PUBLIC POLICY ADVOCACY IN JAPAN

Japan has more interest groups, more organizations of people seeking to get their views represented in the political system, than is true for almost any other country except for the United States itself. Japan is a nation of joiners. To understand how the political system works, one has to look at the structure of interest groups and map the interest group organizations that are so important a player in the Japanese political system.

One of the things that is characteristic of the Japanese political system, and that has been characteristic of Japanese politics going back for more than a hundred years, is that the bureaucracy in Japan is considered by Japanese to be a place where the country’s best and the brightest, or the elite goes. So, unlike some other countries, where bureaucrats do not have a great deal of social prestige and becoming a civil servant is not considered to be necessarily the most successful career that one could aspire to, in Japan becoming a member of the Ministry of Finance or a member of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, becoming a bureaucrat in the elite track — that is that group of senior bureaucrats in the Japanese government — has traditionally been a very prestigious position. In Japan, bureaucrats are drawn from those people who pass the most difficult exams, who are graduates of the best universities in the country.

The most powerful interest groups are the interest groups of businessmen, agriculture and labour.

Businessmen

Businessmen are organized into four major interest groups.

1. The most important one is an organization called Keidanren [Japan Federation of Economic Organizations]. Keidanren is the federation of economic organizations to which the presidents, the chief executive officers of Japan’s major corporations and the leaders of major corporate organizations, like the automobile association or the chemical industry association and other associations, are members. Keidanren has many sub-committees and groups that make recommendations to the government on public policy issues of concern to the business community. It is the centre for business power in Japan. 

2. A second major interest group among Japanese businessmen is an organization called Keizai Doyukai [Japan Association of Corporate Executives]. This organization tends to be run, or to be populated, by people who are somewhat younger than the chief executive officers in Keidanren, and take a longer-term perspective on the Japanese economy, and try to think through long-term issues for Japan and how the business community should deal with the kinds of structural issues that face the economy.

3. The third big organization and important organization among Japanese businessmen is an organization called Nikkeiren. And Nikkeiren, often called in English the Japan Employers Association, is the association that is concerned with labor relations. And so Nikkeiren’s major role is to try to create some unity within the Japanese business community as to how to deal with labor demands for increased wages and other issues relating to the labor market.

4. And finally there’s the Chamber of Commerce, the national Chamber of Commerce, or in Japanese Shoko Kaigisho. And the Shoko Kaigisho, or the Japan Chamber of Commerce, is the organization for leaders of small and medium-sized industry.

So, Keidanren is the organization of big industry and big industrial associations, Keizai Doyukai the organization of far-sighted businessmen concerned with long-term issues, Nikkeiren the organization of businessmen concerned with labor issues, and the Shoko Kaigisho — or Chamber of Commerce — the organization of businessmen from small and medium-sized companies.

Agriculture

Now, along with these powerful business organizations, there is a major interest group among Japanese farmers, in Japanese referred to as Nôkyo, or the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives. The farming population in Japan today is very small, no more than 5 percent of the labor force is in agriculture in Japan. But, as in other advanced industrialized democratic countries, this small farming population has a large political power. And in Japan the farmers organized in these agricultural cooperatives have a very large political power, and they’ve used it to try to protect Japanese agriculture, particularly Japanese rice producers, against competition from foreign producers. So, Japanese agriculture is very protected. And one of the goals of Japanese farm organizations is to make sure that the politicians who are elected to office in the Japanese Parliament continue that protection or else they would not be voted for any longer by the farmers. So this gives the farmers a considerable degree of power, particularly since in the Japanese electoral system rural districts, the rural population, is over-represented in the Diet. This means the voice of the farmer interests through the Nôkyo agricultural cooperatives is much greater than the number of farmers and their percentage in the labor force of five percent or so would suggest.

Labour

The third major group, major interest group in Japan, is that of Japanese labour. Rengo is one of the largest labor federations in the world today, but its power is quite limited since it rejects the kind of political action that Sokyo was so famous for in earlier years.

Professional Associations

There are also interest groups, powerful interest groups, organized among professionals. The Japan Medical Association, the Japan Teacher’s Union, the Japan Dentist’s Association, and many other professional groups have organized interest groups that lobby hard to try to get the interests of their members served by government policy. Some other interests are not well organized in Japan e.g. environmental movements, the consumer movement, women’s groups.

Influencing

The way Japanese interest groups try to influence the political process  is by giving money and campaign support to candidates and political parties so that for candidates for the Diet, for political parties in Japan, getting the support of major interest groups is absolutely essential to being able to run an effective political campaign. One of the ways interest groups seek to have influence in the political system is by supporting the campaigns of candidates who are identified directly with that particular interest group or group of interest groups. This is especially true for candidates in the upper house, where interest groups will run candidates who either have been members of that group or, what is often common, had been working in the government as career bureaucrats — civil servants in a ministry that was concerned with the issues that involved that interest group.

So someone from the Health and Welfare Ministry might run for the upper house with the support of interest groups among doctors, and dentists, and nursing home owners, and the like. Or someone from the Ministry of Construction will run for the upper house with the support of interest groups organized within the construction industry and the building trades.

In Japan interest groups seek to elect members of the Diet who can be expected to represent the interests of those interest groups because that’s who they’re dependent upon for their election support.