Immovable Object

Hit with one of the most important scandals in the history of its democratic system, the island country struggles to find credible alternatives to its decades-long system of governance. Meanwhile, less and less voters are showing up to the ballot box for elections: can Japan’s political class convince its electorate that democracy is a worthwhile endeavor? Does it even want to?

Main Building of the National Diet, Japan's legislative body.

In early November 2023, a story broke in several Japanese outlets that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had abused of the loopholes contained in the 1948 Political Funds Control Act to embezzle “at least” 970 million unreported yen (approximately $6.5 million). The law, which has been cause for debate for decades and has met attempts at reform in 1984, prohibits corporate donations to individuals, but allows for organizations to hold “fundraising parties” which can be accessed through the purchase of tickets.

Organizations are allowed to share the revenue from these sales amongst their members, on the condition that any purchase of more than ¥200.000 be laid out in political expense reports, something that many times does not happen. This fuels an opaque system which constitutes the backbone for wider lobbying schemes in Japanese politics. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has had to reshuffle his cabinet for the second time of his premiership, the first coming when connections emerged between lawmakers of the LDP, including former PM Shinzo Abe, and the ominous Unification Church, in the spring of 2023.

Facing the pressure imposed on his cabinet by mounting tensions in the East Asian geopolitical theater, and a struggling economy (due in no small part to the mishandling of the several waves of the COVID-19 pandemic), the most recent in Japan’s list of political scandals has forced Kishida to do the unthinkable, and disband his own faction within the Liberal Democratic Party (Kochikai).

Following this decision, the two other dominant factions of the LDP, Shisuikai (staunchly pro-China in its foreign policy and led up until this moment by former secretary general Toshihiro Nikai) and Seiwakai (led by Shinzo Abe before his untimely passing, and which represented the spearhead of neoliberalism in Japan), closed their doors after decades of interchanging hegemony over the party’s political project.

The “slush fund scandal” has rocked Japanese politics to its core: while we know of the nearly one billion yen that were misappropriated in the past five years, a statute of limitations prohibits prosecutors from investigating any potential wrongdoing committed further back in time, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of an exhausted electorate that has grown more and more disaffected towards the government.

Kishida’s individual approval ratings reached numbers as low as 16%, and a poll conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s foremost news outlets, has reported that nearly 80% of people are dissatisfied with the PM’s actions since he took office in 2021. All of the other parties represented in the National Diet (Japan’s lower house), including the LDP’s junior coalition partner, Komeito (smaller in size, considered to be a sort of moral and spiritual compass for all the LDP governments it has supported throughout the decades), have raised the issue of revising or suppressing the 1948 law on political fundraising.

However, just as the LDP’s push for relying on internal investigations has hampered the ability of the judiciary to conduct a thorough inquiry (just ten people nominated in the scandal have been formally indicted since it broke back in November, and only Yoshitaka Ikeda, a lower house member, has been arrested to this day), the party’s choke-hold on the legislative system, guaranteed by the sheer size of its parliamentary majority, has rendered attempts at political reform futile. Even as the Diet passed a law consenting to the formation of a Special Committee to revise the Political Funds Control Act, there is little hope that meaningful action will come out of it.

The Elephant in the Diet

An electoral sign for the 2012 presidential campaign of former PM Abe. 12 years later, his party struggles to maintain credibility in the public eye due to a system which he helped to consolidate.

In any modern democracy, a system dominated by a single party for nearly 70 years would at least place it under tighter scrutiny by international observers and raise alarm bells regarding its basic functioning. Japan has lived with this situation since 1955, when the major conservative parties merged to avoid a second cabinet of the unified Socialist Party (recently reunited after a previous split).

Thus, the term “1955 System” was dubbed by Junnosuke Masumi to describe a “one and a half” party system, in which the Liberal Democratic Party has maintained firm control over the country’s legislative infrastructure, shaping the inner workings of the nascent democracy around itself to safeguard the interests of those who made the rise of the party possible in the first place. These include the Zaikai, Japan’s business community, and the United States of America, who could not afford that Japan take on any foreign policy stance short of complete reliance on American military might.

The United States funneled millions of dollars into the accounts of the Liberal Democratic Party, and allowed for the brokering of shady and downright illegal deals between LDP officials and American firms (the 1974 Lockheed Scandal, which took down the cabinet of Kakuei Tanaka, had seen bribes for tens of millions of dollars fill the pockets of prominent cabinet members).

This triangle of interest has been the underlying power dynamic to shape the face of politics in Japan, and all along the way it has been accompanied by a tendency to scandal and corruption which has only marginally endangered the major power players involved. Following the consequences of the 1989 “Recruit Scandal”, and the first loss of power of the LDP in 1993, the government led by Morihiro Hosokawa of the Democratic Party was eventually torn apart by slander and sabotage from LDP lawmakers, who forced the resignation of Hosokawa and took the power back in 1996, after having embarrassed an opposition which could not handle the expectations of the electorate and the consequences of a period of economic instability.

The only other time the opposition came into power was in 2009, after the devastating consequences of the 2008 financial crisis hit Japan, and the LDP had to concede power to the Democratic Party once more. But the years surrounding the nuclear disaster of  Fukushima would delegitimize the “eternal opposition” once more, leading to the resurgence of the LDP under prime minister Shinzo Abe. Facing little threat from a divided and untrusted opposition, the LDP is also the political space in which pluralism manifests: a system of legalized factionalism has allowed for multiple interpretations of the wider conservative dogma to emerge and contend control for the policy making process of the National Diet. From the dovish Kochikai, which didn’t favor the revision of Japan’s anti-war constitution (a hot topic in the nation’s public debate), to the hawks in the Seiwakai, factions have been instrumental in saving the parliament’s claim to function democratically, as well as to assure the public that any wrongdoing carried out by the cabinet in place would meet consequences. All that is needed is a reshuffle of the cabinet to keep business on track.

Factionalism, international support and a business community with iron-clad ties to the party structure have been the pillars of the 1955 System, and there doesn’t seem to be any chance on the horizon for the current opposition to capitalize on the many failings of the more recent generations of LDP lawmakers.

Can’t we all just get along?

Japan’s opposition has had a history of blunders which has considerably hurt its chances of ever being able to form a stable government, let alone to carry one to the end of a regular term. Currently, it is divided into three “major” blocs: the liberals are represented by the Constitutional Democratic Party and the Democratic Party for the People, who respectively embody the left and right wing of the now defunct Democratic Party.

The CDJ controls the largest number of opposition Diet members and had the arduous task of attempting to make all other parties coalesce around a program to build an alternative to LDP hegemony, back in 2021. This effort came to no avail, especially due to the presence of the main leftist force in Japan, the Japanese Communist Party.

The JCP is currently the oldest active party in the country and has maintained a reduced if stable presence in the National Diet. It has ties with news outlets (the slush fund scandal itself originally broke in the columns of a paper close to the JCP) as well as labor unions, but within a traditionally very conservative society, it hasn’t been able to convince more ample sections of the electorate of its democratic intentions.

Alongside the JCP, a minor formation by the name of Reiwa Shinsengumi has emerged in the past couple of elections: led by former actor Taro Yamamoto, it presents a more populist persuasion than the Communists, but so far it hasn’t been able to attract support from the target demographic which it had hoped to convince at its inception, an ever disaffected and uninterested youth. Reiwa is not unique in this aspect: political parties in general have struggled to garner enthusiasm among the country’s youth: despite civic campaigns aimed at bringing young people to the ballot box, Japan still struggles to convince that participation in democracy is worthwhile, leaving considerable power in the hands of older voters.

Finally, Nippon Ishin No Kai is a right wing libertarian party that found considerable support in the last election, picking up 20 Diet members in the contest. However, many conservative voters see the LDP as the safer, more experienced option for implementing free market and right-wing policies; a sentiment that is echoed by the aforementioned Zaikai, whose ties to the Liberal Democrats are now basically irreplaceable. The Zaikai is looking forward to the downfall of Kishida within party circles, as it sees a chance to steer the party in the more neoliberal direction represented by factions such as the Seiwakai.

In fact, the faction’s official downfall shouldn’t give way to any illusion that the ideological line which it represented will lose any relevance. Kishida, who spoke of a “new type of capitalism”, endorsing wealth redistribution measures and increasing spending in social services, is unlikely to survive the next leadership election, and front runners seem to emerge from the neoliberal ranks of the former Abe faction.

At the end of the day, it’s business as usual in Japan: with Kishida’s downfall, new opportunities will emerge for other factions to simply take the power he once held, as the opposition is incapable of capitalizing once more on its opportunities, and the public grows increasingly apathetic.

Is anyone still there?

The reality and consequences of the “slush fund scandal” perfectly encapsulate what it means to do politics in Japan: in the face of corruption and governmental mismanagement of the public good, what the political class can offer is a lot more of the same fake reassembling of institutions which ultimately sabotage any chance at real change and lead to the same circles maintaining power in their hands. This cycle, which has manifested itself at multiple times during the island’s history, has had a devastating toll in public confidence in democratic institutions themselves.

Japan sports one of the lowest voter turnouts among liberal democracies, with the last two elections showing record lows in the country’s post-war history (respectively, 52% and 55% in 2014 and 2021). Opposition parties are attempting to change their personnel, especially with regards to those that participated in the governmental experience of Hosokawa, back in 2009; the JCP, which never entered government in any form, has just elected Tomoko Tamura as party chairperson, the first woman to hold such a position.

Yukio Edano, longtime leader of the CDJ, has stepped down after the 2021 electoral debacle, replaced by the younger (and more right-wing) Kenta Izumi, who has ruled out any electoral pact with the JCP. As we move closer to the next elections, which could now be held much earlier than the mandatory October 31, 2025 deadline, the only number which keeps growing in the polls is that of those who do not identify with any party whatsoever: a staggering 53% of voters responded “no option” when asked for their party preference, according to a JNN poll published at the end of March.

While high voter turnout is not what confers legitimacy to a democratic process on its own (even less so is party identification), Japan faces a troubling reality: the only thing that can bring an end to political apathy is actual interchange between the LDP and other formations, but political apathy itself is so sedimented that such interchange seems farther than ever.

In this sense, Japan’s political system shows itself as a monolithic aberration of the global liberal democratic community.

References and Resources

Japan’s slush fund scandal unlikely to take the LDP down with PM Kishida – East Asia Forum (https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/03/11/japans-slush-fund-scandal-unlikely-to-take-the-ldp-down-with-pm-kishida/#:~:text=Public%20discontent%20with%20Japanese%20Prime,parties%20held%20by%20LDP%20factions.)

Motegi’s political group transfers 320 million yen over 10 years – Asahi (https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15188107)

LDP heavyweights urged to speak as sworn witnesses over funds scandal – Mainichi (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240318/p2g/00m/0na/036000c)

Japan PM Kishida Cabinet support rate at 17% even after ethics committee: poll  - Mainichi(https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240318/p2a/00m/0na/015000c)

Editorial: why are key Japan lawmakers skipping Diet ethics panel over LDP funds scandal? – Mainichi (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240224/p2a/00m/0op/017000c)

No plan to call election before scandal-hit figures punished: Kishida – Mainichi (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240318/p2g/00m/0na/011000c)

Japan’s governing party is engulfed by a slush fund scandal. Will it spur Political Reform? – The Diplomat (https://thediplomat.com/2024/02/japans-governing-party-is-engulfed-by-a-slush-fund-scandal-will-it-spur-political-reform/)

Discontent rises in LDP as Seko, Shionoya face tough penalties – Asahi (https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15218870)

Japan’s Democracy beset by political scandals and high voter abstention (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/01/17/japan-s-democracy-beset-by-scandals-and-high-voter-abstention_6438971_23.html)

Explainer: What is the fundraising scandal engulfing Japan's ruling party? (https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/what-is-fundraising-scandal-engulfing-japans-ruling-party-2023-12-14/)

Disapproval rate for Japanese cabinet highest since 1947 – Poll (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20231218/p2a/00m/0na/003000c)

Editorial: time is ripe for Japan to ban murky political funding practices - Mainichi (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240413/p2a/00m/0op/006000c)

Sources: Diet member arrested while destroying evidence – Asahi (https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15105036)

Japan’s youth shun politics, leaving power with the elderly – Japan Times (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/07/30/national/politics-diplomacy/voter-turnout-youth/)

“The 1955 System in Japan and its Subsequent Developments” – Junnosuke Masumi

Di Luca Otello Gieri