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Kishida Fumio is stepping down. Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
In the Nineties, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her colleagues made a parlour game of seeing whether anyone could name — in the correct order — all seven of the Japanese prime ministers with whom the Clinton administration (1993–2001) had dealt. No-one could. Japan’s revolving-door premiership continued through much of the 2000s until Abe Shinzo embarked on a record-breaking stint in the job, from 2012 to 2020. Now Japan may be returning to the old pattern, as Kishida Fumio announces, after less than three years in the job, that he will not seek re-election as his party’s leader.
Why have Japan’s postwar prime ministers found it so hard to cling to power? One of the biggest reasons is Japan’s failure, since the end of the American Occupation (1945–52), to become a true multi-party democracy. The early years of the Occupation helped restore democracy to Japan after years of militarism. New parties formed and women voted for the first time. But a strong showing by Japan’s socialists and communists worried those in the United States who hoped to turn Japan into a profitable trading partner and dependable Cold War ally. Left-wing success concerned Japanese businesses, too, many of which leant their support to new conservative parties such as the Nihon Jiyūtō (Japan Liberal Party) and to the merger of conservatives in 1955 that created today’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
But America’s interest in supporting anti-communist forces around the world did more than provide a boost for big business in Japan. It ended up creating space in postwar Japanese politics for wartime figures who might otherwise have lived out their days in quiet retirement (or, in some cases, prison). Government bureaucrats managed to hang on to their jobs because the Occupation authorities regarded them as essential to running postwar Japan: senior figures were required only to take a fitness for office test — dubbed the “Paradise Exam” because unlimited time was provided for its completion, alongside tea and cigarettes. Even the notorious ultranationalist and gangster Kodama Yoshio earned himself a second act. He had worked as a fixer in China and Manchuria during the war, building up a multi-million-dollar fortune by running a network that provided intelligence and raw materials like radium and nickel for clients including the Imperial Japanese Navy. Imprisoned in 1946, he was released two years later when America’s intelligence agencies realised how valuable his skills and contacts might be.
Kodama was a man who liked to plan ahead. Before his arrest, he handed over some of his wealth in diamonds and platinum to a friend in the Japan Liberal Party, thereby purchasing himself a place in postwar conservatism. Then, while in jail, he spent time with Kishi Nobusuke, the highest-ranking bureaucrat in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and Tanaka Kakuei, an up-and-coming politician who had been caught taking bribes. Both men were future prime ministers of Japan and both would go on to benefit from Kodama’s underworld connections. Once out of prison, Kodama played a role behind the scenes, together with the CIA, in launching the LDP. Kishi joined the party after his own American backers helped to secure his release from prison. He became prime minister in 1957 and welcomed Tanaka into his first Cabinet post that same year. The price of admittance was a backpack stuffed with three-million yen in cash. Three years later, when Kishi found himself facing popular unrest over the renewal of Japan’s controversial security treaty with the United States, Kodama rustled up some violent men to attack and intimidate the crowds of protestors.
The upside of the LDP’s connections with big business, civil servants and allies in the United States was that the party was able to co-ordinate a remarkable return to prosperity for Japan across the Sixties and Seventies. But this in itself caused problems. The LDP came to dominate Japanese politics so thoroughly — it has rarely been out of power from 1955 to the present day — that the most important policy debates tended to take place not between rival political parties with strong grassroots support but between factions within the LDP whose influence was built on pork-barrel politics. Tanaka Kakuei became perhaps the greatest player of this game. There is no denying his achievements in office, not least a bridge-building visit to Mao Zedong in Beijing; the two men shared rustic roots, and bonded over talk of Buddhism, Confucianism and incense. But the Japanese were shocked by revelations that Tanaka was involved in bribe-taking from American aerospace manufacturer Lockheed to persuade All Nippon Airways and Japan’s defence agency to choose its aircraft over those of its rivals. Helping behind the scenes to move cardboard boxes stuffed with Lockheed cash was one Kodama Yoshio.
Tanaka was forced to resign in 1974, but it did not mean the end of his political career. In Japan’s system, the most powerful people often operate from behind the scenes, as Tanaka now did. He continued effectively to run Japan from a lavish mansion in Tokyo, meeting with aspiring new members of his LDP faction and handing out “bullets”: parcels of tightly-packed banknotes worth 100 million yen each, wrapped discreetly in traditional Japanese cloth. His protege Kanemaru Shin worked in much the same way, until he fell from his senior LDP position in 1992 after being implicated in a bribery scandal involving a delivery company and the Inagawa-kai yakuza group. A raid on Kanemaru’s Tokyo apartment uncovered $50 million in cash, bonds and gold bars, hidden away in wardrobes and desk drawers. Kanemaru — nickname: “The Don” — died before justice could be done, but not before sharing a last word with an astonished and aggrieved Japanese public. “My political philosophy,” he declared, “is to have some appreciation for a person who saves a drowning child in a river, even if that person happens to belong to a crime syndicate.”
Japan’s “lost decades” of economic growth, from the Nineties to now, has eroded the dominance of the LDP and tempered the scale of political corruption. But both remain prominent themes, alongside the failure of opposition parties to mount effective and long-lasting challenges to the LDP. The scandal that has helped to cut Kishida Fumio’s premiership short involves 85 LDP lawmakers who have been accused of channelling profits from the sale of tickets to party gatherings into slush funds, to the tune of more than £3 million. Small change, compared with decades past. But a good many disillusioned Japanese long ago turned to local politics and civic activism via non-profits and the courts to get things done instead. A powerful example of this approach has been the attempt to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples. National politicians are divided on the issue, but campaigners have succeeded in persuading local administrations to offer them official status, along with a number of district courts.
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SubscribeAnother interesting essay. Had no idea about any of this.
Tanaka, Kishi, Abe, Kishida … the truth is, none of them ever ran Japan, whether from the PM’s office or Prison. It’s not just the Liberal Democratic Party (in an unoriginal adaptation of Voltaire, ‘neither Liberal nor Democratic, and not even a Party’), Japan is probably best understood as a collection of factions (Ministries, Businesses, Banks, Political Parties, the Medical profession, the Police, Yakuza, etc.) engaged in a permanent turf war, each intent on preserving its power and influence. Read Karel van Wolferen: ‘The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation’. Over 30 years old, but still bang up to date!
Whereas here we have ‘stakeholders’ (Ministries, Businesses, Banks, Political Parties, the Medical profession, the Police, Quangos, etc.)…each intent on preserving its power and influence. Vote Reform.
Yes it is. Well informed historically. My only quibble is that I don’t the Japanese were surprised Tanaka took a bribe from Lockheed. They were surprised he was careless enough to get caught.
Very informative article. I’d like to see more like this. But I notice a dearth of comments. I guess because it’s hard to argue with actual facts. It makes other stories look like some sort of pop-journalism that manages to get under the skin of people but offers nothing in substance or real information. I’ve noticed this with other stories that address issues with a cool, factual eye, that they get very little feedback. I’m guessing it’s because they’re not being read or they stun readers into silence,
I would say it’s largely because few are in a position to question such accounts. There is one source book with Yamaguchi Gumi on the front with which the author appears to be familiar. Even the Japanese themselves are not familiar with the events that took place after WW2 and the continued powerful role of the underwold, although they are vaguely aware that there are dark forces at play.
These things just aren’t spoken about, and any brave journalists that dare to tackle such topics can meet an untimely end.
“any brave journalists that dare to tackle such topics can meet an untimely end.”
But surely not for commenting on an Unherd piece.
I doubt anybody in Japan outside the gaijin community has heard of Unherd.
The book I mentioned was “Yakuza” by Kaplan.
I particularly remember in the early 2000s one journalist investigating links between organised crime and the building industry – stabbed outside his house and getting barely a mention.
Just a little humour, Harry.
I know. Forgive me.
It happens to all of us. Well not to the perfect anyway.
There’s a much simpler explanation. Few will have the detailed level of insight into Japanese politics/culture that would allow for an intelligent response.
Because, even if you know a bit about Japan, it is difficult to make meaningful comment on such factual article.
Then there is an issue of interest if you are European.
So war in Ukraine is important, net zero and mass immigration and rise of China.
Internal Japanese politics is not that critical.
Well you could say; thank you Christopher for an interesting article, please give us more. Or that we’d like a broader mix of international stories.
Very interesting. All sounds reminiscent of Italy.
This essay makes some contact with a question I’ve been puzzling over for some time: What really is the difference single-party rule and competition between more than one distinct political party? In the former case, a larger share of the politicking and jockeying goes on within the one party. In the latter case, some of that politicking and jockeying–but only some of it–spills out into the public sphere. Does the latter arrangement afford more accountability? Does it make a difference when the media is in the tank for one party?
Meanwhile, whadda we mean by “democracy”? In The Master of Go (1951), Yasunari Kawabata uses the governance of Go tournaments as a metaphor for governance more generally. He poses something of a rules-versus-discretion tradeoff between the traditional way of doing things (discretion in pre-war Japan, which involved deference to age and authority) and rules (the stuff of ostensibly democratic rules-based governance in post-war Japan). But, in the best line of the book (in my view), he observes that factions can yet abuse the rules:
When a law is made, the cunning that finds loopholes goes to work. One cannot deny that there is a certain slyness among younger players, a slyness which, when rules are written to prevent slyness, makes use of the rules themselves.
Then there is an abundant literature from the 1980’s about how awesome the Japanese deep state was–and about how the rest of us should emulate it. (See, for example, Frank Gibney, Miracle by Design). The stuff was (I think) such hoo-hah, but it does illuminate the fact that the Administrative State is not a neutral entity in Japanese politics and policy.