More on the Japanese Election

When I lived in Japan and was more of a young hothead, I used to think that Japan was a sham democracy. After all, it had had essentially one-party rule for all of the post-war period, and the United States had funneled money to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party until the end of the Cold War and the LDP had in turn funneled money to the opposition parties. Moreover, the urban population seemed to be itching for change, while the rural areas, which were rapidly becoming "rotten boroughs" were able to elect majorities and control the government. Plus, the LDP kept piling up majorities by larding the country with pork barrel projects that were unneeded but greased the right palms.

I still think that there was a lot wrong with Japanese politics during the postwar period, and who knows how much will change now, given that the Democratic Party of Japan still has a lot of former LDP pork barrelers in its ranks. But what is interesting to me is the question of legitimacy. For all its problems, my view now is that Japan has had a real democracy during this time, its democratic government has been legitimized over time, and this election is the fruition of the solidification of democracy in Japan after centuries and centuries of monarchical and authoritarian governments.

The LDP was corrupt, no doubt about it. But the Japanese voters kept on returning it to power in what were clean elections in the sense that massive vote fraud was not needed to keep the conservatives in power, as we've seen in places like Iran in 2009 and Florida in 2000. Japan was, and is, a conservative country, in the sense that the appeal of left wing policies espoused by socialists and communists never held widespread appeal beyond a certain limited slice of the population. A big reason the LDP kept being returned to power was that the LDP presided over incredible post-war growth that caused Japan to transform from a burned out hulk to one of the richest countries in the world in a mere 30 years. The opposition Socialists and Communists could not compete with this record of success. Thus, for the 40 years following the LDP's founding in 1955, its continual reelection was legitimate. There was never any need for the LDP to cling to power through violence or fraud.

I think there is a reasonable chance that, had the left-wing parties ever showed any real chance of winning an election during the height of the Cold War, serious oppression could have resulted, winked at by the US. Japan might have wound up looking a little more like South Korea than it did. (Don't forget that the LDP was founded by members of the pre-war right-wing elite that was closely tied to the miltarists, who were returned to power in 1948 after a brief socialist turn, when the US embraced the right-wingers in the "reverse course," when Occupation policy changed directions in response to outbreak of the Cold War.) But there was never a "need" for this result, because the voters kept returning the same party to power that was backed by the US and Japan's business and military elites. As a result, there was never an election that seriously threw the legitimacy of the system into doubt because fraud was necessary to maintain the conservative block in power.

Even during the period after 1994, when the LDP returned to power after a brief hiatus, despite the great satisfaction of most Japanese voters, its return was the result of pragmatism -- there really was no alternative. As hated as the LDP had become because of its corruption, the opposition parties were not seen as ready to govern. Japanese voters had no choice, so they kept returning the LDP to power.

Martin Fackler in his piece in the New York Times today referred to the Japanese voters as "traditionally passive," but this really misses the point. There have been episodes of hard fought elections and real resistance by the left in Japan since the war -- the elections before 1955, the resistance to the renewal of the security treaty with the US in 1960, and the resistance to the construction and expansion of Narita Airport in the 1970s come to mind. In recent elections, Japanese voters did not turn out in large numbers because there was no point -- the opposition had not gotten its act togther sufficiently to convince the majority of Japanese voters that it was capable of governing the country responsibly. Had the Japanese voters been given a real choice, they would have turned out to vote, as this did today. Passivity had nothing to do with it. Voters were either aquiescent to a system that worked for them, or they saw no legitimate alternatives. In this election, rather than discredited socialists and communists, the Japanese voters had a legitimate center-left alternative for the first time, and they embraced it.

Which brings me back to my point. There is no question of the legitimacy of this election, and no chance of the LDP attempting to avoid the results and cling to power, because Japanese democracy has become fully legitimized over the last 60 years. The near constant return of the LDP time and time again reflected the will of the people. Moreover, the LDP did not need to build up an army of thugs to beat up the opposition, because the opposition was never a serious threat. The LDP itself embraced the system, because the system worked for it. And when the LDP finally reached the end of its vitality, it had neither the desire nor the ability to steal the election, even though the business, military, organized crime and other powers that be still support the LDP. The LDP lived by the electoral system, because Japanese voters allowed it to for so many years, and now it has died by the electoral system, with no alternative but to step aside peacefully.