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

3. National Attitudes and Local Action: Changing the Center from the Periphery

3 National Attitudes and Local Action Changing the Center from the Periphery One-party dominance in national politics has propelled voters to seek new opportunities to influence politics at the local level. Local political entrepreneurs—independent politicians, citizen activists, and emerging nonprofit organizations, among others—have worked to widen existing channels of interest articulation, while administrative reforms have created new opportunities for citizen participation by shifting the balance of power between the national government and local government. The Information Disclosure Law (1999), the Nonprofit Organization Law (1998), the Law to Promote Decentralization (1995), and the Revised Local Autonomy Law (1999) are vital tools. Administrative decentralization has revived debate about the meaning of local autonomy and how it is best achieved. At the same time, it has underscored the gap between local administration under the 1955 System and constitutionally defined local government power. Local political entrepreneurs critically reassess conventional interpretations of the constitutionally proscribed relationship among different levels of government administration in Japan, locating new bases of power while recovering 74 Chapter 3 existing ones that have been underutilized to date. Local governments have not realized the full potential of their power relative to the national government , and decentralization provides a framework and incentives for local administrators and citizens to craft a new relationship between themselves and the central government that tips the balance of power more firmly in the direction of ordinary voters. The decentralization process has opened new opportunities for political participation while unleashing multiple pressures to take advantage of them (Machidori and Soga 2007). Administrative decentralization has shifted the burden of responsibility for social welfare and associated costs from the central government to the local government. It is especially difficult for depopulated, rural districts with small tax bases to shoulder this shifting burden. Consequently, small rural communities are merging with or are being absorbed by the closest cities to expand their tax bases and enjoy economies of scale. But the new wave of municipal mergers that has accompanied administrative decentralization has incited anxieties at the very foundations of Japanese civil society. Voters in the smallest towns and villages worry that their absorption into larger units will erode their identities and silence their voices on municipal and regional representative assemblies. Further, the amalgamation process is robbing formerly independent municipal units of property rights, resulting in the erosion of autonomous control over lands and other resources.1 Decentralization can thus be said to be occurring on multiple fronts. Yoshisuke Tajima (2003) observed that the Great Heisei Merger (1999– 2006)2 prescribed the devolution of power from the central government to regional and municipal governments but has incited additional demands for further devolution to the previously existing villages, towns, and cities in newly amalgamated areas. Citizens, arguing that democratic self-government works better in smaller units, advocate maintaining executive authority over the original jurisdiction of town and villages absorbed to create larger municipalities (Tajima 2003). As in the aftermath 1. I extend many thanks to the incredibly thorough reader from Johns Hopkins who reminded me that I was understating what is at stake with municipal mergers. 2. Under the Law for Exceptional Measures on Municipal Mergers, the central government has encouraged small towns and villages to combine into larger municipalities to expand the local tax base in order to ease the financial burdens that local governments will assume with the transfer of administrative power. The number of municipalities was reduced from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 (Kohara 2007). National Attitudes and Local Action 75 of the Showa mergers (Kohara 2007), the Great Heisei Merger has been a catalyst for community building (Tajima 2003). Whereas the handful of referenda carried out between 1996 and 2000, discussed below, were almost exclusively concerned with wasteful or potentially hazardous public works projects, 418 referenda were held on merger plans between 2001 and March 2005 (Kohara 2007, 10). The Great Heisei Merger encouraged residents to demand information disclosure and greater participation in municipal decision-making, “side effects that the central government had never intended” (Kohara 2007, 10). Increasingly, ordinary Japanese are talking about politics as a multilevel game—what happens in the local political arena influences national politics, and vice versa. This reciprocal relationship is a departure from the conventional characterization of Japanese politics as a top-down system. Japanese voters make different calculations about where best to invest scarce political resources—locally or nationally—based on the predictions about...