Thanks for this excellent reference, Yoshie. I hope the point to be garnered here is the usefulness of this sort of independent, disciplined political organization. In the American context the ideological dimension would be of necessity far broader: a heterogeneous Progressive Left party. But the organizational activities would be very much the same.
Unfortunately, after decades of being panicked into an atomized support for the Democratic Party, the progressive left milieu has simply forgotten this as political practice.
Berton's details are corroborated by van Wolferen. Although I am usually reluctant to quote these sorts of self-appointed, uninvited, egotistical gaikokujin advisor-lecturers, van Wolferen does make these interesting observations in an NLR interview (1993): ----------------------------------------- [Interviewer] The break-up of the dominant faction of the LDP, as scores were settled within it through the mechanism of scandal-leakage, shook the political equilibrium enough to precipitate the July elections. What do the election results tell us about public opinion in Japan today, after four years of turmoil?
[vW] The LDP lost virtually no seats, once the Ozawa Hata subtraction from its parliamentary group was consummated. The pattern of its electoral support remained essentially unchanged. Most people in Japan certainly in the countryside, but a large extent in the cities as well - have always voted less for a parry than for a politician, a local notable who distributes largesse, organizes trips for the aged, appears at major weddings or funerals, and-above all-delivers projects that galvanize the construction industry, which in many parts of the country actually organizes the vote-getting machine for the candidates. So people vote for a person rather than a platform. Candidates would often run as an independent and then after the election join the LDP. This time the electorate once again voted by and large for the same people as in the past. The major change was not in the pattern of LDP support, which remained. essentially unaltered. It was the collapse of the Socialist vote. The major parry that was historically supposed to stand for opposition to the system lost half its seats.
This has been a tremendous shock to the Socialists. It was richly deserved. This is a party which has betrayed the electorate for thirtyeight years, by failing to provide any credible alternative to the LDP. It was so totally preoccupied with unrealistic priorities and internal squabbles that it gave the appearance of doing its deliberate best to stay out of power permanently. There was a brief moment in the late eighties when it looked as if there might be some change, after Doi Takako emerged as the first woman to lead a Japanese party. She came over well on television and chose her candidates for the Upper House cleverly in 1989 - intelligent women who had not had any political career before, and so looked clean and genuine. The electoral success gave her temporary prestige, but little power against the obstructionism of her opponents in the party, most of them useless throw-backs to the fifties and sixties. So she didn't last long. The party has never waged any real fight against the system. It's long been considered hopeless by many of its own supporters. I once gave a talk to a group of committed lawyers in Osaka-where the culture is much more oppositional than in Tokyo-who work on behalf of the downtrodden and moved in the orbit of the ]SP. I said that the Socialist Party was the greatest single obstacle to the achievement of a real democracy in Japan, and they gave me an ovation. That attitude is widespread. This year its electorate finally got a chance to punish it. The novelty of the election was the widespread switch by Socialist voters to the so-called reformist parties, of which Ozawa and Hata's Renewal group is the largest, that had split away from the LDP. This was justice on the Socialist Party.
[Interviewer - apparently surprised and dismayed by van Wolferen's sharp criticism of the now defunct Japan Socialist party, hopes that the blame will be shared with the 'commies'] Isn't the Communist Party, which remains a large organization, as much of an obstacle to the emergence of an effective modern Left in Japan?
[vW] No-hitherto anyway-less so. The Communists earned a reputation for honesty that the Socialists lacked. They were less ideologically rigid too. They do stand for certain principles that give them genuine support-you could sense this in any electoral campaign, if you went out with their candidates after being with the LDP or ]SP ones. They derive enough income from their publishing enterprises to be free of the corruption that taints the Socialists-Doi's successor, after all, had to resign for taking bribes in the Sagawa Kyubin scandal. Their newspaper, Akahata, whatever its blinkers, does publish stories that are quite different from what you find in the rest of the press. But, of course, the ]CP' s background in the Comintern tradition means that it is still widely seen as an unpatriotic force, which isolates it.
And BTW:
[Interviewer] What has been the role of the Komeito?
The Soka Gakkai religious movement on which it is based-this is also true of the more recent sects-attracts marginal strata in Japanese society, or shopkeepers and small traders. It has no following in the mass of the salariat, because the large companies screen their employees very carefully, including their family background, and if your parents belong to one of the new religions they will not take you on. They reckon you may have been imbued with some of their spirit, and they want no conflict of loyalties. The lineal element may, in fact, on occasion be of some relevance, in the sense that once a family has signed up for the Soka Gakkai, its members are considered by the sect to belong to it, no matter what they do. There was a time when the Soka Gakkai frightened many Japanese, because their methods of proselytization were so aggressive. But that is long past. They are now very respectable, with their publishing empire, their university, their party. The Komeito is no challenge to the established order. The movement has absorbed potential opposition by giving excluded groups the sense of belonging to something that is not exactly part of the system, but which remains harmless-it is certainly not part of a civil society. --------------------------------------------------------
The Komeito is relevant because the Koizumi LDP today only stays in power with its help as a coalition partner. We see here how it was saved from catastrophe in the mid 1990's by the Socialists, who destroyed themselves trying to act as just the sort of "loyal opposition" that some on this list think is somehow essentially different from the Western European or British system. But that is just another "Western" conceit.
Nor - again! - to mention the United States. The bourgeoisie of Western Europe, Britain and Japan look with envy upon the highly atomized, depoliticized mass ruled by what is in fact a No Party State-sponsered political system. They want to be like the Americans. The US is governed by two State "parties" permanently ensconced in the state institutions, protected from democracy by a massive wall of highly restrictive and discriminatory electoral laws. These two have held a monopoly of state power for so long that their "mass party" presence has largely withered away into instant storefront operations that mysteriously "appear" only around election time, and that just as mysteriously "disappear" as soon as the elections are over. The remainder of the time, the twin State political organizations do not require "party offices" independent of the State offices they jointly monopolize - they simply operate their "party" operations directly out of their State offices.
In the USA, the State is the seat of the Party. What could be worse than this?
Today, the Japan Democratic Party - a latchup of some Socialist Party remnants with ex-LDPers who got cut out of the pork barrel when the spoils system was thrown into crisis in the mid-1990's - is hoping to achieve the American System in partnership with the LDP. That is why the JDP supported the imposition of a more undemocratic electoral "reform" in the last couple of years, because first a monopoly over the State institutions must be achieved. But as the Meiji experience shows, the sudden introduction of reactionary foreign 'models' - as in the original "Bismarckian" 1880's constitution virtually written by two German legal advisors imported by Ito Hirobumi - has had unintended and unpredictable consequences for Japan.
-Brad