A Second Look at Political Reform The Future Course of a Changing Japanese State

Political reform has been a focal point of Japanese politics since the late 1980s. Its

target included many institutions, covering almost all the public spheres. It comprehensively

transformed and continues to reform the Japanese polity. While institutional

changes were almost complete by the early 2000s, they do not become the

past. Currently we see their results and effects in daily political processes. For

example, we find words such as "prime ministerial rule (shusho shihai)" and

"prime minister's office leadership (Kantei shud¿)" in many forms of news coverage

today. Such terms were seldom used for the description and analysis of

policymaking processes in postwar Japan before the 1990s.

It should be noted that many industrialized countries tackled comprehensive

reforms of political institutions between the late 1980s and early 2000s. France

shortened the presidential tenure by constitutional reform in 2002 to prevent cohabitation,

a salient political phenomenon in the 1980s and the 1990s. Italy introduced a

new rule for the lower house election, which was a mixed (parallel) system of the

single-member district one and proportional representation (SMD-PR) in 1994, in

order to establish a more competitive relationship between two major parties or party

alliances. A similar electoral system was also adopted in New Zealand in 1996,

which was aimed rather at having more diverse parties in legislature. There was

clearly a major trend towards changing electoral rules as well as the roles and tenures

of the chief executives. We can easily add more cases such as Korea and Taiwan on

the list.

Accordingly, political reforms in Japan should be understood not only in the

context of postwar Japanese history with its changing socioeconomic and international

environment, but also in connection with the trend shared by other industrialized

nations. While this book does concern itself with the continuities and

discontinuities from the pre-reform Japanese politics, relying, as it does, largely on

works in Japanese, it is always conscious of the connection with theoretical frameworks

for analyzing political reforms in the industrialized countries.