ABSTRACT
Until 1993, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) was the main opposition party in Japan, a position it had occupied since 1955. It formed the backbone of the 1955 system alongside the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The 1955 system denotes the period between 1955 and 1993 when the LDP was the only party capable of forming a government in its own right, a time when the LDP was also permanently and successfully opposed by the JSP (and increasingly throughout that period, by other smaller opposition parties as well). But 1993 was a disastrous year for the JSP. It saw the number of seats it was usually able to win halve in the historic July Lower House election that also saw the LDP lose its majority for the first time in 38 years. While 1993 has become embedded in collective memory as the year of the LDP’s collapse, little attention has been paid to the concurrent decline of the JSP, an event which has had a far greater impact on the face of Japanese parliamentary politics. This chapter shall attempt to show the extent and importance of these changes within the socialist opposition, and illuminate some of the differences between the pre-1993 led opposition party, the JSP, and the main opposition party that subsequently emerged, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ is proving to be an increasingly electable party, and while it does not yet have the power to win an election single-handedly, with each one it is moving steadily towards that goal. With each improvement in its performance, the possibility of the emergence of a twoparty system of sorts becomes more likely, and with that, Japanese democracy acquires a more conventional structure.
