Confessions

Every now and again some kind of significant political event happens in Japan, I read about it, and am reminded that I don't understand Japanese politics at all. The same party, it seems, always wins. And that party is called the Liberal Democratic Party. And then there's the opposition Democratic Party which was formed from a merger of the old Democratic Party and the old Liberal Party. They couldn't, it seems, just call the merged party the Liberal Democratic Party because that was already the name of the other party -- the one that always wins.

And, as best as I can tell, neither party has any actual ideology; both are comprised of competing factions with widely varied agendas. There's also this smaller New Komeito Party which does seem to have an ideology, namely pacificism, and which is in coalition with the ruling LDP even though the current LDP Prime Minister has taken a lot of steps toward remilitarization. I even took a class in college that was supposed to be on modern Japan, but where the professor somewhat mysteriously stopped talking about political events once we got to the post-MacArthur period, though he did specifically note that it was "confusing." So, all that said, the implication of this election result would seem to be a setback for the Japanese remilitarization that the Bush administration has been trying to encourage.

Comments

Some of the analysis sez it's more do with Abe's lack of progress on retirement reforms than the boost in defence spending. But if you're worried about retirement provision, spending a whole bunch of money on the military probably doesn't seem like a great idea.

Posted by P O'Neill | July 30, 2007 11:41 AM

It's actually a fascinating system - a true democracy that's happened to settle on one party rule. The Japanese are averse to dissent and opposition, y'know.

If the Chinese Communist Party had any sense at all, they'd be trying to copy the system before it's too late for them.

Posted by Petey | July 30, 2007 11:41 AM

I am not sure it is true that the LDP has no ideology. It is more that ideology scares Japanese voters and so the LDP tends to keep quiet about such things. As far as the military goes, if Abe goes, it is likely that his successor will be even more Nationalist. As for the Democratic Party of Japan, well they used to believe things. They are one of the off shoots of the collapsed Communist movement in Japan which goes some way to explain what is really going on in Japanese politics. The Japanese Socialist Party was one of the two main Opposition parties in Japan: the other being the Japanese Communist Party. The JSP split in 1960 to seed the Democratic Socialist Party for slightly less Stalinist Marxists. The DSP collapsed and a variety of smaller parties were formed which have now come together again. The problem being that in the wake of the end of the USSR there was no point being Communists.

So the scholarship on Japan tends to blame the LDP always winning on the LDP and the stupid Japanese voters because, well, it is mostly Leftist in orientation. The Right tends to blame the JSP and the JCP. I tend to agree with them. The Left chose to be "pure" rather than win power and so, for instance, rejected recognition of the existence of South Korea for quite some time. As long as the choice was Pol Pot or Boss Tweed, Boss Tweed was always going to win. Since the JSP has dumped Marxism it has become electable under some other name even though it doesn't really have a point. The JCP has not gone away. So there you have it. The LDP was blessed by an Opposition that did not really want to win as long as it remained True to the Cause and so always won. Kind of the America's Democrats only much more so. Imagine if the Dems always chose Al Sharpton as their candidate.

Posted by HeiGou | July 30, 2007 11:46 AM

Also confusing is that the Liberal Democratic Party apparently is not very liberal or democratic.

Posted by Random Dude | July 30, 2007 11:59 AM

Well, if Chalmers Johnson is to be believed (and it is his area of expertise), the fundamental thing to understand about Japan is that it is in effect a vassal state of the United States, and doesn't dare take any positions that are too contrary to American policy. He notes that every time a new Japanese Prime Minister is sworn in, within the first couple months of his term he flies to Washington to kowtow to the president. That's second hand info, but it seems consistent with what else I've read.

Posted by Freddie | July 30, 2007 12:11 PM

The long-term story here is that as a result of the 1994 electoral reform, it's now mostly like the US and UK in that the mechanics force parties to get big or die.* So the Democrats gradually ate up almost all the other opposition parties over the course of this decade, not for ideological reasons but for practical reasons. And finally Japan has two major parties.

So even though the Democrats are certainly a mushy opportunist big-tent party, the more powerful they become, the closer Japan comes to a real oppositional two-party system. And that, I think, has to be an improvement.

*Before, the mechanics, plus ideology of course, encouraged the opposition to split and dwindle into several small parties.

PS: Possibly because of the huge, abrupt turnaround in basic political principles after the war, it's historically standard for Japanese political parties' names to sound leftist, no matter their actual politics. That tendency is still reflected in the major parties' names, though there's more variation looking at would-bes over the last 15 years.

PPS: The Komeito's big issue is actually social welfare programs. Like Soka Gakkai, they're associated with insecure and often socially isolated urbanites. The LDP throws them bones.

Posted by Minivet | July 30, 2007 12:16 PM

"Well, if Chalmers Johnson is to be believed (and it is his area of expertise), the fundamental thing to understand about Japan is that it is in effect a vassal state of the United States"

I'd say that's not the fundamental thing in this context. There are plenty of vassal states of the US that undergo electoral shifts in government. Japan doesn't.

Posted by Petey | July 30, 2007 12:18 PM

Some additional info:
The New Komeito is the party of a Buddhist organization (soukagakai), which is mildly creepy (supreme leader, excessive financial demands on members, manipulating the old and infirm).
Also I wouldn't say the Japanese chose one party rule so much as the LDP engineered it, aided by a pitiful opposition (the socialists are a tiny %, and the main opposition Democratic Party is lead by former members of the LDP, and offers no real alternative.).

Posted by D | July 30, 2007 12:21 PM

You pretty much have it right Matt. It's almost all faction-herding and pure power politics, unfettered by ideology. Note that the head of the "opposition" Democrats, Ichiro Ozawa, was himself the big cheese of the LDP in the early 90s.

HeiGou, I think you're take on the nature of the "left" in Japan is backwards (and BTW, left-right is an extremely problematic distinction in the context of Japanese politics). For the opposition parties it's a vicious circle. It's true that they are too ideologially pure and insufficiently pragmatic, but that's largely because the LDP is such a huge tent that for a pragmatist politician, there is no point in leaving; they're better off staying within the party and trying to assemble a coalition. This makes the opposition parties too purist out of a kind of selection bias. Rinse and repeat.

Ozawa himself didn't leave the LDP because of some policy dispute--he left because he pissed off too many people at the same time.

Posted by Incompetence Dodger | July 30, 2007 12:51 PM

Posted by D | July 30, 2007 12:21 PM:"Also I wouldn't say the Japanese chose one party rule so much as the LDP engineered it, aided by a pitiful opposition (the socialists are a tiny %, and the main opposition Democratic Party is lead by former members of the LDP, and offers no real alternative.)."

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, stopping the Japanese Opposition Parties from becoming sensible viable Parties. The fact is not that the LDP engineered anything but rather that the Opposition Parties, mainly of a Marxist-Leninist orientation, chose to make themselves utterly irrelevant. Japanese people voted for them in the 1950s before they knew what they were about. They leapt at the chance to vote for them in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR. The blame here rests entirely with the insanity of the Left.

Posted by Incompetence Dodger | July 30, 2007 12:51 PM:"I think you're take on the nature of the "left" in Japan is backwards (and BTW, left-right is an extremely problematic distinction in the context of Japanese politics). For the opposition parties it's a vicious circle. It's true that they are too ideologially pure and insufficiently pragmatic, but that's largely because the LDP is such a huge tent that for a pragmatist politician, there is no point in leaving; they're better off staying within the party and trying to assemble a coalition. This makes the opposition parties too purist out of a kind of selection bias. Rinse and repeat."

Except that did not work with the Democrats who were and are also a Big Tent Party. People still stuck with the Republicans. It is true that being part of a Party that does not believe much is handy, but there is ample evidence that the voters did not want a One Party State. As soon as the Japanese Socialist Party ditched Marxist-Leninism they formed government - right after the collapse of the USSR in 1994. So you can't really blame the LDP for being too tolerant as it was just as tolerant in 1994. Rather it is that suggesting collectivization of agriculture, full diplomatic relations and military ties with North Korea, the importation of Chinese economic advisers and Soviet security experts, or whatever other nonsense the JCP was coming up with on a regular basis, is not a sensible policy for Japan. There was no rational path for the JCP and the JSP to come to power but Soviet invasion because mass murder might thin out the crowds in the Tokyo Underground but no one much was going to vote for it. At no point was someone like Doi Takao prohibited from taking the Party in a sensible direction. Eventually the JSP did become a Social Democratic Party - notice that the more moderate the Marxists the bigger their share of the vote.

Posted by HeiGou | July 30, 2007 1:02 PM

A Japanese friend argues that his nation's political system is actually a polite form of Communism hidden in plain sight, and completely misunderstood by the West, because Japan has been so successful at business.

Posted by Kit Stolz | July 30, 2007 1:08 PM

"A Japanese friend argues that his nation's political system is actually a polite form of Communism hidden in plain sight, and completely misunderstood by the West, because Japan has been so successful at business."

See my comment upthread...

Posted by Petey | July 30, 2007 1:10 PM

I'd encourage everyone not to listen to HeiGou without doing some additional reading. In particular, he's determined to write out of history the fact that Japan could have had a different opposition party, rather than just a Communist fringe and that's where the engineering of the LDP tended to take place.

Posted by Meh | July 30, 2007 2:58 PM

Doesn't everyone know that HeiGuo is wrong about everything? I was surprised that he was wrong about Japan as well as everything else, but consistency is a virtue, I guess.

Posted by Walt | July 30, 2007 4:01 PM

I *did* take a seminar on postwar Japanese democracy in college, so

To make a long story short, the Japanese right, with the blessing and aid of the US, engineered the electoral system (multi-member districts, far more representatives per citizen in the countryside than urban areas) specifically to prevent the communists and socialists from taking power, or even holding the balance of power. The resulting system favored single-party rule, and locked out of power, the leftists, rather than mount a coherent counteroffensive, followed the ancient marxist tradition of endlessly schisming over the pettiest bullshit.

During this time, there were several distinct factions in the LDP, each with its own affiliated members and constituency. These factions were enduring, in that you could point to the faction lead by MP X-asawa in 1990 and say that it was the same faction as that led by Y-mura in 1970, but they did schism occasionally. These factions rotated through power regularly, but in honesty, they didn't really have very distinct platforms, and this was mostly part of the "inside game" of making sure that all the party notables got rotated through the high-profile ministerships.

I took the class in 2004 or so, at which point everyone agreed that the Democratic Party's short reign and the electoral reforms of 1994 were worth paying attention to, but no one yet had a clue how, if any way, this would change things. One of the major recurring questions of the class was if Japan would ever have a "proper" democracy - i.e., multiple parties, each holding coherent and opposed ideologies. (As this was a comp gov. seminar, possibly the most lasting influence I took out of it was the fact that very few democracies anywhere came very close to this "ideal".)

Posted by Senescent | July 30, 2007 5:22 PM

Oh, and it's worth noting that the Democratic Party "upset" was largely an outgrowth of the LDP factionalism. This wasn't a party that built itself up in opposition to the LDP through grassroots politics or anything, but rather one out-of-power LDP faction that saw an opportunity in an environment of stasis and scandal, defected en masse, formed an alliance with various minor parties, including near-leftists that weren't nearly as radioactive now that the Cold War was over, claimed power for less than a year, and then were largely reabsorbed by the LDP.

Posted by Senescent | July 30, 2007 5:29 PM

(That last post was talking about the 1993 Democratic Party upset, the one that turned the LDP government out of office. I have no clue what to make of this week's one - I think the method of choosing the upper house has changed since I studied it, and I have no idea what the cleaveages are now.)

Posted by Senescent | July 30, 2007 5:32 PM

The person who said that the Japanese system is Communism hiding in plain sight is so correct....

The real change has not been so much the musical chairs the politicians get up to, but their attempts to claw some power back from the gov't civil servants....will be interesting to see how this pans out.

(I worked as a Japanese gov't civil servant for over four years so have some experience of the system.)

Posted by grumpy realist | July 30, 2007 6:06 PM

In line with what Senescent said, there's two articles worth reading (read them when I was curious about Japan for a while). One is an old NYT article from October 9, 1994 available on Lexis-Nexis and all the usual resources. A short quote goes:

The C.I.A. gave money to the Liberal Democratic Party and its members in the 1950's and the 1960's, to gather intelligence on Japan, make the country a bulwark against Communism in Asia and undermine the Japanese left, said retired intelligence officials and former diplomats. Since then, the C.I.A. has dropped its covert financial aid and focused instead on gathering inside information on Japan's party politics and positions in trade and treaty talks, retired intelligence officers said.

That more or less sums up the a significant reason that the LDP came to power in the first place. In addition, though in a somewhat more confused way, there's an article in the New Left Review that I stumbled accross referenced in one of the books I read. It's in NLR issue #5 (September-October 2000). It's an interview with Asada Akira, which helps place the role of the Japanese left after WWII.

Those two sources might be of help to anyone who wants to understand the politics behind Japan a little better.

Posted by Hammerstein | July 30, 2007 10:09 PM

The New Komeito Party isn't even that simple anymore; since their merger with the Clean Government Party and political alliance with LDP, they've gotten fairly conservative. Their real agenda is set primarily by the very hierarchal and vaguely cult-like Soka Gakkai religious organization who have been compared (perhaps unfairly) to Japan's version of Scientology.

Anyway, I agree. Japanese politics is weird.

Posted by Jake | July 30, 2007 10:55 PM

Is the dominance of the LDP in Japan since WW2 really all that much weirder than the dominance of the Social Democrats in Sweden since about WW1? Granted, the Social Democrats are currently out of power in Sweden, but the overall pattern of dominance is similar, and the LDP has been out of power for brief periods as well.

Posted by Julian Elson | July 31, 2007 2:02 AM

Posted by Meh | July 30, 2007 2:58 PM:"I'd encourage everyone not to listen to HeiGou without doing some additional reading. In particular, he's determined to write out of history the fact that Japan could have had a different opposition party, rather than just a Communist fringe and that's where the engineering of the LDP tended to take place."

There is something particularly absurd about someone who managed to be stupid, insulting and wrong all at the same time. I too encourage everyone to do some reading. I am not determined to write out the fact that Japan could have had a different opposition party. In fact, and this is where the particular conjuncture of your failures is so appalling, that is my entire point. The Japanese did not have a One Party state because of the CIA or the LDP but because the Japanese Opposition parties *chose* to remain a Communist fringe. In other words you are criticizing me for denying a position I have spent some time developing. The LDP did not make the JCP and the JSP remain loyal to Moscow and Beijing. They chose to remain utterly irrelevant to Japanese life and hence doom themselves to Opposition. The problem is not in the LDP but in the JSP. As I have said repeatedly. Now would you like another go at producing a sensible response to what I said?

Posted by Walt | July 30, 2007 4:01 PM:"Doesn't everyone know that HeiGuo is wrong about everything? I was surprised that he was wrong about Japan as well as everything else, but consistency is a virtue, I guess."

You're doing a poor job of showing them aren't you? I am not even wrong about Japan although I like to think I am consistent. Nor does posting childish insults amount to the sort of argument it would take to show that I am wrong. Please feel free to try.

Posted by Senescent | July 30, 2007 5:22 PM:"the Japanese right, with the blessing and aid of the US, engineered the electoral system (multi-member districts, far more representatives per citizen in the countryside than urban areas) specifically to prevent the communists and socialists from taking power, or even holding the balance of power."

Actually that is precisely the wrong way around. The Japanese Liberals with the blessing and aid of the American Occupation authorities (which at that time were heavily influenced by the New Deal and quasi-Marxists and so still saw the Right as the enemy) engineered the system of multiple members. The aim was to prevent one party dominating the system - in a multi-member system you do not need a majority of votes to win. It is a crude form of proportional representations. It is true that the Japanese did not update the system to take into account the shift of population from the country to the cities, but I don't recall that being a deliberate feature of the system as it was set up.

The fears about the Communists came later.

Posted by Senescent | July 30, 2007 5:22 PM:"The resulting system favored single-party rule, and locked out of power, the leftists, rather than mount a coherent counteroffensive, followed the ancient marxist tradition of endlessly schisming over the pettiest bullshit."

It flatly does not. In a four member electorate, it manifestly favors multi-party non-rule as most PR systems do. As it was intended to do. It is also true that the main Opposition Parties chose to be irrelevant, but there was nothing to stop them mounting a real offensive in those multi-party electorates. And much of the National Parliament is elected directly by PR anyway.

Posted by HeiGou | July 31, 2007 6:21 AM

And, as best as I can tell, neither party has any actual ideology; both are comprised of competing factions with widely varied agendas.

See also: Irish politics, though as a country of four million, it's more interesting because of cultural links than global political power.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 31, 2007 11:18 AM