ABSTRACT
First published in Stockwin et al, Dynamic and Immobilist Politics in Japan, Basingstoke, Macmillan, in association with St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1988
DYNAMIC AND IMMOBILIST ASPECTS OF JAPANESE POLITICS
IN NOVEMBER 1987 Nakasone Yasuhiro was replaced as prime minister of Japan by Takeshita Noboru, a politician of the same party that had ruled without interruption since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Nakasone had been widely regarded abroad as a thrusting dynamic leader determined to exercise personal power in order to ‘settle accounts with the postwar period’. By contrast Takeshita-little known outside Japan hitherto-comes over as a behind-the-scenes politician who hesitates to move politically until he has constructed a broad consensus of opinion behind him. Does this mean, then, that Japan has once again entered a period of immobilist politics after five years of unusually dynamic leadership? Why did an established leader who seemed to have given the government and politics of Japan a much more modern image than it had previously enjoyed have to yield office to someone whose approach appeared traditional and unexciting?
