WHY IS SOCIAL DEMOCRACY WEAK IN JAPAN?

Yamaguchi. The left wing in post-war Japan was essentially socialist, and social democracy was not main stream. In post-war history the progressive forces accounted for one third of the political spectrum, and their core was the Japan Socialist Party, supported by the leftist Sōhyō labour movement. After the Japan-US Security Treaty revision crisis of 1960, when the period of rapid economic growth had already got under way, the problem for the Japanese left wing lay in the fact that the influence of Marxism continued as before.

In 1960 the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) was formed, and such top ranking intellectuals as Rōyama Masamichi and Ryū Shintarō gave theoretical underpinning to it. There was also a movement to establish a Japanese-style social democratic force, but the DSP only became a minor party, representing the interests of labour unions in large firms in the private sector. I suppose that a period of rapid growth, with wages rising fast, was a time when a social democratic force in party politics was not really needed.

In a world of workers in employment, the trend was for income to rise and life to become prosperous by distributing the fruits of growth centred on corporate firms. In the world of agriculture where employment was scarcer, and in the world of the self-employed, there were policies under LDP governments whereby each industry would distribute material benefits, leading to stability and rises in the standard of living. In this sense, social democracy really became necessary when rapid economic growth came to an end, the bubble burst and the economy went into a long period of stagnation. Around the same time, the aging of society began to accelerate, essentially from the 1990s.

In this sense, left-wing progressive forces did not think carefully enough about the role they might play if they changed policy to confront socio-economic problems. Instead they concentrated mainly on political themes, the central one being the Constitution, and they identified their raison d’être as being to prevent the LDP from revising it.