Nissan’s Ghosn receives $9.5m package

2010 年06月23日 15:10 PM

日产戈恩成日本薪酬最高CEO

Nissan’s Ghosn receives $9.5m package

英国《金融时报》 乔纳森·索布尔 东京报道

Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn has topped the list of Japan’s best-paid executives after the Japanese automaker revealed on Wednesday that it paid its Brazilian-born chief $9.5m last year.	日本汽车制造商日产(Nissan)周三披露，该公司去年支付给其首席执行官卡洛斯• 戈恩(Carlos Ghosn)的薪酬为950万美元。出生在巴西的戈恩因此登上了日本高管薪酬排行榜榜首。
Mr Ghosn – one of the longest-serving chief executives of a carmaker – took home more than twice the pay of Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chairman and chief executive, who made $4.4m in salary and bonuses running the electronics and entertainment group in the financial year that ended in March.	在所有汽车生产商中，戈恩是服务时间最长的首席执行官之一。其去年薪酬比索尼 (Sony) 董事长兼首席执行官霍华德•斯金格爵士(Sir Howard Stringer)高出逾一倍。在截至3月的上个财年，斯金格薪水和奖金共记440万美元。
Under new rules introduced this year, listed companies in Japan must report the compensation of executives earning more than Y100m.	日本今年发布新规定，规定上市公司必须通报薪酬超过1亿日元的高管的收入。
Mr Ghosn’s pay does not include the €1.24m ($1.5m) he made running Renault, Nissan’s French alliance partner, in 2009.	戈恩的收入还不包括他在2009年运营日产法国伙伴雷诺(Renault )公司的所得——124万欧元（合150万美元）。
The league table of executive pay is still emerging, as not all Japanese groups have reported yet. But Mr Ghosn is widely expected to remain at the top in a country where senior managers generally earn far less than their counterparts elsewhere.	并非所有的日本企业都已发布薪酬报告，意味着这个高管薪酬排行榜尚不完整。然而，业界 广泛预测戈恩将停留在榜首位置，因为在日本，高级经理的薪酬整体上要比其他地区的同行低得多。
Fewer than one in 10 Japanese chief executives are believed to make enough to land them on the new disclosure lists.	在日本所有首席执行官中，薪酬高到必须披露的据信占不到十分之一。
Before the rule change, Japanese companies were required only to report the pay of directors as a group. As a result, debate about chief executives’ compensation among analysts and the public was hampered by guesswork.	在此新规出台之前，日本公司只需披露董事薪酬。造成的结果是，分析师以及公众有关首席 执行官报酬的辩论，都因为只是基于猜测而受阻。
Only a tiny handful of listed Japanese companies have foreign chief executives. All were brought in from outside, and as a result their pay is closer to international averages. However, even Sir Howard’s pay, for example, does not stand out when compared with other executives responsible for Hollywood studios.	仅有寥寥数家日本上市公司雇佣外籍首席执行官。他们全部都是从外部引进，所以薪酬更接 近国际平均水平。但即使是斯金格爵士的薪酬与好莱坞片场的其他高管比起来，也并不出众。
Speaking at Nissan’s annual shareholder meeting, Mr Ghosn defended his pay by pointing out that the car industry’s best-paid chief executive – Ford’s Allan Mullaly – made $17.4m last year.	戈恩在日产年度股东大会上为自己的薪酬进行了辩护。他指出全球汽车产业中薪酬最高的首 席执行官——福特(Ford)公司的艾伦•穆拉利(Alan Mulally)——去年的收入为1740万美元。

Japan worker kills one in Mazda car plant attack

Page last updated at 09:32 GMT, Tuesday, 22 June 2010 10:32 UK

Police said the man hit employees at different places around the site

One person was killed and 10 others hurt when a former worker drove his car at colleagues at a Mazda factory in southern Japan.

The man, Toshiaki Hijiki, fled the scene but was later arrested near the Ujina plant in Hiroshima prefecture.

Police said he had been carrying a knife and had said he wanted to kill people, Kyodo news agency reported.

Mazda confirmed that he had worked at the company for less than a month before he resigned in April.

Ujina is Mazda's main assembly plant, employing some 7,000 people. The incident happened on Tuesday morning.

Police said that Mr Hijiki, 42, hit two people close to the plant's east gate and then hit nine more inside the compound.

A 39-year-old Mazda employee was killed and of the 10 injured, two were seriously hurt, Kyodo said.

At a news conference, company officials said that Mr Hijiki was a temporary worker employed at the plant for a very brief period ending in April 2010.

''As far as we know, there have been no particular events involving him, such as getting into trouble with someone,'' an official said.

Police said Mr Hijiki told them that he had a grudge against the company.

Violent crime such as this is rare in Japan. But there is concern that the economic slowdown has led to a bigger wealth gap, and a two-tier employment system that leaves temporary workers at a disadvantage.

This incident comes two years after Tomohiro Kato, then 25, stabbed seven people in Tokyo in an attack thought to be linked to anger over his job as a temporary worker at another car-maker.

Ink Gushes in Japan’s Media Landscape

Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

Ken Takeuchi, founder of JanJan, at its empty office in Tokyo in May.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: June 20, 2010

TOKYO — For years, the online newspaper JanJan News mounted a scrappy challenge to Japan’s blandly conformist press, offering articles written by readers who took on taboo subjects like whaling and the media’s collusion with the government. But the site never attracted enough readers or advertising and was finally forced to shut down most of its operations three months ago.

Related

Times Topics: Japan

JanJan was the last of four online newspapers offering reader-generated articles that were started with great fanfare here, but they have all closed or had to scale back their operations in the past two years.

And it is not just the so-called citizen journalism sites that have failed here. No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic but sclerotic news media.

“Japan just wasn’t ready yet,” said JanJan’s president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003. “This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news.”

While Japan’s long economic stagnation has prompted a slow dismantling of the nation’s postwar order, punctuated by a historic change of government last year, one pillar of that order, the news media, has so far been left relatively untouched. The new government has taken the initial steps to open up some of the exclusive press clubs that dominate coverage at Tokyo’s powerful central ministries, but it has yet to follow through with more sweeping changes.

For a variety of reasons, cultural as well as economic, the digital revolution has yet to wreak the same havoc on the news media here that it has in the United States and most other advanced countries. The media landscape is still dominated by the same handful of behemoths that have held sway for decades, like the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest newspaper, with daily circulation of more than 10 million.

Personal blogs thrive in Japan, as do shopping sites and chat rooms appealing to groups from pet lovers to angry nationalists. But sites dedicated to news have found only a small foothold, and most of those are run by major news organizations, which often treat them as sideshows.

Most glaringly, there have been few of the alternative news blogs and news sites that have appeared in other countries, like The Huffington Post in the United States. The handful of sites that have drawn attention, like J-Cast News and The Journal, have failed to garner large numbers of readers.

Citizen journalism sites have earned the most attention here, largely for taking the lead in challenging media taboos and criticizing Japan’s press clubs. But they are far from prosperous. Before JanJan, a well-financed startup from South Korea, OhmyNews Japan, shut down two years ago and Tsukasa Net closed last November. Another, PJ News, has shrunk to a single editor who does not even have an office.

Mr. Takeuchi and others in the online media point to a number of reasons the sites have failed, beginning with advertising revenues that are too low to support even a skeleton newsroom staff.

But it also appears that Japan, with its cultural disdain for those who stick out from the crowd, may be inhospitable terrain for the reader-turned-reporter model, Mr. Takeuchi said.

Consider the contrast with neighboring South Korea. OhmyNews revolutionized the South Korean news media with reader-generated stories that challenged the big conservative newspapers, and in 2002 it helped elect a liberal president, Roh Moo-hyun. The site has become a powerful media player, with 62,700 readers-turned-reporters and two million page views a day, in a population a third the size of Japan’s 127 million.

But when OhmyNews took its winning formula to Japan, it flopped. Advertising revenues never materialized, the site drew a meager 400,000 page views a day and just 4,800 readers signed up to write stories, said the site’s former editor, Masahiko Motoki.

Mr. Motoki and others say that another reason for Japan’s resistance to alternative sites is the relative absence of social and political divisions. In politically polarized South Korea, OhmyNews thrived by appealing to young, liberal readers.

“It is only when the society sees itself as having conflicting interests that it will seek out new viewpoints and information,” said Toshinao Sasaki, the author of about two dozen books on the Internet in Japan.

Media experts say Japan has yet to see such critical questioning of its establishment press. They say most Japanese remain at least passively accepting of the nation’s big newspapers and television networks.

Still, there have been growing signs that Japan’s news industry may be primed for change. The biggest has been a slow but steady decline in newspaper readership, particularly among younger Japanese.

Circulation of The Asahi Shimbun, for example, Japan’s and the world’s second largest daily, has fallen by 3 percent over the past decade to just over eight million.

When he started JanJan seven years ago, Mr. Takeuchi, 69, said he hoped to stir up Japan’s mainstream press and its uncritical coverage of the government.

JanJan, short for Japan Alternative News for Justice and New Culture, quickly drew praise for its critical stories on research whaling and other topics considered off limits by Japan’s mainstream news organizations. However, the site barely earned enough to pay for its operations. The death blow came from the global recession, as advertising revenues fell, Mr. Takeuchi said. He reopened the site in May as a much more limited blog.

Mr. Takeuchi said one of his biggest challenges was maintaining the quality of the site’s news content. Most of the articles submitted by readers tended to be rehashed versions of news stories from major media outlets, with the readers’ opinions added.

He also had difficulty hiring experienced journalists because most were reluctant to leave a big company for an unknown startup. Media experts said this might change, especially if big news companies begin to resort to layoffs or go bankrupt as they have in the United States.

“JanJan failed, but there will be others who try to do the same thing,” said Shin Mizukoshi, a professor of information studies at the University of Tokyo. “JanJan has planted the seed.”

The Japanese chalk up two successes in space

Japan's space programme

A blaze of glory

The Japanese chalk up two successes in space

Jun 17th 2010

THE week before last, a falcon was launched into space: Elon Musk’s privately financed Falcon 9 heavy-lifting rocket. This week a different falcon returned from the void. On June 13th Hayabusa, as the bird is known in Japanese, streaked through the night sky of southern Australia to deliver to Earth what researchers hope will be the first sample of rock collected from the surface of an asteroid.

As the picture suggests, most of the craft burned up on re-entry. But a small part, protected by a heat shield made of carbon-phenolic resin, survived and landed in the desert near Woomera. This capsule, it is hoped, will contain material from Itokawa, a half-kilometre-long asteroid whose orbit crosses the Earth’s.

One up, then, to JAXA, Japan’s space agency. Indeed, two up, because on June 10th it successfully deployed Ikaros, a solar sail attached to a small satellite in orbit round the Earth.

In the short term, the mission to Itokawa was the more spectacular of the two. It was dogged by bad luck, ranging from solar flares to boulder-strewn landing fields, and returned to Earth three years late. But return it did, having been nursed through its traumas by a patient ground team at JAXA’s mission-control centre in Tsukuba.

In the long term, though, Ikaros may be the more important mission. Solar sails are not the quickest way to travel through space, but they are cheap. They draw their energy from sunlight (the light exerts a small pressure on the sail, driving it forward) and therefore need no fuel. They are difficult to deploy, though, because they need to be thin, huge and tightly folded for launch. The unfurling of Ikaros, which has an area of 200 square metres, is therefore no mean feat. It will now be put through its paces to see just how much photonic puff it can provide.

Ikaros was launched on May 21st (it hitched a lift on a JAXA mission to Venus). Hayabusa was launched in 2003 and matched orbits with Itokawa in 2005. The intention was to get close, fire a projectile into the surface and grab some of the ensuing dust. That does not seem to have happened, but the probe did sit on the asteroid’s surface for about half an hour, so there is a chance some material, if only a few milligrams of dust, made its way into the grab and will thus be sitting in the return capsule, waiting to be examined.

If it is, it will be only the fourth sort of extraterrestrial material returned to Earth by a spacecraft—the others being the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions and three unmanned Russian Luna craft, the material from comet Wild 2 picked up by the Stardust mission in 2004, and the samples of solar wind collected between 2001 and 2004 by the Genesis mission. Of course, nature delivers extraterrestrial material to Earth every day, in the form of meteorites, most of which are, in effect, tiny asteroids, so whether anything truly new will be discovered by looking at Hayabusa’s trove is moot.

Woomera, the place JAXA chose to land Hayabusa’s capsule, is also the site from which the Black Knight, Black Arrow and Blue Streak rockets of Britain’s aborted space programme were launched in the 1950s to the 1970s. Japan’s space programme has, so far, been a lot more successful than Britain’s was. Thoughtful Japanese though, looking at their country’s debt and wondering what might be cut to reduce it, may regard the coincidence as a bad omen.

日本的領導大危機

After Many Leaders, Japan Still Hopes for Recovery

Chronological, Patrick Kovarik/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images; David Guttenfelder/AP; Franck Robichon/EPA; Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg; Pool Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno; Issei Kato/Reuters

Left to right, top to bottom: Junichiro Koizumi in 2001; Shinzo Abe in 2006; Yasuo Fukuda in 2007; Taro Aso in 2008; Yukio Hatoyama in 2009; Naoto Kan in 2010.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: June 14, 2010

TOKYO — Just a week into office, Japan’s new prime minister, Naoto Kan, has already broken with politics as usual here by making unusually frank warnings about the nation’s growing social inequalities, unsustainable national debt and need for painful tax increases.

Related

• Times Topics: Naoto Kan | Japan

The question now is whether Mr. Kan, a plain-spoken former civic activist, can further defy precedent by lasting more than a year in office.

He seems off to a good start. Japan’s recession-weary voters have already embraced his tough talk, giving his governing Democratic Party a larger-than-expected bounce in the polls.

Political experts say a straight-talking prime minister is exactly what Japan wants, after years of ineffective leaders who seemed hopelessly out of touch with voters’ concerns and unable to restore a sense of direction to this rudderless nation.

What they want, many here say, is the next Junichiro Koizumi, who energized the public between 2001 and 2006 with his calls for Reagan-style economic deregulation and small government. His quirky charisma and willingness to defy entrenched interests made him the most popular prime minister in modern times, say experts, and changed Japan’s expectations for its leaders.

“Japan is starved for strong leadership,” said Satoshi Machidori, a politics professor at Kyoto University. “Voters understand they need someone to lead Japan out of its long stagnation.”

Yet despite Japan’s severe problems, its political system has given its people a string of short-lived, weak leaders. In the last four years, it has gone through four prime ministers in rapid succession, with Mr. Kan now the nation’s fifth new leader since 2006.

His immediate predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama, lasted just eight months. He was driven out by plunging approval ratings after breaking campaign promises and seeming to fritter away the Democrats’ historic election mandate.

Stretch the time frame back to 1990, the approximate beginning of Japan’s stubborn economic funk, and the ailing Asian economic giant has had 13 prime ministers come and go before Mr. Kan. Even Japanese political scientists feel hard pressed to name them all.

“We are competing with Italy to create forgettable leaders,” said Mayumi Itoh, the author of the book “The Hatoyama Dynasty: Japanese Political Leadership Through the Generations,” referring to the string of colorless leaders who preceded the current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Mr. Kan’s ability to fare better than his predecessors will largely depend on how well he grasps the reasons that drove them from office, Ms. Itoh and other experts say. And while experts cite a host of factors, from outmoded political parties to the emergence of an ingrown leadership class, most agree that the underlying problem seems to be a growing gap in expectations between the public and its political leaders.

What voters want, say political experts, is a leader who both understands their concerns and offers the vision and courage to point a way out. Too often, they have suffered instead with prime ministers who worry only about internal party politics, consensus-building and mollifying the nation’s many interest groups, experts say.

Most of Japan’s recent prime ministers have been second-, third- and even fourth-generation politicians who proved too far removed from average voters and were quick to quit when their approval ratings fell.

“Japan has gone through 20 years of economic stagnation, and there is a lot of pain out there, so voters are much more impatient for dramatic reform than politicians realize,” said Jeff Kingston, a professor of Japanese politics at Temple University’s campus in Tokyo.

Voters have responded to their tone-deaf leaders by rejecting each, often in striking style. Approval ratings for Mr. Hatoyama, who took office in September after the Democrats ended a half-century of virtual one-party rule, plummeted to the high teens from more than 70 percent, dragged down by his seemingly terminal indecisiveness.

Political experts say that Japanese voters might be more forgiving if Japan were somehow incapable of producing strong leaders, either for cultural reasons or because of the limited executive powers of the prime minister’s office, as some have argued. But in fact, the nation has produced numerous visionaries, going back to the samurai who put Meiji-period Japan on its march to industrialization in the late 19th century.

The most recent such leader was Mr. Koizumi. When members of his own party tried to block his plan to privatize the nation’s enormous postal savings system, he took his cause directly to the voters by calling a snap election, an act of political brinkmanship that few other Japanese prime ministers would dare. Mr. Koizumi and his supporters won that 2005 election by a landslide.

While Mr. Koizumi’s market-oriented agenda has fallen out of popularity, he has left a more enduring legacy: changing what voters expect of their leaders.

Japan can no longer go back to the colorless insiders who ruled by brokering backroom deals between party factions, experts say. After Mr. Koizumi, political leaders must be more television-friendly personalities capable of reaching out directly to the public, and particularly to undecided swing voters.

Mr. Koizumi also whetted Japan’s appetite for more decisive leaders unafraid to make tough choices. Experts say his successors failed because they lapsed into Japan’s consensus-driven politics, appeasing interest groups while seeming to ignore the nation’s enormous problems.

“After Koizumi, voters don’t want consensus-makers anymore,” said Jun Iio, a professor of government at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. “Koizumi set a high bar for leadership that his successors have failed miserably to meet.”

The question now, Mr. Iio and others say, is whether Mr. Kan fully grasps this shift to a more populist style of politics.

Mr. Kan will face his first political test in the July 11 parliamentary elections. In the longer run, experts say, he will succeed only if he can show voters that he is working in their interests, something Mr. Hatoyama failed to do.

“Mr. Hatoyama is a classic example of a prime minister who needed to set a course for Japan, but couldn’t,” said Kyoto University’s Mr. Machidori. “Mr. Kan must show he has learned the Koizumi lesson.”

Japan’s New Prime Minister Unveils Cabinet

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: June 8, 2010

TOKYO — Japan’s new prime minister prepared to unveil a cabinet on Tuesday that would move his governing party closer to its agenda of domestic political change, and away from the financial scandals that dogged his predecessor.

Naoto Kan, 63, has been assembling his new administration since being elected prime minister by Parliament on Friday, following the abrupt resignation of Yukio Hatoyama. Mr. Kan is seeking to restore political momentum to his Democratic Party, which lost public support as Mr. Hatoyama seemed to squander a historic election mandate.

While Mr. Kan, a straight-spoken former civic activist, appears to be keeping almost the same lineup as the Hatoyama government, he has made changes to refocus the party on its signature effort to fix Japan’s unresponsive political system and end the country’s long malaise. The new cabinet will include some younger members who were active in the Hatoyama government’s efforts to shake up the stagnant postwar political order by reining in the nation’s powerful bureaucracy.But domestic media attention has so far focused on the omission of one face in particular, Ichiro Ozawa, the governing party’s shadowy powerbroker and its secretary general under Mr. Hatoyama.

A gifted political tactician, Mr. Ozawa is credited with engineering last summer’s landslide election victory, which ended a half-century of virtual one-party rule here. But his backroom deal-making became the focus of a series of financing scandals that undermined Mr. Hatoyama, who was also investigated for misreported political contributions from his own mother.

Since his election on Friday, Mr. Kan has reshuffled top party posts in an apparent effort to distance the party from Mr. Ozawa. He replaced Mr. Ozawa as secretary general, the party’s No. 2 post, with Yukio Edano, 46, a prominent fighter of bureaucracy in the Hatoyama government who has been a critic of Mr. Ozawa’s influence.

While Mr. Ozawa heads the largest faction in the party, with some 150 members, few of them appear to be included in the new party leadership or Mr. Kan’s incoming cabinet. Mr. Ozawa also appears to be keeping a low profile, though local media are speculating he may try to reassert his influence after parliamentary elections in early July.

In a news conference on Monday, Mr. Edano vowed to clean up the party’s image and make its operations more transparent.

“From today, we will no longer accept contributions from corporations and groups,” Mr. Edano said. “We must regain public trust in the Democratic Party.”

One unusual new face in Mr. Kan’s cabinet is Renho Murata, a 42-year-old half-Japanese, half-Taiwanese former television announcer who won attention last year when she grilled bureaucrats during an inquiry into wasteful spending. Ms. Murata, who usually goes by the single name Renho, will replace Mr. Edano as minister in charge of administrative reform, giving her a leading role in the Democrats’ pledge to shift power from elite bureaucrats to elected politicians.

There are early signs that Japan’s scandal-weary voters are warming to Mr. Kan. Over the weekend, public opinion polls by major newspapers found a larger than expected bounce for the Democrats’ approval ratings, which jumped from around 20 percent to the mid-30s since Mr. Kan took over.

能公寓

　在日本，安裝太陽能電池的公寓日益增多。而且可創造能源的“創能公寓”也開始亮相。為了有別於太陽能電池，還出現了安裝風力發電機、燃料電池及太陽能熱水器等創能設備的動向……

菅 直人Naoto Kan

菅 直人^[1]（か ん なおと、1946 年10月10日 - ）は日本の政治家。衆議院議員（10期）、財務大臣（第13代）、内閣府特命担当大臣（経済財政政策担当）、民主党代表（第8代）。

时事风云 | 2010.06.04

日本新首相-菅直人

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: 迄今担任日本财务大臣的菅直人

迄今担任日本财务大臣的菅直人周五（6月4日）当选日本新一任首相。63岁的菅直人接替周三辞职的鸠山由纪夫。执政的民主党首先选举菅直人为党主席，然后 凭借该党在下院的多数将其选为新任首相。在日本，执政党主席通常也出任首相。

菅直人已经是日本三年来的第五任首相。他是日本民主党的创始人之一，民主党在野时，他已经两度担任过该党主席。观察家预期，菅直人执政后， 日本外交和经济政策不会出现根本性的转变。

以"复兴日本"为目标

菅直人当选首相后立刻表示，复兴日本将是他执政的首要目标。他呼吁民主党成员对自己所能发挥的作用抱有更大的信心。菅直人表示，民主党人应当自信地 站起来，并表示：我们能做到。

迄今为止在左中翼联盟担任财务大臣的菅直人在过去9个月的任期里，坚决推行削减开支政策，提高消费税，以便对这一全球第二大经济体的国家财政进行整 顿。1990年代，菅直人担任厚生大臣（卫生部长）时，就因推动调查一桩血库血液带有艾滋病毒的丑闻而闻名。

短时首相鸠山由纪夫

上周三，鸠山由纪夫宣布辞去首相职务，以此承担政治资金丑闻和破坏竞选承诺的责任。竞选时，鸠山由纪夫曾承诺将美军基地迁出冲绳岛。

但最终，日本政府让步于美国的压力，同意将位于冲绳岛宜野湾居民区中间的普天间美军基地迁往人口稀少的海边地区辺野古。这一立场变化使鸠山由纪夫受 到强烈批评。

去年9月，鸠山由纪夫才刚刚就任首相。在那之前的议会选举中，民主党战胜了几乎连续50余年执政的自民党。

作者：Stephan Stickelmann / Christian Walz/ 苗子
责编：叶宣

Japan Elects a New Premier, Fifth in Four Years

Junji Kurokawa/Associated Press

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on television in Tokyo on Friday.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: June 4, 2010

TOKYO — Naoto Kan, a plain-spoken finance minister with activist roots, was elected prime minister on Friday, making him the fifth Japanese leader in four years.

Mr. Kan, 63, won a vote in the lower house of Parliament and will now go through the formality of being appointed by Emperor Akihito.

Earlier Friday, hoping for a second chance to fulfill a historic election mandate for change, the governing Democratic Party selected Mr. Kan to succeed Yukio Hatoyama, who resigned on Wednesday over broken campaign pledges.

Mr. Kan faces an uphill task in trying to win back the public support that Mr. Hatoyama had squandered in months of indecision over the fate of an American military base. He must also help the party regain the momentum it had in August after winning a landslide election victory that ended a half-century of virtual one-party rule.

Known for his quick temper, Mr. Kan gained national attention in the mid-1990s when, as health minister, he exposed his own ministry’s use of blood tainted with H.I.V. In the Hatoyama administration, he also served as deputy prime minister and was a point man in the party’s push to rein in the secretive central ministries that have run Japan since World War II.

The cabinet resigned Friday morning to clear the way for the new prime minister to appoint a new cabinet.

Before Friday’s party vote, Mr. Kan vowed to refocus the party on its original goal of ending Japan’s two-decade stagnation. He said he would do this by tackling two of Japan’s most daunting problems, its anemic growth rates and ballooning public debt.

“I will carry on the torch of reviving Japan that the Democratic Party received from the people,” he said.

Touching on his predecessor’s difficulties, he said he would honor an agreement to relocate a United States Marine air base on Okinawa and work to rebuild trust between the allies. But he also said he would place equal emphasis on improving ties with China, with whom Japan now has larger trade relations.

In Friday’s party vote, Mr. Kan defeated Shinji Tarutoko, a relatively unknown legislator backed by the party’s shadowy power broker, Ichiro Ozawa. Mr. Kan won with 291 votes to Mr. Tarutoko’s 129.

Mr. Kan promised to move the party away from the sort of money politics that the scandal-tainted Mr. Ozawa had come to represent.

By choosing Mr. Kan, the party was apparently betting that his background as a former civil rights activist and veteran battler of Japan’s powerful bureaucrats would make him a more forceful leader than the indecisive and professorial Mr. Hatoyama.

Mr. Kan is the latest in what has been nearly a turnstile procession of prime ministers in recent years. Shinzo Abe served exactly one year, resigning under pressure in September 2007. He was succeeded by Yasuo Fukuda and then Taro Aso, each of whom served about one year. Mr. Hatoyama took office on Sept. 16, 2009.