Hello and welcome to the history of the different podcast, episode 407, The Contenders, Part 2.

In his fantastic essay on the rise and fall of the Democratic Party of Japan, Dr. Nakano

Koichi divides the party's history into three distinct eras.

The first of these was what we talked about last week, which began with the founding of the

DPJ in 1996 by Khan Naoto and Hatoyama Yukian. In this early moment, the party positioned

itself as a third alternative to the two major blocks of Japanese politics, the conservative

LDP on the one hand and the remnants of the socialist movement

on the other. In its foundational party document, authored by Hatayama and Khan, the DPJ promised that

it would be, quote, a party of citizens, unquote, charting a new course between, quote,

capitalist liberalism and socialist egalitarianism, unquote.

The DPJ alternative would be grounded in, quote, the principles of independence and

coexistence rooted in the spirit of fraternity, unquote, as well as, quote, a citizen-centered

politics. Transly that of high-minded political speak, ZPJ was in essence charting a position

on the political center-left, trying to carve out a missing middle, so to speak, in Japanese politics.

Phase two of the party's existence began, according to Dr. Nakano, to what we talked about at the end

of last week's episode,

the self-destructing of Osawa Ichiro's Shinshinto or New Frontier Party.

Regardless of Ozawa's precise motivations for doing this, and as we'll see,

Ozawa's precise motivations for doing basically anything are notoriously hard to pin down,

the move had the side effect of making the DPJ the largest opposition party in Japan,

both because the new frontier party itself no longer existed,

and because more than a few of its former Dietmen joined the DPJ,

...