The Mask

As the Democratic Party of Japan seizes power after its historic victory, people are beginning to ask, "Who really calls the shots within the DPJ, Prime Minister to be Yukio Hatoyama or kingmaker Ichiro Ozawa?" Here's Mr. Morita's reply in a recent AP story:

“Ozawa is far more powerful,” Minoru Morita, a politics expert and author, said Saturday. “It’s as though Ozawa is wearing a Hatoyama mask. He is in control, although on the surface Hatoyama is the leader.”

And from Reuters, here's Mr. Morita's take on Naoto Kan, expected to be appointed head of the National Strategy Bureau, a policy-setting group:

"All he has ever done with the bureaucrats is fight them," said political commentator Minoru Morita. "The danger with Kan in this post is that the bureaucrats will simply stop working for fear of being attacked, so nothing will move forward," he added.

In Mr. Kan's defense, he does acknowledge that unemployment is the biggest issue Japan faces; Mr. Morita argues the same thing in the post below this one.