To Mushasi: Japan's Political System

Johnson's recapitulation of modern Japan's government institutions is
well summarised. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. It should
temper your claims about a superior Japanese democratic system of
government and of your public's perception of the subject.



Abstract from:
Peddling democracy the US way
By Chalmers Johnson
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HE04Aa01.html


One might well ask, however: what about the case of Japan? Bush has
repeatedly cited our allegedly successful installation of democracy
there after World War II as evidence of our skill in this kind of
activity. What this experience proved, he contended, was that we would
have little difficulty implanting democracy in Iraq. As it happens
though, General Douglas MacArthur, who headed the American occupation
of defeated Japan from 1945 to 1951, was himself essentially a
dictator, primarily concerned with blocking genuine democracy from
below in favor of hand-picked puppets and collaborators from the
pre-war Japanese establishment.

When a country loses a war as crushingly as Japan did the war in the
Pacific, it can expect a domestic revolution against its wartime
leaders. In accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration,
which Japan accepted in surrendering, the State Department instructed
MacArthur not to stand in the way of a popular revolution, but when it
began to materialize he did so anyway.

He chose to keep Hirohito, the wartime emperor, on the throne (where
he remained until his death in 1989) and helped bring officials from
the industrial and militarist classes that ruled wartime Japan back to
power. Except for a few months in 1993 and 1994, those conservatives
and their successors have ruled Japan continuously since 1949. Japan
and China are today among the longest-lived single-party regimes on
earth, both parties - the nucleus of the Liberal Democratic Party and
the Chinese Communist Party - having come to power in the same year.

Equally important in the Japanese case, MacArthur's headquarters
actually wrote the quite democratic constitution of 1947 and bestowed
it on the Japanese people under circumstances in which they had no
alternative but to accept it. In her 1963 book On Revolution, Hannah
Arendt stresses "the enormous difference in power and authority
between a constitution imposed by a government upon a people and the
constitution by which a people constitutes its own government." She
notes that, in post-World War I Europe, virtually every case of an
imposed constitution led to dictatorship or to a lack of power,
authority and stability.

Although public opinion certainly matters in Japan, its democratic
institutions have never been fully tested. The Japanese public knows
that its constitution was bestowed by its conqueror, not generated
from below by popular action. Japan's stability depends greatly on the
ubiquitous presence of the United States, which supplies the national
defense - and so, implicitly, the fairly evenly distributed wealth -
that gives the public a stake in the regime. But the Japanese people,
as well as those of the rest of East Asia, remain fearful of Japan's
ever again being on its own in the world.

While more benign than the norm, Japan's government is typical of the
US record abroad in one major respect. Successive American
administrations have consistently favored oligarchies that stand in
the way of broad popular aspirations - or movements toward nationalist
independence from American control.

In Asia, in the post-World War II period, we pursued such
anti-democratic policies in South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand,
Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam), and Japan. In Japan, in order
to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls,
which seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to
the representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party.

We helped bring wartime minister of munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power
as prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and
financing a rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the
conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against the
renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. Rather than
developing as an independent democracy, Japan became a docile Cold War
satellite of the United States - and one with an extremely inflexible
political system at that.

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