Japan's Political Earthquake
Japanese General Election for the House of Representatives – December 1979
511 Seats (256 needed to form a government)
Governing Coalition (262 seats)
New Japan Party -- 142
Coalition for A New Defence – 65
New Liberal Progressive Party – 48
Liberal Democratic Party remnants - 7
Opposition (249 seats)
Democratic Socialist Party – 72
Japanese Communist Party – 49
Japanese Socialist Party – 47
Liberal Democratic Party remnants – 37
Justice Party --- 23
Independents --- 12
Daimyo League -- 7
Social Democratic Federation - 2
Prime Minister before election
Takeo Fukuda
Liberal Democratic Party
Prime Minister after election
Yasuhiro Nakasone
New Japan Party (Coalition)
The Japanese National election of December 18, 1979 was held in during a period of long economic decline, for which the Liberal Democratic Party, which had ruled Japan continuously since 1955 was held to be responsible. In fact the Liberal Democratic Party had all but disintegrated by the time of the 1979 election, a situation which gave rise to a number of new electoral coalitions some of which were based on the remaining LDP factions, sometimes joined by new political figures. Additionally, the election occurred only two months after the detonation of a nuclear weapon in the Kwangsi area of China, an event which had seriously alarmed the Japanese population and which resulted in a renewed interested in a more muscular “Japanese Forward Self Defence” (as it was expressed to distinguish the new pro-military policy from 1930’s militarism which remained unpopular within the Japanese context). Further alarm was added by the combined United States-Soviet response at the end of October, which left many Japanese feeling that Japan had to have an independent military capability due to the fact that the U.S. response had exposed Japan without proper consultation with the Japanese (the latter occurring less from a lack of consultation, but the fact that the disintegrating Liberal Democratic government that fell in November had kept its consultations with Washington secret as it tried to [unsuccessfully] walk a middle line between the current crisis and the post-war tradition of Japanese non-militarism.)
The Governing Coalition
The New Japan Party, which took the lead in the new government, was a mix of free traders and more liberal economic groups from the old Liberal Democratic Party which was looking to more closely emulate western conservative parties in its economic and trade orientations (fewer taxes, leaner, more competitive industries) as an economic cure for Japan’s depression. It also more completely embraced the former government’s covert policy of building a Japanese nuclear capability. Nakasone emerged as its leader (although the NJP included more than just the Nakasone group from the old LDP) and became the Prime Minister, although he was more of a chairman of the coalition groups than a dominant leader in the western sense of a Prime Minister. Even so, he embodied the new economic and defence thinking on what was conventionally referred to as the right, as did Shintaro Abe, who became the Finance Minister.
The Coalition for a New Defence was a party that emerged quickly after the Kwangsi incident and which coalesced around the Minister of Combined Defence and Industrial Strategy in the previous government Hayao Kinugasa, a professional military officer who had been brought in by the LDP to manage the covert nuclear program. He didn’t discuss that during the election, but he did present a policy idea that called for a more muscular role for the Japanese military in self-defence and a greater voice in the decision making progress of the U.S.-Japan alliance. His block attracted a lot of support from those worried by the Kwangsi incident and the U.S.-Soviet response who were not inclined to pacifism. Kinugasa remained in the Cabinet after the election as Minister of the National Defence and Territorial Support Infrastructure after the election, and was seen as second to Nakasone himself in seniority within the new coalition structure. Kinugasa’s partner in the CND and chief naval adviser was the former LDP politician Minoru Genda. Genda’s emergence into a more prominent role, particularly as it related to the still secret ballistic missile submarine program, made some Americans nervous as Genda was the former Imperial Naval Officer who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1941.
The New Liberal Progressive Party was inclined to the same economic policies as the NJP, but more sceptical on the defence side and had members more inclined to a mixed economy, more on the line of a center-left party in western terms. The NLPP existed as an opposition bloc to the more extreme economic ideas of the NJP group, but these were disagreements of degrees, which was why they formed a governing coalition with the NJP. They also had a more dovish view of defence matters than the NJP and the CND, but were not pacifists either. Principally they existed to force the NJP and CND to triangulate on policy and provide a brake on extremist positions that might arise within the NJP and CND. The NLPP had a number of leaders who took on important economic and social related portfolios in the new government. Noboru Takeshita as Minister of Industry and Trade emerged as the most prominent of this group.
The Opposition
The Japanese Socialist Party suffered because of its past associations with Maoism, which by 1979 had become very unpopular in Japan (due to the Lesser Mao’s eccentric rule in China). The Japanese Communist Party also began to suffer losses because it advocated pacifism which, in the context of the military threat from China, was being regarded as less popular than it had been in the post-war period.
The Democratic Socialist Party gained support as a left opposition due to the fact that in the period between 1975 and 1979, in the face of the deteriorating security situation in China, it advocated both a social democratic domestic economic solution but stuck to a more rightist defence policy that included maintaining the U.S.-Japan alliance (which the other two larger leftist parties continued to criticize) and clearly condemning Maoism. The DSP also explored working alliances with foreign social democratic and left-wing parties, including the Labour Party of Britain, which gave it a progressive edge over its more doctrinaire opponents.
The Justice Party, while widely regarded for its reform agenda, was also out of step with the political climate created by the Kwangsi aftermath, and suffered as a result at the polls.
Liberal Democratic Party members, of which 44 were elected to the new Diet, were the remnants of the once ruling party, largely hangers-on who managed to ride-out the disintegration of the previous ruling party. While most turned on the NJP-CND-NLPP alignment, variously blaming it for their misfortune, 7 of this group did join the government – and in fact provided the necessary numbers for the ruling coalition to retain power. These 7 were variously absorbed by the coalition parties over time.
The Daimyo League was an off-shoot of the more rightist swing in Japanese politics. They were primarily an agrarian interests party, representing rural farmers interests. However, one of their party platforms, from which they took their name, was the policy of restoring the Emperor to a more central role in policy making and diminishing the power of the party politicians. Without using the ancient term Shogun, they advocated a constitutional change which would permit the Emperor to nominate a figure to serve as Chief Executive of the government for a fixed term and to name a Cabinet from any sector of society he chose, not just the politicians in the parliament. While not absolute in power, this individual would not be subject to dismissal by parliament either. The wider implications of this was to reduce the role of Parliament to a type of Congress with limited powers in favour of a strong executive style government.
For the time being the Liberal Democratic Party retained controlled as a block in Japan’s upper house, the House of Councillors, until upper house elections in 1980, but they were a divided group which largely gravitated toward the governing coalition in the lower house.
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