Matthew M Carlson and Steven R Reed, Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan

PM Abe Shinzo’s final year as PM was accompanied by opposition party criticism for his alleged use of taxpayers’ money to reward his supporters at cherry blossom viewing parties. At around the same time two of his cabinet colleagues were forced to resign amid allegations of having breached election campaign regulations. In the case which involved the husband and wife politicians Katsuyuki and Anri Kawaii, this led to the prosecution of Katsuyuki on vote buying charges, a verdict of guilty and a fine of ¥1.3M. Later, three years in prison was handed down in June 2021. The reporting of these scandals in the media gives the impression that little has changed since the 1970s when reports of the corrupt practices engaged in and inspired by Tanaka Kakuei made it appear to be an integral if unacceptable dimension of political activity in Japan. Carlson and Reed show this conclusion to be unfounded. Their analysis of the combined impact of a series of measures both great and small mainly dating from the 1990s draws them to the ‘optimistic conclusions’ that political reforms have been effective in reducing the incidence of political corruption even if the transparency that has allowed this to happen has had the paradoxical and unintended consequence of making the voting public more aware of that which continues to exist. They present an excellent political science case study that steers clear of statistical data derived from an operational definition of corruption in favour of a conceptual definition of the problem. Rather than marshal statistics of the percentage of citizens who paid bribes or police statistics on election law violations, their research began by looking for ‘anything that seemed to pervert the democratic process’ (p 160). Had they adopted the former approach they admit they would have missed much of the story. Moreover, they would not have been able to reach their two central findings: