The Vote that ROCKED Japan

The electorate has thrown out not just a party but a whole system


JAPAN is a decent, consensual and egalitarian country. Much of it is still prosperous, despite a dismal period for the economy. The beliefs of its two main political parties are often hard to tell apart. Both their leaders are grandsons of (rival) prime ministers. There were no loud celebrations when the results of the general election were announced on August 30th. It is tempting therefore to write it off as no earth-shattering event.

That would be a mistake. The vote, in which the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) broke the half-century lock of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on power, marked the overdue destruction of Japan’s post-war political system. The question is what will now take its place.

System change
There are three reasons to believe that this vote marks a big change. The first is the scale of the DPJ’s victory. When the LDP lost once before, in 1993, it remained easily the biggest party in the Diet, and within 11 months was back in power. Today, the LDP is devastated. It keeps just 119 out of 480 seats in the lower house of the Diet, down from 300. The DPJ has 308.

Second, the rejection of the LDP is the culmination of deep changes in Japan’s political culture. The LDP, a pro-American, pro-business consequence of the cold war, was undermined by two decades in which consumer interests and non-profit groups slowly mounted a challenge to its paternalism. Electoral reform in the mid-1990s introduced single-member districts, helping to create an opposition that could take on the LDP.

Third, by overthrowing the LDP, Japan’s voters have turfed out not just a party, but a whole system. After the LDP’s creation in 1955, Japan’s “iron triangle” of party, bureaucrats and business promoted breakneck growth, and distributed its fruits equitably: cheap finance for big business, contracts for construction companies, jobs for the masses, subsidies for farmers and re-election for the LDP machine.

But corruption flourished, as tax money went to the highest bidders. Growth slowed from the 1980s, and the system was too inflexible to adjust. Voters grew more demanding. Roads, dams and temporary, low-paid jobs were no longer enough. People wanted careers. They wanted doctors, nursing homes and decent schools that would keep young families from moving to the big cities, leaving only the old behind (see article). And they wanted confidence that the government would still be solvent when they drew down their pensions—not a sure bet in a country with a national debt approaching 200% of GDP.

Successive LDP administrations failed to respond to these demands because the government was often the weakest of the three sides of the triangle. Ministers’ best intentions were undermined by bureaucrats or party barons with their own networks of power. Hence the voters’ rejection of the old system in favour of something unfamiliar in Japan: an open and accountable government.

The huge task of creating it falls to Yukio Hatoyama, whom the Diet will appoint as prime minister on September 16th. It is not clear whether he, or his party, is up to the job; for alarmingly little is known—even by the voters—about the people who have taken power in the world’s second-biggest economy.

In opposition the DPJ tapped into the powerful, rather Nordic, vision of their society that many Japanese people cling to and fear they are losing. This left-leaning, pro-union bias explains the party’s silence on liberalisation and deregulation of medical and other services that would boost productivity and help create the demand and jobs that Japan badly needs. The party has also made mild anti-American noises about military bases and the Japanese flefleet. A market economy might be just about acceptable to the party, but an American market society, however defined, is not.