Japan's Non-Revolution

Karel van Wolferen

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1993

Article preview: first 500 of 3,875 words total.

Summary:  Cracks in Japan's political edifice have excited hopes in the United States that reforms are on the way. What American's fail to grasp is that the Japanese politicians do not count for much. In the absence of a strong civil society, and protected by the press, Tokyo's government ministries call the shots. Washington should press Japan to write a new constitution strengthening politicians vis-a-vis the bureaucracy. Until Japan reshapes its political system, the split in the Liberal Democratic Party will remain no more than fractures in a facade.

THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY

The recent and ubiquitous speculation in the world's media that Japanese society has reached a watershed is based more on wishful thinking than on an understanding of the forces at work in the Japanese body politic. It is a curious phenomenon, indicative of Western apprehensions, that almost every time Japanese developments gain international attention they are accompanied by assertions that the Japanese people are making choices that will change the way they live and work. In reality, the saddest aspect of Japan is that the Japanese people are not in a position to make such choices.

It is true that Japan has entered what can properly be described as an age of uncertainty. The recent fracturing of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the parliamentary crisis are symptoms of a disorientation without precedent in postwar Japan. International reality has changed for Japan's elite administrators. Its dominant element, the relationship with the United States, has lost the underpinnings that kept it in place for over four decades. With the disappearance of Cold War certainties from American foreign policy, and Japan's emergence as a discomforting economic force, American indulgence toward Japan is shrinking to a point where the basic guarantees that Japan's political elite could count on for four decades have disappeared.

Changes in domestic reality have been less abrupt and are less easily singled out for analysis, but a pervasive sense of unease about Japan's economic future has left its elites disoriented. Although often deceived by their own propaganda, many of Japan's elite know that Japan's ability to export the costs of its postwar strategy of unlimited industrial expansion has been fundamental to that strategy's success. They doubt that Japan can much longer shift such costs as unemployment, environmental degradation and industrial obsolescence to other countries. During the deflation of the "bubble economy" these past three years, the Ministry of Finance has again demonstrated its genius in disproving prophets of Japanese economic doom. But the officials are now confronting forces so enormous, and international hostility to Japan's "torrential exports" has made the future effectiveness of rescue actions so unpredictable, that continued confidence in their ability to control economic outcomes can no longer be taken for granted.

Japan's age of uncertainty reached an important moment on June 18 when two prominent members of the LDP joined non-LDP politicians in a routine no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Four days later 44 LDP members resigned, forming two new parties. Along with the year-and-a-half-old Japan New Party, they have overturned what Japanese political commentators called "the 1955 setup." This political system, crucial to the shaping of postwar Japan, rested on two pillars: the guaranteed incumbency of the LDP, and a Socialist Party that for 38 years was mired in internal squabbles and unrealistic priorities, guaranteed to keep it out of power.

For over a quarter of a century, informed Japanese and foreigners alike have readily expressed doubts about the authenticity of Japanese democracy. A vote in the countryside ...

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