The Enigma of Japanese Power (5 page)

The LDP is habitually referred to as the ‘ruling party’, but this too is a misnomer. Little legislation emanates from it. In some instances policy initiatives are traceable to powerful LDP groups, but most of the time they are of marginal importance. The LDP hardly ever establishes new administrative priorities. The limits on its power are best seen in the political decisions it
fails
to make – decisions aimed, for instance, at lessening conflict with other countries or at improving the domestic infrastructure. Certain individuals and groups within it exercise power in a largely indirect manner, but not power of the kind that is generally considered relevant to the running of a state. What distinguishes LDP parliamentarians from other Japanese is personal privileges and the ability to relay to the bureaucrats requests for favours from lobbying supporters. In the late 1980s many Western observers had the impression that the LDP had become newly active in debating and sponsoring policies in the areas of industrial restructuring, opening the domestic market, financial liberalisation and educational reform. This notion, based on a plethora of committee reports and newspaper articles stressing the desirability of new policies, was largely inaccurate. In the national discussion the developments in these areas were highly exaggerated; and most were forced on Japan by external circumstances, were kept to a minimum and were monitored by the bureaucrats rather than by the LDP.

Seated above a weak parliament, the Japanese prime minister, who is invariably president of the LDP, in theory has opportunities to exercise great power. But in fact his power does not permit him to do things that foreigners, including foreign governments, expect a prime minister to be able to do. If he focuses most of his energies on one goal and is given more than a couple of years in office, he may subtly effect a small shift in priorities among the administrators. His immediate power is for all practical purposes limited to dissolving the Lower House. If he tried to do much more, his rivals in the LDP, along with the ‘opposition’ parties, would almost surely combine to bring him down.

The power of the Japanese prime minister is less than that of any head of government in the West or Asia. Proof of this, if still needed, was provided by the recent experiences of Nakasone Yasuhiro. As prime minister, Nakasone never allowed any doubt about his ambition to rule. He also tried harder than any of his post-war predecessors to strengthen his office. In the end, though, he failed to bring about the policy adjustments he championed – except for the break-up of the company running the largest losses in the world, the Japan National Railways.

According to the constitution, executive power is vested in the cabinet. But most Japanese cabinet ministers do not run the departments whose portfolios they hold. They tend to have little or no influence within their ministries. The almost yearly cabinet reshuffles give them no time to absorb sufficient detail to outsmart their senior bureaucrats. A strong politician can make his mark on a policy area through a certain amount of leverage in senior personnel appointments, and by climbing the ranks of the corresponding policy group within the LDP. Some bureaucratic preserves, such as education, transport and construction, are less self-willed than others such as the trade and industry or finance ministries. But ministers who make significant decisions are so extraordinary that they fuel inter-departmental gossip and press comment for years afterwards.

If cabinet members were to insist on exercising the kind of power the formal rules give them, they would in nearly all cases run into insurmountable bureaucratic sabotage. Cabinet meetings are, with extremely rare exceptions, wholly ceremonial affairs, lasting between ten and fifteen minutes, for the sole purpose of endorsing the policy adjustments that the administrative vice-ministers (the top bureaucrats in each ministry) have agreed on the previous day at their own meeting. The cabinet does not discuss any new business of which the bureaucrats have no knowledge, as is common in European countries, or business that has not been worked out in all its details by the bureaucrats.

The importance of the politician’s role admittedly varies somewhat, depending on the perceived urgency of new administrative programmes. In the 1950s, for example, a number of LDP parliamentarians, themselves mostly former bureaucrats, helped set the agenda for the various adjustments necessary in preparing for unlimited industrial expansion – which was taken for granted as the top national priority. In the early 1960s Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato overcame finance ministry resistance to an unimpeded application of ‘high-growth’ policies. Subsequently the politicians rarely interfered with this agenda and certainly never introduced new priorities. On the other hand, LDP Diet members have continued to influence the interventions of the education ministry throughout the past few decades. Again, in the late 1970s and the 1980s certain LDP politicians increased their power when the role of mediator in inter-ministry quarrelling over jurisdiction in new industrial fields such as telecommunications was thrust upon them. On the whole, though, while one must guard against underestimating the clout of the LDP, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the power of officialdom is significantly greater where ruling the country is concerned.

Is the power of the Japanese state, then, to be found in the bureaucracy? A fair number of experienced observers have reached this tempting conclusion.

In the everyday business of governing Japan, groups of officials, especially those of the ministries of finance, international trade and industry, construction, and post and telecommunications, wield a great deal of power, definitely more than they are theoretically authorised to exercise. They restrain, control and provide spurs for the economy. They make nearly all laws – which, if not everything, is quite something in terms of measurable power. These laws are almost always rubber-stamped by the Diet, and the bureaucrats typically proceed to use them as means to achieve their own cherished aims. Their informal powers, moreover, give them even greater control over the realms of social activity for which they are formally responsible. This informal power, because it is not exposed to debate about its merits, is very open-ended.

It might help solve the riddle of Japanese power, then, to consider Japan an ‘authoritarian bureaucratic state’; but to try to pinpoint just who among the bureaucrats is in charge is to get lost again at once. Pressed to endorse decisions their respective ministries object to, the administrative vice-ministers will not give in to each other. Regular participants in the vice-ministerial meetings that precede the ceremonial cabinet meetings have told me that controversial issues always result in impasses, because there is simply no way to break a deadlock caused by a recalcitrant ministry.

Intense rivalry among officials has long prevented their achieving a general dominance over Japanese policy-making. By the same token, territorial jealousies among ministries and agencies, which frequently turn into well-publicised wars, obstruct the formulation of sorely needed unified national policies. Even apart from such internal rivalry, the jurisdiction of the bureaucracy as a whole is definitely curtailed, even though nobody seems to be able to point out exactly where its parameters lie.

We are left with one main group of participants in the Japanese power game, a group that is a favourite among theorists who postulate conspiracy in considering Japan’s policies. It is the
zaikai
, the broad circle of top business functionaries, especially those who speak through the powerful business federations. Since Japan is known internationally almost exclusively through the products of its industry and the impact they have on other economies, foreigners are tempted to think that the captains of industry dominate its political decision-making. According to this interpretation both the LDP and the bureaucrats serve as proxies for the
zaikai
.

This picture is false. True, Japanese corporations operate in an extremely favourable political climate in so far as industrial expansion remains the national goal in the eyes of economic officials and the LDP, and most of the methods used to achieve this goal are accepted as a matter of course. But this has not turned the presidents and chairmen of industrial corporations into Japan’s secret rulers.

Admittedly, the business federations, especially Keidanren, have extraordinary powers. Keidanren is a federation of leading industrial organisations such as the automobile manufacturers’ association, the shipbuilders’ association, the iron and steel federation, the petroleum association and the chemical industry association, together with trading companies, wholesale businesses, banks, insurance companies and securities companies. Second in importance, Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employers’ Associations), has had the task of helping control the labour movement and keeping the lid on wage increases. The Keizai Doyukai (Committee for Economic Development) has provided a forum in which élite
zaikai
members can formulate a theoretical basis for business policies; it attracted attention in the mid-1950s with proposals for a Japanese-style ‘reformed capitalism’. The fourth and oldest organisation, the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (originally the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, set up in 1878), monitors the world of the smaller corporations.

It would be a mistake to think of the founders and major leaders of the post-war federations as entrepreneurs, or as representing entrepreneurs. One of the reasons for the success of the bureaucrat-businessman partnership is that these organisations at the apex of the industrial hierarchy were, in their formative stages and long afterwards, led by bureaucrats who had been responsible for wartime economic mobilisation and by bureaucratised leaders of wartime cartels. These men provided the main impetus for the merger of the rival conservative parties to form the LDP in 1955.
⁹
They have also had a decisive influence over post-occupation education policies and the shaping of the school system.

In the late 1980s the
zaikaijin
, business elders, form a gerontocracy at the top of an ever more bureaucratised business world. As chairmen of the boards of their respective companies, they often continue to wield tremendous power, greater even than that of the presidents. The chairmanship leaves them with more time and opportunity to engage in committee work. They enhance the reputation of their firms, as they pontificate on what is desirable for society and add their contributions to the ubiquitous platitudes regarding Japan’s tasks and future role in the world. But they have no ability to steer Japan towards new priorities more consonant with those tasks and the international role.

As a class, contemporary businessmen buy political power on a regular basis. Individual business sectors, even large individual corporations, maintain leverage over most LDP Diet members by footing the incredibly high cost of maintaining an intensive publicity presence in their constituencies. Some businesses buy specific political power from individual LDP members who play a pivotal role in stimulating or retarding bureaucratic decisions affecting them.

But such power is still rather limited, and informal bureaucratic control over business reaches very far. Even within the economic sphere, the
zaikai
is highly dependent on the ministries for protection of its existing industries against international competition on the domestic market, and for guidance and co-ordination as it moves in new industrial directions.

Thus each of the three bodies described above may display surprising power at times and unexpected weakness at others. No elegant equation showing precisely how they relate to each other in their shares of power is possible. The essential fact is that none of them can be perceived as forming the apex of the Japanese power hierarchy.

If there are no other groups that can compete for power with the three we have just been discussing, where then must one locate the Japanese state? Is it perhaps possible that, finally, in this unexpected place, we have a state which is actually at some stage of withering away?

Do the Japanese need a state? At least from the Middle Ages until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Japanese political élite apparently did not think so. But this had not always been the case. When the Yamato rulers of what is now central Japan consolidated their holdings in the middle of the seventh century, they attempted to bring other clan chieftains under control with measures designed to turn Japan into a centrally directed state after the Chinese model. But this ‘state’ did not last long and did not result in an enduring pattern of centralised power. The country was divided into administrative units, and officials were dispatched from the capital to serve fixed terms as governors. After a while, officials remained where they had been sent and passed their power on to their heirs. Once contact with China was broken, the need for a state seems to have vanished from the thoughts of Japanese power-holders. Even the powerful Fujiwara family, at a later stage, never consolidated undisputed control over the entire country.

Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), the first of the three ‘unifiers’ of Japan, might possibly be said to have wanted to establish a state. He tried to attain central rule by conquest, supplanting enemy lords with men he strictly controlled.
¹⁰
Significantly, in justifying this campaign of military ‘pacification’ he used the term
tenka
(‘the realm’) for an entity that was greater than the existing collection of warrior domains.
¹¹
But his ‘realm’ was never consolidated.

His successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), who by 1590 had nearly accomplished the unification of the country, probably came the closest to a paramount leader that Japan has ever had. But instead of eliminating the lords he had defeated, he allowed most of them to retain and rule their domains. He in fact helped bring about the feudal arrangements revolving around semi-autonomous lords called daimyo – that great political balancing act that kept the Tokugawa shoguns in power for over two and a half centuries.