Japan's existing institutions could not harness the particularism, corruption, and inefficiency that arise when political clientelism takes precedence over the general welfare. In 1993 international and domestic factors combined to topple the LDP's legislative hegemony and pave the way for institutional reforms. The end of the cold war deprived the LDP of the scant ideological glue of anticommunism, and deteriorating economic conditions promoted
dissatisfaction among voters and important business interests. Meanwhile, a succession of sensational political scandals made it impossible for LDP
leaders to continue to resist policial reform.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, signaling the end of cold war ideology, jolted mainstream conservative parties like the Christian
Democrats in Italy and the LDP in Japan.[13] With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, the Christian Democrat and LDP candidates lost their tenuous ideological ties to their respective parties. For both parties, a distaste for communism and a general avowal of capitalist democracy had been the only common ideological denominators. The end of the cold war also allowed the United States to re-evaluate its support of conservative regimes in Western- bloc countries. The Central Intelligence Agency had once funneled
clandestine funds to prop up the LDP, but now the Clinton administration felt the American interests would be better served by an open show of support for opposition parties advocating political reform.
Clear signs of domestic unrest had appeared in Japan during the mid-1980s.
Soaring land prices drove the cost of home ownership far beyond the means of the average urban salaried worker. A growing gap between haves and have-nots divided a society that had long perceived itself as a monolithic middle class. Taxpayers and consumers recognized the high cost of policies created to protect domestic inter-
― 143 ―
est groups—such as rice farmers, small shopkeepers, and construction contractors—and they complained that their standard of living and the country's level of infrastructure development were not as high as they should be. The expression "rich Japan, poor Japanese" gained popularity.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the widespread repugnance for American gaiatsu , public opinion polls showed that almost half of the Japanese people supported most or all of the U.S. government's demands in the SII talks (Nihon keizai shinbun , 27 Mar. 1990). In addition, the maturation of vital industries reduced the demand for government intervention, while a pronounced gap emerged between the needs and expectations of
internationally active firms and those with domestic spheres of interests. The turbulence caused by the bursting of the bubble economy and the onset of economic recession also undermined the political status quo (Ishi 1993;
Wood 1992).
Against this backdrop, an unprecedented succession of corruption scandals broke, in Japan and abroad.[14] Scandals were nothing new in Japan:
between 1975 and 1993 there was roughly one major political corruption exposé a year. As it happened, however, two of the most sensational—the Recruit scandal and the Sagawa affair—broke in the wake of the
international and domestic turbulence described above. The combined effect of an unpopular sales tax, opposition to agricultural liberalization, and the Recruit scandal contributed to the LDP's stunning setback in the 1989 Upper House elections, in which the party lost its absolute majority of seats. The LDP's precarious position in the Upper House obliged both the Kaifu cabinet and the subsequent Miyazawa cabinet to focus intensively on reform. As the intervals between scandals shortened and the extent of the exposés
broadened, the LDP could no longer pay lip service to reform. The party's leadership would actually have to attempt to do something.
Nevertheless, no one background factor was sufficient to motivate
fundamental institutional reform in Japan—or in Italy, for that matter. The Berlin Wall had fallen and Eastern Europe's communist regimes had
collapsed, but cold war tensions persisted in East Asia.[15] Although the economic turbulence that began in the late 1980s might have heightened fears of voter reprisal in Japan and Italy, both the LDP and the Christian Democrats had survived similar challenges in the past. And while the
Sagawa and zenekon scandals and the Mani Pulite investigations were highly sensational and involved major po-
― 144 ―
litical leaders, both regimes had weathered countless corruption incidents.
What was distinctive was the unprecedented magnitude of the Italian
scandal and the quick succession of the major Japanese scandals. Moreover, while the Italian electorate cast out the Christian Democratic rascals, the LDP emerged from the 1993 elections with one more seat than it had at the time the elections were called. That is to say, the fall of Japan's Liberal Democrats, which paved the way for the creation of a non-LDP coalition of reformers, was not dictated by disgruntled voters.
While diverse factors contributed to the timing of the collapse of single- party, hegemony and paved the way for political reform in Italy and Japan, the ultimate force for change was structural. [16] The need for massive infusions of money to maintain the LDP's largest faction ultimately dictated the fall of Kanemaru and the subsequent fracturing of the Takeshita faction, which triggered the end of the LDP's legislative hegemony. Kanemaru's mythical political clout had enabled him to charge off-scale rates for his brokerage services in the allocation of distributive policy benefits, but once it became clear that Kanemaru was doomed, Ozawa Ichiro and his followers had to distance themselves from their mentor to preserve their own political future. So they broke off from the Takeshita faction and established the Reform Forum 21, with Hata Tsutomu as its titular head. When the LDP failed to agree on a meaningful electoral reform bill, Ozawa left the party altogether and created the Shinsei Party.
The collapse of the LDP's legislative hegemony was dictated by the success
of Ozawa's party and the other "new parties" in the July 1993 elections, and the establishment of a flimsy non-LDP coalition held together by a vague consensus concerning the need for electoral reform. Had Ozawa and his followers chosen to remain in the fold, the LDP would have prolonged its mastery of the parliamentary realm. And had the LDP's leadership correctly perceived Ozawa's desperate desire to protect and enhance his political power, steps could have been taken to keep him and his followers from defecting. In the end, the LDP could not agree on a political reform bill because the career politicians, who had labored arduously to construct personal support networks, opposed institutional reforms that threatened their incumbency.
The enabling conditions for political reform in Italy and Japan were
― 145 ―
thus broadly similar. The deaths of their respective hegemonic regimes were caused by political trichinosis, contracted from decades of doling out ever- increasing quantities of pork. This rapacious appetite for pork and the
pervasive clientelist structures in both polities were the accumulated product of rational strategies adopted by politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate officials to manipulate the institutional rules of the game for maximum benefit. The end of the cold war, economic hard times, and corruption
scandals involving major political figures—these played a part, but structural imperatives eventually made conditions ripe for reform. And in both polities, exposés involving systematized clientelism—especially in government
procurement and public works—generated widespread condemnation and demands for reform. No matter how self-serving their respective motives, the vocal endorsement of institutional reform on the part of established powerbrokers like Bettino Craxi and Ozawa Ichiro reinforced the mounting pressures for change. The fall of the Christian Democrats and the LDP
resulted from the inability of the respective political systems to harness the spiraling ante and ever more costly by-products of systematized political clientelism.