Japanese General Election 2014

This being DeviantArt, Japan should need no further introduction - it's an island nation to the east of China, with some 120 million people, the most developed economy in the world outside the West (whatever that means this week) and a culture that is second perhaps only to the United States and the United Kingdom for global influence and recognition. It's the only surviving monarchy in East Asia, and the oldest surviving monarchy in the world by quite far - the current Emperor is the 125th to occupy the throne according to the official chronology.

The (most probable) reason the Japanese system of government has survived so relatively unchanged whereas those of China and Korea have not is that Japan was the nation in the region that adapted to modernity the quickest. During the reign of the Meiji Emperor in the late 19th century, Japan abolished its feudal system of government, replacing it with a simplified aristocracy modelled on that of Britain with a legislature and a military modelled on those of Prussia. The Imperial Diet initially consisted of a House of Representatives elected by the people and a House of Peers partially composed of hereditary nobles and partly appointed by the Emperor.

With its victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan began to flex its muscles in foreign adventures, taking over Taiwan as a consequence of said war in 1895 and annexing Korea in 1910. It participated in the First World War on the Allied side, taking over the German concessions in China and a large swathe of islands in Micronesia that had formerly been German protectorates. That war was followed by an abortive period of "Taishō Democracy" which lasted until the economic collapse of 1927. After that, the military began to amass more and more power, launching invasions of Manchuria in 1931 and the rest of China in 1936, and with the signing of the Pact of Steel in 1939, Japan joined the Axis side of the Second World War.

Much has been written about Japanese actions during that war, and it continues to loom large over Japanese politics to this day - it is however difficult to deny the evidence that substantial war crimes were committed by Japan over the course of its involvement in the global conflict. It occupied much of China and Southeast Asia at various points, and after the United States cut off its oil supply, it responded by launching an aerial attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, dragging the US into the war against it. This resulted in a long campaign of naval and amphibious warfare throughout the Pacific, culminating with the capture of Okinawa in early 1945, after which the US made plans for an invasion of Japan itself. Such plans were, however, rendered moot with the development of atomic bombs, which were used for the first and so far only time against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing over a hundred thousand casualties and leading to a Japanese surrender.

This was a turning point for Japan, as many of its people woke up to realise what they'd spent the last half-century doing and started fighting against militarism. Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution unilaterally renounces the right to declare war or use the threat of war as a diplomatic instrument, and Japan officially has a "self-defence force" rather than a military. However, many others remained convinced that what Japan had been doing was the right thing, and revisionist nationalism remains a powerful undercurrent in Japanese society to this day. This was probably helped by the fact that the US military administration, convinced after the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Korean War of 1950-53 that all of Asia was under threat from communism, did not significantly pursue de-Nazification or any equivalent as the Allies did in Germany. They did abolish the House of Peers, replacing it with a House of Councillors elected to staggered six-year terms inspired by the United States Senate.

The party system after the war was initially a three-horse race, with the right-wing Liberal (or Freedom) Party, the centrist Democratic Party and the left-leaning Socialist Party all vying for power, but with the Democrats collapsing and a split in the Socialist Party, the Liberals came to be the dominant force. After the 1955 election, they rebranded themselves as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which became the dominant force in the so-called "1955 System" in which the Socialists formed the main opposition. However, the growth of a number of smaller opposition parties during the 1970s and 80s led to the LDP losing some of its dominance, only retaining power thanks to the single non-transferable vote system, and in 1993 they finally lost power to an alliance of no less than eight opposition parties, some of which were centrist splinters from the LDP itself.

One of the few things the eight-party alliance agreed upon pursuing was electoral reform, although it did not manage to get around to doing this before differences led to its collapse in 1994, within a year of its foundation. Tomiichi Murayama, the leader of the Socialist Party, was elected Prime Minister with the support of the LDP - a situation that would've been unthinkable as little as five years before - and a coalition was formed between the former rivals to implement moderate reforms, chief among them a new electoral law.

Up until the 1993 elections, Japan had used a system of single non-transferable vote (SNTV) to elect both houses of its parliament. This system was very simple in theory - each constituency had a fixed number of seats (usually between three and six), each voter received one vote, and whichever candidates got the most votes were elected. In practice, this system meant that anyone who either had a large personal vote or a large amount of control over the electorate would be able to dominate the electoral landscape to a disproportionate degree, and so most of the Japanese countryside came to be dominated by local political families and patronage networks, most of which naturally aligned with the LDP. Combined with a massive disparity in vote weight between urban and rural areas, this meant that the LDP would be able to hold a permanent comfortable majority on a little over 40% of the vote, a situation the opposition parties not unnaturally regarded as somewhat unfair.

So this system was changed, and once again Japan took inspiration from Germany. The SNTV constituencies were abolished and the prefectures re-divided into smaller constituencies, 300 in number, which would elect a single member each by FPTP. Each voter would now have as many votes as there were seats to fill, hopefully eliminating the chokehold of patronage and allowing whoever the public actually supported to win. Another 200 seats (reduced to 180 from 2000) would be elected by proportional representation in eleven regions, known as "blocks", with a separate ballot to determine this distribution and no account taken to the result of the FPTP constituencies (thus making the system somewhat different from the German one).

This system received its first test in 1996, by which time the LDP had reclaimed the premiership but remained in coalition with the Socialists, and that election established a new party system altogether. The Socialists, now rebranded as the Social Democratic Party (SDP), collapsed utterly, winning only 15 seats (down from 70 in 1993 and 136 in 1990), and were eclipsed as the main opposition by the New Frontier Party, a merger of several left-liberal parties, and the smaller Democratic Party to which most moderate SDP members moved. In 1998 these two parties merged into the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which became the main opposition in the new party system.

In 1999 the LDP formed a majority coalition with the Kōmeitō (uniquely, they use their Japanese name in all languages rather than trying to come up with the blandest-sounding possible translation, but "kōmei" can translate either as "justice" or more directly as "clean government"), the political wing of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement whose ideology can best be described as "Christian Democracy but with Buddhism instead of Christianity", and this would last for ten years in government, the parties gradually moving closer and closer together. In 2003 the Diet approved an abrogation of Article 9 to allow for the deployment of the Self-Defence Forces in international operations, allowing for Japanese troops to participate in the Iraq War. In 2005 the Diet was dissolved in a snap election after voting down a government bill to privatise Japan's postal service; this resulted in an unprecedented two-thirds majority for the LDP-Kōmeitō coalition, which was able to pursue its agenda (including post privatisation) with more freedom than previously.

This eventually came back to bite them, as the global financial sector suffered the worst recession since before the Second World War starting in 2008. In addition, the LDP was in internal crisis, with the leadership changing hands no less than three times between 2006 and 2008. When the elections were called in August, a large group of libertarians led by Yoshimi Watanabe broke with the LDP and founded Your Party (Minna no Tō - this literally means "the party for everyone" but "Your Party" was the official English name), an event that caused some concern for the LDP but ultimately led to very little as the party failed to really make a breakthrough beyond the constituencies of sitting members. Nonetheless, the LDP lost the election and their plurality status for the first time since the formation of the party, with no less than 193 seats in the lower house moving over from LDP to DPJ, and Yukio Hatoyama became the first Prime Minister not from the LDP in thirteen years.

The DPJ ultimately fared little better, pushing through an unpopular consumption tax hike, suffering a number of scandals during their time in office and earning the ire of nationalists by warming relations with China - this served them particularly poorly as the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute flared up once again during their time in office. And then of course there was the 2011 earthquake that caused some 16,000 deaths and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - a disaster of massive proportions that would've hurt any government under which it happened. Summa summarum, the DPJ lost the 2012 elections just as badly as the LDP had the 2009 ones.

This time, however, it was less of a straight swing. In addition to the LDP (which did reclaim power, making Shinzō Abe Prime Minister for the second time after a brief stint in 2006), the newly-founded Restoration Party, led by Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara and Osaka mayor Tōru Hashimoto, made large strides in the elections. This is a right-wing populist outfit that wants to remove Article 9 from the constitution and restore Japan's foreign influence, but it differs from the far-right parties of Europe in that its leaders are almost all veteran politicians - Ishihara was a longtime LDP member and authored a successful book outlining his vision as early as 1989. Its success was mainly in Osaka, where it took 12 out of 19 FPTP seats, but it did fairly well in the PR vote throughout the country as well, capturing a total of 54 seats and nearly overtaking the DPJ (which retained 57 of its 308 seats from 2009).

Abe proceeded to implement an economic plan nicknamed "Abenomics" by the press, which mixed structural reform with heavy fiscal stimulus. Part of this plan was abandoning the tax hike passed under the DPJ, which would run counter to Abe's economic strategy and was scheduled to take full effect in 2015. In order to halt this, and to shore up his own position within the LDP, Abe called a snap election for December 2014.

The snap election did not change a significant amount - the LDP went back by just three seats, while the DPJ shored up its position somewhat against Restoration (which had technically changed its official English name to the "Japan Innovation Party", but the Japanese word ishin can translate either way), and Your Party was wound up. The proportional vote revealed the creation of a five-party system (or perhaps that should be "one-and-four-halves"), with the LDP far ahead of everyone else and the DPJ, Restoration, the Kōmeitō and the Communists in rough order of size to round the system out. The big story of the 2014 snap election was not in its result, but in the massive drop in turnout. Traditionally, Japanese general elections had roughly 70% turnout with a few exceptions, but 2012 had seen a drop from 69% to 59%, and this continued in 2014 with a turnout of 52%, the lowest since before the war.

Abe's LDP-Kōmeitō coalition continued in government with few changes, but in early 2016, in a move that caused observers all around the world to say "okay, what the fuck is going on", the DPJ and Restoration announced a merger, forming the Minshintō (literally "People's Progress Party", but the English name remained the Democratic Party). Initially this was a fairly equitable merger, but the party's platform for the July 2016 House of Councillors election was significantly more DPJ than Restoration in content, and when in October the party chose Renhō, a former DPJ minister and left-liberal activist, as its leader - the first woman and the first person of partially foreign descent to lead a major Japanese party - several former Restoration members quit the party and formed the new Nippon Ishin no Kai party (the same name as the Restoration Party had from 2012 to 2014, but no English translation has been made official). Suffice it to say that the opposition is in utter disarray, and Abe appears completely safe in a way that few Japanese political leaders have ever been before. With plans afoot to revise the constitution and the continuation of Abenomics, Japan is in for interesting times...