In August of 1999 the Diet of Japan voted to amend the Diet Law1 to establish a new
standing Research Commission on the Constitution in each House, representing the first
serious consideration of constitutional amendment by members of the Diet in over
40 years. Stefan Wrbka has already examined the arduous process by which the Commissions
were established in an earlier issue of this publication, in his discussion of one
of the major themes studied by the Commissions: Upper House reform.2
To Wrbka’s analysis I would add that the establishment of the Commissions came
against the backdrop of nearly a decade of popular debate about the suitability of the
Constitution to contemporary Japan and the need for revision. In contrast with previous
decades, constitutional discussions since the early 1990s have focussed not only on thecontroversial Article 9 – the clause which ostensibly prohibits Japan from possessing or
exercising military force – but, as Wrbka’s article indicates, on a number of areas of the
Constitution more generally. In 1994 the Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper published its first
Yomiuri Draft for an entirely new constitution, mapped out by top constitutional
scholars. This was soon followed by a rash of private drafts by politicians, promoted as
a means of re-inventing Japan during its “lost decade”. In the latter half of the 1990s
public opinion polls for the first time showed more respondents in favour of constitutional
revision than against, and in recent years support has exceeded 50 and even 60 per
cent.3
While Western media have often latched onto these figures as a sign that the Japanese
public is becoming more pragmatic in its approach to Article 9, this in fact tells
only half the story. In fact, the majority of the population continues to oppose amendment
to Article 9.4 Rather, a number of other proposed amendments, dealing with
human rights or democratic reform, have received popular currency, and none more so
than the topic of this article: amendment to allow for the direct popular election of the
Prime Minister. Direct election of the Prime Minister has consistently topped opinion
polls as a favoured reason for constitutional amendment, has featured in many of the
private drafts of the 1990s, and was considered by the Research Commissions more
closely than any other non-Article 9 issue.
Direct election of the Prime Minister and other popular constitutional amendment
issues have largely gone unnoticed in the West, yet arguably merit closer analysis.
These issues have significantly contributed to discussions of constitutional revision
becoming socially acceptable, and for public opinion rising ever in favour of revision.
Given the public support for such issues it seems likely that the first amendment to be
made to the Constitution will in fact be in an area other than Article 9. For this reason,
however, some commentators suggest that the direct election issue is in fact just a
populist “ice-breaker” issue, cynically promoted by revisionists to minimise the stigma
of amending Article 9.5 This article will contend that direct election is a genuinely
substantial issue, closely linked with broader political developments of the past decade.
After examining briefly the constitutional ramifications of introducing a direct
election system in Part II, in Part III I will trace the background of the direct election
debate, showing that while suggestions for directly electing the Prime Minister appeared
as far back as 1946, true support did not emerge until the 1990s alongside popular
discontent with party politics, reaching its crescendo in 2000-2001 with the transitionfrom the unpopular Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori to the wildly popular Prime Minister
Jun’ichirô Koizumi. Koizumi was a long-standing advocate of direct election and in the
lead-up to the Liberal Democratic Party presidential election, and again in his maiden
policy speech, stressed his determination to put the issue firmly on the political agenda.
Direct election has also drawn support from a number of other politicians (most notably
former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone), the Japanese business community, and even
the religious group Sôka Gakkai. One group that has definitely not been behind the
direct election movement is constitutional and legal scholars, otherwise behind other
proposed amendments such as the creation of new environmental or privacy rights or the
establishment of a separate Constitutional Court.6 This suggests that the direct election
debate is very much an active political, rather than simply an academic, debate.
Indeed, in Part IV it will be argued that support for direct election must be understood
within the context of two key political developments of the past decade: widespread
institutional and legal reform (particularly targeting the bureaucracy and party
politics), and the trend towards the “presidentialisation” of the Prime Minister. Although
presidentialisation has been noted in a number of parliamentary countries, there has
been relatively little attention paid to this trend in Japan.7 Yet one needs only look at the
tremendous impact of Koizumi over the past five years, as well as the lead-up to the
appointment of now Prime Minister Shinzô Abe, to see the growing importance of
charismatic leadership and personality-based politics in Japan.
From general discussions on the utility of direct election two broad aims can be discerned.
The first is to increase the personal power or “leadership” of the Prime Minister
by providing him8 with a persuasive popular mandate. The second is to make Japan’s
political system more representative, and in doing so restore public faith and engagement
in politics. Parts V and VI of this article will consider the likely success of a
system of direct election in achieving these respective aims in light of deeper institutional
challenges in the Japanese political system, while Part VII will examine common
concerns about the risks of implementing a direct election system in Japan.