[interview] Reform of the Liberal Democratic Party and Proposals for Partial Policy Association

Koichi Kato: Lower House Representative

Born in 1939. Graduated from the Law Department of Tokyo University in 1964 and entered the Ministry of Foreign Affaires in the same year. Attained a Masters from Harvard University. Elected Lower House Representative in 1972. Cabinet Vice Secretariat for the Ohira Administration in 1978. Cabinet Secretariat for the Miyazawa Administration in 1991. Secretary General of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1995. Wrote What Should be Done in Today's Politics: The Design of Japan in the New Century (Published by Kodansha) .

Former LDP Secretary General Koichi Kato contributed this piece concerning the interim summary of the Koizumi reforms and the significance of the LDP reforms, the recent arguments for the development of a prime minister led system and the arguments recently concerning the government sponsored statute proposal of the abolition of majority party investigations and of strict adherence to party lines. In this contribution, Mr. Kato evaluates the success of the Koizumi reforms to move the axis of Japan as a whole, and emphasizes that the LDP reforms were initiated in the doubts of the Japanese people towards the significance of the LDP's existence itself. Furthermore, concerning the issue of a Prime Minister led system, he proposes an experiment of partial policy association within the Diet as an experiment.

When looking at the issues confronting Japan today, (the Koizumi reforms) are said by some to be lacking in speed or not strategic. However, the method of Koizumi's reforms proposes in a unique manner an objective far from where they land, and even with the intra-party objections and resistance, the method taken will land at a goal far further than using regular methods. Therefore, it is obvious that it hasn't reached that objective yet, but it is clear that it is moving us further. This method will change the Japanese axis as a whole as long as the people continue to support Koizumi. The role that has been played by the LDP thus far was speedy and uncorrected passage of the plans set up by the executive and bureaucratic institutions within a political system of nationally regulated economy, and in return, by the rights to portion out the budget and allocate the national resources with their own hands, receive votes and continue to be in power. Of course, the assumption behind this is that the executive branch continues to match with the course of history, the national goals and the consciousness of the people, and when the LDP stopped having this awareness of goals, many of the Japanese started to disdain the LDP system. For Japan to respond to the era of great change in the world, the speed of the political decision making process must be increased. Within the graphics of opposition between the Prime Minister and the resistance forces, there are debates to eradicate the pre-investigation by the majority party and the restraint of party judgment for statutes submitted by the government to strengthen the leadership of the prime minister and as an argument it is interesting, but as long as Japan takes a parliamentary form of government, it becomes an issue of whether or not postwar Japanese political fundamentals will be changed or not. The origins of this debate can be found in the failure of the present political system to absorb the will of the people, and I myself would like to revitalize the arguments for prime minister leadership and the debates in the Diet, and I think that to do so we should partially abstain from majority party investigation and strict adherence to party lines, but there are some assumptions that must be met. First, in the cross voting, we should try to take Diet votes without adherence to party lines about ten times a year. Thereby, we should try to find a partial association within the Diet. Based on this experience, we should abolish majority party investigation and strict adherence to party lines for this debate to become a reality.

Diet Lower House Member Koichi Kato

I believe that Japan is the most successful example of an efficient social democratic nation in modern times.

What the Koizumi administration is trying to do is make this a smaller government and approach a more liberal country. This is the thinking behind the Koizumi reforms. Specifically, it is the idea of letting work which can be done by the private sector to do so, and the reforms should shrink the large fiscal amounts given to special enterprises, etc. This is symbolized by the 30 trillion yen cap of issuance of government bonds.

When looking at the issues confronting Japan today, (the Koizumi reforms) are said by some to be lacking in speed or not strategic. However, the method of Koizumi’s reforms proposes in a unique manner an objective far from where they land, and even with the intra-party objections and resistance, the method taken will land at a goal far further than using regular methods. Therefore, it is obvious that it hasn’t reached that objective yet, but it is clear that it is moving us further. This method will change the Japanese axis as a whole as long as the people continue to support Koizumi's methods.

Looking individualistically, it is not as if there is no dissatisfaction, but the reforms of the medical system, etc. should have gone more forward. I am dissatisfied with the lack of progress in the management of the increase in senior citizen medical expenses. In some ways, the renewed consideration of medical expenses and their total payment and the different payment plans chronic and acute problems during the Hashimoto administration was more revolutionary. Concerning the reforms of the executive branch, they talk about the regulation of total personnel regulations. Looking overall, there are still some places which are lacking, but if we ignore these, Japan is moving forward towards change in fact.

Why is the reform of the LDP itself necessary?

Concerning progress of these reforms, it is said to be lead by the Prime Minister. To change the present Japanese situation, the leadership of the Prime Minister is necessary, and such debates are important, but I think there are still ways to consider in its progress.

The graphics of Prime Minister leadership and resistance forces which are taken up by the mass media may not be interesting, but in the case of medical expenses, we talked it out with former Prime Minister Hashimoto and if we had handled it as peers, the reforms might have progressed more. Of course, politics with conflict will slow down reform and this is irony. I have said before that the three urban leaders who have experienced the Minister of Health and Welfare, Messrs. Ryutaro Hashimoto, Kan Naoto and Junichiro Koizumi could get together and really cooperated, the reforms of medical expenses should have undergone more progress.

Mr. Koizumi became the head of the LDP saying that he wanted to break up the LDP. The person who became president of the LDP is saying that he wants to break up the LDP, so he presents contradictions, but I think that this is of its own significance. This is because it you ask whether or not the LDP should change, that is not the case. In this case, the theme that what form the LDP which should change is of interest.

I myself believe that the LDP is not a party with an ideology, but a system which should support the government. First of all, the LDP is said to be the party with a conservative ideology, but this is not based in fact. The LDP administration has changed Japanese society in the postwar decades.

The LDP was not a party which turned around to defend. It has even broken up Japanese values. Furthermore, it developed postwar Japanese economy.

The policies of the LDP were not a small Adam Smith government based on liberalism and the market mechanism. In other words, what the LDP did was build an extremely large government to which all parties depended. From the angle of making the people’s consciousness dependent on the state, this was not a liberalist, economic politics.

Under such a national regulated economy political system, the government made statutes based on the plans made up by the executive and bureaucratic institutions. The role played by the LDP which took power was for the legislative branch to pass such statutes uncorrected and speedily, and thereby the right to allocate the budget and use national resources by their own hand to gather votes and continue in power. The LDP maintained its legislative function within a national planned economy and the allocation function of the national resources.

Of course, the assumptions behind this is that what the executive branch was doing must match the context of history, the goals of the state and the consciousness of the people. With clear objectives absorbing the people such as the US Japan security system, economic growth and postwar recovery, the present system was created. When these goals and the clear consciousness were lost to the LDP, the majority of citizens started to disdain the LDP system. In other words, the origins of reforms of the LDP were from when the raisond’etre of the LDP were put into question.

What is necessary is for the reform of the people’s consciousness.

Recent voters have begun to think that the LDP should debate its vision of Japan's future, and that they do not want the budget to pass without correction without such debate. Furthermore, it is thankful that the budget is allotted to their regions, but even those who receive the allotments debate whether this type of Japanese democracy is beneficial and they vote for other parties.

Prime Minister Koizumi wants to change all this and thereby has received such strong support. If he were just another character, he should have gotten more votes in the previous LDP presidential elections. However, this was not the case. This time around, when the people thought that they really needed reforms, the character and resonance of a person who brought about expectations of reform became so popular.

However, on the other hand, because the people themselves support reforms, they will have to expect their consequences. They support reforms with pain and say that they would accept the decrease of national resources, taxes and other official funds which go to them, but if this becomes fact, won’t there be criticism from the people? Furthermore, even when the government implements policies for this recession, if it says not all the goods inventory from companies which are not popular cannot all be sold, there will be many people who will become discouraged.

In such an environment, the consciousness that the government doesn’t have some magic hand with which to relieve the recession under the consciousness of politicians who say “leave it all up to me” will not disappear.

Therefore, whether or not the Koizumi reforms will really lead to a reform of the consciousness of the people will become a great theme upon which to continue these reforms.

In such a manner, Mr. Koizumi must explain the present circumstances to the people and question the significance of the reforms. It is alright to be swept in through popularity, but in any event, the people must also be able to test their expectations. This point I believe is still insufficient.

I believe that the questions faced by Japan today must be considered in the context of a wider plane. The reasons are the huge supply of high quality and low priced labor which has appeared on the labor market of liberalist countries accompanying the breakdown of socialism, and within the world deflation and global deflation, I believe that Japan is squirming to find a response. By coincidence, the US covered the lack through its IT bubble and its Hedge Fund bubble for about 5 or 6 years, but recently, it is unable to bear the whole burden and the real questions have become clear. In Japan also, the IT factories and the fabric factories are moving to China, and I believe that when a metals factory from Kamata in Ohta-ku escape also, the real questions need to be raised.

If you believe that the basics of the questions are there, even if demand is increased through increases in the public works budget, the solutions to the questions are not easy. It appears then that the question of the limits of the government bond issues to 30 trillion yen or over that amount is not really significant.

System of Prime Minister's leadership and the abolition of majority party investigation and strict adherence to party lines

Japan must respond to this global era of change which is occurring just now, and it will become necessary for its decision making process to be more speedy.

The Koizumi administration is also trying to progress in the system of leadership by the Prime Minister. Within the graphics of the conflicts between the Prime Minister and resistance forces, there are now debates to abolish the systems of pre-investigations by the majority party and the strict adherence to the party line in the statute proposals of the government. These debates are interesting but they are rather large scale and I believe that it becomes an issue of whether to change one of the fundamentals of postwar Japanese politics.

The abolishment of majority party investigation will on the one hand give the Prime Minister the chance to speed up the timing of statute proposals necessary for reform, and it is a daring reform in the institution of the Diet. However, on the other hand, Diet review will become confused, and it is possible that questions from majority members will continue. The merit that the members of the majority attained in the allocation process of the budget will no longer be a merit, and it is obvious that they would revolt.

The debates which were held within the LDP would become debates in the whole of the Diet, and for the government, the passage of laws would become difficult; the proposals of the statutes will become faster, but the Diet sessions may become extremely slow. However, as a direction I think this debate will become extremely interesting. The conclusion is that the arguments in the Diet will become revitalized, and debates will be possible.

Those Diet members who can plea their messages to the people and their constituents will win seats in the Diet. In fact, there has already been experimentation with abolition of a priori majority investigation and strict adherence to party lines. First, when I was secretary general, it was a time of policy coordination between the LDP, the Socialist Party and the Sakigake party and we were debating the proposed statute for organ transplants. We believed that it was a question concerning life philosophy, the viewpoint towards death and religion, and we determined that it was not an issue of parties. Therefore, we did not have the parties investigate in advance and we did not force strict adherence according to party lines. This was not a statute proposal brought by the government, but by a Diet member, Individual voting brought on interesting results.

I along with then Vice Secretary General Nonaka voted for the proposal in Mr.Nakasone opposition to the proposal. In a LDP General Affairs meeting at that time, I was told that "We would like you to limit the voting format to this one issue". Returning to my election district, I was asked by an elderly gentleman from the town Why did you vote for the statute? And I could not respond. It would have been easiest to say that I voted along with the party line. However, if there is no thinking on your own, you cannot respond to such a question. In cases where there is no a priori investigation, it becomes extremely important for the member to have his own independent types of thinking to improve the qualities of the individual member.

The second experiment occurred in the first rounds of the so-called Finance Diet session starting from August of 1998. At this time, the situation was urgent and the Diet was scared that a Japanese initiated financial depression would spread around the world, and that it had to do something to prevent this. In the end, the LDP and the largest minority party the Democratic party cooperated to proceed to debate the statutes and the members within the party who were called new breed and the minority party members discussed the issues. Thereby, the proposal which the government submitted was changed in a great manner, and the new proposal was to be passed with the cooperation of the parties. In other words, although it was a statute proposed by the government, it was in reality determined during the Diet session.

In the future, the cases of such determination will increase if the laws are passed without a priori investigations. If so, it will be a Diet full of members who understand policy and it will be operated by the parties. It will be an extremely new ways of operation for the parties and the Diet, but because it will be different from the format whereby the intra-party determination of statutes were the main, the initial resistance from within the party was strong. This new method was reversed during the second round of the Finance Diet session. Here, the LDP, the Liberal Party and the Komeito Party could pass the government sponsored statutes with sheer numbers and they reverted to the methods used in the past. The resistance towards this I believe was one reason for the downgrading of the status of the LDP afterwards.

However, we must realize that the recent debates on Prime Minister leadership depends much on the feeling that since Mr. Koizumi's popularity is great, it should go its course. There is the assumption that the resistance forces of the LDP will try to obstruct all development in the world, but unless we let them try, the debate will be weak.

Of course, there will be voices raised against such debates. The breakdown of the past patterns is worrisome to those people who have made the base of their opinions upon the previous system, and even if the present majority party system does not itself present much policy debates, the positioning and the insurance of merits for the Diet members who are from the LDP depends on this framework.

Japan does not take a presidential system like the US but a parliamentary cabinet system. Therefore, the voters choose their desired representatives which in turn create a majority party which chooses its Prime Minister, and this Prime Minister implements good politics based on the opinions of the majority party. If the Prime Minister did not satisfy the people, which is the reverse of the present situation, what would the people think when that prime minister tried to proceed in his own way? It was the LDP Diet members who chose that Prime Minister, and there may be debate that states the framework within which the Prime Minister did not listen to their opinions was a mistake. In Japan, debates tend to get unbalanced, and we must debate based on whether or not we can handle such counter-arguments.

If even in this case the Prime Minister is to take leadership, we must make it so that the people choose the Prime Minister themselves. As long as Japan takes a parliamentary system, the Prime Minister acts as the conductor of an orchestra, and for the members of his party to make harmony, he must retain leadership. If we progress towards debate of the leadership of the Prime Minister, it is difficult to respond to issues such as a parliamentary system or a presidential system, and the relationship between the executive branch and the Diet members.

We must assume experiments such as the partial association in policies

Prime Minister Koizumi is searching for the formation of a Prime Minister leadership system in many ways. One of these is the progress of economic policy through the Economic and Fiscal Advisory Conferences, but in this case, the issue is whether or not the determination of policy is through the leadership and control of the Ministry of Finance or if the prime minister controls the Finance Ministry through the Advisory Conference which is a question within the executive branch. For Diet members of the LDP, the issue becomes whether or not the executive branch has gotten their permission whether or not it is determined by the ministry of Finance or by Minister Takenaka, and if the executive branch does not do so, it may not guarantee that the budget and statutes are passed in the Diet session in cooperation with the government.

In fact, before the Ikeda cabinet, this is how debates were carried out in the Diet. The government had a difficult time, but it was considered a format which was simplified since the LDP would be unified by the party itself. This led to the custom of a priori investigation by the majority party.

The question is that at present, this format cannot absorb the opinions of the people. Should we therefore return to the old ways or should be we continue to use the simplified format, and this is what makes the daily Koizumi administration an active one. I myself believe that partial abolition of the majority party investigation and the strict adherence to party lines is a good thing. It should become all the more interesting if the Diet votes through its individual members and not in control by the majority or other parties.

In the US also, about 30% of the votes are conducted under cross-voting whereby the adherence to party lines is abolished. In this way, the strength of the parties is probably stronger in Japan. In contrast, the simplified format which has taken root in Japan has delayed the revitalization of debate in the Diet.

At the same time, politicians should consider their own merits by positively expressing their viewpoints in the Diet. At present, the members are not accustomed to this type of debate, and the representatives who are serving their first or second term must shut up in response to opinions given by the older representatives who are serving their 7th term. In committees, the media will take up opinions which state that the roads should be built in the representatives' own election district, and these have more merits.

The representatives who have no courage or no way of expressing their opinions must stay quiet, but there are many younger representatives in the party who have a great deal of policy capability and methods of expression.

In Japan, there is already starting to be a situation where the qualities and capabilities of the politician himself are being scrutinized. In the US, there are NPOs which check upon the contents and the voting records of representatives of Congress, and in time, there will probably be the same ranking and points for representatives in Japan.

In Japan also, the politics of majority party rule by numbers and the total acceptance of what the government proposes will no longer stand. It is about time that in Japan also, we must realize that there should be cooperation according to policy or a partial association. This is not just limited to the majority party. The coalition parties should also realize that it can change policy not in total acceptance to what the majority LDP says and the minority policies should determine their opinions on a policy not just in opposition to what the majority party says. This change should change Japanese politics. However, resistance to the abolition of a priori majority party investigation and strict adherence to the party line will be great, and it is possible that the debates will return to their initial beginnings. First of all, we should try ten votes using cross voting.

Then, based on this experience, we should do away with majority party investigation and strict adherence to the party line to make this debate a reality.

The implementation of a Prime Minister lead system and the revitalization of the Diet will, I believe, bring efforts and experiments to a reality under Japan's parliamentary cabinet system.