Opposition
With the downturn in Japan's economic fortunes and the ending of the Cold War, criticism by opposition parties and the public have increased. In 1998 former Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa proposed ending the budget in 2000 when the then-current SMA expired due to Japan's "severe financial crisis."
When the 2008 SMA came to a vote in the Japanese Diet, it was opposed by the opposition Communists, Democrats (DPJ), and Social Democrats, leading to its failure to pass the House of Councillors. Although the House of Representatives later overrode the decision, the oppositions managed to create a 1 month space between the prior Agreement's expiration and the new one's passage, the first gap since the support was established in 1978. In explaining their opposition, the Democrats stated that the Japanese government needed to "negotiate from the viewpoint of the Japanese people," while criticizing the government for destabilizing the lives of the bases' Japanese workforce.
Shortly after becoming Prime Minister of the first non-LDP government since 1996, Yukio Hatoyama promised a "comprehensive review" of the sympathy budget. The 2011 SMA was presented with few changes by his DPJ successor, however, and passed with LDP support.
Read more about this topic: Omoiyari Yosan
Famous quotes containing the word opposition:
“Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,—let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.”
—Sarah Josepha Buell Hale 1788–1879, U.S. novelist, poet and women’s magazine editor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 36-40 (December 1828)
“One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us, and whereto our passions transport us; but those which by long habits are rooted in a strong and ... powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)