For example, the newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun recently lamented the shortcomings of the Kan government’s response, emphasizing the poor lines of command running from the cabinet to officials carrying out rescue and supply operations. But it failed to point out that the feebleness of such coordination, linked to an absence of cabinet-centered policymaking, was precisely the main weakness of Japan’s political system that the founders of the DPJ set out to overcome.