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Japan's new govt takes broom to conservatives' policies
AFP - Saturday, September 19
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Japan's new govt takes broom to conservatives' policies
TOKYO (AFP) - – Japan's new leaders on Friday began unwinding policies of the conservatives they ousted -- pledging to reverse some market reforms, axing a mega-dam and probing secret Cold War US defence pacts.
The centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) also set up a team that will form the core of a new National Strategy Bureau that will be tasked with shaping key policies and putting together the national budget.
Yukio Hatoyama was sworn in as prime minister Wednesday, two weeks after leading the DPJ to a landslide election victory that ended more than half a century of almost unbroken rule by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The new government has the support of at least three quarters of voters, polls said. The public enthusiasm is second only to the more than 80 percent initial approval ratings for former LDP premier Junichiro Koizumi in 2005.
A key reform pledge of the DPJ has been to wrest power back from the bloated and powerful state bureaucracy which, it charges, long ran the country from behind the scenes, with close ties to the LDP and corporate Japan.
"In the past, under LDP governments, bureaucrats from each ministry forged policies for the interest of the ministry rather than the interest of the people," said the new bureau's chief, Deputy Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
"We will review policies aggressively ... to serve the interest of the Japanese people," said Kan, a veteran of battling bureaucrats.
Hatoyama told his cabinet to suspend part of the spending from a 152 billion dollar stimulus package, passed in May amid Japan's worst post-war recession, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano.
In a move to clip the mandarins' wings and return power to politicians, the DPJ has scrapped the bi-weekly press conferences of ministry chiefs, a move criticised by some journalists' groups as a restriction on media freedom.
Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, meanwhile, ordered a probe into four secret Cold War-era defence pacts with the United States.
One of the deals allowed US nuclear-armed warships and aircraft on Japanese territory -- a controversial issue in Japan, the only country to have been hit with atomic bombs, which officially bans all nuclear weapons.
Retired Japanese officials and declassified US documents have long supported the existence of the deals -- but LDP governments have denied them.
Okada on Friday met Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs, and reportedly asked that Washington help clear up the issue.
"The documents from the United States have been made available," Campbell later told reporters. "Those documents essentially speak for themselves."
The DPJ has said it wants a "more equal" relationship with the United States, signaled it will scale down some military cooperation and review a plan under which a new US base would be built on southern Okinawa island.
Campbell said the US wants to stick with the pact but added: "We recognise that it is part of a partnership of equals that it is critical for the United States to prepare to sit down and listen and discuss with a new government."
In other changes announced by the DPJ, two dam projects will be axed as part of a drive to slash what it has labelled wasteful public works spending.
The new government also plans to review the signature free-market reform of a previous LDP government -- the privatisation of Japan Post, which includes large banking and insurance arms that are popular especially in rural areas.
And Justice Minister Keiko Chiba has called for debate on the death penalty, which she personally opposes. But she has not called for its abolition and said Friday that approving executions was among her duties as justice minister.
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