Popular Democracy in Japan: How Gender and Community Are Changing Modern Electoral Politics

2. New Styles of Political Leadership and Community Mobilization

2 New Styles of Political Leadership and Community Mobilization My image is that politics is a world where people’s voices cannot be heard. I can’t support any parties because I don’t understand what each party wants to accomplish because they keep dividing and regrouping. Elections are meaningless because I can’t find any candidates I can trust to exhibit strong leadership to make Japan a better place. I envy nations like the U.S., with a system that allows people to directly elect their nation’s top leader. Prime Minister Mori’s selection was the complete opposite. I feel a deep sense of unease. Nonpartisan female JEDS respondent, 37 years old The Japanese Election and Democracy Study survey coincided with the tenure of Yoshirō Mori, who became president of the LDP and prime minister of Japan in April 2000, following the death of Keizō Obuchi, who had been in office just shy of two years. Japan went through six prime ministers in the seven years after electoral reform. The 1990s witnessed a proliferation of small reform parties formed by defectors from the LDP and the traditional opposition parties on the left. Parties splintered, merged, and dissolved at a dizzying rate, as voters waited for the system to reach a new equilibrium. The instability of the party system meant that party labels did not convey meaningful information to voters, and rapid turnover at the top levelofgovernmentmadeitdifficult foranyadministrationtopushforward a policy agenda. Japan entered a period of coalition government, beginning in1993withaneight-partycoalitionthatincludedallpartiesexcepttheJCP.1 1. The LDP was also excluded from this grand coalition that was formed precisely to unseat the dominant party. The LDP took control of government once again in 1994 when it entered into a coalition with the JSP, its longtime rival. 50 Chapter 2 Coalition government further muddied accountability and made strong leadership essential, since so many players had to be satisfied in order to maintain the stability of the coalition. In coalition, first with longtime rivals the Japan Socialist Party and then with the New Kōmeitō, the LDP was able to regain and retain power in 1994 despite its unpopularity. The fragmented opposition was unable to consolidate into a viable party (or coalition ) that could offer coherent policy alternatives. By 2000, the 1990s were being dubbed Japan’s “lost decade” to reflect mass sentiment that, amid this disarray, national political and economic elites had missed an opportunity to implement a strong reform agenda and had instead relegated the country to a protracted period of “economic stagnation and political convolution ” (Kikkawa 2000). Against this backdrop, the quality of political leadership, specifically prime ministerial leadership, became increasingly salient for voters who craved strong, decisive political decision-makers to guide them through these turbulent political and economic times: “Koizumi was swept into power because of the desire among voters for change in politics” (Yoshida 2002, 15). Prior to the Koizumi administration, public confidence in government was low, turnout was falling, and the rate of nonpartisanship was approaching 50 percent of the electorate. Citizens were disengaging from national politics. National leaders tried to anticipate, respond to, and borrow from changes in local politics to keep their jobs. Many of the JEDS participants who responded to the question, “What image do you have of Japanese politics?” used the prime minister—the office or person as the public face of the LDP and the nation—to structure a largely negative assessment of Japanese politics. When not talking explicitly about the prime minister, participants invoked the names of iconic leaders past (Shigeru Yoshida) and present (Shintarō Ishihara and Makiko Tanaka) or referred to an all-inclusive national “political establishment” to compare and contrast contemporary political styles in an exercise to articulate a vision for better leadership. Narrowly focusing on the prime minister—for voters and political observers alike—is a form of shorthand, a convenient way to alert listeners to a host of problems that plague Japanese politics without having a broader conversation. Targeting specific leaders helps ordinary voters to focus their claims about a national political establishment run by an undifferentiated mass of politicians catering to powerful, and often corporate, interests who are far removed from the everyday lives of Political Leadership and Community Mobilization 51 voters.2 Talking about leaders temporarily narrows the distance between ordinary voters and a corrupt political establishment by locating identifiable and familiar targets. By tying specific acts to identifiable actors, ordinary voters are...