Government and Politics in Modern Japan

The beginning of Japan's modern period is usually considered to be 1868, the year the Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown and a new centralized, bureaucratic government put into place. The symbolic head of this new government was the emperor Meiji and the period from 1868-1912, when the Meiji emperor died, is referred to as the “Meiji period” of rapid modernization in Japan.

I. The Constitution and the Position of the Japanese Emperor

[Video on the Emperor]

In the early years after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Meiji leaders worked hard to create government institutions in Japan that would create a strong united nation, one able to withstand pressures from the West. In 1889 these leaders wrote a constitution which was given to the people in the emperor's name. This constitution, called the Meiji Constitution, established a political framework in which the emperor (or in reality, his advisers) controlled the military and the civil bureaucracy, issued orders called ordinances, and held sovereign power.

The Meiji constitution also established a democratically elected parliament (called the Diet), which was responsible for drawing up the national budget and making national law.

Political power was divided between the parliament, the civil bureaucracy, the military, and the imperial household. In the 1920s the parliament's power gradually expanded, but in the 1930s the Japanese military asserted control over all other branches of government and led the country to war against China and the Allied Powers.
Under the Meiji Constitution, before WW II, the emperor was supreme but did not actually make political decisions. That is, the emperor was sovereign, and everyone who worked for the government, worked for the emperor. In effect, however, that power was divided among several different groups within the Japanese political system — most importantly the military, the civilian bureaucracy, and to some extent, the Japanese parliament. The fact that the emperor was theoretically all-powerful meant, in effect, that those groups who could claim to speak for the emperor were the ones who were in fact all-powerful. In the 1930s, it was the Japanese military, which claimed to speak on behalf of the emperor that managed to secure virtually all political power unto itself.
After WW II ended in 1945 with Japan’s defeat, the Allied Occupation of Japan under American leadership wanted to change the system and make it impossible for any groups to claim power by speaking on behalf of the emperor.
A new constitution was drafted and adopted by the Japanese in 1947. This 1947 constitution, which is still in effect, gave sovereign power to the people, instead of the emperor. The power was put in the hands of those whom the sovereign people elected — namely the members of the Japanese Diet, the parliament. The 1947 constitution states: "The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power."

Today the emperor is viewed by much of the Japanese public with respect and affection as a symbol of Japanese culture and unity. Like British royalty, he must carry out various ceremonial state duties. The emperor is the symbol of the Japanese people and the Japanese state; he is like a living flag for Japan.

The 1947 Constitution also guaranteed many basic freedoms that the Japanese had not enjoyed previously, such as the right to free speech and elections, the right to marry freely, and the right to work, to organize, to bargain and to act collectively.

II. The Branches and their Functions

The emperor is the ceremonial head of state. Japan’s system of government is a parliamentary democracy, similar to Britain and other European countries, but different from the U.S. presidential system.

Executive: Prime Minister and Cabinet

The executive powers are vested exclusively in the Cabinet, which consists of a Prime Minister and the ministers he or she appoints.

Because Japan has a parliamentary political system, members of the House of Representatives elect a prime minister from among themselves by majority vote. The prime minister is usually a leader of the majority party.

The prime minister, as the majority party leader, is “appointed by the emperor” upon nomination by the Diet. The prime minister is the head of the government. To help him direct the government, the prime minister forms a cabinet made up of people who are his political allies. The prime minister appoints the other members of the Cabinet, all of whom must be members of the legislature.

The Cabinet is responsible to the Diet and must resign if the House of Representatives passes a vote of no-confidence.

Powers of the Japanese Prime Minister

As in other parliamentary systems of government, the prime minister is not elected directly by the public, as in a presidential system like that of the U.S.. The prime minister is a member of the lower house of the Diet, who is selected from the members of the party or the parties that control the majority of members of the Diet.

The power of the prime minister in Japan has increased in recent years due to political reforms that have strengthened the control of the kantei, the prime minister’s headquarters, over the bureaucracy and over the ruling party. Even so, the powers of the Japanese prime minister are on the whole more limited than the role of prime ministers in other parliamentary systems like Great Britain or France or Germany. The Japanese Prime Minister has more limited power:

In Japan, political leadership, particularly prime ministerial leadership, has not been as strong or as individually focused as is true in other countries. The leadership style that we see employed by most Japanese prime ministers is a style of leadership with which Japanese feel very comfortable. This is one of consensus leadership. A culture of consensus leadership tends to characterize leadership in Japan in many different aspects of social life — whether it be as president of a company, as leader of a political party, as head of one group or another — the emphasis on the need to build consensus and to involve a larger group of people in making decisions. This is a style that has an enduring quality to it in the Japanese context.
There are exceptions to this rule — a powerful dominating Japanese business man, the strong and charismatic Japanese political leader. Such people of course exist, just as consensus-oriented, group-oriented politicians exist in the United States and in other Western countries as well.
Japan has had 30 prime ministers since the Liberal Democratic Party was established in 1954. Only four of them – Kishi Nobusuke, Sato Eisaku, Nakasone Yasuhiro, and Abe Shinzo – served for more than two years. All of the others served for only one or two years, a pattern of short lived prime ministers that goes back to the pre World War II period.

Executive: The Bureaucracy

The Japanese bureaucracy is part of the “Executive” branch of government, but it also drafts legislation to submit to the Japanese Diet, or Parliament.

Japan, like every other modern industrialized country, needs to have competent individuals working in the government, and these are the people that we call bureaucrats.

Civil Servants and Senior "Elite" Bureaucrats

Bureaucrats in Japan fall into two very different groups of people.

There are the large numbers of civil servants who do all the normal, mundane, and routine business involved in running a government.
Then there is a small group of elite bureaucrats who hold the most important positions in the major ministries such as Finance, International Trade and Industry, Health and Welfare, Education, who are few in number and have a great deal of prestige and a great deal of power. When observers refer to the Japanese bureaucracy, they are usually referring to this small elite within the Japanese governmental administrative structure.

Becoming an Elite Bureaucrat

One of the things that is characteristic of the Japanese political system and Japanese politics , going back for more than a hundred years, is that the bureaucracy in Japan is considered by Japanese to be a place where the country’s best and the brightest, or the elite goes. In many other countries, bureaucrats do not have a great deal of social prestige and becoming a civil servant is not considered to be necessarily the most successful career to which a person could aspire.

In Japan, however, becoming a senior bureaucrat or a bureaucrat in the elite track in the Japanese government — such as a member of the Ministry of Finance or a member of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, —has traditionally been a very prestigious position.
In Japan, these elite bureaucrats are drawn from those people who pass the most difficult exams and who are graduates of the best universities in the country. To become a bureaucrat, an elite bureaucrat in Japan, one has to pass a very difficult and competitive national examination. Most of those who pass this exam and are admitted into the Japanese elite bureaucracy are all graduates, not only of the same university, but of the same department of the same university.
Most Japanese bureaucrats are graduates of the Law Faculty of the University of Tokyo. And the Law Faculty of the University of Tokyo, at least traditionally, has been regarded as the best and the most difficult department in the best and the most difficult university in Japan. So that Japanese bureaucrats have had a reputation as representing the best and the brightest of the Japanese population.

Japan's "Horatio Alger Myth"

In Japan, people have believed that anybody can become a senior bureaucrat in Japan: a person need not be rich, need not be from a good family in an urban part of the country. Rather, a poor farm boy, if he works hard and passes the exam to the University of Tokyo and goes on to pass the civil service exam, could rise to be the vice-minister of the Ministry of Finance, and perhaps then enter the Diet and become prime minister of the country.

In the United States there is the Horatio Alger myth that anybody from no matter how modest a background through hard work can become a successful businessman, can make something wonderful out of his life. In the United States people do not think of becoming a bureaucrat as a way to become a great success, but in Japan, that is considered to be a very prestigious career.

Origins of Bureaucrats' Social Prestige

This tradition in which a bureaucratic career is seen as being a highly prestigious career and the bureaucrat in Japan is regarded as being drawn from among the best and the brightest, has very deep roots in Japanese history. It is a Confucian tradition that came initially from China.

Moreover, In Japan’s modern period the state needed to create a way to have the capacity to rapidly mobilize the population for rapid economic growth and to ward of the dangers of Western imperialism that were already affecting neighboring countries, particularly China. So in the early 1870s, at the beginning of the Meiji period, Japan began to develop the bureaucracy that became so powerful in the following years.

Tradition of Bureaucratic Power

Under the Meiji Constitution, when all power theoretically resided with the emperor, those who carried out the policies of the emperor, namely the bureaucrats, were considered to be more prestigious than, for example, the members of the parliament. Although the members of the parliament, the Diet, were representing the interests of those who elected them, in a sense they were seen as further away from the emperor than were the bureaucrats. This led to the popularity of an expression in pre-war WW II Japan called kanson minpi. Kan is bureaucrat, and son is respect; min is the people and pi, or hi, is to despise. So translated into English it becomes: “Bureaucrats exalted; people despised.”

This tradition of the haughty bureaucrat who is closer to the center of power and legitimacy, closer to the emperor, remained in the post-war system as a kind of bureaucratic culture, where even though the formal powers of the bureaucracy were now subordinate to those of the elected members of the parliament, the tradition of kanson minpi, the tradition of bureaucratic power, remained an important factor in Japanese life.

Retirement: Amakudari ("Descent from Heaven")

One of the features of the Japanese bureaucratic system is that Japanese elite bureaucrats, particularly in the economic ministries, tend to leave their ministries at a relatively young age, in their early fifties, and "parachute" down into other major positions. These positions are usually in business or in financial institutions, or in a range of government organizations that are somewhat independent, but dependent on the government for funding and closely linked to the government in carrying out some of its functions.

The Japanese call this system amakudari, meaning "descent from heaven." The system is quite unusual compared to other countries, where there are also strong bureaucracies, as for example in France and elsewhere in Europe.
For example, if a bureaucrat retires at the age of 52 or 53 from the Ministry of Finance, he might descend from “heaven” (the Ministry) into a position as the president of a regional bank or as the head of a financial think-tank that is funded by the Ministry of Finance or as an advisor to a major financial institution or company.
The Japanese bureaucratic system of early retirement is the result of a Japanese system of seniority: when a bureaucrat is promoted to a senior position in a ministry, such as that of “vice-minister,” every other bureaucrat in that ministry who entered the ministry in the same year or before the newly appointed newly promoted vice-minister, has to resign. No one in the Japanese bureaucracy works for a vice-minister who is an equal or senior to that person in terms of seniority in the ministry.

This is an old tradition in Japan that has been maintained into present-day Japanese life. It is why people retire at the relatively young age they do, and why there is such a need for this amakudari, and for positions for people to descend into.

The Myth of "Japan, Inc."

One of the sources of bureaucratic power in Japan is the very high morale among bureaucrats. This derives from the fact that so many of them come out of such a common background, of being graduates of the same department of the same school. And they also have the sense of obligation to serve the nation that actually goes back to a tradition that’s more than a hundred years old.
At the same time, there’s a great deal of conflict between these bureaucrats and politicians. The politicians believe that they’re the ones who have the responsibility for making policy and that bureaucrats have an obligation to do what they want and to do what will help them get reelected, and not to do simply what bureaucrats think is in the national interest. While it may appear in one sense that there is "Japan, Inc." — in which bureaucrats and politicians and leaders of the business community are all closely tied to each other through similar school ties and similar backgrounds in many different respects — there is also a great deal of conflict between politicians and bureaucrats, between state and society in Japan, that results from the differences in their sense of what is in the national interest and what is in their own personal interest.
The Japanese political system, like political systems elsewhere, is characterized both by consensus among major groups who share political power, and by competition among those groups. In Japan that competition leaves the bureaucrats in a somewhat stronger position than is the case in many other countries, including the U.S. — with exceptions perhaps being France and some other countries that have a strong bureaucratic tradition.
In recent years, however, the bureaucracy has recruited fewer of the most outstanding graduates of the University of Tokyo and other major universities than was true in the past. Economic developments and social change have made the bureaucracy less appealing to the “best and the brightest.”
- As the Japanese economy matured and became more complex the need for an elite bureaucracy to spearhead its modernization declined.
- As political reforms strengthened the powers of the prime minister and the ruling party over policy making the balance of power between the bureaucracy and the ruling party shifted in favor of the political leadership.
- And talented university graduates increasingly have set their sights on securing positions in the private sector that offer salaries many times those received by government bureaucrats.

Parliament: The DIET

Japan has one of the oldest parliaments in the world. The Japanese parliament, known as “the Diet,” was established by the Meiji Constitution in 1889 and the first elections to the parliament were held in 1890.

The Diet is “bicameral” – it is divided into two houses, an upper house (the House of Councillors) and a lower house (the House of Representatives). The bicameral Diet has authority over all legislative matters. Both houses are directly elected by the people.
The House of Representatives (Shugiin, or lower house) comprises a combination of 289 single-seat constituencies and 176 seats determined by proportional representation in 11 multi member districts. Representatives serve four-year terms unless the house is dissolved. The House of Councillors (Sangiin, or upper house) has 245 members, who serve for six years, with half of the Upper House elected every three years. The House of Councilors cannot be dissolved.
The lower house is the more powerful of the two. The House of Representatives is the dominant house in the legislature, possessing the authority to enact laws, approve treaties, pass the budget, and select the prime minister. If the upper house rejects a bill passed by the lower house, it becomes law if passed again by the lower house in a two-thirds vote.
*Since a two-thirds majority in the lower house is, however, usually very hard for one party or coalition to achieve the upper house does have ability to delay and at times to stop legislation from being.

Comparative Power of the Diet

Although the Diet is defined as the supreme organ of state, the fountainhead of political power, where all laws have to be adopted, the Diet has not performed the roles the constitution defines for it for several reasons.

One is the tradition of bureaucratic power and the dependence of politicians on the bureaucracy for policy expertise. Japan does not have a developed think tank sector like what exists in the United States.
Moreover, since the opposition parties have been too weak to challenge the LDP for power, policy making has been centered in the kantei and the party’s policy making organs.
And third, although the Diet has a committee system modeled on the US Congress, Diet committees have not developed the powers that they have in other parliamentary systems or in presidential systems, such as the U.S.

Most legislation in Japan is drafted by the Japanese bureaucracy and then submitted to the parliament by the cabinet. The committees rarely amend these bills; they either vote them up or down. Politicians in Japan do not have large staffs that can draft legislation, and most importantly, their political parties do not have staffs that are able to draft legislation—as is true in Britain, Germany, and other European parliamentary systems.

Judiciary

The Supreme Court, the highest judicial authority, consists of a chief justice and 14 associate judges. The emperor appoints the chief justice upon designation by the Cabinet, which also appoints the other justices. The judges may be removed only by public impeachment. The Supreme Court determines the constitutionality of laws and all its decisions are final. It supervises a system of four inferior courts: a High Court, which rules on appeals of judgments by the lower courts; a District Court; a Family Court; and a Summary Court.

III. Local Government

For administrative purposes, the nation is divided into 47 prefectures, each with its own popularly elected governor and representative assembly. Cities and towns also elect representative assemblies and mayors.

IV. The Electoral System

Electing Members of the Diet: Single-Member Districts and Multi-Seat Districts

Japan has a democratic system of government with a parliament, called the Diet, that has two houses, the House of Representatives or Lower House and the House of Councillors, the Upper House.

The lower house, the House of Representative, has 465 members who are elected for 4-year terms:

Japan is divided into 30 electoral districts at election time for single-seat representatives, and 11 blocks at election time for government posts determined by proportional representation.
Two hundred eighty nine of the lower house members — i.e.,289 of the 465 — are elected in single-member districts, just like members of the House of Representatives in the United States, or just like members of the House of Commons in Great Britain.
- Voters go to the polls and they cast a vote, they write the name of a candidate who is running in that district. This means that, as in the United States, voters in a given district have one vote, and the candidate who receives the most votes wins and becomes the sole representative of that district.
- The candidate who gets the plurality — that is the most votes of all the candidates running in that district — is the only one elected to the Diet in that district. So there are 289 lower house members elected in 289 districts.
The remaining 200 members of Japan's House of Representatives are elected in 11 multi-member districts by proportional representation.
- Under a proportional representation system, voters in a given region vote not for an individual candidate, but for a party. The number of Diet seats that a party receives is based on the percentage of votes that it receives.
- Each party gives its seats to its top candidates, who are ranked from highest to lowest prior to elections.
- Thus, for example, in a district with 20 seats available, if a party running 25 candidates gets 50 percent of the vote, the party gets 10 seat (or ½ or the 20 seats) in principle and gives them to the top 10 candidates on the party’s ranked list.

A voter who goes to the polls when a lower house election is called in Japan has two ballots.

On one he writes the name of a candidate in his single-member district, and the candidate who gets the most votes in that district is elected.
On the second ballot, he writes the name of a political party that is running in his regional "proportional representation" district. Then the seats are given to those parties on the basis of their share of the vote.
*Parties may include their candidates in the single member districts on their candidate list in the proportional representation districts. If a single member district candidate is ranked high on the party list he can be “saved” and be elected even though he has been defeated in the single member district.

This system combines both the "first-past-the-post" single-member district system that is used in the United States or in Great Britain and the proportional representation system that is popular in continental western European countries. This allows smaller parties to compete at least in the proportional representation district part of the election system.

In the upper house, the House of Councillors the 245 members are elected for six-year terms. Half of the members are elected every three years. Councillors must be at least 30 years old, compared with 25 years old in the House of Representatives.

In every House of Councillors election (when half of the members, or 121 seats at stake), 73 candidates are elected from single-seat constituencies in the nation’s 47 prefectures and 48 are elected nationwide by proportional representation.

Political Parties

Japan has a multi-party system with

the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) being the largest by far. .Between 1955, when it was formed. and 2020 it has held power, appointing the prime minister, for all but 5 years of the 60 years. It has a coalition with the small Komeito, or Clean Government Party.
The leading opposition party is the Constitutional Democratic Party in 2020. It has 57 lower house members compared to the LDP’s 285 (in 2020).

Factions within political parties

One of the important features of Japanese politics is the presence of political party factions. This is especially true with the major party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

After the Second World War and until near the end of the century, politics were dominated by political factions led by a powerful politician who exchanged support for his faction members for their loyalty, especially when it came to deciding who to support for party president.

Over time the power of faction leaders over their members and the centrality of factions in the LDP have declined.

The relationship between the faction boss and the other faction members is not as intense and personal as it was in the early years of Liberal Democratic Party rule. Over time, as the faction leadership has moved from one generation to the next, and the ties between the faction leader and the faction members have become much less emotional, much less personal, than used to be the case.
Most importantly, the public has become much less tolerant of “money politics” and political reforms have made it impossible for faction leaders to raise the huge amounts of money that insured the loyalty of his faction members.
Political funds for Diet members today are obtained mostly from the party organization and from the member’s own fund raising efforts. In 1994 Japan adopted a system to provide public funding of political parties. Currently this system allocates 250 yen per voter to Japan’s political parties, the funds distributed to political parties in proportion to their number of Diet members. This has taken power away from faction bosses and strengthened the power of the party president and its secretary general.
In addition to support from the party Diet members raise funds on their own to a much greater extent than was true in the past, thus further weakening the importance of factions in the political party system.

Methods of Campaigning

All modern democratic political systems have rules that regulate election campaigns, election financing, campaign advertising, and so on. Compared with other democratic countries, however, the Japanese laws that regulate these aspects of life of political life are more strict and limiting than in many other countries.

The official campaign period is very brief, lasting for less than two weeks.
House-to-house canvassing is prohibited. A candidate or a candidate's supporters are not allowed to go and knock on somebody's door and say, "Would you please support my candidate?"
In Japan there are strict restrictions on the use of the print and visual media for candidate political advertising. In American elections, it is common for candidates to buy time on television and radio to appeal to voters for support. In Japan every candidate for public office is given a limited amount of free time for TV, radio, and newspaper advertisements. It is illegal to buy additional TV time or run newspaper ads. Political parties, however, are exempt from most of the restrictions imposed on candidates.
There are strict limits on the money that corporations can contribute to a party's electoral campaign. This stands in stark contrast with the United States where there are effectively no limits on political funding.
Though the expense of campaigning and maintaining a political office have decreased in Japan they still cost a considerable amount of money. The government provides funds to cover the salaries of only very few of the people who work in a Diet member’s Diet office and in his local constituency office.

There are now strong arguments made that Japan would be better off with a much less restrictive election law than it currently has. People, however, point to the United States as an example of how complete freedom in election campaigning can create an excessive use of money for media campaigns, and an excessive emphasis on image rather than substance.

Koenkai, Personal Support Groups

An important feature of Japanese political organization is the presence of koenkai, personal support organizations created and maintained by Diet politicians. Koenkai are “support” organizations but they are funded and managed by the politician they are intended to support. Koenkai operate on the local level something like political parties in other countries like the United States. They do favors for constituents from getting roads fixed to helping a constituent’s child get a job. They are large organizations, some having as many as 50,000 or more members. The purpose of the koenkai is to create a personal bond between the candidate and voters and mobilize them to campaign among their families, friends, and colleagues for the candidate they support.

V. Interest Groups in Japanese Politics

One of the characteristics of politics in modern democracies is that citizens basically express their political preferences and their political desires in two ways: through their vote and through the influence exerted by interest groups.

We know in the United States how important interest groups are, whether it be a business group, a labor federation, the medical association, national rifle association. Interest groups are also very important in Japan.

Important Interest Groups

Organizations of labor, businessmen, and farmers have a lot of influence over Japanese politicians and Japanese politics. The Japan Medical Association, the Japan Teacher’s Union, the Japan Dentist’s Association, and many other professional groups also are influential organizations in trying to get the interests of their members served by government policy.

Strategies of Influence

Interest groups in Japan try to influence the political process in many of the same ways that interest groups do in other countries, including the United States.

One of those ways is to give money and campaign support to candidates and political parties so that for candidates for the Diet and political parties in Japan, getting the support of major interest groups is absolutely essential to being able to run an effective political campaign.
For the Liberal Democratic Party, the support of businessmen, and business organizations, and the farmers’ agricultural cooperatives are especially important.
For the opposition Constitutional Democratic party the support of the Rengo labor union federation is particularly important.

Interest Groups vs. Lobbyists

So in Japan there is not the kind of lobbying as we know it in the United States — where interest groups deploy full time lobbyists to live in Washington to cultivate relations with members of Congress and seek their support for legislation that serves the interests of their organization. In Japan interest groups exert their influence in other ways. They make political contributions to candidates and to parties and in the case of the House of Councillors often have representatives of the organization run as candidates on the Liberal Democratic Party ticket.

VI. QUESTIONS for Discussion

1. Compare the Meiji Constitution of 1898 and the 1947 Constitution:

Read each document below and answer the questions at the end of the document
Primary Source/DBQ: 1947 Constitutions: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/constitution_1947.pdf
Primary Source/DBQ: 1898 Meiji Constitution (excerpts): http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/meiji_constitution.pdf
Then refer to these documents to answer the questions below.

2. In what period of Japanese history was the Meiji Constitution written? What was the emperor's position as defined by the Meiji Constitution?

3. Who had gained most of the political control in the 1930's? What was the result?

4.In what period of Japanese history was Japan's current, 1947 constitution drafted?

5. List some of the rights guaranteed by the current constitution. Explain how such rights strengthen the power of the people.

6. What is the emperor's position as defined by the current constitution?

7. Other countries besides Japan have emperors, kings, or queens. Can you name three such countries? Why is there no monarchy in the United States?

8. What is the name of the current emperor of Japan? How long has he held this title?

9. What is the difference between how American presidents and Japanese prime ministers are elected?

10. What is a kôenkai? Why do politicians find them necessary? How do politicians and kôenkai members both benefit from the relationship?

11. Can you describe the difference between a single-seat constituency and a multi-seat constituency?

12. How does a proportional representation system work?

VII. CLASS EXERCISE: School Elections - Japanese Style

Different election rules affect candidates’ campaign strategies. Suppose you are running for class president at your school. Write a plan of how you would run your campaign under the two different sets of campaign rules given below. Explain your reasoning.

Rule Set One

you may only campaign for a few days prior to the election
you are allowed only one poster in the school cafeteria
you may not make any announcements over the school intercom
there will be no debates with other candidates

Rule Set Two

you may campaign for an unlimited amount of time prior to the campaign
you may advertise as much as you wish in any way that you can think of
you will have debates with other candidates