Japanese Elections

Report Outline
Period of Political Transition
Japanese-American Relations
Japan's Role as World Trader
Special Focus

Period of Political Transition

Significance of Elections Due This Month

Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, scarred by scandal and weakened by last December's elections, faces another test at the polls July 10. At stake are half of the seats in the 252-member House of Councillors, the upper house of parliament—the Diet—where the Liberal Democrats hold a bare majority. The party, a collection of moderate conservative factions, has controlled Japanese politics uninterruptedly since 1955 but has been losing support for several years. It failed to win a working majority last December in the House of Representatives, the lower and more powerful house. That forced the resignation of Prime Minister Takeo Miki, and only the support of 11 conservative independents enabled a longtime leader in the party, Takeo Fukuda, to form a government.

Even if the Liberal Democrats now lose their tenuous control of the upper house, as is freely being predicted, the new government that emerges will almost certainly still be led by them. However, they would be quite dependent on allies in other conservative parties or in the ranks of independents to govern effectively. True coalition government may be in the offing in Japan after more than two decades of one-party rule.

The party's slippage from dominance in recent years has been traced to many causes. The Lockheed scandal, Japan's Watergate, was one of them. Another is a change in the public reaction to Japan's economic successes since World War II. As measured by gross national product, Japan is the third richest country in the world, behind only the United States and Russia. And it is second only to the United States in the amount of world trade it conducts. Rebounding from the war's physical and psychological devastation, Japan wrought the “economic miracle,” making itself the only country in Asia ever to become a major force in the modern world's economy.