Practical politics, symbolic conservatism, and the decline of the LDP

The LDP's presidential race is in full swing, and Tanigaki Sadakazu appears to be in command of the race against Kono Taro and Nishimura Yasutoshi. Polls of LDP Diet members suggest that Tanigaki enjoys the support of roughly a majority of the party's 199 Diet members; Yomiuri has Tanigaki with 102 votes, Nishimura with 30, with Kono with 28, with 39 members undecided. Tanigaki has secured the support of the party establishment, which, given the LDP's demographics after the general election, could well be the path to victory. Given these figures, it is little surprise that Kono is pinning his hopes on winning overwhelming in voting in the prefectural chapters, which will cast 300 votes in the election.

At the same time, the LDP is also trying to figure out what is to blame for the party's devastating defeat last month. One Sankei article notes that one group that studied the election found that the LDP's notorious web commercials — especially this one — were well viewed, but were poorly received by those who viewed them, prompting Sankei to ask whether the Internet ads are to blame. The survey was conducted online and had a small sample size, so the idea that the LDP somehow lost because of its Internet ads is absurd (although I'm willing to buy the argument that negative LDP ads combined with the DPJ's positive campaigning may have mattered on the margins). The point is there is no shortage of explanations for why the LDP lost this general election, and undoubtedly many of them have some validity.

One factor that I find worth exploring is the role played by the LDP's virtual abandonment of bread-and-butter issues — pensions especially — to the DPJ. The 2007 upper house election and the 2009 general election were contested over issues on which the DPJ's positions were overwhelmingly favored by the voting public, insofar as the elections can be said to have been concerned with policy. While voters may have had their doubts about various DPJ proposals, the DPJ managed to tell a convincing story of how LDP rule had faltered and why "regime change" was necessary. Central to this story is the LDP's yielding livelihood issues in the years since the end of the bubble economy.

In short, the LDP did not have to lose, at least in the manner in which it lost this year. A critical factor in explaining the LDP's collapse is, I believe, a shift in how the LDP presented itself to the public. Despite having been the party that presided over the economic miracle and guided Japan — with the bureaucracy, of course — to a position of global economic prowess while maintaining social equality, by 2007 the LDP had abandoned this legacy.

Perhaps it is unusual to speak of the LDP's having "abandoned" its legacy. After all, perhaps the LDP didn't abandon its legacy. Perhaps it was punished not for having bad intentions but simply for policy failures: the economy stagnated, LDP-led governments tried to stimulate the economy, failed, and in the process tied the government's hands with tight budgets, leading to austerity that were invariably felt in different forms throughout Japan and reinforced the image of a Japan that had become less equal and more harsh for many Japanese. (Perhaps the export-led boom during the earlier part of the decade was a poisoned chalice for the LDP, in that it kept urban areas buoyant, thereby reinforcing the image of a profound gap between center and periphery.)

But I would argue that it was not simply a matter of the LDP's having tried certain policies and failed. The idea I'm toying with considers how the LDP became a different party during the 1990s, culminating in the government of Abe Shinzo, which, given the support Abe had upon taking office and the manner in which he frittered it away (destroying himself in the process). From the early 1990s until 2007 the LDP shifted not just from center to right, but from pragmatism to idealism. It shifted from the realm of practical politics — which has as its fundamental concern the livelihoods of the Japanese people — into the realm of symbolic politics, Japan's cultural war.

Before I continue, I want to discuss this division between practical politics and symbolic politics. Foreign observers have long puzzled over how to think about ideological divisions in Japanese politics. It is hard to deny that ideological divisions between left and right were an important feature of postwar Japanese politics, especially in the early postwar decades. This division was rooted in the culture war that followed Japan's defeat in World War II. Not unlike Germany after World War I and the United States after Vietnam, Japanese intellectuals and politicians were polarized largely along lines related to the war. The idealistic left saw Imperial Japan and war as the great enemy and sought to prevent Japan's return to the dark valley. Because the US had "reversed course," because it had permitted the return of so many officials associated with Imperial Japan when it realized that Japan was needed as an ally during the cold war, and because in the eyes of the Japanese left US actions against the Soviet Union (with whom the left sympathized, to say the least) risked plunging Japan and the world into conflagration, opposition to the US-Japan alliance became a cultural question as much as it was a political question. Kishi Nobusuke expressed surprise at the opposition to his revised alliance treaty in 1960, which was, after all, a better deal for Japan than the 1951 treaty: but the forceful opposition that drove Kishi from power was responding less to the content of the treaty than the fact that Japan, under the leadership of the former Class A war criminal Kishi Nobusuke (whose ideas about the Japanese economy during the war amounted to Japanese-style national socialism), was in danger of returning to its wartime identity as a participant in power politics and active ally of the "imperialist" US. The treaty protests were, after all, preceded by successful left-wing demonstrations against the 1958 revision of the Police Execution of Duties Law, which the left feared signified a return to wartime repression.

At its founding, the LDP was a party ready to push back against the left in Japan's culture war. Recall that in its founding charter the LDP declared that one of the party's fundamental goals was the restoration of Japanese independence, which for Kishi and others meant in practice revision of the 1951 security treaty and revision of the 1947 constitution. It also meant an unabashed admiration for prewar and wartime Japanese society, in which citizens did their duty in service of the Emperor, based on a mystical bound between sovereign and people. As postwar political theorist Maruyama Masao wrote in his essay "Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism:"

Japanese nationalism...was never prepared to accept a merely formal basis of validity. The reason that the actions of the nation cannot be judged by any moral standard that supersedes the nation is not that the Emperor creates norms from scratch (like the sovereign in Hobbes's Leviathan) but that absolute values are embodied in the person of the Emperor himself, who is regarded as 'the eternal culmination of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful throughout all ages and in all places.'

This is an idea with staying power for the idealistic right: Abe, after all, spoke of the emperor as the loom that has weaved the tapestry of Japan (mentioned here), and the right obviously continues to attribute tremendous importance to Imperial family and its "unbroken line" of sovereigns.

The idealistic right was concerned not only with the position of the emperor in the postwar system: the right-wing position in the culture war addressed larger questions of Japanese nationhood and Japan's place in the world. The difference between left and right was not internationalism versus nationalism, but the left's neutralist, pacifist nationalism versus the right's great-power nationalism. The idealistic right effectively inherited Meiji-era Social Darwinism that saw the world as a dangerous place in which the "fittest" nations were those capable of besting others in conflict. That Japan was virtually occupied after 1951 — given the domestic role the initial alliance treaty accorded to US forces in Japan — and that Japan's ability to compete with other nations was constrained by the "pacifist" constitution drafted by the American occupiers were terrible affronts to the idealistic right, and in practical terms they prevented Japan from contributing fully to the struggle against communism (unyielding anti-communism being another inheritance from the prewar right, despite Kishi's flirtations with leftism while at Tokyo University — indeed, despite his being branded a leftist by his enemies when he was a senior official at the ministry of commerce and industry during the 1930s). The result was that security policy was as much a matter of symbolism for both the left and the right as it was a matter of practical policy concerning budgets, troop strength, procurement, and the like. The Self-Defense Forces, Article IX, and the US-Japan alliance are the prizes over which the idealistic left and right have fought until the present day, in addition to the Imperial family and the education system, the latter with particular resonance as the left sought to prevent the right from rebuilding the education system along cherished prewar principles.

Earlier I compared Japan's symbolic culture war with interwar Germany and post-Vietnam America. There appears to be something about losing wars that results in a continuation of the lost war by other means among domestic political actors as they struggle to rebuild after defeat. Part of rebuilding the shattered nation involves, of course, assigning blame for the defeat and taking steps to ensure that the disaster would not be repeated again. (Perhaps it is controversial for me to include America on this list, but I think when one looks at what American conservatives say about the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and about what happened on the home front during the war, indeed their propensity to blame the 1960s for much of what is wrong with the US today, I think post-Vietnam American politics may follow the same lines as the other examples.)

But the culture war was by no means the whole of Japanese politics. Indeed, the interesting story in the 1960 struggle over the US-Japan security treaty was how the LDP ultimately won the struggle. The LDP was by no means united in sharing Kishi's revisionist and idealistic vision for Japan. While the first principle in the LDP's policy platform in 1955 stressed "the people's morality" and "education reform" and the second stressed reforming the electoral system and the national administration (the politicians have been at this for a while), the third and fourth goals were "economic independence" and "creating a welfare state." There were plenty of LDP members in 1960 who could be called — to borrow the slogan from the DPJ — the seikatsu dai-ichi right, conservatives who stressed the importance of economic reconstruction and egalitarianism as the best weapon against communism. Yoshida Shigeru looms large over this school of thought and it was, of course, Yoshida's protege Ikeda Hayato who succeeded Kishi, promulgated his "income doubling" plan, and stressed a "low posture" in governing. The Yoshida school, and later Tanaka Kakuei and his followers were grounded in practical politics: symbolic politics and the culture war with the left continued to rage, but was pushed to the margins of the party. The Socialist Party, rather than adapt to an LDP that had shifted from symbolic to practical politics, continued to wage its quixotic battle against the idealistic wing of the LDP, which was the "anti-mainstream" from Kishi's ouster until the end of the cold war. As such, the party system that emerged from 1960 saw the bulk of the LDP monopolizing practical, livelihood politics, which enabled it to co-opt ideas from the opposition when challenged (environmental issues in the late 1960s, for example). While corruption scandals weakened the strength of the LDP as a whole, the mainstream, practical LDP remained in control of the party and developed a system that enabled it to cooperate with the JSP — behind the veil of the Kokutai system — and the centrist, urban-based small parties that emerged after 1960.

The problem, however, is that by marginalizing the idealistic right within the LDP, Japan's culture war was essentially frozen in place. The idealistic right never had to modify its views, and thus even today conservatives makes many of the same arguments that their antecedents made in the 1950s and 1960s. Hailing back to the LDP charter, Abe's first "accomplishment" was revising the occupation-era basic education law. More significantly, Abe saw constitution revision — grandfather Kishi's unfinished business — as his government's raison d'etre and the basis upon which the LDP would contest the 2007 upper house election. Even the changes in security policy were as much about symbolism as they were about enhancing Japan's defense capabilities. The defense agency was upgraded to a ministry without fixing the agency's structural problems. Building a Japanese-style national security council, a plan abandoned when Abe left office, seemed more like an effort to acquire the trappings of a twenty-first-century great power than a fundamental transformation of Japanese security policy making. Revising the restriction on the exercise of collective self-defense could have had practical implications but was left unrealized. Meanwhile the defense budget continued to shrink and the defense procurement process — exposed as entirely rotten by the Moriya scandal that blew open just as Abe left office — went unreformed, these being two critical goals that a practical conservative like Ishiba Shigeru desperately wants to reverse in order to enhance Japan's ability to defend itself.

(Ishiba is an interesting figure. He seems to have little patience with the symbolic agenda. A defense policy wonk, he wants to make policies that strengthen Japan's defense, not symbolic measures that accord with some vision of how Japan ought to be. Little wonder that Ishiba criticized Abe after the 2007 upper house election, and that he wound up as defense minister in the eminently practical cabinet of Fukuda Yasuo.)

What changed since the early 1990s is familiar enough. I have previously discussed the monograph by Richard Samuels (my mentor at MIT) and J. Patrick Boyd, my colleague, in which they tell the story of how the LDP's pragmatists and the pacifist left worked together to resist the idealist, revisionist right on the question of constitution revision. They argue that from the early 1990s, the LDP became a more revisionist party as the practical wing of the party was weakened as the result of reforms that weakened faction heads and other party organs and strengthened the party leadership. Their argument is essentially that the LDP's old, practical mainstream was reformed to the point of being marginalized within the party, which may be true, but I wonder whether the practical conservatives also suffered as a result of their having been the ones in charge of the party as the economy foundered and as the bureaucrats — their allies in power — became deeply unpopular following a series of scandals. Indeed, it is ironic that Hashimoto Ryutaro, the heir of the mainstream tradition, was the architect of reforms that contributed to the rise of the idealists.

How did the rise of the revisionists contribute to the LDP's defeat last month? Not surprisingly I see the Abe government as the crucial turning point. It was not necessarily Koizumi Junichiro who doomed the party. Had Koizumi passed power to a successor with greater ties with practical conservatism, a successor who would have sought to reconcile structural reform with the growing perception of inequality on the part of the public, the LDP might have been able to hold out for longer against Ozawa Ichiro's DPJ, which successfully seized the "practical" mantle abandoned by the LDP as it embraced the symbolic. Instead the rise of the revisionists made it possible for Abe, virtually a living fossil of the pre-Ikeda LDP, to succeed Koizumi despite having virtually no experience in governing. Abe became prime minister despite having won only five elections and having never held ministerial positions other than a few years as a deputy chief cabinet secretary and less than a year as the chief cabinet secretary during Koizumi's victory lap. Under the old LDP system, Abe would never have become prime minister when he did (certainly a commendable feature of the old system).

The result was that at precisely the moment that the inequality problem became a grave public concern and the public lost confidence in the pensions system, the LDP was led by a politician who, indifferent to economic policy and the livelihoods of the people he governed, did little more than repeat Koizumi's slogans, while devoting his attention to the planks of a fifty-year-old party agenda. It was also at roughly the same moment that control of the DPJ passed to Ozawa, who saw that as the LDP moved in the direction of symbolic politics voters who had reliably supported the LDP when it was controlled by the practical right were increasingly disenchanted with the party and open to the possibility of voting for the DPJ. Ozawa's DPJ effectively grabbed the mantle of the old LDP mainstream. Seikatsu dai-ichi, the DPJ's slogan in the 2007 upper house election, could have served well as the slogan of the LDP from Ikeda onwards. I do not think it was coincidental that when I visited Kagawa last month, the granddaughter of Ohira Masayoshi, one in the line of practical conservative prime ministers, was campaigning on behalf of a DPJ candidate.

The DPJ as a party, especially under Ozawa, has studiously avoided symbolic politics and stayed focus on improving the lives of the people. By contrast, the LDP's campaign last month was largely symbolic: warnings about the influence of Nikkyoso, the "radical" teachers' union, the DPJ's disrespect for the flag, the party's "leftism" and inability to defend Japan, and so forth. Aso fully embraced the culture war as he campaigned around the country and warned of the dangers of DPJ rule. Of course, the dangers voters were concerned about were dangers to their jobs and their pensions.

To return to power — or, at the very least, viability — the LDP needs to reorient itself to practical politics. Tanigaki, a heir of the old mainstream, may be able to take some steps in this direction, but the idealist conservatives remain powerful, not least because Abe, Aso, and others will continue to be active in debates over the party's future. Some party leaders will no doubt continue to advocate a return to Abe's agenda of "leaving behind the postwar system" (the system built by the LDP mainstream, incidentally). It may be that the idealists are outnumbered, and that should Tanigaki win the LDP might once again focus primarily on livelihood concerns and develop a sophisticated and detailed critique of the DPJ's agenda while offering its own proposals. If so, so much the better for Japan: two large parties debating how best to ensure economic security and opportunity for the Japanese people, with atavistic culture warriors confined to the margins of the political system.

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.

The DPJ in Yoshida country

With the DPJ making the anti-terror special measures law the main point of contention for the autumn special session, it seems increasingly clear that the DPJ has found a solution to the problem of how to distinguish itself from the LDP. The DPJ's positions on social and economic policy not being all that different from the LDP, foreign policy is once again the main partisan cleavage in Japanese politics.

But this is not a return to the cold war, when pacifist left squared off against the nationalist right, to the benefit of the pragmatic LDP mainstream. The triumph of the revisionist right and its emphasis on a strong, global alliance with the US means that the LDP has vacated the center on foreign policy. As I noted in this post, the LDP is more uniform on foreign policy issues than in the past; while some LDP chiefs are pushing for compromise on the anti-terror law for political reasons, I have yet to hear a significant LDP politician dissent from the ideal of Japan's supporting the US (and others) with warships in the Indian Ocean.

Accordingly, with the LDP having moved to the right, especially in the six years since the 9/11 attacks, the center — the Yoshida line of a limited US-Japan alliance due to Japanese domestic constraints — has been vacated, and Mr. Ozawa's DPJ is preparing to occupy the center. The foreign policy debate that was once contained within the LDP is now the debate between the DPJ and the LDP. The DPJ is essentially calling for a US-Japan alliance restored to old limits, and a Japanese security policy that adheres to domestic constraints (and the added twist of UNSC approval). While the not inconsiderable support for constitution revision within the DPJ suggests that the party is willing to consider adjusting those constraints, the party's overall stance is that of moderation in the face of the overcommitment of the Koizumi and Abe governments.

Not surprisingly, then, one of the DPJ's first acts in the new Diet session was to submit legislation to end the JSDF mission in Iraq.

By shifting the emphasis to Japan's international responsibilities — "the promise to the world" that Mr. Abe made in Sydney, described by Asahi today as "selfish" — the government seems to be trying to reclaim the center (and it has Yomiuri's enthusiastic support). But a couple weeks of talking about Japan's obligations to the international community deriving from its position as a commercial power will not undo six years of emphasizing the value of the US-Japan alliance over all other elements of Japanese foreign policy, particularly with US officials having spent the last month practicing their gaiatsu.

The DPJ's stance is anything but radical (which is why Amaki Naoto is so disappointed in the party). It marks a return to the more moderate past — and, more importantly, a return to the thinking of the Japanese people. Washington might want Japan to change radically, but the changes envisioned by Koizumi and Abe are not sustainable over the long term; a correction is in store. Japan will change. It will take on a greater international role. But the change will be grounded in the moderate center, and will acknowledge and embrace limits on what Japan can and can't do internationally and in cooperation with the US.

The DPJ should use this Diet session to better articulate this vision for Japan's foreign policy: that much Yomiuri has right. I think the DPJ will find that it enjoys the support of the Japanese public, and also of some Americans (not to mention Europeans).

In the meantime, Mr. Abe, apparently determined to relive his grandfather's life, is set to sacrifice his political career for the US-Japan relationship, except this time, it is unlikely that it will be necessary for the people to encircle the Diet to make him go. (Having joked for the past year about Mr. Abe getting himself confused with Kishi, it's eerie that Mr. Abe's end may play out in a similar way.)

This time around, definitely a farce

The Kishi (or is it Sato?) clan has an interesting relationship with the Japanese people, and with Prime Minister Abe digging in his heels despite a resounding vote of no-confidence on Sunday, it looks like the prime minister versus the people once again.

Of course, in 1960, the stakes were serious, the issues being matters of constitutional governance and Japan's position in the cold war — and Japan's wartime legacy, as embodied by Prime Minister Kishi, chief of economic planning in Manchuria and then architect of Japan's total war planning, signatory to the rescript resulting in the Pearl Harbor attack, and imprisoned Class-A war criminal.

And now, in 2007? The people have indicated their disapproval at the ballot box, without even having to bother with demonstrations at the gates of the Diet. The issues at stake largely concern the public's loss of confidence not just in Prime Minister Abe but in the governing class as a whole, as the Japanese people have struggled to deal with changing economic conditions. Insofar as Prime Minister Abe has failed to so much as even nod in the direction of popular anxieties, he ought to pay the price, legacy of short-lived premierships in the 1990s notwithstanding. That was then, this is now. Mr. Abe, of course, does not see it that way. As Asahi notes in its editorial today, "'I take the people's stern judgment rigorously and sincerely, and I should reflect, and while I reflect I will modestly fulfill my duty to reform and build the nation;' in a word, the tough election results are not an expression of non-confidence in the prime minister. He probably takes it as a scolding from the people."

Pathetic, really. Like his grandfather, Mr. Abe clings to an ideological perspective when all the people want is economic security; that is why the civil conflict that some feared in the aftermath of Kishi's resignation in 1960 never materialized, because the LDP opted for Yoshida protege Ikeda Hayato, who not long thereafter announced his income doubling plan — and the rest is history. Despite having dragged his party to a historic loss, Mr. Abe still doesn't understand that the vague ideological package that he peddles in Utsukushii Kuni e is of so little interest to the Japanese people that they haven't even bothered to oppose it actively. They see a prime minister obsessed with waging the battles of the past rather than running a government responsive to their concerns, many of which are the product of the policies of his predecessor.

And that is why Mr. Abe's tenure is doomed. Sooner or later, the LDP's chiefs, inheritors of a tradition of political survivalism almost without parallel in the developed world (except for perhaps Italy's Christian Democrats, as argued by Richard Samuels) will rediscover their survival instincts and find a way to ditch Mr. Abe. The question is whether they will do so in time to salvage the party's reputation in its formerly "iron jiban" in rural Japan — and whether it is still possible for the LDP to exercise the kind of unchallenged dominance over large swathes of Japan that it once did.

Does anyone really anticipate Mr. Abe's survival in the face of unremitting unpopularity among the people, control of the Upper House by the opposition, and growing fears within the LDP that their electoral prospects diminish with each passing day?

To once again borrow from Marx, if the resignation of Kishi Nobusuke was a tragedy, marred by violence and involving grand, historical stakes, the resignation of his grandson, whenever it comes, will be a farce, a product of his oblivious leadership in the face of public insecurity and his stubborn insistence on ideological governance when all the people want is a competent response to their concerns. And as a result, the conservative machine forged by Kishi in 1955 may well meet its doom with Mr. Abe acting as the unwitting and witless executioner.

Asking old questions anew

(This is the second post discussing George Packard's Protest in Tokyo; see the first here.)

When I last discussed Packard, I spoke about how his exploration of Japanese thinking behind the first US-Japan security treaty revealed that independence was the dominant theme in Japanese foreign policy thinking throughout the 1950s. Independence has, of course, been a consistent thread in Japanese security policy since the opening of Japan by way of "unequal treaties" made Tokyo acutely aware of its weakness compared to the Western powers.

Occupation and aftermath reminded Japan once again of its low position in the global hierarchy, with the alliance with the US and the accompanying status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) serving as the postwar period's unequal treaties.

Accordingly, as the 1950s progressed and the contours of the cold war in Asia coalesced, Japan once again began to consider how to square the need to ensure its security at the front line while maximizing its independence as much as possible without jeopardizing security. As such, while one can look at the struggles surrounding ratification of the revised Mutual Security Treaty in 1960 as grounded in ideological struggles in Japanese domestic politics, it is essential to recognize that battle was another episode in modern Japan's pursuit of an optimal security strategy that maximizes security and independence. As Packard wrote, "It is well to remember, in looking, at the great struggle of 1960, that it was much more than a battle between left and right—between the free world and neutralism or Communism. The underlying question was: how to provide the greatest security for Japan—and on this question, the Japanese nation was deeply divided."

Packard saw that debate as hinging on three "dilemmas": (1) doesn't an alliance with the US that involves hosting US troops make Japan an inevitable target in the event of a hot war?; (2) won't alliance with the US inevitably result in the introduction of nuclear weapons to Japan, either in US hands or in the hands of the JSDF, while burdening Japan with an expensive defense establishment?; and (3) by allowing US troops to have bases in Japan, near Asia's potential conflict zones, aren't we making it easier for the US to escalate crises in the Taiwan Straits or Korea? The 1960 treaty obviously did not resolve these questions — compromises came later, if at all. Rather, the debate on the treaty was whether Japan should opt for east, west, or Nehru-style neutralism. The outcome was not foreordained: a poll cited by Packard showed that the Japanese people, insofar as they had an opinion on the matter, seemed to prefer Bandung-style nonalignment.

The outcome was not even foreordained within the LDP. Prime Minister Kishi, architect of the revision, had to maneuver among factions in the nascent LDP, playing rivals — who preferred alternative courses in foreign policy — off one another. There is no doubting that Kishi, in contrast to his bumbling grandson, was an adept politician; I do not see how else he could have served in Tojo's cabinet, been purged, served prison time as a Class-A war criminal, and still emerged as prime minister in 1957 (the phoenix in the above Time cover may have been referring to Japan, but it could just as well have referred to Kishi).

Then, as now, what mattered within the Diet was intra-LDP politics. As documented by Packard, the key to guiding the treaty through negotiations to approval by the Diet was management of the LDP — and for all of Kishi's adroitness, the process still consumed him, as public disagreement among LDP factions (and the return of former Prime Minister Yoshida to politics after a short retirement) undermined Kishi's efforts to present the treaty to the public as a fait accompli.

The Japanese left, meanwhile, a bumptious mix of communists, socialists, union organizers, student radicals, and intellectuals had few tools with which to shape the legislative process short of physically trying to prevent votes from occurring, and thus turned to extra-parliamentary measures, demonstrations that grew in scale until the May demonstrations against the passage of the treaty.

While Packard argues that the clash between left and right was over security policy — and it was — security policy was wrapped up with fundamental questions of Japan's identity, and thus encompassed domestic policy as much as security policy. One important disagreement among the left was whether protests should be directed at the Diet and Prime Minister Kishi, the symbol of state capitalism, or the US Embassy, symbol of US imperialism. Similarly, the debate within the LDP was as more about Japan's priorities in the postwar era — domestic reconstruction or a rapid resumption of the duties of a "normal" nation, a question which encompassed but was not limited to Japanese security policy.

We all know, of course, what happened. The LDP, despite internal disagreements, rammed the treaty through the Diet, which both reduced some of the inequality in the initial treaty by scaling back extraterritorial rights and shored up Japan's place in the ranks among the anti-communist allies, shielded by American extended deterrence. The left's attempts to block the treaty fizzled, and it was forced to renew its opposition within the Diet. But in the process, the revisionists within the LDP were stymied; Japan might enjoy an alliance with the US, but it would be an unequal alliance. Japan would adhere to Article 9, even as the JSDF was gradually strengthened, meaning that the alliance would remain focused on the defense of Japan. The Far East provisions would remain largely inoperative. Meanwhile, during the following decades successive governments addressed the dilemmas listed above, issuing the three non-nuclear principles, the principles on arms exports, and the one-percent ceiling on the defense budget, which made the Yoshida Doctrine more robust: Japan would not waver from its determination to rebuild, develop, and prosper.

And so Japan rode out the cold war, with the occasional moment of doubt (the "Nixon shock," for example), but overall the framework held.

Not so since the end of the cold war. While there were murmurs in both Japan and the US during the 1980s that Japan should revisit the security consensus in light of its prosperity, the consensus was not completely blown apart until the end of the cold war, when the alliance's static defense became largely irrelevant. And since the Gulf War, when Japan was asked and failed to contribute to an international coalition, Japan has been asking many of the same questions it was asking in the 1950s. How can we maximize security and independence? Is the alliance with the US still the best choice for Japan? Whereas the US commitment was fairly reliable during the cold war, does it have the same reliability in an era in which the threats are more uncertain (and in which US and Japanese threat perceptions differ in more than slight ways)?

MIT's Richard Samuels, in an essay excerpted from his forthcoming book Securing Japan printed in Journal of Japanese Studies (and reprinted here at Japan Focus), provides an excellent guide to Japan's post-cold war security policy debate, dividing the field into "neoautonomists," "normal nation-ists," "pacifists," and "middle-power internationalists." They differ according to their attitudes to the US and the use of force, and while there are some fundamental differences between them, there is considerable overlap between the schools of thought (excluding the pacifists). I will not summarize his essay in great detail here, but I should note that his essay makes clear the extent to which the debate that was essentially closed in 1960 with the passage of the Ampo has been entirely reopened, and each of these positions has antecedents in earlier debates. As Samuels writes, "Contexts change, but ideas endure."

Of particular note is Samuels' remarks on history and bases. I found his comments on US bases of particular interest, because he implies that a sizable US presence in Japan may be unsustainable over the long term, given that no segment of the debate is unambiguously supportive of the US presence as it exists today — and further cuts, beyond those already agreed, may be inevitable. (For more on this, Gavan McCormack's essay on Okinawa rebasing — also at Japan Focus — is well worth reading.) Meanwhile, the interplay of schools of thought suggest that some new military role is inevitable, but the strategic thinking behind it remains to be decided.

If Japan is more uneasy with the alliance today than ever before, a large portion of the blame must be laid at the White House's doorstep. The Bush administration has managed to exacerbate Japan's fears of both abandonment and entrapment. US bellicosity has sparked fears that Japan will be pressured to follow the US into future wars following on the heels of Afghanistan and Iraq; failure in Iraq has subsequently sparked fears of abandonment, especially vis-a-vis North Korea and China, as the US, suffering in Mesopotamia, looks for ways to stabilize other trouble spots. Accordingly, as the Bush administration slouches to its demise — just as revisionists, whatever their persuasion in Samuels's taxonomy, rise behind the banner of Abe — these questions about Japan can best defend itself in a rapidly changing region are being asked ever more loudly.

As a final note, it is interesting to note that, as before, these questions concerned not only Japan's foreign policy but the composition of its domestic institutions. As this post by Amaki Naoto, who would probably be classified as a "neoautonomist" by Samuels, suggests, those who chafe at Japan's "dependence" on the US are as concerned about the impact of US economic ideas on Japanese society as they are concerned about depending on the US for Japan's security. Samuels quotes Nishibe Susumu, a former Tokyo University professor, as remarking, "As a Japanese, I feel deeply ashamed that we praise the concept of markets, an American idea...[If we continue,] our system of government and our lives will come crashing down." And so Amaki, who resigned over Koizumi's support for the Iraq War, also rails against "neo-liberal" reforms pushed by Koizumi, Takenaka Heizo, and Japanese financial leaders.

And that, of course, is why it is naive to think that constitution revision is just about Article 9 and Japanese security policy. The debate about "securing Japan" is as much a debate about what kind of society Japan is at home — how it secures the lives of individual Japanese — as it is about securing Japan's place in its region and among the family of nations.