Three questions about the state of Japan’s politics

Making sense of a turbulent moment

The ordinary session of the Diet opens on Friday, January 26, and it is difficult to think of a moment in Japanese politics as uncertain as the present moment.

As the new year opened, the dominoes have begun to fall in the LDP’s kickback scandal. In short order, the Abe faction – the LDP’s largest – and the Kishida faction – the prime minister’s own – announced that they would dissolve. They have been joined by the smaller Nikai faction, also implicated in the kickback scheme, and the Moriyama faction, the party’s smallest.

In a stroke, two venerable factions – and the pillars of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s support – are gone. But, adding to the chaos, the Asō and Motegi factions have resisted pressure to join the other factions in dissolving, preventing Kishida from presenting a clean break from factional politics and making a kind of “Koizumian” pivot against old-style politics.

Farewell Kōchi-kai…I stumbled upon the faction’s old headquarters on a visit to Tokyo in 2014.

How real is party reform?

It is against this backdrop that the LDP’s party revitalization headquarters, headed by Kishida himself, delivered an interim report this week that seeks to decouple the factions from campaign financing and party personnel decisions. Not only does this report imply that the factions will continue in some form as “policy groups” – a concession to the Asō and Motegi factions – but it also implies that reforms that would further centralize key party functions in the hands of the party president and secretary-general.

It is unclear whether the factions will be marginalized so easily. This is, after all, not the first time that the LDP’s factions have been the target of outrage and reformist zeal. When the LDP went into opposition in 1993, the factions were also “dissolved” but in practice limped on as study groups and eventually everyone dropped the pretense that they were anything but what they had always been. There is something “sticky” about factions not just in the LDP, but in Japanese politics more broadly, and I am skeptical that Kishida will have the wherewithal to make reforms stick.¹

For all the centralizing tendencies that have dominated Japanese politics over the past thirty years, the LDP has continued to rely on the factions for fundraising; candidate recruitment (albeit less than in the past); career development; and personnel decisionmaking, i.e. the distribution of government and party jobs. They also, as was clearly evident in the 2021 LDP leadership election, continue to serve as the building blocks for winning coalitions in leadership races. They have, in their way, played a sort of check and balance role against the increasingly dominant central executive. Despite the scandals, it is hard to see what replaces them.

What are the costs of the political turbulence?

Beyond the question of whether meaningful reform of the LDP’s factions and internal governance more broadly is possible at this juncture, the disintegration of two of the factions that were propping up Kishida’s leadership will have more immediate consequences.

First, the implosion of the Abe faction has created an enormous power vacuum. The faction’s leaders – including Hagiuda Kōichi, Seko Hiroshige, Nishimura Yasutoshi, and others – may have escaped legal consequences but are effectively out of the running for higher office and are even facing calls from younger Abe faction members to be exiled from the LDP altogether. The Abe faction’s nearly 100 members are now a free-floating bloc that includes some of the party’s more junior – and more electorally vulnerable – members. Whether these lawmakers are pulled into the surviving factions, drift into the orbit of Suga Yoshihide or other independent players, or pull together into new groupings will strongly influence what happens next.

Meanwhile, while Asō Tarō and Motegi Toshimitsu are both maneuvering to preserve their factions and with them, their power – the latter with an eye towards winning the leadership – it is unclear what sort of power their factions will give them in this new environment. They too may shed members; the Motegi faction, for example, has already had a high-profile defection, as Obuchi Yūko announced this week that she was leaving the faction. Perhaps they gain some members from the dissolution of other factions, but their survival is not a guarantee of influence.

Third, the outlook for Kishida’s survival has not improved. He went into this crisis with dramatically low approval ratings, and none of the steps he has taken have fundamentally changed his situation. His handling of the scandal has been reactive and tentative. He can still limp on – unless his approval ratings plummet into the single digits and stay there – but it is an open question whether he can assemble a winning coalition from his fragmented party, and therefore, whether he will even run again. There is some speculation that, if economic news is favorable, he could call a summer snap election, but I am skeptical that he will be able to play the election card in these circumstances.

As such, the likelihood of an especially chaotic LDP leadership election in September – with perhaps five or more candidates in the running – is increasingly high. The contest could be especially fierce, given that the victor could soon be dealing with the transition to a second Trump administration in the US, a prospect that will strongly influence the race.

What does this mean for Japan’s democracy?

In contrast to the wave of political reforms in the early 1990s, when the backlash against the factions and the other institutions of the 1955 system was part of a broader movement to reform Japan’s institutions and introduce stronger top-down leadership, it is not clear what exactly political reform growing out of the kickback scandal will try to achieve. Centralization seems to have more or less run its course. There are calls for transparency and accountability but nothing resembling a comprehensive agenda.

Instead, the kickback scandal, far from delivering a jolt to Japan’s democracy, appears to have instead deepened the malaise. Unlike the scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, there is no sign that the LDP will splinter; the public is not rallying behind the opposition parties, which mostly seem to be going through the motions in their criticisms of the LDP; and while there are critical voices within the LDP, no charismatic reformer has emerged to challenge Kishida on this issue. If a general election were held now, it is easy to see the LDP winning again thanks to historically low turnout. That may not be enough to save Kishida, but the party itself does not appear to be nearly as vulnerable as it has been at other moments over the past thirty years.

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Dialogue on the Japan-EU relationship

This is a bit late, but in November the German Marshall Fund’s Indo Pacific Program hosted its Japan Trilateral Forum in Brussels, where I moderated a discussion with Reinhard Bütikofer, a German member of the European Parliament who was the rapporteur for a report on EU-Japan relations. I found it to be a tremendously informative discussion about a relationship that is poised to grow in importance.

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Personal update

I had hoped to write on this sooner, but my year started with a bout of Covid, which was then followed by heavy snowfall in DC that meant multiple days of school closure. I will hopefully be on a more regular posting schedule heading into February.

Meanwhile, I have been weighing whether I will keep this newsletter at Substack or migrate to a different platform. I am not thrilled with the company’s response to questions about content moderation, but I’m also unsure whether I want to spend the time migrating to a new platform. If I were to migrate, I would have to start charging as the best alternatives are not free to use. For that matter, I still have not decided whether I will charge for this newsletter, but I still welcome pledges, not least to help me gauge the demand. As always, many thanks to those who have already signed up to read these posts.

1. On the “stickiness” of the factions and other LDP institutions, Elliss Krauss and Robert Pekkanen’s The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP is essential.