2023 | 11 min read
Viewed from a safe distance – try it for yourself on a map of the Tokyo Metro – Nagatacho Station looks like any major downtown hub. The Hanzomon, Nanboku and Yurakucho subway lines all appear to converge at this station in central Tokyo, at the southwest corner of the Imperial Palace grounds. If Nagatacho isn’t a hub, it’s surely more than a node. Then again, you’ve heard Tokyo described as a vortex city, with the interesting stuff on the central edges swirling around an empty centre. That makes you slightly wary of Nagatacho. But it looks like a good place to transit at least.
Underground though, Nagatacho Station reveals its true face as a particularly terrible place to change trains. All thoughts of a rapid transfer dissolve miserably against an airport terminal-like experience of long corridors and even longer escalators. Change suddenly becomes a remote prospect. Nagatacho is where one loses all hope. And most Tokyoites know to avoid it for that reason. It’s true that all big cities have their downtown zones, their Trafalgar and Times Squares, that are avoided by locals. Nagatacho’s cruel fate is to be ignored even by most tourists.
But some tourists might, for reasons only they can explain, be interested in Japan’s byzantine democratic process. These enlightened visitors will know that Nagatacho is Tokyo’s political centre. Home to the National Diet Building, the Prime Minister’s residence, and the headquarters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Nagatacho itself is a metonym, like Westminster or the Beltway, for the entire political establishment. Brave tourists alighting at Nagatacho are willing to forgo all other pleasures for a glimpse of Japanese politicians in their natural habitat.
That habitat is now the subject of a book called Nagatacho Zoo by Shizuka Kamei, a veteran politician who spent most of his career as a plucky challenger in the, uh, ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP has been in power for most of the last seven decades, displaced only twice, and only briefly, in the general elections of 1993 and 2009. Both elections followed on the back of financial crises. While there’s fiscal stability, the LDP is more or less invincible, however disreputable its roll call of ancient chauvinists and middle-aged nepo babies becomes.
Nagatacho Zoo brings together Kamei’s columns from tabloid Weekly Gendai about his political adversaries down the decades. The full title is Nagatacho Zoo: 101 People Who Ruined Japan. If the title suggests a political hit-job, that would be only half the truth. The book details pivotal moments of backstabbing, intimidation and other dark manoeuvring within the halls of power, as seen by a long-serving member of the LDP and leader of a breakaway faction. But it’s also a series of affectionate tributes to its subjects’ wiliness and occasional ruthlessness in the political dark arts. It even honours them with mafioso-style nicknames. The LDP is so powerful that even its satirists belong to the party.
Shizuka Kamei can actually lay claim to being a political outsider. Born into an ordinary Hiroshima family, Kamei was expelled from high school for leading a student protest over fees, before trying his luck at another school in Tokyo and winning a place to study economics at the University of Tokyo. While a student, he worked as a cabaret club attendant and practiced aikido, which both provided him with a useful education in mollifying unruly opponents. After two years as a salaryman, Kamei was sufficiently incensed by the Leftist movement of the 1960s to quit his job and join the police force.
Kamei the cop quickly rose through the ranks to land a senior post at the National Police Agency. That post brought him to national attention during the various hijacking and hostage-taking brouhahas carried out by the Japanese Red Army throughout the 1970s. This provided the platform for Kamei to enter politics in 1979 as a member of the ruling LDP. As well as its formidable local campaigning machine – the Moonies say hi! – the LDP has always been adept at spotting and recruiting political outsiders with rising media profiles. The LDP is so powerful that even political outsiders belong to the party.
Once safely elected to his Hiroshima constituency, Kamei followed the familiar arc of an LDP politician. He progressed from back-bencher throughout the 1980s to ministerial posts in the 1990s, before eventually heading up his own faction and facing off against Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in a leadership challenge in 2003. Kamei lost. No matter, the LDP is a constantly swirling intrigue in which factions wax and wane, political careers never die, and there are always second and third acts. Except Kamei chose another path: he quit.
Kamei and other members of his faction formed the Kokumin Shinto, or People’s New Party. In 2009, the PNP manoeuvred itself into the ruling coalition following a surprise opposition victory in the Lower House election. That chaotic, ill-fated administration had the misfortune to be left holding the baby during the Fukushima disaster, which was caused by decades of nuclear mismanagement under LDP rule. The coalition clung on until 2012 before it was crushed by a resurgent LDP under Shinzo Abe. The PNP opted to dissolve itself, as all factions that leave the LDP must do. The LDP is so powerful that even the opposition belongs to the party, at least most of the time.
Nagatacho Zoo is an apt metaphor for the distancing of national politics from everyday life. The zoo metaphor reflects a widespread belief that politicians are a different species. These people are not like us. They’re a special class of animal. They pace their own enclosures called backrooms where they play out their own status games. Only in the run-up to elections, when the apathy of voters can no longer be ignored, do they migrate out into the streets and stationfronts to shriek their mating calls. If the people will not visit the zoo, the zoo must visit the people.
When change is widely felt to be impossible via the ballot box, politics is reduced to a peculiar vocation. What’s left is a kind of rump or post-politics in which parliament remains in session, elections continue to be held, and other familiar machinations take place, but the hopes and interests of the people are directed elsewhere. In Japan, they might be directed towards work, a volunteer organisation, or an epicurean lifestyle. Post-politics leaves a void that can only be filled by social duty or personal expression.
When people can be bothered to vote, they’re just as likely to vote for the status quo. At least it leaves them in peace. You might call this the politics of containment. When people no longer believe that politicians will act in the public’s best interests, they vote for the party that promises the least change or the candidate that has the least hope of winning. Like people caught in a protection racket, they pay with their votes so that nothing bad will happen. The Yen will not stray too far from the dollar. Shops will always be well stocked. There will always be new things to see and do.
The mood on the streets of Tokyo is always a scrupulous blend of personal freedom and social obligation. The political doesn’t figure in your personal fulfilment journey here. Loyalties are to the people whose help you might need along the way. Freedom is highly prized, and remaining apolitical is one way to be left alone. In Tokyo today you can be harassed by crazy neighbours, angry customers, ultranationalists or street cops, but you cannot be harassed by your own government. To understand why, we need to enter the wild and wonderful world of, um, constitutional history.
In 1945, it was decided that Japan needed a new constitution. All that emperor stuff had to go. Allied GHQ put out an RFP and constitutional proposals flooded in from all political parties. Most of these were rehashes of the Meiji Constitution with some expansions of parliamentary power thrown in. But the Americans wanted a more liberal document that would place sovereignty firmly with the people. And more importantly, that would contain and frustrate any nationalist government that might come to power in future. Douglas MacArthur, General of the US Army, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, and Pipesmoker of the Year, grew exasperated. Signalling for his legal team, he gave them one week to write a new constitution from scratch.
The postwar Japanese Constitution that came into effect in May 1947 is most famous for Article 9, which renounces the right to wage war. Almost as significant though is Article 13, which guarantees respect for individuals, making “their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” the supreme consideration in all matters of state. The wording here could hardly be more alien to Japan. The local lawyers called in at the last moment to review the document were busy fighting other fires. Like the mission statements of Silicon Valley tech firms, the postwar Japanese Constitution was an idealistic document written by US college graduates untroubled by too much knowledge of how the rest of the world thinks and lives.
That combination of idealism and haste was compounded by a need to counter pro-socialist sympathies among the Japanese people. This produced a surprising constitution that was progressive on rights for workers and women, as well as for citizens as a whole. There was also that famous renunciation of war and a relatively high bar for amendment. The Japanese Constitution, to put it in contemporary context, is like an Apple User Agreement that you hastily agreed to in 2007 and which is now the only thing preventing the government from accessing your phone or sending you to war. Amending it has become so controversial that it’s now the oldest unamended constitution in the world.
There’s not much actual love for the Japanese Constitution. Like other user agreements, most citizens have never read it or even given it much thought. Instead of love, there’s reverence. That’s because there’s a widely shared belief that the constitution is good for the people. The evidence for this belief is that the constitution is disliked by the LDP. If the people want to maintain their not-very-hard-won rights and freedoms, they should resist constitutional amendment. And there are signs that they will.
According to Article 13, the only thing that can constrain individual rights and freedoms is public welfare, which is taken to mean infringements on the rights and freedoms of other individuals. The long-term goal of the LDP has been to replace “public welfare” with “public interest and public order” and place individual rights back under political discretion. The LDP also wants the constitution amended to give the government more emergency powers and the power to limit freedom of speech where it perceives there to be a conflict with public order.
“Public interest” can of course mean “whatever the LDP decides” as the ruling party has a constitutional mandate to represent the interests of the people. “Public order” is a depressing echo of events happening in other countries where the political consensus that shaped the second half of the last century is slowly breaking apart. Japan is well behind the curve when it comes to rolling out digital surveillance or clamping down on protest. The reason? Again, it’s that pesky constitution.
During 2014-2015, when the LDP under Shinzo Abe took an authoritarian turn, passing new security and secrecy laws and declaring its intent to reinterpret the war-revoking Article 9, it triggered the biggest citizen uprising since the 1960s. Students formed an activist group called SEALDs (Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy) and, alongside tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, staged peaceful mass protests in front of the National Diet Building. The protestors couldn’t stop the passage of Abe’s legislation, but they achieved something else instead. They showed that the Japanese people will turn out en masse, in Nagatacho, to defend their constitution. The amendment agenda was quietly shelved.
It turns out that the people are not so apolitical after all. They may have only a vague idea of their rights, but they know where their obligations begin and end. The Japanese Constitution states that the people have just three obligations: to work, pay taxes, and send their kids to school. In that one pithy sentence could be lived a hundred million lives. In all other respects, the people have the right to be left alone and not be harassed, conscripted, or otherwise molested by their ruling class.
I used to follow Japanese politics, but eventually gave up the habit. Like many others, I realised that positive change could only be pursued on my own terms. Looking back, I was interested in the personalities involved only insofar as they represented threats to my personal freedom. When even that threat seemed remote, I gave up my season ticket at the zoo.
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