Japanese Democracy in the Era of the Triple Ds

Abstract

This chapter provides a synopsis of Japanese politics. This chapter postulates that representative democracy’s rigid nature has prevented the triple Ds from remoulding Japanese politics. Initially, Japanese democracy’s static features are dichotomised into two levels, namely, the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party in national politics and the prevalence of independents in local politics. Next, this chapter perceives Japanese democracy’s unresponsiveness to socio-economic transformations centring around the triple Ds in four aspects in an electoral process, namely the contradiction in representations, the fall in turnouts, the unalteration in support bases and the lack of changes of the government. Japan is by no means an exception, as many other countries too have any kind of troubles, but Japanese politics is a relatively extreme example in comparison with other countries. This chapter concludes that modern representative democracy established in the nineteenth century might no longer fit into contemporary society in the twenty-first century.