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5 Climate Leadership, Japanese Style: Embedded Symbolism and Post-2001 Kyoto Protocol Politics Yves Tiberghien and Miranda A. Schreurs Introduction After the Bush administration pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, Japan found itself the pivotal actor in the global battle over the survival of the treaty. With the United States out of Kyoto, the costs of ratification rose significantly. Japan would be expected to take painful and costly measures to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions without US industries and the public having to take similar steps. This threatened to place Japan at a competitive disadvantage with the United States and with developing countries, which were exempted from taking action under the agreement. For numerous industries, this was seen as making what was already a tough set of requirements even more unpalatable . As a result, they pressured politicians and bureaucrats to do something to ensure that they would not have to bear unacceptably high costs. This meant getting the United States to return to the agreement, abandoning the agreement, or reducing its potential impact on industry and thus on the economy as a whole. Still, many interests within the government—especially the Ministry of Environment (MOE) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)—and some industries (for example, the nuclear, insurance, and pollution control industries) had a strong interest in seeing the agreement enter into force.1 Perhaps even more importantly, the Japanese public was largely behind the Kyoto Protocol. As one indication, the Japanese Consumer Cooperative Union, representing over 500 university, housing, medical, insurance, and retail unions and a combined membership of over 20 million urged early ratification of the agreement.2 Many environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also called for ratification. As a result of these competing perspectives, there was substantial political and bureaucratic debate on how to approach ratification. 140 Yves Tiberghien and Miranda A. Schreurs Because of the global impact of Japan’s decision, international diplomacy intensified. The stakes were very high for Japan’s environmental and global foreign policy. Under the international spotlight, Japan was forced to take a stance. Japan did so, ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in June 2002. Six years later, as host to the G8 meeting in Toyako, Hokkaido, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced that Japan would pursue 60–80 percent cuts in emissions by 2050 under its Cool Earth Initiative.3 In September 2009, Yukio Hatoyama, Japan’s first prime minister from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), announced that his government planned to pursue a 25 percent reduction goal for greenhouse gases relative to their 1990 levels by 2020. This chapter asks two main sets of questions. First, given the power of anti-Kyoto interests and bureaucratic actors, why did the Japanese government ratify the Kyoto Protocol? In the US case, anti-Kyoto forces were able to prevent ratification. Why did the same kind of politics not play out in Japan? The balance of interest group politics, bureaucratic politics, and foreign policy priorities certainly could have led to the agreement’s collapse. With an anti-Kyoto coalition including powerful elements within Keidanren (the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations ), the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, renamed the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry [METI] in 2001), and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and a prime minister (Jun’ichiro Koizumi) who was committed to strengthening US-Japan relations, it is certainly not inconceivable that Japan would have sided with the United States. After all, the proponents of the agreement were led by a weak MOE, a poorly developed EU partnership, underresourced NGOs, and an opposition party with no hope of winning the upper house elections of July 2001. And while the proponents also had supporters within the LDP, several of the strongest advocates had failed to win reelection in the previous lower house election (for example, Kazuo Aichi and Takashi Kosugi). Japan’s decision to ratify cannot be explained by the balance of interests , bureaucratic positions, electoral politics, or foreign relations alone. Another key factor was necessary to tilt the outcome in the favor of the pro-Kyoto coalition. The decision of earlier LDP leaders to pursue global environmental leadership, reinforced through discourse and bureaucratic actions, helped to build the Kyoto Protocol into a symbol of Japan’s new policy identity. In other words, embedded symbolism constrained the ability of anti-Kyoto forces to get their concerns onto the political agenda and limited the freedom of action of...

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