A Perspective from Japan

Parliamentary Elections and the New Defense Ministry

 

Cultural News, June 2007

 

By Motoaki Kamiura, Military Analyst

Translated by Alan Gleason

 

    Elections for the House of Councillors -- the Upper House of Japan's Parliament -- take place every three years. The next one is this July.

 

    Japan's Self-Defense Forces have the power to move one million votes, it is said: active personnel, retirees, and their families add up to a million eligible voters. And if the SDF goes into full get-out-the-vote mode, it could muster twice that many. Candidates for proportional representation seats in the Upper House need a minimum of about 300,000 votes to win election.

 

    In the previous 2004 election, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ran three Defense Agency veterans as proportional representation candidates, but all lost, with none receiving more than 100,000 votes. Since then the LDP has had no ex-Defense Agency or ex-SDF representatives in the Upper House.

 

    The poor showing was caused by the dispatch of SDF troops to Iraq in January that same year. Both active and retired SDF personnel and their families were vehemently opposed to the Iraq deployment due to the lack of preparation, both legal and logistical, for this unprecedented commitment of SDF troops to an overseas combat zone.

 

    So the LDP got off to an early start in its strategic preparations for the elections this July. The government has already withdrawn Ground SDF units from their base in Samawah, and the LDP is running Colonel Masahisa Sato, the mediagenic commander of the Samawah mission, as an Upper House candidate.

 

    The choice of an active military man like Sato reflects the LDP's belief that the three candidates who lost in 2004 lacked popularity because they were all Defense Agency bureaucrats and civilians.

 

    Finally, in what many call the LDP's boldest election gambit, the Defense Agency was promoted into a full-fledged ministry, the Ministry of Defense, on January 9 this year.

 

   The old Defense Agency was low in the Cabinet hierarchy; its director could not submit budget requests directly to the Finance Minister, or legislative proposals to the Cabinet Council. Japanese security policy, particularly the security treaty with the U.S., was in the hands of the Foreign Ministry, while the Defense Agency was responsible mainly for running the Ground, Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces.

 

    The creation of a new Defense Ministry with the power to make policy was a long-cherished dream of both Agency bureaucrats and SDF personnel. By thus boosting the morale of Ministry staff and SDF troops, the LDP hopes to mobilize a million more votes in its favor.

 

Motoaki Kamiura is a Tokyo-based military analyst. When the world is in crisis, he appears frequently on national television programs.

  

   Alan Gleason is an editor, writer, and Japanese-English translator. He lives in Tokyo.