ABSTRACT
In January 2009, the ostensibly center-left Democratic Party came to power in the United States led by Barack Obama with a public mandate to pursue “Change We Can Believe In.” In September 2009, the ostensibly center-left Democratic Party of Japan came to power led by Hatoyama Yukio with a public mandate to affect “Regime Change” in Tokyo. On the face of it, one might have expected Washington to embrace the DPJ’s crushing electoral victory as a manifestation of the very same international progressive movement that President Obama had championed during his impressive 2008 presidential campaign. At the very least, one might have expected considerable appreciation for the fact that the one-party era in Japan had finally come to an end after decades of entrenchment. However, Washington policymakers had grown quite comfortable with the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which had been content to follow the main lines of American foreign policy even when it suffered serious political costs for doing so (Taggart-Murphy 2015).
