Political Opposition and Local Politics in Japan

by Kurt Steiner (Editor), Ellis S. Krauss (Editor), Scott E. Flanagan (Editor)

Overview

Japan's national government, and most of its local governments, have been in conservative hands for more than three decades. Recently, however, the strength of progressive opposition forces has been increasing at the local level. The contributors to this volume analyze this increasing opposition to determine whether it is a temporary phenomenon or portends permanent changes.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691642895
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #609
Pages:	498
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

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Political Opposition and Local Politics in Japan

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By Kurt Steiner, Ellis S. Krauss, Scott C. Flanagan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07625-6

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CHAPTER 1

TOWARD A FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF LOCAL OPPOSITION

Kurt Steiner

This volume has two main purposes: to describe and analyze the spectacular developments in Japanese local politics over the last decade and a half and to contribute to theory building in a relatively new subfield of comparative politics, namely comparative local politics. Up to now the literature in this subfield tended to concentrate on Europe on the one hand and on the Third World on the other hand. By adding the case of Japan, we hope to facilitate a broader comparative analysis; by focusing on the relationship between local politics and political opposition, we want to add a new dimension to the ongoing enterprise of theory building.

The relationship between local politics and political opposition periodically attracts public attention. Partisans greet with hope or view with alarm increases in the number of local communities controlled by the Italian Communists, the French Left, the Japanese "Progressives," the Christian Democrats in West Germany, or whoever may be in opposition in the country at a given time. But a scholarly, objective analysis of the relationship in cross-national terms is rarely attempted. As the title of this essay indicates, we propose to take some exploratory steps in that direction. Although the results are likely to be tentative and the emerging comparative framework may turn out to be a partial one because not all possible variables are taken into account, we feel that the attempt has to be undertaken and that it is inherently worthwhile.

The End of the "Conservative Paradise" of Local Government in Japan

This study was prompted by questions that arose in our consideration of recent developments in Japanese politics. That these developments have been significant becomes clear when we view them against their historical background. Before and during the Second World War, the local government system of Japan was highly centralized, both in law and in practice. After the war, the Allied Occupation of Japan promoted local autonomy as part of its overall effort to democratize the country. Thus the Constitution of 1947 provided for the direct election of local chief executives, from prefectural governors to village mayors, as well as of local assemblies. This opened up new possibilities for political competition at all subnational levels. However, for nearly twenty years after the reform, local government remained a "conservative paradise." Of course, during nearly all of this time conservative governments were also in power at the national level; but there the progressive opposition managed to capture at least one-third of the seats in both houses of the Diet. By comparison, inroads of the opposition at the local level were negligible. From time to time, progressive governors held office in four or five of the forty-six prefectures, but, with the notable exception of Governor Ninagawa of Kyoto prefecture, elected in 1950 and in office for twenty-eight years thereafter, they showed little staying power. Progressive mayors of large cities elected in the first postwar elections experienced a similar fate. By and large, progressive chief executives at both levels faced conservative majorities in their assemblies. Smaller cities, many of them results of recent amalgamations fostered by the central government, and the great mass of towns and villages were the province of the independent mayors and the independent assemblymen, most of them of conservative leanings.

To understand this conservative near-monopoly at the subnational level, it is well to remember that the proportion of voters living in rural areas and employed in primary industries was high. These voters continued to adhere to traditional patterns of attitudes and behavior, based on collectivity orientation and particularistic interpersonal relations. These patterns, benefiting conservative candidates, were of greater effect in local than in national elections, and thus local governments remained under conservative control. The opposition parties showed little interest in local politics, and consequently they made few efforts to overcome this conservative advantage, for example by building up local organizations. They were also hampered much more than the conservatives — many of whom ran as independents — by the notion of nonpartisanship in local politics, which influenced many voters.

The fact that the conservatives were in control of the national as well as of most local governments had implications for the scope of local autonomy. The Occupation's efforts at increasing local autonomy notwithstanding, the central government controlled local governments through a number of channels, some formalized, some informal, some official, some semiofficial or unofficial, and this "guidance" was widely accepted without questioning its legal basis or binding quality. A number of factors contributed to this situation: the lack of a clear definition of independent local functions, the general dependence of local governments on financial grants from the center, and the practice of delegating national functions to local entities or their chief executives, often without providing the requisite financial support, which placed an "excess burden" on the financially strapped local governments. Considering the reasons for the gap between the constitutional ideal of local autonomy and the reality of central control, the following statement seemed appropriate in 1965:

On the one hand, the institutional reforms of the Occupation remained a halfway house, especially in the area of functions and finances; on the other hand, attitudes inherited from the past — such as the persistence of hierarchial notions in the minds of national bureaucrats and local office holders and the slight regard for the legal process as a means of solving problems of inter-governmental relations — prevented the local entities from assuming the role that the reforms supposedly assigned to them. Local autonomy did not fail in Japan; it was never fully established.

In the early sixties, the conservative national government gave great emphasis to plans for national economic development. It provided incentives for local governments to induce new industries to establish themselves in their areas by providing them with land as a gift, by granting them temporary property tax exemptions, and by constructing supportive public facilities for them. Used to following guidance from above, hard pressed for financial resources and thus attracted by promises of grants-in-aid and bond permits from the national government, and persuaded by the argument that new industries would broaden the tax base in the future, local governments actively competed with each other to lure industries to new locations. Somewhat paradoxically, this conservative policy of economic development was one of the factors that weakened the conservative hegemony in local government. The new industries, with the concomitant siphoning off of workers in the primary sector of the economy and the immigration of workers in the secondary and tertiary sectors into rural areas, accelerated and broadened the spread of urbanization. This in turn meant a shrinkage of the hitherto secure electoral base of conservative politicians at the various levels.

As already noted, during much of this time, the leftist opposition concentrated its attention on national elections, in part because the chances of success seemed better and in part because the stakes were higher. Their most immediate and important purpose was to stem the "reverse course" of conservative governments, and above all, to prevent a revision of the constitution. While the Socialist parties routinely referred in their platforms to the need of "democratization" of local government, in actuality they showed relatively little interest in local elections and devoted few resources to them. But, having reached the "one-third barrier" in national elections and having become aware of the need for mobilization at the local level during the security treaty struggles of 1960, they turned their attention increasingly to local politics.

Under the impact of these and other factors yet to be noted, the landscape of local politics changed drastically in the late sixties and early seventies. Progressive local governments proliferated so that some 40 percent of the population lived in areas with progressive chief executives. By 1975, the number of progressive governors had increased to nine, including those of Kyoto, Tokyo, and Osaka. While the Liberal Democrats and conservative independents still held a majority of seats in most prefectural assemblies, this was no longer the case in seven of the forty-seven prefectures.

Progressive successes at the city level — and particularly in the big cities — were equally spectacular. About 130 of the 643 city mayors were considered to be progressive, including the mayors of the most important urban centers such as Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto City, Osaka City, and Kobe. Again, conservative majorities existed in the assemblies of most cities as well as in town and village assemblies throughout the country. However, this was no longer the case in all "designated cities" (major cities designated by the Diet and thereby granted the exercise of certain prefectural functions), nor was it the case in a number of suburban and satellite cities in the Tokyo and Osaka metropolitan areas and in some medium-sized regional cities.

Another factor that is generally assumed to have contributed to the progressive successes in local politics was also a result of national action in pursuit of economic growth. As industry spread, the negative effects of economic growth in the form of environmental deterioration and of pollution-induced illnesses led to the emergence of a new political phenomenon, namely of citizens' movements that were organized in rural and in urban Japan. The actual relationship between these movements and progressive politics at the local level is quite complex, as will be shown in Part Three of this volume. But, since local governments became a major target of protest and since progressive local chief executives were prone in the beginning to show their responsiveness to these new pressures from below, the potential of the movements in their totality (as distinguished from the often ephemeral individual movements) of having an impact on local politics is clear.

All of these developments have naturally attracted the attention of the mass media in Japan. The quantity of the output of Japanese scholarship on related matters is also quite impressive. In the United States, too, research on Japanese local government and politics has proliferated and, in contrast to the past, when rural Japan was the main focus of attention, much of it deals with urban Japan. As stated at the outset, one of the purposes of the present volume is to contribute to that body of literature.

Views on the Linkages Between National Politics and Local Politics

Another purpose of this volume is to contribute to theory building in the field of comparative local politics. Such an effort must be based on the recognition of the wide variety of local-extralocal linkages. We are interested here in local-national linkages of a specifically political nature and, more particularly, in situations in which the content of that linkage-channel may be characterized as opposition. In other words, we focus on situations in which the political forces in control of local units are in opposition to the predominant forces at the national level, whether this be an opposition in terms of party, political tendency, or policy. As noted above, such situations are quite frequent.

Politicians are aware of the potential importance of local opposition for national politics. Thus opposition parties, successful in a local election, may claim that their victory indicates a trend permitting predictions regarding the next national election — a claim usually denied by the government party; the government may view a victory of the opposition in subnational units with alarm, anticipating that it will use its power to resist national policies (such as a policy for economic development) and thus hamstring their implementation; or an opposition party, devoid of hope for a national takeover in the near future, may take heart from its local successes, which permit it to maintain its strongholds or, perhaps, to establish new beachheads. But while the phenomenon is relatively frequent in reality, until recently little consideration has been given to it in the literature, much of which deals with national-local relations in general and depoliticized terms.

Some of the classics in the field of comparative politics and democratic theory saw in local politics not so much a source of potential opposition as an agent for socialization into politics in a democracy. Thus de Tocqueville wrote of the town meetings of New England as "grammar schools of liberty" and Lord Bryce, concurring, considered the practice of local self-government "the best school of democracy." Implicit both in the preference of these writers for local independence and diversity and in their aversion against centralization and standardization is the assumption that a certain antagonism between the national government and the local governments — the type of antagonism in intergovernmental relations that I will later refer to as "institutional opposition" — is natural and legitimate. On the other hand, Bryce condemned the type of opposition with which this volume deals, that is, "political opposition," as disturbing and harmful. He felt that such an opposition is based on questions, foreign to the sphere of local government, and that the intrusion of such questions negates what he considered to be an advantage of local self-government, namely its insulation from national politics. Where such insulation exists, conflict in individual local units need not coincide with partisan political conflict: "When local discontents arise," he wrote, "it is better for them to find vent in the local arena rather than encumber the central authority." Similarly, de Tocqueville felt that a decentralized system has the advantage of resolving many issues short of recourse to the national government and thus of reducing political tension and increasing political stability.

Subsequent social and political developments did not favor the insulation of local government from national politics that had been considered desirable and possible by these writers of an earlier day. The self-sufficient community, which was their ideal, hardly exists anymore. Local systems are — to borrow a term from the literature on international relations — "penetrated systems." Changes in patterns of political participation and in the character of political parties produce a tendency toward an increased "nationalization of local politics." National and local politics no longer move in separate orbits.

While local-national linkages of a political nature have become more salient since de Tocqueville and Bryce expressed their concern about them, the literature tends to treat national politics and local politics in isolation from one another. Thus the recent literature on political opposition deals almost exclusively with opposition between parties at the national level and does not give any detailed consideration to local political opposition. In this volume we discuss local political opposition in one country, Japan, but we also want to call attention to the need for a comparative and theoretical analysis of the relationship between national and subnational politics in general.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Chapter I. Toward a Framework for the Study of Local Opposition, pg. 3
• Chapter 2. Electoral Change in Japan: An Overview, pg. 35
• Chapter 4. Opposition in the Suburbs, pg. 95
• Chapter 5. National and Local Voting Trends: Cross-Level Linkages And Correlates Of Change, pg. 131
• Chapter 6. Citizens' Movements: The Growth And Impact Of Environmental Protest In Japan, pg. 187
• Chapter 7. Political Socialization Through Citizens' Movements, pg. 228
• Chapter 8. Civic Protest In Mishima: Citizens' Movements and the Politics of the Environment in Contemporary Japan, pg. 274
• Chapter 9. Progressive Local Administrations: Local Public Policy and Local-National Relations, pg. 317
• Chapter 10. Political Choice and Policy Change in Medium-Sized Japanese Cities, 1962-1974, pg. 353
• Chapter 11. Opposition in Power: The Development and Maintenance of Leftist Government in Kyoto Prefecture, pg. 383
• Chapter 12. The Partisan Politicization of Local Government: Causes and Consequences, pg. 427
• Contributors, pg. 471
• Index, pg. 473