Presentations

Japan was the first emerging Asian nation to adopt Western-style constitutionalism, and it went on to modernize and democratize. There was a conflict between the Asian order and Western culture. This was manifested in the way politicians were organized through the Meiji Revolution, Taisho democracy, the Pacific War, rapid economic growth, and the "lost two or three decades" that followed. If so, who became politicians in Japan? Through tracing the transition structurally, Yuichiro Shimizu draws a portrait of Japan's modernization and democratization.

As the first "commoner" prime minister, Hara Takashi led the first full-fledged political party cabinet. Born in the Morioka domain, which had been defeated in the Boshin War, Hara studied hard and worked as a newspaper reporter before joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and rising to the rank of Vice Minister. Thereafter, he joined Ito Hirobumi's Seiyukai party and became a party politician. Amidst the Taisho Political Crisis and the 1918 Rice Riots, he served as a cabinet minister, and then as party leader, implementing reforms that sometimes antagonized and sometimes compromised with the various factions based on pre-Meiji feudal domains. After becoming the first elected politician to become prime minister of Japan, he was assassinated in the midst of attempting to bring about far-sighted reforms. Although Hara has sometimes been described as autocratic and dictatorial, this book examines his original intentions and argues that Hara was a realist politician who was willing to forge difficult compromises with his political opponents in order to achieve his aims.

The electoral system, which is the foundation of representative democracy, has been the subject of much debate in Japan in recent years. These include lowering the voting age, relaxing restrictions on electoral activities, and reexamining electoral administration. Among these, the electoral district system has become the most controversial issue. As a result of the campaign to correct the disparity in the number of votes and the "unconstitutional state of affairs" ruling by the Supreme Court, a major revision of the electoral districts for the House of Representatives was made in November 2022. Based on the principle that members of the National Diet are representatives of the people, the current electoral district allocation, which insists on the demarcation of basic municipalities, is questionable. On the other hand, while leaning on the "myth of representation of the people”, the fact remains that regional representatives have been selected. We can find the strong path-dependency, not just the pursuit of reelection possibilities for the representatives. How then, have Japan's electoral districts been divided and changed? There have been major revisions of the electoral district system in 1889, 1900, 1919, 1925, 1945, 1947, and 1994. We can confirm that amendments, which were extremely frequent in the prewar period, became rare in the postwar period. This is inseparable from the instability of party politics and democracy in the prewar period and its stability in the postwar period. At the same time, it is also the institutional basis for the high probability of regime change in the prewar period and the establishment of one-party rule in the postwar period. Japan's electoral district system can be said to be a spatial political system that has strongly defined Japanese politics in the prewar and postwar periods. In other words, understanding the effect of electoral districts reform is a major aid to understanding Japan's political culture and climate. In this report, we focus on the continuum of the electoral districts in order to examine their influence on Japanese politics.