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  • Contemporary Japanese Politics: Institutional Changes and Power Shifts by Tomohito Shinoda
  • Ian Neary (bio)
Contemporary Japanese Politics: Institutional Changes and Power Shifts. By Tomohito Shinoda. Columbia University Press, New York, 2013. xviii, 328 pages. $85.00, cloth; $28.00, paper; $27.99, E-book.

This is at once a fascinating and deeply unsatisfactory account of contemporary Japanese politics from the early 1990s to 2013. Tomohito Shinoda’s two previous monographs have been about the Japanese prime minister—Leading Japan: The Role of the Prime Minister (Praeger, 2000)—and national security policy under Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō, Koizumi Diplomacy: Japan’s Kantei Approach to Foreign and Defense Affairs (University of Washington Press, 2007). What he offers us here covers the main domestic political developments of the last 35 years focusing on the events in Nagata-cho. His goal is to explain how institutional changes have shifted the locus of policymaking among and between bureaucrats, the legislature, and the executive, mainly the prime minister and his cabinet.

The account helpfully begins with a brief—too brief for my taste—review of previous studies in this area, mainly work produced by U.S. colleagues or at least published in English. Then he devotes 35 pages to his characterization of what is often referred to as the “1955 System” in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) dominated the political system. The growth of formal and informal institutional support that was the base of LDP dominance—kōenkai, factions, money politics, and zoku—is a story often told but he adds some telling detail here. There is mention, for example, of the handbook produced and sold by the LDP headquarters on how to create and maintain a kōenkai and statistics detailing the number of year-end and New Year parties, weddings, and funerals an average LDP Diet [End Page 183] member attended in 1989–116.0, 6.6, and 26.5 respectively. (The details of the income and expenditure of LDP members in their constituencies at this time is something I have never before seen in English-language accounts of this period.) It explains a lot about how national politics actually worked at the time and what the changes were aimed to reform.

However, the main meat of the book begins in chapter 2 with a narrative that takes us from the Recruit scandal of 1988–89 to the death of Obuchi Keizō some ten years later. This is followed by an excellent account of Koizumi’s prime ministership—how he got into power and what he did with that position. There is a brief pause as Shinoda returns to the 1990s to discuss consequences of the electoral reforms of 1994 that, among other things, permitted the emergence of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and the development of what seemed to have become a two-party system by 2009. Then back to the narrative, first of Hatoyama Yukio’s period as premier and his “anti-bureaucratic stance,” followed by Kan Naoto’s “struggle in government.” Finally, he spends a few pages summarizing Noda Yoshihiko’s 15 months in power and the first months of Abe Shinzō’s second administration. Once again there is impressive and fascinating detail here in his explanation of how some of the key policies were made, sometimes following policy formulation day by day. Indeed, when describing Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi’s execrable crisis management on the day of the Kobe earthquake in January 1995, he follows the action hour by hour. For those interested in how Japanese politics works, even those fairly familiar with the story being told, there are fresh nuggets of information on almost every page.

So why on completion of the book does one have the feeling that the whole amounts to less than the sum of the parts? In part, this is because of the failure of the final 20 pages to bring the book’s argument together. I suspect the main manuscript was completed at the end of 2012 and a couple of pages were then added to summarize Noda’s time in power—giving him much less space than his two predecessors despite the fact that he was prime minister...

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