Japan's fifty-year political itch
By Andrew Stevens
Open Democracy | August 10, 2005
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/japan_2744.jsp
(An argument over post office reform has led to an early general
election in Japan. But the issues at stake in September's poll –
nationalism, the constitution, the LDP-dominated political system
itself – are far more momentous, says Andrew Stevens.)
The ceremony to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima saw the city's mayor Tadatoshi Akiba feature prominently in
news bulletins during the weekend of 6-7 August.
The mayor's stern address featured a humanitarian appeal for the
world's nuclear powers to abandon their weapons for good. The
contingencies of Japan's national politics meant that the speech
gained less attention than it deserved, for a day later the country's
prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, announced a snap general election
(to be held on 11 September) after his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
colleagues in the upper house of parliament voted down his flagship
reform of Japan's postal services.
Between reform and sclerosis
A second anniversary makes 2005 a significant year in Japan's
political calendar, marking a half-century since the "1955 system" –
the moment when the Liberal Democratic Party's long-term hegemony over
Japanese parliamentary politics – was established.
The LDP's almost perpetual governance since then has made it appear
Japan's "natural party of government" throughout an era of exponential
economic growth and (since the early 1990s) ossification. This system
– oligarchical, clientilist, interest-driven and faction-ridden – may
face its greatest test in the 2005 election.
The electoral alliance that produced the LDP took shape when
independent politics in Japan resumed in 1952, after the post-war
years of American occupation; it was designed to prevent the then
Japanese Socialist Party leading the first administration under the
new constitution. The LDP itself was born of the 1955 merger between
the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party, and has governed the
country ever since – apart from a brief period when a doomed coalition
of opposition parties took power in 1993, which the LDP then entered
in 1994, before regaining its ability to govern by majority in the
1996 election.
Many observers argued that 1993 heralded the demise of the "1955
system", and the LDP with it. They were wrong, as the party proved
capable of reinvention. The election of Junichiro Koizumi as LDP
president in 2001 enabled it to partially rebrand and re-energise
itself with a positive and youthful (by Japanese standards) leader who
resonated with the electorate, and – hard though it is to recall four
years on – even acquired rockstar status among some of the nation's teens.
The LDP's endurance is greatly aided by institutional advantages,
particularly the inherent bias in Japan's electoral system. The
country's multi-member constituency voting system favours rural
constituencies over urban centres, increases the attractions and
rewards of political patronage, and makes it easier for an
establishment party of the centre-right to cultivate and maintain its
power.
Despite this, three political developments have begun to threaten the
hegemony of the LDP before and during the four years of Koizumi's
premiership.
First, the party is forced to rule in coalition with a difficult
partner, the New Komeito Party (Buddhist, but lay), which has
signalled a willingness to enter coalition talks with the main
opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) if the latter won the
largest number of seats in the election.
Second, an acceleration of mergers among the opposition is at last
starting to reap electoral dividends – most recently in the July
elections to the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly. The DPJ was formed in
1998 out of a merger of four left and centre parties, adding another
for good measure in 2003. The recent decision of the Japanese
Communist Party to give the DPJ a clear run in marginal areas will
make a difference to its voting tally.
Third, the strains between factions in the LDP are intensifying under
conflicting political pressures, resistance to Koizumi (who has
already announced his intention to leave office in 2006) has been
growing; the postal crisis has brought these differences to a head.
Going by post
Japan may be a capitalist economic superpower, but it also has an
expansive public sector whose employees and officials enjoy a secure
existence, especially in comparison with the liberalising reforms of
their western counterparts since the 1980s. Any plans to reduce the
size of a civil service whose bureaucrats receive both respect and
derision from taxpayers have thus far proved notional.
The cost-saving efforts have included proposals to decentralise key
public services from Tokyo-based ministries to the nation's
forty-seven prefectures (regions) and 3,000 municipalities. This is
controversial enough, but plans to dissect Japan Post, the world's
largest public enterprise, then privatise its constituent parts, have
become Junichiro Koizumi's flagship policy: one that appears to
embrace economic liberalisation and a reduction in the size of the
state without challenging the rest of the public sector.
In seeking to improve the fortunes of the ailing Japanese economy –
still the second largest in the world, but languishing for over a
decade – Koizumi had hoped to root out "financial socialism" in the
public sector and the jobs-for-life culture. It could in principle be
artful as well as ambitious politics, but where the script goes awry
is the strong support for the status quo within certain factions of
the LDP and the party's grassroots, especially in rural areas. Some of
Japan Post's 400,000 employees act as LDP party workers during
elections; including family members and related workers, the postal
industry could command as many as a million voters.
The postal privatisation crisis is significant, but to assess whether
it will be enough to herald the collapse of the "1955 system" requires
a look at developments elsewhere in the Japanese political system.
A new nationalism
Junichiro Koizumi's attempt to kick-start Japan's sluggish economy
through liberalisation of its largest public sector enterprise is not
the only challenge facing Japan's politicians. Most of the others
relate in some way to foreign policy, in particular the country's
regional role within east Asia.
A third anniversary, the centenary of the end of the Russo-Japan war,
is another relevant marker: this saw Japan emerge as the dominant
power in the region and helped fuel the military ambitions that ended
so catastrophically in Hiroshima and Nagasaki forty years later. Japan
remains involved in territorial disputes with all its neighbours – in
the case of Russia, the concern is over the Kuril (Kuriru) islands
north of Hokkaido, occupied by Soviet forces in 1945 following Japan's
defeat.
More recently, the governor of Tokyo and nationalist provocateur
Shintaro Ishihara has manufactured a territorial dispute with China.
The governor claims that the uninhabitable Pacific islets of
Okinotori, 1,740 kilometres south of Tokyo, lie under his
jurisdiction; his city administration, as well as the national
government, have spent considerable funds on fortifying the outcrop to
pass it off as an island under the 1958 Law of the Sea and thus affirm
sovereignty over the surrounding, possibly resource-rich, area.
The standard Ishihara rhetoric – including the call for a
"Falklands-style" war to decide the islet's fate – is empowered by a
substantial base of support; the maverick independent (and former LDP
cabinet member) has been elected twice with massive majorities over
his former party allies. His campaign has also intensified already
tense diplomatic relationships between Japan and China, and become one
of a range of unresolved simmering frictions with Japan's east Asian
neighbours.
These tensions – over history textbooks used in Japan's schools,
official visits to the Yasukuni shrine, disputes over the ownership of
the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands and Takeshima/Tokdo – have been acutely
felt within Japanese politics.
Rightist groups have desecrated peace monuments, arguing that the word
"evil" in dedications inscribed on them insults Japan's honour. The
desire to shatter Japan's post-war consensus around "peace" has
entered establishment politics, with (for example) more questioning of
the legitimacy of the 1946 Tokyo tribunal which judged – and in some
cases hanged – those accused of war crimes during the 1941-45 war.
Visits to Yasukuni, which houses fourteen "class A" war criminals
among Japan's millions of war dead, by Koizumi and Ishihara have been
especially contentious, inside Japan as well as in China and both
Korean states; there have been several unsuccessful legal attempts to
invoke constitutional provisions for the separation of the state and
religion.
A constitution in question
The Japanese constitution of 1947, developed and written under United
States tutelage during the occupation years, has become another
contested issue in contemporary Japanese politics. The "pacifist
objective" contained in Article 9, which sanctions the existence of a
"Self-Defence Force" greatly restricted in its capacity for action,
has been stretched to breaking-point through the historic vote of the
Diet to commit forces to the US-led coalition in Iraq.
Japan can be said to benefit from its comprehensive defence treaties
and sharing of intelligence capabilities with the United States, but
many Japanese think that becoming a mature, independent nation
requires freeing itself from their restrictions – and that doing so
might remove the wind from the sails of the emerging nationalist right.
A general sense of national insecurity is reinforced by the absence of
a male heir to the throne, a constitutional necessity under the 1947
settlement. Crown Prince Naruhito and Priness Masako have so far
produced only Princess Aiko, whom a consistently large majority of
Japanese citizens would welcome as their empress. A panel of eminent
scholars and constitutional experts has suggested two options: allow a
female to ascend the throne on Akihito's death, or widen the pool of
eligible royals to find a suitable male within his extended family.
A normal state
The younger generation of Japanese politicians, mostly gathered around
the DPJ, hunger for a vision of nationhood based on the idea that
Japan should be a "normal", modern liberal democracy. But fresh
thinking on the constitution and Article 9 has come from within the
LDP also.
Those seeking "normality" and a modern state are frequently accused of
"neo-conservatism", though this may be a skewed description of people
who may be seeking a more robust approach to foreign policy –
including efforts to gain permanent representation on the United
Nations Security Council – but subscribe to no over-arching
ideological blueprint for imposition elsewhere.
Two groups are worthy of mention: the "21st century Rincho" group
includes academics and business figures seeking practical reform of
Japanese public life, and the "Young Lawmakers' Group for Security in
the New Century" represents younger and foreign-educated Diet members
in the LDP and the DPJ alike.
As the election campaign grinds into gear, the opposition parties
(with the exception of the moderate Japanese Communist Party and the
leftist Social Democratic Party) have coalesced behind the DPJ, which
can barely disguise its elation at the collapse of the government
programme and is talking up its chances of power in the face of a
heavily divided LDP.
The recent moves towards genuine two-party politics in Japan,
indicated by the Tokyo elections, make the September 2005 election a
possible breakthrough moment for the opposition. LDP sources have
already suggested that Koizumi's threats to split the LDP will be
realised if the party is forced to endure the humiliation of defeat.
Postal privatisation may have triggered it, but clearly much more is
at stake in Japan's election than the career of the prime minister and
the future of the country's post offices. Whatever the result, the
"1955 system" will not be dismantled in a day.
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