Prior to this Kan had also been active in various protest movements during his student days and had organised a student group. Later, another group he organised was known as shimin no kai (Citizen’s Association).  Shimin no kai persuaded the octogenarian Ichikawa Fusae – a women’s suffrage leader – to run for the 1974 Upper House election despite her reluctance.  Kan himself took the responsibility as her campaign manager (sekininsha) for the election in which she was placed second with close to 2 million votes in the 100-member National Constituency. The system of election to both houses of Japanese parliament was different then from what it is today.

The Citizen’s Association stood for ‘clean elections’ and refused to use either big organiations such as labour unions or business enterprises or ‘unaccounted money’ and took an ‘anti-money politics’ stance. The Association became convinced that it needed its own representative in the national Diet to fight against the corrupt practices and ‘money politics’.  With these objectives in mind, Kan was chosen to be the Association’s candidate for the lower house in the 1976 election. His slogan was ‘better life for the citizen’, and citizen participation (shimin sanka) in politics. He did not succeed in his first attempt. In 1977 he joined Eda Saburo’s group of shakai shimin rengo (Socialist Citizen’s League) and ran unsuccessfully for the upper house.  The Socialist Citizen’s League was later renamed shakai minshu rengo (Socialist Democratic League) in 1978. In 1979 Kan ran once again unsuccessfully from the Tokyo seventh district for the lower house.  But his most spectacular success came in 1980 when he was elected at the top position.  In a 1980 paper I highlighted three factors associated with Kan’s success:. One was that more and more people began to favour younger representatives with a clean image, especially in the metropolitan suburbs.  Kan, at 33, was quite young compared with the average age of Diet members which then stood at well over fifty.  Second, the road to political offices was not only through the established political parties as a new political culture was emerging in Japan, represented by Kan and his group whose political activities were based in civic groups and volunteers.  Third, Kan’s election campaigning style differed significantly from the traditional election campaigning, brilliantly captured by Gerald Curtis in his 1971 book: Election Campaigning Japanese Style.

Kan explained to me that as a young non-traditional Japanese politician he had neither name, organiation nor money (na mo naku, soshiki mo naku kane mo naku): traditionally the three key ingredients of success in Japanese politics. So how did he win this election?  He very lightly compared elections to organiing festivals at university entrance, with which Japanese are quite accustomed, during their university life.  He explained that during these festivals various groups of students have diverse interests.  For example, one might like films, others opt for concerts, and still others may prefer sports, and so on.  This, according to him, presents a difficult situation for the organier.  The organier has to coordinate the festival in such a fashion that aggregates the demands of the bulk of the groups if not all of them.  Every candidate should contest elections in the same spirit.  This is what Kan called ‘participatory citizen’s elections’ (sankagata shimin senkyo) or ‘politics in the hands of citizen’ (seiji o shimin no te ni).

Kan’s rise in Japanese politics is quite unique because it represents the first attempt by any politician in Japan to organie an election to the lower house based on citizen movements, reflecting the idea of participatory democracy and grassroots involvement in national politics.

Purnendra Jain is Professor of Japanese Studies at Adelaide University.

This essay is based on his interview with Kan Naoto in 1980 during field research in Japan in 1980-81 supported by a Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.