Growing Democracy in Japan: The Parliamentary Cabinet System since 1868

4. Confederate Cabinets and the Demise of the "1955 System," 1972-1993

143 4 Confederate Cabinets and the Demise of the “1955 System,” 1972–1993 British government is essentially “ministerial government,” although this is counter-balanced by a Cabinet whose collegiate ethos is stronger than in most countries. —Simon James, British Cabinet Government, 2nd ed. (2002), 12 Those legislators who wield influence in particular policy areas, the zoku politicians, are treated as lawmakers representing the various ministries and agencies. . . . Rather than going through the cabinet minister and the official chain of command, bureaucrats brief the ruling party’s zoku politicians on a daily basis. —Iio Jun, Nihon tōchi no Kōzō: Kanryō naikakusei kara giin naikakusei e [Japan’s Structure of Governance: From Bureaucratic to Parliamentary Cabinet System] (2007), 6. Low Unseat the High On July 7, 1972, at fifty-four years of age, Tanaka Kakuei became the youngest prime minister in the postwar era. His rise from humble origins to the pinnacle of the political executive conjured up images of a latterday Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), the peasant-turned-warlord who helped to establish a system of centralized governance that brought an end to the Warring States (sengoku jidai—1476–1615) period. Tanaka was proclaimed the “commoner premier” (shōmin saishō) because he displayed a populist style, liked to sing naniwabushi (traditional Japanese narrative songs), and lacked the elitist educational pedigree of his predecessors. He established a cabinet of “party men” (tōjin ha) dedicated to “the politics of 144 Growing Democracy in Japan decision and action” (ketsudan to jikkō no seiji) (Watanabe, ed. 1995, 210; Kensei shiryō hensankai, ed. 1978, 45). He assumed the premiership with a promise to visit the People’s Republic of China, and fulfilled that promise just two months after taking office. He further stoked the public’s imagination with a grandiose plan to “remodel” the Japanese archipelago through a bonanza of expressways, bullet train lines, and island-linking bridges. Tanaka’s decision to dissolve the Diet and call new elections in December 1972 left the Liberal Democratic Party in control of a solid majority of seats in the Diet’s lower house. The party’s hegemonic control of the Diet seemed ensured with a dynamic, young, and popular party president sitting in the prime minister’s chair. Contrast this with the scene on August 9, 1993, when septuagenarian Miyazawa Kiichi was forced to turn over the premiership to Hosokawa Morihiro, a young former prefectural governor and the first non-LDP prime minister in nearly four decades. Miyazawa, an ex-Finance Ministry bureaucrat, had assumed leadership of the LDP in the midst of several high-profile scandals. His predecessor had gambled and lost in staking the future of his government on the passage of a package of bills to reform campaign finance and the system for electing lower house MPs. The reform bill proposed by the Miyazawa cabinet was torpedoed by the LDP’s top leaders, resulting in plummeting public approval ratings for the cabinet and the secession of several party leaders and their followers. On June 18, an opposition-sponsored no-confidence vote against the Miyazawa cabinet had been approved as a result of the supporting votes cast by these disaffected former LDP MPs. The LDP emerged from the lower house election that followed in control of only 44 percent of the seats, paving the way for a non-LDP coalition government under the Hosokawa cabinet. With this, the curtain came down on nearly four decades of uninterrupted LDP predominance , bringing with it the demise of the “1955 system.” In this chapter, I explore the evolution of the cabinet system through the last days of the “1955 system.” This was an era of “confederate cabinets,” in which an already blurry distinction between ruling party and cabinet became even blurrier, and a succession of corruption scandals intensified demands for political reform. Measures were taken to enhance the prime minister’s leadership powers, and yet these efforts failed to establish topdown executive leadership. At the same time, prime ministers and their cabinets struggled to provide coherent leadership in a context in which subgovernments dominated policy-making. Meanwhile, cabinets con- Confederate Cabinets and the Demise of the “1955 System” 145 fronted an array of challenges that included reducing government debt in a slow-growth economy and responding to popular demands to reform a structurally corrupt political order. The story begins with the premiers and ministers who occupied center stage in the political drama that unfolded...