Japan's Dysfunctional Democracy: The Liberal Democratic Party and Structural Corruption

The Liberal Democratic Party and Structural Corruption

Roger W. Bowen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315290317
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Norteamérica

This is a short, readable, and incisive study of the corrosive effects of corruption in one of the world's major liberal democracies. It explores the disconnect between democratic rule and undemocratic practices in Japan since the Second World War, with special attention to the corrupt practices of various prime ministers and the resulting sense of political cynicism and powerlessness among the general public.

1
Introduction

"Dysfunctional democracy" resembles "dysfunctional family" in the respect that both democracy and the family persist, even when they do not work very well. Japan's democracy is real, but it suffers from personalism, graft, cronyism, favoritism, bribery, money politics, factionalism, and collusion—all elements of what the Japanese refer to as "structural corruption" (kozo oshoku). Corruption in Japan is pervasive, recurring, and harmful to democracy; and is "structural" because it is built into the way politics works. It endures in part because Japan's politicians who engage in acts of corruption are nearly always reelected and consequently have little reason to change their behavior or practices. Voters and the press periodically express their disgust and call for reform, yet little changes even when new reform laws are enacted. Law-makers themselves, especially those in the historically dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), egregiously break the very laws that they make.

Singling out Japan for its failings as a democracy is difficult on the heels of the 2000 presidential election in the United States. The Republican Party Presidential Convention nominated George W. Bush, the scion of one of America's oldest and most distinguished Republican families. Bush probably got the nomination, and the election as well, in part because of his family name, but also because he outspent all of his competitors combined. He could do this because he chose to bypass federal rules on spending limits that would have applied had he accepted federal campaign finance funding; instead, Bush chose to rely entirely on campaign funds raised privately. In this era of "soft money," that is, donations to the political parties rather than to the candidates (whose campaign spending is limited by law), Bush and his Republicans fed at the trough of big business campaign contributions. Those corporations and individuals, 139 in all—each of whom donated more than $250,000—are called "The Regents." They include Phillip Morris, the tobacco giant; the National Rifle Association, a gun lobby; and Enron Corporation, the scandal-ridden energy and commodities conglomerate from Bush's home state of Texas. According to the New York Times, only 739 contributors provided two-thirds of the Republicans' $137 million in soft money raised just prior to the presidential election.¹ Those same contributors thereby purchased access to Republican lawmakers and can expect sympathetic treatment from the Bush administration. Many of these same corporations hedged their bets, of course, and also courted the Democratic Party nominee, A1 Gore. Instead of "The Regents," the Democrats created a group of eighteen individuals and corporations called "Leadership 2000"; each gave $350,000 or more to the party. Third-party candidate, consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader, characterized the effect of corporate money on mainstream politics as having created a "political corpocracy."

At the same time that the Republicans and their corporate benefactors were wining and dining one another at their party conventions, in Japan two episodes of money politics were being reported in the press. In one case Kuze Kimitaka, the head of the government's Financial Reconstruction Commission and an LDP member of the upper house, was forced to resign his cabinet seat following an admission that he had violated the Political Fund Control Law by accepting a 100-million-yen (about $1 million) donation from a private developer nine years earlier; over a several-year period he had also received free office space and consultant fees, valued at ¥million, from a major bank.

Kuze is a former civil servant who "parachuted" into the parliament (Diet) from the bureaucracy.² To get himself elected, he had used the ¥100 million he solicited from the developer to pay the LDP member-ship dues for some 33,000 LDP members associated with a particular Buddhist sect. Why? To be elected to a seat in the upper house (the House of Councillors) of the Diet on the LDP's proportional representation roster, a candidate must have the support of at least 20,000 party members. Because of declining membership in the LDP, probably reflecting growing voter alienation, would-be legislators like Kuze rely on corporate donations to pay the ¥4,000 membership fee required of all new party members. An opposition party member decried such practices as a "hotbed of back-scratching alliances between politicians and businesses."³ As a result of the scandal, Kuze resigned his position but kept his Diet seat.

At the same time that the Republican and Democrat party conventions were taking place in the United States, another political scandal was unfolding in Japan. It concerned Nakao Eiichi, a former minister of construction who served in the LDP cabinet of Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro (1996–98). Nakao admitted in December 2000 that he had solicited millions of yen from a construction company for financing his own election campaign and that of his son (who today has a seat along with his father in the Diet). The ¥60 million that Nakao squeezed from the construction company and gave to his son was not reported by his son, in violation of the Public Offices Election Law; only a statute of limitations has kept Nakao's son from being arrested. This case, unfortunately, is reminiscent of the indictment of Nakamura Kishiro, LDP minister of construction in the early 1990s, who accepted a $96,000 bribe from a construction firm that was trying to avoid prosecution for rigging bids on construction projects.

Neither of the two more recent money politics (kinken seiji) scandals in Japan is unusual. Indeed, political scandal in Japan is commonplace. Rarely did a month pass during the 1990s when a score or more instances of political, corporate, or government (bureaucratic) corruption were not reported in the Japanese press. That, and the failing economy, help explain why so few Japanese express any confidence in their political system—only 17.7 percent compared with 45 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup–Yomiuri poll of 24 December 1998.⁴

But if the Japanese public has lost confidence in its government because of corruption, it is nonetheless forgiving of certain individual politicians who themselves have proved to be corrupt. In another recent opinion poll by the Yomiuri Shimbun, ordinary Japanese were asked to rank "those people who have done the most to help Japan succeed since the Second World War." Who led the pack? Remarkably, the leader was a two-year-term LDP premier of the early 1970s who had been imprisoned as a young politician in the late 1940s for corruption and twenty-five years later was found guilty of accepting bribes from the Lockheed Corporation while serving as prime minister: Tanaka Kakuei. Ranked behind Tanaka were three other conservative prime ministers—Yoshida Shigeru, Sato Eisaku, and Ikeda Hayato—all of whom were known to the Japanese public as having engaged in corrupt practices. The fifth person who helped Japan most was U.S. General Douglas Mac Arthur: He had headed the military occupation of Japan right after World War II.⁵

Even though most of Japan's postwar prime ministers have been tainted by scandal, as will be shown in a later chapter, the public's high regard for Tanaka Kakuei, the most corrupt of postwar prime ministers, is difficult to square with the public's declining confidence in its government. This contradiction hints at a deeper problem within Japanese democracy, that is, the absence of the sort of democratic disposition that is unforgiving of political corruption.

In "A Quarter Century of Declining Confidence," Susan Pharr, Robert Putnam, and Russell Dalton have written that "public confidence in the performance of representative institutions in Western Europe, North America, and Japan has declined" over the past twenty-five years, even though the public's "commitment to democratic values is higher than ever." Pharr, the Japanologist of the three, points out, however, that "Japanese citizens' disillusionment with government and political institutions has, if anything, proven to be more persistent than elsewhere in the Trilateral world."⁶ A major reason for this example of "Japanese exceptionalism," I argue, is that in Japan the steady parade of corrupt politicians who usually escape punishment, is probably much greater than any found in Western Europe or North America. In brief, the Japanese have more to be "disillusioned" about, yet, curiously, the Japanese voting public is itself responsible for electing corrupt political leaders.

To be sure, the scandals in recent years involving Ezer Weizman, the former president of Israel, Helmut Kohl, the former chancellor of Germany, and Charles Haughey, the former premier of Ireland remind us that Japan is not the only nation disgraced by elected leaders who accepted illegal donations from business interests seeking favorable legislation or government contracts. Americans might well recall the 100-plus government officials in the Reagan administration (1981–89) who were involved in scandal.⁷ Japan does not, therefore, have a monopoly on political wrongdoing by highly placed officials. But Japan does seem to have more instances of such wrongdoing, with more problematic consequences, the most dire of which is the public's steadily declining faith in its elected leaders, as reflected by the enormous growth in nonaligned or independent voters, declining voting rates, and the rapid turnover in prime ministers.

Japan's democracy is young and not exactly homegrown. Democratic roots are neither deep nor strong in Japan. Although Japan has enormous strength as the second largest economy in the world, it remains, as Frank Gibney described it decades ago, a "fragile superpower."⁸ Its fragility is due to its economic decline of the 1990s, symbolized by the worst indebtedness of any major power; its slowness in adapting to a global, deregulated economy; and, among growing social problems, the expansion of its aging population at the same time that its fertility rate (i.e., future taxpayers) is declining. Add to that picture the current movement to rewrite Japan's very democratic constitution, rising nationalistic sentiment, and the virtual disappearance of a credible opposition party that can keep the conservative political parties in check, and you have the key elements of a scenario that may not bode well for the future of democracy in Japan.

The sky is not falling, however, and it would be unwise and unfair to leave the impression that Japanese democracy is descending a slippery slope toward a calamitous collision with a venal force that will crush democracy. No, Japanese democracy functions more poorly than it might because of corruption, but it functions nonetheless. Signs that grassroots democracy is alive include local protest movements calling for a moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants, for the removal of corrupt politicians, and for the government to forgive the debts of underdeveloped countries. NIMBYism, moral outrage, and global compassion, respectively, for the examples given, are all positive signs that the elements of democracy—enlightened self-interest, value distinctions between right and wrong, and universalistic consciousness—do exist among some elements of the population. At the elite level, some would argue, the selection of the self-styled maverick reformer Koizumi Junichiro as LDP president in April 2001 reflects a break from the old pattern of choosing prime ministers in smoke-filled rooms. Possibly. Koizumi is wildly popular with the common person, to be sure, but it is far from obvious that he will be able to hold onto power without the tacit support of the party elders who occupy those smoke-filled rooms.

It may very well be that in any democracy the life force that makes it work is usually found at the level of ordinary citizens whose sense of self-protection, rights, and compassion combine to keep the state or government in check. In the United States the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement serve as forceful reminders that democracy in action is really people in action, citizens exercising their rights to expand equal opportunity to everyone realizing, and perhaps in a self-interested way, that rights denied to any one group can threaten the rights of every group.

This sort of grassroots democracy does take place in Japan, but not as reliably nor as persistently as in the United States. Japanese women, Japanese-Koreans, indigenous Ainu, immigrants, and the homeless have not benefited to the same degree that past and contemporary marginalized Americans have from a variety of social movements demanding the extension of rights. The Japanese remain terribly tribal, or homogeneous, and therefore very parochial, and Japanese society is still very sexist, hierarchical, and closed. In Japan one is either an insider or an outsider, and the latter do not fare well at all; and within the insider group, there is socially sanctioned discrimination based on gender, age, and class. If Japan has an advantage that America lacks, however, it is that class is significantly less salient and incomes less unequal than in most postindustrial societies. Over 90 percent of the Japanese population has for the past thirty years self-identified as "middle class," and with good reason, according to income distribution analysis.⁹

The quality of Japanese democracy and its strengths and weaknesses are not the only focus of this book. My concern rests equally with the gap between the principles of democracy that institutionally govern Japan and the reality of corruption and wrongdoing, especially by prime ministers, at the upper reaches of Japanese politics. However strong the principles, if the corruption is egregious, then democracy is being eroded in Japan, it is dysfunctional, and it permits cynics to call themselves empiricists. "Democracy works only if the people have faith in those who govern, and that faith is bound to be shattered when high officials and their appointees engage in activities which arouse suspicions of malfeasance and corruption," wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter in a recent ruling that upholds the states' authority to place limits on campaign contributions.¹⁰

Souter could have been describing why Japanese democracy is not working very well. The Japanese public has, in fact, lost confidence in its elected leaders, as opinion poll after opinion poll has shown. A major reason for the loss of confidence is its elected leaders' corrupt behavior. Their wrongdoing in turn is a function of the high cost of getting elected; and there is a high cost to democracy in fulfilling personal obligations of loyalty to dominant leaders within the party. Money and morals, too much of the first and too little of the second, threaten democracy in Japan.

I hope there is a take-home lesson for American readers of the story that follows. The ills that plague Japanese democracy and make it dysfunctional illustrate all too well what Americans know to be true-namely, that money politics corrupts the political process and undermines democracy.

My focus is almost entirely on the LDP and the lower house (the House of Representatives)—the LDP because since its founding in 1955 it controlled the government continuously until 1993, and since 1994 it has dominated electoral politics by forming governing coalitions with smaller parties. Today the LDP calls the shots in alliance with the New Komeito and the New Conservative parties, but the LDP alone controls 270 of the 480 seats in the lower house. And I focus largely on the lower house because it chooses the prime minister and is the site of origin of most important legislation.

I will not say much about the House of Councillors. The LDP lost its majority in the upper house in 1989 and has not regained it; the LDP-led three-party coalition controls 139 (of which 110 are LDP seats) of the upper house's 252 seats today. Opposition parties do not figure prominently in this study either. Until 1993 the Socialists were the leading opposition party, but never a serious contender—hence the often used term "one and one-half party system" to describe the period 1955 to 1993—and today has almost disappeared as a political force to be reckoned with.¹¹ Even in this era of decline, the LDP most always holds a 100-seat advantage over the next largest opposition party in the lower house of the Diet. Also, little attention is given here to the role of ideology in Japanese politics for the simple reason that it lacks salience in Japanese electoral politics, although the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and to a lesser extent the Komeito, or Clean Government Party, a creation of the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai, are residual reminders of the Cold War in the first instance and, in the second, the modest influence of religion on politics, in a remarkably irreligious nation. The dominant ideology in Japan today, to the extent that one even exists, ranges from conservative to centrist. What largely separates the LDP from today's next largest party, the Democratic Party, is the identity of the respective parties' leaders and the size of the party coffers. As will be made clear, personalities, and not ideas or platforms or ideologies, carry the most weight in today's electoral politics.

A majority of voters today have lost confidence in politics and have disaffiliated from the parties. Parties without ideals or principles and having only the one goal of capturing power are parties consisting merely of individual politicians, more or less appealing to district constituents, more or less effective in buying voter loyalty with gifts and pork. Such parties cannot keep members, especially when times are difficult. Even in the good old days for the LDP in the seventies and eighties, about 40 percent of all eligible voters were nonaligned; but today, now that the economy is on the skids, that figure has grown to between 50 and 60 percent.¹² Such voter independence will predictably keep electoral politics fluid for some time to come and, interestingly, keep the LDP dominant. The communists notwithstanding, the LDP is the grand old party and the only one that holds bragging rights for making Japan the economic power it remains today, however diminished. The parties in opposition to the LDP ruling coalition—Democrats, Liberals, Communists, and Social Democrats (the former Japan Socialist Party)—are do-nothing parties with more or less weak leadership that have only their antipathy toward the dominant LDP to recommend them to voters. And that is not enough to win voters and defeat the LDP.

Today the younger generation of LDP members—forty or so who call themselves "the Group to Create Tomorrow's LDP" (jiminto no asu o tsukuru kai)—lurks in the alleyways of power and whispers about the need for insurgency, not unlike the then-Young Turks of 1993 whose defection temporarily brought the LDP down. Steadily declining electoral support for the LDP has forced its younger Diet members to worry about their political future, especially during the decade of the nineties as the economy has worsened. With no improvement in sight, the Young Turks have made public their impatience with the failure of senior members of the party to work ima...