Notes
235 Notes Introduction 1. As a result of the 1995 Kōbe earthquake, the posts of Minister of State for Disaster Management and Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary for Crisis Management were created to coordinate disaster response policies. 2. The “lost decades” refers to the prolonged economic stagnation and absence of effective political leadership that followed the bursting of the “bubble economy” in the early 1990s. It left Japanese financial institutions buried under a mountain of nonperforming loans and produced a succession of governments that proved unable to enact fruitful policy solutions. 3. The symbolic powers of Japan’s head of state are constitutionally defined, while in Britain those powers developed through historical convention. Australia’s constitution grants extensive powers to its head of state, although those powers are not actually used. Aurelia George Mulgan kindly pointed this out to me. 4. Members of the press corps were allowed to observe cabinet meetings in December 1985, September 1993, and April 2002 (Naikaku seido hyakunen shi henshū iinkai 1980, 22 and 24). 5. Tent villages became a fixture on the scene around the time of the formation of the Okada cabinet in July 1934 (Naikaku seido hyakujūchōnen 1995, 130). 6. For purposes of this study, the Imperial Household Office, Fair Trade Commission , Financial Services Agency, and the National Personnel Authority are not considered part of the cabinet system. 7. Of the forty-nine non-confidence motions submitted between May 1947 and May 2013, only four were approved—December 23, 1948 (second Yoshida cabinet), March 14, 1953 (fourth Yoshida cabinet), May 16, 1980 (second Ōhira cabinet), and June 18, 1993 (Miyazawa cabinet). 8. Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany , Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Korea, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom also permit ministers to retain their parliamentary seats. 9. By traditional convention, British ministers are expected to be MPs (Rose 1971, 401, 411). Many of the isolated instances in which non-MPs have been awarded portfolios occurred during wartime, and came with the expectation that these individuals would win a seat in the House of Commons in a subsequent by-election. Peacetime examples are rare. In October 1964, Prime Minister Har- 236 Notes to Pages 10–32 old Wilson gave the foreign secretary portfolio to Patrick Gordon Walker and the technology portfolio to Frank Cousins even though neither held seats in the Commons. Walker and Cousins agreed to accept peerages, and were expected to win seats as “carpetbaggers” in by-elections held several months later. Cousins emerged victorious, but Walker was defeated and had to surrender his portfolio (Brazier 1997, 64–65). More recently, in October 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave the business secretary portfolio to Peter Mandelson, a veteran of Tony Blair’s cabinet who did not currently hold a seat in Commons, but Mandelson was immediately elevated to the House of Lords (Telegraph, October 3, 2008). I am grateful to Arthur Stockwin for pressing me to clarify this point. 10. Britain’s “government” consists of about one hundred members who are nominated by the prime minister and appointed by the monarch; the “cabinet” itself consists of only about fourteen of these individuals (Curtis 1997a, 68). In contrast, Japan’s government in late December 2012 consisted of seventy-four individuals—nineteen cabinet ministers, three deputy chief cabinet secretaries, twenty-five state secretaries, and twenty-seven parliamentary secretaries. 11. A study of Canadian provincial governments found that larger cabinets complicate decision-making and erode teamwork (White 1994, 262). 12. The types of cabinet decisions are explained at “Naikaku seido to rekidai naikaku,” www.kantei.go.jp/jp/rekidai/1-2-5.html; accessed May 23, 2013. 13. Since May 7, 2002, cabinet meetings have been held in a room on the fourth floor of the Prime Minister’s Official Residence (Kantei), except during parliamentary sessions, when they are held in a special chamber in the National Diet Building. Prior to this, the cabinet met in a room on the second floor of the old Kantei, a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired structure that opened in March 1929. In the closing days of the Pacific War, cabinet meetings were held behind two-meterthick reinforced walls in the National Defense Telephone Bureau (Naikaku seido hyakujūchōnen 1995, 99). 14. The term “government” denotes the continuous period from the appointment of a prime minister until his or her dismissal. 15. As Heasman observed, “the relative importance of any office . . . [depends] in large measure on the influence...
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