Collected Writings of J. A. A. Stockwin

Part 1

J.A.A. Stockwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135312008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

The volume opens with a detailed autobiographical sketch of the author's original 'meeting with Japan', which began in 1961after taking up a post at ANU, Canberra (the result of a successful response to an advert in the Manchester Guardian). After twenty-one years in Australia, Arthur Stockwin moved back to the UK to take the chair of the then recently-established Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. He was to be in post there also for twenty one years, his retirement coinciding with publication of his Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Japan (Routledge, 2003).

Part I
Japanese Elections

1
Electing the Kyōto Governor: Travail of the Opposition

First published in Asia Pacific Forum, No. 5, 1974, Oriental Press Service Ltd, Tokyo

THE PLACE IS the bank of the Kamo River below the bridge on Sanjo Street opposite the Keihan railway station in Japan's ancient capital city of Kyōto. The time is six o’clock in the evening on April 6, 1974. There is a soft light over the river as a warm spring day draws to a close. The crowds of people crossing the Sanjo bridge on their way home from work pause to watch a folk-dance troupe performing on the river bank below. A row of banners are spread out on the ground nearby. One reads: ‘Unity and solidarity of the working people,’ another: ‘The wisdom of the masses is the voice of tomorrow.’

After each dance is over, a man dressed up as a tiger makes a brief political speech. The tiger-skin symbolises Governor Ninagawa, whose given name, Torazo, includes the ideograph for ‘tiger’ (tora). With careful economy, just one point is hammered home each time the man in the tiger-skin speaks: ‘Look at this beautiful river; it is a river fit for fish to swim in. Think of the contrast with Osaka (where the troupe hails from). In Osaka any fish that has the misfortune to find its way into a river promptly dies from the water pollution.’

Again: ‘A victory for Ninagawa is a victory for progressive local authorities throughout the nation. It would be a national tragedy if he were defeated.’

The next day, April 7, the electors of Kyōto prefecture were to elect their governor for the next four years. The only candidates really in the race were Torazo Ninagawa, a big burly economist with a deep voice and a direct, earthy style of humour, and Kazutaka Ohashi, a local doctor with a smoother and more conventional, but still tough and forthright approach. Ninagawa was seeking the unprecedented in Japanese prefectural politics, to be elected for a seventh four-year term in office. He had first been elected governor in 1950, and had retained the post ever since, through various twists and turns of politics, but always backed by some combination of left-wing parties. No other prefecture in the country could boast a regime so consistently ‘progressive’ in its political allegiance as his, although he drew extensive support from small and medium industry and from farmers—traditionally conservative sections of the electorate.

In 1974, however, the political alliance which had helped to keep Ninagawa in power was rent by serious conflict, with national as well as purely local ramifications. Doubts about the wisdom of Ninagawa's candidacy were spurred in part by his advanced age. In 1974 he was 77, and if he were elected for a seventh term, he would be 81 by the time his term was completed. Even by the normally gerontocratic standards of Japanese politics, this was cause for some concern. (Ohashi, on the other hand, was a comparative stripling at 63.)

More serious, however, were the political problems which had developed for Ninagawa in the course of the previous eighteen months. During the 1950's and early 1960's, Ninagawa's principal political base had been the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), which was the only Opposition party of significance at that time. His opponents were always backed by the ministerial Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), or its predecessors, though in 1958 the LDP attempted to attract Ninagawa to its camp by refraining from putting up a candidate against him, and the Japan Communist Party (JCP)—at that time a minuscule political force—put up a rival candidate instead, who attracted only a small fraction of the votes cast.

During the 1960's, the JSP fell upon hard times, for reasons which are too complicated to go into here. A right-wing splinter group broke away in 1960 and formed the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), which weakened the JSP without developing into a major political force in its own right. In the mid-1960's a new political party, the Komei Party (KP), based on the neo-Buddhist sect the Soka Gakkai, began to contest national and local elections and made inroads into JSP support in big cities. Meanwhile the JSP found itself also under attack from another direction, since the JCP, now under strong and imaginative leadership, was experiencing a revival, and carving out for itself an impressive base of support in many parts of the country. In 1974 the JSP, though still the largest opposition party in terms of seats in the National Diet, was badly organised, inefficiently led, and chronically divided into left and right wings.

SOMETHING OF REVIVAL

Despite their divisions and ineptitudes, however, the opposition parties began to experience something of a revival in the early 1970's, with a succession of victories in local and national elections in the increasingly polluted big cities of Japan's Pacific conurbation. The ‘progressive local authority’ became the rallying cry of an opposition determined to make further advances at the expense of the ruling Liberal-Democrats. The extremely serious inflation of the period following the oil crisis late in 1973 gave them hopes of further reducing, or even of overturning, the LDP majority in the House of Councillors elections scheduled for July 1974.

The task of sinking their differences to the point of effective electoral cooperation proved too difficult for parties which were fiercely competing with each other for a share of vote. In particular the spectacular success of the JCP in the 1972 House of Representatives election (when its number of seats jumped from 14 to 39) led to a marked anti-Communist reaction among sections of the opposition parties. The JSP was divided between those who thought that electoral cooperation with the Communists was the wave of the future and those who preferred to contemplate alliance with the DSP and KP, parties which stood closer to the centre of the political spectrum.

In Kyōto the high point of opposition party cooperation had come in 1970, when Ninagawa, backed jointly by the Socialist and Communist Parties, defeated a Liberal- Democratic opponent by 145,000 votes with an unusually high poll (73%), and so entered his sixth term in office. This was widely heralded as a signal victory for ‘progressive local authorities,’ and was followed by similar victories in Tokyo and elsewhere. In terms of opposition party cooperation, this was a victory for Socialist-Communist alliance, since the DSP and the KP supported the Liberal-Democratic candidate. Increasingly, however, strains were coming to be felt within that alliance, as Communist organisational strength within Kyōto itself grew steadily, and Socialist influence within the Ninagawa administration declined. In the 1972 House of Representatives elections, the JCP polled 24.6% of the vote in Kyōto Prefecture, as against 19% for the Socialists. (The LDP polled 29.8%, the DSP 13.8% and the KP 12.7%.) For the first time in Japanese political history, the Communists had two candidates elected from the same (five-member) constituency.

Local Socialist resentment at becoming the junior partners in Ninagawa's electoral machine was compounded by their experience of what they saw as Communist exclusiveness in the day-to-day affairs of Ninagawa's prefectural administration. At its annual congress held in February, 1973, the local ISP branch resolved not to support Ninagawa's candidacy for a seventh term, and in November the branch decided to put forward its own Chairman, Ohashi, as an alternative candidate. It was not, of course, within the competence of the local branch to decide on a candidate without reference to the Party central headquarters in Tokyo, and so the question of Ohashi's candidacy was put into the hands of the top Party leadership. The Party leaders were thus confronted with an almost insoluble dilemma: how to avoid further fragmentation within the opposition camp (and within the JSP itself) which would irreparably harm the chances of electoral cooperation against the LDP in the forthcoming House of Councillors elections. After abortive attempts to find a ‘third candidate’ acceptable to a substantial section of the opposition (but particularly to the JSP and the KP), the JSP central leadership decided to throw the Party's weight behind Ninagawa as in previous elections. The reasons for this decision involve complex problems of intra-Party factionalism, but also seem to have been based on a calculation (probably erroneous, as it turned out) that Ninagawa was likely to win, with or without Socialist support.

CATASTROPHE

The consequences of this decision were catastrophic from the point of view both of opposition party cooperation, and of unity within the JSP itself. The KP was particularly angry at a decision which it regarded as a ‘breach of trust.’ Ohashi shortly afterwards announced his own independent candidacy, and was backed by the large majority of the local JSP branch. Ohashi and his closest supporters were expelled from the Party, and Ohashi resigned his House of Councillors seat, which was subsequently won at a by-election by a Liberal-Democrat.

The election for the Kyōto governorship was thus fought between Ninagawa, supported by the Communists, officially by the Socialists but in fact only by a small minority of the local branch, and also by the main trade union federation Sohyo and other local organisations. Ohashi ran with the backing of the majority of the local Socialist branch, the DSP (and the Dōmei trade union federation), with tacit support from the KP and even the LDP (which refrained from putting up a candidate of its own.)

When the results were announced, Ninagawa had won, but only just. The difference between the two candidates was exactly 4,500 votes, or 0.4% of valid votes cast. The turnout was down to 63.8%, no doubt reflecting voter confusion at the complexity of events leading up to the election. The ‘national tragedy’ of his defeat had been narrowly averted, but the adverse effects of the episode on the morale of the opposition parties as a whole would be felt for some time to come.

2
Shifting Alignments in Japanese Party Politics: The April 1974 Election for Governor of Kyōto Prefecture

First published in Asian Survey, Vol. XIV, No. 10, October 1974, University of California Press

THE DOMINANT FEATURE of Japanese party polities over the past decade is the continued success of the conservatively oriented Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in maintaining itself in power despite challenges from the opposition parties. In the mid- 1950s, the formation of a government in which the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) was a major participant seemed a real prospect. Three main factors, however, conspired to prevent this happening. The first, and most important, was the extremely rapid economic growth which extended from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The bulk of the population received unprecedented increases in its standard of living over this period, and this undoubtedly blunted the appeal of alternative forms of government.

The second was the success of the LDP in retaining and developing its cohesion as a political machine. The Party was beset by formidable problems of internal factionalism, and yet was able to overcome these to the point of containing its own divisions within a loose yet reasonably firm organizational structure. The third factor was the contrasting inability of the opposition to remain intact. Whereas in the late 1950s the JSP was the only opposition party of significance, by the early 1970s it was merely primus inter pares, having to share the anti-LDP vote with three other parties. Of these the Kōmei Party (KP) and especially the Japan Communist Party (JCP) presented a formidable challenge to its traditional base of support, while a small proportion of its potential supporters vote for the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP).

For the LDP, however, success brought its own problems. Economic growth had a healthy effect on standards of living, but was accompanied by urban overcrowding, fantastic land prices, and such phenomena as photochemical smog and mercury-contaminated fish. Environmentalism became popular and the Government found itself under pressure to place curbs on hitherto largely uncontrolled industrial expansion, especially in polluted urban areas. In national eleetions the LDP percentage of the vote was steadily if slowly declining, and now fell below 50%, ¹ although the imbalance in the value of a vote between urban and rural constituencies (approximately 500% at its most extreme) gave the LDP some 60% of the seats in the House of Representatives. The LDP also experienced a period of serious leadership crisis during the final year of Sato's prime ministership (1971–72) and this was not completely resolved by the transition to Tanaka in 1972.

It was in the big cities that electoral support for the LDP was becoming seriously eroded. This was happening in both national and local elections, but the most heartening development for the opposition was that LDP candidates were being replaced by opposition-backed candidates in local elective offices in many urban areas. By 1974, prefectural governors had been elected with opposition party backing in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyōto, Saitama and Okinawa, while anti-Government candidates had become mayors of over 200 cities, including Yokohama, Kawasaki, Nagoya, Kōobe and Sendai. The sweeping victory in 1971 in Tokyo of Minobe Ryōkichi,² an Independent backed by the JSP and the JCP, was symbolic of the ‘progressive local authority’ (kakushin jichitai), seen by many as a base from which the opposition parties could hope eventually to overthrow and replace the LDP at the national level.

During the first six months of 1974, opposition hopes focused upon the prospect of annihilating the LDP majority in the House of Councillors elections in July. If this could be achieved, the opposition would have a veto on Government bills, and the LDP could no longer use its majority to pass legislation objectionable to the opposition without taking their views into account. The inflationary situation in the aftermath of the 1973–74 oil crisis (though serious inflation was already making itself felt before the crisis broke), and a sharp fall in Tanaka's popularity with the electorate since he became Prime Minister, added substance to these hopes. The prospect of replacing the LDP in office seemed at last no idle dream.

The dream, however, once more appeared to recede, largely as a result of acute divisions between the opposition parties and also within the JSP itself. For several months left wing discord focused upon one painful and complex issue, the election for governor of Kyōto Prefecture, scheduled for April 7, 1974. Kyōto, though usually considered traditional and conservative in social outlook, had been a political stronghold of the left ever since Ninagawa Torazo was elected prefectural governor in 1950. Ninagawa, dependent upon Socialist and, increasingly,...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: JAPANESE ELECTIONS
• PART II: JAPANESE POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM
• PART III: THE JAPANESE POLITICAL SYSTEM AND POLITICAL SYSTEM REFORM
• PART IV: POLITICAL FACTIONALISM