Political reform has been a focal point of Japanese politics since the late 1980s. Its
target included many institutions, covering almost all the public spheres. It comprehensively
transformed and continues to reform the Japanese polity. While institutional
changes were almost complete by the early 2000s, they do not become the
past. Currently we see their results and effects in daily political processes. For
example, we find words such as "prime ministerial rule (shusho shihai)" and
"prime minister's office leadership (Kantei shudō)" in many forms of news coverage
today. Such terms were seldom used for the description and analysis of
policymaking processes in postwar Japan before the 1990s.
It should be noted that many industrialized countries tackled comprehensive
reforms of political institutions between the late 1980s and early 2000s. France
shortened the presidential tenure by constitutional reform in 2002 to prevent cohabitation,
a salient political phenomenon in the 1980s and the 1990s. Italy introduced a
new rule for the lower house election, which was a mixed (parallel) system of the
single-member district one and proportional representation (SMD-PR) in 1994, in
order to establish a more competitive relationship between two major parties or party
alliances. A similar electoral system was also adopted in New Zealand in 1996,
which was aimed rather at having more diverse parties in legislature. There was
clearly a major trend towards changing electoral rules as well as the roles and tenures
of the chief executives. We can easily add more cases such as Korea and Taiwan on
the list.
Accordingly, political reforms in Japan should be understood not only in the
context of postwar Japanese history with its changing socioeconomic and international
environment, but also in connection with the trend shared by other industrialized
nations. While this book does concern itself with the continuities and
discontinuities from the pre-reform Japanese politics, relying, as it does, largely on
works in Japanese, it is always conscious of the connection with theoretical frameworks
for analyzing political reforms in the industrialized countries.
