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Japan MINORITY PARTIES
With the exception of the period from May 1947 to March
1948,
when a socialist, Katayama Tetsu, was prime minister and
headed a
coalition of socialists and conservatives, opposition
parties
failed to gain enough national electoral support to
participate in
forming a cabinet or to form one of their own until
Hosokawa
Morihiro's minority government was formed in 1993. In 1990
major
opposition parties with representation in the Diet
consisted of the
Japan Socialist Party, the Komeito, the Japan Communist
Party, and
the Democratic Socialist Party (Minshato). Two smaller
opposition
parties were the Socialist Democratic League and the
Progressive
Party (Shimpoto). None had a sufficiently broad base of
support to
challenge the LDP at the polls, and in the early 1990s,
they had
not been able to form workable coalitions. An exception
occurred in
some local elections, where "progressive" coalitions were
more
effective in electing opposition candidates than on the
national
level.
The opposition parties were separated by ideology, with
the
Japan Communist Party and a significant faction of the
Japan
Socialist Party espousing Marxist revolution; the others
were
moderate and pragmatic. In many cases, the programs of the
Komeito
and the Democratic Socialist Party differed little from
those of
the LDP. Unlike the Japan Socialist Party, smaller
opposition
parties lacked the resources to run candidates in all the
country's
constituencies.
On various occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed
that the
end of conservative power was at hand. One such time was
following
the Lockheed scandal of the mid-1970s (a journalist at the
time
described it as "conservative power self-destructs");
another was
the combined furor over the 3 percent consumption tax and
the
Recruit scandal in 1988-89. When the LDP was pushed into
the
minority in the July 1989 House of Councillors election,
many
commentators believed that Doi Takako, chairwoman and
leader of the
Japan Socialist Party, was within striking distance of
forming a
government, probably in coalition with other opposition
groups, in
the upcoming, more important general election for the
lower house.
That this situation failed to materialize suggested not so
much
popular contentment with the LDP as the opposition's
inability to
present a viable alternative to voters.
The opposition was important if only because its
existence
legitimized Japan's claim to be a modern, democratic
state.
Moreover, the Japan Socialist Party and the Japan
Communist Party
played a major role in the 1950s and 1960s in protecting
the
democratic institutions promoted by the United States
occupation.
The opposition's control of more than one-third of the
seats in the
Diet meant that amendments revising the constitution (such
as the
proposed rewording or abolition of Article 9) could not be
passed.
If conservatives had had their way in the early postwar
years, some
of Japan's prewar symbols and military power would have
been
restored, a move that most likely would have greatly
affected
relations with East Asian and Southeast Asian countries,
where
bitter memories of Japanese wartime occupation remained
fresh.
In a political system where the ruling party habitually
swept
embarrassing matters under the carpet and the established
press
club system inhibited investigative reporting, the
opposition
functioned reasonably well, to use film scholar Donald
Richie's
phrase, as "carpet picker-uppers." They exposed and
demanded
parliamentary investigations of scandals like the Recruit
affair.
Routinely, they used meetings of the Budget Committee and
other
committees in the Diet to question cabinet ministers and
government
officials, and these sessions received wide media
publicity.
Ideas first proposed by the opposition, such as
national health
insurance and other social welfare measures, were
frequently
adopted and implemented by the ruling party. The "Eda
Vision" of
moderate socialist leader Eda Saburo in the early
1960s--"An
American standard of living, Soviet levels of social
welfare, a
British parliamentary system, and Japan's peace
constitution"--were
largely realized under LDP auspices.
Although opposition control of the upper house after
the July
1989 election represented a change, the opposition had
little
impact on the legislative process. Regulations in the Diet
Law and
the rules of the two houses gave presiding House of
Representatives
officers the power to convene plenary sessions, fix
agendas, and
limit debates. Because these officers were elected by the
LDP
majority, they used these powers to constrain opposition
party
activity. Although the opposition could not filibuster,
the lack of
a time limit for formal balloting allowed them to use the
gyuho
senjutsu (cow's pace tactics) to cause excruciating
delays in
the passage of LDP-sponsored bills, walking so slowly to
cast their
individual votes that the process took several hours,
sorely trying
the tempers of LDP Diet members.
Data as of January 1994
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