Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 2 (Summer 2000)

 

The Logic of Japanese Politics: Leaders, Institutions, and the Limits of Change
By Gerald Curtis. New York, Columbia University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Dennis Patterson

 

The 1990s represent arguably the most important decade in the history of postwar Japan, because during this period the political and economic features that came to define that country changed dramatically. In 1993, the Liberal Democratic party (LDP), after heading all governments for the previous thirty-eight years, was forced into temporary opposition, and in the 1990s Japan experienced its worst economic crisis since it rebuilt itself and evolved into the world's second largest economy. These watershed events are worthy of scholarly attention in and of themselves, but they demand explanation for one other reason. In the late 1980s, a revisionist view of Japan emerged, particularly in the worlds of journalism and policy, which constructed Japanese politics and economics in a way that, if true, precluded the events of the 1990s from ever happening.

Explaining Japan in the 1990s is essential for understanding that important nation's past and future, and the latest book by Columbia University political scientist Gerald Curtis is directed to the political side of this task. As is the case with his earlier work on postwar Japanese politics, Curtis's attempt to explain this important decade reflects not only his intimate knowledge of Japan but also his sharp instincts for politics in general and how that process should be understood.

This is evident from the beginning of the book, with its emphasis on the roles played by Japan's political actors in this drama and with Curtis's scrupulous attention to the contexts that helped define the political events that unfolded. These characteristics can be found in Curtis's treatments of all the significant events of the 1990s; and even for those of us who watch Japanese politics through field research and its many vernacular sources of information, there is still much that can be learned by reading this instructive book.

Consider, for example, Curtis's discussion of the political struggles that led ultimately to the LDP being tossed out of power for the first time in thirty-eight years. While the LDP's problem of containing its factional disputes is well known, the details involved in the events that led individuals like Ozawa Ichiro and Hata Tsutomu to bolt the party and form a new party (the Japan Renewal party) that would ultimately join in coalition against the LDP is illuminated in a way that has generally not been done. This is not simply because Curtis provides more details to the story than others have, but rather because his insights into the conflict that existed between such individuals as Kajiyama Seiroku, who ". . . led the forces in the Takeshita faction opposed to letting Ozawa or one of his associates occupy the post of faction chairman" (p. 190), and Ozawa tell the story more completely than has been done before.

Curtis's discussion of the creation of Japan's new election system is equally as effective. He begins with the idea that electoral reform in Japan is not a new issue, something he brings to light not only by his discussion of all of Japan's past election systems but also by his attention to electoral reform efforts that occurred throughout the postwar period, particularly the "Electoral-System Advisory Council created by Diet legislation in 1961." Curtis explains that this council was convened seven times and then abandoned until it was resurrected in 1989, when the issue of election system change came to encompass the larger issue of political reform in the wake of that period's political scandals. Curtis also is quite persuasive in his argument that the whole idea of election system reform was oversold to the Japanese public and as such led to a very negative reaction in the aftermath of the 1996 election.

Because Japanese politics in the 1990s is such an interesting and important subject, one wishes that Curtis would have spent more time with some topics and less time with others. An example of the former concerns the drawing of Japan's new district boundaries, which is dealt with in three paragraphs and does not cover the important political drama that guided the placing of incumbents in new districts. The overwhelming majority of candidates who stood for election under the new rules in 1996 did so in the sections of their old districts where they were strongest electorally. Also, where there were conflicts and an incumbent could not be accommodated, that candidate was generally allowed to run on at or near the top of his or her party's list in the proportional representation district that subsumed that new single member district.

Concerning the latter, there is an underlying theme in this book that plays like a leitmotif at different times in each of the book's chapters. This theme is addressed to the discipline of political science at large, especially those scholars who work in the rational choice tradition, and involves Curtis's message that Japan's political drama of the 1990s cannot be understood through the use of such methods. The problem here is not that Curtis has in a sense used Japan as a laboratory to speak to the discipline at large. Indeed, this is a commendable effort. Rather, the problem is that so much of what he criticizes is not rational choice but a caricature of that approach, and the evidence he offers in support of his criticisms often substantiates the view he criticizes. Because the book is otherwise a well written and argued discussion of Japanese politics in the 1990s, Curtis's time would have been better spent staying with the issues that advance his overall interpretation of Japanese politics.

Dennis P. Patterson
Michigan State University