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Since 2020, I've been lurking Japanese websites regularly. Easily the biggest contrast between the English and Japanese net is the total lack of any real CW or political energy over there. Japanese people hardly vote, they don't follow politics, and if Marx is brought up they'll discuss him calmly from a historical/economic perspective rather than an ideological one. There's a palpable sense that Japanese are somehow immune to the Culture War -- that it's just fundamentally never going to happen, barring a World War II-style shakeup, and even then I seriously doubt it.
So why are they immune to the CW? The keyword is society. Japanese people (and other Asians) have a fundamentally different relationship with their society compared to Westerners. Over there, "society" is basically a sprawling, abstract, ephemeral organism that's almost like a father figure. You may not always like his authority, you definitely don't understand him, but if you listen to his rules and obey his commands, you will probably be happy. You'll be safe, you'll have clean streets, a wife, a career, expendable income, medical care, good food! Society is -extremely- stable, so virtually all risk is removed. Trust in society, and you'll be happy. Disrespect society, and you'll be shamed on national TV.
Western society -- especially America -- is the opposite. As authority is stripped away from the social body and granted to the individual, society loses its ability to fix norms and values, and so every individual is left to determine his own truth rather than inheriting some default opinion from above. The more atomized and individualist a society is, the smaller the corpus of collective knowledge/belief gets, and the more pressure is placed on each person to find an answer themselves. This is why even in Scandinavia, CW potential is much lower because they're collectivists, despite being very developed, terminally online, and fluent in English. For CW to become truly big in Scandinavia, their collectivist culture would have to decay.
I don't really think the average person wants a Culture War. They just have this void in their lives -- no social organism they can feel proud contributing to, no God that brings purpose to their life, and 2008 butchered any remaining Y2K optimism with an axe. Seems natural that mass political utopianism is the move.
My understanding is that Japan had a highly polarizing culture war in the 1950s, with street violence and riots, in which right-wing nationalist parties and organizations duked it out with communists, Weimar-style. This of course boiled over into the assassination of socialist political candidate Inejirō Asanuma by a hardcore ultra-nationalist on live television.
While I think there’s something real that you’re pointing to - and though I’ve never been to Japan (although that will change this year!) my naïve outsider’s impression jibes with what you’re saying. Knowing that Japan was roiled by bitter ideological civil conflict so recently, though, is enough to make me deeply skeptical of the claim that its current cultural/political harmony is the result of some deep primordial aspect of Eastern communitarianism, as opposed to Western individualism/idealism. (See also: the entire history of China.)
Sure it happened. What country would this not happen in, when the entire foundation of their world view is rocked? When you go from dominating your half of the planet, and viewing your emperor as a literal god, to becoming an economic vassal state of foreign powers and everything you believed in was violently flushed down the toilet? I can't imagine any scenario or any culture where this goes smoothly.
The fact it only took 25 years for all conflict to die off is amazing. There's no residual fighting, no scars left over from the transition, no one really cares about American military bases or the treaty or communism anymore. It didn't involve some enormous deal-with-the-devil style compromise cough Korea cough to lift them back up. They had the perfect opportunity to go apeshit and tear up the country for their beliefs, but it simply didn't happen. When Mishima committed suicide in 1970, he was laughed at for his extremism like he was Chris-chan. Bear in mind, this man was a teenager when Kamikaze pilots were killing themselves for the emperor. His extremism is nothing like a Civil War LARPer trying to revive the confederacy -- it's like a guy born in Alabama in 1845, waxing poetic about the Antebellum era, and getting laughed out of the room by Reconstruction-era southerners. Japan's entire world view collapsed and they moved on like it was no big deal. 25 years is amazing.
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@Hoffmeister25 I belive you're correct about the post-war riots.
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1187711152/ja/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF%E3%83%95%E3%82%A9%E3%83%88/high-angle-shot-of-a-crowd-of-labor-union-protestors-who-are-gathered-on-an-urban-playing.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=p28vxdNNaeQ9m1WAvwUzAH0uSn90dj_6dILjbKARG1w=
https://www.gettyimages.co.jp/detail/ニュース写真/tokyo-japan-left-wing-japanese-trade-union-members-in-tokyo-are-ニュース写真/515935648
Japan is technically a democracy but practically it's a one-party state. The same party (Liberal Democrats) has been in power for most of the last 70 years; it has a cosy consensus with the news sites and bribes a lot of demographics pretty openly. For example, the recent scandal where the party turned out to have been cooperating with the Moonie cult (Unification Church) in exchange for the cult ordering its members to vote Liberal Democrat. Or the massive amounts of money that are funded to unnecessary building works to prop up local labour. People don't see any point talking about politics because the situation is mostly comfortable and there's no prospect of change.
Don't let the party label fool you. In Asia, democratic parties are much less of 'political parties' in the American or especially European sense, roughly fixed coalitions with a breadth of ideological representation, and far more personality-based coalitions of factions. You don't support the Party, as is the European norm, or even necessarily the Person of a specific geographic area as is the American practice, you support the political faction, which can be substantially more dynamic than in Europe as factions even within the same party maneuver.
In Japan in particular, the Liberal Democratic Party factions are basically parties-within-a-party, such that 'the Liberal Democratic Party' is just the current coalition government of internal LDP factions, whose breadth and diversity can marginalize, co-opt, or subsume parties outside of The Party. If you want a more pro-China Japanese government, you don't need (or want) to start a pro-China party for people to vote for- you're better off just pumping up the current more-pro-China factions so that their factional strength influences the party's internal coalitions and maneuverings. Voting directly affects these, as LDP candidates can run against eachother as much as opposition parties- meaning that instead of a 'here is your only possible candidate from the one-party', you can have as many LDP candidates as opposition candidates running in a slate. Nominally they may be from the same party, but in effect they are each from distinct factions or faction-alliances, meaning that the victory of 'the party' is not synonymous with the status quo.
Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is 'one-party' in the same sense that the American 'bipartisan consensus' is 'one party'. There have been many people who feel there's no point in voting because there's no prospect of change and that all the candidates are the same, but they'd be just as wrong in either country.
The Japanese electoral system was changed in 1994 to a mixture of FPTP and list-based PR so that same-party candidates no longer compete directly for popular votes. This was supposed to encourage anti-LDP leadership politicians to join opposition parties rather than anti-leadership factions within the LDP. I don't know why it didn't work.
The single biggest factor I've heard/been convinced by is that the 1994 reforms didn't go far enough in providing public funding for the operations of the politicians. Faction support is financial not only critical in funding for the election phase (what US political parties serve as), but in the daily operations of the candidate and their staff to, well, work. What the government provides as an operating allowance is often insufficient, and so a faction provides the function for staff and systems and such.
In short, it's a power of the purse issue.
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I see, so basically you’re saying that the primaries are where the magic happens?
The UK Tory party for controlling candidate selection with a tight fist, so I guess I’m not really used to this perspective. In theory paid-up party members get a say but not really in practice.
It's not a primary issue per see, because Japan isn't First Past the Post, and so it's not solely one candidate per geographic area. Additionally, the Party isn't so unified to have total control of candidate lists (hence the factions), nor does it control the money to candidates (which is the factions key leverage/reason to align with a faction).
The Japanese system post 1994 reforms is a mix some seats being elected via plurality voting (as in, the most votes even if not a majority), and a party-list proportional voting across 11 regional blocks (voting for the party gives the party the proportion of seats on hand, but the party selects the candidates). The proportional aspect is what favors the LDP as a party, while the plurality system is what favors the factions.
The plurality seats in various regions favor the factions because this is what lets a faction have key relationships with key local players (and donors) to the point that they can be the biggest individual party/faction in an area. Key donors / electoral influencers can enable a faction to win a seat in an area, even if not a majority coalition, and these faction-candidates are thus the influence the party as a whole needs to court/convince the faction to support the government. This is part of the post-1994 reforms dynamic reverted back to LDP dominance, because LDP/former-LDP types already had the key relationships/economic relationships to win pluralities where a FPP system would have required more comprehensive majority coalitions.
The proportional representation party-list is why it's better to be a dissident-faction within the party rather than an opposition party. Part of the political game is the push/pull/negotiation of how much of the LDP's list is aligned with your faction (or, alternatively, who you think might join your faction after being elected). As long as LDP remains dominant, it's better to negotiate/play for a share of the LDP's share than to try and fight for a share outside of the LDP. Naturally, this is a self-reinforcing cycle.
One of the key tools/roles the factions play in this, which is distinct from most other modern democracies post-election phase, is the role of providing financial support for government operations. The public funding allowance provided by the Japanese government to politicians is reportedly far less than what those in the US or European electoral systems expect. This makes party money critical not only for elections (as is the expectation for the US), but also daily operations post election for things like staff and systems to, well, do the job. Except that in the Japanese political context, the critical money isn't necessarily coming from 'the Party'- the LDP as a whole- but also 'the Faction'- the patrons (political and business relationships and donors). You, as a candidate, need someone's patronage if you intend to do things / be influential- or provide patronage yourself- and who you align with can be ideological or mercurial.
This is why the intra-LDP politics can be so dynamic, even as inter-party politics just seem like a LDP monolith. Factions that gain or lose major patronage streams- such as the changing business climate making new winners/losers- may gain or lose the ability to support / attract as many candidates. Personality conflicts between a faction's key leaders may drive off people who were only there for the monetary support, while a particularly charismatic person may be able to bridge ideological divides and create a new power center. Factions are ideology + money, in a framework where it's often still better to be within the LDP than outside it.
As a consequence, though, the LDP/factions lack the sort of party control mechanisms that developed in the US/Europe for maintaining party discipline and control. There isn't the same equivalent of the UK's Leader-control over the party list, which can be used to de-select dissident party members who oppose the leader like. Because plurality-seats, there can be / are 'independent' and politically critical geographically-tied political power centers that tend to be wiped away by pure proportional systems, which weakens national-level party control to enable lower level actors (and factions). And because money comes from factions, not just the national party, there isn't the sort of national party control (by way of controlling funding) that empowers the more centralized US party setups. All of these- plus other cultural/social dynamics- prevent the LDP's current leader from having the sort of ability to discipline the party as a whole that is normal for democratic party-based-systems, or for non-democratic party-states.
While it's not the normally desired way for a national system, in many respects the LDP is it's own political eco-system, within the broader Japanese national eco-system.
Thank you for the very interesting and detailed reply.
You are quite welcome.
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