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$Pretitle{}
$Title{Japan
Chapter 5D.   Bureaucrats and the Policymaking Process}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald M. Seekins}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{party
political
japan
ldp
diet
opposition
late
parties
policy
support}
$Date{1981}
$Log{}
Title:       Japan
Book:        Japan, A Country Study
Author:      Donald M. Seekins
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 5D.   Bureaucrats and the Policymaking Process

     Although Article 41 of the Constitution states that the Diet "shall be
the highest organ of state power, and...the sole lawmaking organ of the
State," the fact that in late 1981 the LDP had been in power for twenty-six
years made it possible for the party to keep the policymaking process outside
the legislature and in the executive branch of government. The bureaucracy
attached to the ministries and agencies of the cabinet remained a partner with
the LDP in the governing of Japan, perhaps the dominant partner. According to
one retired high official, quoted by the political analyst Chalmers Johnson,
the Diet is merely "an extension of the bureaucracy." He claimed that "the
bureaucracy drafts all the laws...All the legislature does is to use its
powers of investigation, which for about half the year keeps most of the
senior officials cooped up in the Diet." Although his characterization may be
a bit strong, the fact remains that the bureaucrats have not been mere
functionaries under the control of the legislators, but highly independent
political actors who have played a central role in the formulation of policy.
Bureaucrats have often compared themselves modestly to the Kuroko, or the
stagehands in a Kabuki drama, who set things up for the actors but are dressed
in black to remain inconspicuous (see Performing Arts, ch. 3).

The Elite Civil Service

     Japan's upper professional or higher civil servants are an elite whose
prestige in the eyes of the general public is unmatched by any other group in
society. As of late 1981 there were about 500 of them in each ministry. A
handful, perhaps ten to twenty, have been admitted each year to a ministry,
after having passed through an extremely rigorous educational screening
process that begins as early as middle school and culminates in successful
passage of the ministry's civil service entrance examination. The great
majority of them were graduates of the Law Faculty of the University of Tokyo,
although some were graduates of other national universities such as Kyoto and
Hitotsubashi or the most prestigious private universities, Keio and Waseda.
Graduation from the best universities was important not only because this
assured the employment of the most talented applicants, but also because
coming from the "right" schools gave the individual the sorts of connections
with fellow graduates that were essential in career advancement-"old school
tie" sentiments remaining very strong.

     Although they received modest salaries and benefits in comparison with
their counterparts in the private sector in late 1981, and worked long hours
under intense pressure, elite bureaucrats retained a strong sense of mission
as the real guardians of the country's welfare and future destiny. The ideal
official has been described as one who is bright, though not necessarily
brilliant, and a good team player rather than an individualist. The Ministry
of Finance (MOF) was generally considered to be the most prestigious of the
ministries, because its Budget Bureau regulated public finance and formulated
the national budget. Its officials have been described as the "samurai of the
Japanese government," much envied for their power and resented for the
position of privilege they occupy in relation to other ministries and agencies
of the government. The Ministry of International Trade and Finance (MITI) was
also prestigious, given its close association with Japan's postwar "economic
miracle" and its connections with powerful business interests (see
Government-Business Relations, ch. 4). Its staff and resources overshadowed
the other ministry concerned directly with overseas developments, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs (see Institutional Framework, ch. 7). Given Japan's
commitment in the postwar era to a peaceful foreign policy, expressed in
Article 9 of the Constitution and the generally pacifist bent of public
opinion, the Defense Agency of the Office of the Prime Minister was among
those government bodies with the lowest prestige, although that might change
with increasing pressures for a military buildup.

     Elite bureaucrats were homogenous in terms of outlook and background,
having virtually the same educational experience. They were, like the elite
civil service of other countries, "generalists" rather than technical
specialists. Those who graduated from the University of Tokyo Law Faculty
received a theoretically oriented education in the principles of law,
political science, and administration, and once hired by the ministry they
received experience in all aspects of the ministry's work, rather than a
narrow specialty. Unlike the elite civil servants in many countries, most
Japanese bureaucrats remained in one ministry throughout their careers. This
created a strong sense of identification, which at best promoted a sense of
dedication and esprit de corps, but which at worst encouraged a strong feeling
of sectionalism, making bureaucrats extremely jealous of their powers and
jurisdictions.

     Bureaucrats were largely insulated from Diet pressures in late 1981. They
were required to appear in the Diet for questioning, and as the senior
bureaucrat quoted earlier suggests, this could be a burdensome duty. Outside
of this, however, they had little to fear from legislators. One reason for
this was that there were very few political appointments within the civil
service. Cabinet ministers were usually politicians, but they were moved in
and out of their posts somewhat rapidly, as cabinets were reshuffled, and had
little opportunity to develop a power base within a ministry or apply pressure
on their civil service subordinates for reform. Below the cabinet minister was
the administrative vice minister. He and his subordinates were career civil
servants whose appointments were determined in accordance with an internally
established principle of seniority; thus civil servants were generally
unaffected by pressures resulting from infighting by LDP factions. Cabinets
may rise and fall with the clash of mainstream and anti-mainstream factions,
but bureaucrats remain.

     A second factor in the immunity of bureaucrats from political pressure
was their virtual monopoly of information. Unlike United States
representatives, who have large research staffs independent of those in the
executive branch of government, members of the Diet were dependent on
bureaucrats for staff and research support. There have been cases of
opposition legislators going to a bureaucrat for documents on certain policy
issues in order to question the very same official during a Diet session.
Officials seconded Diet committees in order to carry out research activities,
and they played the most important role in the drafting of new legislation.
Japanese political scientists argue that the great power of the bureaucracy
has derived from its control over the process of initiating legislation and
the drafting of the national budget.

Policymaking Dynamics

     Observers have described political dynamics in contemporary Japan in
terms of the dominance of a triple alliance of LDP politicians, big business
interests, and elite bureaucrats, a "tripod" upon which political institutions
rest and through which policies are formulated. Owing to the "back room"
nature of many political decisions and the studied indirectness of much
political and administrative language, it was often impossible to tell who
exactly was responsible for, or was in control of, a specific policy decision.
The political elite was remarkably homogeneous and interconnected, defined by
a "geography of personal networks" built up through the years in college, in
work relationships, and even marriage connections. This homogeneity was
sustained by the institution of early retirement and the practice of amakudari
("descent from heaven") in which retired officials assumed top positions in
public corporations and private enterprise. Retired bureaucrats in some cases
became LDP politicians, including eight out of fifteen postwar prime ministers
by late 1981. The closeness and interconnectedness of political, business, and
bureaucratic elites has led to a fine sense of haragei, literally "belly art,"
an intimacy between individuals that facilitates implicit and even nonverbal
communication and helps keep the wheels of the political process running
smoothly.

     On the institutional level in 1981, a number of entities existed that
served as the locus of interest, articulation, and policy formulation. The
simplest and most direct of these was the petition group (chinjodan)-large
numbers of individuals mobilized to go to Tokyo to pressure politicians and
bureaucrats. But with the possible exception of farmers agitating for high
price supports on rice, petition groups were not thought to be especially
effective in seeking policy changes, although they remained popular with
politicians seeking publicity.

     Deliberation Councils attached to each ministry consisted of both
government officials and prominent private individuals who consulted together
and advised the ministry on matters of policy. Business leaders were
especially well represented on those councils attached to ministries dealing
with economic policy, and they performed the important function of serving as
means of communication between the private and the public spheres. Yet they
were dependent upon the bureaucracy for financial support and have been
described ironically as kakuremino, a "fairy's cape for creating the semblance
of official-civilian collaboration," according to a former MITI vice minister.

     A policymaking institution of basic importance in 1981 was the Policy
Affairs Research Council of the LDP. This consisted of a number of committees
made up of members of the Diet, which corresponded to different ministries and
agencies. Persons on a given committee worked closely with officials in the
corresponding ministry, advancing the requests of their constituents and at
the same time taking care to maintain close working relationships with their
opposite numbers in the ministry; the Policy Affairs Research Council
committees have been some of the most effective mediums through which interest
groups can state their cases to the bureaucracy, through the "pipeline" of the
LDP.

The Budget Process

     The Budget Bureau of the MOF has been in a real sense at the heart of the
political process in contemporary Japan because it has been responsible for
drawing up the national budget each year and thus has served as the ultimate
focus of interest groups in society through the medium of the LDP and for the
other ministries that find themselves in competition for limited funds. As of
early 1980, soon after the beginning of the fiscal year on April 1, the
ministries and agencies of the government started the process of formulating
their budget requests, in consultation with the appropriate committees of the
Policy Affairs Research Council of the LDP. Factions, otherwise such a central
feature of the LDP, particularly in elections, did not play as important a
role in budget politics as did the Policy Affairs Research Council. In the
fall of each year, the Budget Bureau of the MOF assigned its examiners to go
over the requests of each agency in great detail, while top MOF officials
worked out the general contours of the new budget and the distribution of tax
revenues. During the winter, after the release of a MOF draft budget,
campaigning by individual Diet members for their constituents and different
ministries for revisions and supplementary funds became intense. Party and MOF
officials consulted on a final draft budget, which was passed by the Diet in
late winter.

     In broad outline, the budgeting process revealed a basic characteristic
of Japanese political dynamics: that despite the oft-stated and affirmed
ideals of "harmony" and "consensus," interests, including bureaucratic
interests, were in intense competition with each other, and LDP politicians
and Budget Bureau officials needed great political skill in order to reach
mutually acceptable compromises. The image of "Japan Inc.," where harmony and
unanimity are virtually automatic, belied the reality of intense competition
between different political groups. The present system has been successful
insofar as superior political skills-the adept application of nemawashi or
"root cutting" - and an overall appreciation of common interests have served
to minimize differences and antagonisms, and maintain a mutually acceptable
"balance of power" between elite groups. Whether this will continue in the
future, especially in the light of recent commitments to reform the
bureaucracy, remains unclear.

The Opposition Parties

     With the exception of a period from May 1947 to March 1948, when a
Socialist, Katayama Tetsu, was prime minister heading a coalition of
Socialists and conservatives, the opposition parties have not gained enough
electoral support on the national level to participate in the formation of a
cabinet or form one of their own. In late 1981 the major opposition parties
with representation in the Diet were the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), the
Japan Communist Party (JCP), the Komeito, and the Democratic Socialist Party
(DSP). Two smaller opposition parties included the recently formed NLC and the
Socialist Citizens' League (SCL). None of these parties has had a sufficiently
broad base of support to effectively challenge the LDP at the polls, and in
late 1981 they had not been able to form workable coalitions, except in some
local elections where, until the late 1970s, the opposition was more effective
in uniting and electing candidates than on the national level. The parties
were separated by ideology, with the JSP, or a significant faction of it, and
the JCP espousing Marxist principles while the others were pragmatically
oriented, in many ways differing little in their programs from the LDP. Unlike
the LDP, the smaller opposition parties lacked the resources and support to
run candidates in all national constituencies.

     The role of the opposition appeared in late 1981 to be not so much the
presentation of an alternative to LDP rule as it was to act as a monitor and
vocal critic of conservative policies and practices. In the Diet their
representatives used meetings of the Budget Committee to question cabinet
ministers and government officials, and these sessions received wide publicity
in the media. The opposition, however, was largely cut out of the legislative
process. Regulations in the Diet Law and the rules of the two houses designed
to prevent filibustering gave the presiding officers of the houses the power
to convene plenary sessions, fix agendas, and limit debates. Because these
officers were elected by the LDP majority, they used these powers to constrain
opposition party activity. Opposition party members headed several Diet
committees, chairmanships being distributed to parties on the basis of numbers
of persons in the Diet. Although they cannot employ filibustering methods to
slow down Diet proceedings, the fact that there is no set time limit on taking
a formal ballot allows the opposition to use gyuho senjutsu, or the "cow
walking" method, to cause excruciating delays in the passage of LDP-sponsored
bills, walking so slowly in casting their individual votes that the process
takes several hours and sorely tries the tempers of LDP members of the Diet.
On May 16, 1980, the Socialists were able to pass a no confidence vote in the
House of Representatives. This was unprecedented, but it was possible only
because anti-mainstream faction members under Miki and Fukuda had boycotted
the proceedings, allowing Ohira's government to fall.

The Japan Socialist Party

     The JSP was the largest of the opposition parties in late 1981. Like
the LDP it was a union of two smaller groups that joined in 1955; the
divisions between these left-wing and right-wing factions remained prominent
in intraparty dynamics. In the House of Representatives election of 1958, the
JSP gained 32.9 percent of the popular vote and 166 out of 467 seats. But it
has not since been able to pierce the "one-third barrier," and both its
percentage of popular vote and number of seats in the two houses of the Diet
have declined. In the "double election" of June 1980, there were 107
socialists elected to the House of Representatives and twenty-two to the House
of Councillors, there being a total of forty-seven Socialist councillors
including the ones elected in 1977.

     The JSP has often been described as the "political arm" of Sohyo, from
which it has received most of its financial and organizational support. In
late 1981 two-thirds of the party's 55,000 members were Sohyo unionists,
including most union executives. There has been some movement in recent years
for some Sohyo members to support the JCP, but the Socialists remained the
principal representatives of the Council in the political sphere.

     In the past the concentration on union support limited the party's
appeal. Unlike the LDP it lacked an extensive network of local support
organizations outside the union framework. Because unskilled and temporary
workers-estimated at about 24 million in 1977-as well as small business
entrepreneurs, housewives, and farmers were not members of unions, and workers
in private enterprise were largely members of labor federations other than,
Sohyo, it could not draw on an especially broad popular base. Internally the
party was divided along ideological lines, with a left-wing faction organized
around the Socialist Society and a moderate faction led until 1977 by Eda
Saburo. This cleavage made it difficult for the Socialists to agree on
leadership at the 1977 special party conference, and it was only in December
1977 that Atsukata Ichio, former mayor of Yokohama, was chosen as JSP
chairman. Atsukata's main task has been the promotion of party unity and a
more moderate, nonideological stance that would make coalition with centrist
opposition parties possible.

     In March 1977 Eda left the JSP, criticizing it for its doctrinaire
inflexibility, and formed his own party, the SCL. The league, led by his son
after Eda's death in June 1977, has remained very small, winning only three
seats in the House of Representatives and three in the House of Councillors in
1980.

     The JSP has advocated greater welfare measures for the people, the
abolition of entrance examinations for high school and college, and the
holding down of consumer prices. It remained in late 1981 a steadfast opponent
of constitutional revision and advocated abolition of the Self-Defense Forces
(SDF) and a neutral foreign policy. Socialists have taken different sides in
the confrontation between the Soviet Union and China. They have cooperated, to
a limited extent, with consumer and citizens' movements, except where such
cooperation runs counter to the interests of union workers.

     Although the party has been closely identified with Sohyo, statistics
suggest that its support has not been limited to large cities. It has gained
over 20 percent of the popular vote in semiurban and rural
constituencies-using the Asahi shimbun's classification of "metropolitan,"
"urban," "semiurban," and "rural" districts (see fig. 13). The election of
socialist Francois Mitterand to the presidency of France in 1981 was looked
upon with great interest by party leaders, yet the goal of forming, as
Mitterand had, a broad base of popular support from which to wrest power from
conservatives remained a distant one in late 1981.

The Japan Communist Party

     The JCP was first organized in 1922, in the wake of the Russian
Revolution, and remained a part of the international communist movement
controlled by Moscow until the early 1960s. Although it won a large percentage
of the popular vote in Diet elections in 1949 it became extremely unpopular
after 1950, when the Com-intern ordered it to cease being a "lovable party"
and to engage in armed struggle. It was forced to go underground, and in the
1952 election it lost all its seats in the Diet. A formal break with Moscow
took place in 1963, and the party drew closer to Beijing, only to break with
the Chinese Communists in 1965. Since then the JCP has followed an
"independent line" advocated by its chairman, Miyamoto Kenji. Miyamoto has
stressed the "parliamentary road" of nonviolent, electoral politics, and at
the 1976 party convention a "soft line" was espoused, emphasizing freedom,
democracy, and an underplaying of the class struggle and dictatorship of the
proletariat themes. In late 1981 the party advocated a peaceful, neutral
stance for Japan in foreign policy, the cutting of military ties with the
United States, and on the domestic front a concern for welfare and "quality of
life" issues. Like the Socialists, it has consistently attacked the "monopoly
capitalism" of the LDP.

     The Communists have gradually gained electoral support, particularly
since the 1960s, winning a maximum of thirty-nine seats out of 511 in the
October 1979 House of Representatives election; in the June 1980 election this
number fell to twenty-nine. Unlike the Socialists the Communists have not had
strong union backing, although some members of Sohyo, especially members of
the Japan Teacher's Union, support them. The JCP has been strongest in
metropolitan and urban areas and thus, unlike the Socialists, has suffered
greatly from the overrepresentation of the rural districts. It had a large
membership, some 400,000 in 1981, as well as a youth movement known as Minsei,
which was active on university campuses. It received much of its financial
support from the sale of its publications, especially Akahata (Red Flag),
which had an estimated 3.5 million subscribers in mid-1981. The party has done
well financially; in fact the Asahi shimbun reported in August 1981 that in
the previous year the JCP had the largest income of any of the political
parties, including the business-backed LDP.

     The Communists continue to carry the stigma of their early association
with the international movement led by the Soviet Union, a country that is
most unpopular, according to opinion polls, with the public and much
distrusted. A "summit meeting" between JCP chairman Miyamoto and Soviet Party
Secretary General Leonid I. Brezhnev in December 1979, reestablishing formal
relations between the two parties, is unlikely to have contributed greatly to
its preferred image of stalwart independence. The party's tight organization,
based on the principle of "democratic centralism," has not allowed much room
for dissension within its ranks and critics have accused it of antidemocratic
tendencies.

The Komeito

     The Komeito, the translation usually given somewhat inaccurately in
English as the "Clean Government Party," was, in numbers of seats in both
houses of the Diet, the second largest opposition party as of the June 1980
election, although it suffered heavy losses at that time, declining from
fifty-eight to thirty-three seats in the House of Representatives. The party
is an offshoot of the militant Soka Gakkai or "Value Creation Society," an
organization of lay followers of Nichiren Buddhism founded before World War
II. The number of members in postwar Japan has been estimated as between 10
and 16 million (see Religion, ch. 2). In 1962 the Soka Gakkai established a
League for Clean Government, and this became a regular political party, the
Komeito, two years later. This party came under a great deal of criticism
because the close ties it had with the religious group seemed to violate
Article 20 of the Constitution. In 1970 the Komeito severed all official ties
with the Soka Gakkai, and the image of an "open party" was promoted. The
Komeito's strength has been greatest in the metropolitan and urban
constituencies, and has found itself competing with the Communists for the
same group of voters. Its supporters have tended to be less well-educated
people who are largely outside the privileged labor union and "salaryman"
circles of lifetime employment in large enterprises. Like the Communists, it
has suffered from the underrepresentation of urban and metropolitan districts.

     The Komeito's programs have been somewhat vague, between those of the
Socialists and Communists on the left and the Democratic Socialists and
Liberal Democrats on the right. It has emphasized welfare and quality of life
issues but in foreign policy has dropped its previous opposition to the
security treaty between Japan and the United States and the maintenance of the
SDF.

The Democratic Socialist Party

     The DSP was established in January 1960 when right-wing members of the
Socialists broke away to form their own party. It has derived much of its
financial and organizational support from the labor confederation, Domei,
although like the LDP it has also received business contributions. It has
supported welfare benefit increases, state regulation of private enterprise,
and a hold-down of consumer prices. In foreign policy it has come, in recent
years, to support the security treaty and has even advocated a modest buildup
of the SDF. As the most right-wing of the opposition parties, it has formed
coalitions with the LDP as well as with other opposition groups. The largest
number of seats that it has won in the House of Representatives was thirty-six
in the 1979 election, losing three of them in June 1980.

The New Liberal Club

     The NLC was founded by Kono Yohei and five other LDP Diet members who,
disgusted with the "money politics" of the ruling party, resigned from it in
June 1976 to form their own group. Though conservative in general political
orientation, it has stressed a youthful and "clean" image. In the "Lockheed
election" of December 1976 it won an impressive seventeen seats in the House
of Representatives. This fell to four seats in the October 1979 election,
climbing back to eleven in June 1980, with two in the House of Councillors. In
September 1981 the NLC and the SCL formed a coalition to act jointly in the
Diet, although the two parties had somewhat different ideologies.

The Prospects for Coalition

     In late 1981 it was clear that no single opposition party would have
sufficient support to oust the LDP from power, and the various parties have
attempted-unsuccessfully-to forge stable coalitions. In 1975 Eda Saburo, then
JSP chairman, joined with the leaders of the Komeito and the DSP to set up the
Society to Think About a New Japan, the first step in the formation of a
three-party alliance. This effort collapsed, however, when leftist Socialists
forced Eda out of the chairmanship in February 1977. Attempts at coalition
have continued, however, among the Komeito, the DSP, and the Socialists.
Observers have suggested that in the early 1980s a new alignment of parties
might be emerging, with the JCP isolated on the left, a "centrist" grouping of
the DSP, the Komeito, and the JSP, and the LDP on the right. "Centrists" have
supported each other's candidates in national and local elections and have
come closer to a broad consensus on programs and policies, although the left
wing, of the JSP remains a serious obstacle to all such efforts. The
possibility of the right-wing opposition parties allying with the LDP was not
discounted, although this seemed less likely after 1980, as long as the LDP
could maintain its solid majority in both houses of the Diet.

     "Progressive" coalitions of Socialists and Communists had been successful
in local elections, especially in the large metropolitan areas, two examples
being the coalition that backed Minobe Ryokichi as governor of Tokyo for three
terms from 1967 to 1979, and the one that backed Ninagawa Torazo as governor
of Kyoto Prefecture from 1950 to 1978.

Political Extremists

     The Asahi Yearbook for 1980 reported that there were some 35,000 members
of the "new left" organized into five major "currents" and twenty-three
different factions, as well as several thousand more persons in three hundred
or more "anarchist" groups. "New left" groups in recent years have become
involved in the movement to stop construction of a second Tokyo International
Airport at Narita-Sanrizuka in Chiba Prefecture, north of Tokyo, supporting
local farmers who opposed government expropriation of their land. Some eleven
radical student groups were involved, including the United Red Army, the Japan
Marxist-Leninist League, the Revolutionary Marxists, the Trotskyite Fourth
International, and the Communist War Banner League. The Narita confrontations,
which pitted 20,000 or more radicals (all identified as to faction by a
different colored helmet) and local farmers against riot police, lasted for
some ten years. The confrontations began in 1971 when the farmers' land was
first expropriated for construction of the airport and continued until 1980. A
striking feature of the resistance movement was the fact that student
radicals, including anarchists and Trotskyites, were able to form a workable
alliance with normally conservative farmers, whose families had lived at
Sanrizuka for generations.

     One of the most conspicuous of the "new left" groups has been the Red
Army Faction, formed in 1969, which is the most extreme group in the radical
student movement that grew up on Japan's university campuses in the 1960s. It
was responsible for, among other things, a number of hijackings of passenger
airliners, and the murder of twenty-six people at Israel's Lod Airport on May
30, 1977. It has close connections with a network of international terrorists
that includes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (see Civil
Disturbances, ch. 8).

     Right-wing groups were highly diverse. In late 1981 there were an
estimated 600 of them, having a membership of about 120,000. They have in
common the desire to revive prewar militaristic and nationalistic symbols,
particularly the "divinity" of the emperor, and a strong antipathy to
Socialists and Marxists. They have occasionally indulged in acts of terrorism,
as when Asanuma Inejiro, chairman of the JSP, was assassinated in 1960 by a
knife-wielding rightist youth, or when in 1978 an attempt was made on the life
of Ohira. Rightist figures such as the writer Mishima Yukio, who committed
suicide after an abortive attempt to rouse soldiers of the Ground
Self-Defense Force to attempt a coup d'etat in November 1970, have stressed
the theme of the "emptiness" and "materialism" of contemporary Japan, longing
for the restoration of a glamorized samurai style of life. His Shield Society
(Tate no Kai) was a student group that was, in the words of one critic, "a
band of real-life toy soldiers," complete with neatly tailored grey uniforms.
Other rightist organizations included the Great Eastern Academy (Daitojuku),
which emphasized the study of Shinto lore, and the Greater Japan Patriotic
Party (Dai Nippon Aikokuto). The All-Japan League of Patriots (Zen Nippon
Aikokusha Kaigi) was connected with Kodama Yoshio, who played a prominent role
in the Lockheed payoff scandal. Right-wing groups have been active in the
campaign for constitutional revision and have supported a more aggressive
foreign policy, especially against the Soviet Union. Many right-wingers,
including Kodama and Sasaki Ryosuke, Japan Motor Boat Racing Association
magnate, had extensive ties with the yakuza (gangster) underworld.

                                    * * *

     Basic orientations to the Japanese political system in English include
J.A.A. Stockwin's Japan: Divided Politics in a Growth Economy; Robert E.
Ward's Japan's Political System (second edition, 1978); Ike Nobutaka's A
Theory of Japanese Democracy; and Watanuki Joji's Politics in Postwar Japanese
Society. Maruyama Masao's Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics,
Lewis Austin's Saints and Samurai, and a collection of essays, Authority and
the Individual in Japan, edited by J. Victor Koschmann, are especially
interesting for their discussions of basic social and political values; see
especially Sakuta Keiichi's "The Controversy Over Community and Autonomy," in
the Koschmann volume.

     Gerald L. Curtis' Election Campaigning Japanese Style, published in 1971,
and Nathaniel Thayer's How the Conservatives Rule Japan, published in 1969,
still provide an enlightening inside view of the workings of the Liberal
Democratic Party. Hans Baerwald's Japan's Parliament: An Introduction is a
definitive study of the National Diet. For local politics see Kuroda
Yasumasa's Reed Town, Japan and Political Opposition and Local Politics in
Japan, edited by Kurt Steiner, et al.; for "citizens' movements" see Margaret
A. McKean's Environmental Protest and Citizen Politics in Japan. For
policymaking dynamics and the budget process, see T.J. Pempel, (editor),
Policymaking in Contemporary Japan and John C. Campbell, Contemporary Japanese
Budget Politics.

     Journals such as the Asian Survey, the Japan Interpreter, the Japan
Quarterly, and the Journal of Japanese Studies frequently have articles on
aspects of the political system; for the latest developments, see the Far
Eastern Economic Review and the Japan Times Weekly (International Edition).
Articles from Japanese newspapers are translated in the Daily Summary of
Japanese Press, and those from important magazines in the monthly Summaries of
Selected Japanese Magazines, both published by the Political Section of the
American Embassy in Tokyo. (For further information see Bibliography.)