Real democracy slowly coming to Japan

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It is, for Japan, a revolutionary election campaign. Not only is the outcome of the vote for the lower house of the Diet tomorrow uncertain, but the two major parties have taken to television advertising as never before. Attack advertising, at that.

True, the opposition New Frontier Party's main TV commercial is aggressive only by the hitherto ultra-courteous standards of Japanese politics. It shows vegetables being squeezed in a juice- maker, a fairly obscure metaphor for the government's proposed tax increase. But the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's ad is downright violent.

At first you don't know it's supposed to be the LDP's leader, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, and New Frontier leader Ichiro Ozawa, for both men are wearing face-masks. The ad is a kendo match shot in the best 'noodle Western' style, with lots of (wooden) sword-play, bursts of flame, swirls of smoke, the lot. Over the sound of the battle come portentous platitudes in Hashimoto's voice: "What Japan lacks is dreams. I want Japan to be a country where those who strive can be happy." The prime minister vanquishes his foe, then removes his mask and gazes straight into the camera. "This is the new Liberal Democratic Party," he says. Fade to black.

The question is whether there is any substance behind the sound and fury. This was supposed to be the election that turned Japan into a modern, fully democratic nation where the government occasionally changed hands, but the faces look awfully familiar. Back in 1993, when the LDP lost power after 38 consecutive years in government, the talk was all of politicians wresting control of the country away from the bureaucrats who have really been running it for the past generation, of a new Japan that would be more democratic, less conformist, less isolationist.

But the reformers who broke away from the LDP in 1993 got little done except the passage of an electoral reform bill before their ramshackle coalition fell apart. The LDP regained power in mid-1994 in an unlikely alliance with its old enemy, the Japan Socialist Party. And now the polls are saying that the LDP will win a slim majority in the new Diet, or at least come very close. Meanwhile, Ozawa's reformers have frittered away the enormous popularity they enjoyed three years ago: some polls have put their support in single figures. And who cares anyway, when both New Frontier and the LDP are making the same vague promises to deregulate the economy and make "administrative reforms" to break the hold of the bureaucracy? Plus ca change....

If what we have here is a national failure of nerve, then the least surprised people of all will be the Japanese. Even more than foreigners, most older Japanese firmly believe that their country is so instinctively submissive to authority, so utterly conformist, so unique, that it can never really change.

"I think it's basically a matter of national character," Motoyuki Shibata told me in a downcast tone last year. We were walking around his home district of Rokugo in the working-class southern suburbs of Tokyo, a place where everybody ought to want change but few people actually vote for it.

It was like a hundred other conversations about the impossibility of real change in Japan -- and then Shibata, a translator by trade, thought of a way of illustrating the difference in mentality. "In English there is an expression 'status quo'," he said. "Is that a positive expression, or a negative one?"

"Negative," I replied.

"Right. So the status quo is not something you should keep. It's something you should change. Well, in Japanese, 'status quo' can be translated as 'genjo' -- and the word people automatically add to genjo is iji, meaning 'maintain'. So status quo is not something you should change here."

"My point is that Japanese people in general are very reluctant to change things of their own will," he concluded. "And as far as that aspect of national character is concerned, they haven't changed much."

One of a hundred conversations, all making the same point -- but I am still not convinced. The Japanese, like the English and the Javanese, are an island people, and that makes them a little weirder than the rest of the world. But only a little weirder, and getting less so all the time.

The LDP may win this election, and it is not a party of philosophers and philanthropists: like politicians everywhere, most rank-and-file LDP members are fixers, compromisers, deal- makers. But the LDP has been forced to change, not just in style but in substance.

Like its bastard offspring, the New Frontier Party, it has been forced to broach formerly forbidden topics like cutting the bureaucracy (the LDP proposes to close ten of twenty ministries and fire 25 percent of government employees). It had to, in order to keep up with the growing impatience of the voters.

And coming up on the outside is the Democratic Party, whose leader Naoto Kan strikes terror into the bureaucrats. (Earlier this year, as health minister, Kan forced his own ministry to admit blame for passing on HIV-contaminated blood that infected thousands of Japanese hemophiliacs with AIDS.)

Real democracy is coming to Japan. It's just doing it by evolution rather than revolution. The same might be said of the whole post-war, ultra-conformist culture as well.

It's a generational thing, so change is gradual. But even a brief glance at Japanese history will tell you that this was not always a submissive culture where everybody kept their heads down and tried to be the same. And the briefest glance at young Japanese will tell you that it won't be like that much longer.