The travails of Taro Aso and, more recently, Ichiro Ozawa, combined with the ascendance of Barack Obama in the United States have left many Japanese with leadership envy. Prime Minister Aso himself may have a mild case of it: Following the recent passage of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill, Mr. Aso admired the speed with which the new U.S. administration acted and lamented that he was unable to do the same. Similarly, in his 2006 book “Ozawaism,” Mr. Ozawa wrote of Japan as a “country without leaders” and detailed his efforts to train future leaders in his annual workshop. Messrs. Aso and Ozawa are joined by politicians and journalists from across the political spectrum who bemoan the country’s ability to produce inspiring leaders, leaders like Mr. Obama capable of inspiring people far beyond their nation’s borders instead of serving as the butt of jokes at home and abroad. The foreign press has echoed domestic Japanese sentiment. As Christian Caryl recently asked in Newsweek, why are Japan’s politicians so bad?
There is more than a grain of truth to this notion that Japan has, in the words of Australian academic Aurelia George Mulgan, a “leadership deficit.” The three prime ministers who have followed the dynamic Junichiro Koizumi have shared a degree of tone deafness to the concerns of the Japanese public; have done little to fix the many problems facing Japan, problems compounded by the country’s stunning economic collapse; and have struggled to control their unruly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). With each passing year the need for action has grown at the same time that the prime minister’s ability to act creatively has diminished, thanks in part to falling public expectations of the prime minister’s ability to act, a vicious cycle that former Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and now Mr. Aso have been singularly unable to break. There is no shortage of theories for why Japan’s politicians are so inept. One popular explanation is that Japan is cursed with hereditary politicians. The argument is that the princelings, having ambled into politics without having to forge close relations with the voters who elect them, have lost touch with the concerns of the average citizen. With roughly a quarter of the members of both houses of the Japanese Diet being representatives by inheritance—and reportedly 40% of LDP members—the idea is that Japanese politicians are a pampered lot, insensitive to the concerns of the people. But it is unclear how hereditary politicians are any worse than their ancestors or their nonhereditary peers. There is a sense that this argument amounts to “Abe, Aso, and Nakagawa Shoichi, Q.E.D.” Except that lineage is not destiny. After all, Mr. Koizumi, recognized as one of postwar Japan’s most able leaders, is a third-generation politician; his predecessor, Mori Yoshiro, regarded as one of postwar Japan’s worst prime ministers, was not a hereditary Diet member. If Japan has a leadership deficit, its source likely lies elsewhere. That was precisely Aurelia George Mulgan’s argument in her 2002 article on the leadership deficit. She suggested that Japan lacks strong leaders as a result of institutional design, not culture or personality. Japan’s prime ministers and cabinets, she argued, were constrained because unlike in other parliamentary systems, they had to contend with strong institutional rivals in the bureaucracy and the backbenches of the LDP. Despite reforms initiated under Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto during the 1990s and accelerated under Mr. Koizumi earlier this decade, the prime minister and the cabinet are still forced to do battle with the bureaucracy and LDP members outside the government in order to move their agendas. While the LDP’s factions have lost much of their strength—removing at least one constraint on the prime minister’s freedom of action—the LDP’s internal divisions are now more ideological than they once were, in part due to Mr. Koizumi’s having bolstered the ranks of reformists within the party. Political turmoil within the LDP, meanwhile, has created an opening for bureaucrats to reassert themselves in the policy-making process. Contrary to the argument made since the opposition took control of the upper house in 2007, gridlock begins in the government benches. The DPJ’s having a foothold in the policy-making process is another obstacle to the government’s advancing its agenda, but it is far from the most important obstacle, especially considering that the government has held a trump card since 2005 in the form of its lower house supermajority. In addition to institutional constraints on leadership, there may also be a generational constraint at work. Namely, the political skills necessary to exercise leadership in the 21st century are not the skills possessed by the politicians in the pool of potential LDP presidents. In particular, recent LDP prime ministers, would-be prime ministers, and cabinet ministers have been distinguished notably for their tendency to wind up with their foot in their mouth. Mr. Aso may be most notable for his inability to express himself clearly, but he is hardly alone. Part of Mr. Koizumi’s success must be attributed to the fact that compared to the competition, he was a mastermind of political communication, as recognized by both friends and foes. He used—perhaps even created—a prime ministerial “bully pulpit” in a way that no prime minister had done before, lambasting his political rivals and appealing directly to the public for support. Most senior Japanese politicians, however, lack the skills to communicate effectively in a modern media environment, perhaps in part because before becoming prime minister they have little need to do so. Winning re-election still depends more on an ability to raise funds to finance a permanent campaign and develop personal ties than on using modern communications technology to mobilize voters and deliver a policy message to a broader segment of the Japanese public. The younger generation of politicians is undoubtedly more astute in the arts of modern political communication, but at least in the LDP they are not in a position to vie for the leadership yet. (Forty-something Maehara Seiji was briefly the president of the DPJ, which only goes to show that youth is no guarantee of political adroitness.) For much of modern Japanese history, the political system has prized different qualities in its leaders than in other countries, particularly the U.S. Whereas Americans have valued leaders capable of inspiring and persuading the public, successful leaders in the Japanese system are better known for their work behind closed doors, their ability to assemble coalitions within the ruling party, with the bureaucracy, and with opposition parties. They may not look or sound like the leaders of North American or European governments—Charles De Gaulle once infamously referred to Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda as a “little transistor salesman”— but a number of postwar Japanese prime ministers surely qualify as capable leaders, including Shigeru Yoshida, Prime Minister Aso’s grandfather, who was not called “One Man” Yoshida for his humility. Another element affecting the quality of contemporary Japanese leadership may simply be the immensity of the problems facing Japan, even before the global economic tsunami hit Japan’s shores. Facing a fiscal crisis, a demographic crisis, a health-care crisis, a pensions crisis, an employment crisis, and a “regions” crisis, Japan’s leaders have simply been overwhelmed, unsure of which problem to tackle first and constrained by the debt compiled in the late 1990s when the government was struggling to escape the post-bubble “lost decade.” Now, in addition to all of these pre-existing problems, the Aso government is overseeing a macroeconomic crisis as Japan suffers the consequences from having depended on export-led growth for its economic recovery. The long overdue structural transformation of the Japanese economy will now occur beyond the control of Japan’s leaders and with considerable pain for the Japanese people, perhaps more pain than if the government had moved deliberately over the past decade to stimulate domestic demand. Japan’s leaders as a whole deserve the blame for having let it come to this, but in this instance is the problem leadership deficit or institutional failure? In any event, contrary to an argument made by Ms. Mulgan in her book “Koizumi’s Failed Revolution,” economic crisises, far from providing an opportunity for creative leadership, can just as easily trigger paralysis on the part of a country’s leaders, particularly when compounded with other crises. Given this last point, it is easy to be skeptical about the significance of a DPJ-led government should the opposition party win this year’s general election. Whoever the prime minister is he will face the same crises faced by LDP governments. If it is the DPJ’s Mr. Ozawa, a more doubtful prospect following the arrest of his top secretary on corruption charges, the prime minister will be of the same generation as Messrs. Fukuda and Aso and without a particularly sterling reputation as a political communicator. But what a DPJ government could change are the constraints that have undermined LDP prime ministers. The DPJ has carefully studied why LDP governments have failed and has formulated transition plans with an eye to avoiding the LDP’s mistakes. Accordingly, the party has developed a scheme that would greatly expand the number of political appointees in cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, which if implemented would kill two birds with one stone: it would tighten the cabinet’s control of the ministries—as would the DPJ’s plan to ask for the resignations of senior bureaucrats and other officials hostile to the party’s program—while bringing potential rivals within the DPJ into the government. These are just the major pieces of a wide-reaching administrative reform plan that the party hopes will permanently strengthen the power of the cabinet and the prime minister over the bureaucracy and ruling party. The DPJ, should it get the opportunity to govern, could easily fail to implement this program. Should Mr. Ozawa be forced out of power, it will surely have a harder time implementing its scheme, because Mr. Ozawa is respected (and feared) like no other politician in the DPJ. But the DPJ at least recognizes that Japan’s leadership deficit, such as it exists, is the result of institutional defects associated with the LDP rule that the DPJ must be careful to avoid. What is clear is that the LDP is incapable of making these changes itself. If the most charismatic politician in his generation is incapable of cowing party and bureaucracy, what hope is there for lesser talents? All of which goes to show that Japan’s problems do not lie in its decadent politicians but in its broken institutions. In some way Japan would have had it easier if its problems could be traced to its politicians. There is no shortage of politicians in a democracy. Good institutions are harder to come by.
Tobias Harris is a doctoral candidate in political science at MIT. He is the author of Observing Japan (www.observingjapan.com), a blog on Japanese politics.
Comment:
by Tobias HarrisJapan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has lost the coherence it had when it was simply a union of factions.
by Nobuyoshi SakajiriJapan's political decline is even worse than its economic decline
Posted March 20, 2009
The travails of Taro Aso and, more recently, Ichiro Ozawa, combined with the ascendance of Barack Obama in the United States have left many Japanese with leadership envy. Prime Minister Aso himself may have a mild case of it: Following the recent passage of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill, Mr. Aso admired the speed with which the new U.S. administration acted and lamented that he was unable to do the same. Similarly, in his 2006 book “Ozawaism,” Mr. Ozawa wrote of Japan as a “country without leaders” and detailed his efforts to train future leaders in his annual workshop. Messrs. Aso and Ozawa are joined by politicians and journalists from across the political spectrum who bemoan the country’s ability to produce inspiring leaders, leaders like Mr. Obama capable of inspiring people far beyond their nation’s borders instead of serving as the butt of jokes at home and abroad. The foreign press has echoed domestic Japanese sentiment. As Christian Caryl recently asked in Newsweek, why are Japan’s politicians so bad?
There is more than a grain of truth to this notion that Japan has, in the words of Australian academic Aurelia George Mulgan, a “leadership deficit.” The three prime ministers who have followed the dynamic Junichiro Koizumi have shared a degree of tone deafness to the concerns of the Japanese public; have done little to fix the many problems facing Japan, problems compounded by the country’s stunning economic collapse; and have struggled to control their unruly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). With each passing year the need for action has grown at the same time that the prime minister’s ability to act creatively has diminished, thanks in part to falling public expectations of the prime minister’s ability to act, a vicious cycle that former Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and now Mr. Aso have been singularly unable to break. There is no shortage of theories for why Japan’s politicians are so inept. One popular explanation is that Japan is cursed with hereditary politicians. The argument is that the princelings, having ambled into politics without having to forge close relations with the voters who elect them, have lost touch with the concerns of the average citizen. With roughly a quarter of the members of both houses of the Japanese Diet being representatives by inheritance—and reportedly 40% of LDP members—the idea is that Japanese politicians are a pampered lot, insensitive to the concerns of the people. But it is unclear how hereditary politicians are any worse than their ancestors or their nonhereditary peers. There is a sense that this argument amounts to “Abe, Aso, and Nakagawa Shoichi, Q.E.D.” Except that lineage is not destiny. After all, Mr. Koizumi, recognized as one of postwar Japan’s most able leaders, is a third-generation politician; his predecessor, Mori Yoshiro, regarded as one of postwar Japan’s worst prime ministers, was not a hereditary Diet member. If Japan has a leadership deficit, its source likely lies elsewhere. That was precisely Aurelia George Mulgan’s argument in her 2002 article on the leadership deficit. She suggested that Japan lacks strong leaders as a result of institutional design, not culture or personality. Japan’s prime ministers and cabinets, she argued, were constrained because unlike in other parliamentary systems, they had to contend with strong institutional rivals in the bureaucracy and the backbenches of the LDP. Despite reforms initiated under Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto during the 1990s and accelerated under Mr. Koizumi earlier this decade, the prime minister and the cabinet are still forced to do battle with the bureaucracy and LDP members outside the government in order to move their agendas. While the LDP’s factions have lost much of their strength—removing at least one constraint on the prime minister’s freedom of action—the LDP’s internal divisions are now more ideological than they once were, in part due to Mr. Koizumi’s having bolstered the ranks of reformists within the party. Political turmoil within the LDP, meanwhile, has created an opening for bureaucrats to reassert themselves in the policy-making process. Contrary to the argument made since the opposition took control of the upper house in 2007, gridlock begins in the government benches. The DPJ’s having a foothold in the policy-making process is another obstacle to the government’s advancing its agenda, but it is far from the most important obstacle, especially considering that the government has held a trump card since 2005 in the form of its lower house supermajority. In addition to institutional constraints on leadership, there may also be a generational constraint at work. Namely, the political skills necessary to exercise leadership in the 21st century are not the skills possessed by the politicians in the pool of potential LDP presidents. In particular, recent LDP prime ministers, would-be prime ministers, and cabinet ministers have been distinguished notably for their tendency to wind up with their foot in their mouth. Mr. Aso may be most notable for his inability to express himself clearly, but he is hardly alone. Part of Mr. Koizumi’s success must be attributed to the fact that compared to the competition, he was a mastermind of political communication, as recognized by both friends and foes. He used—perhaps even created—a prime ministerial “bully pulpit” in a way that no prime minister had done before, lambasting his political rivals and appealing directly to the public for support. Most senior Japanese politicians, however, lack the skills to communicate effectively in a modern media environment, perhaps in part because before becoming prime minister they have little need to do so. Winning re-election still depends more on an ability to raise funds to finance a permanent campaign and develop personal ties than on using modern communications technology to mobilize voters and deliver a policy message to a broader segment of the Japanese public. The younger generation of politicians is undoubtedly more astute in the arts of modern political communication, but at least in the LDP they are not in a position to vie for the leadership yet. (Forty-something Maehara Seiji was briefly the president of the DPJ, which only goes to show that youth is no guarantee of political adroitness.) For much of modern Japanese history, the political system has prized different qualities in its leaders than in other countries, particularly the U.S. Whereas Americans have valued leaders capable of inspiring and persuading the public, successful leaders in the Japanese system are better known for their work behind closed doors, their ability to assemble coalitions within the ruling party, with the bureaucracy, and with opposition parties. They may not look or sound like the leaders of North American or European governments—Charles De Gaulle once infamously referred to Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda as a “little transistor salesman”— but a number of postwar Japanese prime ministers surely qualify as capable leaders, including Shigeru Yoshida, Prime Minister Aso’s grandfather, who was not called “One Man” Yoshida for his humility. Another element affecting the quality of contemporary Japanese leadership may simply be the immensity of the problems facing Japan, even before the global economic tsunami hit Japan’s shores. Facing a fiscal crisis, a demographic crisis, a health-care crisis, a pensions crisis, an employment crisis, and a “regions” crisis, Japan’s leaders have simply been overwhelmed, unsure of which problem to tackle first and constrained by the debt compiled in the late 1990s when the government was struggling to escape the post-bubble “lost decade.” Now, in addition to all of these pre-existing problems, the Aso government is overseeing a macroeconomic crisis as Japan suffers the consequences from having depended on export-led growth for its economic recovery. The long overdue structural transformation of the Japanese economy will now occur beyond the control of Japan’s leaders and with considerable pain for the Japanese people, perhaps more pain than if the government had moved deliberately over the past decade to stimulate domestic demand. Japan’s leaders as a whole deserve the blame for having let it come to this, but in this instance is the problem leadership deficit or institutional failure? In any event, contrary to an argument made by Ms. Mulgan in her book “Koizumi’s Failed Revolution,” economic crisises, far from providing an opportunity for creative leadership, can just as easily trigger paralysis on the part of a country’s leaders, particularly when compounded with other crises. Given this last point, it is easy to be skeptical about the significance of a DPJ-led government should the opposition party win this year’s general election. Whoever the prime minister is he will face the same crises faced by LDP governments. If it is the DPJ’s Mr. Ozawa, a more doubtful prospect following the arrest of his top secretary on corruption charges, the prime minister will be of the same generation as Messrs. Fukuda and Aso and without a particularly sterling reputation as a political communicator. But what a DPJ government could change are the constraints that have undermined LDP prime ministers. The DPJ has carefully studied why LDP governments have failed and has formulated transition plans with an eye to avoiding the LDP’s mistakes. Accordingly, the party has developed a scheme that would greatly expand the number of political appointees in cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, which if implemented would kill two birds with one stone: it would tighten the cabinet’s control of the ministries—as would the DPJ’s plan to ask for the resignations of senior bureaucrats and other officials hostile to the party’s program—while bringing potential rivals within the DPJ into the government. These are just the major pieces of a wide-reaching administrative reform plan that the party hopes will permanently strengthen the power of the cabinet and the prime minister over the bureaucracy and ruling party. The DPJ, should it get the opportunity to govern, could easily fail to implement this program. Should Mr. Ozawa be forced out of power, it will surely have a harder time implementing its scheme, because Mr. Ozawa is respected (and feared) like no other politician in the DPJ. But the DPJ at least recognizes that Japan’s leadership deficit, such as it exists, is the result of institutional defects associated with the LDP rule that the DPJ must be careful to avoid. What is clear is that the LDP is incapable of making these changes itself. If the most charismatic politician in his generation is incapable of cowing party and bureaucracy, what hope is there for lesser talents? All of which goes to show that Japan’s problems do not lie in its decadent politicians but in its broken institutions. In some way Japan would have had it easier if its problems could be traced to its politicians. There is no shortage of politicians in a democracy. Good institutions are harder to come by.
Tobias Harris is a doctoral candidate in political science at MIT. He is the author of Observing Japan (www.observingjapan.com), a blog on Japanese politics.
Comment:
by Tobias HarrisJapan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has lost the coherence it had when it was simply a union of factions.
by Nobuyoshi SakajiriJapan's political decline is even worse than its economic decline
Posted March 20, 2009
The travails of Taro Aso and, more recently, Ichiro Ozawa, combined with the ascendance of Barack Obama in the United States have left many Japanese with leadership envy. Prime Minister Aso himself may have a mild case of it: Following the recent passage of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill, Mr. Aso admired the speed with which the new U.S. administration acted and lamented that he was unable to do the same. Similarly, in his 2006 book “Ozawaism,” Mr. Ozawa wrote of Japan as a “country without leaders” and detailed his efforts to train future leaders in his annual workshop. Messrs. Aso and Ozawa are joined by politicians and journalists from across the political spectrum who bemoan the country’s ability to produce inspiring leaders, leaders like Mr. Obama capable of inspiring people far beyond their nation’s borders instead of serving as the butt of jokes at home and abroad. The foreign press has echoed domestic Japanese sentiment. As Christian Caryl recently asked in Newsweek, why are Japan’s politicians so bad?
There is more than a grain of truth to this notion that Japan has, in the words of Australian academic Aurelia George Mulgan, a “leadership deficit.” The three prime ministers who have followed the dynamic Junichiro Koizumi have shared a degree of tone deafness to the concerns of the Japanese public; have done little to fix the many problems facing Japan, problems compounded by the country’s stunning economic collapse; and have struggled to control their unruly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). With each passing year the need for action has grown at the same time that the prime minister’s ability to act creatively has diminished, thanks in part to falling public expectations of the prime minister’s ability to act, a vicious cycle that former Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and now Mr. Aso have been singularly unable to break. There is no shortage of theories for why Japan’s politicians are so inept. One popular explanation is that Japan is cursed with hereditary politicians. The argument is that the princelings, having ambled into politics without having to forge close relations with the voters who elect them, have lost touch with the concerns of the average citizen. With roughly a quarter of the members of both houses of the Japanese Diet being representatives by inheritance—and reportedly 40% of LDP members—the idea is that Japanese politicians are a pampered lot, insensitive to the concerns of the people. But it is unclear how hereditary politicians are any worse than their ancestors or their nonhereditary peers. There is a sense that this argument amounts to “Abe, Aso, and Nakagawa Shoichi, Q.E.D.” Except that lineage is not destiny. After all, Mr. Koizumi, recognized as one of postwar Japan’s most able leaders, is a third-generation politician; his predecessor, Mori Yoshiro, regarded as one of postwar Japan’s worst prime ministers, was not a hereditary Diet member. If Japan has a leadership deficit, its source likely lies elsewhere. That was precisely Aurelia George Mulgan’s argument in her 2002 article on the leadership deficit. She suggested that Japan lacks strong leaders as a result of institutional design, not culture or personality. Japan’s prime ministers and cabinets, she argued, were constrained because unlike in other parliamentary systems, they had to contend with strong institutional rivals in the bureaucracy and the backbenches of the LDP. Despite reforms initiated under Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto during the 1990s and accelerated under Mr. Koizumi earlier this decade, the prime minister and the cabinet are still forced to do battle with the bureaucracy and LDP members outside the government in order to move their agendas. While the LDP’s factions have lost much of their strength—removing at least one constraint on the prime minister’s freedom of action—the LDP’s internal divisions are now more ideological than they once were, in part due to Mr. Koizumi’s having bolstered the ranks of reformists within the party. Political turmoil within the LDP, meanwhile, has created an opening for bureaucrats to reassert themselves in the policy-making process. Contrary to the argument made since the opposition took control of the upper house in 2007, gridlock begins in the government benches. The DPJ’s having a foothold in the policy-making process is another obstacle to the government’s advancing its agenda, but it is far from the most important obstacle, especially considering that the government has held a trump card since 2005 in the form of its lower house supermajority. In addition to institutional constraints on leadership, there may also be a generational constraint at work. Namely, the political skills necessary to exercise leadership in the 21st century are not the skills possessed by the politicians in the pool of potential LDP presidents. In particular, recent LDP prime ministers, would-be prime ministers, and cabinet ministers have been distinguished notably for their tendency to wind up with their foot in their mouth. Mr. Aso may be most notable for his inability to express himself clearly, but he is hardly alone. Part of Mr. Koizumi’s success must be attributed to the fact that compared to the competition, he was a mastermind of political communication, as recognized by both friends and foes. He used—perhaps even created—a prime ministerial “bully pulpit” in a way that no prime minister had done before, lambasting his political rivals and appealing directly to the public for support. Most senior Japanese politicians, however, lack the skills to communicate effectively in a modern media environment, perhaps in part because before becoming prime minister they have little need to do so. Winning re-election still depends more on an ability to raise funds to finance a permanent campaign and develop personal ties than on using modern communications technology to mobilize voters and deliver a policy message to a broader segment of the Japanese public. The younger generation of politicians is undoubtedly more astute in the arts of modern political communication, but at least in the LDP they are not in a position to vie for the leadership yet. (Forty-something Maehara Seiji was briefly the president of the DPJ, which only goes to show that youth is no guarantee of political adroitness.) For much of modern Japanese history, the political system has prized different qualities in its leaders than in other countries, particularly the U.S. Whereas Americans have valued leaders capable of inspiring and persuading the public, successful leaders in the Japanese system are better known for their work behind closed doors, their ability to assemble coalitions within the ruling party, with the bureaucracy, and with opposition parties. They may not look or sound like the leaders of North American or European governments—Charles De Gaulle once infamously referred to Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda as a “little transistor salesman”— but a number of postwar Japanese prime ministers surely qualify as capable leaders, including Shigeru Yoshida, Prime Minister Aso’s grandfather, who was not called “One Man” Yoshida for his humility. Another element affecting the quality of contemporary Japanese leadership may simply be the immensity of the problems facing Japan, even before the global economic tsunami hit Japan’s shores. Facing a fiscal crisis, a demographic crisis, a health-care crisis, a pensions crisis, an employment crisis, and a “regions” crisis, Japan’s leaders have simply been overwhelmed, unsure of which problem to tackle first and constrained by the debt compiled in the late 1990s when the government was struggling to escape the post-bubble “lost decade.” Now, in addition to all of these pre-existing problems, the Aso government is overseeing a macroeconomic crisis as Japan suffers the consequences from having depended on export-led growth for its economic recovery. The long overdue structural transformation of the Japanese economy will now occur beyond the control of Japan’s leaders and with considerable pain for the Japanese people, perhaps more pain than if the government had moved deliberately over the past decade to stimulate domestic demand. Japan’s leaders as a whole deserve the blame for having let it come to this, but in this instance is the problem leadership deficit or institutional failure? In any event, contrary to an argument made by Ms. Mulgan in her book “Koizumi’s Failed Revolution,” economic crisises, far from providing an opportunity for creative leadership, can just as easily trigger paralysis on the part of a country’s leaders, particularly when compounded with other crises. Given this last point, it is easy to be skeptical about the significance of a DPJ-led government should the opposition party win this year’s general election. Whoever the prime minister is he will face the same crises faced by LDP governments. If it is the DPJ’s Mr. Ozawa, a more doubtful prospect following the arrest of his top secretary on corruption charges, the prime minister will be of the same generation as Messrs. Fukuda and Aso and without a particularly sterling reputation as a political communicator. But what a DPJ government could change are the constraints that have undermined LDP prime ministers. The DPJ has carefully studied why LDP governments have failed and has formulated transition plans with an eye to avoiding the LDP’s mistakes. Accordingly, the party has developed a scheme that would greatly expand the number of political appointees in cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, which if implemented would kill two birds with one stone: it would tighten the cabinet’s control of the ministries—as would the DPJ’s plan to ask for the resignations of senior bureaucrats and other officials hostile to the party’s program—while bringing potential rivals within the DPJ into the government. These are just the major pieces of a wide-reaching administrative reform plan that the party hopes will permanently strengthen the power of the cabinet and the prime minister over the bureaucracy and ruling party. The DPJ, should it get the opportunity to govern, could easily fail to implement this program. Should Mr. Ozawa be forced out of power, it will surely have a harder time implementing its scheme, because Mr. Ozawa is respected (and feared) like no other politician in the DPJ. But the DPJ at least recognizes that Japan’s leadership deficit, such as it exists, is the result of institutional defects associated with the LDP rule that the DPJ must be careful to avoid. What is clear is that the LDP is incapable of making these changes itself. If the most charismatic politician in his generation is incapable of cowing party and bureaucracy, what hope is there for lesser talents? All of which goes to show that Japan’s problems do not lie in its decadent politicians but in its broken institutions. In some way Japan would have had it easier if its problems could be traced to its politicians. There is no shortage of politicians in a democracy. Good institutions are harder to come by.
Tobias Harris is a doctoral candidate in political science at MIT. He is the author of Observing Japan (www.observingjapan.com), a blog on Japanese politics.
Comment:
by Tobias HarrisJapan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has lost the coherence it had when it was simply a union of factions.
by Nobuyoshi SakajiriJapan's political decline is even worse than its economic decline
Posted March 20, 2009
The travails of Taro Aso and, more recently, Ichiro Ozawa, combined with the ascendance of Barack Obama in the United States have left many Japanese with leadership envy. Prime Minister Aso himself may have a mild case of it: Following the recent passage of the Obama administration’s stimulus bill, Mr. Aso admired the speed with which the new U.S. administration acted and lamented that he was unable to do the same. Similarly, in his 2006 book “Ozawaism,” Mr. Ozawa wrote of Japan as a “country without leaders” and detailed his efforts to train future leaders in his annual workshop. Messrs. Aso and Ozawa are joined by politicians and journalists from across the political spectrum who bemoan the country’s ability to produce inspiring leaders, leaders like Mr. Obama capable of inspiring people far beyond their nation’s borders instead of serving as the butt of jokes at home and abroad. The foreign press has echoed domestic Japanese sentiment. As Christian Caryl recently asked in Newsweek, why are Japan’s politicians so bad?
There is more than a grain of truth to this notion that Japan has, in the words of Australian academic Aurelia George Mulgan, a “leadership deficit.” The three prime ministers who have followed the dynamic Junichiro Koizumi have shared a degree of tone deafness to the concerns of the Japanese public; have done little to fix the many problems facing Japan, problems compounded by the country’s stunning economic collapse; and have struggled to control their unruly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). With each passing year the need for action has grown at the same time that the prime minister’s ability to act creatively has diminished, thanks in part to falling public expectations of the prime minister’s ability to act, a vicious cycle that former Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and now Mr. Aso have been singularly unable to break. There is no shortage of theories for why Japan’s politicians are so inept. One popular explanation is that Japan is cursed with hereditary politicians. The argument is that the princelings, having ambled into politics without having to forge close relations with the voters who elect them, have lost touch with the concerns of the average citizen. With roughly a quarter of the members of both houses of the Japanese Diet being representatives by inheritance—and reportedly 40% of LDP members—the idea is that Japanese politicians are a pampered lot, insensitive to the concerns of the people. But it is unclear how hereditary politicians are any worse than their ancestors or their nonhereditary peers. There is a sense that this argument amounts to “Abe, Aso, and Nakagawa Shoichi, Q.E.D.” Except that lineage is not destiny. After all, Mr. Koizumi, recognized as one of postwar Japan’s most able leaders, is a third-generation politician; his predecessor, Mori Yoshiro, regarded as one of postwar Japan’s worst prime ministers, was not a hereditary Diet member. If Japan has a leadership deficit, its source likely lies elsewhere. That was precisely Aurelia George Mulgan’s argument in her 2002 article on the leadership deficit. She suggested that Japan lacks strong leaders as a result of institutional design, not culture or personality. Japan’s prime ministers and cabinets, she argued, were constrained because unlike in other parliamentary systems, they had to contend with strong institutional rivals in the bureaucracy and the backbenches of the LDP. Despite reforms initiated under Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto during the 1990s and accelerated under Mr. Koizumi earlier this decade, the prime minister and the cabinet are still forced to do battle with the bureaucracy and LDP members outside the government in order to move their agendas. While the LDP’s factions have lost much of their strength—removing at least one constraint on the prime minister’s freedom of action—the LDP’s internal divisions are now more ideological than they once were, in part due to Mr. Koizumi’s having bolstered the ranks of reformists within the party. Political turmoil within the LDP, meanwhile, has created an opening for bureaucrats to reassert themselves in the policy-making process. Contrary to the argument made since the opposition took control of the upper house in 2007, gridlock begins in the government benches. The DPJ’s having a foothold in the policy-making process is another obstacle to the government’s advancing its agenda, but it is far from the most important obstacle, especially considering that the government has held a trump card since 2005 in the form of its lower house supermajority. In addition to institutional constraints on leadership, there may also be a generational constraint at work. Namely, the political skills necessary to exercise leadership in the 21st century are not the skills possessed by the politicians in the pool of potential LDP presidents. In particular, recent LDP prime ministers, would-be prime ministers, and cabinet ministers have been distinguished notably for their tendency to wind up with their foot in their mouth. Mr. Aso may be most notable for his inability to express himself clearly, but he is hardly alone. Part of Mr. Koizumi’s success must be attributed to the fact that compared to the competition, he was a mastermind of political communication, as recognized by both friends and foes. He used—perhaps even created—a prime ministerial “bully pulpit” in a way that no prime minister had done before, lambasting his political rivals and appealing directly to the public for support. Most senior Japanese politicians, however, lack the skills to communicate effectively in a modern media environment, perhaps in part because before becoming prime minister they have little need to do so. Winning re-election still depends more on an ability to raise funds to finance a permanent campaign and develop personal ties than on using modern communications technology to mobilize voters and deliver a policy message to a broader segment of the Japanese public. The younger generation of politicians is undoubtedly more astute in the arts of modern political communication, but at least in the LDP they are not in a position to vie for the leadership yet. (Forty-something Maehara Seiji was briefly the president of the DPJ, which only goes to show that youth is no guarantee of political adroitness.) For much of modern Japanese history, the political system has prized different qualities in its leaders than in other countries, particularly the U.S. Whereas Americans have valued leaders capable of inspiring and persuading the public, successful leaders in the Japanese system are better known for their work behind closed doors, their ability to assemble coalitions within the ruling party, with the bureaucracy, and with opposition parties. They may not look or sound like the leaders of North American or European governments—Charles De Gaulle once infamously referred to Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda as a “little transistor salesman”— but a number of postwar Japanese prime ministers surely qualify as capable leaders, including Shigeru Yoshida, Prime Minister Aso’s grandfather, who was not called “One Man” Yoshida for his humility. Another element affecting the quality of contemporary Japanese leadership may simply be the immensity of the problems facing Japan, even before the global economic tsunami hit Japan’s shores. Facing a fiscal crisis, a demographic crisis, a health-care crisis, a pensions crisis, an employment crisis, and a “regions” crisis, Japan’s leaders have simply been overwhelmed, unsure of which problem to tackle first and constrained by the debt compiled in the late 1990s when the government was struggling to escape the post-bubble “lost decade.” Now, in addition to all of these pre-existing problems, the Aso government is overseeing a macroeconomic crisis as Japan suffers the consequences from having depended on export-led growth for its economic recovery. The long overdue structural transformation of the Japanese economy will now occur beyond the control of Japan’s leaders and with considerable pain for the Japanese people, perhaps more pain than if the government had moved deliberately over the past decade to stimulate domestic demand. Japan’s leaders as a whole deserve the blame for having let it come to this, but in this instance is the problem leadership deficit or institutional failure? In any event, contrary to an argument made by Ms. Mulgan in her book “Koizumi’s Failed Revolution,” economic crisises, far from providing an opportunity for creative leadership, can just as easily trigger paralysis on the part of a country’s leaders, particularly when compounded with other crises. Given this last point, it is easy to be skeptical about the significance of a DPJ-led government should the opposition party win this year’s general election. Whoever the prime minister is he will face the same crises faced by LDP governments. If it is the DPJ’s Mr. Ozawa, a more doubtful prospect following the arrest of his top secretary on corruption charges, the prime minister will be of the same generation as Messrs. Fukuda and Aso and without a particularly sterling reputation as a political communicator. But what a DPJ government could change are the constraints that have undermined LDP prime ministers. The DPJ has carefully studied why LDP governments have failed and has formulated transition plans with an eye to avoiding the LDP’s mistakes. Accordingly, the party has developed a scheme that would greatly expand the number of political appointees in cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, which if implemented would kill two birds with one stone: it would tighten the cabinet’s control of the ministries—as would the DPJ’s plan to ask for the resignations of senior bureaucrats and other officials hostile to the party’s program—while bringing potential rivals within the DPJ into the government. These are just the major pieces of a wide-reaching administrative reform plan that the party hopes will permanently strengthen the power of the cabinet and the prime minister over the bureaucracy and ruling party. The DPJ, should it get the opportunity to govern, could easily fail to implement this program. Should Mr. Ozawa be forced out of power, it will surely have a harder time implementing its scheme, because Mr. Ozawa is respected (and feared) like no other politician in the DPJ. But the DPJ at least recognizes that Japan’s leadership deficit, such as it exists, is the result of institutional defects associated with the LDP rule that the DPJ must be careful to avoid. What is clear is that the LDP is incapable of making these changes itself. If the most charismatic politician in his generation is incapable of cowing party and bureaucracy, what hope is there for lesser talents? All of which goes to show that Japan’s problems do not lie in its decadent politicians but in its broken institutions. In some way Japan would have had it easier if its problems could be traced to its politicians. There is no shortage of politicians in a democracy. Good institutions are harder to come by.
Tobias Harris is a doctoral candidate in political science at MIT. He is the author of Observing Japan (www.observingjapan.com), a blog on Japanese politics.
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