They are the images that will define Japanese politics for a generation; images as potent for Japan in their own way as those of Germans dancing on a crumbling Berlin wall or Boris Yeltsin atop a tank at the Russian Parliament. They were of the sudden but irrevocable change that was the consequence of a historic election on July 18. That day Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party–and the out-of-touch old men who ran it–lost majority control of the all-powerful lower house of Parliament for the first time in 38 years.
Last week the images came in waves. There, on Tuesday, was Michio Watanabe, the LDP faction leader who turns 70 this week, once bucolic but now gaunt and suffering from cancer, begging to be prime minister–and saying that he would sacrifice his life, quite literally, for the chance. The next day 78-year-old Shin Kanemaru, whose arrest on charges of tax evasion last March was the beginning of the end for the party he had come to dominate as money-politics meister, was wheeled, wizened and decrepit, into a Tokyo courtroom for the start of his trial. Finally, on Thursday, came the resignation of 73-year-old Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, looking daily a more broken figure Since losing the vote of no confidence over political reform that triggered the snap election.
But what was to have been a ritual resignation became an astonishing rank-and-file revolt. Gulping down his anger and sadness, Miyazawa formally told a full gathering of the LDP’s parliamentarians that he would step down. But when the party’s hard-line secretary-general, Seiroku Kajiyama, then announced that a committee of party elders would pick the next party president–and thus nominee for prime minister-the generational revolt that has been simmering within the LDP for years boiled over. Younger members of the party bolted from their seats in fury, knowing that their fate was in the hands of an old guard that, in the words of one foreign diplomat, “just didn’t get it” that the political world they had ruled had been rent asunder. “All of you sitting on the platform there,” shouted Seiichi Obta, leader of a group of young legislators, “you should all resign. You were the ones who pulled down Miyazawa. I regard the prime minister as a class-C war criminal. I demand that class-A and class-B war criminals also take responsibility.”
Unable to quell the uprising, the old guard yielded. Instead of the traditional backroom horse trading between faction leaders, all 379 of the LDP’s legislators in both houses of Parliament will cast a secret ballot on Friday to pick their new leader. To make clear to the nationwide television audience how revolutionary that procedural change was, 45-year-old Diet member Shokei Arai shouted into a television microphone, “The ancien regime has collapsed!”
And so it has. Japan’ s politics, usually as scripted in public as any communist regime’s, has been plunged into turmoil. There it will likely remain for months. By the end of last week it seemed unlikely the LDP could attract the 33 extra legislators it needs to command a majority in the lower house to form a new government. Instead, members of two new conservative splinter parties that scored well in the election were moving toward an alliance that may allow the LDP’s disparate opposition to rule Japan.
After a week of hesitation, Morihiro Hosokawa, an early LDP renegade and founder of the year-old Japan New Party, said he favored a non-LDP government. The JNP, in combination with its ally, the Sakigake, or Harbinger, party, plus an independent that has joined them since the election, controls the key swing block of 49 votes. Political analysts in Tokyo were cautiously predicting that the most likely outcome was a seven-party coalition cabinet led either by Hosokawa or by Tsutomu Hata, the front man for the group of LDP defectors who led the revolt against Miyazawa earlier this month. Hata’s own conservative splinter group, the Japan Renewal Party, won 55 seats (diagram).
That is by no means certain, however. Hata and Hosokawa are sufficiently distrustful of each other that they may need to find a mutually agreeable compromise prime minister, such as justice Minister Masaharu Gotoda, a longtime proponent of political reform, or the Sakigake leader Masayoshi Takemura.
Still, amid the chaos, it does seem clear that the LDP’s long monopoly on power is history. As in the United States last year, the July 18 ballot in Japan–as well as Thursday’s open rebellion by young LDP members-signifies a major generational shift in Japanese politics. Men and women who came of age after World War II will now lead Japan in the post-cold-war age just as their generation is rising to positions of power and influence in the bureaucracy and in business; in time that will mean profound change–both within the country and in its relations with the rest of the world. “New, younger faces are going to run Japan, and that will be good in some respects and bad in others,” said the diplomat.
The new era will bring with it a group of more nationalist-minded leaders less willing to toe Washington’s line, though also more willing to effect change in an economy creaking under the weight of its bureaucratic minders. Once the current turmoil passes, Japan’s new leaders, who have only known an ascendant Japan, are likely to be far more assertive both at home and abroad. That in time may cause significant discomfort among Japan’s trading partners and among its bureaucrats-so used are they to running politicians, rather than having politicians run them.
The new leaders are also likely to increase Japan’s own role in its defense, betting that the U.S. military presence in the Pacific will diminish over time. In fact, Ichiro Ozawa, the brains behind the Japan Renewal Party, calls for a change in Japan’s pacifist Constitution to allow Tokyo to participate more easily in international peacekeeping operations. At the same time, the new leaders understand that as an economic power almost Washington’s equal (and, many of them believe privately, its innate superior), Japan need not compromise on every trade dispute that arises. “In time you are going to have a group of politicians who can-and will-say no very directly to us when they feel like it,” said one U.S. diplomat last week.
There is a remarkable convergence among the younger-generation politicians about what Japan should look like at home. Urged on by an increasingly restive business community, many of whose members feel the LDP has lost touch with the needs of Japan’s younger industries, the new breed wants both much less bureaucratic control and much more decentralization of authority from Tokyo. Most of the talk is vague–and its implementation years away–but it captures a growing sense that the post-cold-war world requires changed economic arrangements, too, As Natsuaki Fusano, senior managing director at the Keidanren, Japan’s big-business lobby, puts it: “The factors that led to our old success are now barriers to growth.”
Nearly everyone now at least gives hp service to the idea that policy should be aimed at what Asahi Shimbun columnist Yoichi Funabashi calls Japan’s “silent majority”–big-city consumers–and not the old-fine corporations, construction firms and farmers who have been the main beneficiaries of Japan’s postwar economic miracle. That could spur consumption and help eventually to ease Tokyo’s seemingly intractable trade problems with the rest of the world. But the operative word is “eventually.” “All of these issues are now moving onto the table,” concedes a U.S. diplomat, “but none of it is a certainty, and for sure it’s not going to happen any time soon.”
Not for a lot of reasons. Whatever coalition forms the next government, it is going to be extremely weak. An opposition-led group, for example, would have to accommodate the left-wing foreign–and nuclear-policy views of the 70 Socialist members of Parliament, as well as their reluctance to embrace any political reform that introduces single-seat constituencies. The Socialists fear that such a reform will only lead to a repeat of the rout they suffered in the election just past, when they lost 67 seats. For that reason alone, the next government is likely to be short-lived. All parties are already preparing for a new election, perhaps within a year.
The next government may do no more than pass a political-reform bill that will set the rules for that vote. If the legislation looks to diminish the influence of money in Japanese politics, then that may be enough to dissipate public anger at the politicians. Voters will then let the old conservative coalition reassemble into something akin to the old LDP, but under a new banner, with a younger leadership that is connected to the business interests of the new industries. Everything else that might then flow out of a competitive political system-including bitter debates over the role of the bureaucracy, the opening of protected markets and defense policy-could take years to get resolved. “Don’t underestimate the power of inertia in Japanese society,” says Takashi inoguchi, a political scientist at Tokyo University.
But inertia does not account for the fact that the party that has fashioned modern Japan now cannot claim power on its own. “This was a tremor,” Inoguchi concedes, “that will produce big changes.” Within three weeks Miyazawa will call the new Diet session that will officially end his tormented time in office. History will record that whoever succeeds him will matter far less than the earthquake that produced the new prime minister.
Japan’s next prime minister needs the support of 256 M.P.s to command a majority in the 511-seat lower house of Parliament. The coalition contained within the broken line won 261 seats, enough to oust the LDP.
DSP-Democratic Socialist Party and United Social Democratic Party IND-Independents JCP-Japan Communist Party JNP-Japan New Party and Sakigake KO-Komeito LDP-Liberal Democratic Party JRP-Japan Renewal Party SDPJ-Social Democratic Party of Japan
