Election 2005: Did the Press Do Its Job?
Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party scored a landslide win in the Sept. 11 general election. The LDP-New Komeito coalition captured a combined 327 of 480 seats in the House of Representatives, which exceeded the two-thirds threshold of 320 seats needed to override an upper house veto. Just as importantly, voter turnout surged to 67.5 percent in single-seat constituencies, the highest since 1990.
In the past, the higher the turnout, the more likely opposition parties would gain ground. But this time, the trend did not apply. According to exit polls conducted by the Yomiuri media group, unaffiliated voters accounted for 19 percent of those who had cast their ballots. And an unprecedented number of swing voters (32 percent) chose LDP candidates.
Analysts agree that the election results were unprecedented. But we shouldn’t be too surprised because the mainstream media helped the LDP achieve the big win and solidify the “1955 System,” the arrangement that has governed the nation for most of the postwar period.
The 1955 System arose when the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party merged to form the LDP. It was designed to cement the LDP’s monopoly of power — literally as well as figuratively. To that end, a horde of pork-barrel operators in the Diet have kept the system in place with public works projects built on the foundation of corrupt, collusive and close-knit ties uniting business and government.
Nihon Kisha Kurabu, or the Japan National Press Club, has always been an integral part of the 1955 System. Its major role is that of “political sandmen,” to borrow the phrase coined by Ian Buruma, author of Inventing Japan – 1853-1964. Buruma showed that as politicians scattered money around, the media sprinkled sleep powder all over the electorate.
In fact, the 2005 election didn’t bring about any change at all to the system, thanks to the concerted efforts of JNPC members.
Japan National Press Club: What It Really Is
According to “Declaration of Departure from The Press Club System” by Yasuo Tanaka, Nagano governor and now the head of the newly born New Party Nippon, there are more than 800 press clubs in Japan. Some are attached to prefectural or municipal governments and others to central government offices. At all levels, the press clubs are granted an exclusive privilege to report on government activities. So, of course, the privileged media cook the news to the satisfaction of the authorities. For instance, reporters stationed in a rent-free office at a prefectural police department are allowed full access to information concerning crimes on the condition that the rules imposed by the police chief are strictly observed.
On the surface, these press clubs are independent of one another, but they really form an integrated whole supporting the 1955 System. And at the top of the sub-system sits a de facto head office, the Japan National Press Club. The JNPC is a fish that is only viable in a murky stream. For a media organization, it is shy when it comes to media coverage. As a result, we know very little about who funds its operations, what it’s up to, or how it’s organized.
We can, however, tell something about its history. The JNPC was formally founded by Nihon Shimbun Kyokai (NSK), or Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, in 1949, but actually it dates back to May 1941, seven months before the war in the Pacific broke out. The precursor of NSK was Nihon Shimbun Renmei (NSR), Japan Federation of Newspaper Publishers. NSR acted as the mouthpiece of Dai Hon-ei, or Headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army. Suppression of the press during the war by the military led to suppression afterwards by the U.S.-led Allied occupation forces.
Japanese journalists blamed Gen. Douglas MacArthur only after he left for gagging them, but they didn’t resist new press restraints that followed. They generally accepted a subtler Jishu Kisei (self-censorship) in compliance with tacit demands by the LDP-led government, which wanted to protect its vested interests by taming the press. So the LDP granted favored members of the media a monopoly of information sources and distribution channels. Once the press struck a reciprocal deal with the politicians, the 1955 System was secure.
At every transition of power in Japan, the media automatically repledged loyalty to the new rulers.
Undertone of Mainstream Media’s Coverage of Election 2005
If the press did not change, society did. Now the 1995 System looks even more fragile.
Today, the Japanese media can no longer avoid questioning pork-barrel operators, both in and out of the government, in the wake of an endless series of scandals involving public agencies, lawmakers and private sector companies. So the press has turned the spotlight elsewhere, trying desperately to avoid an examination of itself.
To escape attention, the mainstream media employed the art of misdirection. In the 2005 election, the press tried hard to misguide the public by making it believe that something unprecedented was happening and that it was a prelude to a sea change. LDP president and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi even said he was going to “destroy” the 60-year-old LDP to replace it with a new LDP. The media promoted his deceptive rhetoric from Day One of the campaign through the end. For instance, the Aug. 18 Yomiuri Shimbun editorialized that the “waning of [intra-]LDP factions led to the birth of a new party,” where that wasn’t the case at all.
Actually, what we were seeing during the campaign period was not unprecedented. During the first half of the 1990s, intra-party “rebels” were smoked out of the LDP, or voluntarily fled it. New parties with fancy names mushroomed as a result of the spin-offs, some party mergers ensued, unholy coalitions were formed, and opportunists hopped back and forth between these parties. In the end, the 1955 System survived intact.
Now, the media are continuing their tradition of trumpeting change while nothing occurs. Today the mainstream press tirelessly promotes the fallacy that Japan is transforming itself under the strong leadership of the current prime minister. From Hideki Tojo to Douglas MacArthur to Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese media love a strong leader.
Media’s Modi Operandi
On Sept. 7, Daniel Sloan, chairman of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan and Reuters business television senior correspondent, told Japanese reporters that the Sept. 11 poll would be a “watershed election.” The Yomiuri Shimbun and other press organizations liked Sloan’s phrase so much that they kept using “watershed” until the last day of the campaign.
Originally, Koizumi declared this election to be a single-issue poll, like a national referendum, to be fought solely over his postal privatization bills. That bill’s vote-down at the House of Councilors on Aug. 8 triggered the dissolution of the House of Representatives. Ever since, Koizumi has used “postal privatization” and “postal reform” interchangeably and opportunistically as if they were synonymous. The media echoed his tricky rhetoric.
In fact, the real issues all boiled down to one root problem — the government’s impending bankruptcy. But all along, the media chose to parrot Koizumi’s distortions about postal reform. The press did get around to reporting other matters — such as Japan’s bid for a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council — but not with any enthusiasm.
As was true with past elections, there were no valid and viable alternatives for the voting age population at the ballot box. Nonetheless, in recent years the media had been ardently disseminating the false notion that a modern two-party system was taking root. But this time around, they had to drop this fallacy, in part because it was more and more apparent that the major opposition, Democratic Party of Japan, whose support groups include the Postal Workers Union, was nothing more than a double of the LDP.
However, knowing that the consistent downturn in voter turnout in recent years could lead to the collapse of the entire 1955 System, the media were making believe there were decent alternatives. Three new parties were born, and one, Shinto Daichi, formed by Muneo Suzuki whose suspected graft case is currently under litigation, was made to look viable.
To make sure the media’s tricks worked, the Yomiuri Shimbun editorialized, on the morning of the poll, that “the future of the nation [lay] in voters’ hands.” Voters, unfortunately, didn’t wake up in time from their daydream to understand that they had nothing but false choices.
Yet Another False Dawn
In the final chapter of Inventing Japan, Ian Buruma writes of a hiccup of the 1955 System in the tumultuous days of 1993: “It turned out to be another false dawn. The electoral changes did not go far enough to make a difference.” In the post-election landscape, we are now experiencing déjà vu.
On Sept. 20 at the Apple Expo 2005, Paris-based press watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released “Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents,” which is meant to provide know-how and technologies to defeat Internet censors in such countries as China and Iran. Julian Pain, head of RSF’s Internet Freedom desk, writes in the handbook: “Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media are censored or under pressure.”
While “real journalists” in these countries are facing “Great Firewalls,” their Japanese counterparts confront a challenge of a different sort. In October last year, Reporters Without Borders released the results of its third annual survey of press freedom in 167 countries. The report ranked Japan No. 42 from the top, by far the lowest position for a G-7 nation. At that time RSF attributed Japan’s disastrous showing to the fact that the nation’s mainstream media are shackled by the press club system. The press clubs show little evidence of reform, so independent journalists — and bloggers — need to find new ways to bypass the “glass firewall” put up by the system.
Until they can have first-hand access to information sources and talk to the public directly, Japan’s Dark Age will continue.
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