NAOKI TANAKA
President
Center for International Public Policy Studies
Naoki Tanaka is Japan’s leading economic advisor, serving both the business community and the highest levels of government. A decade ago, he helped create the 21st Century Public Policy Institute established by Nippon Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation) and served as its first president. He is currently serving as the first president of the Center for International Public Policy Studies (CIPPS), which was established in 2007. Among his numerous government-related positions, he is best known for his work as a special economic advisor to former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, acting as one of the lead architects of Koizumi’s landmark postal system reform. Tanaka is the author of many books and the recipient of the prestigious Yoshino Sakuzo Prize and Ishibashi Tanzan Prize.
With the emergence of a fully fledged change in administration in Japan, we are once again forced to question the detailed pragmatic development of the Japanese political party system.
Our forefathers experienced such changes in administration during the so-called Taisho Democracy, mainly in the 1920s, during the Imperial Parliament operated under the Meiji Constitution. Concrete provisions were gradually put in place regarding the finer points of this parliamentarianism, known as “Constitutional Convention,” developed through the changes in administration between the Seiyukai, based on prominent farmers in the agricultural villages, and the Constitutional Party, or Kenseito, which arose against the backdrop of the urban bourgeoisie.
Instances of coalitions formed with smaller parties did exist, but what eventually became established as “Constitutional Convention” was a system whereby the ruling cabinet was formed by the dominant party, and new “solutions” were sought through an en masse cabinet resignation or dissolution of the parliament in cases of cabinet discord.
This is the historical backdrop to Japan’s parliamentary government, but during the political era of the Liberal Democratic Party-dominated government established in 1955, the mechanism of seeking the “solution” of a change in administration ceased to operate. The very concept of “Constitutional Convention” appears to have disappeared from this point on, and Japanese political history, without an actual change in administration for over half a century, surely demanded that we, the voters, pay a price.
What needed to be carried over at the change of administration seen in 2009 were the establishment of fiscal discipline and the solid framework of U.S.-Japan Security Agreements. That’s because it was extremely important to confirm these two points from the position of Japan as a state in the international community of nations. If any slackening had been witnessed in fiscal discipline, it would have produced a fund flight from the Japanese markets via a collapse in Japanese Government Bond prices. And if a collapse in the debt market produced an inactivation of the Japanese financial markets, then it would also have led to speculation that adjustments in employment were unavoidable.
Ongoing foreign policy arrangements founded on solid U.S.-Japan security arrangements are essential, both to back up demands that North Korea dispose of its nuclear weapons and to cement Japanese nuclear nonproliferation policies. In actual fact, however, the succession of these two points was left unclear when the government of Yukio Hatoyama was established.
During the Cold War, a transfer in government to the Japan Socialist Party, which was the leading opposition party, would have been unthinkable. That was because it would have been impossible to confirm the aforementioned two points. But now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, awareness in Japan of the need to reconfirm these points has receded, despite the ongoing severe realities surrounding the Korean peninsula. We can say that this is the price of not having had a change in administration.
The semi-perpetual government of the Liberal Democratic Party led, in reverse, to a spread in the belief in absolute regime change within the Democratic Party of Japan. That belief manifested itself in the endorsement of methods, including making extravagant promises to voters in order to induce a change in administration. It was also embodied in the viewpoint that “the establishment of fiscal discipline” was possible only by stripping away vested interests.
In the period leading up to 2013, when it is expected that the next lower house election will be held, our pragmatic exercise of “Constitutional Convention” in the 21st century will enter a new stage. The structural reform of Japanese politics has just begun.