TOKYO – Is America partially to blame for Naoto Kan’s becoming the fifth Japanese prime minister to resign in the same number of years? At the risk of joining the "blame America first" crowd, let me say that a case can be made that the political institutions created by the American Occupation laid the seeds for Japan’s current dysfunction.
Japan, like most parliamentary democracies in the world, operates under a constitution; unlike other parliamentary democracies that constitution was written by Americans. And some provisions in the document are as much to blame for Japan’s political gridlock as any supposed character or leadership flaws in Naoto Kan or any of the other recent premiers.
The roots go back to 1947 when the American proconsul in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, unhappy with drafts of a new constitution presented by the Japanese, decided to take matters into his own hands. He gathered 20 or so members of his staff and told them they constituted a constitutional convention. They had a week to come up with a satisfactory charter.
One might have thought that a group of Americans would have more or less copied the U.S. Constitution, but the decision had already been made to retain the monarchy. So they had, per force, to fashion a parliamentary form of government in which the government depends on a majority in the lower house known as the House of Representatives. But they grafted on to it an American-style upper chamber, called the House of Councillors.
Japan’s pre-war Diet had an upper chamber called the House of Peers filled by aristocrats and appointed plutocrats. It was fairly easy for the American drafters to purge the aristocrats and plutocrats and fill the house with elected members. Not so easy was to find the right balance of powers of the second chamber with the supposedly "more powerful" lower house.
The constitution makers didn’t spend a lot of time fussing over the balance between the two new legislative bodies during their short time as constitution drafters - they were instead obsessed with finding the right language to define the role of the emperor. After all, it was MacArthur’s dissatisfaction with the wording supplied by the Japanese legislators that caused him to scrap the proposed charters and write a new one.
Americans did a lot of good during the occupation, but it made the upper Japanese chamber too powerful. It is the most powerful second chamber of any parliamentary democracy. It is much closer to the U.S. Senate than, say, the British House of Lords. With very few exceptions, a bill defeated in the House of Councillors stays defeated, not delayed or amended or otherwise massaged – simply defeated.
When, about a month after becoming prime minister, Kan’s party lost control of the upper house, his government was doomed. He might just as well have resigned then and there. The opposition could use its upper house majority to block virtually any initiative that the government might undertake, even threatening to kill a bill allowing the government to issue deficit-covering bonds to keep the government solvent.
