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1 Introduction
The politician Ozawa Ichirō, and his political significance
Ozawa Ichirō was the axis on which Japanese politics turned for more than two decades. Until the triumphant return of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to office in December 2012, he was a prime mover and shaker in the political world, a larger-than-life figure whose presence could not be ignored even when he disappeared from public view. Admired and reviled in almost equal measure, Ozawa has been the most debated and yet least understood politician in Japan. Little agreement can be found amongst the many who have debated his patent political assets and palpable political flaws.
Ozawa’s political persona and influence on the conduct of politics in Japan make for a complex story. The dominant image he projects is that of the quintessential political boss or power broker, controlling people, votes and key party resources as well as important decisions of state from behind closed doors. Hence, his attracting of the classic label ‘shadow shogun’ (yamishōgun), a concept that reaches back into Japan’s feudal past when military dictators, or shoguns, wielded the real political power by manipulating emperors from behind the scenes. In its modern incarnation, ‘shadow shogun’ depicts both a preference for backroom dealings and an ability to exert considerable power and even control over governments without occupying any formal government office. It certainly encapsulates key aspects of the way in which Ozawa practises politics.
Understanding Ozawa, however, and his impact on Japanese politics requires deeper analysis than simply resorting to labels from the Japanese vernacular.1 Ozawa presents a paradox: an old-school backroom fixer from the LDP who set out to reform many aspects of Japanese politics, particularly entrenched power structures and political institutions, but without discarding his old political habits.
The key to understanding Ozawa lies in the concepts of ‘old’ and ‘new’ politics. Ozawa was a politician who preached ‘new’ politics and was the most important political reformer of his generation. However, in the way he conducted himself as a politician, he remained the embodiment of the unreformed ‘old’ political system.
Ozawa’s contribution: new rules, old practices
Ozawa had a unique role in shaping not only political developments in Japan, but also the nature of politics itself. His influence was ‘systemic’, extending beyond the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of politics to the ‘how’ - to the rules of the game and thus to how the Japanese political system actually functions. Ozawa achieved this by acting as an architect of political system change. He contributed substantially to the major modifications and adjustments in the Japanese political system from the early 1990s onwards, not least by formulating prescriptions for political reform. He devoted energy to placing proposals for systemic reform in the public arena and on to the policy agenda of governments. He was unequalled amongst Japanese politicians for articulating and then implementing plans for wide-ranging reform of Japan’s political institutions. In this way, he helped to reshape the electoral system, political funding rules, the evolution of the party system, the nature of executive government, the roles and powers of bureaucrats, and the conduct of parliamentary and policymaking processes. Ozawa not only possessed a reforming vision but also played a pivotal role in achieving significant change in line with that vision.
Ozawa deserves comparison with former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō in this regard. The key difference between the two was the nature and rationale of their respective contributions to political reform. Koizumi certainly changed the way politics and policymaking were conducted in a number of important ways, but his primary agenda was economic structural reform, not the structural transformation of Japanese politics. Moreover, in pursuing his quest for economic structural reform, he relied primarily on exploiting to the full existing political mechanisms and powers rather than attempting to change them by enacting systemic reforms.2 His view of political reform was instrumentalist: it was a means to an end. Even his much-vaunted goal of ‘destroying the LDP’, which he continued to lead rather than founding a new party based on neo-liberal principles, was a threat to the old guard in the party to support his reforms or else.
Ozawa, who also shared Koizumi’s goal of destroying the LDP (by leaving it first, in contrast to Koizumi), set out to make alterations to Japan’s political structure beyond any contemplated by Koizumi. Like Koizumi, Ozawa also had an agenda for neo-liberal economic reform such as deregulation, privatisation, and tax and trade policy reform. However, these were transient goals to which he failed to dedicate himself as policy priorities, unlike Koizumi, for whom they remained long-held ambitions. Other reforms that Ozawa espoused related to social policy and even fundamental attitudinal changes to what one might call Japan’s political culture, which Koizumi did not pursue at all. Nevertheless, Ozawa’s economic and social policy reforms remained largely declaratory goals and statements of good intentions rather than concrete policy objectives. Although they amply demonstrated his economic reform credentials in the early 1990s, his economic policy standpoint changed dramatically over time. As a reformer, he was primarily dedicated to changing the structure of power in the political system and how politics was conducted rather than the content of government policy and the economic and social principles underpinning it.
If Ozawa’s unique moulding influence on Japanese politics stemmed from his role as an architect of political system change, it also derived from the impact of his modus operandi on other politicians and on political institutions and processes. Beyond his role in catalysing a series of political reforms, Ozawa’s own political behaviour, style, methods, practices and choices had a wide-ranging influence on many aspects of Japanese politics including the nature of political leadership, policymaking structures and processes, election campaigning and vote mobilisation, the activities of intra-party groups, political fundraising and deal making, and clientelistic connections between the political and construction worlds. In these and other areas, Ozawa was frequently a force for political regression rather than political reform: re-energising and restoring power to intra-party factions; strengthening the role of key party executives in allocating government patronage; undermining ministerial prerogatives and the power of the cabinet in policymaking; conducting ‘politics behind closed doors’ (misshitsu seiji); exploiting government-funded public works as a tradable political commodity; practising ‘money-intensive politics’;3 and allocating budgetary largesse for short-term political and electoral gain - to name a few. Ozawa was, therefore, pivotal in entrenching some of the Japanese political system’s singular pathologies, particularly those inherited from the era of LDP governance under former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei.
Ozawa thus played a dual and contradictory role: he was both an agent of political reform and an agent of path dependence in Japanese politics.4 These contradictory aspects of Ozawa’s character and contribution make him a subject worthy of further analysis and explanation. They may help to explain why, despite many systemic changes to Japanese political institutions, political behaviours have not yet fully adjusted to these changes and some old pre-reform patterns are still in evidence.
Models of ‘old’ and ‘new’ politics
This book encapsulates Ozawa’s paradoxical and conflicting contributions in terms of two contrasting models of ‘old’ and ‘new’ politics. He embodied these models by advocating, pursuing and assisting in the implementation of new politics goals, while, at the same time, continuing to conduct old politics, particularly in the way in which he built and exercised his power. In some cases, he simply transferred old habits to a new set of institutional arrangements and political contexts, even using old politics methods to achieve new politics goals. Hence, operating within new politics systems did not necessarily lead to changes in Ozawa’s political style and behaviour. Nor did it allow the new institutions to become fully embedded and functioning in the way they were originally intended. In this respect, Ozawa appears not to have honoured the intent of his own reforms and, in some ways, even to have betrayed it. Despite his rhetoric and contribution to political system change, he remained the same old Ozawa, unreconstructed and unrepentant in his attachment to old ways and approaches. He contributed to political system change, but he himself did not change as a politician.
Understanding Ozawa therefore requires an appreciation of how he practised old politics while acting as a change maker to bring about new politics. He represents a genuine enigma in his peculiar combination of mutually contradictory roles and methods. To some extent, these contradictions are captured in oxymoronic epithets such as ‘creative destroyer’, ‘disruptive reformer’, ‘heretic authoritarian’, and ‘radical conservative’. However, not even these epithets provide a definitive understanding of the man as a political actor. Ozawa confounds analysts who cannot agree on his true character or motivations. On the one hand, his stated goals and demonstrated commitment were patently for political reform. In other respects, his unchanged conduct as a politician suggested that he remained locked in an old politics paradigm. The problem of understanding the ‘real’ Ozawa thus arises because he remained a practitioner of old politics despite his rhetorical agenda of change to bring about new politics. At times this manifested as a profound disjunction between what Ozawa said and what he did.
At the heart of the Ozawa enigma is, therefore, a fundamental question about Ozawa’s primary motivations and whether he was a genuine political reformer. Was he a reformer by conviction or by strategic choice? Was he an authentic political reformer whose ambition was to use his power and position in order to bring change to what he has denounced as ossified and dysfunctional aspects of the Japanese political system? In short, did he seek power primarily to enact reforms? Or, were his reform goals simply disguised power-seeking objectives? Was he a supreme political manipulator who cynically used the cause of reform for his own narrow political ends? Did his stated goals obscure his real goals? Was his prior ambition consistently to wield untrammelled political power? In short, which were the ends and which were the means? Ozawa’s actions could so often be interpreted or explained in different ways - in terms of either power seeking or reform seeking, or even a mixture of both. This book seeks to illuminate Ozawa’s true motivations and character, and untangle the complex elements of old and new politics that he represents.
How are ‘old’ and ‘new’ politics to be defined? Table 1.1 outlines in a systematic and contrastive way the conceptual paradigms that are relevant to this study of Ozawa. They are generalised constructs of political system attributes distilled from Ozawa’s political reform programme and his actual conduct as a politician. The ‘new’ model of politics is encapsulated in Ozawa-inspired reforms, in his writings and statements, and in his stated goals for reform of the political system. They encompass the systemic attributes designed by Ozawa to produce a new kind of politics in Japan and his aspirations for a reformed polity.5
Counterposed to the ‘new’ model is the ‘old’ model of politics, which can be discerned in Ozawa’s actions, methods and modus operandi. It is essentially the paradigm of politics that was in evidence during the almost uninterrupted rule of the LDP from 1955 until 2009. At its core, it embodies the political style and practices of Tanaka Kakuei, Ozawa’s mentor and the original shadow shogun of post-war Japanese politics. Ozawa has continued the Tanaka ‘line’ in many aspects of his politics. Like Tanaka also, Ozawa represents ‘a particular figure as a type or pattern [that captures] the essence of an age’.6 Ozawa is important to understanding Japanese politics from the late 1980s until the early 2010s, just as Tanaka was the key to understanding Japanese politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
Actors and political institutions
In terms of social science methodology, the theoretical premise of this work is that individuals influence the way in which political institutions work in any given historical, political and cultural setting, how these institutions evolve and develop, and why particular political conventions, norms and practices persist. While institutions clearly shape the behaviour of political actors through path dependence and other mechanisms, at the same time they are themselves significantly influenced by these actors. In the technical language, institutions are not simply an exogenous given because the rules that constitute them are ‘provided by the players themselves’.7
Table 1.1 The Ozawa models of old and new politics
From this perspective, an institutional account of Japanese politics - an outline of its principal structures, conventions, norms and rules - cannot fully explain how Japanese politics works, nor how it has changed over time. It is necessary also to take account of the shaping role of individual political actors, particularly political leaders and other powerful political figures who may set out to alter various aspects of how a political system operates. These are individuals whose behaviours mould both structured and unstructured institutions, and the way these institutions change and evolve in particular national settings.
This approach therefore rejects institutional determinism, which argues that both political behaviour and policy outcomes are influenced by their institutional settings. In short, not everything is structural; some may be individual.8 The approach also rejects electoral determinism, which explains the nature of party systems simply by reference to electoral system factors. Electoral rules cannot fully account for the way in which Japanese political parties form and operate, and how the party system is organised and develops.9 Both institutional and electoral explanations ignore the role of individual politicians as independent variables - in explaining, for example, how particular policymaking and electoral systems function, or how parties organise themselves.
However, rather than focusing on the shaping role of groups or actors or general categories of actors, this book is concerned with one particular political actor - Ozawa Ichirō. Ozawa had a formative influence on Japanese politics for the two major reasons noted earlier. First, he was a principal player in the drama of p...
