Text | Zhou Yuan
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After the Meiji Restoration, Japan embarked on the path to prosperity and strength, but this political change was not completely Westernized. Although Japan implements a campaign system, the political elite family still maintains a strong influence, and family politics, ancestral politics, and hereditary politics have gradually become a fixed program on the Japanese political stage.
This phenomenon of "familialization" of political power stems from the inducements of cultural traditions, political systems, and economic interests, which violate the concept and spirit of democracy, block the way for selecting talents, degrade the political decision-making system, and induce political corruption. The large number, high proportion, great power, and wide influence of political families in Japan's political arena are unique among contemporary developed countries, reflecting the immaturity of Japan's political system.
Many political elite families have indirectly manipulated elections by forming spheres of influence in fixed areas that others cannot resist by long-term operations. When the family leader reigned, he often installed family forces, became the secretary and assistant of political allies, accumulated contacts, and created favorable conditions for the implementation of family monopoly.
The forms of Japanese family politics can be summarized into three categories, one is to enter the political arena with fathers and brothers or relatives, and to pass on political heritage in the form of a family; the second is the long-term relationship of trust formed in work, turning to political leaders to seek appreciation and promotion; the third is the relationship between protégés and teachers, helping each other to run or promote.
"Hereditary politics" has become the tacit "unspoken rule" of the Japanese people. In the more than one hundred years of the history of the Japanese Diet, various blood relations have abounded in the Japanese Parliament. More than half of the LDP, which occupies the most seats, are hereditary legislators who "inherit their father's business", some of whom have been hereditary for three or even five generations, and one-third of all members of the National Assembly. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is known as the "Hereditary Party" due to its large number of hereditary parliamentarians.
At present, there are five major political families in Japan: the Aso family, the Hatoyama family, the Abe family, the Koizumi family, and the Fukuda family. Not only that, but these families are also inextricably linked, and there are not a few people who have formed parties or turned against each other for political gain, so today we will talk about the enmity between the Aso family and the Hatoyama family for generations.
The Japanese often use the term "Inuyasha No Naka" to describe who looks at both sides and does not like the eyes, and the dead opponent does not wear the sky together. For some reason, dogs that rely on force to solve problems and monkeys that present themselves as agile brains are listed as natural enemies in Japanese culture. In Japanese politics, the real-life version of the "Inuyasha No Naka" is the Aso family and the Hatoyama family (click to review the secret history of the two major families ☜).
Both the Aso family and the Hatoyama family belong to families that have been running in Japanese politics for a hundred years, spanning both political and business circles, which can be described as having a strong foundation. On the family lineage, both families are political giants, political families, the door is not inferior, and even have two generations of grandchildren and grandchildren, in terms of strength, they are equal. The discord between the two families dates back to the 1940s.
Ichiro Hatoyama
In 1945, the Liberal Party, founded by Ichiro Hatoyama, became the largest party, and he himself became the president of the Liberal Party, and the position of prime minister, which should have been stable, had already begun to form a cabinet. But the Allied Supreme Command began a purge of Japanese militarists after World War II, and Ichiro Hatoyama was stripped of his political rights.
Shigeru Yoshida
Frustrated, Ichiro Hatoyama approached Shigeru Yoshida, the second-in-command of the Liberal Party at the time, and the two reached a "gentleman's agreement" in which Ichiro Hatoyama supported Shigeru Yoshida as prime minister, and shigeru Yoshida had to relinquish power after Hatoyama returned to public office. Shigeru Yoshida gladly agreed, and in 1946 he became prime minister of Japan.
In 1951, the United States lifted restrictions on Hatoyama's holding of public office, but Shigeru Yoshida, who was already in a stable position, refused to perform the contract, and the two turned against each other. In 1954, Ichiro Hatoyama led Kishi Nobusuke and a number of other cronies to break away from the Liberal Party, founded the Democratic Party of Japan, and regained a majority of votes in the general election. A year later, Hatoyama finally regained his position as prime minister from Shigeru Yoshida.
In November 1955, Ichiro Hatoyama merged the Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Party and established the Liberal Democratic Party, with himself as its president, ending the 10-year post-war era of multi-party politics and giving the LDP a twice the advantage of other political forces such as the Socialist Party in parliament, which remained unchanged until 1993.
After the merger of the LDP, Hatoyama Ichiro's personal feud with Shigeru Yoshida was not resolved. On the contrary, in the process of cultivating their own confidants, more people were involved, such as Kishi Nobusuke and Sato Eisaku, who belonged to two different camps of Hatoyama and Yoshida, and their grandson Shinzo Abe became the longest-ruling prime minister in Japanese history...
Of course, the complexity of Japanese politics is far more than that, but it was also the feud between Ichiro Hatoyama and Shigeru Yoshida that evolved into a political dispute between several families in Japanese politics in the following decades. The "fateful showdown" between these two major political giants has also continued from the ancestors to the grandchildren.
Taro Aso was the eldest grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, and he had high hopes from birth. And Aso Taro also admitted that his grandfather had the greatest influence on him. When he was a child, he would often sit on Shigeru Yoshida's lap, watching his grandfather smoke while listening to his grandfather talk about his life experience.
Although Aso Taro has a prominent family, he does not have the elegant style behind the famous door, and his speech is slippery and harsh, so he is rated as "big mouth" by many Japanese. He also once laughed at himself and said that "he was born very well, but his upbringing was very poor." During his time as a member of parliament, he repeatedly engaged in stalemate relations with people because of his old problem of not covering his mouth, and even was expelled from the branches of the Democratic Party.
After some ups and downs in the political arena, Aso Taro felt that his wings were gradually full, and he ran for the prime minister of Japan four times, but all three times he lost, which was really due to Aso's usual arrogance and offended too many people. In 2008, Yasushi Fukuda abruptly announced her resignation as Prime Minister. The crowd could not be left leaderless, and an emergency vote was held within the LDP. In the end, Taro Aso defeated the other four candidates with an absolute advantage of 351 votes out of 527 and was elected as the 23rd president of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan and the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan.
However, Aso's prime ministerial career was also bumpy, losing power less than a year after taking office, and ending the LDP's 50-year history of ruling. It was Ichiro Hatoyama's grandson, Yukio Hatoyama, who pulled him off the horse.
Yukio Hatoyama and his brother Kunio Hatoyama are the fourth generation of the Hatoyama family, the grandson of the late former Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama and the son of the late Foreign Minister Yoshiichiro Hatoyama. Yukio Hatoyama entered politics at the age of 39, and his mantra was "Politics is love", based on the idea of "fraternity" put forward by his grandfather Ichiro Hatoyama. In 1996, Yukio Hatoyama, together with Naoto Kan and Ichiro Ozawa, formed the Democratic Party of Japan and headed the party.
In May 2009, Yukio Hatoyama was elected as a representative of the Democratic Party; in July, the Liberal Democratic Party lost to the Democratic Party in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election, followed by the Democratic Party under the leadership of Yukio Hatoyama, together with three other opposition parties, submitted a case of no confidence in the Aso Cabinet and a case of accountability for the Prime Minister to the Senate and the House of Representatives.
In August 2009, a month after Yukio Hatoyama, the head of the Democratic Party, and Taro Aso, then Prime Minister of Japan, struggled to compete for voters, many media outlets referred to the battle between the hatoyama family and the Aso family, two major political giants, as a "fateful showdown."
On August 30, 2009, Yukio Hatoyama led the Democratic Party to a historic victory in the House of Representatives elections, ending the LDP's long-standing ruling position. On September 16, 2009, he was elected as the 93rd and 60th Prime Minister of Japan.
Yukio Hatoyama's challenge to Aso seems to be a continuation of the feud between Ichiro Hatoyama and Shigeru Yoshida more than half a century ago, and although Yukio Hatoyama eventually won, he was only about a year old as Prime Minister of Japan. In a sense, both Yukio Hatoyama and Taro Aso are merely a replica of the power struggle of their ancestors, and it is a tiny but vivid microcosm of Japan's entrenched hereditary politics.