Japanese Democracy After Shinzo Abe

The Shinzo Abe administration, the longest in Japanese history, came to an abrupt halt in September 2020. This article argues that while the Abe administration has strengthened democratic control at the institutional level in certain respects, he has gone too far in undermining the norms and practices that underpin democracy in Japan. While the Yoshihide Suga administration is expected to continue along these lines, the prospect of growing economic disparities in society, as well as the spread of misinformation and disinformation, will weigh on Japanese democracy.

The longest administration in Japan’s history came to an end in September 2020, when an ailing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigned after close to eight years in office. This was an abrupt ending, in Japanese eyes, given that Abe had failed to step down at times of political scandal that would have prompted other Japanese prime ministers to tender their resignations. Abe’s tenure as the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government had marked a period of exceptionally prolonged cabinet stability in Japan, which has had no fewer than 33 prime ministers (counting Abe’s first tour in 2006 and 2007) since the end of 1945. While the immediate reason for Abe’s departure was a worsening of his chronic ulcerative colitis, the decision to leave at age 65 came against a background of rising criticism for his lack of a firm response to the covid-19 pandemic.

On September 16, a new government was sworn in. At its head is Yoshihide Suga, a senior LDP figure and Abe’s longtime chief cabinet secretary (the holder of this post is generally understood to be the Japanese government’s “second in command”). By law, there must be a new election on or before 22 October 2021, and there may (in principle) be a snap election sooner. The LDP, which has held power almost continuously since 1955, enjoys a commanding 312-seat majority in the 465-member House of Representatives. The 72-year-old Suga is running a “continuity administration” that is expected to hew closely to many of Abe’s signature policies. This has not stopped discussion of “politics after Abe” in the Japanese media, of course, with concerns about covid response, stimulating the economy, and Japan’s place in the U.S.-China competition being leading topics.

Those concerned with the future of Japanese democracy find that signals regarding its health and prospects are mixed. On the positive side, near the start of October the new Suga administration hosted in Tokyo the second iteration of the so-called Quad Meeting, in which the foreign ministers of the leading Indo-Pacific democracies (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) talk face-to-face. This signaled the new government’s commitment to the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific region based on freedom of navigation and the rule of law.¹ In terms of Japan’s outward-facing policy, the emphasis on the Quad Meeting bespeaks a new administration that will continue Japan’s close collaboration with fellow democracies in defending liberty and a rules-based international order.

A more troubling signal came in the domestic arena. Shortly after its inauguration, the Suga administration refused to appoint six candidates (from a list of 105) that the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) had recommended for inclusion in its ranks. This body, which is an official policy advisor to the government, includes scholars from a wide array of fields. Since 1983, the practice has been for the SCJ to effectively name its own new members, with the prime minister’s office merely giving pro forma approval. The six whose appointments were refused were scholars in the humanities and social sciences who had voiced opposition to key policies of the Abe administration, such as the 2013 State Secrecy Act and 2015 legal changes that permit Japan the right to take part, together with its allies, in collective self-defense.

Academic circles in Japan reacted with indignation to what they saw as a violation of academic freedom. Petitions have made the rounds, and about six-hundred academic societies have published statements of protest. While Suga refused to explain, a report emerged that, according to multiple government officials, the appointments had been rejected out of worry that these academics might lead an antigovernment movement.² These scholars criticized certain policies, but there is no evidence that they intended to organize a movement against the government. The administration’s action showed a lack of respect for the rule of law, academic freedom, transparency, and accountability. It gives the impression that the new cabinet is willing to weaken Japan’s democracy.

Which signal will predominate? Will the Japanese government after Abe continue to respect democracy? The expected continuity between the Abe and Suga administrations suggests that we can begin answering this question by analyzing the state of democracy under Abe’s premiership, and then turn to what is needed under Suga to ensure that liberal-democratic standards, in both their letter and their spirit, are reinforced and not sapped in contemporary Japan.

Shinzo Abe first became prime minister in September 2006, after the LDP won the 2005 election and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi retired. Abe struggled politically and resigned after a year, his chronic illness having worsened. He retained his House seat, and was able to return as LDP leader and prime minister in December 2012 thanks to his consistent outreach to the public through outlets including Facebook, internet television, and email newsletters, together with heightened appreciation for a strong conservative leader amid intensifying anti-Japan demonstrations in China. As noted, the length of his second tenure is exceptional in Japanese history. During a time when much of the world, including Europe and the United States, saw rising populism rock political systems, Japanese politics remained stable.

With its support for values-based diplomacy and the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” the Abe administration embraced universal values and democratic norms such as the rule of law, transparency, and accountability. At home, Abe promoted the advancement of women in the work-place and the acceptance of foreign workers. After U.S. president Donald Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Abe played a major role in saving the agreement from collapse. His international standing rose, and his political “brand” seemed to shift from “right-wing” to “liberal.”

How real was this shift? Hiroshi Nakanishi of Kyoto University argues that it was more symbolic than substantive, using the term “exterior administration” (sotozura seiken) to describe the freshly liberal coloration of this administration’s initiatives masking an unchanged substance—in short, a smooth presentation without enough behind it.³

As for Abe’s domestic actions, critics charged him with doing more to erode than to defend liberal democracy. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in their influential book How Democracies Die, unwritten norms remain important as outer guards against such destroyers of democracy as political domination of the judiciary or the media; the suppression of competitors, businesspeople, and cultural figures; or expedient changes to the electoral system. The norms can only stand, however, if political rivals maintain a level of mutual tolerance and courtesy while refraining from the worst kinds of attacks. Informal rules are by definition difficult to codify, but this makes their preservation no less important. Levitsky and Ziblatt refer to such standards of mutual tolerance and organizational restraint as democracy’s “soft guardrails,” and warn that the death of democracy can begin with the erosion of soft guardrails before continuing in a gradual and invisible process.⁴

Japan under Abe saw nothing as dramatic as what one might associate with Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, or the United States under Trump. There was bargaining between the ruling and opposition parties over matters such as the voting age (which dropped from twenty to eighteen years in 2016) and electoral apportionment, but the equality of the electoral system was generally maintained. Even though the LDP enjoys extraordinary electoral dominance—it has held power for more than sixty of the past sixty-five years—it remains true that oppositionists can win seats and the voters can change governments, as they did in 2009 when the Democratic Party of Japan soundly defeated the LDP at the polls.

Under the 1947 Constitution, which replaced the Meiji Constitution of Imperial Japan, electoral competition is fair and open. Since New York–based Freedom House began its worldwide system of rating countries on their respect for “political rights” and “civil liberties” in 1973, it has continuously rated Japan a Free country. Fears of foreign intervention in Japanese elections are insignificant. No major Japanese politicians or movements reject the democratic system, and no one calls for violence as a solution to political problems. Even when the government declared a national emergency over the covid-19 pandemic, there was no lockdown or other form of extreme restriction on movement, and individual privacy was not invaded, despite the Japanese media’s overall failure to objectively and positively evaluate this aspect due to their focus on the health issue.

The Rise of the “Abe School”

Even in view of all the above, it can be argued that the Abe administration weakened some of democracy’s soft guardrails. The weakening came, ironically, out of an effort to dilute the LDP’s traditional internal arrangements in favor of something more democratic.

The House of Representatives is the lower house of Japan’s bicameral National Diet. As is normal in a parliamentary system, voters elect House members, and they elect the prime minister when they meet as part of the new Diet. The prime minister chooses the members of the cabinet, and these cabinet ministers in turn head the various administrative divisions of the government. In this way, the will of the people flows through the Diet to the cabinet and thence to the bureaucracy in what political scientists call a system of “unitary representation.” During its long tenure in power, however, the LDP sought to manage its own internal dynamics by introducing twists that made the system less direct and gave it a somewhat closed quality.

The basic problem was the LDP’s own internal factionalization. Political competition took place not only between the LDP and other parties, but within the LDP itself. Under the multimember-district (MMD) system used in the lower house until 1993 and in the upper house still today, LDP members had (or have) to compete not only against opposition candidates but also among themselves. The MMD system makes it difficult to run an election campaign under the party umbrella, so influential members created their own LDP factions and provided campaign support through factional channels. Each faction had the ability to raise money for its members not only by means of allocations from the LDP, but by taking donations and holding fundraisers as well. By 1980, the LDP had opted to seek a stable modus vivendi among its various internal camps by portioning out cabinet seats to each faction according to its size in the House of Representatives. In order to decide who within each faction would receive a cabinet post, the seniority principle was informally adopted. The rule, unwritten but robust, was that any LDP legislator who was serving a fifth to seventh term (a House term is four years long) would be virtually guaranteed a cabinet seat.

This meant that the LDP always had a list of “next-up” cabinet candidates that was outside the prime minister’s control. Under this system, ministers were loyal mainly to their respective factions rather than to the prime minister, the party as a whole, or the government. As a result, the prime minister, who was indirectly elected on the basis of voters’ decisions, had only limited influence over either the choice of ministers or their actions.⁵

Since the 1990s, Japan has seen the adoption of measures meant to weaken intraparty factions and strengthen cabinet members. These measures have included reforms to the Political Party Financing Act, the electoral system, and the LDP’s internal financial system. Acting in accord with this line of reform, Abe named to key posts people whose political beliefs were close to his own conservative and nationalist views, instead of adhering to factional ratios and seniority.

In addition to giving the prime minister more control over the government, this change also meant that more young LDP lawmakers (or those close to Abe, at least) could gain experience sooner than might otherwise have been the case. The new chief cabinet secretary, Katsunobu Kato (b. 1955), is a figure whose career Abe advanced in this way, as are a number of other key officials in Prime Minister Suga’s “continuity” administration.

Hitoshi Komiya of Aoyama Gakuin University calls this new approach the foundation of the “Abe School.”⁶ Souchi Naraoka of Kyoto University faults it for denying LDP members who were not close to Abe the opportunity to develop their own leadership skills. The previous system, whatever its faults, did have the effect of spreading cabinet posts across the party instead of leaving them all in the hands of a single “school” associated with one dominant politician.⁷

Abe’s reshaping of the appointment system, combined with his extraordinarily long tenure in power, gave him something like monopoly control within the LDP. As his control over the party grew, his confidence was also bolstered by his government’s passage of the new national-security laws in 2015. These laws roused controversy because they change what many see as a key plank of Japan’s postwar Constitution: In Article 9, the Japanese people “forever renounce” war and the threat of force as a method of settling international disputes.⁸ The 2015 legal changes shift Japan’s stance from one where it accepts the use of force only for purposes of national self-defense strictly construed to one where the country declares that it can also use force to defend its allies for purposes of “collective self-defense” in keeping with the rights guaranteed to each country under the United Nations Charter.

Backers of the new laws regard them as a realistic and prudent move in the face of rising Chinese power and a need for tighter bonds with allies, while critics decry the laws as unconstitutional, and on substantive grounds fear them as a step back toward the posture of aggressive militarism that caused so much harm in the first half of the twentieth century. For Abe, whose political vision was to “break away from the postwar regime,” regaining the right to take part in collective self-defense as a step to becoming a normal country was a major achievement in pursuit of one of his key goals.

If term limits on the chief executive can be considered a guardrail protecting democracy, Abe and the LDP have something to answer for here. There is no formal end to the number of terms that someone may serve as Japan’s prime minister. Rules adopted internally by parties had served as a de facto limit, however. Abe’s grip on the LDP was such that he could ignore this. He wanted to stay on, so in March 2017, the LDP amended its bylaws to extend the party president’s maximum time in office from two consecutive terms of six years each to three consecutive terms of nine years each. Prior to the worsening of Abe’s health problems, some powerful LDP legislators had even started suggesting that four consecutive terms should be allowed. Under Abe, the LDP had performed well in the July 2016 upper-house election, so the 2017 acceptance of longer terms came without particular objection. The extension had precedents dating to the administrations of Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982–87) and Junichiro Koizumi (2001–2006), where in each instance the intent was to extend the term of a prime minister who had been successful in elections.

Controlling the Bureaucracy

In another corner of the political system, away from the prime minister’s office, there is the problem of self-perpetuating bureaucracy. The tradition in Japan is that government ministries and agencies, staffed via the merit system, handle their own personnel affairs without input from the minister in charge. This practice, especially when it was coupled with the old cabinet seniority system (which produced many “amateur” ministers given posts on the basis of “time in grade”), made for a largely autonomous bureaucracy characterized by ample organizational inertia and rigid policies. The world of administration did not respond to the world of politics (where voters have a say), and ministries all too often had introverted “sectional” attitudes that prevented them from working together to solve challenging problems. Jun Iio of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies argues that instead of maintaining a parliamentary system, Japan over time developed a “bureaucratic cabinet system” that violated the very nature of democratic control.⁹

Here, the Abe administration should get a measure of credit. Building on discussions dating back to the 1990s, it formed in 2014 a Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs (CBPA) to fill (or vacate) 680 senior officials’ jobs through consultations among the prime minister, the chief cabinet secretary, and the relevant minister, based on proposals made by senior officials of each ministry. The advent of the CBPA has without a doubt increased the speed at which the government’s agenda is implemented.

In making these appointments, however, the Abe administration demoted bureaucrats who had been critical of its policies. Akihide Hirashima was director-general of the Ministry of Home Affairs and Local Government Taxation in 2014, when he opposed one of the administration’s major tax policies. He soon found himself off the career fast track and relegated to an unusual external post. A year before, an official in the Legislative Bureau who had voiced caution about the proposed shift to “collective self-defense” was replaced by a Foreign Ministry functionary who favored the change.

In addition to reassigning or replacing critics, the administration bent retirement-age rules to keep bureaucratic allies in harness. Makoto Fujiwara, who was due to retire in March 2018 as the cabinet chief of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), stayed on with a promotion. He received another extension in March 2020. Such extensions are lawful, but against custom.

Lower tolerance for internal criticism has the obvious downside of inhibiting vigorous policy debate. At worst, it can even discourage rational decision making. A bureaucrat’s dissenting opinion cannot prevent a cabinet minister from making choices and issuing directives. Policy can be carried out without demoting bureaucrats who voice misgivings. Making “examples” of dissenters is nothing but a fear tactic: It reflects fear of criticism, and seeks to use fear to muzzle critics.

The exertion of political control over officialdom represents a harm to democracy if those in power use that control to cover up problems that they themselves have caused. In 2017, Abe’s approval rating and the LDP’s standing took a hit over the Kake Gakuen affair. This was a case of suspected cronyism in which MEXT officials were said to have departed from years of policy by speeding up approval of a new veterinary school run by a friend of Abe’s. When a former MEXT vice-minister named Kihei Maekawa admitted that Abe’s “will” had moved the agency, Yomiuri Shimbun reported Maekawa’s visits to a shady “dating” bar.¹⁰ Opposition lawmakers suggested that the Prime Minister’s Office may have leaked word of the scandal in order to discredit and silence Maekawa.

With the establishment of the CBPA, bureaucrats began conspicuously following unspoken orders (sontaku). This was terrible for transparency. Awkward questions about Abe or his administration were swaddled in silence, while in a number of cases information was never disclosed. Some of the gravest examples of sontaku had to do with bureaucrats protecting elected politicians by means of cover-ups or other efforts to undermine the rule of law. Not only in the Kake Gakuen affair but also in two other cronyism and illegal-favors scandals (known, respectively, as the Moritomo Gakuen affair and the affair of the Cherry Blossom party), bureaucrats in charge denied that records had been kept or claimed that they had been innocently destroyed. In the Moritomo scandal, falsified documents were produced. Japan has had a Freedom of Information Act since 2001. Among other things, that law has raised awareness of the need for public access to information. By denying this need, officials in these cases violated the democratic principle of accountability.

Although the Japanese parliamentary system grants the prime minister power to name judges and prosecutors, it was customary for these appointments to be handled by the Justice Ministry while the prime minister kept a distance. By means of this norm, the executive showed respect for the democratic constitutional principles of judicial independence and the separation of powers. With the arrival of the CBPA, all that changed. The prime minister began intervening not only in the naming of judges but also in the naming of public prosecutors, who long have enjoyed considerable independence of action in Japan. (In 1976, prosecutors convicted Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka of taking money from the Lockheed Corporation in order to aid sales of Lockheed aircraft to Japan.)

In 2018, the Moritomo scandal was raging over suspicions that the Abe government had improperly offered drastically discounted land in Osaka to the founder of a nationalist grade school whose honorary principal was Akie Abe, the prime minister’s wife. Hiromu Kurokawa, an experienced figure who normally would have been in line for a top prosecutor’s job, was instead kept on (against expectations) in a bureaucratic post as the highest-ranking civil servant at the Justice Ministry.¹¹ Was he there to shield political figures from being held to legal account?

Cases in which Prime Minister Abe and members of his cabinet might be implicated as wrongdoers continue to go unprosecuted. Although public documents related to the Moritomo scandal are known to have been falsified, no one has been indicted for anything to do with this case. Likewise, during the Abe administration, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office failed to act on the Cherry Blossom party scandal. The same office dropped an influence-peddling case against a former economic-revitalization minister suspected of having taken 6 million yen in cash from a construction company in 2016.

In January 2019, Kurokawa left the Justice Ministry and was named to head the Tokyo High Public Prosecutor’s Office. In January 2020, as his sixty-third birthday approached, the Abe government moved to amend the law on public prosecutors so that Kurokawa could stay on past what had been the normal retirement age. Submitted in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the amendment seemed to critics like an effort to sneak through a dubious legal change while public attention was focused elsewhere. The matter spilled over into the world of popular culture as singers, comedians, and other celebrities denounced the amendment as another maneuver by the government to protect itself from legitimate prosecutorial inquiries. The affair ended with Kurokawa’s surprise resignation and the withdrawal of the amendment in May 2020, after it was revealed that Kurokawa had been violating social-distancing rules while taking part in high-stakes gambling on mahjong.

The Abe government’s intervention in personnel matters extended also to the Supreme Court of Japan. This court’s body of fifteen justices has customarily comprised six judges, four attorneys, two prosecutors, two administrative officers, and one university professor. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations has selected suitable candidates for the attorney slots, sending to the Supreme Court a list from which that court itself picks the actual lawyer or lawyers to be appointed. Approval by the prime minister follows, in pro forma fashion. In 2017, when an attorney vacancy appeared, the Abe government chose someone to fill it who was not on the Bar Federation’s list. This move constituted an intrusion of politics into the judiciary and a violation of judicial autonomy.

Taming the Media

The Abe administration’s erosion of democratic norms and practices extended to the media as well. There was no overt takeover, of course, but the administration sought to tighten its grip on the press through a series of actions that violated previous conventions regarding media relations.

A prominent target of these efforts was the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), a special corporation privatized from a state-owned entity. Although the government holds NHK’s shares, it is not state-run and has retained its independence. Arguing that the broadcaster needed outsider-led reform, the first Abe administration named Fujifilm head Shigetaka Komori, a well-known conservative and Abe supporter, to chair NHK’s management committee. In 2014, the second Abe administration made Katsuhito Momii NHK’s top executive, and he opined that “it would not do for us to say left when the government is saying right.”¹²

The administration dealt with press conferences by limiting—in ways not seen before—both the numbers of questions that could be asked and who could ask them. During his long tenure as chief cabinet secretary, Suga sometimes flatly refused to answer questions at all.

Over the years, politicians and the media in Japan have developed a relationship of trust and coexistence. The system of press clubs and beat reporters (bankisha) provides daily contacts through which politicians can convey information to certain journalists.¹³ The Abe administration framed its move to coopt the independent media as an extension of this approach. After the LDP won the December 2012 snap election and came back to the governing-party seat, Abe began to hold a series of dinners with the heads of major newspapers, news agencies, and television stations. Progressive outlets and the Japan Communist Party criticized these events as attempts to manipulate the media.¹⁴ As part of Abe’s image-building effort, his administration pursued a strategy of having the prime minister appear as much as possible only in “soft” media contexts (whether print interviews or live television appearances) where there would be little or no chance of encountering difficult questions.¹⁵

A bigger change was the direct and indirect chastisement of media outlets that dared to criticize the government. Ryosuke Nishida of the Tokyo Institute of Technology points out that although these changes can be traced back as far as 2000, they accelerated under the Abe administration.¹⁶ Abe used Facebook and other social-networking sites to respond to critical coverage of himself and his government that appeared in major left-of-center newspapers such as Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun. This approach contributed to the polarization of public discourse, with media organs now more closely identified than before with particular ideological audiences—Asahi and Mainichi on the left, and Yomiuri Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun on the right.

As noted earlier, Yoshihide Suga served as Shinzo Abe’s longtime chief cabinet secretary. Suga became prime minister with the support of the various LDP factions that want to continue Abe’s conservative approach. There is little chance that Suga’s government will take a path much different from Abe’s. The real question with Suga’s administration is how long it will last. Can it endure, or will it prove only an interim government after Abe’s extended time in office? There is no reason to think that Abe’s retirement has cost the LDP its accustomed electoral dominance. Although there has been a move to merge the existing opposition parties to keep them from splitting the vote in single-member districts and to promote a change of government, proportional representation has made it attractive for even small opposition parties to hold on to their distinctness rather than converge. In addition, the opposition parties’ alignment against constitutional reform is costing them among the younger voters, who prefer change. In 2021, there will likely be a general election between the end of the Olympics (postponed a year from July and August 2020 due to the pandemic) and October, when the lower-house term expires. Thanks to the weakness of the opposition, the Suga administration seems poised to renew its mandate.

Where does all this leave Japan’s democratic outlook for the next several years and beyond? First, there is concern that the cabinet’s excessive control over the bureaucracy will continue. As chief cabinet secretary, Suga was involved in all the Abe administration’s maneuvers regarding bureaucratic appointments. In September 2020, during the run-up to the LDP leadership election, Suga said publicly of civil servants, “We were elected. If you disagree with the direction we have decided to go in, I will have you transferred.”¹⁷ Suga is known for having a more uncompromising personality than Abe, and is a good bet to prove even more thorough when it comes to preventing bureaucratic criticism of administration policies. This approach will make it even harder to preserve space for the expression of objective and honest opinions in the policy-making process. Transparency will be lost, and formulating rational policies will grow harder. Rather than downgrading bureaucrats whose opinions differ from those of the administration, the government needs to appreciate that critical opinions are a vital part of sound governance.

Government efforts to exert control over the media will also remain a worry. Suga is said to have extensive media contacts.¹⁸ Almost as soon as he became prime minister, he called on journalists to hold a completely off-the-record get-together over pancakes. At that time, the controversy over the SCJ rejections and Suga’s refusal to explain them was raging, and progressive media turned down the pancake invitation. They feared that it was another media-cooptation ploy, and noted that if anything newsworthy came up at the meal, they would be unable to report it anyway, given Suga’s restrictions.¹⁹ The new premier went ahead nonetheless, and since then has held repeated off-the-record meetings with willing media figures.

Disinformation, Misinformation, and Disruption

The weakening of democratic safeguards is particularly worrying given two growing social problems that could negatively affect the future of democracy in Japan: the spread of disinformation and misinformation, and widening economic disparities.

While Japan has so far had only a limited encounter with the troubling spread of misinformation and (even worse) deliberate disinformation via social media, the phenomenon is sure to grow as a problem for the democratic system. The SCJ controversy gave a taste of things to come. As criticism of Suga’s rejections mounted and he refused to give his reasons, Fuji-TV commentator Fumio Hirai claimed—wrongly—that any SCJ member with six years’ tenure in the organization receives a lifetime pension worth 2.5 million yen per year. Hirai’s misinformation took wing on Twitter together with two LDP politicians’ similar tweets. Fuji-TV issued a correction the next day, but by then many citizens had already come to credit the misunderstanding as truth.

Former Osaka Prefecture governor Toru Hashimoto tweeted another piece of misinformation, claiming (by way of urging the SCJ to pay for itself) that both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Britain’s Royal Society receive no government money. This was not true—while being a nonprofit NGO, the NAS receives 35 to 40 percent of its funding in the form of reimbursements and grants from the U.S. government. The Royal Society receives a grant from Parliament worth about US$63 million per year. Hashimoto was trying to paint the SCJ as concerned not with academic freedom, but rather with its own “vested interest” in taxpayer funding.

House member Akira Amari of the LDP had written on his blog the further misinformation that the SCJ was actively working with China’s “Thousand Talents” plan and its military research, leading to a flood of postings condemning the SCJ for this alleged collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The discussion surrounding the SCJ grew so distorted that it became hard to understand what the essence of the problem was. The impression that the SCJ was a pro-CCP organization preoccupied with money was false.

Eager to take advantage of this situation, the Suga administration did nothing to correct the misinformation, but instead began calling for the SCJ to be “reformed.” This was a deliberate diversion of the discussion from the original issues, which were government infringement on academic freedom and avoidance of transparency and accountability.

As it is, false information is said to spread six times faster on Twitter than accurate information.²⁰ The government’s willful exploitation of misinformation to change the subject of the SCJ debate is an ill portent for the future of Japan’s democracy.

As of early December 2020, according to worldometers.info, Japan has suffered about 165,000 cases of covid-19 and about twenty-four hundred deaths from the disease. With a population of about 126 million, Japan has a covid death rate per million people of 19, putting it near the lower end of the deaths-per-million statistic from around the world. The pandemic and the response to it are turning into drivers of widening economic disparity, however, and this must be considered a serious concern regarding the health of Japanese democracy.

Until now, for economic, political, and “identity”-related reasons, Japan has largely avoided political polarization and the rise of populism. Japanese economic policy is a decade behind U.S. or U.K. policy in its embrace of neoliberalism, so the sharpening of economic disparities has been delayed as well. The LDP draws on a widely diffused support base, as does its main rival, the Constitutional Democratic Party. The two parties’ bases overlap, moreover, and party loyalties do not break down along predictable lines of income, education level, or generation. Finally, Japan’s populace is 98 percent ethnic Japanese, and the country lacks the sectarian or other divisions that elsewhere have fueled the creation of mutually exclusive social groups.

Japan has struggled for decades with stagnation and slow growth, however, saddling it with an unfavorable economic and employment situation. The political tensions that such circumstances breed are making themselves felt, and deliberate measures are needed if worsening polarization is to be avoided. A high percentage of those who graduated from college in the 1990s, when Japan fell into recession, have never found full-time employment and are living through middle age in that condition. In a “graying” society, the middle-aged “working poor” often find themselves hard-pressed to care for the needs of elderly parents. Employment did expand under Abe, but much of the growth came in the part-time and temporary sector, and has left the low-income bracket still all too full. In Japan as elsewhere, the pandemic has hit the service sector (retail, travel, restaurants, and so on) very hard while favoring those with the kinds of (usually better-paying) jobs that can be done remotely. Covid, or the response to it at least, is therefore making economic disparities worse.

Suga has a track record as an economic liberalizer and deregulator, and learned politics at the elbow of politicians famous for such policies. If he takes that path now in pursuit of more jobs and higher growth, Japan will need an enhanced social-welfare safety net to protect those on the less favorable side of the economic gap.

Another worry is that Suga’s relative lack of ideological coloration will leave some of Abe’s right-wing supporters open to being wooed by populist parties. Formations such as the Japan Innovation Party and the Party to Protect the People from the NHK control few seats in the Diet, but if the economy falls and discontent rises, they could be in line for greater right-wing support. An ideologically blander LDP under Suga could, like Germany’s Christian Democrats under Angela Merkel, end up leaving an open space to the right that populist parties will move to fill as they draw conservative voters who no longer see their preferences reflected in LDP words and actions.

Peering into a cloudy future, we see these reasons for worry, but we can also note that maintaining a healthy democracy is likely to benefit the LDP administration as well. Even if it was carried to excessive lengths, the LDP’s original idea of giving the people’s representatives more control over the unelected administrative state was in keeping with the advancement of democratic principles. And showing restraint and tolerance in relations with critics and rivals is a course whose prudence the LDP should be able to grasp as a benefit to the Japanese public, the Japanese future, and the LDP itself.