Political Reform in Japan: Leadership Looming Large (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Political Reform in Japan: Leadership Looming Large Tomohito Shinoda (bio) Political Reform in Japan: Leadership Looming Large. By Alisa Gaunder. Routledge, London, 2007. xiii, 178 pages. $125.00. Does political leadership matter in Japan? Karel van Wolferen, in his bestselling The Enigma of Japanese Power (Knopf, 1989) provides a negative answer to this question. He describes Japan as a country with an elite system and a submissive middle class. “The System”—elites in the political, bureaucratic, and business worlds—somehow makes decisions as one unit. This system does not have or need political leadership. Even before van Wolferen’s book, the most popular explanation of the Japanese policymaking process was the power elite model. This model characteristically featured three actors: bureaucrats, politicians, and interest groups. Although supporters of this view markedly disagreed on the balance of power among those groups, bureaucrats were often described as pivotal. With a strong bureaucracy, the role of the prime minister was limited. The Japanese prime minister faces strong constraints that come from the decentralized nature of the political system. Two dimensions of friction between the government and the ruling party are issue-specific sectionalism that is policy oriented and factionalism that involves intraparty power struggles. My view is that prime ministers have played very important roles in major policy decisions by effectively utilizing their resources—such as connections within their own parties as well as with other parties and the bureaucracy, appointment powers, and media and public support—and that political leadership indeed matters. The prime ministership of Koizumi Jun’ichirō supports this view, and many studies have been published to describe his leadership. Most of those studies stress differences between his leadership and that of his predecessors. I welcome Alisa Gaunder as a new scholar in this school of thought, one who believes that political leadership mattered even before Koizumi. Gaunder presents an interesting and useful framework of analysis to evaluate leadership in political reform since the 1970s. In addition to political [End Page 536] resources, she introduces three elements that are important to achieving policy goals: risk taking, vision, and commitment. In her conclusion, Gaunder argues that these three personal attributes made the difference in the outcome. On one hand, Miki Takeo and Ozawa Ichirō were successful leaders with clear visions of reform who were willing to take risks to pursue their ideas. On the other hand, Kaifu Toshiki and Miyazawa Kiichi did not have these personal attributes and failed in their reform efforts. Her main argument is well supported with background information on the leaders’ vision and commitment. However, I have difficulty accepting the author’s evaluation of the amount of political resources the political leaders had. Qualitative analyses such as this study cannot escape being arbitrary and subjective. But Gaunder basically recognizes only two levels of political resources, high and low. Kōno Yōhei is the only leader perceived to have had a low level of resources, while five others (Kaifu, Koizumi, Miki, Miyazawa, and Ozawa) are identified with high levels. Kōno was a junior member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and later leader of the New Liberal Club, and therefore it is self-evident that he had fewer resources than the others who represented the views of a majority of the Lower House. Including Kōno allows the author to find two levels of resources among political reform leaders; the other five all fall into the same category. But I wonder if adding Kōno is appropriate. I further question whether Kaifu Toshiki should be included with Koizumi in the category of politically resourceful leaders. My earlier work on this topic is cited to describe the significant informal powers that come with the post of prime minister, which Kaifu assumed. It is true that public support of the Kaifu cabinet was relatively high, especially compared with his immediate predecessors, Takeshita Noboru and Uno Sōsuke, who suffered from political and personal scandals. But Kaifu lacked other important sources of informal power introduced in my study. His professional reputation was probably the lowest among the LDP prime ministers. His power base within the LDP was weak, and his ties with the bureaucracy, the opposition parties...