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Japan:
Two's a party, three's a crowd?
By Jamie Miyazaki
The dust has settled after Sunday's Lower House elections in Japan. The
ever-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) managed to romp home as expected
as the largest party but at the loss of 10 seats, and in the face of a massive
40-seat gain by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Takenori
Kanzaki, leader of the coalition New Komeito party (another big winner of the
election), summed up the new balance of power in the Lower House well: "I did
not expect such an outcome." Neither did Junichiro Koizumi nor Naoto Kan, head
of the now-considerable opposition DPJ.
Newspapers both domestic and foreign breathlessly trumpeted the emergence of a
US-style two-party system. For good measure, various LDP and DPJ bigwigs
pitched in with their takes. "The political system of two major parties has
taken root," said DPJ secretary general Katsuya Okada.
Not since the 1950s, when the Socialist Party gained as many as a third of the
seats, has an opposition party fielded such a heavy Diet (parliamentary)
presence. The DPJ didn't quite hit its 200-seat target (few thought it would)
but, weighing in at 177 seats, it now appears to be a credible contender for
government further down the road - something that the Socialists never were.
But is a two-party system what actually emerged in Monday morning's early
hours? Proponents of the two-party state, Koizumi and Kan included, like to
point to the United States and the United Kingdom as successful examples of
two-party democracies. Both parties have borrowed political tricks and
techniques from the US and the UK - spin-doctoring and the use of manifestos,
to name but two.
However, to point out the obvious, the Anglo-Saxon and Japanese political
models are fairly dissimilar. Most important, the US and UK both have
single-seat-constituency first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral systems. The
single-seat-constituency FPP system inherently lends itself to two-horse races
with votes for minor third parties in effect "wasted" - as any member of Al
Gore's campaign team will tell you on mentioning Ralph Nader.
Proportional representation (PR) systems, on the other hand, favor multi-party
systems and coalition governments. Ironically, until 1994 Japan too had a
multi-seat constituency PR system that the LDP managed to dominate completely
through skillful use of divide-and-rule tactics and other means of dubious
legality. In effect, Japan's electoral and political system resembled a cross
between Italy's and Mexico's - a dominant political force buying off favored
constituencies, exploiting weaknesses in the electoral system and cementing
(literally in the LDP's case with its close ties to constriction firms) its
primacy and behind the scenes power-brokers engaging in political
horse-trading.
However, in 1994 Japan adopted a hybrid PR/FPP system similar to Germany's.
Three hundred of the Lower House seats in Japan are done on an FPP system and
the remaining 180 are done via PR. A glance at Germany's Bundestag, however,
shows that two-party politics is not the norm. It does admittedly have two
major political parties - the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats - but
also a host of minor parties that must be relied upon to form a viable
coalition government, Joschka Fischer's Green Party being the current junior
coalition member. The Greens only managed to garner 8.6 percent of the vote in
the 2002 election, yet Fischer is vice chancellor and the Greens carry clout
disproportionate to their electoral mandate.
New Komeito shares a comparable percentage of Lower House seats, 7 percent, to
the Greens in the Bundestag at 9 percent. Moreover, New Komeito's clout in the
ruling coalition is definitely on the up after the decimation of the New
Conservative Party (NCP) and its formal absorption into the LDP. Many LDP
candidates in single-seat constituencies had to rely on organized votes from
the New Komeito-affiliated Soka Gakkai religious organization to secure their
seats. Like the German Greens, one can expect the minority coalition partner to
set significant parts of the government agenda, in New Komeito's case pension
reform. This kind of situation is hardly a salient feature of two-party
politics as witnessed, say, in the UK.
In fact New Komeito will also remain important because the LDP needs extra
support in the Upper House election to be held in mid-2004. The electorate is
notoriously volatile in elections to the 247-member Upper House. Many voters
chose to use Upper House elections to the constitutionally less important
chamber as a chance for protest votes against the government. After Sunday,
Koizumi cannot afford be complacent, especially considering the fate of another
reform-minded prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto. Hashimoto was forced to resign
after a poor LDP performance in the 1998 Upper House election. Minor coalition
parties will thus be of greater, not less, importance for at least the
immediate future, a familiar scenario in Germany's "two plus others" party
system.
Moreover, while the DPJ put in a solid performance and made considerable gains
in single-seat constituencies, its performance in the PR seats was where it was
strongest. Not to discount the very impressive overall gains made by the DPJ,
but for a party looking to transform the political landscape into a two-horse
race, this is a bit disappointing, as winning against multiple candidates is
easier than against one particularly strong candidate and a host of weaker ones
in a single-seat district. In part, some of these gains in PR seats are also
because DPJ candidates no longer had to compete against Liberals and thus took
votes previously destined for Liberal candidates.
Even if the recent elections were to herald the arrival of a US/British-style
two-party state or, as is more probable, the onset of a German-style "two plus
others" state, it is not clear that anything other than a cosmetic change in
Japanese politics will have occurred.
The Iron Triangle of big business, bureaucrats and the LDP that has dominated
postwar Japan may be splintering, but many senior DPJ members are defectors
from the LDP, and some candidates have admitted they could as easily have run
for one party as the other. Reformists have often blamed bureaucrats for
hampering efforts at overhauling Japan's inefficient economy. In the past,
bureaucrats who nurtured political ambitions would go on to join the clubby
world of the LDP, but there is considerable evidence that many former
bureaucrats are now joining the DPJ instead. Many voters have also complained
that the DPJ is merely an extension of the LDP continuum.
Among all the optimistic hopes for the dawning of a new two-party era for
Japanese politics, it is worth remembering the initial euphoria that greeted
the demise of the "1955 system" back in 1993 when the LDP, the natural party of
power, suddenly found itself out of office, and how quickly that euphoria
evaporated just over a year later when the LDP succeeded in getting back into
power. Likewise, Koizumi's election back in 2001 was heralded with euphoria
only to be dampened in the same way.
It would be unfair to discount what are significant gains by the DPJ in
Sunday's elections. The emergence of a two-party state in the vein of the US
and UK is, however, unlikely, and if the DPJ is capable of capitalizing on its
gains, it may well have initiated the birth of a viable opposition, which would
be the biggest development of this election. Any viable opposition, though,
that saw itself as a contender for government would still most likely be
hostage to a junior coalition member just as every government since 1994 has
been.
Japan has had many false starts before, and it is early days yet for the new
Diet, as Japan scholar Chalmers Johnson put it in an interview to the Mainichi
Shinbun recently: "I'm reluctant to be drawn in once again to the trap of
Japanese politics - that is, to pretend that something significant has
happened."
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
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