Japan Decides 2012

The Japanese General Election

R. Pekkanen, S. Reed, E. Scheiner, R. Pekkanen, S. Reed, E. Scheiner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349467655, 9781137348517
• eBook ISBN: 9781137346124
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2012 election in Japan ejected the governing DPJ and returned the LDP overwhelmingly to power while brand new parties pulled in millions of voters. This book explains what happened, why it happened and what it means. International experts analyze the election results, parties strategies, gender issues, policy implications and more.

Part I

Introduction

1

Introduction

Robert Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, and Ethan Scheiner

Something old and something new. The 2012 election saw new political parties burst onto the scene and shake up Japan’s political landscape. That’s the new part, obviously. But the same election also saw the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) return to power, a position they had held for all but 14 months of their 54-year existence before the 2009 election.

The 2012 poll was important for numerous reasons. For one thing, although it appeared as the campaign opened that the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) would be a big loser in the election, little else was easy to predict. The 2009 election had been a watershed, seeming to mark the introduction of a competitive (roughly) two-party system after years of LDP dominance, but the new DPJ government was as unsuccessful as any in Japanese history. The LDP, meanwhile, had been crushed in 2009—with some observers even questioning its ability to survive—but in the years that followed played the role of the active (if intransigent) opposition. Confronted with a political world with two such unattractive options, political entrepreneurs sought to shake up the system further, and introduced new parties that could challenge the leaders in 2012. With such a confusing array of alternatives—including two who had proved themselves unable to maintain popular support—it was unclear just what would happen in the 2012 election.

In addition, insofar as Japan faces significant public policy problems today, the outcome of elections—which determines the composition of governments—is terribly important. Japan is in the midst of its most intense conflicts with its neighbors—most notably China and Korea—in decades. Clean-up and restoration projects remain after the devastating 2011 triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant accident), and has resulted in serious rethinking of the country’s nuclear power policy plans. And, most of all, Japan has now completed not one, but two “lost” decades, with low economic growth and little optimism about its economic future. The country has important decisions to make about its willingness to trade openly with foreign countries and firms and about the extent to which it will support its less competitive economic sectors. Japanese income and economic inequality are at their highest points in decades, the public pension system is a mess, and the government generally has monumental decisions to make about how to promote economic growth both without devastating a large, internationally uncompetitive economic sector and without undercutting political bases of support.

Also, even aside from the sheer importance of the election itself in Japan, this is an election that is important to analyze. First, the election demonstrates the significant role electoral rules can play in electoral outcomes. The LDP won a huge majority, despite earning fewer votes than in its 2009 shellacking. This was only possibly because of the majoritarian electoral rules, and it is important to explain how this seemingly counter-intuitive result came about. Second, the election itself was confusing to many voters. There were so many new parties and so many candidates, that it was hard even for veteran political observers to keep up. Many readers of this book will be familiar with the tables, that newspapers regularly post during campaigns, which list each party’s policy positions. With 12 parties, the policy descriptions in the newspapers were shorter than usual in 2012 because they required too much physical space to lay out more complete information.

In short, 2012 is a great election to kick off this new Japanese General Election series. Japanese elections these days are pretty exciting affairs, even if they are hard to follow closely sometimes. In 2012, newspaper readers will have seen parties they had never heard of and wondered, “What is the Japan Restoration Party? The Tomorrow Party of Japan? Your Party?” This volume and this series will provide answers to such questions and keep readers up-to-date concerning other important questions, such as, “Who is Ichirou Ozawa?”, “Where did the DPJ come from?”, “How can the LDP go from a landslide victory in 2005 to a landslide defeat in 2009, and back to a landslide victory in 2012?”

Summary of the chapters

We (and readers) are fortunate to have many of the top English-language Japanese politics specialists in the world contribute chapters to this volume. We divide these chapters into four parts: Part I provides an introduction to the 2012 election, offering background and a basic summary of the results. Part II introduces the reader to the most significant parties contesting the election. Part III provides analysis of recent Japanese politician behavior, and the district constraints that they face. And, finally, Part IV discusses specific policy and governance issues that have shaped electoral politics in the lead up to the 2012 election.

More specifically, Part I helps the reader generally make sense of recent events in Japanese politics. In Chapter 2, Pekkanen and Reed detail the events—from the DPJ’s smashing victory in 2009 to the 2012 campaign—in Japanese politics that set the scene for the LDP’s 2012 return to power. In Chapter 3, Benjamin Nyblade discusses the major starting point of the DPJ’s 2012 collapse—the splintering that occurred in the party as scores of incumbent politicians left the party to form new alternatives. In Chapter 4, Steven R. Reed, Ethan Scheiner, Daniel Smith, and Michael Thies summarize the results of the 2012 election and highlight how the LDP benefited greatly from displeasure with the DPJ, which produced a split anti-LDP vote.

Part II discusses in detail the core components of party politics since 2009. In Chapter 5, Masahisa Endo, Robert Pekkanen, and Steven R. Reed explain how the LDP planted the seeds of its own comeback through opposition tactics that contributed to and publicized the failures of the DPJ. Numerous other chapters in Japan Decides 2012 address a variety of features of the DPJ’s candidate and campaign strategies, as well as policy positioning. However, in Chapter 6, Robert Weiner addresses the question of just what makes up the core of the DPJ at this point, especially after the party faced such a dramatic shellacking in 2012. In Chapter 7, Steven R. Reed makes sense of the confusing mass of new parties that emerged in the lead up to the 2012 election, detailing the causes of each new party birth and highlighting the significant differences between the parties. Finally, in Chapter 8, Axel Klein explains how Komeito—the LDP’s coalition partner for more than the past decade— has managed to survive as a small alternative in a system that primarily advantages large parties.

Part III examines the strategies and behaviors of politicians and parties in recent years in Japanese politics and looks at the significance of regional differences across the nation in shaping electoral outcomes. In Chapter 9, Daniel Smith examines the characteristics of the candidates who ran for office in 2012 and finds little significant change from past nomination patterns. Most notably, there continue to be few female candidacies, the LDP continues to promote “legacy” candidacies (i.e. politicians who inherited their district seat from a family member), and even the new parties followed nomination patterns that were similar to those of the DPJ and LDP. In Chapter 10, Kuniaki Nemoto details how DPJ and LDP sitting Diet members have become more active within the legislature, engaging in greater open questioning of the government and introducing more individual pieces of legislation.

In Chapters 11 and 12, respectively, Ray Christensen and Kay Shimizu indicate ways in which a long-maintained political divide between urban and rural regions of Japan did not have as meaningful an electoral effect in 2012 as in the past. Christensen’s chapter examines district malapportionment in Japan, which provides more seats (per voter) in less populated rural areas than in more heavily populated urban ones, but indicates that such malapportionment has not significantly altered electoral outcomes. Shimizu’s chapter provides evidence that the long-important differences between urban and rural areas have become increasingly muted in recent years.

In Chapter 13, Matthew Carlson examines the growing number of campaign finance and sex scandals that have emerged in Japan in recent years, in particular, he argues, as a result of changing campaign finance regulations and efforts by the LDP and DPJ to gain a competitive political edge. In Chapter 14, Sherry Martin Murphy details the significant decline in the number of House of Representatives’ (HR) seats held by women.

Finally, Part IV delivers a series of chapters that introduce the reader to central parties’ policy positions and actions, as well as highlight important governance issues that have emerged in Japanese politics over the past couple of decades. In Chapter 15, Paul Midford indicates important ways in which parties now look to public opinion to help shape Japan’s foreign policy, particularly as such policy has played a major part in demonstrating party competence (or lack thereof) in an electoral context in which party image has come to take on great importance. Handling the economy is a similarly important issue on which voters judge parties, and in Chapter 16 Yves Tiberghien provides the backdrop on Japan’s political economy, assesses DPJ management, and evaluates the LDP’s “Abenomics” policy. In Chapter 17, Christian Winkler examines the role of ideology in shaping policy and party, a matter that has already attracted considerable attention with the LDP victory and JRP gains. Agricultural policy and the farm vote have long been critical in Japan’s electoral landscape, and Aurelia George Mulgan tells us in Chapter 18 how these played out in 2012. In Chapter 19, appropriately the concluding chapter in the volume, Michael Thies and Yuki Yanai provide an important analysis of how Japan’s bicameral system affects governance, offering a new framework for understanding how parties govern subsequent to HR victory.

This final chapter points us already in the direction of the next election, the July 2013 House of Councillors (HC) contest. At the time of this writing in January 2013, we cannot yet forecast the results of that election. However, the learned analyses in this volume give us greater insight not only into the 2012 election itself but also into the future direction of Japanese politics.

2

Japanese Politics Between the 2009 and 2012 Elections

Robert Pekkanen and Steven R. Reed

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a smashing majority (308 out of 480 seats) in the 2009 Lower House election. This historic election marked the first time that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) did not win a plurality (at 119 seats). In 2012, the Japanese voters reversed the parties’ fortunes, awarding the LDP a huge majority (296) and humbling the DPJ (57 seats). Over their three-and–a-half-year reign, the DPJ would suffer numerous defections, finishing with only 230 seats when the election was called. The DPJ also managed to lose the confidence of the Japanese public. The main culprits were the mishandling of the US–Japan alliance (by the first DPJ PM, Yukio Hatoyama); ineffective response to the triple disasters of 11 March 2011 (by his successor Naoto Kan); controversy over the raising of the consumption tax (the third DPJ PM, Yoshihiko Noda); and criticism over the handling of a territorial dispute with China (the Senkaku Islands—Diaoyutai to China and Tiaoyutai to Taiwan). Several new parties emerged in this three-year period, and a total of a dozen parties contested the election. Most notably, the rise of the Japan Restoration Party meant that the DPJ maintained its lead as Japan’s second party over this newcomer by a mere two seats (57–55) in the House of Representatives (HR).

The 2009 election marked the first time that the LDP did not win a plurality of seats in the HR election and only the second time that it was forced to the opposition bench. The DPJ administration was greeted with high hopes. A Yomiuri poll found 68 percent of respondents were pleased with the result (2 September 2009, web). When asked why the DPJ has won such an overwhelming victory, however, the answer was clearly not support for DPJ policy proposals. The Asahi poll found that 81 percent of respondents explained the DPJ victory as voters wanting a change from the LDP administration as opposed to only 38 percent crediting support for DPJ policies (2 September 2009). Similarly, the Yomiuri poll found that 46 percent explained the result as a rejection of the Asou administration, 37 percent as the desire for alternation in power, and only 10 percent as support for DPJ policies. The Hatoyama administration was given the chance to prove itself, starting with 71 percent in the Asahi poll (Asahi, 17 September 2009).

Having run on a slogan of politicians exercising greater leadership over the bureaucracy, the new DPJ administration quickly initiated a series of moves to reduce the power of the bureaucracy. Perhaps the most popular was budget line item meetings (jigyou shiwake). A group of Diet members and selected private experts, along with a Ministry of Finance (MOF) bureaucrat, questioned bureaucrats about the merits of individual programs and voted on whether those programs should be continued or whether their budgets should be cut. The sessions were shown on television and often produced dramatic confrontations between critical politicians and citizens on the one hand and defensive bureaucrats on the other. An Asahi poll found that 76 percent of respondents approved of the DPJ’s attempts to reduce waste (Asahi, 15 November 2009). The budget line item meetings did reveal a great deal of waste but it proved a good deal more difficult to actually reduce budgets and eliminate that waste. Similarly, attacks on the post-retirement employment of bureaucrats (amakudari) were popular and informative but not visibly effective. The DPJ also moved on this agenda by abolishing the Administrative Vice-Minister’s Council (jimujikan kaigi), preventing bureaucrats from holding press conferences and requiring bureaucrats to keep records of their meeting with politicians.

The first serious drop in the polls for the Hatoyama administration occurred in December according to Asahi (20 December 2009). A slow decline from 71 to 65 and then to 63 suddenly accelerated to 48 percent support. The drop was particularly dramatic among independents (those who do not support any party), with support dropping from 39 to 24 percent and non-support rising from 27 to 45 percent. The problem was that 74 percent found Hatoyama lacking in leadership. In particular, 60 percent disapproved of his handling of the Okinawa base problem. Hatoyama had decided on his own to make promises not made in the manifesto to reduce Okinawa’s base burden, promises that proved unfeasible and were perceived as irresponsibly raising and dashing the hopes of Okinawans while simultaneously antagonizing Japan’s lone ally, the United States. Hatoyama had naively opened the door on a no-win conversation without a clear idea of how to bring about resolution (Midford, this volume).

Support fell the following month to 42 percent. This time the problem was Secretary-General Ozawa’s political finances, something that would plague the party until Ozawa left to start a new party in 2012. Hatoyama defended his secretary-general to the point of seeming to criticize the public prosecutors even as polls showed over three-quarters of respondents in favor of Ozawa’s resigning that post.

Support rates continued to fall, reaching 17 percent in the May 2010 poll, numbers not seen since the Fukuda (19 percent) and Asou administrations (13 percent) (Asahi, 30 May 2010). Again, the problem was Hatoyama’s handling of the Okinawa base issue. Finally, Hatoyama and Ozawa resigned to be replaced by the DPJ’s original leader, Naoto Kan. The news was greeted with a bounce in DPJ support rates. Asahi reported that 62 percent of respondents thought that Hatoyama’s resignation was a good thing and 85 percent thought the same of Ozawa’s r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Political Parties
• Part III: Campaigning, Candidates, and Districts
• Part IV: Governance and Policy
• Index