Schizophrenic Japanese Politics…??

Well, the election is over, and as shown in the post below, the results were a massive win to the opposition DPJ. Just how big that win was gives rise to the title of this post…

With the result of the election in no doubt minutes after the polls closed (actually they haven’t been in any real doubt since before the election was even called….), discussion on the TV election coverage immediately began to turn towards what this all means. One question that has been asked is whether the DPJ win was ‘too big’.

Its a question without an easy answer, but it does raise a number of interesting points. Firstly, there is the issue of how one party can go from a 200 seat advantage to a 200 seat deficit in the space of one election for a 480 seat lower house. Its a startling turn-around, and has given rise in the press to comments about ‘homogenous’ Japan. I think this may be missing the point a little. It may in fact be that it was the 2005 election that was the blip, and that the huge swing in the balance of power this time is a product of restoring what was lost in 2005, as well as an additional swing to the DPJ. The LDP created a massive press circus in 2005, and as a result they were able to win many more seats than I think were reflective of the true political mood of the country prior to the election. So many of the seats lost this time around may in fact have been a correction, in addition to the mood for a change in government…

Another aspect of this ‘winning too big’ issue is the fact that while the DPJ won just 42.4% of the vote compared to the LDP’s 26.7%, the DPJ won 308 seats to 119, or 64% to 25%. The system certainly favors the winner, and this is a system that has treated the LDP well for more than half a century… On this occasion, it has worked against them. Not only are the proportion of seats far above the proportion of votes, it should be noted that the DPJ government that takes power over the coming weeks is a government that is actively supported by just 42.4% of the country (48.4%, if you include likely coalition partners SDP and PNP). This is far from the massive landslide and change that it is being touted as…. The LDP and NKP coalition themselves may only have managed 38.2%, but out of 70 million voters, the governing coalition could only manage 34 million votes, which is something that should give them pause in implementing their policies…

A related issue is the question of whether this ‘massive victory’ is a sign of a movement away from ‘conservatism’ in Japan. This is a complicated question to answer, and will take many more posts over many more months to discuss I’m sure… For now, it should just be noted that while certain of the foreign press are hailing this a move away from conservatism, those lines are far more blurred than they may seem. For one thing, I’ve joked for a while now that the two main parties in Japan are made up of the Liberal Democratic Party, and a merger of the Democratic and Liberal Parties. Its no coincidence then that their policies have shared many similarities for a long time, and at times it has been difficult to differentiate them except on a few fringe issues…

With wars, increasing unemployment, and other welfare related issues coming to the fore in recent years, these differences have been enhanced slightly, as the DPJ have certainly made some show of moving to the left on some of these issues. But at the same time they have been careful in the way that they have spoken about such issues as taxes and the size of government, signs that they are aware of a latent conservative attitude in the country as a whole. In actuality, in my opinion, a major reason why Japan has struggled for so long to develop a true two party system is because both of the main parties have lacked a great deal of philosophical backbone. They flip and flop all over the idealogical spectrum, whenever convenient. This has been a good thing for the LDP, because it has meant that they were not tied down to particular courses of action and could just go with the populist flow, even when it may hurt the country, as long as it would get them back in government. For the opposition it has meant that the government were always a moving target, not easy to pin down, and thus making it more difficult to score deadly shots against them.

The question of whether Japan is (or has been) a fundamentally conservative country is one that I will save for further debate in the future. But suffice it to say here now that part of the political schizophrenia that I named this post about is due to the fact that a good portion of the public do not seem to identify as readily with specific idealogical or philosophical views as strongly as they do with expediency and populism. In fact, in a country well known for being so reserved and polite, and keeping their emotions in check, the Japanese culture is one that is based far more on emotional reactions than it would first appear… These cultural traits make Japan a great place for pragmatists, and this, I think, is part of the reason for the massive successes as the country geared up to rebuild after the war and in subsequent decades. But the lack of idealogical underpinnings, and the cultural training to not debate idealogies where such can be avoided leaves Japan as a nation that is still learning its place in the world, and still coming to terms with how it wants to be governed. I know, these kind of statements will require a lot of explaining… I hope that in the coming months I can do just that…

Congratulations to the DPJ and their coalition partners. I hope that they will form a strong government, and that the LDP will also rally to ‘keep them honest’. Japan has needed a two party system for many years, because of the transparency and accountability that it of necessity will breed. But the DPJ, and others, would do well to not believe all the hype about massive landslides and huge mandates to do whatever the hell they like. While the mandate does certainly seem to be there to make changes to the stale, beaurocrat-focused political system, most other issues seem far from settled. And given the fact that in an historic election, where the opposition party swept to power with almost 2/3 of the seats, only 42% of people voted for the new largest party, this may have been the least confident and most lukewarm landslide victory that I can remember….