Organizer: Sheila A. Smith, Boston University
Chair: Ellis Krauss, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Patricia G. Steinhoff, University of Hawaii, Manoa
The impact of local politics on national policy has been overlooked in recent studies of Japanese politics. This panel examines issues in which local governments and other local actors have tried to be advocates—and even agents—of policy change at the national level. Our case studies reveal a range of strategies and outcomes in local interactions with the center and highlight the myriad forces which have either prevented or contributed to heightened local autonomy in contemporary Japan.
Each paper traces the formal institutional linkages between the localities and Tokyo; identifies events which have contributed to cooperation and/or conflict between the two; and examines the nature and impact of citizen group activism on center-local relations. Maclachlan argues that local innovation and influence on national consumer protection policy can occasionally occur within the pre-existing legal and administrative constraints set by the center. Smith, on the other hand, finds that local efforts to pressure Tokyo into downsizing the U.S. military presence in Okinawa have failed in the context of those pre-existing constraints, and that successful challenges to Tokyo’s authority on this issue have been mounted outside of established center-local linkages. In his analysis of local economic development, Gilman is skeptical of the ability of the localities to innovate and shows how routine policy making norms often present significant policy change at the local level. In a similar vein, Tegtmeyer Pak finds that even though local governments and locally based NGOs have mounted separate challenges to national immigration policies, they have been largely unsuccessful given their inability to surmount the institutional or ideological barriers to cooperation on this issue.
Sheila A. Smith, Boston University
Local protest against U.S. military bases in Japan has taken a variety of forms, but no locality has challenged Tokyo’s authority on this issue as blatantly and comprehensively as Okinawa. With its history of occupation by the U.S. between 1945 and 1972 and its ongoing geostrategic importance, the relationship between Okinawa and national policy is unique in terms of both its complexity and overall significance for Japan’s national security policy.
This paper will explore this complex relationship by focusing on Governor Ota’s post-1995 strategy to expand the boundaries of local autonomy. Briefly stated, that strategy has consisted of highlighting the breadth of popular support for reducing the U.S. bases by publicizing the September 1995 rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by U.S. military personnel and holding a local referendum the following year; resorting to the courts to protest the expropriation of land for military use; exploiting tensions in the U.S.-Japan security relationship and appealing directly to Washington for support; and engaging national politicians in discussions over a new form of economic cooperation that would diversity the Okinawan economy and decrease its dependence on national subsidies. To conclude, the paper will assess Governor Ota’s strategy in terms of its impact on the division of authority between national and local government and on the national security policy-making agenda.
Patricia L. Maclachlan, University of Texas, Austin
The relationship between the central and local governments in Japan vis-à-vis consumer protection policy is both complementary and competitive. It is complementary in that policies affecting the nation as a whole are formulated by the center and implemented by both the national bureaucracy and local administrations, while consumer issues of a strictly local concern are delegated to the jurisdictions of the localities. Within the more or less routine processes of policy implementation and policy-making at the local level, however, ordinances are occasionally formulated which conflict with the objectives of the center and lead to changes in the national consumer policy agenda.
In this paper, I explore the process of local consumer policy-making and innovation and highlight the political conditions under which local innovation can alter the national agenda. To illustrate, I examine the national and local policy processes surrounding labeling regulations and information disclosure rules, with special reference to recent developments within the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. As these examples will attest, the localities are prime venues for citizen groups to articulate their preferences and to challenge the more business-oriented policies of the national government. Although the willingness of the center to duplicate local policies is contingent upon factors beyond local control, the fact that local consumer policy can condition national policy options has important implications not only for the advancement of the consumer interest in Japan, but also for the functions of local governments in unitary states.
Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, University of Chicago
There are significant differences in the national and local responses to the growing foreign migrant population in Japan. Local governments have been more likely to recognize Japan’s emergence as a destination for immigration than the national government, going so far as to craft policies of "local internationalization" targeted to the needs of migrants. The hundreds of locally based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) founded to assist foreign migrants share local government’s perspective that the central government is failing to develop policies which sufficiently address how to incorporate migrants into Japanese society. Despite the possibility of making common cause on this issue, the NGOs and local governments have yet to engage in much meaningful cooperation.
The paper focuses on how NGOs determine their options for involvement in immigration-related policies given institutionalized patterns of local-national political interaction. Attention is also given to NGOs’ interpretations of the relationship between internationalization and immigration issues. I argue that these two factors explain how local NGOs divide their limited resources between privatized efforts to assist migrants, advocacy of migrants’ needs before potentially sympathetic local governments, and legal or political challenges to national policy.
Theodore Gilman, Union College
Local economic redevelopment is a policy area where traditional characterizations of Japanese intergovernmental relations still apply. Revitalization efforts tend to be top-down, elite-led, and dominated by career civil servants. Governmental institutional structures and linkages reinforce these behavior patterns. Though citizen participation is rhetorically solicited by local elites, contributions by non-elites are peripheral at best. Overall, Japan’s unitary system of government promotes a high degree of centralized, specialist-led policy making for urban revitalization. Evidence from a case study of a struggling medium-sized city in Kyushu supports these statements, and national aggregate data further buttress these assertions.
Two institutional features make local economic redevelopment a top-down policy arena. First, fiscal constraints keep localities heavily dependent on central policy directions and initiatives. Second, local policy-making norms in other areas are used in urban revitalization. Local officials attempt to make policy in this area the way they do in other policy areas: they borrow ideas from national policy menus and copy ideas from successful localities elsewhere. These actions require knowledge of the policy process and expertise in extracting benefits from higher levels of government. Career bureaucrats are best suited to these activities, so they tend to dominate the process.
Though this policy area is dominated by the "experts," city residents play a visible though substantively marginal role in the process. Citizens participate in two ways. First, citizens sit on advisory committees that recommend areas for redevelopment. These committees are highly publicized and produce reports with catchy titles and colorful illustrations. However, their reports usually contain obvious suggestions that have little effect on governmental behavior. Second, when citizen groups do get involved in urban revitalization, their actions center on grassroots projects that boost community morale but do not change local socioeconomic conditions.