Ishiba’s Fumble

Slush fund scandals fueled the electoral drubbing, as LDP politicians failed to report the leftovers from excess ticket sales at fundraising events. $3.5 million allegedly went unaccounted for and possibly into the pockets of lawmakers, with over 180 LDP members implicated.

While the amount at stake is substantially greater than the wardrobe revamps that British Labour Party officials received from party donors, it still pales in comparison with the Japanese money machine of the past, when prime ministers had control over personal slush funds worth millions of dollars and former politicians could be found stocking gold bars in their homes. But such practices are still against the law, and the populace has shown much less tolerance of such behavior as the decades of economic stagnation wear on.

Money politics are the subcutaneous lifeblood of the LDP — the party originated out of helicopter cash dropped in by the US government during the 1950s — and its scandals continue to erupt into public view at regular intervals. In the 2010s, a series of financial improprieties and sweetheart deals shook confidence in Prime Minister Abe Shinzō during the waning days of his leadership. However, he had the media in his grip and the LDP firmly whipped behind him.

Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, by contrast, had no such bulwarks to protect him last year when dozens of party politicians were exposed as being knee-deep in slush. A public show of cleaning house was needed, and that meant dismissing four cabinet ministers. More significantly, Kishida dissolved three key factions — habatsu, or sub-groupings within the LDP — including his own and that of Abe.

This was no small shift. In a country where a single party has held the reins of state power for sixty-five of the past sixty-nine years, the faction system is lauded as a form of internal democratic opposition. The LDP is a big tent that shelters a wide range of tendencies, ranging from centrist to right wing, organized around faction lines to get things done.

Politicians join one of these factions to hook into networks and mutual support systems that assist them with getting elected and pushing their policy agendas through. The heads of the most powerful tendencies can end up as “shadow shoguns” who call the shots behind the scenes, sometimes more effectively than the serving prime minister. This was the role that Abe Shinzō had assumed for himself before his assassination, and his faction continued to be the most numerous and powerful. However, it was also the one most deeply imbricated in the latest scandal that shook the core of the LDP.

Ishiba Shigeru was supposed to turn that around. He was elected party leader at the end of September by a mere twenty-one votes in the second ballot, defeating his hard-right archrival Takaichi Sanae, who won the first round by a length and has refused to support his leadership. Although Ishiba is a political insider — like many top lawmakers in Japan, he inherited his job from his father — he has crafted a reputation as an iconoclast who pushes the envelope. This was the image the LDP needed to signal a clean break.

However, the new leader is also an experienced flip-flopper. In his first speech as prime minister, the erstwhile nonconformist promised stability. His government was to be a paragon of pastoral care that would, he insisted, protect the rules, protect Japan, protect its citizenry, protect local communities, and protect young people and women. Ishiba immediately called snap elections to secure his mandate, but policy fumbles and botched messaging in his first weeks left him off balance. The last thing he needed was another round of funding scandals, which local-level chapters of the LDP supplied in embarrassing abundance just days before the election.

Amorphous Opposition

Whom did the Japanese electorate turn to instead? The biggest winner overall was the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP). Its seat count soared from 96 in the 2021 election to 148 this time. However, this force is unlikely to offer anything new. The party is merely the latest incarnation of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which has offered a pantomime version of opposition politics since the 2000s.

The current party president, Noda Yoshihiko, is a former DPJ prime minister, who has the ignominious distinction of leading his party to the biggest electoral defeat on record in 2012 when the DJP took a spectacular dive from 308 seats to just 57. Now as then, the platform of the main opposition party offers a wishy-washy center-leftish stance. It supports wage raises, some increases to social welfare, and the recognition of same-sex marriage, but there is little to distinguish it from the vaguely left-tilting parts of the LDP.

Even the emphasis on the constitution in the CDP’s name — supposedly the party’s defining issue — tells us little. It is simply a throwback to the debates of the 2010s, when then prime minister Abe sought to ram through a controversial revision of the Japanese constitution. But no one has pressed for this since Abe left office in 2020, and the constitution didn’t figure at all in the party’s campaigning. People turned out for the CDP simply because they are fed up with the LDP.

Most of those were middle-aged voters who knew the CDP and its leading faces from the past. Younger voters, by contrast, registered their dissatisfaction by turning out for the Democratic Party of the People (DPP), which increased its seats from eleven to twenty-eight. The DPP emerged from the churn of opposition groups that tried to stand up to the LDP after Abe took power in 2012. In that sense, it is little different from the CDP, which — in the polycule mergings and splittings of the amorphous oppositional space — it once joined and then left.

The DPP has a base in private-sector workers’ unions but was also able to bring the youth vote into the fold by campaigning to increase disposable income rather than merely salaries. The issue strikes a chord with both constituencies, which are similarly impacted by imbalances in the creaking social security system that bear down heavily on the young and precariously employed.

However, as with the other parties, there is little else to distinguish it from the LDP. DPP leader Tamaki Yuichiro incongruously describes himself as a “reformist centrist” and readily flips his alignment between the ruling party and the opposition depending on the issue and the prevailing winds. A tabloid newspaper recently revealed that he also flips between romantic partners by publishing photographs of him with a woman who is not is wife. Whether he can politically survive the affair remains to be seen.

Nationalist Retreat

Where is Japanese politics heading? Mainstream challengers to the LDP have long called for a real two-party system with a proper opposition and regular turnovers of power, but this is still nowhere to be seen. Japan may be a democracy on paper, but a single party, the LDP, has held office almost continuously since 1955.

For its first forty years, the LDP faced a real opposition in the form of the Japan Socialist Party, which up to the end of the Cold War could gather as much as 25 percent of the vote on a platform that offered a genuine alternative to that of the LDP. With real choices on offer at the ballot box, voter turnout often exceeded 70 percent. Now it barely edges above the 50 percent mark. This year’s elections saw the second-lowest participation rate ever.

It’s hard to blame the public. Since the end of the Cold War, opposition parties in Japan have grouped, degrouped, and regrouped in an ill-defined miasma. They are all anti-LDP in name but not content. One patchwork project, brokered by the shadow shogun Ozawa Ichirō, brought down the LDP in 1993 — the first time it lost power since 1955 — through backroom deals. From then until recently, it has been the parties engineered by Ozawa that have seen the greatest success, culminating in the DPJ’s electoral defeat of the LDP in 2009, the first time it was beaten at the national polls.

Ozawa could pull this off as a consummate strategist. This quality, though, has also been his downfall, not only at the ballot box, where he was never quite trusted, but also in his long-term project of creating a serious opposition and a regular rotation of power between two parties. As a dealmaker through and through, he could build an alternative space but had nothing to fill it with. There was no grand plan, no ideological guide, and no alternative to the status quo.

The inheritors of his projects, from the CDP’s Noda Yoshihiko and Edano Yukino to Maehara Seiji of the DPP, continue in this mode: all form and no content, as each party claims to be some variant of “centrist.” The CDP’s shapeless platform comes from a shapeless Edano who describes himself without blinking as both liberal and conservative.

The big-tent LDP is little different, now lined up behind a supposedly iconoclastic Ishiba, who readily swings between positions as it seems convenient. With the exception of the Japanese Communist Party, which drifts along with eight seats and about 6 percent of the vote, or the left-leaning Reiwa Shinsengumi, one can find as much policy diversity inside the LDP, expressed through its different factions, as there is in the parties outside it. In 2012, Abe could run on the slogan “there is no other path” with some honesty: there were and remain no serious alternatives.

Is this a good thing? It might be if stability is what’s sought. Remarkably, Japan has not seen the hyperpolarization of politics and the rise of charismatic populist leaders that have dogged other parts of the world. For this, Japan has the inertia of an aging society to thank.

Even in the digital age, the conventional mainstream media remains the dominant news source, if a tamed and conservative one. The national news channel, NHK, is flipped on in most households every evening. The two main newspapers, the Yomiuri and Asahi, enjoy massive circulations that make them the two largest in the world.

Outside the fans of the far-right online platform 4chan, voters have not retreated into internet echo chambers where they only feed on the stories and positions they want to hear. Instead, the mainstream media lays down the middle ground — right of center, where all parties jostle for a share of the political action — while much of the populace simply goes on with their lives. This may not be great for democracy, but if political polarization and right-wing populist virulence is the alternative, it may be the best one can hope for.