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Country Bio Japan

• Population
• 127.1 million
• Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces combined
• Territory
• 145,882 square miles
• Smaller than Yunnan Province
• Year of Independence
• 660 B.C.

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Country Bio Japan

• Year of Current Constitution
• 1947
• Head of State
• Emperor Akihito
• Head of Government
• Prime Minister Naoto Kan

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The Tokugawa Clan 1600-1868

• In 1600, the Tokugawa clan finally managed to
  achieve preeminence and a considerable degree of
  national unity.
• The Tokugawa family ruled from Edo, present-day
  Tokyo, from 1600 to 1868.
• After over 250 years of virtual isolation, a U.S.
  naval officer, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, sailed
  a small fleet into what is now known as Tokyo Bay
  in 1853.

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The Meiji Restoration 1868

• This action emboldened regional barons to depose
  the Tokugawa clan and restore the emperor to
  power.
• The Meiji Restoration (1868), as this transition
  is called, was named for the young Emperor Meiji,
  who was nominally installed as the supreme
  political and religious leader.

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The Meiji Restoration 1868

• Although the new oligarchs had no intention of
  democratizing politics on any mass level, they
  did relent to the establishment of a constitution
  with an elected legislature.
• The government established the Diet, a bicameral
  legislative body, on the model of European
  parliamentary democracy.

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The 1889 Constitution

• The 1889 constitution had given the Diet the
  ability to reject certain governmental actions
  (specifically the budget), so that the cabinet
  had to bargain with nascent political parties on
  many issues.
• This creeping democratization reached its prewar
  apex from 1918 to 1932.

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The Occupation

• It was not until Japans surrender in August
  1945, and its subsequent occupation by the Allied
  powers, that the militarys role in politics was
  ended and civilian democracy was allowed to
  flourish.
• The Allied Occupation of Japan was administered
  by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers
  (SCAP), under the direction of U.S. General
  Douglas MacArthur.

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The Occupation

• Its initial objectives were to demilitarize and
  democratize Japan, to render Japan unable and
  unwilling to wage war ever again.
• This idealism was discarded rather quickly in the
  face of Communist advances in China and
  increasing conflict between the United States and
  the Soviet Union.

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The 1947 Constitution

• Perhaps the best known provision of the Japanese
  Constitution is Article 9, the Peace Clause, in
  which Japan renounces the right to wage war or
  even to maintain a military capability.
• Conservative governments and courts have
  interpreted the provision flexibly (to say the
  least) to allow for a defensive capability.

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The 1951 Peace Treaty

• The priorities of SCAP shifted from the
  demilitarization of Japan to securing Japan as a
  reliable ally in the Cold War.
• In September 1951, Japan signed a general peace
  treaty in San Francisco with all Allied powers
  except the Soviet Union (and China), formally
  ending the Occupation and ceding Japans postwar
  autonomy.

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The US-Japan Security Treaty

• At the same time, the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security
  Treaty was signed.
• This treaty allowed the United States to station
  troops in Japan and to continue to occupy Okinawa
  as a military base, a vital link in the U.S.
  anticommunist containment strategy during the
  Cold War.

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Watershed Events since WWII

• Postwar Japanese politics is chock-full of
  fascinating personalities and episodes, but four
  watershed events stand out.
• The first was the promulgation of the postwar
  Constitution in 1947, which established Japans
  political institutions and specified their
  relative shares of political power.

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Watershed Events since WWII

• The second was the 1955 party merger that
  resulted in the formation of the Liberal
  Democratic Party (LDP), which was to govern Japan
  for the next four decades.

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Watershed Events since WWII

• The third was the 1960 U.S.-Japan Mutual Security
  Treaty crisis, which both crystallized the
  foreign policy cleavage that persisted until the
  end of the Cold War and induced the government to
  downplay such issues and instead place economic
  growth squarely on the front burner.

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Watershed Events since WWII

• The fourth was the temporary fall of the LDP from
  power in 1993, and the subsequent adoption of new
  electoral rules in 1994.

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The National Diet

• Japans system of government is parliamentary,
  bicameral, and, despite the existence of elected
  local governments, nonfederal.
• Article 41 of the Constitution specifies that the
  parliament, the National Diet, shall be the
  highest organ of state power, and shall be the
  sole law-making organ of the State.

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The National Diet

• Thus, there is no separately elected executive
  with whom the Diet must share policymaking
  authority.
• The Diet consists of two legislative chambers
• the House of Representatives (the Lower House)
• and the House of Councillors (the Upper House).

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The National Diet

• Both chambers must pass a bill in identical form
  for it to become law, with three important
  exceptions
• the House of Representatives alone
• chooses the prime minister,
• passes the budget,
• and ratifies treaties.

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The House of Representatives

• As in all parliamentary systems, the first
  business that any new parliament must conduct
  (after an election) is to elect one of its
  members to serve as prime minister.
• The person elected is usually, but not always,
  the leader of the largest party in the Lower
  House.
• During the LDPs long reign as majority party,
  the LDP leader always won that prize.

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The House of Representatives

• The new prime minister then appoints a cabinet,
  at least half of whose members must be
  legislators.
• These appointees head up the cabinet-level
  ministries and agencies that comprise the central
  government bureaucracy.

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Local Government

• Japan is divided administratively into
  forty-seven prefectures, each of which elects its
  own governor and legislature.
• The countrys hundreds of municipalities elect
  their own mayors and city councils as well.
• Nevertheless, Japan is not a federal system all
  local government authority is delegated, and may
  be retracted, by the national government.

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The Judiciary

• The Japanese legal system ostensibly features the
  same degree of judicial independence that courts
  in the US enjoy.
• Such independence is guaranteed in the
  Constitution.
• Nonetheless, independence does not appear to be
  the reality in Japan.

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The Judiciary

• Political domination and manipulation of the
  courts have arisen from a combination of the
  LDPs long reign and its ability to use
  appointment powers and bureaucratic mechanisms to
  avoid putting courts into positions where they
  might render decisions anathema to LDP interests.

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The Judiciary

• In a unitary parliamentary system, especially one
  with a long-tenured majority party, there are
  fewer checks and balances, and hence fewer
  conflicts for courts to mediate, other things
  equal.
• It will be interesting to see if this practice
  changes now that LDP control of government is
  over.

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The Judiciary

• The Cabinet directly appoints the fifteen members
  of the Supreme Court, and indirectly, through the
  administrative apparatus of the Supreme Court,
  helps to determine all lower court appointments
  as well.
• The Supreme Court, through its Secretariat,
  controls the career paths of lower court judges.

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Electoral Systems

• The two chambers of the National Diet use
  different electoral rules.
• The rules for the more powerful House of
  Representatives were changed in 1994.
• According to the Constitution, members of the
  House of Representatives are elected to four-year
  terms, but these terms usually end early, as the
  prime minister may dissolve the chamber and call
  elections at any time.

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New Electoral Rules

• In January 1994, several months after wresting
  power from the LDP, a seven-party coalition
  government enacted a major restructuring of the
  Lower House electoral rules.
• The new rules set the size of the House of
  Representatives at 500 seats, later reduced to
  480.

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New Electoral Rules

• Of these, 300 are elected on the basis of
  equal-sized single-member districts, and 180
  (originally 200) are elected from eleven regional
  districts by proportional representation (PR).
• Each voter casts two votes one for a candidate
  in the single-member district, and one for a
  party in the PR region.

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New Electoral Rules
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Political Participation

• By international standards, the political
  involvement of ordinary Japanese is low.
• Voters generally identify with political parties
  based on personal identification with a candidate
  or association with a party-affiliated interest
  group.

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Voter Turnout in Elections

• Voter turnout at election time has been declining
  steadily on a nationwide basis.
• Recently, party identification has declined as
  well, as self-proclaimed independents now make
  up the largest group of respondents in public
  opinion polls.

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Voter Turnout in Elections

• It is unclear whether it represents a worrisome
  new political alienation or whether it is simply
  a sign that Japanese democracy has matured,
• now that Japanese voters seem as apathetic and
  complacent about politics as their counterparts
  in other advanced democracies.

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Political Culture

• In discussions of Japanese political culture, the
  concepts of hierarchy, homogeneity, and
  conformity to group objectives take center stage.
• Social hierarchy governs most Japanese
  relationships.
• In the family, in the workplace, and in politics,
  the hierarchical traits of loyalty and obligation
  can be found.

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Political Culture

• Japanese political behavior and economic success
  have also been attributed, at least in part, to
  ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
• This homogeneity has been credited with allowing
  Japan to focus in a unified manner on national
  goals, the foremost being economic growth.

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Political Culture

• An understanding of why the Japanese feel
  confident that they are homogeneous may be found
  in the lack of strong issue cleavages.
• Indeed, one reason the LDP was so successful for
  so long at implementing a campaign strategy that
  downplayed issues in favor of the distribution of
  private goods was the simple absence of many
  common issue cleavages.

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Political Culture

• Studies of Japanese culture also stress the
  Japanese emphasis on conformity, the belief that
  individual goals should be sublimated to the
  objectives of the group.
• But by itself, reference to culture can not
  explain many things that are interesting about
  Japanese politics.

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The Policymaking Process

• Japan is a parliamentary democracy, with both
  houses of the National Diet directly elected, and
  with the prime minister and the cabinet chosen
  by, and accountable to, the Lower House.
• In practice, the Diet, like all parliaments,
  tends to leave the proposal of legislation to the
  Cabinet, reserving the right to pass, reject, or
  amend those proposals as it sees fit.

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The Policymaking Process

• The Cabinet, in turn, delegates the task of
  drafting legislation - everything from regulation
  to the budget - to policy experts in the
  bureaucracy.
• The Cabinet ministers oversee this process in the
  broadest sense, but most of the expertise
  resides, and most of the action takes place, in
  the various bureaus and departments of the
  government ministries and agencies.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law

• Members of either house of the Diet may submit
  legislation, and they do so quite often.
• But these member bills are almost always
  exercises in grandstanding for the sponsors
  constituencies, where the proposal itself is the
  point, and they rarely have any hope of passing
  into law.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law

• The typical path for new legislation proceeds as
  follows.
• A ministry drafts legislation for some policy
  change in its jurisdiction and submits the bill
  to the Cabinet.
• The Cabinet may send the bill back, reject it, or
  amend it in any way it wishes, but if and when it
  is satisfied, it submits the bill to the Diet.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law

• The Diet may then do whatever it wants with the
  bill.
• Normal legislation must be passed in identical
  form by both houses, unless the Lower House can
  muster a two-thirds majority to override Upper
  House objections.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law

• Again, if the bill is the annual budget, or a
  treaty to be ratified, then only the Lower House
  need pass it
• the Upper House may delay that passage for up to
  thirty days, but it may not stop it.
• Any bill passed by the Diet becomes the law of
  the land.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law

• There is no separately elected president who may
  veto Diet actions, and Diet laws supersede any
  local laws that might conflict.
• The Supreme Court may declare a law
  unconstitutional, but this is exceedingly rare.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law

• The final steps in the process involve
  implementation.
• The Diet can pass legislation, but it delegates
  to the bureaucracy the job of implementing and
  enforcing the new rules.
• Indeed, laws are often so vague that the
  bureaucrats must do considerably more than
  robotically carry out the Diets orders.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• Perhaps the most well-known aspect of postwar
  Japanese history has been the countrys
  remarkable economic development.
• As the first industrial democracy in East Asia,
  Japan has been looked to as a model for other
  industrializing countries in the region.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• Arguments over who should receive credit for
  Japans economic growth have raged for years,
  with three major theories contending.
• The role of government intervention in the
  economy is at the center of each of these
  explanations.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• The first theory stresses the role that market
  fundamentals have played in directing Japanese
  economic growth.
• Japans high postwar growth is simply a result of
  returning to the growth path established before
  World War II.
• This theory discounts any positive role for
  interventionist government policy in explaining
  Japans economic miracle.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• A second theory, widely subscribed to both inside
  and outside Japan, contends that Japans
  government (or more precisely its well-trained
  bureaucrats) is the source of economic success.
• In this account, skillful use of government in
  providing firms with access to capital was
  crucial to Japans economic rebirth.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• Further, the Ministry of International Trade and
  Industry (MITI - since renamed), the bureaucratic
  agency in charge of industrial policy decision
  making, used its administrative authority to
  point firms in fruitful directions.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• Government is also credited with retreating
  intelligently and carefully from declining
  economic sectors, such as coal, that were
  unlikely to prove beneficial in the future.
• This view argues that MITI was adept at picking
  industries that would become profitable, and
  discarded losing economic sectors to enhance the
  economy as a whole.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• A third view suggests that Japan has maintained a
  form of strategic capitalism requiring
  cooperation between the firms in an economic
  sector and the government over the type and depth
  of government involvement.
• Government is most involved in economic decision
  making when firms can agree to limit competition
  among themselves.

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Industrial Policy and the Miracle

• Since the beginning of the 1990s, Japan has
  reeled from one recession to the next, from bad
  economic straits to worse.
• Deflation, unemployment, and bankruptcies, all
  unheard of for decades, have stagnated the
  economy and shocked the national psyche.
• Fiscal deficits are worse than ever.

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Security and Foreign Policy

• Japans postwar security and foreign policy have
  focused on maintaining a close relationship with
  the United States.
• Bargaining from a position of weakness, Japan has
  been on the receiving end of most U.S. foreign
  policy decisions.
• With the end of the Cold War, Japanese voters
  have become more ambivalent about the alliance.

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Security and Foreign Policy

• With national security taken care of by the
  U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, the Japanese
  government was able to focus its foreign policy
  on economic matters.
• Recently, however, Japan has been obliged to pay
  for a large share of the U.S. defense commitment
  to all of East Asia.
• Japan now pays fully 50 of all costs of
  deploying U. S. troops on Japanese soil.

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Welfare Policy Health Care

• Health care in Japan is universally covered
  through a government-administered, single-payer
  program that requires all individuals to pay a
  health insurance premium based on income level.

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Welfare Policy Health Care

• Standards of service are below what is commonly
  found in the U.S. private system, but the
  coverage ensures widespread access to basic
  health services.
• Despite many failings, the benefits of Japans
  health care system are clear.

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Welfare Policy Health Care

• Infant mortality is the lowest among
  industrialized nations, and life expectancy is
  the highest.
• The Japanese accomplish this even though public
  spending on health care constitutes a smaller
  percentage of GNP in Japan than in the US (6.6),
  Britain (5.8), France (8), or Germany (8.2).

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Welfare Policy Pensions

• On pension policies, the Japanese government has
  been much less active.
• Public and private pensions are meager.
• Nonetheless, overall welfare spending has grown
  steadily as Japanese society has aged.

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Welfare Policy Pensions

• An aging society in Japan will exacerbate the
  costs of present welfare benefits and increase
  the political desirability of expanding such
  programs.
• Reductions of existing benefits may become more
  common as the government strives to keep up with
  the demographic changes that increase the number
  of people demanding assistance.

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