The Japanese Diet: Parliamentary Groups and Lawmaking

By exploring specific incidents and parliamentary practices and reviewing how parliament operates across a typical year, this chapter highlights the significance of the negotiation between parliamentary groups, explaining how the Diet rules and procedures strongly influence parliamentary behavior. Representative democracy functions through the interconnection of the legislative and electoral systems, affecting the fusion and diffusion of powers. The constitutional fusion of power underlies the whole process of lawmaking in the Diet. However, one-party dominance makes the government and opposition relations permanently asymmetrical. Unless elections allow voters to choose a government, the majoritarian control to make the ruling party accountable will not work, and legislative activities will remain mismatched with electoral competitions.

Japan and Nuclear Nonproliferation

This chapter analyzes the evolution of Japanese policies toward nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation, and nuclear disarmament. It traces the development of Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles and examines how these principles relate to Japan’s security alliance with the United States. By examining the interaction of domestic politics and changes in the international environment, the chapter shows how Japan has reaffirmed its status as a non-nuclear-weapons state. Japan’s promotion of nuclear power to meet its energy needs has rested on an explicit policy to forgo nuclear weapons and a commitment to the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. At the same time, Japan’s reliance on US extended nuclear deterrence and its concerns about regional security threats have tempered its support for nuclear disarmament initiatives.

Japanese Politics: An Introduction

The study of Japanese politics has flourished over the past several decades. This Handbook provides a state-of-the-field overview for students and researchers of Japanese. The volume also serves to introduce Japanese politics to readers less familiar with Japan. In addition, the volume has a theme of “evaluating Japan’s democracy.” Taken as a whole, the volume provides a positive evaluation of the state of Japan’s democracy. The volume is divided into two parts, roughly corresponding to domestic Japanese politics and Japan’s international politics. Within the domestic politics part, there are four distinct sections: “Domestic Political Actors and Institutions,” covering the Japanese Constitution, electoral systems, prime minister, Diet, bureaucracy, judiciary, and local government; “Political Parties and Coalitions,” covering the Liberal Democratic Party, coalition government, Kōmeitō, and the political opposition; “Policymaking and the Public,” covering the policymaking process, public opinion, civil society, and populism; and, “Political Economy and Social Policy,” covering industrial, energy, social welfare, agricultural, monetary, and immigration policies, as well as social inequality. In the international relations part, there are four sections: “International Relations Frameworks,” covering grand strategy, international organizations, and international status; “International Political Economy,” covering trade, finance, foreign direct investment, the environment, economic regionalism, and the linkage between security and economics; “International Security,” covering remilitarization, global and regional security multilateralism, nuclear nonproliferation, naval power, space security, and cybersecurity; and, “Foreign Relations” covering Japan’s relations with the United States, China, South Korea, ASEAN, India, the European Union, and Russia.

Gender and Politics in Japan

This article argues that Japan, a wealthy, secular country with a highly educated population, provides an important counterweight to assumptions about modernization and gender. The authors outline the ways in which gender inequality was a cornerstone of Japan’s economic development. This still has ramifications today for women’s political participation and representation, and for the quality of Japan’s democracy.

Neoclassical Realism in Japan’s Space Security

Japan’s space security commands attention as the country shifts toward internationalism in a world returned to great power competition. Using the framing from neoclassical realism, this article discusses the ways in which Japan has adjusted both its internal portfolio and its external postures to balance against perceived threats in outer space. While neoclassical realism is foundational for understanding what motivates, empowers, and constrains states in the space domain, the article also layers in the importance of international law to the conduct of statecraft within it. Doing so gives us a more holistic understanding of the material, legal, and normative evolution of Japan’s winding space trajectories. Although Japan’s Basic Space Law of 2008 is seen as a watershed event for legal and policy purposes, the law merely caught up with the extraordinary quality and range of Japan’s long-evolving dual-use space technologies. It is these autonomous foundations that empower Japan to pursue three distinct strategies in its interest—counterspace capabilities, organizational changes, and space diplomacy—with implications for both rivals and allies in a changed world order.

The Effect of Changing Political Contexts on Public Opinion in Japan, 1945–2020

The role of public opinion in Japan has changed dramatically in response to major shifts in party politics over the past seventy years. This chapter explains how the creation and disintegration of a dominant pattern in elite political discourse shaped people’s understanding of and response to public affairs. It also describes how polling and the electorate developed side-by-side in a newly democratic Japan. During the early postwar period, Japanese people were preoccupied with achieving economic security. The party system was initially very unstable, but constitutional revision and the security treaty with the US became central issues due to the Korean War and other Cold War conflicts. A bipolar political competition over these issues drove public opinion from 1955 to the mid-1990s. The “conservative” and “progressive” ideologies were diametrically opposed over constitutional revision and the US-Japan Security Treaty. This ideological divide was institutionalized in a decades-long conflict between two political camps in the legislature. Ordinary people understood public affairs through the rhetoric of these two ideologies. In the current post–Cold War, post-reform era that began in the mid-1990s, the conflict between the conservative and progressive ideologies no longer provides signals for understanding politics. Political parties differ mostly in the fact that one group is in government and the others are in opposition. Without guiding principles to organize political discourse, short-term policy concerns and perceptions of incumbent government performance influence public opinion the most. At the same time, whether a government remains in power depends on public approval more than ever before.

Social Welfare Policy in Japan

This chapter surveys main topics and debates related to the Japanese welfare state. For a long time, scholars disagreed on the basic facts about Japan’s postwar welfare state. Some said it was too small, other said it was not. This chapter solves this mystery by introducing the concept of functional equivalents. It explains how social welfare programs and their functional equivalents had become important components of the so-called Japanese model of capitalism in the postwar period. Once the new socioeconomic conditions that arose in the 1990s (demographic aging, economic stagnation, and financial liberalization), pressures for change intensified. The chapter demonstrates how the electoral context had set the political parameters on welfare politics in Japan differently before and after the 1994 electoral reform.

Japanese Naval Power

The chapter develops for the first time in the Japanese context a framework to comprehend the role of naval power as a tool of statecraft and why it matters to Japan’s foreign and security policy. The chapter employs a strategic studies methodology to overcome the explanatory limits of mainstream perspectives narrowly focused on debating the nature of Japanese military power from a normative perspective. In so doing, it aims to make three distinctive contributions. First, the chapter argues that Japan’s military posture is not the result of a constrained legal framework. As a liberal democracy with an export-oriented economy, the shape of Japanese military power is consistent with the model of a “seapower state.” Second, the chapter argues that the most significant changes in Japanese naval power do not concern the expansion of capabilities or renewed commitment to the US-Japan alliance. They concerned the empowerment of Japanese foreign policy with the option to actively “shape” international stability. Third, the chapter explores how Prime Minister Abe’s impact on the use of naval power has not negated constitutional constraints. Rather, he focused naval power’s shaping potential to underpin and reinforce his signature Free and Open Indo-Pacific initiative.

Japan-U.S. Relations: The Most Important Bilateral Relationship in the World

The US-Japan relationship has survived for three-quarters of a century, despite economic and security crises, and consistent pressure from the United States to build contribute more to the alliance and open its domestic markets. This chapter analyzes these developments since the US Occupation imposed its postwar “pacifist constitution” on Japan. That constitution’s pacifism was ignored almost from the beginning, but it left an indelible imprint on public opinion, opposition parties, and what (and how) the perennial conservative governments could accomplish in security relations and the alliance. The chapter shows how economic and security relations have been related, how major international changes and domestic politics have been intertwined, and how the three main approaches to international relations have characterized the relationship. Finally, we discuss the relationships’ successful management and some implications for Japan’s democracy.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party: Changes in Party Organization under Shinzō Abe

This article has two main purposes. First, it offers a critical meta-review of the literature on the recent evolution of the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) party organization, by focusing on two of the LDP’s most entrenched institutions: factionalism and the policymaking process through the Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC). Although some scholars predicted that some of their functions—such as the posts allocation norm and the decentralized policymaking norm—may not disappear at least for a while, the article argues that these norms should be inefficient in theory. With the electoral reform to a party-centered system, the cabinet now needs to appoint able and loyal agents free from factions and formulate and implement programmatic public policy in a top-down manner. Second, in light of these theoretical predictions, it offers a critical evaluation of the LDP under Shinzō Abe’s second administration. A tentative conclusion that can be drawn from anecdotal evidence is that the LDP now looks different from the old LDP before the 1990s. Rather than using traditional, pre-reform governing styles, Abe’s second administration appeared to be adept at adapting to the new institutional environment.