John Nilsson-Wright
For Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), securing and sustaining political power has been the dominant factor in uniting a diverse coalition of interests over 70 years of remarkable success since the party’s founding at the height of the Cold War in 1955.
A little like Britain’s Conservative Party, the LDP has embraced often competing policy options, tailoring them to reflect changing political and economic realities. At different times in its history, the party has included advocates of an activist state, reliant on redistributive welfare and interventionist industrial policies to promote economic prosperity (for example, Prime Ministers Hayato Ikeda in the first half of the 1960s and Kakuei Tanaka in the 1970s); at other times, especially since the early 2000s, it has been led by proponents of a smaller, deregulatory state, stressing economic liberalism and the encouragement of entrepreneurship and innovation (for example, prime ministers Jun’ichirō Koizumi and, most recently, Fumio Kishida).
On security and foreign policy, LDP leaders have all recognised the indispensability of the country’s alliance with the United States, but some have periodically sought to moderate this partnership by reaching out to other states (China and Russia, for example, in the mid-1950s when Ichirō Hatoyama was briefly prime minister), or by stressing the need to promote the country’s ties with the United Nations and with the non-aligned movement or with regional actors in Southeast Asia (Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda in the 1970s).
Conservative nationalism has also been a core feature of the agenda of the country’s leaders, with some expressing this primarily in economic terms (Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida in the 1940s and 1950s), and others focusing on gradual but deliberate rearmament and proactive security policies (Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi in the late 1950s, Yasuhiro Nakasone in the 1980s, and most strikingly of all Shinzō Abe – Kishi’s grandson – between 2012 and 2020).
These diverse approaches represent differences of emphasis, rather than zero-sum choices. They reflect the inherent pragmatism of a political party that has been remarkably adaptive and pluralistic in responding with Darwinian agility to changing political environments both at home and abroad.
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