Japan’s Questionable Democracy : Recruit Scandal Has Revealed the Truth of a One-Party State

Businessman Hiromasa Ezoe, the 52-year-old founder and former chairman of Recruit Co., may go down in history as Japan’s greatest political revolutionary. Ezoe, who has been under arrest since mid-February charged with bribing ministers and other top officials, has revealed the dark side of the relationship between business and government, contributing to a growing sense of economic and political alienation among average Japanese citizens. And in blowing the lid off Japanese politics, Ezoe has raised the most fundamental question of all: What kind of democracy is Japan?

By now, most Americans have grown accustomed to the notion that Japan’s business and government leaders work together closely to pursue an agenda of shared interests--economic growth for the nation, competitive success for the companies. Most observers agree that this tight relationship is at the heart of Japan’s postwar resurgence, its meteoric rise from ashes to affluence. What Ezoe’s arrest reveals is the pervasive political dishonesty and rampant profiteering at the heart of the system--the staggering scale and enormous sums of money that lubricate the critically important business-government relationship.

Now that Ezoe has been caught, the Japanese are finally free to acknowledge publicly that this kind of “money politics” has long been the accepted way for business and government to serve each others’ basic needs. Business provides the huge sums of money it takes for the Liberal Democratic Party to maintain control of the government; the party provides the economic policies it takes for Japanese business to compete globally and prosper domestically.

Of course, this is not the first time the issue has surfaced; a similar charge involving Lockheed brought down Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in 1974. If anything differentiates the Ezoe scandal, it is the proportions of the corruption. Operating in a way that we have come to expect of the Japanese, Ezoe was thorough and efficient so that the scandal now threatens to taint dozens of political leaders.

Indeed, Ezoe’s most serious crime may not even be bribery. Rather, the unspoken charge is that he is an outsider--a relative newcomer to business and political circles--in a country where connections, status and social legitimacy are all-important. The most common criticism leveled against Ezoe is not that he broke the criminal code. Most agree that his actual crime is rather commonplace. “He went too fast” is the explanation; he tried to reach the inner circle of Japanese power and influence too quickly.

But within Japan, among average citizens and working men and women, a scandal of this proportion, involving so many politicians and such huge sums of money, only feeds a growing cynicism about Japanese businesses and politics and begins to suggest that greed and personal gain may be inevitable companions to skyrocketing national wealth.

Just as important is the international perspective. Here, Ezoe has given the West a rare glimpse of a perplexing paradox of politics Japanese-style: This global power is an undemocratic democracy. For 34 uninterrupted years, since its founding in 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party has ruled Japan. Only once has Japan’s Socialist Party ever governed, then only briefly from May, 1947, to March, 1948. Now comes a scandal of immense proportions. There have been 13 arrests; three cabinet ministers and two vice ministers have already resigned; Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita himself acknowledges receiving 151 million yen from Ezoe’s Recruit group for political purposes. The scandal confronts Japan with an untenable political choice--One course is unimaginable; the other, undemocratic.

The unimaginable choice is that four opposition parties will somehow join together to form a coalition capable of winning power and governing Japan. Of course, this is unimaginable only in Japan; anywhere else it would be virtually a foregone conclusion. It is, after all, how Jimmy Carter and the Democrats managed to win their only presidential victory in recent memory, campaigning on a platform of clean government in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In Britain, governments have fallen over the occasional sex or spy scandal.

And even here in Japan there is much head-shaking and breast-beating that the Liberal Democratic Party has been in power too long and has grown complacent and corrupt. But the same head-shakers are always quick to assert that a left-wing coalition of the four opposition parties is unthinkable. After all, these parties have no agenda, no real political program or practical governing experience. Besides, it would threaten Japan’s stability, disrupt the economy and derail the established way of doing business. It is simply unimaginable.

But the alternative is simply undemocratic: The Liberal Democratic Party remains in power, with or without Takeshita at the helm. He may resign or be replaced by a temporary figurehead, an even older politician with clean hands who can calm things down and hold office long enough for a new, perhaps younger-generation candidate to emerge. There is talk of cleansing the political system with new controls on campaign contributions. There is even talk that the Liberal Democratic Party, which is composed of separate and often warring factions, could formally split into two discrete parties, like the Democrats and Republicans.

But the fundamental political reality remains. Even under the most extreme conditions, Japan operates as a country with one-party rule. Voters can choose any candidate they like, but the Liberal Democrats will always emerge as the ruling party. And that leaves a big unanswered question: What kind of democracy is that? Thanks to Ezoe’s brand of capitalist revolutionary zeal, we may have a chance to find out.