The Japanese electorate woke up last Monday to discover that, for the first time ever, they had elected a left-leaning government with a overall majority in the Lower – and most important – House of the Japanese Diet. The Liberal Democratic Party (Jiminto), in power for all but 11 months since its formation in 1955, had a result that made John Major’s defeat in 1997 look mild in comparison. It wasn’t a landslide. It was an earthquake.
The LDP lost almost two out of every three seats, going from 296 in 2005 to 119, while the Democratic Party virtually tripled its representation from 113 seats to 308. The small left parties stood pat, the Japanese Communist Party with nine and the Japanese Socialist Party with eight. Put another way, it was the first unambiguous change in power through the electoral process since Japan introduced democracy in 1881.
What does this mean for Japan and the rest of the world? The Democratic Party is no traditional left organisation. While it was courted by both the Socialist and Liberal Internationals, even that fails to reveal the full hybrid nature of the beast. It emerged from a series of realignments in Japanese politics from the early 1990s, triggered to a degree by changes in the electoral system. Until then, Japan had multi-member constituencies with a single non-transferable vote. The consequence was inter-party factional division and political inertia.
In most five or six-member constituencies, the LDP could expect to win three or four seats. However, the LDP candidates were competing with each other for votes and therefore sought finance from the various faction leaders in Tokyo who would back only one of the candidates. Once elected, their first loyalty was to patron not party.
On the other side, any opposition MP elected in a constituency certainly did not want a second candidate standing for their party, as they would split the vote and both candidates might lose. It was necessary to guess the result of the election in order to decide the appropriate number of candidates to run.
Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas and so it was never the time to be bold. The left retreated into a psephological ghetto where you could win a seat with as little as 6 per cent of the vote. Consequently, there were elections when the opposition did not put up enough candidates to take power even if they had all won.
When this changed to single member constituencies plus a small block elected using proportional representation on a regional basis, it catalysed the political realignment. The era of two-party politics was conceived and it had a gestation period of a generation.
Then a centrist section of the LDP left to join the small Japanese Social Democratic Party. The largest part of the JSP followed suit, abandoning the party name to the rump of MPs who chose to remain with the sinking ship.
Around this time, the JSP had more than 100 MPs. It was also joined by Ichiro Ozawa’s faction of the LDP. The other three groups were part of an ideological continuum that stretched, in British terms from, say, Chris Patten via Gordon Brown to Peter Hain.
Ozawa, in contrast, left the LDP for personality not political reasons, having fallen out with the LDP’s other faction leaders. A self-confident neo-conservative, his book, Blueprint for a New Japan, argued the case for a “normal” Japan that would take its rightful place in the world. He wanted to amend the United States-imposed post-war constitution of 1947 to remove Article Nine that declares Japan will not be a military power and instead deploy Japanese troops abroad on peacekeeping and peacemaking operations.
Although he never said it openly, the logic was inexorable that Japan should not continue to go naked into the conference chamber. Japan should not be the only non-nuclear power in the region. With a more assertive and independent foreign policy, it was incumbent on Japan to have its own umbrella and not continue to depend on the US.
During the honeymoon period, Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama will have full control. His promise to look increasingly to Asia rather than across the Pacific will give him a window of opportunity to recast Japan’s relationships with China and South Korea, both still overshadowed by the LDP’s failure to reconcile the victims of Japan’s wartime aggression and horrors, and finally close that chapter of east Asian history. Equally, there is an opportunity to restart the dialogue with North Korea, which abandoned to the hurly-burly of domestic political considerations.
Hatoyama’s first 100 days will be crucial. With his government inevitably under pressure, the internal tensions will build. The ex-socialists don’t want a “normal” Japan and certainly not one where “normality” is pre-emptive deterrence.
Yet their priorities are domestic. Close to the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, “Rengo”, they want to see labour market reform designed to curtail the growing army of temporary employees who are undermining living and working standards for Rengo’s members and their supporters and creating a two-tier workforce.
Despite the recent financial scandal that forced Ozawa into the background to his favoured role of éminence grise, he is in a powerful position. He devised and implemented the electoral strategy that won the Democrats their staggering victory. So we may see Japan facing both ways at the same time: progressive at home and aggressive abroad, with the left team playing the home match and the neo-conservatives playing away, running foreign policy and the ministry of defence.
What will prove important will be the roles of the JSP and another small left party, the People’s New Party, inside the new tent, and the JCP outside. While Hatoyama doesn’t need them in the Lower House of the Diet, in the Upper House they are crucial. With no elections for two years, the Democrats will rely on all three for a working majority.
One of the problems facing the LDP over the past couple of years has been its loss of control of the Upper House to a Democratic Party-led informal coalition. It was a new experience of cohabitation for Japan that often came close to divorce.
The Democrats will have to tread carefully if they are not to be hoist with their own petard – either losing their erstwhile allies or their majority in mid-term elections when the electorate next votes for the Upper House.
Hatoyama’s wife believes that she was once abducted by aliens. We can only hope that progressives from Europe and the US can work with the new Japanese government to build a global progressive forum that addresses issues of security and climate change, economic recovery and development in a way that allows us to be grateful they didn’t take her husband as well.
Glyn Ford is a former Labour MEP
