Here's an infobox of the most recent Japanese election in my China TL. I'm not sure how plausible it is, but I've wanted to do a TL where the JSP survives for a while and thought it'd be fun to try and work it in with the China TL.
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Japan’s postwar political history is a fairly straightforward one to recount. In the early days, the country, still in the aftershocks of World War II, the atomic bomb and the realization of its extreme imperialism, set about dramatically reforming itself (under a not insubstantial amount of pressure from the US) and adopting a pacifist, democratic and capitalist system. Resuming the parliamentary politics it had had prior to the emergence of Tojo and other extreme imperialists in the 1930s, albeit with significant reforms, after several years of competition between the right-wing Liberals, centrist Democrats and left-wing Socialists, the former two combined into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and established a dominant party system.
For almost four decades, the LDP would rule Japan through thick and thin- mostly thin, thanks to the country’s so-called ‘post-war economic miracle’. The country developed a booming technology sector and white-collar business sector that made it famous worldwide for stability and a hard work ethic, and the LDP responded to public needs with an economic process known as rieki-yūdō, meaning ‘profit guidance’, but usually known in English as ‘pork-barrel spending’, whereby its Diet members would invest more in their constituents’ areas and guarantee greater personal popularity. This, combined with the SNTV (single non-transferable vote) system and their main opponents being the divided Socialists, guaranteed LDP success for decades.
In 1993, however, this finally changed. For one thing, the Japanese economy was finally declining- the property market started to stagnate in 1990-91, bank debt started to accumulate and by 1992 wage growth had outright stopped. To make matters worse for the LDP, they had not only overseen this disastrous downturn, but were implicated in more political corruption scandals during this time, and new Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was badly hamstrung by both this sleaze and the emergence of faction fighting that ran deeper than ever in the party.
Consequently, three high-profile figures who had previously been aligned with the LDP, Morihiro Hosokawa, Ichirō Ozawa and Tsotumu Hata, chose to leave the party and set up their own- Hosakawa founded the Japan New Party, and Ozawa and Hata the Japan Renewal Party. At first this might seem merely embarrassing to the LDP, but things became a lot worse for them when the Socialists, led by the increasingly pragmatic Takako Doi since 1986, moved to align with them, sensing that they risked being drowned out in this vast new political feud. Doing this allowed Doi to preserve the Socialists’ strength; the party gained a few seats in 1993, and she managed to become the first woman elected Prime Minister of Japan, albeit with major portfolios given over to Hosokawa, Ozawa and Hata.
Despite this marriage of convenience and an intense distrust of each other by the parties making up the new government, Doi’s government had a bright start, easily putting through electoral reform and repealing the consumption tax to stimulate the economy. Further benefitting the Socialists was the resignation of Hosokawa on corruption charges (note that I said ‘the Socialists’ and not ‘the government’, mind) and the public unpopularity of former Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, now the Leader of the Opposition courting the Socialists’ coalition partners.
Ultimately, when Ozawa led the JRP out of the government and threw his weight behind Kaifu, Doi stood down in favour of Tomiichi Murayama, a more ‘traditional’ Socialist, and the LDP split yet again- ultimately they backed Kaifu to return to power, and he consequently presided over one of the most fraught periods in Japanese history, with the Great Hanshin Earthquake, the Tokyo subway attacks and the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II with a non-apology that appalled the Chinese and Koreans all happening under his watch.
Suffice to say, by putting Doi back in the driver’s seat of the party in time for the 1997 election, the Socialists made huge strides, though, as the cynics pointed out, at the cost of any actual socialism. Meanwhile, the opposition had divided between the rump of the LDP (which had its worst performance since its founding by a mile) and the New Frontier Party controlled by Ozawa and his allies. Under Doi in this election, the Socialists won their only ever majority government, though they would stay in power under Doi , Murayama, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan at various points with support from smaller parties like the Kōmeitō and Ozawa’s party-of-the-week, keeping them on a fairly centrist course.
This ended in dramatic fashion in 2011, with the Great Recession, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and efforts by the government to reintroduce the consumption tax making the Socialists vastly unpopular and divided them, and their vote collapsed badly, with the LDP under Tarō Asō recapturing power for the first time in 14 years and the first time with an overall majority in 18. But the picture wasn’t that simple; Shintaro Ishihara, the far-right former Mayor of Tokyo, managed to bring his Restoration Party to (albeit a distant) second place, and together he and Asō looked set to dismantle Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, re-establishing the country’s right to declare war.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this set off alarm bells among Japanese pacifists and East Asian nations alike (though Asō always insisted it was a symbolic gesture), and new Socialist leader Banri Kaieda quickly took advantage, speaking of forming a ‘pacifist coalition’ against Asō’s agenda and opposing the austerity measures his government advocated for (though he neatly sidestepped the issue of the consumption tax). Kaieda’s policies helped the Socialists recover a lot of lost ground in the 2015 election, and to deprive Asō of a supermajority as well as almost wiping out the Restoration Party.
This symbolic defeat badly embarrassed Asō, and he resigned in favour of the more moderate (albeit still nationalist) Shinzō Abe. Abe shifted the LDP’s agenda to a more domestic one, focusing on issues like tax cuts and Kaieda’s support for gay marriage, as well as slamming his friendly relations with Chinese opposition leader Jiang Jielian and falsely accusing him of being willing to enter coalition with the Communists. While Kaieda at first dismissed these tactics as ‘slander’, the allegations stuck, and he eventually resigned in early 2017 in the hopes of his party recovering its popularity.
The Socialists did not choose to pivot back to moderate politics after this, though, picking Yukio Edano to succeed Kaieda. Like Kaieda, Edano could capitalise on a positive public image; he had been the face of the government response to Fukushima and stimulated the Socialists’ use of social media- his supporters in the run up to the 2018 election started the hashtag ‘#edano_okiro’ (‘Edano wake!’), as a play on the hashtag ‘#edano_nero’ (‘Edano sleep!’) that had become popular during Fukushima. This was particularly effective given the voting age being reduced from 20 to 18.
The 2018 election, called by Abe to shore up his government, was one Abe was favoured to win, and with anti-Abe politicians like Ozawa (whose New Frontier Party imploded, with Ozawa’s faction becoming the Liberal Party, in 1998) and Governor of Tokyo Yuriko Koike (leader of the new Kibō no Tō, or Party of Hope) having parties that were allied with neither the LDP nor the Socialists, it was seen as a long shot for the Socialists to get back to power.
In the end, Abe did indeed win it, but came 21 seats short of an overall majority. Edano had managed to cut the bleeding of the Socialist vote to a trickle, and in doing so saved his leadership (despite quite a bit of grumbling from the Socialist right), and Abe would have to deal with squabbling with rivals Koike and Ozawa and the pacifist Kōmeitō to get his agenda through.
This squabbling House seemed set to bring down Abe for almost two years, particularly with Edano and Ozawa trying to patch up the differences between their parties and forge an alliance in time for the next election. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Abe managed to respond fairly productively, kept rates fairly low, looked in a perfect position to call a snap election… and then resigned amidst health issues.
The leadership contest came down to the moderate Sadakazu Tanigaki* and the more conservative Yoshihide Suga. Pledging a continuation of Abe’s policies, something which would have been suicide 18 months earlier, Suga won easily, and even with COVID slowly dying down in Japan, the House looks set to remain tightly-balanced and adversarial. Whether Suga will be returned when the next election happens is largely predicated on whether the Japanese voting public sour on the continuation of Abe’s legacy or not, though the odds for the LDP look good as of this writing.
*Tanigaki never has his spinal cord injury in TTL.
(The election map is in the thumbnail, since the wikibox was too large with it attached.)
*
Japan’s postwar political history is a fairly straightforward one to recount. In the early days, the country, still in the aftershocks of World War II, the atomic bomb and the realization of its extreme imperialism, set about dramatically reforming itself (under a not insubstantial amount of pressure from the US) and adopting a pacifist, democratic and capitalist system. Resuming the parliamentary politics it had had prior to the emergence of Tojo and other extreme imperialists in the 1930s, albeit with significant reforms, after several years of competition between the right-wing Liberals, centrist Democrats and left-wing Socialists, the former two combined into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and established a dominant party system.
For almost four decades, the LDP would rule Japan through thick and thin- mostly thin, thanks to the country’s so-called ‘post-war economic miracle’. The country developed a booming technology sector and white-collar business sector that made it famous worldwide for stability and a hard work ethic, and the LDP responded to public needs with an economic process known as rieki-yūdō, meaning ‘profit guidance’, but usually known in English as ‘pork-barrel spending’, whereby its Diet members would invest more in their constituents’ areas and guarantee greater personal popularity. This, combined with the SNTV (single non-transferable vote) system and their main opponents being the divided Socialists, guaranteed LDP success for decades.
In 1993, however, this finally changed. For one thing, the Japanese economy was finally declining- the property market started to stagnate in 1990-91, bank debt started to accumulate and by 1992 wage growth had outright stopped. To make matters worse for the LDP, they had not only overseen this disastrous downturn, but were implicated in more political corruption scandals during this time, and new Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was badly hamstrung by both this sleaze and the emergence of faction fighting that ran deeper than ever in the party.
Consequently, three high-profile figures who had previously been aligned with the LDP, Morihiro Hosokawa, Ichirō Ozawa and Tsotumu Hata, chose to leave the party and set up their own- Hosakawa founded the Japan New Party, and Ozawa and Hata the Japan Renewal Party. At first this might seem merely embarrassing to the LDP, but things became a lot worse for them when the Socialists, led by the increasingly pragmatic Takako Doi since 1986, moved to align with them, sensing that they risked being drowned out in this vast new political feud. Doing this allowed Doi to preserve the Socialists’ strength; the party gained a few seats in 1993, and she managed to become the first woman elected Prime Minister of Japan, albeit with major portfolios given over to Hosokawa, Ozawa and Hata.
Despite this marriage of convenience and an intense distrust of each other by the parties making up the new government, Doi’s government had a bright start, easily putting through electoral reform and repealing the consumption tax to stimulate the economy. Further benefitting the Socialists was the resignation of Hosokawa on corruption charges (note that I said ‘the Socialists’ and not ‘the government’, mind) and the public unpopularity of former Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, now the Leader of the Opposition courting the Socialists’ coalition partners.
Ultimately, when Ozawa led the JRP out of the government and threw his weight behind Kaifu, Doi stood down in favour of Tomiichi Murayama, a more ‘traditional’ Socialist, and the LDP split yet again- ultimately they backed Kaifu to return to power, and he consequently presided over one of the most fraught periods in Japanese history, with the Great Hanshin Earthquake, the Tokyo subway attacks and the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II with a non-apology that appalled the Chinese and Koreans all happening under his watch.
Suffice to say, by putting Doi back in the driver’s seat of the party in time for the 1997 election, the Socialists made huge strides, though, as the cynics pointed out, at the cost of any actual socialism. Meanwhile, the opposition had divided between the rump of the LDP (which had its worst performance since its founding by a mile) and the New Frontier Party controlled by Ozawa and his allies. Under Doi in this election, the Socialists won their only ever majority government, though they would stay in power under Doi , Murayama, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan at various points with support from smaller parties like the Kōmeitō and Ozawa’s party-of-the-week, keeping them on a fairly centrist course.
This ended in dramatic fashion in 2011, with the Great Recession, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and efforts by the government to reintroduce the consumption tax making the Socialists vastly unpopular and divided them, and their vote collapsed badly, with the LDP under Tarō Asō recapturing power for the first time in 14 years and the first time with an overall majority in 18. But the picture wasn’t that simple; Shintaro Ishihara, the far-right former Mayor of Tokyo, managed to bring his Restoration Party to (albeit a distant) second place, and together he and Asō looked set to dismantle Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, re-establishing the country’s right to declare war.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this set off alarm bells among Japanese pacifists and East Asian nations alike (though Asō always insisted it was a symbolic gesture), and new Socialist leader Banri Kaieda quickly took advantage, speaking of forming a ‘pacifist coalition’ against Asō’s agenda and opposing the austerity measures his government advocated for (though he neatly sidestepped the issue of the consumption tax). Kaieda’s policies helped the Socialists recover a lot of lost ground in the 2015 election, and to deprive Asō of a supermajority as well as almost wiping out the Restoration Party.
This symbolic defeat badly embarrassed Asō, and he resigned in favour of the more moderate (albeit still nationalist) Shinzō Abe. Abe shifted the LDP’s agenda to a more domestic one, focusing on issues like tax cuts and Kaieda’s support for gay marriage, as well as slamming his friendly relations with Chinese opposition leader Jiang Jielian and falsely accusing him of being willing to enter coalition with the Communists. While Kaieda at first dismissed these tactics as ‘slander’, the allegations stuck, and he eventually resigned in early 2017 in the hopes of his party recovering its popularity.
The Socialists did not choose to pivot back to moderate politics after this, though, picking Yukio Edano to succeed Kaieda. Like Kaieda, Edano could capitalise on a positive public image; he had been the face of the government response to Fukushima and stimulated the Socialists’ use of social media- his supporters in the run up to the 2018 election started the hashtag ‘#edano_okiro’ (‘Edano wake!’), as a play on the hashtag ‘#edano_nero’ (‘Edano sleep!’) that had become popular during Fukushima. This was particularly effective given the voting age being reduced from 20 to 18.
The 2018 election, called by Abe to shore up his government, was one Abe was favoured to win, and with anti-Abe politicians like Ozawa (whose New Frontier Party imploded, with Ozawa’s faction becoming the Liberal Party, in 1998) and Governor of Tokyo Yuriko Koike (leader of the new Kibō no Tō, or Party of Hope) having parties that were allied with neither the LDP nor the Socialists, it was seen as a long shot for the Socialists to get back to power.
In the end, Abe did indeed win it, but came 21 seats short of an overall majority. Edano had managed to cut the bleeding of the Socialist vote to a trickle, and in doing so saved his leadership (despite quite a bit of grumbling from the Socialist right), and Abe would have to deal with squabbling with rivals Koike and Ozawa and the pacifist Kōmeitō to get his agenda through.
This squabbling House seemed set to bring down Abe for almost two years, particularly with Edano and Ozawa trying to patch up the differences between their parties and forge an alliance in time for the next election. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Abe managed to respond fairly productively, kept rates fairly low, looked in a perfect position to call a snap election… and then resigned amidst health issues.
The leadership contest came down to the moderate Sadakazu Tanigaki* and the more conservative Yoshihide Suga. Pledging a continuation of Abe’s policies, something which would have been suicide 18 months earlier, Suga won easily, and even with COVID slowly dying down in Japan, the House looks set to remain tightly-balanced and adversarial. Whether Suga will be returned when the next election happens is largely predicated on whether the Japanese voting public sour on the continuation of Abe’s legacy or not, though the odds for the LDP look good as of this writing.
*Tanigaki never has his spinal cord injury in TTL.
(The election map is in the thumbnail, since the wikibox was too large with it attached.)
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I wonder how that slipped through the cracks. Maybe the (age 70) thing was a separate piece of info that I didn't see or something. I mean, how can someone be 70 years old when they are born!? LOL
