Party Politics and the Japanese Labor Movement: Rengo's "New Political Force"

Abstract

A growing number of recent studies in English and in Japanese have focused on how, since the early 1970s, the Japanese movement has been incorporated into the policy networks that generate public policy in Japan and how, in the process, the Japanese movement has metamorphosed from an excluded opposition group into an increasingly important insider. As a direct consequence of these studies, the earlier image of Japan as a system of without labor appears on the verge of being replaced by one that-if not corporatist per se-is either increasingly taking on the attributes of corporatism or constitutes a functional equivalent thereof.1 For reasons that appeared self-evident until the end of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) majority governance in the summer of 1993, deepening links between leaders and the LDP were generally assumed to be, along with deepening ties with the bureaucracy, the sine qua non of the corporatization of Japanese labor.2 However, as this study attempts to show, the significance of this phenomenon in terms of its impact on party politics needs to be care-