Above, newly-elected Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. This article originally appeared in the Japanese daily Yomiuri.

Whether or not the newly dominant Democratic Party of Japan succeeds or fails at the helm of Japan's political order, a new era in Japanese history has begun--and the White House should embrace it.

The governing Liberal Democratic Party, which has run Japan uninterrupted since 1955 but for a single short period, has seen its control of the decisively powerful House of Representatives of the Diet collapse to just 25 percent of the seats of that chamber whereas the DPJ won 308 seats out of the 480 total and can easily tie up with allies from lesser parties to control the needed two-thirds majority, or 320 seats, that assure absolute control of Diet legislative affairs.

This struggle between the LDP and DPJ was not just about power but over who would define the character and soul of Japan in the 21st century. This was a struggle--over domestic pocketbook issues as most elections are--but it was also an important contest over national identity, over Japan's place in the world, and about U.S.-Japan relations.

The outcome has staggering importance and is a manifestation of Japan finally embracing a real democratic template rather than one that has for decades been essentially fixed by a political cartel of self-perpetuating elites.

This election signals Japan's Democracy 2.0 moment--in which power monopolies in Japan are definitively broken.

Rather than a resurgent right wing, history-denying, pugnacious nationalism that had been gaining traction in recent years, Japan will now benefit from a "negotiated nationalism" with a wide swath of players from across Japanese society sculpting what that means.

Rather than serving as a vassal and satellite of U.S. interests in Asia, Japan will become better at articulating and pursuing its core interests and reclaim its full sovereignty over its alliance and national security decisions.

The lobotomized Japan that the United States grew used to working with for more than five decades after the U.S. occupation is now back in control of its faculties and will require a reworking, a renegotiation, and revitalization of the relationship.

The DPJ itself is not assured of success--but it has shown an ability to challenge Japan's previous political order at the ballot box and to appeal to the aspirations of the people in a way that has finally shattered the LDP's mystique. What the DPJ has not shown is an ability to develop and deploy its own legislative agenda in a way that will stay true to its reform agenda.

The first foreshock of change came in 1993 when Tanaka-faction lieutenant Ichiro Ozawa broke ranks with his party and took enough of his frustrated fellow LDPers and faction members out of the party to start a process that culminated in the Aug. 30 election results sixteen years later. DPJ President and the next prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, also broke from the LDP at the same time--and the two launched then rival political parties.

Now they are partners on top, but their differing strands of political thinking--one fashioned in crude realities of power and the other tied to a long family lineage of liberal horizon-setting--is exactly what is needed to move Japan on a new course.

I remember when in early 1993, former U.S. President Richard Nixon asked me to help organize what would be his final trip to Japan and South Korea in order to nudge the government of then Prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa to get beyond the northern territories issue and to generate some kind of symbolic financial assistance package for Boris Yeltsin's Russia. Nixon pushed back on my plan for him to meet Ozawa, someone whose name he did not then know.

I told him that Ozawa was already positioning himself to be the person who would make or break the LDP--and who, in a Nixonian way, would be the person to help Japan work through important questions of political, economic and national security reform and reconfigure a militarily lobotomized U.S.-Japan relationship.

When I saw Nixon again in Los Angeles in April 1993, he told me his meeting with Ozawa the month before had been the most interesting and important encounter of his trip. By June 1993, Ichiro Ozawa had defected from the LDP allowing a motion of no-confidence to end the Miyazawa government and create the first serious crack exposing vulnerabilities of the monopolistic conservative government.

While the DPJ is comprised of a diverse range of political and policy players, Ozawa and Hatoyama symbolize the two strands of enwrapped matter that constitute the party's DNA. One is brusque, pragmatic, a Nixonian power wielder who is ruthlessly committed to results. The other, Hatoyama, is an idealist who excels at defining a progressive vision for his party and Japan. While Hatoyama inspires, Ozawa compels and manipulates.The two were made for each other.

Some in the White House are concerned that Japan's political shift will mean a net loss to U.S.-Japan relations. After all, Hatoyama published a powerful article in the Western press arguing that U.S.-style globalization and neoliberalism had undermined Japan's economic situation and had hurt the pocketbooks of average Japanese citizens. Others on the DPJ ticket have argued for a "distancing" from the United States on security issues and the DPJ itself has pledged to end the Indian Ocean refueling mission of U.S. and other coalition ships going to and coming back from the Persian Gulf, which started under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

Ozawa as well, in his provocative and brilliant 1993 book, "Nippon Kaizo Keikaku" (Blueprint for a New Japan), calls for Japan to become an "ordinary nation"--that is, a nation more in control of its own destiny and interests.

First of all, the American people--angry at what an out of control financial sector has wrought for the American middle class and the global economic system--are pretty much in lockstep with Hatoyama on the need for government to fashion a new social contract and to help those who have been harmed.

The Obama White House recognizes that despite Japan's beleaguered economic position, it still has enormous global economic weight and recognizes that both the United States and Japan have an interest in global economic stabilization and rebalancing of demand. The United States and Japan will be mostly on the same track at Pittsburgh's Group of 20 summit meeting later this month.

Furthermore, as Hatoyama takes on his official responsibilities as prime minister, he will find his "inner Obama." Things said on the campaign trail are not the same as priorities set behind the prime minister's desk. Some of the more strident promises will be softened or lowered in priority. Domestic economic challenges will be first on Hatoyama's plate--preceding a more comprehensive restructuring of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

But there will be issues, many of which Ozawa and Hatoyama have highlighted--perhaps aspects of the current Status of Forces agreement governing Japanese and U.S. legal rights over U.S. bases and military personnel; or the evolving arrangement of U.S. troops based in Okinawa Prefecture and the fate of the controversial Futenma Air Station; or a new posture for Japan in its support role of U.S. forces operating in the Gulf--that will be at the periphery of the overall structure of the alliance that nonetheless will illustrate Japan's desire to have more weight in U.S.-Japan alliance decisions.

The White House will need to embrace this role for Japan's new political leadership to show that it can work with Japan's moderate progressives on security issues--and not just Japan's right wing-tilting hawks.

The United States and Japan will not soon be done with each other. They will each remain vital features of each other's global national and economic interest maps.

The United States will have to work harder in this new era to convince Japan to support its global objectives--and Japan, conversely, will have to work harder to secure U.S. support for its interests. The relationship will be renegotiated, modernized--and will be healthier and even stronger over the long term for it.

Just like the LDP, which used to twist and turn its internal factions to refresh leadership, has become rigid and lost its internal flexibility--so too does the U.S.-Japan security relationship look overly rigid and anachronistic.

The new political leadership in both Japan and the United States offers an opportunity to organize tomorrow an alliance that looks a bit different than it did yesterday--and this is vital to keep Japan engaged in global affairs and to keep it on a track that does not raise the fears of its Asian neighbors in ways that the governments of Koizumi, Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso have recently done.

Japan has huge global assets--technology, massive domestic household savings, and a practical facility with international institutions--that will be very helpful in trying to stabilize the global order.

Hopefully, Barack Obama's team will embrace this new Democracy 2.0 phase in Japanese democracy--and realize that what we have avoided in Japan is the dark side of a growing Japanese nationalism that hyperventilates about China as an existential threat and desires for this reason an offensive rearmament of Japan within the current structure of the U.S.-Japan relationship. Eventually, the constraints of the U.S.-Japan relationship or America's engagement with China would have triggered a virulent anti-Americanism from this very hawkish element.

Now, Japan's next nationalism will be more healthily constructed--a negotiated nationalism.

The LDP will be back--and this too will be good for the ultimate narrative of Japanese democracy.

But for the time being, the DPJ--both through the idealism of its leader Hatoyama and the pragmatic power-brokering of the new DPJ Secretary General Ozawa--has a real chance to make Japan an "ordinary nation" in all the good ways.

An America that is working hard to reinvent its own mystique in a world where its power is doubted should applaud Japan's democratic reinvention, which is good not only for Japan and U.S.-Japan relations, but for an international system that needs to begin pondering what it will look like decades from now.

--Steve Clemons