THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: INTEREST GROUPS IN JAPANESE POLITICS Most Powerful Interest Groups: Farming |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: Now, along with these powerful business organizations, there is a major interest group among Japanese farmers, in Japanese referred to as Nôkyo, or the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives. The farming population in Japan today is very small, no more than 5 percent of the labor force is in agriculture in Japan. But, as in other advanced industrialized democratic countries, this small farming population has large political power. And in Japan more so than in the United States, and at least as much as in European countries — such as France and Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe — the farmers organized in these agricultural cooperatives have a very large political power, and they’ve used it to try to protect Japanese agriculture, particularly Japanese rice producers, against competition from foreign producers. So, Japanese agriculture is very protected. And one of the goals of Japanese farm organizations is to make sure that the politicians who are elected to office in the Japanese parliament continue that protection or else they would not be voted for any longer by the farmers. So this gives the farmers a considerable degree of power, particularly since in the Japanese electoral system rural districts, the rural population, is over-represented in the Diet. After the change in the election system in 1994, there was a reduction in the relative weight of rural districts as contrasted with the urban districts, but, even so, rural voters remain over-represented in the Japanese parliament — which means that the voice of the farmer interests through the Nôkyo agricultural cooperatives is much greater than the number of farmers and their percentage in the labor force of five percent or so would suggest. |
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