Who Rules Japan

Abstract

Who rules Japan? At one time, this was a question that Japanese social scientists used to put to each other, but now it seems that the very question has disappeared from those circles. However, it still lives on in the minds of most ordinary people, some of whom reply that it is the prime minister who rules Japan, others that it is the bureaucracy, and still others that it is the mega-rich like Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of the firm that bears his name. It is the responsibility of social scientists to resolve this question both theoretically and empirically. But in Japan, this responsibility has long since been abandoned. This is the first reason why the structure of control in Japan is invisible to the mass of the people and why each person can only answer the question from his or her own experience. This is the fault of Japanese scholars who used up their energies in importing foreign works and in explaining and interpreting them, and who did not construct an independent theory on the basis of the actual situation in Japan.