Growing Democracy in Japan: The Parliamentary Cabinet System Since 1868

Abstract

Quite often the best ideas seem so obvious in retrospect. As soon as you start reading this, it strikes you as odd that no one has previously thought of tracing the evolution of Japan’s cabinet system from its mid-19th century origins, through its mid-20th century forms and into its 21st century incarnation. Brian Woodall has produced a readable, lively and provocative addition to the literature on Japan’s political structures that I am sure all of us who teach about the politics of Japan will be recommending to students as well as using to enliven their lectures. The two basic questions to which he seeks answers are firstly why cabinet government has failed to take root in Japan and, secondly, why has Japan’s cabinet system assumed its characteristic form and function? (p. 29). Unsurprisingly, he answers the second question more convincingly than the first. He structures his political history of the last 150 years around eight historical junctures. This gives him eight periods for his narrative. The first three are prewar and are covered in a single long chapter: the Meiji restoration, 1869–1898; ‘the fleeting age of quasi-party cabinets’, 1898–1932; the period of the ‘techno-fascist cabinets and the total state’, 1932–1946. He then has five relatively brief chapters on: the occupation, 1946–1955; the emergence and demise of the 1955 system (1955–1972 and 1972–1993, respectively) and finally two chapters that he entitles ‘Disjoined Cabinets I and II’, which take us up to 2013 and the start of the second Abe cabinet. This narrative structure is supported by a conceptual framework that draws eclectically on institutionalisation theory and historical institutionalism. This he uses to describe and assess how Japan’s cabinet system has evolved. He supplements this with comments derived from a database he has created that contains information on the 141 cabinet formations, 1350 individuals and 3612 portfolios allocated between July 1871 and May 2013.