The Japanese Party System

From Oneparty Rule To Coalition Government

Ronald J Hrebenar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367293338
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000302745
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"This is a nuts and bolts textbook in the best sense of the term. … It is bound to be a great boon both to teachers and students of contemporary Japanese politics." —from the Foreword by Haruhiro Fukui This timely volume is the first book in nearly twenty-five years to focus on the party system of Japan. In the past two decades, the Japanese political scene has undergone a dramatic transformation. What had been a two-party system proliferated during the 1960s and 1970s into a seven-party system. This book provides a comprehensive look at all of Japan's current major and minor national-level parties. For the first time in English, detailed analyses are presented on the Democratic Socialists, the Clean Government party (KÅmeitÅ), and the New Liberal Club. Thorough coverage is provided for parties in the "1955 System"—the ruling Liberal Democratic party and the two long-term opposition parties, the Socialists and the Communists. Many of the new miniparties that have appeared in recent elections are also discussed. Japanese Political Parties gives readers a solid understanding of party histories, leadership, and internal organization, as well as a look at prospects for the future. The party discussions are preceded by three chapters on the laws and political forces affecting Japanese politics. Chapter 1 describes the basic characteristics of the Japanese party system since 1945 and provides an overview of Japanese voting behavior and political values. Chapter 2 describes the "rules of the game"—the electoral laws—and discusses the ongoing political problem of malapportionment. Chapter 3 interprets data on political finance in contemporary Japan. Along with a wealth of information and interpretation, the authors offer insight into the common patterns Japan shares with democracies around the world, placing the Japanese system within the larger context of world party systems. Designed for courses on Japanese politics, this text should also prove useful to students of comparative politics and political parties.

[Part One]
Introduction to the Japanese Party System

[1]
The Changing Postwar Party System

RONALD J. HREBENAR

The Japanese political system is democratic, has several parties, legislates through a parliament (the Diet), and has a well-educated, supportive, but basically uninvolved electorate. It is also defined by the continuous rule for three decades of the conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which has held a majority of seats in the Diet since the party’s creation in 1955. In this introductory chapter these basic characteristics of the Japanese party system will be explored in order to provide the reader with a foundation for the subsequent detailed examination of the seven parties in the current party system. The chapter is based on a variety of types of data, especially public opinion polls of the Japanese electorate.

From a One-and-a-Half Party System to a Multiparty System

When Japan returned to a democratic, parliamentary system in 1946, a period of great confusion in party politics preceded the first postwar elections, which were held in April 1946. The Dietmembers of the great prewar parties had mostly been purged by the U.S. Occupation authorities. Of the incumbent Dietmembers of the Progressive party, 260 out of 274 were purged; in addition, 30 of the 43 Liberal party Dietmembers, 21 of 23 Cooperative Dietmembers and even 10 of the 17 Socialist Dietmembers were prevented from running for public office. Thus, the first postwar election introduced a nearly new set of candidates to the voters. Not only the candidates but also the parties were new. A total of 267 “parties” participated in these elections. Many of these parties were just the personal organization or label of a given politician; others operated only in a very limited geographical area; still others were the reconsituted organizations of some of the famous pre-1940 parties. Among the successful candidates to the lower house (the House of Representatives) at this election, only 19 percent had served in that body previously. However, over the next decade these parties gradually disappeared until, in 1955, a merger of conservative parties on the one hand and Socialist parties on the other produced a de facto two-party system on the national level. In the first House election (1958) held after the two mergers, the Liberal Democratic party and the Japan Socialist party (JSP) captured 453 of the 455 House seats won by political parties. One seat was won by the Japan Communist party (JCP), a second seat was won by a minor party, and 12 seats were held by independents.

This two-party system lasted only two years. In January 1960 the JSP split into two parts, with 40 of its moderate Dietmembers departing to create the Democratic Socialist party (DSP). A reorganized JCP went from a single seat in the 1958 elections to 3 seats in 1960, to 14 in 1969, and to 38 in 1972. Meanwhile, the lay organization, Sōka Gakkai, of the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist sect, had formed its own political party in 1964—namely, the Kōmeitō or Clean Government party (CGP)— and it captured 25 seats in 1967 and 47 seats in 1969. Thus, by the 1960s, what seemed to be a “two-party system” (in the words of many Japanese political commentators) consisting of the LDP and JSP or, as some called it, a “one-and-one-half party system” (the LDP plus a splintered and seemingly permanent opposition JSP and a very small DSP), quickly moved to true multiparty status as the DSP demonstrated its staying power and the JCP and GCP proved they could regularly win 20 to 50 House seats. By the mid-1970s, these five parties seemed to be permanent parts of the Japanese national political system. In the 1972 House elections, the percentage of seats won by the LDP and JSP had dropped to 81.5 percent from the 99.5 percent they had held in 1958.

There was defection in the ranks of the LDP in the summer of 1976. Though minor in terms of numbers, the defection was significant in its impact on the proliferation of new parties. Kōno Yōhei, a young LDP Dietmember, led five other Dietmembers out of the LDP, set up a new Diet-level party, and named it the New Liberal Club (NLC). From this humble start of only a few seats, the NLC exploded to 18 in the December 1976 election and touched off a Kōno and NLC boom in the Japanese media. The NLC boom subsequently encouraged the establishment of other new parties in the 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1983 general elections. The 1983 elections to the upper house (the House of Councillors) had on the ballot twelve new small parties (minUseito), which collectively captured over 15 percent of the vote and won 5 seats (10 percent). Japan now has a seemingly established multiparty system operating on the national level of politics.

Comparing the Prewar and Postwar Party Systems

A comparison of the post-World War II party system with the system that existed in prewar Japan is useful. Considerable scholarly effort has produced a very good perspective on the problems of the prewar Japanese party system. The work, for example, of G. Berger, Peter Duus, Robert A. Scalapino, T. J. Pemple, and others is well done and well known to scholars of Japanese politics.¹

As all political institutions are products of their history, it is necessary to present some generalizations about the prewar party system. Pemple has noted that the prewar party system was inflexible in its retention of ties to rural agricultural and urban commercial bases despite the rise of new social groups. Consequently, the parties of the 1930s were “largely irrelevant, either as the vehicles or the reflections of social changes.”² Pemple suggests that contemporary Japanese parties have the same problem of being “locked into past constituencies.”³ Those “past constituencies” would have been the rural sectors for the LDP and the industrial labor unions for the socialists.

In actuality, then, parties did not have a long history of significant influence in Japanese politics. Following a long emergence period beginning in the decade after the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, it was not until the post-World War I period that cabinets were formed on the basis of electoral results. Yet by the 1930s, parties were effectively excluded from real political power. Sustained party control of Japanese government can be perceived as having begun only in the years since the end of World War II.

Another parallel between the pre- and postwar party systems is the dependence of the conservatives on “big business.” Just as the Jiyuto and Seiyukai were the “financial children” of the zaibatsu (Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and others), the postwar LDP, NLC, and DSP are the dependents of the Keidenran and other business organizations of modem Japan.

In both systems the incumbent parties always won: In neither the prewar nor the postwar period did the incumbent party ever lose an election. Moreover, in both party systems, the incumbent parties never lost power as a result of electoral defeat. As Pempel notes, government changed, but it did so usually prior to the elections.⁴ In addition, the conservative parties in both systems were infiltrated by the bureaucracy. Such support forced the parties to deal with the elite on a day-to-day basis rather than encouraging the development of mass followings or support groups to confront it.

Having observed the similarities between the two party systems, we can now look at their differences. For example, the prewar party system was characterized by the lack of a dominant party. Only 18 percent of the prewar elections produced a majority party, whereas in the post-1955 period, every election (after independents were sorted out) produced an LDP majority. Moreover, during the prewar period, only 18 percent of the governments were actually party cabinets; since the war, all governments have been put together by party leaders.⁵

When compared with the prewar party system, the postwar system is significantly broader in its ideological range. Despite the existence of leftist parties, the prewar party system was overwhelmingly conservative. Leftist parties were seldom allowed to participate fairly in elections. Whereas the prewar system was in essence a mechanism to legitimize the ruling clique, the postwar system, despite certain significant distortions such as malapportionment, is a much fairer representation of the political attitudes of Japan’s electorate.

The postwar Japanese party system is a difficult one to portray on a liberal-conservative continuum. Although most might agree with the placement of the LDP and NLC on the conservative end and the JSP and JCP on the leftist end of the continuum, the so-called center parties might be much more difficult to position correctly. Do the DSP, CGP, and SDF collectively represent the center, the left-center, or the right-center? Or do they really belong in the center at all? Some argue that the DSP and CGP are essentially conservative parties despite their socialist rhetoric. Others ask whether the party farthest to the left in Japan is the JCP or the JSP.

A One-Party Predominant System

The Japanese party system has been described in a variety of ways— that is, as a one-party, a one-and-one-half party, a two-party, and a multiparty system. Actually, part of the explanation for this variety of labels lies more in their “snapshot” nature (i.e., their descriptive function at a particular moment in time) than in the fundamentally different interpretations of the nature of the system. When Robert Scalapino and Junnosuke Masumi surveyed the Japanese political scene in 1960, they observed the two-party system of the ruling LDP, a strong opposition in the JSP, and two very small parties (i.e., the JCP and the newly formed DSP). Thus they described the political scene as a “one-andone-half” party system in its actual operation because the “one” party is always in power and the “half” party is permanently out of power.⁶ Nobutaka Ike correctly perceived that, by the early 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Note on Personal Names
• PART ONE INTRODUCTION TO THE JAPANESE PARTY SYSTEM
• PART TWO THE PARTIES OF THE LEFT
• PART THREE THE PARTIES OF THE CENTER
• PART FOUR THE RULING PARTY OF JAPAN AND ITS FUTURE
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• About the Author and Contributors
• Index