The LDP is/was suffering under a huge John Maynard Keynes addiction. May we all survive long enough for history to record that the biggest villain of the 20th century was Keynes and not Hitler/Mao/Stalin.
When the LDP was courting the New Komeito party around the turn of the century to shore up their majority in the Diet, they passed a "stimulus" bill that consisted of a voucher give away to younger Japanese with children (basically the prime demographic of the Soka Gakkai) and most of the vouchers ended up being spent in hostess bars.
In 1999 they also went through the same kind of bank bailouts that the US did in late 2008 and again in 2009.
With the kind of track record the LDP has, it's not surprising that enough people finally got fed up and wanted to throw out the old.
And, if you read carefully what the DP is now saying it wants to do, in sum it amounts to them saying that the LDP did not do enough of the very things you point to as part of their errors.
The fact is that while the DP played on the “change” theme, just as Obama did, that does not yet show that they (1)actually agree with your ideas as just what the LDP errors were, or (2) that the course they seek is in truth a “correction”.
Hotoyama, the DP leader, did not, in the 1990s, and does not now view the economic/policy philosophy that helped create Japan's economic problems of today - the policies that made the 1990s a stagnant decade and kept growth so low since - as the nation's essential economic errors, and thus his prescriptions for solutions are likely to be as misguided as BHOs.
“change” and “reform” are NOT synonyms