Introduction

Abstract

Whilst a veritable avalanche of research has appeared in English on topics ranging from ‘global governance’ down to ‘corporate governance’ in different parts of the world, especially the Anglo-American world, the amount of work in the Japanese language is far more limited. Except for a burgeoning literature on corporate governance and to a lesser extent local governance, for the most part governance in Japan is simply viewed as what governments do, and, as the years since 1955 have been dominated by governments led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), except for a brief period in the mid-1990s, governance has been viewed as predominately a question of how the LDP governs. Thus overwhelming interest has been focused on the balance between and amongst what are viewed as the key actors in the classic tripartite elite model of policymaking in Japan, the LDP, bureaucracy and big business, or how things have changed in the era of coalition governments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Other analysts have sought to broaden the understanding of how policy is formulated by examining actors outside of this triumvirate. This has expanded the range of actors seen to be involved in the policymaking process beyond the so-called ‘iron triangle’, as suggested by the term ‘patterned pluralism’ (Muramatsu and Krauss 1987), or ‘bureaucracy-led, mass inclusionary pluralism’ (Inoguchi and Iwai 1987: 5–7; also see Stockwin 1999: 221). Despite such a broadening in the way the actors playing a role in the governance of Japan is understood, however, the main focus has remained on how Japan is governed in terms of the actors involved in the policymaking process at the central government level.