So much for “strong foundations.” To the outside world, Japan’s politics once again seem as drearily irrelevant as ever. The hope for political openness that arose last summer – when Morihiro Hosokawa and Hata himself led a historic revolt against the arrogant-ly corrupt Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – seems to have succumbed to business as usual. Japan’s politics now seem so weirdly removed from anything substantive that by late Saturday evening, the most likely successor to Hata seemed to be . . . Hata himself. Never mind how that might happen. Who cares? As ever, Japan’s able bureaucrats were still running the country, weren’t they?
Americans – including President Bill Clinton – can hardly be blamed for lapsing again into relative cynicism about Japan. For the past five years the debate in the United States over how to think about Tokyo has been dominated by two positions: one, put forth most famously by the so-called revisionist critics of America’s cold-war policy toward Tokyo, is that Japan never changes, so don’t bother trying to force it to; the other, as Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, is that there is a “new Japan” trying eagerly “to be like the old United States” – that is, openly democratic and bearing the torch for unfettered free trade.
Last summer, with one-party rule crumbling after 38 years, the romantic “they’re just like us after all” view suddenly seemed plausible; now, however, it’s back to Japan never changes. That, anyway, is a discouraged Clinton administration’s current conclusion. But in fact, the events of the past year – indeed, of the past week – give the lie to both views. The LDP’s sudden demise last summer did demonstrate that Japan is hardly a static society. Sometimes it actually changes radically. And despite the recent descent into backroom dealing and utter political confusion, the world should not draw the wrong conclusions. There are issues of real consequence that provide a coherent subtext to the current political instability: in essence, Japan is moving, however fit-fully, toward a political system that will in time be dominated by two major groups. Former prime minister Noboru Takeshita calls them “the liberals and the new conservatives,” and in no less than five years, Takeshita predicted recently, they will have transformed the landscape of Japan’s politics into a kind of hawks-versus-doves contest that Westerners might actually relate to.
There is, indeed, a pretty clear natural fault line in Japanese politics today that is obscured by the current flailing. There are two large groups of reasonable Japanese politicians who have legitimate differences of opinion over issues that – make no mistake – matter immensely and that are going to come to the fore in Tokyo before this century ends. Their resolution will define the role Japan plays in the world as the 21st cen-tury begins.
That is precisely what a man named Ichiro Ozawa wants to have happen. An LDP defector, he is the main force behind the new conservatives, the real power in the party that former (and maybe future) prime minister Hata now formally leads. Ozawa is gradually trying to piece together a coherent coalition that will push his ambitious agenda. By Japanese standards, Ozawa and the new conservatives are hawks; they want Japan to step up in the world and finally play a geopolitical role commensurate with its status as the world’s second most powerful economy. To them, checkbook diplomacy in situations like the gulf war simply is an embarrassment. If Japan is to get a seat on the U.N. Security Council before the end of the century – as the new hawks dearly desire – Tokyo must do more, including occasionally risking blood as well as treasure in the maintenance of international order. And if Japan’s so-called peace constitution – written by the Americans during the postwar occupation – stands in the way of a more assertive foreign policy, then it may have to change.
Few issues in Japanese politics are more explosive, and across that constitutional divide sit the liberals. Like the new conservatives, their numbers span current party boundaries; there are politicians in the LDP, like Koichi Kato, a former defense minister, whose dovish views on Japan’s role in the world jibe more closely with those of moderates in the socialist party than they do with former LDP ally Ozawa’s. The doves believe that talk of a bolder Japan risks disastrous military adventurism; they do not want to rewrite the Constitution to embrace the use of force.
What is happening now, slowly, is the reordering of Japan’s politics along that ideological divide. The process is tortuous, however, precisely because Japan is not turning itself into the “old United States.” For a while, in fact, Japan’s politics will continue to be full of unwieldy alliances of the sort unthinkable in the West, partly because many Japanese voters remain uncomfortable with open political warfare. It’s a cliche, but consensus is still valued in Japan more than in the West. The fact that it’s far more difficult to attain now shows that Japan does change.
