Paper short abstract:

The left-wing populist Reiwa Shinsengumi party emerged onto the national stage in the 2019 upper house elections. This paper explores the attempt by the party to politicise widespread experiences of precarity and disenfranchisement, and expand the bounds of a stagnant political imagination.

Paper long abstract:

The July 2019 House of Councillors elections in Japan saw the unexpected success of a new left-wing populist political party: Reiwa Shinsengumi. The party challenged political orthodoxies and energised many first-time voters. Many such voters felt that the party was the first to truly recognise the indignity and unfairness of their precarious livelihoods and to offer the possibility of a meaningful political intervention – or at least a voice on the national stage.

I contend that it is productive to view the Reiwa Shinsengumi phenomenon as an attempt to politicise ‘post-democratic’ grievances in a context of ‘post-politics’. That is, as an attempt to leverage the disenfranchisements and disenchantments of the unequal (neo)liberal political economy to fuel a populist challenge to established norms of consensus-oriented politics where only minor adjustments to hegemonic neoliberalism are considered within the realm of political possibility. Such a framing allows us to bring Japan and Reiwa Shinsengumi into comparison with similar dynamics elsewhere, of (left or right) populist and prefigurative responses to the ongoing crisis of liberal orders and institutions.

This framing also foregrounds the politics of possibility, imagination and hope. These issues are at the heart of Japan’s ongoing and deepening political disengagement and apathy. Surveys show that while many Japanese expect livelihoods to worsen, most do not expect change or improvement via politics. Many young people aspire only to a ‘normal’ life and passively support the conservative establishment – fearful that rocking the boat would upset their already uncertain chances for stable, ‘normal’ futures. Reiwa Shinsengumi, proposing substantial government interventions to improve livelihoods, makes the simple case that things can in fact be made better through politics.

But how, within Japan’s post-political context, can the party make its proposals seem like real possibilities rather than mere fantasy? Looking ahead to field work beginning in autumn 2021, this paper draws on preliminary online research to sketch an initial argument about the position of the party in the Japanese political economy and examines some of the strategies it is adopting to address the many challenges of expanding the bounds of political imagination.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution aims at analyzing the relationship between the semi-populist communication strategy of Shinzo Abe since 2012, and the increasing distrust among the Japanese people. How has he successfully adapted his personal style, and which lessons can it provide to populism theory?

Paper long abstract:

The contemporary Japanese political situation has become a challenging case for populism theory. On the one hand, Japan seems to experience most of the main evolutions which led many scholars to consider an "era of populism" in Europe and America; but on the other hand the current executive power, which represents the traditional political elite, seems to be the most powerful one since the creation of the LDP in 1955. One could argue that there has been a "populismization" of Japan in the last three decades, due to a personalization of politics; a rise of political distrust and inequalities, etc. Such evolutions are supposed to nurture the most basic elements of populism: the emergence of charismatic leadership, from the outside of the political class, with a populist discourse that separates the people and the elites in order to manufacture popular trust and legitimacy (Schmitter, 2004; Laclau, 2007; Müller, 2016). Populism is supposed to feed on political distrust. However, the current Japanese situation shows that such evolutions do not guarantee national-scale populism in a representative democracy.

This contribution aims at understanding the apparent uncommon evolutions of Japanese national-scale populism since the successful return in power of Shinzo Abe in 2012 (Burrett, 2017). By adopting a Schumpeterian approach, we will analyze the relationship between "popular demand" (political distrust) and "political offer" (populism). The Japanese people are frequently defined as one of the most unsatisfied people in the world (Suzuki, 2015). Exploiting political distrust has become an important element for a successful communication strategy. We will focus on how, after the success of Prime Minister Koizumi as the first Japanese-style populist leader (Otake, 2000), Prime Minister Abe's communication strategy successfully adapted to political distrust by implementing a semi-populist and anti-political strategy which targeted the youth and silenced ideational and conflictual dimensions. Since 2013, the youngest segments of the Japanese people vote more for the LDP than the oldest, phenomenon which seem to be unique in the world. This new situation makes contemporary Japan a challenging case for populism theory.

Paper short abstract:

This paper interprets Tokyo's mediation in Konfrontasi as one of the earliest instances of executive leadership in Japanese foreign policy, carried out via envoy diplomacy - a tool that bypasses institutional channels and challenges postwar narratives of Japan as an impartial 'bridge' in Asia.

Paper long abstract:

In 1964, Japan acted as a mediator in the Indonesia-Malaysia dispute (commonly known as Konfrontasi), in what was its first unilateral political initiative in Asia after the Second World War. Tokyo's mediation efforts culminated in Spring 1965, when the LDP Vice-President Kawashima Shōjirō was sent as Special Envoy of Prime Minister Satō to Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in order to persuade President Sukarno and PM Abdul Rahman to a negotiated settlement. His endeavour (and more broadly, Japan's mediation initiative) has been generally overlooked in the scholarship of Japanese foreign policy, not least because of Kawashima's diplomatic failure.

This paper offers a new appraisal of Japan's efforts by focusing on the particular mediation strategy adopted by the Satō administration, namely the appointment of a special envoy - a diplomatic device that offers a unique insight into two of the most consequential fault lines of Japanese postwar politics: the first being the policy-making rivalry between the bureaucracy and the government, and the second the ever-contentious question of what role postwar Japan ought to play in the world, and in Asia in particular.

By drawing upon Japanese and British diplomatic archives, this paper explores the inter-institutional rivalries underpinning Japan's mediation in Konfrontasi, challenging the trope of early postwar Japan as a 'leaderless state', and highlighting the persistence of prewar practices and attitudes in the conduct of its regional foreign policy.

The paper argues that the deployment of special envoy Kawashima was - long before the presidentialization of the premiership initiated by Koizumi and now institutionalized by Abe - one of the earliest expressions of 'prime ministerial foreign policy' in postwar Japan's diplomacy, serving as an executive tool of PM Satō to de facto circumvent the Foreign Ministry's official bureaucratic structures. The paper also measures Japan's mediation in konfrontasi against the notion of 'middle power' (of which the willingness to act in 'bridging' roles in international conflicts is a defining feature) to show that Japan's mediation - heavily relying on prewar era personal networks - resembled more closely the approach of an interest-maximizing aspiring regional power rather than a selfless and impartial kakehashi (bridge).