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The Washington Quarterly 23.2 (2000) 17-21



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Why Japan Can't Lead

W. Lee Howell


Fin de siècle discussions in Japan focused on the pace and profile of the country's economic recovery. Can Japan transform itself into a knowledge economy, where a premium is placed on innovative services rather than goods? Will the financial and high-tech industries regain their competitiveness? Elements of Japan's political economy appear up to the task; business models are changing and government agencies have been restructured and reorganized. But there are lingering doubts about whether political leaders, irrespective of party affiliation, will take on the more difficult problems of labor market, pension, and fiscal reform.

Yet despite the economic gloom of the past decade, the conventional wisdom regarding Japan's politics has not changed in the new century. The perception remains that Japan's political ills were remedied by the change brought on by the reform bills of 1994 which forced elections in the lower house of the Diet to be held under a new electoral system. However, the prime minister is still elected by members of the lower house and this remains the root cause of the country's continued political malaise.

But there is little debate over the adequacy of the existing political system in large part because Japan, on the surface, appears to have adapted to the economic uncertainty introduced by recent market and banking crises. Currently, angst reaches beyond the domestic economic malaise. Globalization and the information revolution have proven capable of transforming societies. Yet Japan, faced with corporate restructuring, enormous fiscal deficits, and significant demographic change, is still coping with rougher aspects [End Page 17] of modernity. Given the velocity of change, many more Japanese are now beginning to question if their leaders are fighting yesterday's battles and therefore are risking the nation's future stability and prosperity. In fact, the current stability associated with Japan's status quo politics will prove ephemeral in the next decade.

There are other compelling reasons why Japan needs to undergo a dramatic transformation. Japan enters the year 2000 with a still unscheduled, but constitutionally mandated, election of the lower house of the Diet. The forthcoming elections will be the sophomore attempt at political change; the process began with the historic election of October 1996, held under a new electoral system. Multimember districts were replaced with 300 new single-seat districts where only the top vote-getter obtained office. In addition, 200 seats are apportioned based on each party's election performance in fourteen regional districts. In practice, the parties submitted a list of candidates to fill these seats that would be administered proportionally. Japanese voters dispensed two votes--one for their candidate in their home district and one for their preferred party on the proportional slate. The question no one asked at the time was whether the average voter preferred quantity to quality.

The expectation of most observers was that the new system, after a few election cycles, would work against money politics and eventually encourage a straight debate on policy issues. The old multimember system discouraged public debate and eventually led to political corruption scandals that were directly linked to a tradition of distributive (i.e., "pork-barrel") politics. The new system discouraged accommodation and collusion and sought to inject competition and accountability into the democratic process.

The deeper concern is not about whether one party had dominated the political scene for too long. If the problem were one of political diversity or power sharing, then the solution would rest squarely with the opposition parties--all of which have failed to develop a compelling, or convincing, agenda for positive change.

Four years after the first election under the reforms, political imbalance exists in part because of old-fashioned gerrymandering--a rural vote in the lower house is still worth two urban votes. Recent upper house elections, where the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) performed poorly in major cities, were a signal of the emerging polarization in Japanese politics. Adding to the rural-urban divide is the country's longevity revolution. There...

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