I’m more of a Shitamachi guy, so I haven’t spent much time there myself.
These parties were where a lot of the dealmaking of politics got done, both across LDP factions and across parties–That approach is so common it even has a fancy name, machiai seiji, or teahouse politics, from the time when backroom deals were made in teahouses instead of bars and high-end restaurants. Still, the core idea is the same–hash out deals behind the scenes over some high-end food and drink, and socialize to build the sort of relationships you can then utilize in your politicking.
Thing is, Hatoyama Iichiro never went to these parties, and had no interest in machiai seiji at all. He liked to hang out, not in Akasaka, but in the confusingly named and far less trendy neighborhood of Asakusa (which is completely different from Akasaka), in a far less high class neighborhood of Tokyo. Simply put, he was the kind of guy who would rather hang out with his friends in a low pressure environment than engage in that sort of “after hours” politicking–and so that was what he did.
After all, what did he have to prove? After all, it wasn’t like he needed the job; he was a Hatoyama, and as one of his friends put it, “the scion of a dynasty, in both a positive and a negative sense.”
And I have to say that on the one hand I admire him for that–but on the other, that kind of backroom dealing is just fundamentally a part of politics. Hatoyama Iichiro
It really seems like he would simply have been happier staying in the bureaucracy where that sort of socializing was not a requirement.
Now, he did have two sons, as we’ve said–Hatoyama Yukio, born in 1947, and Hatoyama Kunio, born in 1948. To be honest, I’m not interested in doing more episodes on them, for a simple reason. We’ve already covered Hatoyama Yukio’s career pretty extensively; for a quick refresh, he followed in his father’s footsteps and ran for office in 1986 after a brief career as a professor of engineering. Like his father and grandfather, he joined the LDP, running for the House of Representatives in Hokkaido in 1986 (the Hatoyamas have owned a massive amount of land up there since the days of Hatoyama Kazuo). However, he quit the party in 1993 over the absolute truckload of corruption scandals that wracked the party. From there, he joined or founded a series of opposition parties dedicated to unseating the LDP and dealing with the issues of corruption so endemic to a party that had ruled for that long. Along the way, he developed a reputation for being, honestly, kind of a weird, stiff, and offputting dude–so weird that he was nicknamed “uchuujin”, or “the space alien.” The most successful of his projects, of course, was the Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ, which grew steadily until it unseated the LDP in 2009 and made Hatoyama Yukio the prime minister (the second in his family).
Still, the narrative didn’t stay happy for long; the DPJ did not prove adept at governing and Hatoyama himself was forced to resign after a series of political blunders. He retired from politics after the 2012 general election. If you want to know more about his whole arc, see episodes 406-409, which cover the meteoric rise (and equally meteoric fall) of the Democratic Party of Japan in all its glory.
Hatoyama Kunio, meanwhile, spent his whole career in politics (and according to family friends wrote an essay in 3rd grade about how he wanted to be a politician and prime minister). First (as we’ve covered) he became an aide for Tanaka Kakuei (against his father’s wishes; Iichiro wanted his son to study harder instead of playing golf all the time, become a lawyer, and then consider politics if he still wanted to). After Tanaka’s fall, Kunio angled for a seat in the House of Representatives, winning an election for the first time in 1976 in Tokyo’s 8th district.
He won based primarily on swing voters, and arguably in large part because of his wife: Takami Emily, a half-Australian half-Japanese TV announcer who is apparently very charming but new so little about politics that in her first interview she accidentally endorsed the Japanese Communist Party instead of Kunio’s own party. Kunio himself would later say that he picked her 70% for love and 30% because her popularity and beauty would help his political career.
Like his brother, Kunio did end up leaving the LDP at a few different points over corruption concerns (he actually ran initially in an LDP splinter party, joined the LDP, left it in the early 1990s over corruption, left again in the late 2000s and then rejoined again). He did not follow his brother into the DPJ, and generally was more aligned with the LDP’s right wing. For example, he served on the cabinet of noted right-winger Aso Taro and openly endorsed Nippon Kaigi, an ultraright political group that essentially exists to challenge the legitimacy of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, the Peace Constitution and Article 9, and defend the broader legitimacy of Japan’s wars of imperial expansion before 1945. His political career lasted until his death in 2016.
Both sons benefitted from the patronage of their mother Hatoyama Yasuko, who used both the family’s original fortune and her inheritance from the Ishibashi family to finance her sons’ political ambitions; she too seems to have embraced the idea that the role of women in the Hatoyama family was to advance the political careers of men, and pushed both her sons toward politics where Iichiro was more ambivalent.
By the way: in their time, Yukio and Kunio were respectively the 1st and 3rd richest members of the Diet, with assets in the early 1990s of 11.9 billion yen/97.4 million USD and 2.3 billion yen/19.6 million USD respectively.
Kunio’s third child (and second son) Hatoyama Jiro is currently a member of the House of Representatives from Fukuoka’s 6th district–making him the fifth generation Hatoyama in the Diet. His eldest Taro has not, so far as I know, entered politics. Yukio’s son, Hatoyama Kiichiro, is a professor of engineering and technology who made some remarks about a potential career in politics back in 2009 but has not, so far as I know, pursued it.
Still, if I’m doing my math right, this means that between Kazuo, Ichiro, Iichiro, Kunio, Yukio, and now Jiro, there has been a Hatoyama in the Diet from 1892-1912, 1915-1959, and 1974 to the present: 103 of the 133 years the Diet has existed.
And, having wended our way through the history of the family–in many ways also the history of Japanese representative politics as well–I think there are a few interesting conclusions we can draw.
First, of all the generations of Hatoyamas, it really comes off, to me at least, like only the very first two actually wanted to be politicians. Arguably Hatoyama Kazuo, and certainly Hatoyama Ichiro, were genuinely interested in a career in politics out of some combination of self-promotion and genuine idealism.
Hatoyama Iichiro honestly comes off as having been manipulated into a career in politics, and by the time we get to Hatoyama Yukio and Hatoyama Kunio, it really reads to me like the expectation was so embedded into the family self-image that, in a very real sense, there wasn’t another choice for them.
Perhaps that’s the perspective of an outsider looking in and it felt different on the inside of the family, so to speak, but at least that’s my perception.
Instead, from the time of Hatoyama Iichiro onward, the family seems like it’s primarily been used as an ideological totem to prop up one cause or another. Hatoyama Iichiro was useful to an LDP that needed to clean up its image in the early 1970s; Hatoyama Kunio was useful to the party’s right wing as it tried to launder its image of militarism; Hatoyama Yukio arguably was more of a figurehead for powerful figures within the DPJ like Ozawa Ichiro and Kan Naoto than a genuine ideological leader for the DPJ itself. Honestly, I don’t know much about Hatoyama Jiro beyond the fact that he exists, but that alone tells you something about his leadership role in the LDP today.
And that, when you really get down to it, is what political dynasties are all about. True, you can get dynastic politicians who are genuinely interested in politics for its own sake, or who are motivated by a genuine desire for public service. But honestly, that seems like a true rarity. Instead, you mostly get figureheads trotted out for name recognition and the symbolism attached to it–in many ways the exact same justification attached to actual aristocratic dynasties.
The goal of representative democracy, inasmuch as I understand it, is to have genuine contests at the ballot box to determine the best candidate available. And sure, it doesn’t always–or even often–work out that way, but the absence of perfection does not undercut the goodness of the goal. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Hatoyama dynasty–and really dynastic politics in general–is anathema to that goal, trading as it does on name and legacy instead of values and policies.
140 years ago, Hatoyama Kazuo lived a life dedicated to, as he saw it, building a real and viable civil society for Japan. It is perhaps one of the great ironies of Japan’s political history that his own family’s trajectory has, in many ways, positioned it against that laudable goal.