Case notes
Japan Restoration Party/ Japan Innovation Party
The only national Japanese party that could be considered populist by the dataset’s standards is the Japan Restoration Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai, JRP). JRP was is the national successor to the Osaka Restoration Party (Osaka Ishin no Kai, also translated “One Osaka Party”) (Jou 2015), both built around then Mayor of Osaka and former Governor of Osaka Prefecture, Tōru Hashimoto. Hashimoto is a former television personality and lawyer who split from the dominant Liberal Democratic Party to run successfully for Governor in 2007. ORP was a regionalist party with a neoliberal reformist agenda. As his national brand grew, he created the JRO as a merger of the ORP with the nationalist Sunrise Movement of Tokyo Governor Shintarou Ishihara before the 2012 election. While Ishihara was technically the leader of the national party, most analyses seem to consider Hashimoto to have been the “face of the party during the election” (R. J. Pekkanen and Reed 2016, 66), and the continuity of the Ishin name suggests as much. The party did surprisingly well, leading some to consider it a brief “third force” in Japanese politics (Komatsu 2017, 165). Note that the English name “restoration” was chosen by the party, but Ishin actually means “innovation” in Japanese (Kobori 2013, 108), and some literature refers to the party as the Japanese Innovation Party. To complicate matters, when Hashimoto pulled his faction out of the JRF following strategic disputes with Ishihara’s Tokyo wing of the party, the new party he founded was called the “Japan Innovation Party” (JIP) (Fahey et al. 2021, 319). This party stood in the subsequent 2014 elections, and although a new party, evidence suggests that Hashimoto absorbed the newly merged faction into his own operation more than vice versa, and hence we’ve considered it a continuation of the JRP in the dataset (except on CHARISMA, as discussed below). Hashimoto’s popularity declined following the 2014 election, and after his signature policy of uniting Osaka prefecture and Osaka city was defeated in a referendum in 2015, he announced he would leave politics.
Hashimoto’s populism was rooted in his harsh and acerbic criticism of the political class. His primary antagonists in this regard were national political parties, bureaucrats, and unions (Jou 2015, 149), as well as local councils and academics (Yoshida, 2019:3). His success was due to the “theatrical” (Klein 2015, 3) way in which he berated his opponents with “sometimes-violent criticisms” (Yoshida 2020, 3) “especially before television crews” (Weathers 2014, 82) and on social media (Fahey et al. 2021, 327). This rhetoric accused government employees (probably his main “other”) of not caring about their jobs (Weathers 2014, 82), of being overpaid (Kobori 2013, 112), and of being “termites of public finance” (Pons 2012). Further to these insults, he repeatedly claimed or implied that public servants actively and intentionally maintained the status quo for their own material interest (Kobori 2013, 112; Ichihara 2021, 92). Likewise, he claimed that politicians in the major parties were untrustworthy, suggesting before the 2011 Osaka Prefecture elections, for example, that “We can’t entrust things to Diet politicians. Isn’t it only the people of Osaka Prefecture who can get this country moving?” (Weathers 2014, 84). In 2012 he campaigned on the slogan “If you are fed up with the two major parties, vote JRP” (Reed 2013, 81). This anti-politician message has led many observers to consider him and the JRP “anti-establishment” (Lindgren 2015, 577). In Fahey’s words, Hashimoto “depicted politics as a good-versus-evil struggle between his reforms and the entrenched, self-serving bureaucrats and public servants,” (Fahey et al. 2021, 327). (OTH_POLCLASS = 3).
The party’s key ideological hallmarks were nationalism (Horiuchi 2014, 29; Jou 2015, 156) and neoliberalism (Weathers 2014; Lindgren 2015), due to which it is usually considered to be right-wing (Kobori 2013, 117; Chiavacci 2022, 127) (LRPOSITION = R). Other than the political class and state bureaucrats, other “others” in Hashimoto’s and the JRP’s discourse are somewhat more difficult to clarify. His nationalism was not “hard core” in the mould of Ishihara (Horiuchi 2014, 29), but by the time of the 2012 election the JRP was clearly a hawkish anti-China party which mobilised heavily around the sensitive Senkaku Islands issue (Horiuchi 2014, 33). However, we have seen no evidence that the party accused domestic rivals of being loyal to these foreign powers, and hence we’ve coded it 2 on OTH_FOREIGN.
Likewise, while some scholars have suggested that Hashimoto was something of a nativist (Lindgren 2015, 586), others have stressed that “despite his embrace of many nationalist views, Hashimoto strongly opposed xenophobic movements” (Fahey et al. 2021, 328–29). While he probably deserves a 1 on the OTH_ETHNIC and OTH_IMMIGRANT variables in his own right, JRP’s coding is complicated by its amalgamation with Ishihara’s hard right sunrise movement, which was known for harsher nativist rhetoric in this regard (Lindgren 2015). Owing to this we’ve coded the JRP 2 on both scales for 2012, but this could be revisited. Given that the JIP did not include Ishihara, we’ve reduced these variables to 1 in the 2014 election. JRP was clearly “pro-business” (Yoshida 2020, 3; see also Jou 2015, 150) and did not show any major hostility to the wealthy (OTH_FINANCIAL = 1) or the military (OTH_MILITARY = 1).
The ORP was clearly a “leader-defined party” (Jou 2015, 145). Numerous sources note that Hashimoto’s “aggressive and impatient political style” made him Japan’s “most popular politician” in 2012 (Weathers 2014, 77; see also Fahey et al. 2021, 327), and that he was notably “charismatic” (Horiuchi 2014, 29). However, the JRP being a merger with the Sunrise party again complicated the coding here for the 2012 election. Jou claims that this co-leadership model means that JRP cannot truly be considered a leader-defined party, even though Hashimoto’s charisma was a key reason why voters supported it (Jou 2015). Conversely, Reed (Reed 2013, 72) claims that the party didn’t really have a coherent policy profile, and that “personality” was a dominant reason why most of its voters supported it. While there may be a case to code it 2 on CHARISMA, we’ve coded it 3. However once the JIP formed for the 2014 election, Pekkanen and Reed suggest that it was new partner Kenji Eda, not Hashimoto, who was the “face of the party durin the election” R. J. Pekkanen and Reed 2016, 69), and hence we’ve reduced CHARISMA to 1 for that vote. Hashimoto was not a figure in previous national governments at the time of the 2012 or 2014 elections (INSIDER = 1).
Hashimoto pushed Japanese liberal democratic norms in several ways. Ideologically, he advocated what he called a “decisionist” ideal of political control (Kobori 2013, 114), where elected leaders (like him) would not be as constrained by checks on their power (Fahey et al. 2021, 327). “His distaste for institutions that limit executive power was clear” claims Fahey (Fahey et al. 2021, 327). On 30 June 2011, he notoriously said, “the most important thing in Japanese politics is dictatorship” (Kobori 2013, 114). He also abused the rights of government employees in Osaka by subjecting them to full body searches for tattoos (Kobori 2013, 113; Fahey et al. 2021, 328), and attempting to force them to complete a non-anonymised questionnaire about their political affiliations and activities (Kobori 2013, 112). In addition not this he aggressively denounced media outlets critical of this administration (Fahey et al. 2021, 327; Yamakoshi 2019, 12). All of this led him to labelled “hashizumu” by some critics – a portmanteau of his name and fashizumu (fascism) (Weathers 2014, 83). While this is clearly evidence of threats to liberal democratic norms, we don’t feel that it quite rises to 3 on the LIBDEMNORMS scale (= 2).
Not included
The nature of the Japanese Socialist Party (JPA) is not really populist, and the same can be said of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). Like other socialist parties worldwide, their platform is predominantly ideological and issues-based, even if they imply a kind of anti-elitism in their economic policy. In the case of the JPA, the two issues that are arguably its raison d'etre are the evils of free-market capitalism and militarism. The party did dilute its socialist rhetoric as time went on, however, dropping its comittment to socialist revolution in 1989. But this was more acquiesence to the political estabilishment than response to some bubbling populist sentiment. The JCP, on the other hand, has remained steadfastly ideological. It did express willingness in 2016 to form a coalition with the Democratic Party to challenge the dominance of the LDP/Kometio coalition, but the leader of the DP rejected the possiblity due to the JCP being too far left.
The growth of the Democratic Party through the 2000s into government in 2009 has been called populist by some, but this is only really so because of how staid and conservative Japanese politics is generally under LDP dominant part rule. Several actors within the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have been considered populist. The first is Jun'ichiro Koizumi emerged at a time when severe economic downturn reduced the public's faith in the political establishment and the bureaucracy (Kato 2018). He ran on a neo-liberal reformist platform (advocating privatisations of key sectors) and assailing the more patrimonial bosses in the LDP, against whom he commanded deep member-based support. While Koizumi often used terms that might be considered populist, and occasionally hit touchstone nationalist issues (like visiting the Yasukuni shrine), his style seems to have more in common with a Ronald Reagan-style outsider politician reformer (Otake 2009; Fahey et al. 2021), and not a populist as we define the term. According to Otake, he avoided “highly inflammatory” rhetoric while criticising his opponents (cited in Weathers 2014, 82), contrasting him with populists like Hashimoto and Ishihara. Likewise, Koizumi's successor Shinzo Abe has a strong nationalist streak similar to far-right populist parties, but not one that could render him or the LDP categorically populist under his leadership. Interestingly, it seems that Abe's ability to command this nationalist flank is the reason why far right groups don't get much traction, even though several very small ones have emerged of late. The Komeito Party (both the original and the New Komeito) is tough to code because it defies conventional party typologies. There is a case to consider it a populist party because its mantra is the representation of “common people”, there’s no evidence that it engages in anti-elite rhetoric.
References
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