The Economist eulogizes the LDP

In its Banyan column, the Economist documents the rise and fall of the Liberal Democratic Party, in effect writing the LDP's obituary before the party's death.

For the most part it is a handy review of a fascinating organization, whose history is virtually synonymous with Japan's postwar political history. Indeed, the genius of the LDP system was that it ensnared everyone: bureaucrats, opposition party politicians, local politicians, the media, interest groups, big business, small business, farmers, and the United States. It was the perfect system for a growing economy tied to an open US economy, for dividing up the pieces of a growing pie. In an era of stagnation, of demographic decline, and of international uncertainty, it is a system that has produced nothing but paralysis. Deprived of resources, the ideal machine for winning elections could well result in a truly historic defeat for the LDP on 30 August.

Some wonder whether Ozawa Ichiro plans to build a new system for perpetual rule around the DPJ, but whatever Ozawa's desires, it is questionable whether a two-party system, based mostly on single-member districts, could sustain the type of policy-election machine constructed by the LDP over the course of the postwar era. Not only do the problems of the age demand decisive action by a centralized government, but because a two-party system contains the risk of being removed at the next election, the ruling party will want to act decisively to implement its policies before going to the voters, as doing so can both boost its electoral chances and possibly bind a victorious opposition party. A ruling party confident in its electoral prospects can be more patient and can comfortably seek the approval of as many actors as possible when formulating policy.

But while the Economist captures this well, it gets the LDP's origins wrong, important if one wants to draw parallels to today's battle between Aso Taro, Yoshida Shigeru's grandson, and Hatoyama Yukio, Hatoyama Ichiro's grandson. The LDP emerged not through Yoshida and Hatoyama's "joining forces" — after all, even the Economist notes that Hatoyama was Yoshida's "nemesis" — but through maneuvering by Liberal Party members dissatisfied with Yoshida who allied with conservatives in the ironically named Progressive Party to form first the Democratic Party and then, once Yoshida had retired, the Liberal Democratic Party. Tellingly, Yoshida refused to participate in the LDP when it formed in 1955. Completely missing from the Economist's story of the LDP's creation is Kishi Nobusuke, Abe Shinzo's grandfather, who first helped create the Democratic Party and then the LDP itself. A history of the rise of the LDP without Kishi is wholly incomplete; for this piece of the story, I strongly recommend Richard Samuels's "Kishi and Corruption: An Anatomy of the 1955 System." [Full disclosure: Samuels is my adviser at MIT.]

The Economist even misattributes the creation of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry to Yoshida, when it was Kishi who was among the founding fathers of MITI.

To quote Chalmers Johnson:

...The struggle of greatest interest to this study occurred between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and MCI [MITI's predecessor].

Most important in this struggle was the fact that the key politician of the postwar years, Prime Minister Yoshida, was an ex-Foreign Office official. Yoshida has always acknowledged that he did not know much about and was more or less uninterested in economics, but he had quite firm views on certain other matters about which he knew a great deal. Two such issues concerned Japan's wartime controlled economy and the economic bureaucrats who cooperated with the military. He deeply disliked both of them. According to many accounts, Yoshida "could not distinguish an MCI official from an insect"; and he was determined to put reliable Foreign Office men over what he regarded as the dangerously national socialist MCI bureaucrats. (pp. 176-177)

The point of this episode is that it reveals the many streams that flowed into the LDP and shaped its history up to the present day. Ex-bureaucrats versus party men; Yoshida versus Kishi; mainstream versus anti-mainstream; Tanaka Kakuei versus Fukuda Takeo; and so on through to Koizumi's struggle against the "opposition forces," to a certain extent an extension of the "war" between Tanaka and Fukuda.

But the LDP as a system of government was finished years ago — this is Nonaka Naoto's argument in his Jiminto seiji no owari [The End of LDP Politics], which describes the shape of the LDP system but opens with the roles played by Ozawa and Koizumi in destroying it — and the LDP being led by Aso into what looks like a certain landslide defeat is merely a shell of the party that governed Japan during the cold war.

Low posture to blame for Fukuda's problems?

In Japanese postwar political history, the phrase "low posture" — 低姿勢, teishisei — is most associated with Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato (1960-1964). No mere slogan, the phrase signaled an end to the Kishi era, which ended in violence in the streets of Tokyo.

The Ikeda era would be one of "tolerance and patience," of working with the opposition to formulate policy.

The phrase subsequently became associated with the LDP mainstream as embodied by the Kochikai — indeed, it became part of the furniture of LDP rule under the 1955 system. Even Fukuda Takeo, the current prime minister's father, who was associated with the anti-mainstream Kishi faction, declared his commitment to a "low posture" in Diet proceedings in August 1977: "As for Diet management, for my government and the LDP, in facing other parties we must have a low posture...So, concerning important policy, before the government decides we want to ask for everyone's opinions as much as possible."

Of course, the flip side of the declared commitment to a low posture was the inevitable criticism from opposition parties when the government reportedly failed to adhere to this stance. Prime Minister Ikeda was not immune, as in the later years of his government, Socialist Diet members regularly claimed that his low posture was just a political maneuver to placate the public before elections.

Fukuda Yasuo is but the latest adherent of the LDP's low posture school to serve as prime minister — and according to Sankei, the Fukuda cabinet's troubles illustrate the "bankruptcy" of the low posture and the need for a firmer line with the DPJ. In an article that sounds suspiciously editorial-like, the newspaper suggests that there are "omens" that Mr. Fukuda is set to abandon the cooperative posture he adopted upon taking office.

It seems that Mr. Fukuda's — and the LDP's — problem is that its posture hasn't nearly been low enough. While the government has been sparing in its use of its HR supermajority, it has acted as if the supermajority gives it the ability to dictate terms to the DPJ and the HC. Prior consultation? Genuine deference to the DPJ's positions? The government has preferred to submit its proposals and then attempt to hammer out a compromise after the fact. MTC ably demonstrates how the government's poor time management is indicative of the Fukuda government's attitude towards the DPJ. In the months since being denied its grand coalition with the DPJ, the LDP has preferred to gripe about the DPJ's failure to be a "responsible" opposition party than to forge realistic and working cooperation as necessary with the HC's largest party. If any government deserves to be criticized for announcing a "low posture" as a political ploy, the Fukuda government is it.

The government still has not come to terms with the idea that unless it wants to govern solely by Article 59 and leave important posts unfilled, it has no choice but to work with the DPJ. And so the BOJ governorship is occupied by an interim governor (has the sky fallen yet?) and the Japanese people are about to get a nice tax cut come April 1.

Recommended Book: Democracy Without Competition in Japan, Ethan Scheiner

"First-rate economics, third-rate politics."

This phrase has long been shorthand for the LDP's half-century of nearly uninterrupted rule, despite corruption and high levels of unpopularity among the Japanese people (although of late there might be some convergence between economics and politics).

Japanese and non-Japanese scholars have concocted numerous explanations for the LDP's enduring hold on power. Some have suggested a cultural basis for Japan's "one-party democracy": the Japanese people are unwilling to vote for any party other than the familiar LDP. Others have pointed to the now-retired single, non-transferable vote/medium-sized district electoral system, although the LDP's endurance under the new system has surely weakened this hypothesis. Others have argued that the incompetence of opposition parties over the past fifty years is the most important explanation for LDP rule. Still others have dismissed the importance of politics altogether, viewing LDP politicians as little more than bagmen for the all-powerful bureaucracy.

In Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State, Ethan Scheiner, a political science professor at the University of California, Davis, has developed a sophisticated argument on the failure of the political opposition to take power that demolishes these well-worn arguments.

The core of his argument is clientelism: the combination of clientelistic relationships between voters and politicians and Japan's fiscally centralized state that makes localities and prefectures clients of Tokyo has provided a solid foundation for LDP rule. For Professor Scheiner, opposition failure is not simply a matter of the failure of opposition parties to form national governments. Opposition failure begins at the local level. As a result of the clientelistic, fiscally centralized state, the quality most desired in local and prefectural elected officials has been connections to the national government that enable them to secure more subsidies from Tokyo for local projects. Not surprisingly, local LDP members with links to LDP Diet members have done particularly well in prefectural assembly elections, to the point that in the 2007 unified local elections, the LDP lost ninety-seven prefectural assembly seats nationwide and still held 1212 seats (to the DPJ's 375). Local opposition failure has contributed to national-level opposition failure by depriving opposition parties of "quality" candidates — meaning candidates who have been previously elected to public office and are therefore more trusted by voters — in HR races under both the old MMD and new SMD electoral systems.

Ah, you say, but what about wealthy, densely populated prefectures that are less dependent on Tokyo? Professor Scheiner grants that not all prefectures are equally prone to clientelism, and introduces the concept of parallel party systems. One party system, he argues, is quite competitive. In the approximately 200 urban and mixed SMDs and in PR voting in these areas, the DPJ has been fairly successful. Voters in these areas are response to anti-clientelistic appeals, explaining why the DPJ and Koizumite LDP candidates have had considerable success in urban Japan in recent years. The problem is in the rural SMDs that constitute approximately a third of the HR's 300 SMDs. Not surprisingly, support for clientelism remains high, and in these areas voters continue to elect LDP candidates at both the local and national levels. In fact, of 99 mostly rural SMDs, the LDP took 75 in 1996 and 77 in 2000 and 2003. One-party democracy exists in Japan, but not everywhere. However, on the back of its dominance of rural Japan, the LDP has been able to cling to power. As Professor Scheiner wrote, "Despite the fact that rural SMDs constitute only about 20 percent of all seats, rural SMD victories provide the LDP with nearly one third of all the seats it needs to win a majority. To win a majority, the LDP needs to take only around 40 percent of the remaining seats."

Professor Scheiner's thesis points at the way forward and illuminates some of the recent trends seen in Japanese politics. It explains why Mr. Koizumi's attacks on vehicles of clientelism were so vociferously opposed within the LDP, and why Mr. Koizumi may yet have succeeded in destroying the LDP as promised. It explains why the DPJ is attracted to decentralization (see this post by Jun Okumura), and why the LDP is becoming increasingly uneasy about the "nonpartisan" Sentaku movement that is pushing hard for decentralization. It also explains why Ozawa Ichiro has been spending his time touring the country, and why he has been so heavily involved in selecting candidates. Perhaps Mr. Ozawa learned from his experiences in the early 1990s, when he tried to take power by forming parties with inverted-pyramid structures: unseating the LDP will require political change at the local level in order to build up a stable of quality candidates for national elections.

I saw this dynamic at work in Kanagawa-4. The HC member for whom I worked is also the DPJ's presumptive HR candidate, making him a "quality" candidate according to Professor Scheiner's definition. His staff campaigned hard and successfully for DPJ candidates in local and prefectural candidates. Once elected, the newly elected officials began working more or less full time on behalf of my boss to bolster his support in the district.

Many expected that electoral reform, once implemented, would yield immediate regime change. Clearly that wasn't the case. But the combination of shrinking budgets, the Koizumi reforms, more effective campaigning on the part of the DPJ, and an LDP increasingly at war with itself over how to preserve the party's dominance of the rural third while remaining competitive in the other two-thirds of the country suggest that regime change is on the way. The DPJ's impressive showings in last year's local and HC elections may have been important portents of things to come.

Intimations of change

The revised bill for the special measures law on taxation, which includes the government's ten-year extension of the temporary gasoline tax, has been scheduled for interpellation in the plenary session of the House of Representatives from Tuesday, 19 February. The bill on the road construction special fund will be under discussion from Thursday, 21 February. The tax bill will be submitted for questioning in the HR Financial and Monetary Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

In the midst of the slow progress towards the climax of the debate on the gasoline tax and road construction, Yamashita Yasuo (DPJ), chairman of HC State Basic Policy Committee, and Eto Seishiro, chairman of its HR counterpart (LDP), called upon Prime Minister Fukuda and DPJ President Ozawa to have a debate in the Diet. They have yet to do so this session, and did not debate last session until the final days of the session.

They're right: the party leaders should debate, regularly and publicly.

But even without regular clashes between Messrs. Fukuda and Ozawa, the current "Road Diet" (previously known as the Gasoline Diet) belies the popular notions that the Japanese political system is broken and that the DPJ is little more than a pale imitation of the LDP. The clash between the LDP and the DPJ over road construction is a policy debate with real consequences for the future of Japan — and shows that there are genuine and deep differences between the two parties. The DPJ, in taking a stand on the special fund for road construction, has placed itself firmly on the side of ending the privileged and corrupt system that has long characterized LDP rule; the LDP has shown, in the blatant attempt by road tribesmen to preserve the special fund, that vestiges of Tanaka Kakuei's LDP remain, even if their days are numbered. The line between the parties is clear; it is not just a matter of a twenty-five yen surcharge on gasoline.

Political change is happening before our eyes.

A new 1955 system?

With Typhoon Fitow bearing down on the Kanto plain, I have decided to take shelter from the storm for the evening, and so there's no better time to step back and ponder the evolution of the Japanese party system.

In the aftermath of the Upper House election, there was some talk of a political realignment as a possible result of post-election uncertainty. That talk has diminished somewhat, especially because Ozawa Ichiro has managed the DPJ adeptly, most notably by co-opting Maehara Seiji with a deputy leadership post. (Although I think the talk of a grand coalition by LDP leaders hints at a political realignment of sorts.)

An article in this week's Liberal Time, however, renews the conversation about the shape of a new political alignment. The speculation considers the usual actors. Mr. Koizumi, dissatisfied by his party's backtracking on reform (as Mr. Hiranuma's return suggests), could split from the LDP with his "children" to form the "Koizumi New Party." Joining him could be Mr. Maehara — Hatoyama Yukio is apparently convinced that he would — and Mr. Tanigaki, who has, with his faction, been effectively isolated within the LDP.

I don't think this scenario is particularly plausible at the moment. More interesting is the article's conclusion, which is called "the demise of the two-party system" and looks back to the founding of the LDP in 1955 to call for a new ruling party:

It was said by Miki Bukichi, who successfully created the "conservative fusion," "This will last ten years." The thought that the LDP has steadily exceeded its service life is strong.

Conversely, avoiding internal dissension in the midst of the suddenly changing international situation means (1) we should make a kyukoku cabinet [kyukoku, means patriotic in the sense of the salvation of the country], and (2) it is starting to be recognized that the LDP/DPJ grand coalition idea is an essential second "conservative fusion."

This might be what Mr. Ozawa has in mind — the article mentions the possibility of Mr. Ozawa's luring onetime allies from the former Tanaka faction to his side.

But the idea that a grand coalition (i.e, a new permanent ruling party) will save Japan is a dangerous illusion. In an ever more dynamic world, the homeostatic management of Japan's affairs implied by a new permanent ruling party (like the 1955 system, and the Tokugawa bakufu for that matter) is impossible, because such systems invariably focus on maintaining the delicate balance among factions (or daimyo) rather than making the good policy decisions required in a dynamic environment. Hence the Tokugawa shogunate's inability to cope with "troubles at home and abroad." Hence the suitability of the 1955 system in an international system frozed by the cold war, and its almost instant collapse in the aftermath of the cold war.

Japan needs a two-party, even a multi-party system because competition in politics as in other areas of life depends better performance from all actors, and the people's interests are served by having the government held accountable by active opposition parties (each with a reasonable chance of taking control of the government for itself).

So thank you, Liberal Time, for calling attention to 1955 and reminding us all why a grand coalition is an awful idea.

Who's in charge here?

MTC asks an extremely pertinent question about which I have been wondering all week.

While pleasantly surprised by the new cabinet, MTC wonders who exactly was responsible for picking the new lineup. Mr. Abe no doubt has many people whispering in his ear — perhaps he would think more clearly if that wasn't the case — but it is necessary to ask whose guidance was decisive in shaping the new cabinet.

And now that the cabinet and the new party leadership are in place, it's equally important to ask who will be calling the shots; I remain unconvinced that the new cabinet is Mr. Abe's in anything but name only. Not his agenda, not his way of operating — and perhaps not even his people.

One major player will no doubt be new LDP secretary-general Aso Taro. Asahi writes today about Aso's consolidation of power through his control over the new personnel appointments, through which he sought to disarm critics and favor the factions (leading to new widely voiced fear that this cabinet marks a return to the old LDP). For example, Aso named Kosaka Kenji, organizer of an anti-Abe study group, as deputy of the party's Diet strategy committee. In the process, the influence of Mr. Koizumi within the party may be waning, as his followers in the Koizumi non-faction, anti-faction faction have found themselves blocked from power. Koizumi's followers, however, insist that it will benefit them in the long run: "This latest lineup is a reversion. With this, there will be a rise in new Diet members who think 'I will not join a faction.'"

I think such optimism might be misplaced, but at the same time, despair about the return of the old LDP is also misplaced. The old LDP has been destroyed, as promised by Mr. Koizumi. There is no going back to the old way of collusion between bureaucracy and LDP policy specialists and factions, at the expense of the cabinet.

What seems to be emerging instead is a tighter union between party and cabinet. The policy initiating powers of the Kantei have grown, but more at the expense of PARC than of the bureaucracy, which seems to have recovered, at least partially, from its mid-1990s nadir. (The vacuum created by Mr. Abe's poor leadership has undoubtedly helped this process along.) In the new cabinet, we may see a more cohesive LDP working with the bureaucracy as a whole to form policy, thanks to the presence of Mr. Yosano at the head of cabinet secretariat. An article in today's Asahi, not online of course, talks about the new chief cabinet secretary's "respect for the bureaucracy," suggesting that with his hand at the controls of government, the LDP will move further away from the anti-bureaucratic populism of Mr. Koizumi.

Recognizing the shifting balance is an important corrective, at least partially, to the argument made by Tomohito Shinoda in his recent book Koizumi Diplomacy, in which he outlines the emergence of the Kantei as a policy actor in its own right, especially in security policy. Shinoda is not wrong to point to various cases in the past two decades in which the Kantei has played a decisive role in decision making, but as the title implies, the key factor in his cases was often having the right personnel in place (whether Mr. Ozawa as an assistant CCS in the late 1980s or Mr. Koizumi as prime minister) than any permanent institutional change. If there's one constant in Japanese politics, it's that the formal institutions and rules often matter less than the informal arrangements grounded in custom, culture, and personality. The balance of power within the government can change greatly depending on who is sitting where.

Accordingly, the bureaucracy's comeback is due to continue under the second Abe cabinet, thanks both to accommodative, cautious leadership in the LDP and stalemate due to the DPJ's control of the Upper House.

Thinking about Japanese democracy

With the Upper House elections now a week away, it is worthwhile to step back and think about Japan's political system. At least that's what I did recently, reading Bradley Richardson's Japanese Democracy: Power, Coordination, and Performance — this month's recommended book.

Published in 1997, Richardson's book is obviously not the place to go for analysis of the latest developments in the Japanese political system. Rather his book is useful for his elaborate illustration of what is enduring in postwar Japanese politics. How is power distributed in the political system? How do actors reconcile clashing interests? What role for special interests? Political parties? Bureaucrats? Richardson provides a thorough portrait of the 1955 system, and with the LDP reverting to old ways, perhaps his book might be becoming more current by the day.

My biggest problem with it is that Richardson spends the book demolishing a straw man. He conceived the book as an argument against the idea, popular among polemicists in the 1980s and early 1990s, of a monolithic Japan, Inc. in which bureaucrats, the LDP, and big business collaborated to formulate policy that would make Japan "number one." While that idea may have gained popular currency at one time, enough academics — Richardson's audience, for this is an academic book — had done work illustrating the various ways in which Japanese politics were more pluralistic than commonly thought. As such, Richardson wastes plenty of ink explaining the straw man of a top-down, monolithic, "undemocratic" Japan and then demolishing it, when he would have been better off documenting the problems with Japanese democracy as he describes it (more on this later).

The thrust of his argument is that although the long, uninterrupted rule of the LDP made Japan appear to be less than democratic, the reality is that at each stage in the policy making process the LDP dominance was challenged and the party was forced to compromise (and even with the LDP there were, and are, considerable divisions that frustrate efforts to impose policy top-down).

For our purposes, the most useful chapter in this book is probably the second chapter, "Political Culture and Electoral Behavior." With scores of data breaking down Japanese voting patterns throughout the postwar period, Richardson provides an excellent look at how Japanese voting behavior has changed and become more unpredictable, concluding that there is considerably more to how the Japanese vote than economic actors lining up behind different parties, especially as Japan has urbanized. His discussion of "political alienation" in Japanese political culture particularly resonates for us watching this Upper House election campaign, with the two major parties both struggling to overcome strong negative perceptions among voters. His section on mobilizing Japanese voters is also useful, supplementing and updating the description of Japanese campaigning found in Gerald Curtis's landmark study Election Campaigning Japanese Style.

Meanwhile, one table — "Cosmopolitanism Versus Parochialism in Japanese Political culture" — suggests that the LDP may really be in trouble next week, with Mainichi finding the DPJ leading the LDP 31% to 21%. Why? Because according to Richardson's data, only 29% of voters surveyed said they voted on the basis of the candidate in Upper House elections, as opposed to 49% saying Lower House elections and 57% saying Prefectural Assembly elections. Of the 29%, slightly above-average percentages were found among farmers and those living in rural areas (as opposed to urban areas). In the years since Richardson compiled that data, I have to imagine that that figure might be even lower as party identification has fallen. All of which leads me to wonder if we might be witnessing the beginning of a new, more competitive era in Japanese politics (or perhaps it began earlier but had been obscured by Prime Minister Koizumi, and is now returning in his wake).

The most interesting thing about this book to me, however, is what's missing. Namely, the phrase "liberal democracy" does not appear outside of being part of the name of that impeccably liberal organization, the Liberal Democratic Party. It seems that the absence of liberalism would be worthy of comment, but Richardson is silent on this score. The differences between liberal democracy and plain, old democracy (or illiberal democracy or whatever other variety of democracy imaginable) are substantial, and if Richardson had taken his argument in this direction this book could have made a valuable contribution to discussion about democratization. It is this absence of liberalism — which for our purposes can be thought of as the expression of the individual citizen and his or her rights in politics — that makes Japanese politics problematic, especially when American advocates of democratization try to use the US occupation of Japan as an example of successful democratization (not to mention when the Japanese government talks about democracy promotion; I don't think this is what most people have in mind). In fact, Richardson's "bargained distributive" democratic Japan owes much to a style of social organization that existed in prewar Japan. For you see, it is groups that matters in Japanese democracy, even as elections are apparently decided on the basis of personality. The mechanism has worked to resolve differences between parties, interest groups, businesses, and government ministries, and the individual has been forced into the background.

This is not meant to be taken as criticism, but I still find that the absence of liberalism in Japan is not easily explained. Richardson indirectly points to that absence, but does not get any closer to giving a convincing account of why it's the case. Is it culture? Political culture? "Sticky" institutions? Education?

This is not merely an academic question. With politicians struggling to figure out how to make Japan a dynamic economy in which individuals "can challenge again and again," answering the question of why Japan is not a particularly liberal democracy can help predict whether and how efforts to reform the Japanese economy along more individualistic, dynamic lines can succeed.

(I will pick up this thread in my next post.)

Death of the 1955 system? Greatly exaggerated.

With Prime Minister Abe turning his attention and blame to the hapless bureaucrats in the Social Insurance Agency — those bureaucrats who have served as the fly in his constitution revision ointment — the Japan Times published a piece by Philip Brasor discussing the actual conditions within the agency, and the bureaucrats who lorded over citizens, namely the citizens who lacked the protection of company pensions.

Brasor's point: "What the pension crisis teaches us is that the main task of bureaucrats is not service but self-preservation, which makes them actually quite human, and also a bit pathetic."

Bureaucratic self-preservation is common to just about every bureaucracy in the world, but few bureaucracies enjoy the prestige and high status of Japanese bureaucrats. This is undoubtedly factor in the stunted development of Japanese liberalism. Both by undermining civil society and by co-opting politicians by helping them use the policy making system on behalf of private interests, bureaucrats have preserved their kingdom — and lorded over Japan's citizens. The bureaucrats are not entirely to blame for this situation, of course. They have just done what generations of Japanese bureaucrats have done. The blame, instead, falls on the shoulders of Japanese politicians, many of whom are former bureaucrats, who have utterly failed to use the power of the legislature to provide oversight for the bureaucracy and demand accountability. And some blame too should be laid at the feet of the Japanese people, who have accepted, willingly or not, the system whereby elected officials and bureaucrats have cooperated to serve anything but the public interest.

Similar to my argument here, through an utter lack of accountability from inside or outside government, Nagatacho and Kasumigaseki have colluded to misgovern Japan. Change of government in 1993 by no means ended this system. And now the consequences of this collusion is being felt directly, even painfully, by Japanese citizens.

Criticize the media, but don't let up on the pols

Ampotman directs another post against the media -- this time the Wall Street Journal -- for being unfair to Japanese prime ministers, this time Abe's august predecessors from the revolving-door nineties.

Now, I don't disagree with his main point: the Western media's lack of attention to what happens in Japan is shockingly bad, with the possible exception of the FT and the Times of London. (Longtime readers will recall my fondness for articles by the FT's Tokyo correspondent David Pilling; Pilling attempts to explain Japan as it is, instead of reducing it to a handful of cliches about resurgent nationalism, etc.)

But that does not mean that Japan's prime ministers, especially those who governed during Japan's "lost decade" should be let off the hook. Japan's prime ministers, up to the present day, have largely been content to operate in a system in which their ability to initiate policies and lead are strongly limited, with significant policy making power resting in the hands of the bureaucracy and the LDP's policy making organs. (And with cabinet ministers "captured" by their ministries rather than serving the prime minister's goals.)

To quote from Aurelia George Mulgan's Japan's Failed Revolution, which I've touted before:

The role of the prime minister in this system has not been to lead and impose his will on the party and the government, but to articulate the agreed consensus reached in party-bureaucratic negotiations. Prime ministers have largely been figureheads for the political and bureaucratic forces operating outside the cabinet who exercise the real power. They have exercised weak powers of policy direction and leadership, including within the cabinet itself, where they have lacked explicit legal authority under cabinet law to propose items for debate on the cabinet agenda. They have chronically had no views on matters of policy. Former Prime Minister Mori's reply during a 2000 interpellation session in the Diet is indicative. Responding to a question from a member of the DPJ about giving foreigners the vote, he said simply: "This is a very important issue having relevance to the basic structure of the state. I have my own ideas about it. But, as the prime minister and the president of the ruling party, I think I should not say what I think about it." [emphasis added]

Can you imagine the leader of any other mature democracy, any other leading power, abstaining not only from voicing an opinion, but from leading the country on an "issue having relevance to the basic structure of the state"? The Japanese political system has discouraged the top-down leadership that Koizumi tried to wield, much to the detriment of the Japanese people.

Now with Abe depending on LDP heavyweights again, it is entirely reasonable for media outlets to question whether the Abe Cabinet signifies a return to the worst aspects of the LDP rule. Are Western media organizations lazy? Yes. Have they neglected Japan for far too long, failing to report on the changes afoot in Japanese politics for society? Yes. And they should be criticized for their shoddy reporting. But they are not wrong to compare Mr. Abe to his predecessors, Mr. Obuchi included.

Who cares if the late Mr. Obuchi traveled around the world in his youth? What matters is how he (mis)governed Japan as the head of a party congenitally incapable of governing the country with national -- as opposed to sectional -- interests in mind.

Meanwhile, the discussion of former Prime Minister Murayama -- the product of perhaps the most shamelessly opportunistic maneuver in the political history of postwar Japan -- misses the point. As I asked in this post, on whose behalf was Murayama apologizing? As the fate of the June 1995 Resolution to renew the determination for peace on the basis of lessons learned from history shows, Murayama was pretty much speaking for himself. The resolution, intended to foreshadow Murayama's August apology, was watered down to appeal to conservatives, alienating the resolution's original left-wing supporters; it passed, but with only half the members of the Lower House voting.

Criticizing the media for its shortcomings should not serve as a substitute for critical analysis of the Japanese political system, which is much needed, both within and outside of Japan.