Moreover, as political analyst Minoru Morita told the Japan Times, some DPJers fear he might split the DPJ if it pressed him too hard to relinquish power.
Ozawa and political reform
Ozawa’s supporters say that he is driven, not by a desire for power per se, but by a desire to use that power to drive political reform. The key event in that narrative is his defection from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1993—a defection that caused the LDP to lose power for the first time—supposedly over the issue of electoral reform. Ozawa argued that a switch in the elections system—from multi-member districts to single-member districts (SMDs)—would create a system whereby two parties would compete on the basis of policy and would alternate in power. That, in turn, would make the government more effective in correcting the country’s problems, partly by increasing the power of politicians vis-à-vis the bureaucracy.
When Ozawa left the LDP and helped form an eight-party coalition led by Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, that coalition passed in 1994 an electoral reform that combined 300 SMDs with 300 proportional representation (PR) seats (where voters choose from party lists) in the Lower House. Undoubtedly, that reform was a major ingredient in the 2009 downfall of the LDP and the end of one-party democracy. Some Ozawa supporters give him the primary credit.
In reality, the story is more complicated. Several LDP leaders had supported a switch to SMDs going back to Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama (the grandfather of the current Prime Minister) in the 1950s and Ozawa’s own surrogate father, Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, in the early 1970s. As LDP support eroded, Tanaka figured it would do better under an SMD system because a divided opposition would win fewer seats. Conversely, the opposition parties like the Socialists wanted a pure PR system.
For decades, corruption scandals brought calls for electoral reform. Such was the case in 1993, when another Ozawa mentor, Shin Kanemaru, was convicted on corruption charges. Ozawa was one voice among many calling for electoral reform and his proposal, a pure SMD system, was not adopted.
More importantly, if political reform is Ozawa’s main ambition, why are so many of his actions inconsistent with that notion? Why do they repeatedly look like backroom opportunistic machinations aimed at increasing his own power? Let’s look at the record.
Why Ozawa left LDP
The story of Ozawa’s departure from the LDP begins in October 1992, when Kanemaru had to resign from the Diet over corruption charges and eventual conviction. (Although Ozawa was grilled in the Diet about accompanying Kanemaru to meetings with Sagawa Kyubin executives, he claimed he was merely serving drinks and emptying ash trays.) Kanemaru’s departure sparked a succession fight over chairmanship of the Takeshita faction, the controlling faction in the LDP (the latest incarnation of the Tanaka faction). It pitted Seiroku Kajiyama, whose front man candidate was Keizo Obuchi, against Ozawa, whose front man was Tsutomu Hata. Professor Gerry Curtis writes in The Logic of Japanese Politics that, ‘It is impossible to decipher any ideological or policy content to Kajiyama’s antipathy to Ozawa. Several years later, Kajiyama… favored an alliance with Ozawa.’ The issue was personal chemistry and power.
Rather than electoral reform being a cause of the fight, it was simply the tactical battleground. ‘Because he [Kajiyama] opposed Ozawa, he opposed what Ozawa was advocating in the way of political reform,’ writes Curtis. In December, when the faction chose Obuchi, Ozawa took his 36 Diet members out of the faction. From the number two spot in the LDP’s most powerful faction, Ozawa had descended to a situation of relative powerlessness.
A few months later, as the Kanemaru scandal re-heated, Ozawa voted for a no confidence motion against Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, ostensibly over electoral reform. And why did Miyazawa reject electoral reform? Because, Curtis writes, Kajiyama insisted that any passage would be viewed as a political victory for Ozawa. ‘The issue of electoral reform has become hopelessly entangled in the LDP’s factional power struggle.’ The day after the no-confidence vote, Ozawa left the LDP, created a new party called Shinseito and, weeks later, regained power as a leader within the Hosokawa coalition.
With apparently unintended irony, Ozawa wrote in his own book, Blueprint for a New Japan, published in the midst of this fight: ‘[In] the LDP…serious matters of policy tend to become little more than tools in factional haggling, as was all too evident in the recent struggle over political reforms.’
Party after party; alienating allies
In the years since the 1993, Ozawa has traversed through a variety of parties, pleaded (unsuccessfully) to be allowed back into the LDP, alienated myriad allies, and engineered marvelous electoral victories. It’s quite a story. A year after helping to create the anti-LDP coalition government in 1993, Ozawa inadvertently brought it down. At this time, Ozawa ally Tstutomu Hata had succeeded Hosokawa as Prime Minister when it was revealed that Hosokawa had also taken Sagawa Kyubin money.
While Hata was waiting for Ozawa to give him the list of new cabinet members, Ozawa started pressing the Socialists on a variety of matters. Ozawa figured that they would never leave the coalition and ally with their old enemy, the LDP. But that’s exactly what the Socialists did. The LDP was back in power; Ozawa was on the outs again. Haunting memories of this incident is said to be one of the reasons Ozawa does not want disagreements between the DPJ and the Social Democrats (the tiny successors to the Socialists) over the Futenma marine base on Okinawa to lead to a premature dissolution of today’s coalition.
Out of power again, Ozawa merged his own Shinseito Party into yet another new party called Shinshinto (New Frontier Party). But the latter soon failed. Partly it was due to defections to the LDP. But another factor was Ozawa’s imperious manner as party Secretary-General. In December 1995, Hata ran for party president, promising not to reappoint Ozawa as secretary-general. Ozawa ran against Hata and won, whereupon Hata and a dozen members left to form their own tiny party. Shinshinto later dissolved. Curtis writes that, ‘Ozawa, concluding that there no point in heading a party that he could not completely control, decided to abandon the Shinshinto…He formed yet another party, the Liberal Party.’
1998: shoring up the LDP
1998 was a crucial year that could have brought about political realignment and the LDP’s downfall. Instead, Ozawa shored up the LDP by enter a coalition with it and even pleading to rejoin it. One of his supporters was Kajiyama, his rival back in 1992. Another was Shizuka Kamei—famous later as a ‘postal rebel’ thrown out of the LDP by Koizumi—who is now in coalition with the DPJ as head of the tiny People’s New Party.
In July of 1998, with the economy in serious trouble, the voters repudiated the LDP. They gave control of the Upper House to a coalition of opposition parties, including the new DPJ and Ozawa’s smaller Liberals. With the banks in crisis, new LDP Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi tried to push through a bailout with virtually no conditions. The opposition parties controlling the Upper House blocked him. Initially, the DPJ had an equally bad policy; they countered Obuchi’s ‘money with no conditions’ with ‘no money under any conditions.’ Soon, however, negotiations began between urban-oriented reformers in the LDP, such as Yasuhisa Shiozaki, and wiser heads in the DPJ, such as Naoto Kan (now Finance Minister), Yushito Sengoku (now head of the National Strategy Unit) and Yukio Edano (now a special adviser to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama). This cross-party alliance of reformers began to coalesce around ‘money with conditions.’
They took control of the banking issue away from the Ministry of Finance and created the new Financial Supervisory Agency. They might have done more, both in resolving the banking crisis and possibly engineering a healthy party realignment. Curtis writes that LDP leaders ‘doubted that the government would survive if the LDP were forced to capitulate again to the opposition.’ At that pivotal fork in the road, Ozawa accepted an offer from Obuchi—his opponent back in 1992—to defect from the Opposition. He brought his Liberal Party into coalition with Obuchi’s LDP, giving the latter control of both Houses of the Diet and no more need to negotiate with the DPJ. Why did Ozawa do it? One theory is that his 35 Lower House members would have had difficulty getting re-elected. So, Obuchi agreed to have the LDP endorse Ozawa’s SMD Diet members in the next election. Many in the LDP opposed the pact. Hajime Funada, who had defected from the LDP with Ozawa in 1993 and later returned, warned of a plot by Ozawa to throw the LDP into chaos.
Ozawa claimed to have gotten a great deal in return in the way of political reform. But it’s hard to see how Ozawa’s demands— reducing the number of ministries from 20 to 17, reducing the size of the two Diet houses by 50 each, preventing bureaucrats from responding to questions in the Diet— amounted to a substantial transformation. He got nothing on assorted policy matters: first reducing the consumption tax to stimulate demand and then raising it to 10 per cent to cover the deficit, or changing the law to allow Japanese troops to participate in combat as part of UN-authorized international peacekeeping forces.
Over-reaching again
Once again, Ozawa miscalculated. He pressured Obuchi to allow him to rejoin the LDP. Others in the LDP had no desire to see Ozawa come back, fearing he would attempt to regain control, or split the party by pushing out more liberal factions, like that of Koichi Kato. In any case, believing he had the support of heavyweights like Kamei and former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, Ozawa not only demanded re-entry into the LDP but threatened to leave the coalition unless Obuchi caved into various demands, including the firing of LDP Secretary-General Hiromo Nonaka.
At a contentious April 1, 2000 meeting, when Ozawa again levied his threats, Obuchi called his bluff and kicked him out of the coalition. Several hours later, perhaps due to the stress of the meeting, Obuchi suffered a stroke. He died six weeks later. 27 members of Ozawa’s Liberal party members left, formed another new party, and joined the LDP-led coalition. In the ensuing election, Ozawa’s Liberals won only 22 seats compared to 127 for the DPJ.
Another attempt to ally with LDP
Just before the 2003 Lower House election, Ozawa merged his tiny Liberal Party into the DPJ. His talents rapidly took him to the top. In 2005, he became DPJ President and is widely credited with the party’s big victory in the 2007 Upper House elections, where the DPJ won 60 seats compared to 37 for the LDP.
Then, completely behind the backs of his colleagues in the DPJ leadership, Ozawa entered into negotiations with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to form a ‘grand coalition’ between the DPJ and LDP. Ozawa has never explained his motivations. Some observers suggest that he did not believe the DPJ could win the coming Lower House election. Hence, his best bet was to form a coalition in another attempt to provoke an LDP split. The DPJ allowed him to stay as party chief anyway, based on a promise to act more collegially in the future and especially on the premise that Ozawa’s skills gave the party its best bet to win the 2009 Lower House elections.
What does this all add up to?
What does any of this maneuvering have to do with creating a system of two-party politics based on policy differences? Or with Ozawa’s talk of destroying the LDP? Or even with a cool calculation of his real leverage and power?
People who have known Ozawa for years insist that there really is a principled method to his apparent madness. That he sees himself as an historical figure who will modernize Japanese politics. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps power is just a means to an end. But he never seems to get to the end. Neither he nor they have ever explained how his maneuverings square with his talk of reform. Perhaps he is simply a man marked by his contradictions.
Unaccountable politicians
Increasing the power of politicians vis-à-vis the bureaucrats is a mantra of both Ozawa and the DPJ. Naturally, we’re all for increasing the power of elected, accountable leaders. But it’s hard for us to see how colorful rustic politicians making deals in smoke-filled restaurants is any better or more democratic than faceless urbane bureaucrats from Tokyo University making decisions in Kasumigaseki offices. Ozawa and his Tanaka faction mentors have had a habit of picking weak, easily manipulated men as prime ministers—from Tomohiro Kaifu to Yukio Hatoyama—and then acting as ‘shadow shoguns.’ The real issue is whether power lies with the elected Prime Minister and his Cabinet or with unaccountable wire-pullers, be they bureaucrats or party bosses.
Besides, it is Japan’s pervasive web of regulations and public works projects that create the opportunities for politicians to extract graft. Take the regulations and private anti-competitive practices that make it so hard for new firms to challenge entrenched leaders. That can induce the new boys on the block to pay off a politician who can ease the way. According to Jake Schlesinger in Shadow Shoguns, when Tanaka was communications minister, he expanded the number of TV licenses, ‘told the bureaucrats which companies should be allocated the lucrative permits, and he took payments from each.’ Another classic case is the Recruit scandal of 1989, where more than 40 politicians, including Ozawa, were on the take. Schlesinger wrote, ‘When the rules were not favorable to Recruit, the company sometimes bent them and then required assistance in averting the penalty. As Recruit diversified…[it] needed a wider range of bureaucrats who had the power to grant permission to buy land, waive height limits on buildings.’
To overcome the corruption that has so damaged Japan, it needs real transparency and accountability.
This article is the second of a two part feature on Ichiro Ozawa, and first appeared here in the February issue of The Oriental Economist Report.
Richard Katz is the Editor of The Oriental Economist Report and the author of Japan: The System That Soured