The Enigma of Japanese Power (22 page)

The bureaucrats also take the initiative in policy adjustments that are likely to run into hindrance from interest groups or provoke noisy opposition in the Diet. The main instruments for taking such an initiative are the numerous deliberation councils, or
shingikai
, in which well-known scholars, journalists and businessmen and noted representatives of the interest groups concerned are asked to take part. Participation in these councils is considered an honour, and much is made of an allegedly evolving ‘consensus’: opinions that are generally manipulated to echo those of the bureaucrats in question, who also participate. The
shingikai
often helps the bureaucracy to scatter and neutralise potential opposition to a plan.

The law-making process is usually over by the time a bill is submitted to the Diet. In nearly all cases, the people’s elected representatives merely rubber-stamp what the bureaucrats put under their noses. The actual haggling over bills, if there is any, takes place within LDP ranks, and its outcome is determined by differences between ministries and negotiations with the business world and other major petition groups. Once a bill is submitted to the Diet, the LDP makes every effort to get it adopted; it is difficult to get it amended on the floor of the Diet, since that would imply a loss of face for the ministry concerned.

In the Diet, LDP members tend to be lost without the help of the bureaucrats. In most parliamentary systems, political discussion is waged between members of parliament. In Japan this is extremely rare; to the extent that ‘discussion’ does take place, it consists of tricky questions asked by opposition members and answered, basically, by expert officials. Well-prepared bureau chiefs and bureau directors accompany their minister when he attends hearings of the Diet committees, and ‘supplement’ his non-committal explanations with their own stereotyped answers.
⁸⁴
In most cases the minister lacks a general grasp of the administrative area of which he is formally in charge.
⁸⁵
Guiding LDP Diet members through material related to government policy tends to occupy an important part of a top-ranking bureaucrat’s schedule. In MITI, directors spend roughly half, and directors-general about one-third, of their time with politicians.

The worst that can befall a Diet member is to be thought ‘indifferent’ or insufficiently ‘sincere’ by his constituency. To avoid this happening, the average LDP member must spend an extraordinary amount of his time going around his district, demonstrating his concern. He also must show that he really does have access, which he calls a
paipu
(‘pipe’), to people in high places in Tokyo. When elections are in the offing, he will bring thousands of people from several villages to a central place – a gymnasium or public hall – where a senior member of his
habatsu
, preferably a minister, will make his appearance as living proof of this ‘pipe’.

Once he becomes a minister, the LDP politician is expected to pay very special attention to the client groups his ministry has gathered under its wing. To demonstrate ‘sincerity’ in their eyes, he will also have to indulge in much ritual behaviour, often including a visit to the office of his colleague in the Ministry of Finance in the period when the final budget adjustments are made. In fact these final touches are always settled on a lower level among the bureaucrats, but in typical cases the minister will emerge from the office of the Minister of Finance making a show of how hard he negotiated. On one such occasion, after a minister had exclaimed ‘1 got it!’, he was asked by a reporter what it was that he had actually got, whereupon the minister replied: ‘You will have to ask the vice-minister about that – all I had to do for him was pay my respects to the finance minister.’
⁸⁶

The Japanese prime minister has less real power than any head of government in the Western world, or in most countries of Asia. He also has considerably less power than he is implicitly credited with by most casual foreign observers. In the autumn of 1964, when Sato Eisaku was prime minister, a movement was launched to strengthen the office of prime minister and thereby central political control over the bureaucracy.

Based on ideas inherited from the previous Ikeda cabinet, a cabinet assistant (
naikaku hosakan
) system was to be established, manned by special secretaries advising the prime minister. The plan failed because of strong opposition from both the LDP and the bureaucracy. Politicians did not want it because they feared it would come between them and the ministries, endangering a major source of political funds; the civil servants were against it because the new institution might have endangered some of their established prerogatives.

In the end, the prime ministers themselves saw the danger of ending up with even less control if they were surrounded by a permanent group of their own cabinet assistants. Normally, the existing temporary assistants, drawn from officialdom to give advice on special current issues, double as spies, enabling their ministry to take counter-measures if prime ministerial thinking threatens to result in action affecting them. With an arrangement of permanent cabinet assistants, the prime minister would need yet another instrument of control to check on them.
⁸⁷

Yet while the prime minister cannot establish new national priorities or enforce important measures he believes are vital to Japan’s international position, one prime minister can still make a big difference from the next. Tanaka is, of course, the example that immediately comes to mind, though his importance in Japanese political history derives mainly from what he accomplished after he ceased to be prime minister. But that a prime minister can make a difference could not have been more dramatically illustrated than by the last two prime ministers chosen by Tanaka, Suzuki Zenko and Nakasone Yasuhiro.

Suzuki Zenko had polished the Japanese skills of side-stepping decisions to an extent unprecedented among post-war Japanese prime ministers. In the years when Tanaka was prime minister, a then invisible Suzuki had helped keep order within the ranks of the LDP, thus giving Tanaka a reason for picking him as prime minister. Keeping party order requires hypersensitivity to changing power patterns among and within the
habatsu
, together with subtle mediating skills. Japan’s political commentators soon agreed that Suzuki indeed excelled in these skills, but that he correspondingly lacked any human urge to make decisions, so that his political passivity broke all records within memory.

His elevation to prime minister was totally unexpected, because few people had ever noticed him before. What was apparent soon enough, however, was that he had no understanding whatsoever of economic or diplomatic affairs. Suzuki’s paramount interest was never to incur anyone’s wrath, and the way to ensure this was to do absolutely nothing. One example among many was the diplomatic crisis that developed with South Korea and China over the rewriting of colonial and wartime history in Japanese middle-school textbooks. At the peak of the crisis, he weighed in with his official solution: that the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should settle the problem between them, even though the former had all along been staunchly refusing to make the symbolic gestures called for by the latter.

The bureaucrats despised Suzuki. His ministers ignored him to an extent previously unknown in post-war Japan. Insiders leaked the information that he was not treated with the usual deference at the short cabinet meetings, and that only on his first foreign trip was he accorded the small signs of respect that a prime minister normally receives. Again, although Japanese cabinets usually try to preserve at least a semblance of unity towards the outside world, Komoto Toshio, the director-general of the Economic Planning Agency (with the rank of minister), acted independently to place economic stimulus measures on the government’s programme, evoking denials from the Ministry of Finance that this was part of the government’s policy.

None of this is exaggeration. One of the nicknames that Suzuki earned as prime minister was ‘tape-recorder’ because for meetings that could not be avoided the bureaucrats had to train him to recite the answers by heart. The bureaucrats began to shield him carefully from visiting foreign dignitaries and editors, but a press conference with European journalists before Suzuki’s visit to Europe, made for the announced purpose of lessening misunderstanding, could not be avoided. Some three weeks beforehand I received a call from the Foreign Ministry asking me whether I wanted to ask a question and what that question would be. I then received instructions to ask my question, ‘so as not to cause confusion’, immediately after the question of another specified journalist had been answered. Before the press conference I twice received revised instructions as to my place among the seven chosen questioners. On the big day, Suzuki sat back and, with eyes half closed, recited the answers he had memorised, which sometimes sounded odd since some correspondents, perversely, had rephrased their questions.

But the highlight of the ‘press conference’ came at the end when, using the most courteous language, a German journalist asked Suzuki amid quiet applause whether he was aware of the fact that everything had been prearranged to look spontaneous, but that some fifty European newspaper and television reporters had come in the belief that each had an equal chance to ask questions; did not Suzuki think that this was unfortunate, given the official reason for his European trip? The question was interpreted impeccably, yet Suzuki merely recited the answer to the question my colleague had originally submitted to the Foreign Ministry.
⁸⁸

That Suzuki was an international liability for Japan became clear when he denied a statement included in a joint communiqué signed together with President Reagan.
⁸⁹
At the subsequent annual summit meeting in 1981, the US president was visibly uninterested in discussing anything with him. The preparations for the next summit in 1982 gave Japanese bureaucrats more than the normal headaches, for a pre-summit meeting between the US president and the Japanese prime minister had become an established opportunity to reduce the possibility of unpleasant surprises, and President Reagan had pointedly not found time to meet Suzuki. By then a yardstick for Japanese success at the summits was the degree to which other heads of government ignored Suzuki, and Japanese newspapers were stating uninhibitedly that Suzuki was not intellectually equipped to think seriously about matters that would come up for discussion.

In one sense Suzuki was the ideal Japanese prime minister, judged by standards often presented as ideally Japanese. He was self-effacing and believed above all in ‘consensus’. But the press was nearly unanimous in suggesting that over-consistent adherence to such ideals would not do, and that Suzuki was simply not doing his basic duty.

It occasionally happens that a powerful behind-the-scenes figure averts an impending crisis. In 1982 the serious deterioration in relations between the US president and the Japanese prime minister was halted when Kishi Nobusuke subtly blocked the re-election of Suzuki Zenko. In the early summer of that year Tanaka Kakuei had several times visited this elderly bureaucrat-politician at his country retreat. They had been considered natural enemies; Kishi was the political patron of Fukuda, Tanaka’s main adversary, while Kishi’s son-in-law, Abe Shintaro, was the anointed heir to Fukuda’s
habatsu
. But descriptions of the Kishi-Tanaka meetings given by their aides to a few journalists gave the impression that the two powers behind the LDP behaved like gods on Mount Olympus, benignly looking down on the political scurrying going on below. The upshot of whatever agreement they made was that Kishi sent a message to Suzuki explaining that he would not necessarily back his candidacy for a second term. Suzuki immediately announced that he would not be available for re-election, surprising most of the Japanese political world with what was wrongly dubbed the only decision he ever made.

The motives for Kishi’s move have never been disclosed, but they are not difficult to guess. He had long been considered a ‘friend of the United States’, and certainly understood the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. Imprisoned as a class ‘A’ war criminal, he was never put on trial, and re-entered politics with the USA’s blessing. He was particularly identified with the effort to revise the US–Japan Security Treaty, and helped promote close strategic relations with the United States in other ways too. He must have been acutely aware of the disastrous effect Suzuki was having on these relations.

The
habatsu
leader whom Tanaka and Kishi chose to become prime minister in November 1982 was Nakasone Yasuhiro. He was asked to repair the damage done to the US–Japan relationship; and from his very first statements, made even before he took office, he showed great enthusiasm for doing just that. Shortly afterwards Kishi, uncharacteristically, publicly praised Nakasone’s diplomacy. He also made sure that his son-in-law Abe Shintaro continued to support the Nakasone government in times of
habatsu
strife, against the wishes of Abe’s political boss, Fukuda Takeo.

As early as the 1970s political commentators had been speculating that Nakasone Yasuhiro would be a possible exception in a line of relatively featureless prime ministers. He did not disappoint them. But he had also long been considered rather unsuitable for the prime ministership for precisely the same reasons as made him colourful: his emphatic ideas, quotable pronouncements and nationalistic preoccupations. He had drawn an uncommon degree of attention as director-general (with the rank of minister) of the Self-Defence Agency, which he attempted to shake up without much lasting effect. Long before this, in January 1951, he had had the audacity, as a new Diet member, to present General Douglas MacArthur with a ‘manifesto’ summing up ‘what the Japanese think’, which earned him an early reputation among Americans as a radical nationalist. In this document he expressed concern that Japan’s continued subservience to the United States would threaten Japanese sovereignty. He was also one of the few LDP members who openly argued for constitutional change.

From the moment he became prime minister, Nakasone left no doubt that he had every intention of ruling. Any uncertainty about this was dispelled at the very beginning of 1983, when he confronted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a
fait-accompli
decision to travel to South Korea, whose relations with Japan were surrounded by controversy. His leadership ambitions were equally clear in his choice of cabinet ministers. Hitherto, such choices had been determined by the
habatsu
power balance and only very rarely by the ability of the candidates themselves. All Nakasone cabinets were distinguished by an uncommonly high number of ‘strong’ ministers, and by the retention of key ministers through several of the traditionally frequent reshuffles. In 1985 Nakasone confessed to his former classmates at a school reunion that he wanted to be a president-type prime minister who could carry out strong policies the way Mrs Thatcher did. And on 25 July 1986, shortly after forming his third cabinet, he held separate meetings with eleven ministers, instructing them to overcome resistance from bureaucrats in dealing with important pending issues. At the first meeting of this new cabinet the preceding Tuesday, he had said that ministers must not become the spokesmen of their departments but should have an overall understanding of national issues. He often chose to answer questions in parliament himself instead of leaving it to his ministers and their bureaucrats; and he drew attention with his (by Japanese standards) clear and straightforward answers.

A resolute manner and firm commitments tend to cause shudders among the administrators. Important decisions on every level are generally made only if accompanied by a display of collective agreement, or if implement-able without anyone noticing. A third option very commonly resorted to, especially in international dealings, is to avoid decisions in the hope that the reasons for them will disappear by themselves – a hope often fulfilled in practice. Against this background, Nakasone’s decisiveness shocked many and made him unpopular among his fellow LDP members.

The Japanese press reacted negatively to his first cabinet and united in dubbing it a ‘Tanakasone government’ because of the large proportion of representatives of the Tanaka
gundan
in it. But the editors overlooked how relatively purposeful this first Nakasone cabinet was, and entirely missed the fact that it had created new possibilities in Japanese policy development; for this relationship in Japanese politics brought together its most talented power-broker and the first prime minister in recent memory who actually wished to rule.

While Tanaka continued catering to his pork-barrel empire, Nakasone addressed himself to issues ranging, for once, beyond those immediately connected with economic growth, the pork-barrel or the need to hang on to the top post. He referred to a backlog of ‘unsettled post-war business’, by which he meant inhibitions and taboos inherited from the post-war occupation period. In line with this, he evinced great personal concern with various questions connected in some way or other with Japan’s sovereignty, such as education and international responsibility. He invited questions in the Diet on defence matters, which, touching as they do on national pride, form a potential political platform. He could afford to do so because his tenure was guaranteed as long as Tanaka was in charge and the two did not fall out with each other. Tanaka’s machine not only dominated the LDP, but was also the best means for an enterprising prime minister to cope with the bureaucracy.

The major help in dealing with the bureaucracy in successive Nakasone governments came from Gotoda Masaharu, Nakasone’s chief cabinet secretary (an important co-ordinating function with the rank of minister). The appointment was considered Nakasone’s most spectacular choice, as the post had hitherto been reserved for a member of the prime minister’s own
habatsu
. Gotoda had been discovered by Tanaka and was considered one of the most capable politicians in the
gundan
, a man sometimes referred to as Tanaka’s ‘brain’. Tanaka had often used him to penetrate phalanxes of recalcitrant bureaucrats when he was in a hurry to get things done. He had been director-general of the National Police Agency, and he knew how to use the power he derived from his very special
jinmyaku
. He became Nakasone’s right-hand man, and the key figure in his cabinets. And when Nakasone created a new government agency (the Management and Co-ordination Agency) to facilitate quick responses to emergencies, he appointed Gotoda as its first director-general.

When, for the first time in twelve years, a Japanese prime minister was given the chance to stay in his position for more than two years, the significance was international. Nakasone had said that he would help Japan play a world role in keeping with its economic power, and he made important symbolic gestures towards that end. He presented Japan unambiguously as an active member of the Western alliance, and he introduced a style of direct personal diplomacy in dealing with the US president.

President Reagan was pleasantly surprised, when Nakasone first visited him, to find himself face to face with a leader who appeared to see the Soviet Union through the same glasses as he did. He asked the Japanese prime minister to call him ‘Ron’, whereupon Nakasone offered an abbreviation of his first name in return. The fact that even close male friends in Japan seldom call each other by their given names made the symbolism all the more significant in Japan. The ‘Ron–Yasu’ relationship muted, for a couple of years, the strident voices from Washington taking the Japanese to task for various sins in connection with trade and defence. The relationship was skilfully used on the Japanese side. It swept some important problems under the carpet, and strengthened the illusion in the USA that Japan had finally found itself a leader.

Nakasone’s popularity as measured by Japanese public opinion polls broke all records. Tanaka alone was rewarded with similarly high figures, when his government was one year old, but his popularity subsequently sank to a record low. The support figures for the Nakasone government remained high; contrary to what has often been alleged, the Japanese public appreciated a prime minister who gave clear answers and made a strong impression at home and abroad.

These public feelings contrasted starkly with the aversion a majority of LDP parliamentarians felt for Nakasone. He was said to be lacking in personal warmth because of his rational approach to problems and his relative impatience to achieve political goals. With Tanaka incapacitated from 1985 onward, Nakasone’s leadership seemed in jeopardy as he was confronted with renewed
habatsu
wrangling. The record LDP victory in the 1986 elections earned him an extra year as prime minister, but popular support is the last thing that keeps a Japanese prime minister in power, and Nakasone had to select Takeshita as his successor in the autumn of 1987.