Abstract
In November 1987 Nakasone Yasuhiro was replaced as prime minister of Japan by Takeshita Noboru, a politician of the same party that had ruled without interruption since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Nakasone had been widely regarded abroad as a thrusting dynamic leader determined to exercise personal power in order to ‘settle accounts with the postwar period’. By contrast Takeshita — little known outside Japan hitherto — comes over as a behind-the-scenes politician who hesitates to move politically until he has constructed a broad consensus of opinion behind him. Does this mean, then, that Japan has once again entered a period of immobilist politics after five years of unusually dynamic leadership? Why did an established leader who seemed to have given the government and politics of Japan a much more modern image than it had previously enjoyed have to yield office to someone whose approach appeared traditional and unexciting?
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Notes
For a generally positive view, see Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1977) Part 4, and especially p. 297.
See also T. J. Pempel, Policy and Politics in Japan: Creative Conservatism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982).
For a more critical approach, see Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds), Democracy in Contemporary Japan (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986)
and Jon Woronoff, Politics the Japanese Way (Tokyo: Lotus Press, 1986).
T. J. Pempel and Keiichi Tsunekawa, ‘Corporatism without Labor’, in Philippe C. Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds), Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979).
See Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986).
For an analysis of élitist and pluralist approaches, see Haruhiro Fukui, ‘Studies in Policymaking: a Review of the Literature’, in T. J. Pempel (ed.), Policymaking in Contemporary Japan (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1977) pp. 22–59.
See Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982).
J. A. A. Stockwin, ‘The Future of Japanese Party Politics’, Fukuoka UNESCO: Proceedings of the Fifth Kyushu International Cultural Confer-ence, 1982 (Fukuoka: The Fukuoka UNESCO Association, no. 18, 1983) pp. 326–36.
See Ehud Harari, ‘The Institutionalisation of Policy Consultation in Japan: Public Advisory Bodies’, in Gail Lee Bernstein and Haruhiro Fukui (eds), Japan and the World: Essays in Honour of Takeshi Ishida (London: Macmillan, 1988).
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© 1988 J. A. A. Stockwin
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Stockwin, J.A.A. (1988). Dynamic and Immobilist Aspects of Japanese Politics. In: Dynamic and Immobilist Politics in Japan. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10297-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10297-6_1
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