From: Jonathan Lewis [jonathan[atx]iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp]
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995

Opposition Politics and Environmental Politics

At the second day of the Japan Politics Group Colloquium (September 5), Stephen
Johnson of Oxford University examined efforts by the DSP, the JSP and the
Komeito to form a united non-Communist opposition in Japan during the early
1970s. His hypothesis was that parties suffering organisational crises are
likely to seek coalitions, and that coalitions formed for this reason will not
last long. To test these hypotheses he looked at the three parties during this
period to see whether they confirmed the following conditions:

(1) The party seeking the coalition is undergoing organizational crisis.
(2) Proposals for coalitions reflect organisational issues rather than policy
issues.
(3) Concerns for organisational stability contribute to a coalition's downfall.

Mr. Johnson found that all three of these conditions obtained in this case,
hence the failure of the coalition to materialise. In the second paper, John
Crump of York University outlined environmental politics in Japan, based on his
forthcoming focus article in Environmental Politics. He categorised the key
players into Government (which in addition to the relevant government agencies
and the ruling parties includes business interests and opposition politicians);
Citizens' Movements, comprising the vast number of grassroots organisations; and
Environmental Ideologists, further divisible into those experts prepared to sing
the government's tune at symposia etc., ex-leftists looking for a new field in
which to agitate the passive masses (e.g., Ota Ryu), and fresh thinkers such as
Toda Kiyoshi.

Naoko Ise of Sheffield University took issue with Dr.Crump's categories,
pointing out that the standard social movement literature does not distinguish
between citizens' movements and ideologists; she further pinpointed the problem
of local government, perceived as part of the citizens' movements by central
government and as government by the citizens' movements. Other delegates
questioned the rather monolithic picture of government presented in the paper.
Commenting on both papers, Glen Hook (Sheffield) said that the late 1960s and
early 1970s saw a regime crisis from below as the socialists attempted and
failed to capture local power amid a pluralization of politics (emitomised by
the environmental movement), and also crisis from outside with the breakdown of
the Bretton Woods agreement. Regarding opposition politics, David Williams
(Sheffield) commented that the key linkages in the 1970s were not within
opposition parties but between the opposition and the LDP. James Babb
(Newcastle) pointed out that now that the "unchanging" 1955 system has passed
away, we are re-examining it in order to explain current splits and coalitions,
and discovering that it was by no means an unchanging system.

The East Asia Centre,
The University of Newcastle upon Tyne