That Election In Japan

The DPJ?

Here's a pretty cool article, thanks to Rasterfield.

When the great recession began last year, the fate of Japan was often held up as an awful warning to the west. If the US and the European Union failed to adopt the right policies, it was said, they too might suffer a Japanese-style “lost decade”, followed by years of feeble growth.

Now that the Japanese have used Sunday’s election to elect the Democratic party – breaking with more than 50 years of rule by the Liberal Democratic party – a new western narrative is taking hold. This is a political revolution; it is Japan’s big chance to break with the years of stagnation.

But both these stories are wrong. The Democrats are unlikely to shake things up hugely. Nor should they. For the story of Japan over the past 20 years is by no means as dismal as much western commentary would have it.

It is true that, since its asset-price bubble burst in 1990, the country’s economy has grown slowly, the stock market has slumped and national debt has risen to awesome proportions. But, despite these trials, it has remained a sane, stable, prosperous and exciting country. Politically, culturally and even economically, it offers not so much a warning as an inspiring example of how to deal with a long period of adversity.

The fact that, throughout the years of relative stagnation, the Japanese kept electing the LDP puzzled many outsiders. A few even saw it as evidence that Japan is somehow less than democratic. But it was willing to try and change. The country gave a mandate to Junichiro Koizumi, the flamboyant LDP prime minister, who pushed Japan in a more free-market direction from 2001 to 2006. Now it has turned to Yukio Hatoyama and the Democrats, who are less enamoured of the American model.

However, Japan has always gone for change within well-defined limits. Europeans and Americans worry that a deep recession could stoke political extremism – not without reason, perhaps, given the hysterical tone of politics in the US and the increase in the vote for far-right and far-left parties in Europe. But during almost 20 years of tough times, the Japanese have never flirted with political extremism.

Its a really cool article that illustrates some important points so I do recommend you have a read if you want to understand just what is going on with Japan.

I've been asked a bit about the election in Japan simply because the new guys are inscrutable to most observers including the Japanese media. The origins of the DPJ are as strange and strained as anything you'll read about murky backroom politics in Japan. One of the Democratic Party of Japan's architects is Ichiro Ozawa, who used to be a power-broker for the LDP, who then broke away from the LDP in order to bring it down.

At certain points in Ozawa's long tenure as architect of the second major party in Japan were the travails of the Hosokawa government that brought together a coalition of the most unlikely parties, just to temporarily oust the LDP. Since then, he's clearly been busily building the DPJ out of the tiny fragments of that coalition and other disaffected defectors from the LDP.

The LDP for its part played a historic role up to 1993, whereby they held power by being at once socially conservative, but instituting a welfare state that marginalised the Socialist and Communist Parties. So, basically people got the best of both worlds where socially values were kept intact as welfare was put into place that made Communist nations envious. Of course that system had to break down because it cost too much, and has made Japan less competitive in other ways. In short, the LDP were an amalgamated middle ground of Japanese politics which sat dead bang in the middle, marginalising the Socialists and Communists right out of the picture to the left, and squeezing the nationalists into the far right where they look decidedly retro and insane.

In other words, the '1955 system' as it came to be known is essentially a collusion of politicians in the centre to trade horses in order to hold on to power indefinitely. Which of course led to a whole weird synergy with the bureaucracy and General construction companies.

Ozawa's great accomplishment has been to forge a second party that could be - and has become - an alternative to the LDP that still is close to the centre of politics. The reason why the DPJ is inscrutable to even the media of Japan is that it's still yet to define the limits of how it will stack up against a LDP that is trying to couch itself as the 'conservative' party of Japan.The DPJ is still too new, fresh, and untested to be understood. The point of the election in a sense was to see if a two party system can replace the '1955 system' to better effect.

The position statement of the DPJ is not that different to the LDP in many ways, except they seem to be a little bit more on the welfare side of things. The proof of the pudding can only be in the tasting, and in a sense, this brings us to the present day. If the DPJ becomes a durable force in Japanese politics, thus ushering in a two party system, then this election will be come to be seen as a truly heroic event. If the DPJ gets ousted after 1 term and never gets back in, then we will likely see a reversion to the '1955 system' through lack of other models.

I tend to be a optimist in the sense that the DPJ looks like a possible stayer to me. Even though Ichiro Ozawa got kneecapped by a scandal and thus could not lead his DPJ to this election. The Japanese could have been given much worse alternatives in the re-packaged Socialists or the unflailingly ideological Communists.