Explaining important public contests in Japan: Rhetorical strategies, causality, and populism

Abstract

This article studies two of the most important public contests in contemporary Japanese politics, Prime Minister (PM) Koizumi’s postal privatization and PM Abe’s introduction of collective self-defense. I investigate the rhetorical dynamics of these public contests, and find that the initiations and the yearlong continued efforts by the prime ministers and their cabinets narrowed down the options for resistance in Japanese political networks, as manifested in coercion, compromises, and policy swaps by the main political parties involved. I make three theoretical and conceptual contributions. First, I map the rhetorical process of the political actors involved by combining existing research on rhetorical contestation and the findings from the two contests. Second, I sketch causal models for the two contests, and argue that the public contests and rhetorical strategies that were initiated functioned as a social mechanism in the case of PM Koizumi and as a social mediator in the case of PM Abe. Third, I intervene in an ongoing discussion about the presence of populism in Japanese politics, and conclude that PM Koizumi represented a quintessential populist neoliberal, while PM Abe’s re-interpretation efforts did not exhibit populist features.