The Enigma of Japanese Power (9 page)

While the consumer and anti-pollution activists have gradually faded out of the political picture, other types of pressure group have remained politically important, not because of any changes in the political process achieved by their ‘pressure’, but for the work they do on behalf of LDP politicians.

Since the government party has almost no grass-roots organisation, candidates for parliamentary elections must rely on personal organisations of supporters, known as
koenkai
. In most cases the chances of an incumbent staying in parliament relate first and foremost to the membership and influence of the
koenkai
that he keeps going between elections. And almost from the moment that pressure groups made their appearance it was clear that they would, if properly treated, make ideal
koenkai
. Thus it comes about that pressure groups are right up front in Japanese political life, canvassing votes, collecting funds and performing all manner of odd jobs for individual LDP candidates.

For the LDP parliamentarian friendly connections with various ministerial bureaux are crucial in achieving such a relationship with a pressure group, since the politician must prove, by at least token measures, that he is doing something in return. In speaking to his constituents the incumbent rarely beats around the bush. Should they want a new airport, they are assured that he has the best entrée, or
paipu
(from the English word ‘pipe’), to the Transport Ministry and the Finance Ministry; if wider roads are needed, or a new bridge, then he has more friends at the Ministry of Construction than any other candidates. In the multi-member constituency, the LDP politician compares his access to bureaucrats with that of his fellow LDP members; and everyone understands that the minority parties do not have a
paipu
into the ministries.

The party ‘colleagues’ against whom an LDP candidate fights in parliamentary elections almost always belong to different LDP
habatsu
(cliques). Thus it is important for
habatsu
leaders to cultivate good relations with national umbrella organisations controlling local pressure and petition groups. This is why the veterans’ organisations, the association of war wounded and the organisation of the families of war dead continue to be a significant force pressuring the LDP to endorse and participate in controversial symbolic activities extolling the military past.
¹⁴
A politician whom I accompanied on his initial round of a hamlet recently added to his constituency made a special point of first seeking out the house of a man without legs – the local representative of the association of war wounded.

Many pressure groups will start by going directly to the officials whose cooperation they need for their original purposes. Relatively weak regional industrial and trade associations have used the bureaucracy ‘to help them strengthen their organisational foundations through government legislation legalising their status and providing for compulsory membership’.
¹⁵
Pressure groups, established to promote specific agricultural or other economic interests, will find open doors at the ministries that must deal with those interests. If a group appears large and potentially powerful enough, it will be actively courted by the officials. In return for having its wishes taken into account it provides detailed information about conditions, personalities and important events in its locality. It thus becomes part of the ‘radar’ whereby the bureaucrats effectively steer the System as a whole. Since the information moves in only one direction, towards Tokyo, the administrators gain firmer control over segments of Japanese life that have hitherto been less effectively incorporated in the System. And this increased control is often exercised through the pressure groups in question.

Regional pressure groups usually continue to exist after the original reason for their creation has been lost sight of. Often, their activities and purposes become diffuse and vague, significant primarily in providing a focus of loyalty for people who do not belong to large companies yet feel the need for social immersion. Once the interest groups attach themselves to politicians, as almost all do outside the large cities, their primary function is simply to organise election campaigns. At this point, the original movers may become disaffected, but they will lose their influence; nor will appeals to ‘fundamental principles’ be understood. Even though these original activists may want more than the group is getting out of the cosy relationship with officialdom, the rank and file ‘consider it prudent or even inevitable to depend upon or adjust themselves to the existing mechanism’, since disturbing the established reward-allocation mechanism implies ingratitude and can be risky.
¹⁶
Control of a pressure group caught up in the embrace of the System tends to pass to leaders who use it for their own purposes. The group nevertheless can continue to command far-reaching loyalty.
¹⁷
Loyalty becomes an end in itself; if there are hints of conflict in the group, the notion that solidarity should come first can easily be implanted by bureaucrats and politicians. It is often even possible for the representatives of the System to help bring about a change of leadership.

If the pressure groups, or the industrial and trade associations, are important enough they are likely to pass into the hands of former bureaucrats who are parachuted into top positions of the organisation. In such cases, the pressure groups often become stepping-stones to a political career for the former official.
¹⁸
The fact that many LDP Diet members were once bureaucrats should make it clear just how cosy negotiations among pressure-group executives, bureaucrats and politicians generally are.

The System undermines potential opposition, or buys acquiescence, at considerable cost to governmental flexibility. Ministries become intensely involved with the groups they must control, and show signs of identification with the groups’ goals. That is why, for instance, the Agriculture Ministry remains an immovable obstacle to the liberalisation of food imports – something that other System components believe is necessary, and which would serve the entire System well as a hedge against foreign trade-related retaliation. Thus the impulse of the System to maintain itself by absorbing antagonistic and potentially hostile groups leads, ironically, to its own partial paralysis.

The pressure groups are, wherever possible, also used by government agencies in their disputes and power struggles with other government agencies and components of the System. At one point during a campaign to open segments of the market inhospitable to imports, the then prime minister Nakasone received thousands of telegrams and postcards urging him not to take any drastic steps. Since the wording of these entreaties was remarkably similar, it was understood that they all came from a limited number of agricultural associations and industrial interest groups. At a subsequent cabinet meeting Nakasone angrily reminded his ministers that it was hardly the proper task of their departments to ask industry to start a protest movement.

New pressure or petition groups are constantly being formed, and sometimes they become the means by which certain claims of the public are brought to bear on the System. Elastic as the System is, it accommodates these groups to some extent. But it will not allow an essential change in the status quo or genuine sustained opposition.

A well-tested ploy used by components of the System to defuse problems before they grow out of hand, or to expand control over an area which still eludes their grasp, is to establish their own ‘opposition’ group. The alternative unions created by management in the 1950s and 1960s to suck in members of the potentially threatening Marxist-inspired national unions are a celebrated example of this strategy. Similarly, the Nosei Suishin Kyogikai (discussion group for the promotion of agricultural policy), which played a pivotal role in co-ordinating rural pressure groups in the 1960s, was in fact the brain-child of Agriculture Ministry officials seeking to strengthen control over their parish and to increase their own bargaining power with the Finance Ministry in the budgeting season.
¹⁹

The emergence of a new house-trained opposition group proved most helpful to the LDP when it suffered from criticism and voter disaffection because of bribery scandals and a temporary wave of press indignation. In 1976 six LDP members, led by the son of one of the LDP’s great post-war bosses, Kono Yohei, left the party, ostensibly to set up an opposition party, the New Liberal Club. The NLC made occasional opposition-like noises and advocated clean politics, thus enabling some disgruntled voters to quieten their consciences yet still stick with the LDP. For in effect the NLC was an LDP
habatsu
outside the LDP, voting with the LDP on any issue that came along. This meant that the LDP did not have to worry about losing its formal parliamentary majority. After the elections of December 1983, when the LDP suffered a record loss of seats (although not of the popular vote). Prime Minister Nakasone asked the NLC to join the cabinet and gave it the portfolio of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Many Japanese and foreign journalists, forever on the look-out for momentous, trend-setting events, concluded that the long-awaited era of ‘coalition government’ had arrived.

It was not to be. Two and a half years later, when the LDP gained a record number of seats and seemed to have no further use for the NLC, the ‘opposition’ party was quietly disbanded, and its Diet members slipped back into the ranks of the LDP as smoothly as they had left it ten years before. As Japan’s largest daily, the
Yomiuri Shinbun
, said in an editorial:

The NLC absorbed the urban votes which the LDP lost as a result of the Lockheed scandal and developed new conservative votes. In a period of the near balance of power in the Diet between the LDP and the opposition parties, the NLC supported the ruling party and thus contributed to political stability.
²⁰

To appreciate just how much the
nokyo
does for the System, one must take account of how limited the control of Japanese central governments over the countryside has traditionally been. For centuries the villages were virtually autonomous in regard to maintenance of internal order. For the majority of them, the ‘joint control system’ of the Tokugawa shogunate existed only on paper. There was much regional variation, but in many places the political patterns that developed through village self-rule formed a fairly effective shield against central administrative authority.

To break through this shield, the Meiji state established a variety of nation-wide organisations, but it never succeeded completely. Another channel through which Tokyo attempted to instil proper patriotic behaviour was the local landlords, who personally stood to gain by village compliance. Again, the powerful pre-war Naimusho could punish recalcitrant villages by depriving them of such necessities as repairs to their river banks after a typhoon.
²⁴
Even so, village tradition continued in many places to spawn independent attitudes. Under such circumstances the agricultural co-operatives organised around the turn of the century were naturally seized upon by the government and the landlords as yet another channel through which to control the farming population. As late as 1924, however, less than half the farms had joined the local co-operatives, which were grouped in about two hundred federations. Rural recalcitrance was finally overcome when in 1943 all co-operatives were placed under central control and the prefectural federations dissolved. The Imperial Agricultural Association, or Nogyokai, was born as part of the effort to bind tightly together as many organisations as possible for the sake of the war effort; membership was no longer a matter of choice.

In contemporary Japan, the hold exerted by the Tokyo authorities on rural communities via their law-enforcement personnel has remained fairly tenuous. The policemen who serve two or three years in the hamlets and villages drink sake with the local inhabitants and are given seats of honour at communal events; they are great sources of information and advice for the villagers, but they remain outsiders. The construction, industry provides another important instrument of control, but rural Japan is most effectively made to serve the System – and the LDP in particular-through the agricultural co-operatives that were in fact inherited from the wartime system.

The centralised Imperial Agricultural Association provided the infrastructure for the post-war
nokyo
system. Its offices, equipment and employees, and most of its roles, were simply taken over by the ostensibly new organisations set up with the encouragement of the United States occupation.
²⁵
Since nearly all Japanese farmers are dependent on its services, the post-war system also inherited the total, or near-total, organisation rate.

The government’s food control system, which contributes to extraordinary high prices for Japanese agricultural products, is inextricably intertwined with
nokyo
interests. Equally important to the
nokyo
are the agricultural protectionist barriers that constitute a major bone of contention with the US government. For this reason Japan’s ‘overprotected agriculture’, and by implication the
nokyo
system, has been under attack since the late 1970s from the business world and the bureaucrats of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, who hope to shift international criticism away from themselves. Yet these rival sides within the System have stopped short of publicly analysing the true problem. It was pointed out by Japanese specialists as early as the 1960s that the
nokyo
could not be said to represent the farmers. The prefectural federations behave like subcontractors of the central
nokyo
institutions, and the promotion of the interests of the upper-level organisations sometimes causes considerable friction between them and the local
nokyo
‘chapters’.
²⁶
The combined interests of the
nokyo
and the Ministry’ of Agriculture form a greater obstacle to agricultural liberalisation than the farmers’ interests.

By whole-heartedly embracing their role as ‘subsidiaries’ of the Ministry of Agriculture, the
nokyo
organisations have found a way to survive. The farmers themselves are by and large ambivalent towards the system they have been roped into, especially in view of the failure of government plans to modernise agriculture, for which
nokyo
practices are blamed.
²⁷
Very few Japanese farmers can make ends meet by farming. More than four-fifths of all farming households have supplementary income from other work – usually with small factories, trucking companies or service establishments in the nearest town. In over 85 per cent of the households, earnings from this so-called part-time work are greater than from farm produce. But because Zenkoku Nokyo Chuokai (better known as Zenchu), the general headquarters of the
nokyo
conglomeration, is very vociferous every year when officials are deliberating the artificially high price of rice, Japanese and foreigners alike receive the impression that Japanese farmers are very powerful and can make the government dance to their tune. In fact, the real power is the
nokyo
–Agriculture Ministry combination. No other ministry has a force of such guaranteed impact to back it up in dealing with the Ministry of Finance. Its budget proposals are sacred cows. And no other business enterprises have as much freedom from regulation as those guided and co-ordinated by Zenchu.

The government’s payment for nearly the entire rice harvest goes straight to the Norin Chukin (Central Bank for Agriculture and Forestry), whence it ‘circulates in all the sections of the
nokyo
organisation like blood, supplying nourishment to each segment’.
²⁸
The Norin Chukin transfers the government’s rice money, via the prefectural Shinyo Nokyo Rengokai (
nokyo
credit federation), to the savings accounts of the individual households that contributed to the sale. This automatic transfer means that the cost to the
nokyo
banking organisation is a fraction of that at ordinary commercial banks. The same money flows back and forth within the
nokyo
family of corporations, in the form of loans to the rural population through credit facilities, and as payment for all manner of services. The central
nokyo
bank reserves roughly half of the amount for outside investment. When a general meeting of
nokyo
members endorses a nation-wide campaign, headquarters may automatically deduct contributions from all savings accounts. This makes possible the copious propaganda for
nokyo
interests at home and abroad, not to mention ritualised petition activities directed, on a scale that no other group can match, at the Finance Ministry and the LDP.

The more than ten thousand local
nokyo
units in towns and villages all over the country buy farm products (other than rice) and market them through the
nokyo
trading companies on a higher level. On top of this they sell the rural population practically everything it needs for farming, and much else besides. The totality represents an almost perfect model of a captive market, given the savings accounts already in
nokyo
hands. The subsidiaries also provide health and welfare facilities, credit, storage and warehousing, guidance and instruction. One of their most interesting ventures is a ‘mutual aid’ business which has grown into the largest insurance operation in the world.

When the relevant laws were first drawn up, the US occupation initially insisted that the insurance activities of the
nokyo
be placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Finance. However, agriculture officials argued convincingly that the
nokyo
did not intend an actual insurance system, but a system based on the custom of Japanese farmers helping each other in times of disaster. Little did the finance bureaucrats and the insurance corporations suspect that by the beginning of the 1980s the assets of the
nokyo
‘s ’mutual aid’ business would reach more than 4.9 trillion yen – a great deal more than the total assets of the world’s largest commercial life insurance company, Japan’s Nihon Seimei, and five times the assets of Tokyo Marine Fire Insurance, the largest property insurance company in the country. Every grass-roots
nokyo
unit is an insurance outlet. Since this operation is classified, along with its other centrally organised businesses, as a species of non-profit organisation, the
nokyo
is allowed, unlike the ‘commercial’ companies, to sell both life insurance and property insurance. All in all, probably no other Japanese industrial conglomeration has been as spectacularly successful.

Come election time and the
nokyo
’s insurance salesmen, orange buyers and seed suppliers are transformed into enthusiastic campaign staff for the local LDP candidate – at least, in theory. Although the
nokyo
units derive their power from the assumption that they form an unbeatable voting machine, one which must remain tied to the LDP, their electoral effectiveness in fact varies greatly from place to place. On the whole the LDP’s dependence on the farm vote is on the decline, but in the late 1980s there were still eleven out of forty-six prefectures with more than 30 per cent of their households classified as farmers, and nineteen prefectures with more than 20 per cent such households. When the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) ordered Japan to liberalise imports of twelve agricultural products in 1987, as many as 359 out of the 445 LDP Diet members signed a declaration opposing compliance with the ruling of that international body. Irritated local
nokyo
units have been known to work, very occasionally, for an opposition candidate. But even though farmers of a different political persuasion do, of course, belong to the
nokyo
, it is agreed that the organisation as such has no choice but to stick with the LDP.

This still leaves room for choice among LDP candidates competing with each other in the multiple-seat constituencies. If a regional
nokyo
sets its mind to serious electioneering, it can muster a tremendous force to oppose LDP headquarters’ intentions, as a case in Miyazaki prefecture demonstrated. Angered by the choice of candidate made by party officials in Tokyo, the
nokyo
organisation decided to back an alternative LDP politician. During the election campaign between four and five thousand
nokyo
personnel and farmers assisted him every day. A rally at which the original candidate planned to draw two thousand voters was countered on the same day by a rally attended by ten thousand brought together by
nokyo
chartered buses.
Nokyo
teams campaigned in all the shops, and in the final stage wives and teen-aged children joined a campaign staff which had grown to sixty thousand workers.
²⁹

The
nokyo
of Miyazaki prefecture, which is known as a fairly active voting machine, normally supplies some three thousand campaign workers free of charge. Shortly before elections are announced, meetings of the area groups are organised. Specialist groups such as the pig-raisers or mandarin orange growers, organised under another
nokyo
sub-umbrella, will also meet around this time. The strict election law forbids open electioneering, so at such meetings a ‘report’ is presented telling who the
nokyo
has decided to support. To get around legal stipulations, the candidate himself holds ‘study meetings’ reporting on his initiatives in Tokyo. As election time approaches
nokyo
salesmen pay extra visits to the farmers. Though door-to-door soliciting of votes is strictly forbidden, even during the official campaign season, it is easy to find a pretext – a new kind of insurance, a
nokyo
publication – for referring obliquely to the chosen candidate. Each house is visited at least twice during the campaign. The
nokyo
unit’s office telephones members and urges them to come to meetings which they know to be election rallies and to which the
nokyo
also arranges transportation. Out of a sense of indebtedness to local
nokyo
officials, farmers rarely refuse to attend.

For more straightforward campaigning, the
nokyo
village units function not as
nokyo
sub-units but as branches of the Miyazaki Farmers’ Federation. Unlike the
nokyo
, this federation is not politically restricted, but it conveniently happens that the chief of the one organisation is simultaneously the chief of the other, and that the offices of both occupy the same space. Staff members of
nokyo
units are free to recommend anybody they choose, until the time when the organisation decides who to recommend. After that, they must stick to speaking on behalf of the chosen candidate. A staff member who complains about this task (because of personal support for the JSP, for instance) will be reprimanded by higher officials and risks demotion if he or she fails to follow the ‘informal’
nokyo
guidelines.
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