When the back-pull of bourgeois charm
Kept from your ears the soaring sound
of the people singing.
You are still prisoner under the claws
of a fierce eagle.
– Bangla Poet Shamsur Rahman, translated by Kabir Chowdhury
A scion of arguably the most prominent political family of Japan, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama did not really need to resort to sloganeering to win an election, in August, given that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was sure to lose. After over a half-century of nearly uninterrupted hold over the resources of the state, the LDP had become prisoners of outdated policies that prioritised businesses over citizens. All that the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) needed to tell the voters was that they were ready to take over. But Premier Yukio is no ordinary politician. He aims for nothing less than "creating history".
The Hatoyama family has been active in Japanese politics since the mid-19th century. But Yukio chose as his role model grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama, the three-time prime minister who argued that there was no reason to regard communist China as an enemy. Premiership was denied to Ichiro twice, first by militarists of the imperial court and then by US General Douglas MacArthur. But Ichiro persevered, and eventually made history by initiating the process of normalisation of Japan's relationship with the then-Soviet Union. The US overlords may have disliked Ichiro's tendency towards charting an independent course for Japanese foreign policy, but they needed his nationalist credentials even more to counter the rise of the socialists in this strategically important island nation.
The Western press has not taken the emergence of Ichiro's grandson Yukio in Japan particularly kindly. "Hatoyama's Fantasy Island", mocked the Tokyo bureau chief for Forbes magazine in a write-up dripping with acid. The Economist, the old guard of conservatism, was even more acerbic; it asked Yukio whether he was a poodle (the purported national dog of France) or a Pekinese, a Chinese breed of cuddly canines. There must be something about Yukio, a distinguished alumnus of Tokyo and Stanford universities, that makes Anglo-Americans finally recognise that the Japanese flag has a rising red sun emblazoned on it.