Takashi Oka - Policy Entrepreneurship and Elections in Japan: A Political Biogaphy of Ozawa Ichirō

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Policy Entrepreneurship
and Elections in Japan

A political biography of Ozawa Ichiro

Takashi Oka

First published 2011
by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 Takashi Oka

The right of Takashi Oka to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Oka, Takashi, 1924
Policy entrepreneurship and elections in Japan : a political biography of Ozawa Ichiro / by Takashi Oka.

p. cm. -- (The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese studies series ; 79) Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

(ebook) 1. Ozawa, Ichiro, 1942- 2. Ozawa, Ichiro, 1942---Political and social views. 3. Ozawa, Ichiro, 1942---Influence. 4. Politicians--Japan--Biography.

5. Japan--Politics and government--1989- 6. Japan--Politics and government--1945-1989. 7. Political parties--Japan. 8. Elections--Japan. I. Title.

DS890.O93O37 2011

328.52092--dc22

[B]

2010046624

ISBN 978-0-415-58752-5 (hbk)

ISBN 978-0-203-81736-0 (ebk)

Contents

Tables

Preface

Ozawa Ichiro was a senior member of the Takeshita faction when I met him for the first time in October 1987. Takeshita Noboru was then one of three candidates to succeed Nakasone Yasuhiro, the outgoing Prime Minister. Mr Nakasone was expected to make his choice in the very near future, and Mr Ozawa had organized a press conference in the annex of the Akasaka Prince Hotel for Mr Takeshita to meet the international media. I attended the press conference in my professional capacity as Tokyo correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, and remember being struck by the directness and frankness of Mr Ozawas introductory remarks. Soon thereafter, Mr Takeshita received Mr Nakasones recommendation to become the next Prime Minister, and Mr Ozawa became Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary in the Takeshita cabinet a position roughly equivalent to Deputy Chief of Staff. Unlike most of his predecessors, Mr Ozawa agreed to meet informally with a group of us who spoke Japanese, and these meetings, generally at twomonth intervals, continued throughout the Takeshita prime ministership, which lasted until June 1989.

Some years later, when I had retired from the Monitor, Mr Ozawa asked me to accompany him to Washington and to interpret for him during meetings with former President George H.W. Bush, Vice-President Albert Gore, House Speaker Tom Foley and other American officials. I also interpreted a speech he gave at the National Press Club. This led to my becoming Staff Director of the International Department of the New Frontier Party (Shinshinto) on its establishment in December 1994. After the party was dissolved and the much smaller Liberal Party was formed in January 1998, I worked for the new party, first in Tokyo, then as its Washington representative until October 2001, when I became a full-time graduate student at Oxford University (St Antonys College). My thesis, which was completed in 2008, was a political biography of Mr Ozawa from 1987 to 2007. In this book, I have extended the biography to September 2009, when his party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), won a landslide victory over the long-ruling LDP.

My motive for embarking on the thesis, which I subsequently turned into this book, was as follows: On one hand many of my Japanese colleagues regard Mr Ozawa as the very embodiment of the power politics characteristic of the Takeshita faction and its predecessor, the faction created and led for many years by Tanaka Kakuei, Prime Minister from 197274. On the other hand, there are also Japanese of various backgrounds who look on Mr Ozawa as a genuine reformer who has worked to change the whole context and dynamics of politics in Japan. Personally, I found Mr Ozawas advocacy of individualism strikingly unusual for a Japanese politician, and was curious to find out where and how the trait originated.

That is why, first in the thesis, and now in this book, I have posed my principal research question in the form of hypothesis and counter-hypothesis. Is Ozawa Ichiro a genuine reformer, a policy entrepreneur who uses critical junctures as defined by John W. Kingdon to push forward the policies he advocates?1 Or is he a power broker who cloaks himself in the garments of reform while he pursues naked power?

I am grateful to many individuals who shared their insights and perspectives with me. First, I am deeply appreciative of Mr Ozawa, who is not naturally a patient man, but who consented to many interviews, formal and informal, before and during the writing of this book. Next, the late Lord Weatherill, whom I first met when he was a junior minister in the Heath government, guided me through the intricacies of British parliamentary procedures, then and during his nine-year tenure as Speaker of the House of Commons.

The greatest debt I owe is to the supervisor of this thesis Professor J.A.A. Stockwin, who helped me turn the idea with which I started into an acceptable thesis. He has the patience of several Jobs, and rescued me out of each conceptual and methodological hole into which I had dug myself. And I can never express enough gratitude to my wife Hiroko, without whose stalwart support, both moral and logistic, in sickness and in health, I would never have completed this project.

John W. Kingdon, 1984, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies.

Foreword

How politics is conducted in Japan has gone through a lengthy, painful, but nevertheless fundamental transformation over the two decades from 1990 to 2010. General elections held in August 2009 broke the half century of near monopoly of power by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and placed in power the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which had come together as a single party a mere thirteen years earlier, attracting later accretions. The central figure promoting and organizing a reform agenda over these twenty erratic years of change, regression and further change has been a controversial, canny, manipulative, difficult, fallible, far-sighted strategist and political thinker called Ozawa. He has never become Prime Minister (though he could have been), and has therefore attracted rather less attention outside Japan than his rival, Koizumi (a different type of reformer), who was Prime Minister for five and a half years between 2001 and 2006.

In this, the first political biography of Ozawa to be published in English, the veteran journalist and observer of Japanese politics, Dr Takashi Oka, brings years of research experience to bear on the career of this most extraordinary of politicians. Dr Oka has had unusually frequent access to his subject, both in formal interviews and informal contacts, for instance over a long train journey conducive to the expression of frank opinions. He identifies a divide among Ozawa-watchers between two schools: first those, including much of the mass media, who see him as still mired in the old-style, money-centred politics of the LDP, and therefore essentially concerned to maximize his own power; and second, those who focus on his strategic thinking and intellectual qualities, especially his perception that Japans political system was stuck in a time warp and that determined leadership was needed in order to lift it into new and creative modes of operation. He is inclined towards the second school, without entirely denying elements of the first.

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