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Regime Shift: Japanese Politics in a Changing World Economy

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Regime Shift: Japanese Politics in a Changing World Economy Regime Shift: Japanese Politics in a Changing World Economy T. J. Pempel For the past several years, Japan has been in the midst of a fundamental re- gime shift.* At least three essentials of the old regime have been undergoing sweeping changes. First, on the political level, the 38 years of dominance by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ended with the party’s internal fragmen- tation, its loss of a parliamentary majority and executive control, and the in- troduction of a new electoral system for the Lower House of the Diet. In July 1993 the handsome, youthful descendant of a well-established samurai family, Hosokawa Morihiro of the Japan New Party, cobbled together an ideologically disparate, seven-party coalition that made him Japan’s first non-LDP prime minister since the party’s formation in 1955. Soon thereafter, the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ; previously the Japan Socialist Party, JSP), long the LDP’s bête noire, ended nearly 50 years in the political wilderness as its leader Murayama Tomiichi became prime min- ister in coalition with the LDP and another small conservative party, Sakigake. After taking power, however, the SDPJ also wound up squandering whatever ideological cohesion it once had by reversing its hitherto sacrosanct policy po- sitions on Article IX, defense, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and the dispatch of Japanese troops abroad. Largely as a consequence, the party was the heavi- est loser in the 1996 elections and the party’s few remaining parliamentarians fell to quarreling with one another. The mid-1990s were years of rampant party realignment. Kaleidoscopic groupings and regroupings led cynics to suggest that Japanese politicians and political groupings were like passengers standing on a platform waiting just long enough for the next train to come in, when they would jump on board and Source: Pempel, T. J., “Regime Shift: Japanese Politics in a Changing World Economy,” in Journal of Japanese Studies 23(2) (1997): 333–361. * Earlier versions of this paper were presented to seminars at Australian National University, Harvard University, Kobe University, Northwestern University, and the University of Tokyo’s Social Science Research Institute. I wish to thank the participants in these seminars for help- ful comments. I also wish to offer my appreciation to David Asher, Walter Hatch, Ikuo Kume, Aurelia George Mulgan, Richard Samuels, Keiichi Tsunekawa, and Kozo Yamamur, all of whom provided one or more readings and detailed suggestions for improvement. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004380547_040 1000 Pempel move on for another station or two. Individual parties and governmental coali- tions flashed into view and disappeared with the unpredictability of fireflies. Between 1993 and 1996 alone eleven different political parties shared power and four individuals held the office of prime minister. Although the LDP reentered government in alliance with Murayama and then became the sole party of government following the 1996 elections, the party no longer exerted the sweeping dominance that it once enjoyed.1 Electoral politics and the Japanese party system were in the midst of a mas- sive overhaul that undercut roughly 25 years of previous stability. Second, on the economic front, Japan’s seemingly endless string of achieve- ments from the early 1950s until the end of the 1980s came to a crushing halt with the puncturing of the economic bubble, the simultaneous collapse of both stock and land prices,2 five years of almost zero growth from 1991 to 1995, an international downgrading of Japanese bonds, the collapse of a number of substantial financial institutions, and a host of other economic reversals. These represented a dramatic turnaround from the unrelenting successes that had previously marked the national economy. Third, in international relations, the once close fraternal relationship with the United States, solidified by common cold war opposition to commu- nism, the USSR, and China, had become marked by something akin to sibling rivalry: the security-bonded allies discovered they were economic rivals as well. This competition was manifested in a series of trade and market disputes throughout the 1980s and early 1990s that were wrenchingly deviant from the general cordiality that had characterized relations from the 1950s into at least the early 1970s. And in the wake of the Gulf War, U.S.-Japanese differences on security also came to a head, eventually leading to Japan’s redefinition of the roles that its Self-Defense Forces could play in international military actions. By the latter years of the 1990s, Japanese conservatives were actively discussing Japan’s security and foreign policy options in ways unheard of a decade earlier. Many had also become worried about the long-term dependability of ties to the United States and were expressing worry about the possibility that Japan would be “bypassed” and that China would replace Japan as America’s major ally in Asia.3 1 On Japanese conservative dominance in comparative perspective, see T. J. Pempel, ed., Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). In Japanese see “Ittō yūisei no hōkai,” Leviathan, special issue, 1994. 2 On the collapse see Noguchi Yukio, Baburu no keizaigaku (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1992), p. 25. 3 E.g., Terashima Jitsuro, “Nichi bei chū toraianguru kuraishisu o dō seigyo sum ka?” Chūō kōron, August 1996..
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