A month in office, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama appears to face difficulty in effecting his key slogan of reducing, if not eliminating, the government's heavy reliance on the bureaucracy, due mainly to confusion as to who will take the lead andwith how much power.

In leading his Democratic Party of Japan to a big victory in the Aug. 30 general election, he pledged to create a "National Strategy Bureau" responsible for mapping out a vision for the nation's future and for the budgetary outline.

After being named to head the government, Hatoyama chose long-term colleague Naoto Kan as deputy prime minister for national strategy and economic and fiscal policy. According to some insiders, though, Kan was not happy with the appointment and did not understand what was in Hatoyama's mind. It was rumored that Kan had wanted the post of chief Cabinet secretary.

Although Kan has a handful of lawmakers assisting him, he does not have a staff for the day-to-day work as the Diet has yet to pass new laws to formally establish and define the job of the bureau that he heads. This isolation means that the government lacks the "control tower" to combat the bureaucracy.

The day after he was appointed deputy prime minister, Kan is said to have told Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii that he would not be involved in the review of a supplementary budget passed on from the previous administration, because he said he was totally unprepared.

Although the DPJ manifesto says the National Strategy Bureau will also be responsible for drawing up the nation's basic diplomatic agenda, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told reporters that he would not regard the bureau as having almighty power.

Even though Kan has not been successful in building teamwork with the finance and foreign ministers, his presence has helped newly appointed Cabinet ministers increase their independence from bureaucrats. At their initial press conferences, most of the ministers put an end to the past tradition of speaking solely from memos provided by bureaucrats and, for the most part, told in their own words how the DPJ election campaign platform will translate into action.

Several key ministers lost no time in drastically changing major programs that bureaucrats had inherited from the previous administration.

Land minister Seiji Maehara, for example, said he was determined to suspend a large dam construction project and to make expressways toll-free; welfare minister Akira Nagatsuma said he would end the current health insurance program for those at least 75 years old; and farm minister Hirotaka Akamatsu proposed institutionalizing income compensation for farmers.

These moves should not be viewed as the beginning of the all-out battle between elected politicians and bureaucrats. Instead, the battle should be seen as between those who follow the Finance Ministry's conventional idea — for whom maintaining the established budget distribution is of utmost importance — and those who seek reform. The latter include not only Cabinet ministers and their deputies assigned by the prime minister to various ministries and agencies but also certain bureaucrats who want to bring about changes in cooperation with the politicians.

So far, the all-powerful Finance Ministry bureaucrats seem to have the upper hand, and it is not at all certain that Hatoyama has the nerve to collide head-on with them.

To accurately comprehend what has been going on during the initial days of the Hatoyama administration, it is essential to understand the relationship between the prime minister and Ichiro Ozawa, who was forced to resign from the DPJ presidency earlier this year because of a campaign funds scandal involving his chief secretary and was then named the party's secretary general by Hatoyama after the election.

Although Hatoyama insists that he selected his Cabinet ministers without being influenced by Ozawa, it is fair to wonder why Ozawa — who didn't seem much interested in the appointment of Cabinet ministers — got the all-powerful post of party secretary general.

Hatoyama reportedly had wished to maintain the pre-election party leadership consisting of Ozawa as deputy party president and Okada as secretary general. On Sept. 1, however, Azuma Koshiishi, head of the DPJ Upper House caucus, phoned Hatoyama to tell him that there was only one person suited to lead the party as secretary general.

Two days later, Hatoyama met with Ozawa and offered him the important party post, and the latter accepted it. After the meeting, Hatoyama reportedly called Koshiishi to make sure that this was what the latter meant.

On the day of the general election, Okada, who had earlier lost the party presidential election to Hatoyama, met with five of his top supporters who were rumored as having a good chance of being assigned Cabinet posts. Surprisingly, Hatoyama chose none of these five for his Cabinet. This is said to reflect Ozawa's anger over the way Okada's top lieutenants had behaved.

On Sept. 18, all DPJ members of both Diet chambers received a one-page notice from secretary general Ozawa. In blunt language, he said all policy matters would henceforth be debated within the administration and that various intraparty policy panels would be abolished. This change is regarded by political observers as an indication of Ozawa's stronger autocratic rule of the party.

As for the functioning of the National Strategy Bureau, Ozawa has been quoted as saying he does not know much about the plan. Apparently he, too, is not keen about fighting with Finance Ministry bureaucrats.

Having gained complete control over the party, Ozawa is now watching how each of the newly appointed Cabinet ministers performs. If one falters for any reason, he is expected to step in immediately to make a replacement. Nor is the prime minister himself immune.

This is an abridged translation of an article from the October issue of Sentaku, a monthly magazine covering Japanese political, social and economic scenes.