政治家-seijika—politicians

“My idea of electoral integrity is voting for the person who pays me to vote for him”: the words of a high school teacher in Minamata, a town in the southern part of Kumamoto Prefecture. He was talking to Michael, a New Zealand friend who was working at the school as an AET （an Assistant English Teacher, a label since changed to JET—Japanese English Teacher）. The going rate for a vote doesn’t seem to have varied much over the past fifteen years-- about 10,000 yen. Every now and again, a politician gets caught, or, more probably, their secretary does; vote buying is clearly endemic, and regarded with cynicism rather than outrage by the woman on the Shin-oo-e omnibus. Sometimes, the money is simply dropped in one’s letterbox a few days before an election. There is no need for any message. The person receiving it will know very well who has put it there and, come election day, will feel morally obliged to vote for the local candidate. I remember reading about the caciques, the system of vote control in rural Spain which ensured that the local elite maintained their grip on the 19th century parliaments in the same way that they controlled their peasantry (Spain 1808–1975. Carr, R. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 1-129).
There is very little feeling that people in areas like Kumamoto are betraying their principles for money. Elections seldom seem to be about ideas or principles. Campaigning seems largely to consist of politicians, or their agents, driving around in little vans, shouting their name over and over again, along with a plea that people vote for them: “Tanaka desu. Tanaka desu! O-negai shimasu! Tanaka desu! O-negai shimasu..” (“This is Tanaka. This is Tanaka. I beg you! This is Tanaka! I beg you!”)
Kumamoto politics, like politics in most of the rest of the country, has been dominated for more than half a century by the Liberal Democratic Party. Y’s father appears to have been a supporter of various LDP politicians for most of that time. Whenever there was a particularly gross case of LDP corruption or venality, he would mutter “Terrible!” or “Disgusting!” along with the rest of the family but, come the next election, he would be round at the local headquarters of the LDP man he was supporting, to share in the excitement of the night.
Electoral politics was much less of a contest between parties and more a competition between rival firms, several of which might have the same party affiliation. For the first ten years that I was in Kumamoto, each electoral area was represented by two, or sometimes three, MPs. There might be several candidates from the LDP who would in effect be competing with each other, as well as with candidates from other parties.
Influence peddling is seen by most people as the main business of politicians, rather than as a distortion of the electoral process. One of my foreign friends was having trouble getting a visa. He told me that his Japanese wife’s family had contacted one of the local MPs. Within weeks, he had been granted his permanent residence. After ten years in Japan, he accepted this as the appropriate way of achieving results.
While this attitude to politics may be dominant, it is far from universal. The LDP covers the whole of the right half of the spectrum and while, several times during the past fifteen years, it looked doomed to follow its equally corrupt Italian sister party, Democrazia Christiana, into the oubliettes of history, it has proved a phoenix too frequent. Rather it has been the opposition parties, less frankly commercial in their electoral appeal, which have suffered most from electoral disillusionment.

When I first arrived in Kumamoto, the Socialist Party (社会党/shakai-tou), led by Takako Doi, was popular, and seemed to represent the same kind of politics as sister social-democratic parties like Helen Clark’s Labour Party.
The deeply conservative rural heartland of Kumamoto always seems more likely to support an alternative right wing party over any leftwing party, particularly if that right-wing party is led by a local aristocrat.

The family that ruled Kumamoto for centuries on behalf of the Shogunate is called Hosokowa. The present Lord (殿様/tono-sama) is called Hosokawa Morihiro (細川護熙). He was elected governor of Kumamoto soon after I arrived in 1986. It seemed a fitting expression of the survival of feudal attitudes that the hereditary lord should actually be elected Governor. He moved on from there to national politics, still within the bosom of one of the factions of the LDP. Before long, he led a faction which jumped ship when the parent party seemed too disgusting to continue to win the votes of even the super-tolerant Japanese electorate, and formed the New Party (新党/Shin-too).

At the subsequent election, I saw the first sign of genuine political enthusiasm among young people. Students were actually campaigning for Hosokawa, without being paid-- something which was rare, even for supporters of the left-wing parties.

Before long, Hosokawa was Prime Minister. People in Kumamoto were as proud as if a local boy had become a sumo Yokozuna (grand champion), or a judo gold medallist, like local hero Yamashita (L.A. Olympics).

Within months, though, Hosokawa had been forced to retire in disgrace, like so many of his LDP predecessors. He had been caught receiving kickbacks from one of the biggest despatch companies, Kuro-neko-ya (黒猫や/Black Cat Co.).

How could he not have done something like that, when such relations with business are the lifeblood of Japanese politics? The lucky don’t get caught, but it would seem almost impossible, even for someone as independently wealthy as Hosokawa, to avoid compromising oneself.

He retired to his mansions, one in Tokyo and the other in Kumamoto, to lick his wounds. He hasn’t exactly abandoned the exertion of political influence but certainly plays no overt role. I was persuaded to go to one of his annual cherry blossom season garden parties a couple of years ago, to see if he could be interested in the fate of the two foreign colleagues who had been unfairly sacked by the Prefectural University, where I worked.

Since the university had been very much Hosokawa’s brainchild, and internationalization had long been one of his hobbyhorses, Yoko, the mother hen of the teachers’ support group, was sure it was worth trying to talk personally to him.
When we arrived in the car park of his mansion, the attendants were wearing “happy coats” (traditional festive jackets) bearing the name of one of Hosokawa’s current political protogees, a certain Matsuno Yorihisa （松野頼久）. Mr. Matsuno was, like Hosokawa himself, a refugee from the LDP and, like him, had inherited his political influence from his father.

Hosokawa gave a warm, eloquent speech, lamenting the decline in the number of traditional varieties of flowering cherry in the face of the ubiquitous ????, which he said had been imported from the Himalayas in the nineteenth century.

There was nothing as crude as an overt political endorsement of Mr. Matsuno. Yoko guided us into a line which would lead to a photo-op with the ex-P.M. In the thirty seconds that were open to them,Yoko and C, one of the sacked teachers, tried to impress upon him the injustice of the situation. He was polite and non-committal, looking wary and weary, as if such minor ambushes were a regrettable but distasteful necessity. He promised nothing, and probably did nothing.