In Japan’s elections this past weekend, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s “ruling” Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, endured a humiliating drubbing—losing 56 seats in the lower house of the Diet, close to a quarter of its pre-election number. Its coalition partner, the Komeito, suffered an even more severe setback. These two parties can now only form a minority government, leaving them vulnerable at any time to a no-confidence motion.
“Bureaucrats can’t run countries.”
I put the word “ruling” above in quotes since the LDP has never actually ruled Japan in the sense of originating policies, enacting them into law, and then implementing them. The late political scientist Chalmers Johnson once wrote that it might be more accurate to describe Japan’s political setup as one in which politicians reign but bureaucrats rule. This is true as far as it goes. The problem is that bureaucrats can’t run countries. Never accountable to an electorate, they inevitably put the interests and survival of their particular bureaucracy—in Japan’s case, the great ministries—ahead of the broader national interest.
This structural flaw has plagued Japan since the 1920s, when the last of the low-ranking samurai from western Japan who had staged a coup under the rubric of the Meiji Restoration died off. They left behind no clear procedures by which political decision-making could occur. Theoretically, the great ministries reported to the emperor, which in practice meant they reported to no one. The result was a murderous power struggle that culminated in Japan being dragged into the worst disaster in its history by mid-level zealots in a powerful rogue bureaucracy known as the Imperial Army. Governing was so fractured that the army and the navy effectively waged what amounted to separate wars—one with China and the Soviet Union on the Asian continent and the other with the United States in the Pacific.
The absence of a ruling political center was long disguised after the war, because the United States assumed for Japan two of the three responsibilities by which a state is most commonly identified: warmaking and foreign relations. The third—management of the economy—was left to the Japanese themselves, but because the need for reconstruction was so evident, it required no political discussion. Two great bureaucracies—the ministry of finance and the ministry of international trade and industry—oversaw the mixture of macroeconomic and industrial policies that brought about Japan’s return to the front rank of the world’s economies.
The LDP played, it is true, a critical role in the unfolding of the Japanese economic miracle. CIA funding brought the party into being in 1955 to forestall an election that would probably have been won by Japan’s hard-left Marxists. The LDP provided crucial political cover and legitimacy behind which the great ministries could proceed with policymaking, and its factional structure ensured that groups with the potential to make trouble—farmers, construction companies—would be bought off with rivers of government spending.
It all worked well enough until the 1970s, when the external environment that had facilitated Japan’s return to economic preeminence began to shift with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates; the diminishing purchasing power of Japan’s largest export market, the United States; and the beginning of serious trade conflicts with Washington. Japan’s economic model needed an overhaul, but there was no one with the power to carry it out.
Yasuhiro Nakasone, prime minister from 1982 to 1987, was arguably the first political leader to recognize and attempt to fix the problem. But his efforts to concentrate more power in the kantei, the office of the prime minister, came to naught in the aftermath of a collapsing financial bubble.
Amidst the political and economic wreckage of the early 1990s, Ichiro Ozawa, a former secretary general of the LDP, led the second major modern attempt to construct a political center for Japan. Convinced that Japan needed a genuine two-party system that would force parties to do more than just pass out goodies, he helped to construct the Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ.
These efforts culminated in the 2009 electoral landslide that put the DPJ into power. But Ozawa’s experiment failed. The self-appointed guardians of political order in Japan—the public prosecutor, the mainstream media, and the permanent bureaucracy—worked ceaselessly to undermine the DPJ. They were aided and abetted by the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton’s State Department, which bristled at Ozawa’s attempts to forge an independent relationship with Beijing. The catastrophe of the 2011 earthquake-cum-tsunami, with its destruction of the Fukushima nuclear plant, didn’t help matters; the seemingly ham-fisted response was (largely unfairly) blamed on the DPJ.
That debacle paved the way for the third great attempt to create a governing political center for Japan under the administration of Shinzo Abe, who led the LDP back to power in the 2012 elections. He proceeded to wrest control of senior appointments in the bureaucracy from the ministries and took charge of Japan’s foreign relations, forging a friendship with Donald Trump to ensure he wouldn’t be undercut by Washington. It worked for a while—he became Japan’s longest-serving prime minister and apparently planned to leave the kantei in a cloud of glory with the staging of the 2020 Olympics.
Most expected that Abe would continue to exercise power from behind the scenes and might live to create a Japan that had finally jettisoned its dependence on the United States, revamped its political arrangements (starting with the amending of the postwar constitution that had been forced on Japan by the occupation), and re-emerging as a great power in its own right, led by a kantei with full ability to make and implement decisions. Alas for him and his dreams, Covid intervened—Abe was blamed for what appeared to be a dithering response—and then he was assassinated, an event that laid bare the LDPs long-standing links to a far-right Korean cult and the party’s continued dependence on factions doling out political favors in return for money.
Most Japanese voters could discern in the post-Abe years little more than a return to politics as usual—a revolving door ushering in and out of “power” men with neither the will nor the ability to tackle the nation’s manifest problems: demographic collapse, a frightening fiscal situation, declining export competitiveness, a belligerent China, and the decay of American power.
But this time, unlike in 2009, they had no credible alternative. In a jaw-dropping development, the center-left Constitutional Democratic Party, or CDP, chose as its leader none other than Yoshihiko Noda—a tired old hack right out of central casting, completely under the thumb of the finance ministry. Noda had been the third and last of the three DPJ prime ministers, digging his party’s grave by acceding to the ministry’s insistence on a hike in the regressive consumption tax. Instituting that tax as the primary source of revenue for the Japanese government has been the preeminent goal of the ministry since the late 1970s. For a country whose greatest economic challenge is anemic domestic demand, this borders on policy malpractice. The ministry’s ability to force this hugely unpopular tax on the country and then raise it repeatedly gives the lie to any notion that politicians have finally brought the ministries under their control.
The choice facing Japanese voters in Sunday’s election bore a superficial similarity with that in the United States, where both major parties proved unable to field candidates that a majority would want to vote for. But while Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stir hatred and fear in large swathes of the American electorate, Ishiba and Noda engendered little more than apathy. Before becoming LDP leader, Ishiba had, it is true, spent 10 years as a rank-and-file legislator, talking freely to the press about Japan’s problems. But once he became prime minister, he seemed to scrap his positions, saying whatever other party leaders (such as LDP Secretary-General Hiroshi Moriyama) told him to say. Neither Ishiba nor Noda was thus seen by most voters as willing or able to do much of anything about Japan’s problems. Voter turnout fell to an anemic 53 percent, the third lowest in postwar history.
Where does this leave Japan? Probably facing more years of rudderless drifting at a time when the country can little afford it. The sweep of Japan’s modern history demonstrates just how dangerous this kind of power vacuum can be. Those of us who love Japan can only hope for some sort of repeat of the events of the 1860s, when a group of immensely capable young men seized control of their country and averted the catastrophe of colonization that would otherwise have been their country’s fate—and that this time around, they leave behind them a clear means by which power can legitimately be exercised and passed on.