August 30, 2009 was a momentous day in the history of modern Japan. On

RELATED ARTICLES Japan’s living national treasures Texas Instruments closing Houston, Japan plants to cut costs

that day, the Japanese voted for a new House of Representatives, the lower chamber of their Parliament. Opinion polls lo­ng before election day had indicated that the incumbent government of prime minister Taro Aso was in for big trouble. In the end, the opposition won a landslide victory of a proportion unseen since Wor­ld War II. The main oppositi­on force, the Democratic Party, alone got 308 of the 480 seats in the Lower House. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had governed Japan for most of the past 55 years, came a poor second and saw its representation reduced from 303 seats to a mere 119.

The economic crisis that has hit Japan hard was, of course, a major reason for the massive defeat of the LDP. One day before the election, the Japanese media reported that the unemployment rate had reached 5.7 per cent, the hi­ghest since the end of World War II. Both, the ministry of the economy and the Bank of Japan, the national bank, had earlier reported that the economy had bottomed out and that in some significant areas, such as industrial production and exports, the situation had improved. Like in other indu­strialised nations, the end of the recession will take some time to have a significant effect on the labour market.

However, the economic pl­ight of Japan is not the sole reason for the heavy electoral defeat of the LDP. In the previous elections to the Lower House, in September 2005, the LDP, under the leadership of then prime minister Juni­chiro Koi­zumi, had scored a massive vi­ctory. People expected great th­ings from Koizumi who, in the previous ye­ars, had projected himself as a reformer.

Over 80 new members of Parliament whom Koizumi had launched against old-fa­shioned party stalwarts, got elected. These so-called “Koi­zumi children”, however, lost their mentor, when only a ye­ar later, in September 2006, Koizumi resigned as party le­ader and prime minister. Fr­om then on, the LDP-led government went downhill. Wi­thin three years, Japan had no less than three prime ministers, each of them were equally unpopular.

The verdict on August 30, which almost certainly puts the LDP on the opposition be­nches for the next four years, may turn out not only to be a temporary setback for the pa­rty but a strong rejection of the existing political system, which had provided Japan wi­th unique political stability but had also stifled profound and necessary reforms.

The LDP is a product of a marriage of convenience in 1955 between two conservati­ve parties, the Democratic Pa­rty and the Liberal Party. From the start, it was a very pragmatic force with few programmatic commitments. The LDP stood for an alliance with the US for making Japan a leading nation once again and for the economic welfare of the people.

This pragmatism was, ho­wever, only a part of the LDP’s success story. The party also had a unique structure, whi­ch proved to be very successful at securing electoral victories. Unlike other parties, the LDP tolerated, even encouraged, the existence of internal factions. Each faction has its leader, its secretariat, its fin­ances and, of course, its me­mbership. The battle for political influence between the di­fferent factions is fierce. In fa­ct, they replaced the battle between the opposition and the ruling party. Whenever LDP barons saw their hold on power endangered, they wou­ld change the party leader and give another faction a go at governing the party. This is the reason why Japan had no less than 25 prime ministers during the pa­st 55 years.

In any other country, such frequent changes at the top of the government would have led to political turmoil. Not in Japan. The reason for this is the intensive relations and co­nnections that existed betwe­en the LDP, bureaucracy and major companies. In fact, it is this conglomerate of power that, in the recent election campaign, the victorious De­mocratic Party promised to dismantle.

Only time will tell if this ambitious goal will be within reach of the new government that is going to be led by the Democratic Party leader Yu­kio Hatoyama. One of the major handicaps the new government faces is due to the de­cade-long stranglehold the LDP has had on the Japanese government, which leaves it with very few members with extensive executive experien­ce. This, of course, makes the new ministers more dependent on the bureaucracy.

Furthermore, if the new go­vernment is really keen on implementing the policy reforms they have promised, it needs the experience and, in particular, the loyalty of the bureaucracy even more. All this implies that even this historic change will not rattle Japan, a country that is used to earthquakes.

The writer is the Far East correspondent of Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung