And you thought 8 years of one party being in power was bad…

…try 54. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has controlled the lower (more powerful) house of the Japanese Diet (parliament) for the last 54 years. To put this into perspective, the last time Japan had a power change was when Dwight Eisenhower was the President of the United States. The “1955 system” as it is called here and abroad was created when the two most powerful conservative parties in Japan joined together the form the LDP, and with the exception of a brief period in 1993-94, they’ve been in power ever since. Somehow the fact that the opposition parties here have taken up the Obama theme of “Change” and chanting “Yes We Can” doesn’t seem as hokey as it really should- when it comes to party change, they’re looking good for the first time in over half a century.
This Sunday Japanese voters will go to the polls to elect the Diet’s more powerful lower house. Since the leadership of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006), who as a charismatic Japanese leader (seemingly an oxymoron in itself) was able to enact some real reform in the Japanese system (privatization of Japan’s largest banking system, the Postal system- yes, they keep their money at the post office), the LDP hasn’t been able to keep a PM around for longer than a year, and they’ve lost the majority in the less-powerful upper house of the Diet. This Sunday will see the first lower-house elections since 2005, when Koizumi was still in power. Current LDP PM Taro Aso’s approval ratings have hovered around 20%, sometimes dipping into the single digits. Though he has handled the economic recession fairly ably, his gaffe- and scandal-prone administration is likely to see the first pure opposition victory in the lower house since before 1955.
This “opposition” comes in the form of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Lead by Yukio Hatoyama (and formed by Ichiro Ozawa, an LDP defector), they are campaigning for “Change,” though this can always be a relative term in Japanese politics. Regardless, there are many signs that the Japanese electorate has become fed-up with the countless failed policies, corruption scandals, and unpopular PM’s of the LDP. To be fair, the DPJ has had its share of corruption scandals, etc., but they have not had the chance to have a majority government in power in order to show whether they’re able or not to steer the country in what they see is a positive direction.
The Japanese political system for beginners: Japan has a bicameral legislature (like ours) that is elected through proportional representation (not like ours). Their system much more resembles England’s than our own. Like in many, many other countries in the world, their head of government, the Prime Minister (equivalent to our President) is not directly elected into office. Instead, the PM is elected within by the party in the Diet with the most seats. This makes up for a much weaker Executive branch (the cabinet), especially in Japan, where consensus policy making is endemic. Unlike the US government, which upon a major party change in the Executive may be left to fill about 7,000 positions (which the Obama administration is still working on), the Japanese government is primarily run by a powerful bureaucracy. This means that only about 200-300 people change after any given election, even with a possible “major” power shift. Things that have gotten in the way of any type of power shift in the past half century: an ineffective opposition (imagine the Democrats, Libertarians, and any other left party being unable to come to any agreement, and none being able to muster a majority by themselves), the Japanese electorate’s loyalty to local politicians (despite widespread corruption scandals in the LDP), and the close ties between the government, the bureaucracy, and large groups of business corporations (this relationship is called the “iron triangle”). For these reasons, the Japanese government has been slow to change, and there have been very, very few people/Prime Ministers that have been able to enact any type of real change in the government (Koizumi being the notable exception).

We shall wait and see what happens this weekend. Because I work in a rural Japanese middle school, my co-workers aren’t the most politically outspoken/active people, though I have found a few people that I can speak to about the election. More on the Japanese sentiment later, though the next time I write there may be the first change of government here since, well, pretty much since my parents were born…