Daily Yomiuri, January 15,2006
The overwhelming victory for the Liberal Democratic Party in the September 2005 general election of the House of Representatives was a major moment in Japan's political history.
Conservative media abroad applauded it, while those with leftist-liberal leanings carried commentaries that stereotypically deplored the LDP triumph and said a two-party system was far off.
Noteworthy among comments from overseas was that by Margarita Estevez-Abe, an up-and-coming Japan expert at Harvard University. In an article in the Sept. 29 edition of the International Herald Tribune, she said the election results marked an end to the conventional pattern of Japan's politics, and turned it more into a British-style parliamentary democracy.
She wrote: "The days of weak leaders are over in Japan. With or without Koizumi, the change in leadership style is here to stay. Japan introduced a number of important institutional reforms in the 1990s, including a change in the electoral rules in 1994, and the strengthening of the cabinet and the prime ministerial office in the late 1990s.
"All these changes were designed to turn Japan into a British-style parliamentary democracy. Koizumi is a product of this new political structure. He was the first to understand how the new political rules of the game worked. Under them, individual politicians cannot survive by bucking party leaders. Koizumi's victory has taught ambitious politicians the need to rally behind a strong leader. There is no going back."
Estevez-Abe expressed her desire to see Japan's political system becoming more like Britain's, which is easier to understand and easier for the United States to deal with. She also noted that Japan should address revising the Constitution to take on a more international role as an ally of the United States.
Given that parliamentary democracy was born and matured in Britain, the statement by the Harvard researcher that Japan's politics are now more like Britain's can be taken as compliment.
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Among the biggest achievements brought to Japanese politics by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's administration has been its success in breaking down the decades-old pattern of decision-making divvied up among factions within the LDP. From the beginning of the Koizumi administration in 2001, the prime minister has handled governmental as well as party personnel decisions without regard for the desires of faction chiefs.
Some political commentaries in newspapers have labeled this as a kind of factional strife, much like the earlier conflicts between factions headed by past LDP heavyweights Kakuei Tanaka and Takeo Fukuda. Successors to the Fukuda faction notoriously harbored grudges over the long period of dominance of rivals in the Tanaka faction, according to the commentaries.
But there also have been some that view Koizumi's leadership style in a positive light, viewing it favorably as a reform-oriented movement devoted to erasing the legacies of leadership styles like Tanaka's, which were dominated by vested interests and the predominance of LDP lawmakers that were essentially mouthpieces for interest groups. This was exemplified by the fact that very few legislators acting on behalf of lobbyists, popularly known as "zokugiin" (special-interest lawmakers), had a say in state budget compilations for fiscal 2006.
Fiscal policy is a matter outside my field, but I am definitely in favor of breaking away from the political style that took root in the days of Tanaka's administration.
When Tanaka was in office as prime minister from 1972 to 1974, I was a mere section head at the Foreign Ministry. But because I felt deep misgivings about his policy toward China, I tried to stir up resistance against the premier and be a thorn in his side.
Since then, there has been no common policy between Japan and the United States regarding problems involving China and Taiwan, which is indeed an unusual situation for this country, the United States' key ally in the Far East.
Bringing this unusual situation to an end would mark a truly epoch-making development that would boost stability in Asia. In fact, there have been some signs of this becoming a reality.
When Tanaka and a long line of his successors were at the national helm, I could not help but feel repugnance toward the prevalence of their money-power politics.
It was in those days that the Foreign Ministry's disbursements of its confidential funds, though originally intended to be used for intelligence-collecting purposes, started to be squandered for currying favor with politicians. Spending taxpayers' money that way was bound to affect the morale of bureaucrats who appropriated the ministry's budget.
A spate of corruption scandals in many other ministries and agencies also were exposed. The root cause of these irregularities all sprouted from the Tanaka administration and its offshoots.
The transformation from this pattern of politics can be characterized as a departure from a political system based on power balances between factions. The situation was considered the natural result of the adoption of the single-seat electoral system for Diet elections, as Estevez-Abe pointed out.
The abolition of plural-seat constituencies has naturally resulted in the strengthening of the powers of political party heads who have the power to put candidates on the party ticket in each electoral district. In addition, the system of granting subsidies from the state coffers to political parties has caused faction heads to lose influence that in the past was wielded on the strength of their fund-raising capabilities.
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Lying behind the departure from a political system based on factional power balances was not only factors attributable to institutional arrangements, but also the trend of the times--that is, elements pertaining to political philosophy.
Undoubtedly, the creation of the Tanaka Cabinet marked a major change in the atmosphere of Japan's politics, while most political institutions were left unchanged.
Before that, it was popular to use the word "caliber" to judge the qualifications of politicians--as in which people had the right caliber to be prime minister or heads of ministries and agencies. Those who fell short of being recognized as having such makings were not kept in the dark about their mediocrity.
But since the days of the Tanaka Cabinet, whether a person was suited for a ministerial post came to rely on how many times he or she had been reelected to the Diet and whether the faction the lawmaker belonged to was strong or weak. These new rules of the game were reportedly laid down by Tanaka himself.
The term "caliber" vanished from the political world when this practice became entrenched. Although I have no intention to speak ill of the late Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki, I have heard that when he became prime minister in 1980, rank-and-file legislators in the LDP were excited because they believed they all had a chance of becoming prime minister.
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What then happens when a system of power politics based on factional balances is replaced by a British-style parliamentary democracy? One major issue certainly is how the successor to the incumbent leader is selected.
The first posting of my diplomatic career was to Britain in 1953, in the twilight of the golden days of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. At the time, Anthony Eden had already been taken for granted as Churchill's successor.
As long as a leader is truly confident of the way he runs his government, he should naturally have a say regarding who should be his successor.
Liu Bang, the founder of China's Han dynasty more than 2,200 years ago, cited Xiao He as the man to be his prime minister, whose successor, Liu said, should be Cao Shen. Liu went on to say, "It will surely be Zhou Bo who eventually will put the Liu clan to rest." It was a prediction that came true.
Zhuge Kongming, known as a great military strategist and statesman in the Three Kingdoms period that followed the Han dynasty, asked Jiang Wan and Fei Yi to look after his affairs after he was gone. One of the offshoot successors to the Han dynasty, the Shu, remained secure so far as Fei Yi was in office.
The same can be said about every organization, company or government body. One of the most important things to a company president or the head of a ministry's bureaucracy is selecting a successor. Leaving the succession matter at a company up to vying subordinates shows nothing but absence of ability or sense of responsibility of the president.
Regardless of whether his wishes will be obeyed, the man at the top must come out with his own judgment concerning the right person to succeed him.
It is common for a company to have a presidential successor, and even the successor after that, already determined, even if unofficially. Otherwise, the continuity of the firm's business strategy would be in jeopardy.
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There can be no doubt that in the political world things do not often go as smoothly as hoped for.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that the idea of relegating of succession affairs entirely to competition among aspirants comes from the belief that there is no problem in having the nation's top political post assumed by anybody, irrespective of personal traits or competency. This is nothing but a reflection of the misguided notion of equality endemic in postwar Japan, in particular the antielitism that has taken root since Tanaka's administration.
To cite "Tanaka's legacy" may be incorrect. The blame should go back to Tanaka's predecessor, Eisaku Sato, who did not nominate his successor though he had the power to do so. That enabled Tanaka to seize power with the extravagant use of money, and make him and his successor believe that what is necessary is not caliber but something else.
This misconceived egalitarianism also is represented by the term of office of the LDP president. Is there any ruling party overseas that limits the tenure of office of its head to a maximum of four years?
Every country with a four-year presidency system allows the president to serve two terms, or eight years in total.
The frequent change of LDP presidents due to the pecking order is a negative legacy of factional power-based politics, which has resulted in lack of rleadership in Japanese politics, dating back to the Tanaka era.
I would like to refer to Britain again. It even took Margaret Thatcher nine years as prime minister to root out left-leaning education in her quest for educational reform--the closing chapter of her reform agenda. Therefore, there would be nothing wrong at all--from the perspective of parliamentary democracy--in revising the LDP's rules to allow a party president to be elected for a third three-year term.