Growing Democracy in Japan: The Parliamentary Cabinet System since 1868 by Brian Woodall (review)

A number of books have tried to explain how Japan, a non-Western democracy, is governed. Karel van Wolferen’s path-breaking work, The Enigma of Japanese Power, made it clear as many as 25 years ago that decision making in Japan was not working in a way that might be expected for a democratic country.¹ In fact, the decision-making process was very blurred and no cabinet, prime minister, or group of ministers seemed to be in charge. Van Wolferen’s book, which sought to analyze the political-corporate relationship, was published in 1989 when the Japanese economy was booming. Other scholars have pointed instead to the strong power of the bureaucracy, party government, or government by individual ministers in Japanese policymaking.

In this book, Brian Woodall tries to answer the question of why cabinet government has failed to take root in Japan although Japan has a Westminster-style parliamentary system. Why is Japanese governance different in practice and how did it get its characteristics? The author addresses these issues through an institutional approach, emphasizing the historical development of institutions but still using the approach of eclecticism in the analyses. According to Woodall, the Japanese cabinet system underwent a transformation at each of eight historical junctures. In prewar times, these were the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the advent of party-led cabinets in 1898, and their demise in 1932. In the postwar period, the Allied occupation, the emergence of the party system in 1955, the shocks of the early 1970s, the advent of coalition cabinets in 1993, and the emergence of “twisted Diets” (different majority in the two houses) in 2007 were decisive. We need to understand what happened at each of these historical junctures to be able to understand how Japanese democracy works today.

Other books have tried to explain democracy in Japan. One of the most recent is Mary Alice Haddad’s Building Democracy in Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which takes a state-society approach showing how local voices can effect change. Brian Woodall’s book is quite different. There are not many local voices here, but the multidisciplinary approach he uses is very effective in understanding the complexity of the question of democracy in Japan. He clearly shows that we need a historical account as well as different theories to be able to understand the way it has developed. There are no simple answers and no easy patterns for achieving democracy—that is the take-away the reader gets.

The book gives a detailed account of the historical development of the Japanese parliamentary system. It is so detailed that the reader at times almost loses track of the main threads. We get information about numerous different councils and movements and their formal decision-making structure as well as about key persons who might not all have been of equal importance. Sometimes the text almost reads like an encyclopedia that covers everything. What saves the text is that the author himself seems to have realized this and ends each of his chapters with a section labeled “Findings” in which he summarizes the main points.

The first chapter, “The Anti-Westminsterian Roots of Japan’s Parliamentary Cabinet,” covers all the prewar historical junctures and takes us up to the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur and the occupation. There is almost no account of the war or of the way in which the government was structured at that time. Personally, I would have considered the war another historical juncture that had an effect on the postwar parliamentary system. The fact that the Japanese cabinet did not have a minister of defense until 2007 is just one of those effects.

The second chapter deals with the Allied occupation which, under strong U.S. leadership, imposed a constitution that laid the basis for the present parliamentary system in Japan. Forced onto the country as the new constitution was, it might not be so strange that democracy in practice failed to take root. The fact that the Americans, not formally but in practice, were running...