The DPJ government will collide head-on with the mandarins, partly because the party will find it hard to recruit sufficiently qualified policymakers. The mandarins have maintained their privileged position in this regard, owing partly to the tax system, which prevents the emergence of non-profit institutions, especially think tanks, where independent policy expertise can be forged. Moreover, perhaps in anticipation of a change in power, the mandarins have moved forward the annual personnel changes in the major ministries’ top administrative positions.
And what of the LDP? Having fallen from power, it will lose its control of the redistribution of government funds. Unable to pay off its constituencies, disintegration looms, for the LDP has never been a party with entrenched grass-roots support, but instead operates as a machine of power and redistribution through a web of insiders across the country’s industrial sectors, occupational associations, and local communities. Only by recruiting new blood and reorganizing itself with a solid ideological platform will an LDP comeback be possible.
The DPJ has even weaker grass-roots support, so the mandarins will most likely use their standard techniques of divide and rule to cajole the party by teaching it to mimic the LDP in using state money and contracts to underwrite its major constituencies, such as labor unions and other interest groups.
The birth of the DPJ government can yet be a turning point. A major power shift in favor of “society” has taken place. If the DPJ can break free of mandarin control by centralizing policy formation in the office of the prime minister, as it intends, Japan can emerge as a more resilient democracy with a full-fledged two-party system and greater willingness to assume an international leadership role.
Masahiro Matsumura is Professor of International Politics, St Andrew’s (Momoyama Gakuin) University, Osaka.
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