Losing Face: Status Politics in Japan

University of California Press

In the mid 1970s, Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Watanuki Joji issued a report on behalf of the Trilateral Commission which argued that the United States, Western Europe, and Japan were in the grip of a crisis of governability: social demands were rising, outstripping the capacity of the state to respond, while authority was on the decline.1 When they compared the situation in the three regions, however, the authors found that in terms of success rates for governability, Japan came out ahead—in a sense foreshadowing the current "Japan boom," led by writers such as Ezra Vogel, in which Japan's accomplishments in everything from industrial organization to crime control have become the subject of Western study and admiration. Chalmers Johnson spurred further acclaim for Japanese governmental performance in 1982 by heralding Japan as the ultimate "developmental" state; whereas the bureaucracy has provided the driving force behind the economic miracle, the politicians, he said, "create space for bureaucratic initiative" by successfully handling, among other things, disaffection and social protest.2

By the late 1980s, many observers were arguing that the "crisis of democracy" had been overstated and that democratic governments and capitalism itself were showing resiliency in all three regions.3 Indeed, market-

Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Watanuki Joji, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 3–9, 161–170.

Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 316.

See, for example, Hans Daalder, ed., Party Systems in Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); Joseph LaPalombara, Democracy, Italian Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987; Eva Kolinsky, ed., Opposition in Western Europe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); and Inoguchi Takashi, ed., Shin hoshushugi no taito (The rise of neoconservatism), Leviathan, no. 1 (special issue) (Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 1987).

oriented economic reforms in the Soviet Union and China, and pressure for greater democratization in socialist countries as well as in authoritarian systems such as those of South Korea and Taiwan, suggested that capitalism and democracy were proving their superiority over alternative arrangements. Within the democratic camp, however, Japan's superior record of economic success and governmental stability continued to stand out. Even as Japan became a target of steady Western criticism because of conflict over trade and investment issues, the country's political, social, and economic systems continued to be the object of Western fascination and study.

Japan's record of success in governing is all the more striking because this continuity has been maintained despite regular tests of the authority of those in power by political parties, protest groups, and opposition movements.4 Japan has four major opposition parties, two of which, the Japan Socialist and Communist parties, pose fundamental ideological challenges to rule by the conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP). The percentage of popular votes cast for all opposition parties has surpassed that cast for the LDP in numerous postwar elections. Indeed, as of 1989 the LDP has failed to capture a majority of seats in three out of five of the most recent lower house elections; only through postelection overtures to non-LDP conservatives was it able to secure a working majority.

In the area of mass movements, Japanese labor has successfully organized more workers than has the U.S. labor movement.5 Unions, some of which are quite radical by American standards, annually engage in nationwide mass demonstrations, as well as in "offensives" against both the government and employers.6 Citizens' movements demanding that the government cope with Japan's environmental pollution problems were a major phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, according to

A valuable survey of the changing pattern of protest activities is found in Michitoshi Takabatake, "Mass Movements: Change and Diversity," in Annals of the Japan Political Science Association 1977: The Political Process in Modern Japan, ed. Japan Political Science Association, 323–359. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1979). See also James W. White, "Civic Attitudes, Political Participation, and System Stability in Japan," Comparative Political Studies 14 (October 1981): 371–400.

In 1986, 28.2 percent of Japanese workers were in unions, as compared to 18.0 percent in the United States; Japan 1988: An International Comparison (Tokyo: Keizai Koho Center, 1988), 73.

See Solomon Levine, "Labor in Japan," in Business and Society in Japan, ed. Bradley M. Richardson and Taizo Ueda, 29–61, (New York: Praeger, 1981).

one estimate some seventy-five thousand complaints over pollution were lodged with local governments in 1971, and in 1973 antipollution groups sparked as many as ten thousand local disputes over environmental issues.7 In the postwar era vast numbers of protesters have been mobilized at peak periods by peace movements and student movements, and in recent years conflicts over land use at Narita Airport, over property and people affected by extension plans for the bullet train (shinkansen ), and over nuclear power plant siting have commanded national attention. Recent protests over proposed expansion of U.S. military facilities in Zushi and Miyakejima follow in the same tradition.8 Certain watershed protests, notably the struggles in 1960 and 1970 against the United States-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, have been mammoth in scale: for the antitreaty protest on 23 June 1970, for example, almost three-quarters of a million people took to the streets.9 Other advanced industrial democracies have seen relatively few protests of comparable magnitude and intensity over the past three and a half decades.10

A critical view of the social order under the LDP is echoed in the opinions of many ordinary people, as reflected in numerous survey results. At the same time that the foreign media were conveying images of the happy and productive Japanese worker adjusting ably to rapid technological change, the majority of Japanese were voicing a deep-seated malaise about the nature and quality of life and work in Japan. Between 1958 and 1973, for example, a steadily increasing percentage of young people in the twenty-to-twenty-nine-year age group—well over the majority of them by 1973—agreed that human feeling is lost with the development of science and technology.11 An eleven-nation survey conducted by the Manage-

Ellis S. Krauss and Bradford L. Simcock, "Citizens' Movements: The Growth and Impact of Environmental Protest in Japan," in Political Opposition and Local Politics in Japan, ed. Kurt Steiner, Ellis S. Krauss, and Scott C. Flanagan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 187.

See New York Times, 5 March 1986, A32, for an account of a citizens' protest over a U.S. Navy housing project in Zushi; and Daily Yomiuri, 11 February 1986, 5, concerning a protest in Miyakejima over a proposed U.S. Navy landing strip.

Ellis S. Krauss, Japanese Radicals Revisited: Student Protest in Postwar Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of...