The Enigma of Japanese Power (33 page)

The management of ‘truth’ in Japan often involves a set of not just two but three or four layers of reality among which highly placed participants in the System wriggle towards their goals. A spectacular example of this is provided by a mock political battle that will also serve to illustrate further some of the crucial relationships in recent political history described in Chapter 5.

In October and November 1983 Japan went through a ‘political crisis’. It began with the verdict of the Tokyo district court finding political boss Tanaka Kakuei guilty in connection with the Lockheed bribery scandal, and climaxed in a 47-day opposition boycott of parliament and a vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Nakasone.

Tanaka appealed against the verdict and left it at that. The rules say nothing about resigning from parliament under such circumstances, but the opposition raised a hue and cry because Tanaka did not make this symbolic gesture. It demanded that an unprecedented motion for his dismissal be discussed, and when Nakasone rejected this the minority parties walked out, paralysing the Diet.

Tanaka, it should be remembered, was not a member of Nakasone’s party. He had resigned from the LDP seven years previously, the top managers of the LDP having concluded that it would not look good to have an indicted bribery suspect in their ranks. To be corrupt is one thing; to be tapped on the shoulder by the public prosecutor is quite another. Yet, as we have seen, Tanaka had more control over the LDP than any of its real members had ever had, and had already selected three prime ministers. Nakasone, who owed his position to Tanaka, found himself in a quandary. Parliamentary boycotts undermine the prestige of Japanese prime ministers, since containing an unruly opposition is one of the few ways in which they are allowed to show leadership. Moreover, Nakasone urgently needed to have a number of laws passed. But even aside from his sense of indebtedness to Tanaka, he wanted to remain prime minister and knew that his chances of doing so, even until the end of the year, would be close to nil if Tanaka decided to withdraw his support. Hence he could not bring an end to the parliamentary crisis by simply giving in to the opposition.

The tensely awaited solution finally came when the obstreperous minority parties agreed to a compromise. They would table a no-confidence motion against the prime minister – which is one way of letting people know that they too have power. Nakasone ‘accepted’ this oppositionist plan to introduce a no-confidence motion against himself, in exchange for the opposition promise not ritually to object to the pending bills. It did not matter that opposition Diet members were absent from the sessions during which the laws were put to a vote, since they were no longer officially boycotting. Their votes would not have made any difference anyway; what mattered was their having formally called off their boycott. Nor were there any rules prohibiting the LDP from voting while the boycott was on. But in this case the minority parties would have screamed about the ‘dictatorship of the majority’, which would have had an unfortunate effect on public opinion – or (another sub-layer of reality) what the press would tell its readers their opinion should be.

This brief trip through Japan’s political wonderland shows, first of all, that the formal rules of parliamentary democracy have no relevance at all. If they had been followed there would have been no crisis; there could have been no conflict regarding Tanaka’s remaining in the Diet, and the LDP majority could at any time have voted on as many bills as it pleased. But this was only the beginning of the farce of competing ‘realities’.

The compromise between the opposition and Nakasone was the formal reality as portrayed by the media. Press commentators almost uniformly showed Nakasone as reluctantly agreeing to it. According to this version of reality, the elections that followed the no-confidence motion and the dissolution of the Lower House were not in line with the prime minister’s original plans. This generally accepted interpretation, however, contradicted numerous bits of leaked information, carried earlier in the same newspapers but now apparently forgotten, that indicated preparations on a large scale for elections in connection with an early parliamentary dissolution.

The manipulators of the journalistic chorus had thus done Nakasone a great favour. His biggest problem had been how to create the impression in the public eye that he was distancing himself from Tanaka, without Tanaka getting the same idea. Furthermore, by giving in to the opposition he had demonstrated how ‘democratic’ he was. And on top of this he found himself blessed with the early elections that he had been planning all along. To sum up: beneath the outer political forms, there exists a semiofficial reality of expected ritual behaviour. Beneath this again, there is the true reality of power relations. The reality of these is in turn further scrambled by reporters who love to ‘expose’ real (and supposedly unseen) motives. The press, in the process, unwittingly distorts these motives since it, too, often ends up being manipulated.

One of the most telling episodes of recent Japanese political history, one in which the press helped establish a formal reality created by LDP bosses, was the ousting of Miki Takeo from the prime ministership in late 1976. According to the official version, Miki quit to ‘take responsibility’ for the loss the LDP had suffered in the elections that had just ended. This sounded reasonable, since Japanese prime ministers are expected to take symbolic responsibility for failures they have had nothing to do with, just as they bask in the glory of achievements that are not theirs.

This time, however, there was nothing reasonable about it. True, the Lockheed scandal had that year damaged the LDP more severely than any other post-war scandal, but Miki’s incumbency had helped more than anything else to control the damage. For much of the year, the Japanese press had urged the LDP to engage in public soul-searching concerning its ‘ethics’ and had applauded Miki (‘Mr Clean’) for taking this seriously. It was widely agreed that the LDP would have lost much more heavily in the elections had Miki not been at the helm during the preceding year.

The true reason why Miki had to resign was entirely different. Heavy guns had been trained on him within the LDP ever since Tanaka’s arrest, which Miki had done nothing to avert. Shiina Etsusaburo, the kingmaker responsible for Miki’s prime ministership, implicitly accused him of un-Japanese behaviour by saying that ‘Miki has no inkling of others’ feelings’. Terrified lest his ‘reformist zeal’ tempt him to further ‘excesses’, leading figures in the LDP established a ‘council to achieve party solidarity’ (
Kyoto-kyo
) to work for Miki’s dismissal. Under its auspices, Ohira Masayoshi and Fukuda Takeo were prevailed upon to cease the rivalry that had been the only reason for choosing Miki as prime minister in the first place. They made a deal settling the order in which they would become prime minister, after which for Miki to hang on as prime minister would have meant an almost certain split in the LDP. Unwilling to take the responsibility, and missing the chance to reintroduce a two-party system, he pulled back after a formula for changing intra-party election rules had been accepted, thus allowing him to save face. After some nine months of cheering Miki on and encouraging him to clean up Japanese politics, the press played the major role in creating the reality in which Miki resigned to take responsibility for the electoral misfortune.

In the uniformity of its interpretations of events, the Japanese press has the power to manufacture expedient ‘realities’ that would suggest a comparison with the controlled press of the communist world if it were not that the latter is far less successful in convincing foreign observers.

The Japanese press is the major source of information and misinformation about Japan. It has more influence on the dispatches of Tokyo-based foreign correspondents than the local press has on correspondents in other major capitals. Only the specialist in one fairly narrow subject can afford to rely solely on non-journalistic sources; generalists must depend on the Japanese media for a great deal of information about a number of relatively inaccessible fields in which they cannot possibly have enough first-hand knowledge, no matter how good their language skill or how hard-working their assistants. The same applies to even the best-equipped embassies and foreign firms.

Foreign journalists, diplomats and businessmen tend to trust the information given in Japanese newspapers because of its very uniformity. There is nothing like an air of unanimity concerning political events, of conveying the ‘voice of the people’, for creating a convincing air of portraying reality. Basically, the outside world receives its picture of Japan through one filter and, because the Japanese press is not followed with the suspicious scrutiny it deserves, that picture is often very misleading.

Take, for example, the coverage of the elections of December 1983, following the no-confidence motion and the dissolution of the Lower House that ended the ‘crisis’ described above. In its editorial comment and much of its reporting, the Japanese press ascribed the LDP’s loss of thirty-six seats to popular discontent with the way in which the government had handled ‘political ethics’. Editorials in major newspapers throughout the rest of the world were perhaps less adamant on the subject, but most referred to a supposed ‘Tanaka burden’ which Nakasone was forced to shoulder, or uttered platitudes about public reaction to corruption in the ruling party. In fact, neither ‘political ethics’ nor Nakasone’s policies affected voter support for the LDP in any significant way. There had been a 2 per cent drop in the share of the vote for the LDP, but this correlated with the extraordinarily low turn-out (always disadvantageous to the LDP) due to weather conditions. The irony left unexplained by the Japanese press was that those candidates associated with Tanaka’s critics had fared much worse than those associated with Tanaka.

When the press refers unanimously to the Lower House elections as a ‘stern verdict on Nakasone’s reluctant stance to restore political ethics among his party members’, it describes a reality that has been agreed upon. A few articles in serious monthly magazines make feeble attempts to place cause and effect in a logical relationship, but by the time they appear the reality is no longer open for discussion.

Nakasone would have been howled at if he had tried to explain, with concrete figures, that the conclusion of the media was wrong. The artificial reality had become too firmly established for that. The LDP, which must also formally subscribe to the press-endorsed reality, got back at the jubilant minority parties by presenting its umpteenth (phoney) plan for ‘establishing political ethics’. Amidst all the management of reality, to feign contrition is the ideal way to give the voter an impression of ‘sincerity’.

The press role in the management of reality may be to the disadvantage of certain groups of administrators, but it is always to the advantage of other groups: in the above episode, the many enemies of Tanaka and Nakasone within the LDP.

Deference to the artificial reality that props up the System is habitual among newspaper editors. During the closing months of 1987 the steep increase in land prices caused by speculating corporations, and the activities of the gangster-affiliated
jiageya
who intimidated tenants into leaving their homes and owners into selling their property, became an embarrassing problem. The government was taken to task, also in the press, for not doing anything about it. But in January 1988 the problem vanished from the pages of the newspapers to make room for reports on how the government was planning to move the capital, and in that process alleviate the land price problem. About every ten to fifteen years plans for moving a number of government offices and universities out of Tokyo (or for constructing a new capital at the foot of Mount Fuji) get an airing in the press, and again in 1988 not a soul in government had any intention of carrying them through. But the press, rather than pursue the original and very pressing problem of land prices, helped spread an illusion among the public that something was being done.

There are numerous other instances in which the media help the administrators give the illusion of guarding the public interest. Take their reaction when, in January 1988, the Osaka district public prosecutor’s office decided that a ‘political donation’ was a bribe. The victim of its selective judgement was an Upper House member, Tashiro Fujiro, of the Komeito (a party with a ‘clean image’), who was indicted on charges of having accepted ten million yen in return for official favours. To LDP heavyweights with connections in the construction business, ten million yen is a mere pittance. The Komeito member’s sin was to have accepted the money in exchange for a recommendation to the Transport Ministry, on behalf of the national federation of private gravel- and stone-shippers’ co-operatives, for a partial revision of certain measures that discriminated against members of the federation. It should be remembered here that such a federation cannot take any ministry to court; that to mediate in such cases is an accepted task of the Japanese politician; and that if no LDP member can be found to do this, a well-connected member of a minority party will do. Nevertheless, the opposition politician resigned his Upper House seat and, while fervently protesting his innocence and emphasising that the money had been a political contribution, also made a big show of apologising for not fulfilling his ‘ethical responsibility’. Had he not done so, the newspapers would have unleashed the full force of their indignation upon him. The obvious question as to why exactly the public prosecutor suddenly saw fit to ruin the career of an opposition Diet member failed to stir journalistic instincts. Instead, the press carried the usual homilies about the need for self-reflection among politicians. Editorials explaining that such things cannot be tolerated in Japan deceive the public knowingly. Not only are they tolerated, but uncountable transactions of the same type, involving ten or a hundred times more money, form the substantial reality upon which, as we saw in Chapter 5, Japan’s entire political system is based.

The degree of transparency in manipulating reality varies. When the news went around the world that Prime Minister Suzuki Zenko had taken the drastic step of forming a new cabinet ‘in order better to deal with international trade problems’, everyone with any experience saw at once that this was nonsense. Cabinet reshuffles are routine affairs, taking place about once a year for the purpose of rewarding LDP parliamentarians with the ministerial posts they crave. The new set of ministers chosen by Suzuki had no intention of tackling international issues in any different manner from their predecessors; in the unlikely event that any individual among them had any such intention, he could never have carried it out.

The frequent discussions within the LDP about the need to dissolve the
habatsu
(the cliques of which the party is a coalition) are another case in point. Because the
habatsu
are considered the cause of much political corruption, many plans have been announced to do away with them. In the late 1970s some cliques actually announced their dissolution, with the newspapers printing photographs of
habatsu
offices being vacated. But an experienced observer would know that to take the
habatsu
out of the LDP would be like taking the skeleton out of a living body.

In many areas, however, the management of reality has made accurate analysis difficult or impossible, with the result that much generally accepted history is unreliable. Even well-informed Japanese journalists (who are generally highly specialised) tend to suppress their privileged knowledge of events in favour of an officially agreed-upon reality. There are many political and diplomatic events, even within recent memory, of which the true facts will never become generally known, despite the fact that they are accessible to a number of Japanese observers outside the diplomatic and political circles that want to keep them hidden.