policy failure scandals as political scandals in japan · 2017-09-28 · classiﬁcation of...

MATTHEW CARLSON

Policy Failure Scandals as Political Scandals in Japan

ABSTRACT

Major political corruption scandals were a common occurrence in postwar Japan.

After the 1990s, policy failure scandals generated by bureaucratic rather than

political corruption became more common. Among the crucial ingredients in gen-

erating policy failure scandals was the role of interparty competition and the func-

tioning of a two-party system.

KEYWORDS: Japanese politics, political corruption, scandals, Liberal Democratic

Party, nuclear accidents

MAJOR POLITICAL CORRUPTION SCANDALS frequently surfaced in postwarJapan. They involved everything from raw corrupt exchange to interestgroups spreading money around to purchase general access to the corridorsof power. After the political reforms of 1994, the nature of corruption scan-dals changed considerably. Policy failure scandals focused public attention onpolicy and government performance and contributed to the first lastingswitch in power since 1955. In 2007, the Japanese public learned that theSocial Insurance Agency had had failed to identify some fifty million pensionrecords despite having known of the problem for decades. The ‘‘lost pen-sions’’ scandal contributed to the fall of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)–led government in 2009, allowing the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) tocontrol government for three years. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear accidentthen happened when the DPJ was in power and played a significant role in its2012 electoral defeat.

The 1994 reforms, with a new electoral system as their centerpiece, alteredJapanese politics, with important consequences for scandal construction.First, the election system virtually eliminated intraparty competition, whichis linked to candidate-centered campaigns and corruption. With its emphasis

MATTHEW CARLSON is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont,Burlington, USA. He wishes to thank Professor Steven Reed and the anonymous reviewers for theirhelp in preparing this article. Email: <[email protected]>.

Asian Survey, Vol. 57, Number 5, pp. 933–955. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2017 byThe Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissionto photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints andPermissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/AS.2017.57.5.933.

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on single-member districts, the election system also encouraged movementtoward a two-party system and led to two switches in power. The functioningof a two-party system after 2003 was one of the crucial ingredients in gener-ating the major policy failure scandals in 2009 and 2012. Second, the reformsincreased transparency through the enactment of stricter campaign financeregulations. Parties and politicians are required to disclose more of theirfinancial activities, which have become an important source for the massmedia and opposition parties to construct scandals.1

The purpose of this paper is to focus more narrowly on some of thedynamics of major policy failure scandals and how changes in the partysystem have contributed to their formation. The analysis will draw onexamples of policy failure scandals that were detailed in Japanese newspapersduring specific time periods as the party system evolved. It proceeds in fivesections. The first section defines scandal and policy failure scandal anddiscusses patterns in postwar scandals. The second section examines scandalsaround the period of the 1994 reforms, with a focus on two policy failurescandals that occurred in 1996. The third section details the major policyfailure scandals linked to the pension system and the Fukushima nucleardisaster and considers some of the major nuclear accidents before 2011. Thefourth section considers the lack of major policy failure scandals in the Abeadministration. The final section summarizes key findings and discusses theimplications of policy failure scandals for Japanese politics in the near future.

SCANDALS AND SCANDAL TYPES

Scholars interested in the evolution of a political system or in analyzingpolitical corruption have sometimes turned to the study of scandals. Mostcorruption, however, happens without becoming public knowledge. Andeven events that become public knowledge may fail to generate much publicresponse. Many scandals also emerge that do not involve corruption, such asthose that focus on incompetence or carelessness.2 Because scandals provideunsystematic glimpses into corruption, data derived from them are generally

1. Matthew Carlson and Steven Reed, Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan (New York:Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

2. Graeme Moodie, ‘‘On Scandals and Political Corruption,’’ in Arnold J. Heidenheimer,Michael Johnston, and Victor T. Levine, eds., Political Corruption: A Handbook (New Brunswick,NJ: Transaction, 1999): 873–86.

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unsuitable for statistical analysis. In this paper, information derived fromscandals will be used to discuss reasons for the changing nature of scandalconstruction in Japanese politics.

Scandals are socially constructed phenomena generated by complex inter-actions among many actors and produce unsystematic glimpses into thepolitical system.3 Scandal can be defined as ‘‘intense political communicationabout a real or imagined defect that is by consensus condemned and meetsuniversal indignation or outrage.’’4 In this paper, this definition is modifiedby replacing ‘‘intense political communication’’ with a focus on events thatreceived significant media coverage, for weeks, in Japan. I also replace ‘‘uni-versal indignation or outrage’’ with events that damage a political figure orpolitical party, such as loss of public support or the loss of votes at electiontime. The scandals examined below thus were events that received significantmedia coverage and had important political consequences.

An important study of scandals in American politics defines scandals asinvolving ‘‘individuals or actions which are situated within a political field’’and altering ‘‘relations within that field.’’5 This provides a useful theoreticalclassification of scandals as falling into three main types: sex, money, andpower. More recently, Matthew Kerby and Raj Chari have proposed a fourthtype of scandal, the policy scandal, which they define and apply to the studyof a Spanish scandal that occurred in the 1990s. This paper builds on theirdefinition of a policy scandal as

a negative event in the political field that is scandalous in nature, but isdifferent from scandals generally mentioned in that an individual politicalactor is not directly implicated in the scandalous occurrence. It is anoccurrence that the political actor did not set, but must deal with, includinga loophole in a policy that surfaced only after a political actor has left theirposition, or an event related to policy that may have occurred under a pre-vious administration.6

3. Lawrence W. Sherman, ‘‘The Mobilization of Scandal,’’ in Political Corruption: A Handbook,887–911.

4. Frank Esser and Uwe Hartung, ‘‘Nazis, Pollution, and No Sex: Political Scandals asa Reflection of Political Culture in Germany,’’ American Behavioral Scientist 47:8 (2004): 1041.

5. John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (Cambridge:Polity, 2000).

6. Matthew Kerby and Raj S. Chari, ‘‘‘Policy Scandals’: A Spanish Case,’’ Government andOpposition 37:3 (2002): 411.

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Policy failure scandals can adversely affect the reputation of parties andgovernments. They can also affect the reputation of specific individuals, suchas party leaders.

Kerby and Chari’s discussion and study of a single policy scandal can beapplied to what can be called ‘‘policy failure scandals’’ in Japanese politics.Because Japan has a small yet powerful bureaucracy that is actively involvedin policy administration, the causes of policy failure scandals are linked tobureaucratic corruption rather than political corruption by politicians orinterest groups.7 Politicians, of course, must rely on bureaucrats to influencepolicy, so most of Japan’s major postwar political scandals did involve bu-reaucrats, even though their names and actions seldom surfaced in newspaperaccounts. After the 1990s, scandal construction changed, and several policyfailure scandals became major political corruption scandals that involvedpoliticians, influenced election outcomes, and altered political careers. Poli-ticians can no longer let the bureaucracy solely manage policy, because theyrisk losing elections or damaging their personal reputations when bureau-cratic corruption is uncovered.

Instead of focusing narrowly on a single scandal, we will consider severaldifferent scandals to think more critically about some of their dynamics andchanges over time. There is no master list of scandals or policy failure scan-dals, and trying to explain all possible cases would not be easy. It would beeven more difficult to examine all policy failures or ‘‘negative’’ political eventsthat did not become scandals, because there have been so many. This paperwill focus more narrowly on political scandals, including policy failure scan-dals, which received significant media attention and had significant politicaleffects for the actors involved. To make better sense of how scandal con-struction has changed in Japanese politics, it is useful to say more about someof the major postwar corruption scandals, which generally involved politicalrather than bureaucratic corruption.

Patterns in Postwar Corruption Scandals

Postwar Japan experienced major political corruption scandals as well ascountless other minor scandals. Several of the major scandals affected general

7. See Carlson and Reed, Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan, for a finer discussion of thetypes of political corruption and a discussion of bureaucratic corruption.


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elections, even leading to switches in power in the first two postwar elections.The Showa Denko and coal mine nationalization scandals of 1948, whichinvolved corrupt exchange between interest groups and the government,forced the resignation of the ruling government and contributed to the switchof power from the Democrat-Socialist coalition to the Liberals.8 In the ship-building scandal, bribes were paid to politicians and bureaucrats, affecting the1955 election and even contributing to a second switch, from the Liberals tothe Hatoyama Democrats. The Democrats failed to secure a majority, andmerged with the Liberals to form the LDP.

LDP predominance was established in the 1960 election, aided by a split inthe socialist camp. The only major political scandal, Black Mist, was a matterof the abuse of power as much as of corrupt exchange.9 The media focused ona variety of incidents, and the scandal tarnished the reputation of the LDPand helped trigger the dissolution of the lower house. In the 1967 election, theLDP vote fell considerably, but the party retained most of its seats and itssolid majority in the Diet. The anti-LDP vote was spread out across anincreasing number of opposition parties, and switch in power did not occur.

While the media had played an active role in creating the Black Mistscandal and investigating corruption, corruption scandals largely disappearedfrom the newspapers between 1968 and 1974. In the mid-1970s the Lockheedscandal in Japan arose after testimony surfaced in the US Senate.10 A com-mittee investigating malfeasance by American companies learned that theLockheed Aircraft Corporation was paying bribes to sell its aircraft in at least15 different countries, including Japan. The prime minister at the time,Miki Takeo, known as Mr. Clean, pursued the issue with the support ofthe public, the opposition parties, and the media. In the 1976 ‘‘Lockheed’’election that followed, the LDP was only able to gain majority control by

8. Steven R. Reed, ‘‘The People Spoke: The Influence of Elections on Japanese Politics, 1949–1955,’’ Journal of Japanese Studies 14 (1988): 309–39.

9. The most serious incident of corrupt exchange involved officials from the Kyowa SugarRefining Company giving large sums of money to LDP members in exchange for assistance ob-taining a loan. There were also many other incidents under the heading of Black Mist that involvedLDP members and their questionable use of power. The minister of transport, for example, orderedan express train to stop so he could get off at a small town in his district, and the uproar caused him toquit his post. Another LDP politician managed to have the government fund his daughter’s hon-eymoon trip.

10. Maggie Farley, ‘‘Japan’s Press and the Politics of Scandal,’’ in Susan J. Pharr and Ellis S.Krauss, eds., Media and Politics in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996): 133–63.


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bringing conservative independents into the party. After Lockheed, manyof the major scandals involved interest groups spreading money around topurchase general access to the corridors of power. The Recruit and SagawaKyuubin companies, for example, spread cash widely among the politicalelite to insure broad access to the policymaking process. The Recruit andSagawa Kyuubin scandals also affected the 1990 and 1993 elections. Thelatter, for instance, was called after a no-confidence vote for the MiyazawaKiichi government over the issue of political reform. Defectors from theLDP formed new parties, which helped deny the LDP the chance of form-ing a majority government. The coalition government that formed underHosokawa Morihiro excluded only the LDP and the communists, andmanaged to pass political reforms in 1994.

One recent study examines many of the major scandals and a few of thelesser-known scandals during this time.11 It covers scandals that received exten-sive media coverage and those that altered lower-house elections in terms ofmoving a large number of votes away from the ruling party. The basic list ispresented in Table 1, along with an effort to classify the type of the corruptionand the actor who seems most responsible for scandal construction.12 The listwas partially derived from Benjamin Nyblade and Steven Reed’s newspapercoding of politicians involved in corrupt ‘‘looting’’ activities between 1948 and1993.13 It is difficult to count scandals in an objective way, so caution is requiredin even the simplest analysis. Only the grossest patterns should be interpreted.

In the 1950s, bribery was the only type of scandal to appear in Japan. Thefirst three scandals involved cases of corporations purchasing public policy.Table 1 also makes an additional point clear: bribery never disappeared.Bribery is the most common form of corrupt exchange and probably themost common form of political corruption worldwide. Scandals involvingspreading money around to purchase access to the policymaking processbecome common in the 1980s. The type of corruption seems to have chan-ged, likely reflecting the consolidation of LDP single-party dominance.

11. Carlson and Reed, Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan.12. The major types of corruption considered are bribery, buying access, abuse of power,

embarrassment, and policy failure. See Carlson and Reed for more discussion.13. The scandals represented in Table 1 include the majority of politicians that they identified.

Another 30% of the cases were minor scandals involving smaller numbers of politicians. Ben Nybladeand Steven R. Reed, ‘‘Who Cheats? Who Loots? Competition and Corruption in Japan, 1947–1993,’’American Journal of Political Science 52:4 (2008): 926–41.


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Turning to the actors that constructed the scandal, it is also clear andunsurprising that the legal system played an important role throughout thepostwar period. The most interesting pattern is the relative absence of eitheropposition or journalistic activity after the Black Mist scandal in 1967. If onefocuses on mainstream Japanese journalism, ignoring foreign journalists andtabloids, the pattern is even starker. This is also the era when serendipityplayed a large role in revealing corrupt activity. Though these data onlyconcern scandals, these patterns suggest that opposition parties and the massmedia were not playing the roles normally assigned to them by democratictheory in controlling political corruption.

Finally, the table does not list any examples of policy failure scandalsbetween 1947 and 1993. There are likely countless examples of bureaucraticcorruption, as well as policy failures in general, that warrant more systematicstudy, but the list focuses on major political corruption scandals. Policyfailure scandals became a more common form of political scandal after1993. Policy failures were common before reform but generally failed todevelop into full-fledged scandals in the newspapers. Under the long reignof the LDP, the party in power and the bureaucracy shared an interest inkeeping policy failures hidden from the public eye. Opposition parties had an

table 1. Scandals in Japan by Type and Source, 1948–1993

Year Scandal Type of corruption Scandal constructor

1948 Showa Denko Bribery Opposition

1948 Coal nationalization Bribery Opposition

1954 Shipbuilding Bribery Legal system, serendipity

1957 Prostitution bill Bribery Legal system, serendipity

1966 Black Mist Bribery, abuse of power Journalists, opposition

1974 Tanaka Kakuei Bribery, various Journalists (including foreign)

1976 Lockheed Bribery Foreign journalist, serendipity

1979 KDD Buying access Serendipity

1988 Recruit Buying access Journalists, serendipity

1989 Uno Sousuke Embarrassment Tabloids

1989 Pachinko Buying access Tabloids, targeting

1992 Sagawa Kyuubin Buying access Legal system, serendipity

SOURCE: Matthew Carlson and Steven Reed, Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan (New York: CornellUniversity Press, forthcoming).


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interest in exposing policy failures but seldom had access to the necessaryinformation. When policy failure scandals finally became public knowledge,it often turned out that the problems had been known, and ignored, fordecades by bureaucratic and political insiders.

At the root of policy failure scandals in Japan is the ‘‘bad behavior’’ ofbureaucrats, not politicians, so there are a few plausible reasons whybureaucratic corruption and policy failure scandals were not prevalentduring the LDP’s long reign. One reason seems to be that policy failuredoes not always produce the ideal ingredients for a scandal. Politiciansembroiled in scandals face re-election and thus are in the public eye before,during, and after the scandal. But bureaucrats are seldom featured in thenews before a scandal and soon disappear into anonymity afterwards. Inthe scandals listed in Table 1, the newspaper reports focused on the poli-ticians and virtually ignored ministry officials. Although other explanationsare possible, the prevalence of political corruption scandals over corruptioninvolving the administrative process seems to be based primarily on differ-ential media coverage. This would begin to change after 1993 as the oppo-sition parties obtained the necessary information to generate policy failurescandals.

REFORM AND SCANDALS, 1993–96

In 1993 the LDP lost power to a coalition government, which focused onpassing a significant political reform bill in 1994 that changed the electionsystem of the lower house to a mixed-member majoritarian system.14 Mixed-member systems have two tiers, one featuring single-member districts and theother proportional representation. In Japan, voters cast a single vote in eachtier; the single-member-district tier currently elects 295 members, while theproportional-representation tier elects 180. The reforms also introduceda public subsidy system for political parties and stricter campaign financeregulations.

The general goals of the reforms were to encourage party-centered overcandidate-centered campaigns, reduce the cost of elections, and, more con-troversially, promote a two-party system with alternation in power between

14. Matthew Shugart and Martin Wattenberg, ‘‘Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: A Definitionand Typology,’’ in Matthew Shugart and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds., Mixed-Member ElectoralSystems: The Best of Both Worlds? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 9–24.


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the ruling and opposition parties.15 Single-member districts promote a two-party system, but it takes time for such a system to evolve, and there is noguarantee how long it will last. The reformed lower house first used its single-member-district system in the 1996 election, but it took several elections forthe party system to evolve.

The New Frontier Party (NFP), which had emerged in 1994 as the mainopposition to the LDP, disbanded in 1998 after failing to defeat the LDP inthe 1996 general election.

After the reform, several major corruption scandals emerged that con-cerned behavior that had taken place before the reform, contributing to theperception that little had changed. In 1994, for example, LDP Diet memberNakamura Kishirou was indicted on charges of accepting bribes from a majorconstruction contractor in 1992, when he was the minister of construction.A similar scandal involved Nakao Eiichi, who was arrested in 2000, also foraccepting bribes when he was minister of construction. Bribery had beena common mode of corruption before the reform, but some of the reformsmade it easier for journalists to pursue and investigators to prosecute. In2002, for example, Suzuki Muneo’s campaign finance reports were used bythe Communist Party in a Diet committee meeting broadcast on television tosuggest that Suzuki was involved in corrupt dealings with a lumber company.Prosecutors used the transparency generated by the stricter campaign financerules to build a bribery case against him.

In 1996, two policy failure scandals emerged, which received considerablemedia attention and affected Japanese politics in significant ways. First, therewas a scandal over HIV-tainted blood products. Beginning in the late 1980s,lawsuits were filed against the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the drugcompanies, and a leading doctor, charging them with knowingly providingHIV-tainted blood to hemophilia patients.16 Several hundred patients died.The families of those infected not only sued the company but also drew widepublic support for their cause.17 Although the origins of the scandal began

15. Steven R. Reed, ‘‘Evaluating Political Reform in Japan: A Midterm Report,’’ Japanese Journalof Political Science 3:2 (2002): 243–63.

16. See e.g. Eric Feldman, ‘‘HIV and Blood in Japan: Transforming Private Conflict into PublicScandal,’’ in A. Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer, eds., Blood Feuds: AIDS, Blood, and the Politics ofMedical Disaster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 59–94; Japan Center for InternationalExchange, Japan’s Response to the Spread of HIV/AIDS (Tokyo: JCIE, 2004).

17. Asahi Shimbun, evening edition, July 14, 1995.


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during the era of LDP single-party rule, it achieved some resolution in 1996

under the LDP-led coalition government that included the socialists and theNew Harbinger Party.

Kan Naoto was appointed minister of health and welfare in 1996. He wasa member of the New Harbinger Party and had organized a group within hisparty to study the tainted-blood issue.18 As minister in the new coalitiongovernment, Kan organized a project team to investigate the ministry’s role inthe problem. The ministry bureaucrats initially claimed that they did notknow much, but Kan’s team managed to find files that bureaucrats hadhidden in a locker and on a bookshelf, and was able to help settle some ofthe dispute between the ministry and the affected families.19 It appears certainthat the ministry was trying to keep the information in the files secret fromKan and the public.

If the government of the day had been a single-party LDP administrationor if the minister of health had been a member of the LDP, it seems highlylikely that the public would never have known of this policy failure. A minorparty in a coalition government thus provided some of the transparencyneeded to construct a policy failure scandal. In the October 1996 lower-house election, the coalition government won a narrow majority. The NewHarbinger Party won only two seats, and Kan would later migrate to the DPJ.The tainted blood became a policy failure scandal, but without a credibleopposition party, there was no one to hold the LDP-led government account-able at the polls and force a change of government.

A second scandal also unfolded in 1996 but was a product of party com-petition, because it was orchestrated by the NFP. When the economic bubbleburst, financial institutions were faced with the problem of how to deal withall the loans that could never be repaid. One set of institutions that poseda particularly difficult political issue was the juusen, the housing-loan corpora-tions roughly analogous to the US savings and loan network.20

Many of the juusen loans were owed to agricultural cooperatives thatserved as a major source of votes for the LDP. The LDP-led coalition pro-posed a bailout using public funds.21 Their move was deeply unpopular, with

18. Asahi Shimbun, January 12, 1996.19. Hiroshi Kaihara, ‘‘A Dawn of Two-Party System in Japanese Politics? The Emergence of the

Democratic Party of Japan,’’ East Asia 27:3 (2010): 221–44.20. Peter DeLeon, Thinking about Political Corruption (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).21. Asahi Shimbun, December 21, 1995.


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87% of the public expressing disapproval. The NFP had previously failed tohold the Murayama Tomiichi government accountable for the 1995 GreatHanshin earthquake, but saw an opportunity to attack again with a variety ofobstructionist tactics, which it hoped would attract public support to itsside.22 This time it tried to block the passage of the budget, which includedthe bailout funds.

NFP leader Ozawa Ichirou decided on a strategy of boycotting the pro-ceedings and picketing the committee rooms, bringing deliberations to a halt.The financial crisis implicated the Ministry of Finance as well as the LDP andbriefly brought Japanese politics to a standstill. But the NFP lacked thenumbers to prevent the passage of the budget, including the bailout funds.Its boycott tactics and strategy also proved unpopular with the public. Ozawaand the NFP had initially called for cancellation of the use of public funds tobail out the troubled firms, but struggled to develop an effective counterpro-posal not based on the use of tax money.23 When the 1996 lower-houseelection was held some eight months later, the scandal had already run itscourse. While the NFP emerged as the main opposition party, it failed todefeat the LDP and would disband at the end of 1997, with many membersjoining to form what would become the DPJ. The next section jumps aheadto the period when a ‘‘two-party’’ system featuring the DPJ and LDPemerged, albeit briefly, with focus on the major policy failure scandals alongwith added detail about nuclear accidents.

SCANDALS DURING THE TWO-PARTY ERA

The construction of political scandals changed between 2003 and 2012 inseveral ways. First, the transparency induced by the campaign finance reformsgenerated more scandals that involved embarrassing details about how poli-ticians were spending or raising money. Additional requirements that politi-cians attach receipts contributed to a rash of expenditure scandals, includingcases where politicians were linked to outings to nightclubs. An investigationby the Mainichi newspaper, for example, revealed that five senior members ofthe LDP spent taxpayer funds in hostess bars, which was embarrassing

22. Asahi Shimbun, February 28, 1996.23. Yomiuri Shimbun, February 28, 1996.


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because the party came to power on a promise to stop wasteful publicspending.24

Second, the media and opposition began to actively target cabinet minis-ters. From 2007 to 2009, a string of LDP ministers were targeted, leading toseveral resignations as well as the suicide of a sitting cabinet minister, Mat-suoka Toshikatsu. In 2009, as the DPJ came to power, the media andopposition targeted senior leaders, including Ozawa Ichirou and HatoyamaYukio, for shady financial practices. They also targeted numerous DPJ cab-inet ministers, constructing scandals largely based on embarrassing detailsgleaned from campaign finance reports and from inappropriate public com-ments. Lastly, policy failure scandals developed during this period, withsignificant consequences for Japanese politics. In the post-reform environ-ment, their development is further linked to the role of interparty competi-tion as well as media interest in scandal construction.

The electoral reforms passed in 1994 encouraged the formation of a two-party system, albeit for a brief time, but this took many elections to accom-plish. The DPJ became the major opposition party after the NFP, and fora time (2003–12) Japan had what appeared to be a functioning two-partysystem. In 2007 the DPJ was able to capture control of the upper house, andin 2009 it defeated the LDP in the lower house and became the ruling party.Part of this story involves scandals surrounding the government managementof the pension system, scandals which the DPJ began to construct in 2004.

Pension Scandals and the DPJ

In 2004 the DPJ helped orchestrate a pension scandal, which failed to dentthe popularity of Koizumi Junichiro or the LDP in the 2005 election butwould help set the stage for a bigger scandal in 2007. The 2004 scandalinvolved the Social Insurance Agency, which faced an increasing number ofpeople who were not paying their pension premiums. These payments areusually deducted, but those not employed in a salaried position need to makethe payments themselves. The agency started a publicity campaign to encour-age citizens to make payments and hired an actress as the spokesperson. Thisproved to be an embarrassing choice when it was discovered that the actresswas delinquent in her own payments. The media thus began to ask whether

24. Kyodo, 30 September 2009.


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the politicians behind the legislation might also be delinquent, and foundthat many of them had not been paying their premiums, even as they wereencouraging citizens to pay theirs.25

The DPJ took the leading role in pursuing the scandal. The DPJ asked thatall members of the Koizumi cabinet publicly reveal their payment status.26

A total of seven cabinet members admitted to lapses in their payments or thattheir payment status was not current. These admissions, however, lost someshock value when it was reported that the DPJ’s own leader, Kan Naoto, hadalso lapsed in his payments.27 In the end, a total of more than 100 Dietmembers spanning six different political parties were identified in the news-papers as having failed to pay part of their pensions after April 1986, whenpayments became mandatory.28 It was later discovered that Social InsuranceAgency workers had inappropriately accessed private records, and probablyshared information on specific politicians with journalists.29

The pension premium scandal failed to become a major policy failurescandal capable of denting the LDP or Koizumi. The details that wererevealed were mostly embarrassing to all of the parties and politicians impli-cated. But the DPJ’s efforts were not in vain, because they helped generatepositive media coverage for the party as it struggled to gain a footing againstthe LDP. From 2003, the DPJ enjoyed significant and increasing newscoverage, which over time increased its support in opinion polls and helpedpropel it into power.30 The 2004 scandal also made it possible for the DPJ torevisit the pension issue, when one of its members was able to obtain thenecessary information to construct another scandal.

A young DPJ Diet member, Nagatsuma Akira, tried to use the skills hehad developed in his previous career as a newspaper reporter to exposeincompetence at the Social Insurance Agency. After he repeatedly pressedthe agency to release more information on pension records, the governmentfinally acknowledged in 2007 that some 50 million pension records remainedunidentified. It soon became clear that the government had known of the

25. Asahi Shimbun, March 23, 2004.26. Asahi Shimbun, evening edition, May 7, 2004.27. Asahi Shimbun, April 29, 2004.28. Yomiuri Shimbun, May 14, 2004.29. Asahi Shimbun, April 28, 2005.30. Yukio Maeda, ‘‘The Development of DPJ Partisanship from a Fraction to a Majority (and

Back Again?),’’ in Phillip Y. Lipscy and Ethan Scheiner, eds., Japan under the DPJ: The Politics ofTransition and Governance (CA: Walter H. Shorenstein, 2013): 191–218.


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problem since the 1960s but had neither informed the public nor madea serious effort to remedy the situation.31 If not for the DPJ’s control of theupper house, the problem may never have been uncovered. Between the DPJand the mass media, a massive policy failure scandal was constructed. Rev-elation after revelation kept the pension fiasco in the news and severelydamaged the LDP’s reputation for competent government, making it mucheasier for voters to make a leap into the dark and vote for the inexperiencedDPJ in the 2009 general election. However, the LDP in opposition was ableto drum up a different policy failure scandal to attack the DPJ over itshandling of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.

Nuclear Accidents before Fukushima

Until the accident at Fukushima, the nuclear industry had successfully soldthe public on their ‘‘fail-safe’’ precautions. In addition to a well-designed andsustained media campaign, the key to maintaining that reputation for safetywas preventing the public from finding out about the accidents at theFukushima plant in 1978 and 1989.32 In the early 1990s, however, severalaccidents happened in Japan that became public. None of them becamefull-fledged policy failure scandals that damaged the reputation of a rulingparty. Details of the accidents were covered up, and the ruling parties wereable to pin the blame on the operators of the plants. There was no effectiveopposition party in place to turn these accidents into major policy failurescandals capable of damaging the ruling coalition at election time.

In 1991 an accident happened at the Mihama nuclear power plant which wasconsidered Japan’s most serious until this time. A tube in a steam generatorbroke, causing primary cooling water to leak into a secondary cooling system.Kansai Electric plant operators detected abnormal readings and activated theemergency core cooling system, which shut down the reactor.33 No one waskilled or injured, and radioactive release into the atmosphere was negligible.

From 1991 until August 1993, the single government in power was theLDP, led by Kaifu Toshiki and then Miyazawa Kiichi. Blame for the accident

31. Yomiuri Shimbun, July 7 and 21, 2007.32. Akira Nakamura and Masao Kikuchi, ‘‘What We Know, and What We Have Not Yet

Learned: Triple Disasters and the Fukushima Nuclear Fiasco in Japan.’’ Public Administration Review71:6 (2011): 893–99.

33. Yomiuri Shimbun, March 12, 1991.


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was assigned differently by Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission and theMinistry of International Trade and Industry. The ministry pinned the directcause of the accident on the faulty installation of metal antivibration fixturesdiscovered where the tube had ruptured, whereas the commission faulted thegovernment’s safety inspection system.34 The LDP pledged to implementvarious safety checks going forward, and the badly damaged plant resumedoperations in 1994 after replacement of its older steam generator.35 Thepublic wrangling over the direct causes of the accident and the LDP’s effortsto increase checks helped insulate it from what might have become a majorscandal.

When the next major nuclear mishap struck, it went considerably beyonddesign flaws and problems associated with older technology. On December 8,1995, a major sodium leak and fire shut down the Monju reactor plant, Japan’sonly fast-breeder reactor. At the time, Monju was at the center of the govern-ment’s plans to guarantee a stable energy supply and to create a nuclear fuelcycle. Four months after the plant began generating electricity, more than a tonof liquid sodium leaked from a cooling system, and a fire followed. No one waskilled or injured, and a major environmental catastrophe was averted.

Unlike Mihama, however, the mishap quickly became scandal fodder,because the operator of the plant, the Power Reactor and Nuclear FuelDevelopment Corporation (PNC), was caught (by local officials and themedia) trying to minimize the damage. PNC had initially released selectivevideo images to TV networks that did not show the extent of the damage.When outside groups, including a prefectural survey team and the broad-caster NHK, obtained and broadcast their own footage, citizens were shockedat the rubble and destruction they saw. The ensuing investigation revealedother attempts to hide details and minimize the extent of the damage. Thescandal stayed in the headlines for weeks and gained momentum when thePNC official in charge of an in-house investigation of his company commit-ted suicide after expressing failure to get to the bottom of the cover-up andhis fear of getting his colleagues in trouble.

The last nuclear mishaps of the 1990s were the Tokaimura nuclear acci-dents in 1997 and 1999. In 1997 a fire and explosion occurred at one of the

34. Yomiuri Shimbun, March 10, 1992.35. In 2004, the Mihama plant became news again when a pipe ruptured in its Unit 3 generator,

killing five workers and injuring six others.


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Tokaimura nuclear fuel reprocessing plants in Ibaraki Prefecture, operated bythe same organization (PNC) as Monju, discussed above. A total of 37 work-ers were exposed to radiation, in Japan’s worst nuclear accident to date. PNCtried to cover up some of the details, and negative press coverage of theaccident stayed in the news. In 1999 Tokaimura would make the news again,but this time for an accident in a different reprocessing plant run by a differentoperator.36 The accident happened when workers took shortcuts to save timeand mixed dangerous amounts of uranium in metal buckets. Their actions setoff a nuclear reaction that would kill two of them and led to an evacuation oflocal residents.37

The above discussion of nuclear mishaps in the 1990s is instructive inthinking about the ways the LDP was able to control the fallout. First, theLDP was successful in placing the blame on the operators and distancingitself as much as possible from the disaster. After the Monju accident, forexample, the LDP government blamed and tried to severely punish thetroubled PNC by forcing it to reorganize as the Japan Nuclear Cycle Devel-opment Institute, which ironically was run primarily by former PNCofficials.

Another important distancing strategy for the government was to letvarious bureaucratic entities investigate and take the lead in assigning andshifting blame. In the Mihama case, for example, Japan’s Nuclear SafetyCommission and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry bothstudied the accident and released reports, which emphasized different causesand offered different recommendations. The LDP sided with the ministry’sreport, which blamed human error rather than government failure, andused the reports to deflect blame elsewhere. The opposition parties, ofcourse, had a clear interest in exposing bureaucratic failure and corruptionlinked to the LDP, but seldom had access to the necessary information, andmoreover many of the administrative details failed to stimulate intensemedia coverage.

36. The plant was operated by the Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Co. until its license wasrevoked the following year.

37. The nuclear accidents were not restricted to Tokaimura during this period. There were alsomajor nuclear leaks in Fukui Prefecture in 1997 and 1999 that generated major headlines in Japan andaround the world. In April 1997 there was also a tritium leak at the Fugen advanced thermal reactor,exposing 11 workers to radiation. In July 1999, more than 50 tons of primary cooling water was leakedfrom the Tsuruga nuclear plant.


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It is also worth reiterating that the mass media focused primarily on thegeneral causes of the accidents, but the names of bureaucrats and officials inthe organizations received little coverage. Compared to major political scan-dals involving politicians, bureaucrats are much less in the public eye, whichpartially explains why there has been little systematic research on bureaucraticcorruption in Japan in general. This is unfortunate, because the postwarimage of bureaucrats as clean and efficient no longer seems accurate sincethe 1990s, as scandals and serious corruption have come to light.

The DPJ’s Handling of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck Japan, and thenuclear accident that unfolded would become the world’s second most seri-ous, after Chernobyl in 1986. The accident was a direct consequence ofdecades of inefficient management and failure to address obvious problems.Problems with the plant and operator started as early as 1978 but wereminimized or covered up.38

Electric power companies could get away with such mismanagementbecause of weak state oversight and weak civil society. A government panelwas created in 2006 to draft guidelines for companies to use to check theiradherence to standards, but it was filled out with experts that had ties to theelectric companies.39 Although an agency for nuclear safety exists, it seems tohave played a minimal role, as revealed in the aftermath of the Fukushimanuclear accident. Local residents were aware of these problems but wereunable to influence policymakers. They had filed 14 major lawsuits againstthe state or power companies since the late 1970s, but without a single legalvictory, because ‘‘it seems the judges perceived that the state and nuclearoperators were more reliable sources of information.’’40

Established by the Japanese parliament, the National Diet of JapanFukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commissionreleased a report in 2012. It argued that the root causes of the disaster were

38. In 1978, for example, its No. 3 reactor malfunctioned and leaked radioactive substances.TEPCO hid this accident for 29 years until finally disclosing in 2007.

39. Yuuko Kawato, Robert Pekkanen, and Yutaka Tsujinaka, ‘‘Civil Society and the TripleDisasters,’’ in Jeff Kingston, ed., Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan (London: Routledge,2012): 80–82.

40. Ibid., p. 82.


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the ‘‘organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales fordecisions and actions, rather than issues relating to the competency of anyspecific individual.’’41 This report also faulted the Prime Minister’s Officefor creating a response team within the Tokyo Electric Power Company(TEPCO) headquarters, which disrupted the planned chain of command.Prime Minister Kan was also criticized for visiting the Fukushima plantbecause it ‘‘diverted the attention and time of the on-site operational staffand confused the line of command.’’42 The Diet commission report, on thewhole, was dissected carefully by the press and was used to understand thecauses of the accident and also to criticize Kan and the DPJ.

The initial impression of the Kan administration’s handling of the tripledisaster was chaos. ‘‘Information given to the public was fragmented, andcoordination between the prime minister’s cabinet, the relevant governmentorganizations, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company . . . operating theFukushima Dai-Ichi plant seemed highly problematic.’’43 Later, the reasonfor the chaotic response became clear: ‘‘The DPJ leadership was operatingunder conditions of extreme information uncertainty and communicationdifficulties, exacerbated by preexisting governmental and contingency-planning shortcomings.’’44 No contingency plan took into account the factthat a tsunami and earthquake could deprive the plant of electricity. Whenthat happened, the plans were rendered irrelevant. The public, of course, wasnot aware of these problems (and many others) at the time.

Kan’s distrust of TEPCO was also severely criticized: ‘‘With his distrust ofthe officials of TEPCO and the bureaucracy, Kan personally made himselfinvolved in the nuclear crisis, and began micromanaging in response.’’45 Theadvice to leave the on-site operational staff in command of operations on theground makes sense, but in this case the on-site staff was from TEPCO,which ‘‘consistently failed to inform government officials, especially theprime minister and cabinet, of what was happening at the plant, downplayed

41. Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, ‘‘The Official Report of the Fu-kushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission,’’ <https://www.nirs.org/fukushima/naiic_report.pdf>, accessed January 1, 2016.

42. Ibid., 18.43. Kenji E. Kushida, ‘‘The DPJ’s Political Response to the Fukushima Natural Disaster,’’ in

Japan under the DPJ, 405–06.44. Ibid., 412.45. Tomohito Shinoda, ‘‘DPJ’s Political Leadership in Response to the Fukushima Nuclear

Accident,’’ Japanese Journal of Political Science 14:2 (2013): 256.


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https://www.nirs.org/fukushima/naiic_report.pdf

https://www.nirs.org/fukushima/naiic_report.pdf

dangers, did not adequately inform or misinformed the government andpublic about developments, and then tried to shift all the blame onto theprime minister rather than admit its epic mismanagement of the crisis.’’46

When Kan finally testified and was interviewed by the Diet commission togive his side of the story, he had already resigned as prime minister, and hiscomments likely did not generate massive sympathy, given all that hadhappened. He was quoted as telling the panel, ‘‘I was frightened and felthelpless. You can’t expect a nuclear expert to be prime minister or a cabinetminister, so we need top regulatory officials to provide expertise and help us.We didn’t have those people.’’47 He further defended his visiting the plantand speaking with the plant’s manager, because officials in Tokyo had failedto provide information about what was going on.

As Kenji Kushida notes, ‘‘Much of the blame-game after the crisis stabi-lized was an outgrowth of the LDP becoming a more effective oppositionparty, using the accident and broader Tohoku recovery issue as a means tosuccessfully undermine the credibility of the DPJ.’’48 The mass media and theLDP successfully pushed a story of DPJ incompetence before the Japanesepublic, and the policy failure scandal was one of the reasons for the DPJ’sdevastating election loss in 2012, where it lost nearly half of the support that ithad won in 2009.

THE ABE ADMINISTRATION AND THE FUTURE OF POLICY

FAILURE SCANDALS

The first serious policy failure scandal in the second Abe administration lookedsurprisingly like the major policy scandal of the first Abe administration:incompetence in the management of pension information. In 2010 the SocialInsurance Agency was reorganized into the Japan Pension Service. In 2015, thesecond Abe administration faced another scandal after hackers stole personalinformation on more than a million Japanese citizens by sending virus-infectedemails that were opened by Japan Pension Service employees.49 Although

46. See e.g. Ellis Krauss, ‘‘Crisis Management, LDP and DPJ Style,’’ Japanese Journal of PoliticalScience 14:2 (2013): 191.

47. The Guardian, May 29, 2012.48. Kenji Kushida, ‘‘The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the DPJ: Leadership, Structures, and

Information Challenges during the Crisis,’’ Japanese Political Economy 40:1 (2014): 29–68.49. Asahi Shimbun, July 7, 2015.


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internal regulations require employees to assign passwords to files containingpersonal information, many of the stolen files had no such protection.

Strangely, this scandal did not draw much attention. The most likelyexplanation is that the media was occupied with a more important issue: theimplementation of collective defense. In July 2014 the Abe cabinet reinter-preted the constitution as providing a right to participate in collective defensearrangements, historically a highly contentious issue. The Cabinet Legisla-tion Bureau had consistently interpreted collective defense as a violation ofthe constitution, but Abe appointed a new bureau chief who agreed with hisown position. Abe ignored public opinion, falling support rates, and theopinion of almost all constitutional scholars that his policies were unconsti-tutional, in order to push his policy through the Diet.

Ironically, in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to divert attentionaway from his unpopular defense policies, Abe inadvertently drew attentionto another policy failure: the main stadium to be built in Tokyo for the 2020

Summer Olympics. With criticisms mounting over its cost and size, Abeintervened by making a dramatic decision to send the plans back to thedrawing board. The decision was popular but failed to divert attention fromhis defense policies. Instead, it produced a search for the officials responsiblefor the cost and design fiasco. The opposition repeatedly pressed for theresignation of the education minister, who stepped down in September 2015.

The second Abe administration is hoping that another major nuclearaccident will not happen on its watch. It is also operating cautiously, in aneffort to avoid further scandals linked to the Fukushima nuclear accident andthe cleanup, which will likely span decades. The accident and policy failurescandal at Fukushima revealed decades of failure to address obvious prob-lems. The LDP knows that if another major policy failure surfaces, thepoliticians will take the most visible part of the blame.

There are hints that the Abe administration is taking more aggressive stepsto control the bureaucracy. First, after the pensions administration hadspawned its second policy failure scandal, the Ministry of Health set up a newteam inside the administration with the power to check on compliance withrules at any time with no warning. The ministry also prevented basic pensionrecords from being connected to the Internet, to prevent further leaks.Finally, it instituted an annual educational program for all employees.50

50. Yomiuri Shimbun, December 8, 2015.


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However, it is worth reiterating that previous attempts to reorganize thegovernment management of the pension system have generally not achievedsome of their goals, such as restoring public confidence.

Another example of the LDP’s efforts to control the bureaucracy wasvisible in 2017. A government watchdog panel uncovered efforts by theMinistry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology to findjobs for retiring senior officials, in a practice called amakudari (descent fromthe heavens).51 The media has covered the issue extensively, and the oppo-sition has criticized the LDP for failing to enforce the national public servicelaw, which was revised in 2008 to make it illegal for current civil servants touse their influence to help retiring bureaucrats land jobs. In Diet hearings,the LDP has vigorously criticized the bureaucrats involved, nearly as much asthe opposition. The Abe administration also ordered an investigation into thepractice of amakudari in every ministry and agency. Investigators failed touncover a systematic practice beyond the one ministry, although they diduncover 27 cases, involving at least a dozen different organizations.52 Withouta viable alternative to the LDP, however, future policy failure scandals do notseem likely to result in the replacement of the government, nor will they haveas much effect on national elections as witnessed in 2009 and 2012.

Another potential problem for Japanese politics surfaced in the course ofthis study. In the absence of the pressures generated by two-party competi-tion, there are some signs that the LDP is taking a more aggressive approachin passing legislation that could be used to control the media as well as otherindividuals or groups. For instance, the State Secrets Law passed in 2013,which punishes whistleblowers who reveal confidential information, mightalso be used to discourage journalists from investigating potential policyfailures.53 Likewise, the anticonspiracy bill passed in 2017 allows authoritiesto prosecute ‘‘criminal organizations’’ of two or more people for 277 differentcriminal acts. Joseph Cannataci, the United Nations special rapporteur onthe right to privacy, cautioned that this bill will lead to greater restrictions onprivacy and freedom of expression.54

51. Yomiuri, January 21, 2017.52. Kyodo, June 15, 2017.53. Asahi, October 15, 2015.54. New York Times, May 23, 2017.


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CONCLUSION

Postwar Japan has experienced many corruption scandals, although mosthave involved political rather than bureaucratic corruption. Administrativedetails and the names of bureaucrats involved in corrupt behavior often failedto capture the headlines. In the realm of nuclear accidents, for example,a common strategy of the government was to shift blame onto the nuclearoperators. In a few of the cases examined, the mass media uncovered ‘‘hid-den’’ information and scandalous material but the LDP leadership was quickto distance itself from the causes of the accident. Without an effective oppo-sition party to present itself as an alternative to LDP rule, it was difficult togenerate major policy failure scandals that might threaten the standing of theLDP at the polls.

Policy failure scandals became more common in Japanese politics after the1990s. The political reforms of 1994 led to a change in the electoral system,which helped foster the rise of a two-party system. Media interest in scandalconstruction was further heightened during this time because of increasedparty competition, but also because of the additional transparency generatedby the reforms, such as changes in campaign finance laws, which made iteasier to obtain embarrassing information about politicians and generatescandals. Positive media coverage of the DPJ when it was in the oppositionalso proved useful in its efforts to highlight LDP failures and achieve power in2009, although this would end in the policy failure scandal connected withFukushima.

While the role of interparty competition and the functioning of the two-party system was highlighted above, several other factors proved to be impor-tant. First, the ability of party leaders and politicians to obtain embarrassinginformation from bureaucrats was critical in several of the cases. Both the‘‘missing’’ pensions scandal and the HIV-tainted-blood scandal might nothave been exposed if bureaucrats had been able to control potentially em-barrassing information. Coalition government also helped generate the trans-parency necessary to uncover details that might otherwise have remainedhidden. In the tainted-blood scandal, for instance, it was a minor coalitionpartner rather than the opposition that obtained the necessary informationfrom the ministry. Finally, the role of the media was important in many ofthe policy failure scandals.


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The future role of policy failure scandals in Japanese politics seems lesscertain, because the 2012 election destroyed the nascent two-party system.Not only did the DPJ lose almost half its 2009 vote, but opposition to theLDP fragmented, allowing the LDP to win a large majority while continuingto lose votes and then to repeat that performance in 2014. Since then, policyfailure scandals have become less common and less consequential in Japanesepolitics. The Abe administration has managed to avoid a major policy failurescandal thus far, but no amount of preparation can stop unexpected events orother types of political scandals from emerging.55 The telltale signs thus leadto the tentative conclusion that policy failure scandals become more signif-icant in the context of interparty competition, especially when that contextalso includes a credible alternative government.

55. In 2017, for example, the Abe administration struggled to contain the fallout from a scandallinked to Kake Gakuen, a school operator based in Ehime Prefecture, as well as scandals generatedafter cabinet ministers made inappropriate comments.


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