Chikuma Shinsho 1176 Meisō suru Minsyusyugi (Democracy Off Course)

As a sequel to Democracy Transfigured (2008), also published by Chikuma Shinsho, this book examines the 2009 transition of governmental power to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the party’s failures, and the meaning of the subsequent return to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from a democratic viewpoint. This change in government drew great expectations from the media and political scientists, who hoped to see the emergence of fundamental alternatives to the LDP’s one-party rule and bureaucratic control, which had until then been regarded as the cause of Japan’s ineffective politics. However, shortly after assuming power, the new government fell into disarray and quickly lost support. Nevertheless, the reasons for the reorganization’s failure remain largely uninvestigated. This book studies the reasons for this failure from the standpoint of political thought while reexamining the principles of democracy.
 
As a premise to discussing Japanese democracy, Part I explores situations around the world in which democracy is in trouble. On the one hand, democracy is falling into a state of incompetence due to the neoliberal justification of the unfettered expansion of capitalism. On the other hand, because of such difficulties, there is a growing tendency to think of democracy as the willingness to grant free rein to any strong leader bearing promises, and against this background of populism and its excesses, to consider democracy dangerous. The following sections tackle the question of whether it is possible to overcome these two issues.
 
Beginning with a brief outline of the political history of postwar Japan and a description of the ideas that guided subsequent political reforms, Part II addresses the 2009 change in government as the main theme, examining the issue from the angle of political thought. This book takes the position that a historical examination of Japan’s postwar politics is essential to any investigation of thinking that underlies regime change and political reform. From this point of view, the book explains the chronology of the so-called “1955 system,” as well as the Cold War regime and the demise of economic growth, which served as conditions for the justification of this system’s fluctuating political reforms. Part II also discusses events that occurred during reform governments, including the Hosokawa administration of the 1990s, Koizumi’s LDP administration in the early 2000s, and the DPJ government of 2009. Next, the politics of the 2009 DPJ administration are considered in terms of policy and influence, the politics that connect them, and why they collapsed in a short period of time. Based on this, the factors that make up democratic politics such as deliberation, decision-making, coordination, and governance are analyzed, and the conditions of multifaceted democracy are problematized.
 
Part III discusses the cultural conditions that support democracy and their modern transformation from a different perspective. The achievements and limitations of post-materialist politics are covered, including problems posed to democracy by changes in knowledge representative of the Internet society, and the relationship between internationalization and nationalism. Here, the main focus is on issues that arose after the return to the LDP.
 
This book takes an idiosyncratic standpoint in which democracy is not just a matter of politics; rather, it must be explored within wider economic, cultural, and intellectual contexts, which is why Shinsho wrote this book from a standpoint that diverges from political science.
 

(Written by MORI Masatoshi , Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2017)