Today Japan votes in an election of the House of Representatives, the house that elects the prime minister. Wiki tells us:
Japanese general election will be held on 30 August 2009 for all of 480 seats of the House of Representatives, which designates the Prime Minister of Japan. In the election, it is widely expected that the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which gained the control of the upper house in 2007, will defeat the ruling coalition (Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and New Komeito Party), ending its 54 year near-uninterrupted control of government. The voter turnout is also expected to be high.
There seem to be two reasons why the Japanese tend to be a bit disengaged about politics. Apart from the LDP always winning they say the public service runs the country, not the politicians, so nothing much normally changes. So this time may mark a clear break on both counts.
Both main parties, it seems, are promising to get rid of amakudari, a metaphor
where “heaven” refers to the upper echelons of the civil service, the civil servants are the deities, and the earth are the private sector corporations.
But this time the DPJ in particular are promising that the politicians will run the place in future, so we’ll have to wait and see how all that turns out.
Climate change isn’t a top issue apparently, but the DPJ are promising to to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 as against 15% below 2005 levels for the other mob. So we’ve got a bit of an auction going on there. That’s if business and the public service allow the politicians to have their way.
The BBC has a short account of the key policy issues and associated coverage.
I’m told that TV and radio advertising are banned, so it’s like circuses invading public places, with plenty of noise, colour and movement. A relief, perhaps, that the campaign only lasts 12 days.
One party that caught the eye is The Happiness Realization Party which is running the most candidates. Apart from increasing the population to 300 million (there’s vision for you!) other aims include:
actively accepting foreigners, taking more responsibility as a world leader, amending the pacifist Article 9 of the existing constitution to be able to guarantee the safety and protection of its people against the military threat of North Korea, to encourage a nuclear-free world grounded in a spirit of religious tolerance, and introduce a religion education, as they state, that is based on a universal spirit of love, compassion, spirit of self-help and be able to make the distinction between good and evil.[3]
Doesn’t sound all bad!
If you have any penetrating analysis or links to other coverage, please contribute.
Pet peeve: “Wiki” is not a proper noun. I don’t read people saying things like “Person told me she was unhappy”, or “Bank announced its new interest rates”.
Wiki: a cateogry of software.
Wikipedia: a single instance of the wiki concept.
A few more points.
1. The Happiness Realisation Party are a bunch of religious kooks. Look it up.
2. Japan has had more than a decade of massive stimulus. Everything in the playbook. It hasn’t worked. But it’s OK! In the late 1980s the Japanese developed a time machine which could swipe copies of Kevin Rudd’s essays from the future, thereby avoiding all the terrible ills and evils of neoliberalism. Phew! Bullet dodged!
Get the good oil on Japanese political parties here: http://www.reuters.com/article/gc05/idUSTRE57J0QG20090820
Thanks, Lefty E.
Jacques, of course The Happiness Realisation Party are a bunch of religious kooks. Look it up yourself. Have you ever heard of irony? It will be interesting to see whether they get even one person elected, though.
On Wiki, duly noted. Usage will determine what prevails but it does not always follow logic and may even be excruciating to sensitive souls.
I’ve been in Japan for the past week.
The election campaign, from what I have seen, is very low-key and old-fashioned by Australian standards. Indeed, the last week hasn’t been all that much different from previous visits since April. The same election posters are on the walls (a prominent one in Asakusa has the candidate looking a bit like an Eastern “Superman” — the only things missing are the cape and the big “S” on his chest). The candidates are still standing on the roofs of Toyota Coasters giving their speeches to the crowds.
The polls say that the LDP will fall to the DPJ, but how reliable are pre-election polls, anyway?
It sometimes fails to punch through plaintext.
Cute dog policies are the best
Over the last few weeks, many gaffes by the Japanese PM have been reported. Is he as much of an Aso as he sounds?
Richard @ 7:
The Asakusa Superman doesn’t need cute dog policies, and the cute dog would run in fear from Red Dot Man.
Best Japan coverage is at mutantfrog and Observing Japan.
Sadly this isn’t as earth-shaking as it would be in Australia, for example. The incestuous relationship between the parties nullifies much of their differences. Also, back in the day the DPJ was nominally left, however a centre-right party joined in about ’99 I think, blurring the differences between them and the LDP even further.
Ozawa, one of the main powerbrokers in the DPJ is a dodgy, dodgy bastard.
Jacques, way to take two completely unconnected things to shoehorn your arbitrary and monotonous neolib hard-on into discussion. Worthy of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, only you need another two thousand words.
One feature of Japanese electioneering that got me was the way candidates would stand atop the backs of trucks giving insipid waves to unmoved and unattentive crowds. I’d take red dot man over that any day!
Elsewhere I described this election as being between parties most reconisable in Australia as the party of Joe Tripodi & Co vs a ragtag bunch of Billy Hughses and Brendan Nelsons. The Machine, whose perpetuity is its own meaning, and those who left the machine solely because it didn’t serve their ambition. Thus Ozawa managed to build a party based solely on his own ambition and not being the LDP.
Just a note on how cynical the voters get. In the 2007 upper house election, my wife and I happened to be in Japan, so her parents asked her to vote, specifically in the single member seat for the LDP candidate. Why? Because they were pharmacists, and the candidate was in the pocket of the pharamacists association. That was the sole reason.
And in a disfunctional democracy, I guess for most people who vote like that, or be a sucker.
The Happiness Realisation Party are a bunch of religious kooks.
.
Noooooo! They sound so sensible.
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54 years of the same mob in power. And to think you lot complained about 11 years of Howard.
We read in the media how, contrary to expectations about the GFC, social democracy is taking a beating. This is because the media seems to think the world consists of the US and Europe.
But in Latin America and Japan social democracy has been on the march for a long time now.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say the Japanese are politically disengaged. Japanese people don’t shout their opinions from the rooftops like australians or brits, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have strong views on politics. The turnout for this election is probably higher than in most non-compulsory-voting societies, and I would have thought that this counts as a reasonable sign of political engagement.
Fair enough, SG. Just something I heard on the BBC. I did hear that the turnout was expected to be higher than usual this year.
East Asia Forum generally is good for keeping up with Japanese politics.
I may be misintrepreting you here Ginja, but I would be hesitant to describe the DPJ as any more or less socially democratic than the LDP (but surely, every party that gets voted in is ‘socially democratic’ anyway?)
A left blog and no one even mentions the JCP!
patrickg,
Any party that has been spending on a fortune on just about any project that crosses their desk and running up debts the way that the LDP has is not, and cannot, be described as anything other than a case study of attempts to pump-prime and in no way fiscally “conservative”.
The DPJ will be forced to follow more fiscally responsible policies for the simple reason that they will find it more and more difficult to borrow and spend with the same drunken abandon that the LDP has managed.
If you were looking for a study of the abject failure of demand management strategies it would be difficult not to put this one towards the top of the list.
Results at Wikipedia. Seems much as expected.
There’s reporting and commentary at the BBC, at the SMH amongst others. The Oz has Rohan Callick on trade, Peter Alford from Tokyo and of course Greg Sheridan.
The ABC’s AM had a report from Mark Willacy. The World Today had several items. I’ll put up the links when the transcripts are available.
BTW, the turnout was reported as a bit under 50% which has to be seen in the light of heavy rain from a storm late in the day.
GR @ 18, you thought the JCP was important?
Brian,
“Kyodo News agency put turn-out at 69%, up from 67.5% in 2005.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8229988.stm
the Democratic party is made up of the old socialist party as well as defectors from the LDP. It’s usually described as centre-left, though it isn’t a member of the Socialist International.
Andrew Reynolds: the key difference between the parties seems to be that the Democrats say they will redirect government spending towards households instead of industries and corporations. Much of the Japanese malaise has been attributed to thrift. Like all Asia, having too small a welfare state, they tend to save like mad – hence the emphasis on infrastructure spending by the LDP as a means to fight deflation.
It proves the abject failure of Japan’s conservatives to see the economic rationality of a decent welfare state, not the failure of demand management.
AR @ 22, the “bit under 50%” came from a BBC story also, I think about 12 hours earlier. So we’ll assume the later information is closer to the mark.
patrickg is pretty right in my view – this is not as big a deal, real change-wise, as much media commentary has it.
Yukio Hatoyama’s father was an LDP Prime Minister; his father an LDP Foreign Minister and powerbroker for yonks; his brother held several Ministerial porfolios, as a (guess what) LDP member of the Diet. Hatoyama Y himself was an LDP member, and only jumped ship opportunistically in about 1993 when he thought he wasn’t getting the promotions his pedigree deserved in the LDP, and there was a short-lived (and apparently forgotten entirely by most of the western media) non-LDP government in which he participated. The DJP came into existence more as a dissatisfied clique of Hatoyama types breaking from the LDP and absorbing the then Socialist party, than vice versa.
OK, governments in Japan are not necessarily as single personality driven as they tend to be here, so this probably makes too much of Hatoyama’s own background – but precisely because personalities can’t drive things, change is that much harder. In any case as several have pointed out, the super-Keynesian LDP has hardly been a far-right government for at least 20 years if not for ever.
Anyone remember Roh in South Korea? Came to the Presidency as a social activist, virulently anti-American, and proceeded to send troops to Iraq, negotiate a Free Trade Agreement with the US, and mire himself in scandal by buddying up to business. Eventually changed nothing, and threw himself off a cliff. No doubt a facile comparison, and Japanese and Koreans will deny any similarities in their politics or anything else. But just saying – there has been a hyped up ground-breaking regime change in North East Asia in the quite recent past which didn’t live up to the hype.