Asia in the New Milllennium. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. xi, 284 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8131-4501-3.
In this book Woodall makes a valuable contribution to the study of Japanese politics by carefully examining the historical development of the cabinet system, literally the centre of the Japanese government. Starting with the tragedy of the 2011 Eastern Japan Great Earthquake and the then government’s flawed response, the book questions: “Why did Prime Minister Kan and his cabinet ministers fail to use their powers to galvanize and reassure the nation following the catastrophic sequence of events?” (2). More generally, the book attempts to answer why cabinet government failed to set root in Japan and how Japan’s cabinet system came about, in a comparative perspective—especially in contrast to the Westminster system. In answering these puzzles, Woodall draws theoretical concepts from works by Huntington, North, and Mahoney and Thelen on institutionalism and institutional change to show that Japan’s cabinet system evolved in a gradual process against a backdrop of historical change.
Utilizing a wealth of both Japanese and English documents, Woodall chronologically traces the evolution of Japan’s cabinet system by focusing on major political actors, their interactions, and political structures at different times, or “critical junctures.” Such actors include bureaucrats and party politicians, with the first half of the book—whether intentionally or not—focusing on the former. In building up a modern state, oligarchs from Satsuma and Chōshū avoided implanting a constitutional monarchy as in the UK, but rather chose the Prussian system whereby political powers were centred on a sovereign emperor and the central bureaucracy (chapter 1). This quasi-cabinet pseudo-democracy was followed by bureaucratic dominance after the war, when Prime Minister Yoshida appointed cadres of bureaucrats and utilized core state organs for the cabinet (e.g., the Cabinet Legislation Bureau), in the political vacuum created by the US occupation’s demilitarization and democratization reform measures (chapter 2). Bureaucrats-turned-politicians such as Kishi, Ikeda and Satō kept dominating politics after the birth of the Liberal Democratic Party’s one-party dominance in 1955 (chapter 3).
The second half of the book, in turn, explains how party politicians and opposition parties make the cabinet system obsolete. The long-term LDP dominance allowed veteran MPs acting as zoku giin(policy specialists) to demand particularistic benefits for their home districts through the LDP’s policy-making organ, to the extent that such demands eroded the cabinet’s own policy initiatives (chapter 4). This fragmented policy-making process did not disappear after a series of administrative measures in the 1990s and the 2000s. Rather, as the 2005 postal privatization tumult suggests, Prime Minister Koizumi needed to go through intraparty disunity and revolts (chapter 5). After 2007, divided parliament or “Twisted Diets” have become the norm, as the opposition controls the equally powerful law-making body, the House of Councillors, to stop the government’s important legislation (chapter 6).
All in all, as the first comprehensive analysis in English providing an in-depth account of the historical development of Japan’s cabinet system since the Meiji period, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on Japanese politics.
That said, there are several problems that could have been better addressed. Most notably, empirical evidence is offered in a somewhat ad hoc manner, making the arguments a bit unconvincing. This is mainly because the Westminster model is (a little unrealistically) depicted as an omnipotent cabinet filled with senior, skillful MPs that can adequately respond to a (somewhat daunting) list of issues: economic downturns, government deficits, public health concerns, environmental problems, demographic changes, natural disasters, foreign relations, territorial conflicts, major corruption scandals, and others (15–17). Whenever Japan’s cabinet showed an inadequate response to any of these issues or was filled with junior MPs, the book argues it was dysfunctional.
Let’s take the example of ministerial appointment: Woodall argues that a stylized Westminster cabinet should have senior politicians who can effectively monitor bureaucrats. Based on this thesis, Woodall attempts to show that Japan’s ruling party in the early postwar period only formed figurehead cabinets—and therefore they were inefficient agenda setters—because of the shortage of career politicians. But one could argue that Prime Minister Yoshida and the subsequent LDP leaders were able to circumvent this information asymmetry problem by actively utilizing the bureaucracy as a potential pool of candidates to train future political leaders. In fact, according to some claims made in this book, this is the case: the bureaucratic dominance disappeared by the 1970s as “the influence of the government bureaucracy declined” (165), because the ruling party was indeed able to nurture career politicians skilled at dealing with the bureaucracy and specializing in some policy areas. This point further implies that there seem to be multiple different causal pathways leading to the dysfunctional cabinet system, and that the “institutions, structures, personnel, and norms from an authoritarian prewar order” (217) may not be necessarily important, as opposed to the thesis presented in the first half of the book.
More generally, the Westminster system is just one of the different parliamentary models out there. It can inadequately respond to a corruption scandal, as the British Tories could not recover their brand name after the party was tarnished in the 1961–63 Profumo Affair. It can make a policy mistake, as evinced when the market liberalization policy of the 1984–90 Labour government in New Zealand was unable to meet its core supporters’ expectations. It can have a factional struggle over leadership, as anti-mainstream factions in the Australian Labour Party demonstrated when they staged intraparty coups to oust the incumbent prime ministers in 2010 and 2013. In each of these cases, the result was electoral defeat. And while Japan’s cabinet system may not be working like that of the UK, New Zealand or Australia, perhaps it can be conceived of as just another parliamentary democracy model, under which the country was able to recover from the ruins of war to become an affluent, safe, well-organized society.
Kuniaki Nemoto
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
pp. 922-924