Reviewed by: Policy Entrepreneurship and Elections in Japan: A Political Biography of Ozawa Ichiro by Takashi Oka Aurelia George Mulgan (bio) Policy Entrepreneurship and Elections in Japan: A Political Biography of Ozawa Ichiro. By Takashi Oka. Routledge, London, 2011. xiv, 210 pages. $148.00, cloth; $148.00, E-book. Takashi Oka’s book about the last shadow shogun of Japanese politics, Ozawa Ichirō, is exceptional for a volume based on a doctoral thesis. Its beautifully flowing prose has been crafted by an old-fashioned practitioner of high-quality journalism (indeed, as a former Tokyo correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor) rather than by a freshly minted doctoral student still relatively unschooled in the literary arts. Linked to the journalistic foundations of the book is another virtue. It wears its academic conventions lightly. Observing the format of a historical narrative, it could easily double as a concise history of Japanese politics during Ozawa’s formative and productive years between 1969 and 2009. The book genuflects to the use of academic concepts such as John King-don’s “policy entrepreneurship,” “critical juncture,” and “punctuated equilibrium,” but these are used quite loosely and are not applied in any rigorous and systematic fashion. Even if reiterated frequently, mere repetition does not a theory or serious conceptual framework make. As a result, Oka’s book is a highly readable and informative narrative, which is not forced into any intellectual straitjacket. Of course, Oka had the advantage of personal acquaintance and employment with Ozawa over many years, which bestowed firsthand, close-up observation of the man and yielded many valuable and unique insights into his thinking and behavior. Oka’s interest in Ozawa appears to have been prompted by his “strikingly unusual for a Japanese” (p. xii) advocacy of individualism, which prompted Oka’s curiosity “to find out where and how the trait originated” [End Page 244] (p. xii). In his view, Ozawa’s advocacy of so many important political, economic, and social reforms, including liberating the individual from the yoke of bureaucrats, remaking Japan as a “normal” nation, and “giving voters a clear choice between competing candidates” (p. 45) could be traced back to his philosophical individualism. The book begins with a description of the two major popular perceptions of Ozawa—as the “very embodiment of the power politics characteristic of the Takeshita [Noboru] faction and its predecessor, the faction created and led for many years by Tanaka Kakuei” (p. xi) and as a “genuine reformer who has worked to change the whole context and dynamics of politics in Japan” (p. xii). Most Japanese writers and biographers of Ozawa, of which there are a large number, usually fall on one or the other side of this line. However, it is perfectly possible for Ozawa to be both genuine reformer and power-hungry politician. Oka converts what is essentially a false dichotomy into the principal research question underpinning the book in the form of a hypothesis and a counterhypothesis: “Is Ozawa Ichiro a genuine reformer, a policy entrepreneur who uses ‘critical junctures’ … to push forward the policies he advocates? Or is he a power broker who cloaks himself in the garments of reform while he pursues naked power?” (p. xii). There is no doubt which interpretation Oka chooses: he regards Ozawa as a genuine reformer and he marshals the weight of historical exploration and explanation in the book to substantiate this view. By making this choice, Oka is able, conveniently, to omit the evidence pointing to Ozawa’s myriad power-seeking behaviors, including his involvement in political corruption. Oka makes no bones about the fact that he vastly admires Ozawa, raising the question whether his feelings of admiration and respect for his old boss might have influenced what information he chose to include and/or leave out of the book. This is where the major problem with Oka’s narrative lies. He argues the case for Ozawa by largely ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Oka needs to tell the other side of the story. In this sense, the book could be described as an Ozawa whitewash. In the end, the debate about Ozawa comes down to a question about his prior motivation. Is he an...
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Jan 1, 2017
Masayoshi Kuboya 
Open Access
