Abstract
The bills on central government reforms were prepared by Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryūtarō in 1996–1998 and entered into force in January 2001. The chapter describes to what extent the reforms affected the balance of power between the three main foreign policy making centers: the prime minister’s closest entourage (Kantei), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), and ruling parties. On the one hand, the powers of the prime minister, chief cabinet secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and newly established Cabinet Office were significantly strengthened. On the other hand, apart from introducing the system of “three political officials,” MOFA’s internal structure remained almost unaffected by the reform, and no significant institutional changes were implemented in the Diet and ruling party decision-making bodies. As a result, the Kantei’s position vis-à-vis veto players improved considerably. However, some constraints on the prime minister’s leadership remained untouched or were only indirectly influenced by the reforms. Among the obstacles to top-down decision-making in the post-reform period, the most significant were such factors as the relative easiness of taking control over the House of Councilors by the opposition parties, shortness of parliamentary sessions, lack of the government’s full control over the legislative process, fluidity in public support for the cabinet, high frequency of ruling party presidential elections, or political culture that petrified the strength of bureaucrats and LDP backbenchers. For that reason, effective usage of new institutional tools was still dependent on personal skills of the prime minister and policy cohesion of the Kantei.
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- 1.
In 1988, it was revealed that a number of influential Japanese politicians, including Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru, had been offered shares of Recruit Cosmos (a real estate development company) through insider trading. Moreover, in 1992 the media reported that LDP Vice President Kanemaru Shin had received bribes from Sagawa Kyūbin (a transportation company).
- 2.
Excluding the period from September 2009 to June 2010, when the Policy Research Committee was abolished.
- 3.
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Zakowski, K., Bochorodycz, B., Socha, M. (2018). Central Government Reforms and Foreign Policy Making in Japan. In: Japan’s Foreign Policy Making. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63094-6_2
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