In 2013, for the first time since 2005, Japan began and ended the year with the same prime minister: Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Abe had taken office on Dec. 26, 2012, after his party won a landslide share of the seats in the House of Representatives (lower chamber of the Diet). In July 2013 he consolidated his position when the LDP won a solid majority in the House of Councillors (upper chamber), ensuring that he would not have to face the voters again until the summer of 2016. With full control of the legislature and sustained popular support, he began to implement a series of economic reforms.
Abe’s victory in the lower house benefited immensely from an electoral system that favoured large parties competing against a divided opposition. With public support for incumbent Yoshihiko Noda’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) dropping to levels not seen since its founding in the late 1990s and the other small parties squabbling rather than cooperating, Abe was able to turn a relatively small minority of votes (28% for the LDP on the proportional representation ballot) into a massive haul of 294 seats, or 61% of the total. With another 31 seats won by its coalition partner, New Komeito, Abe’s cabinet enjoyed the support of 325 seats against a divided opposition in which the largest rival won just 57 seats.
Abe was then able to expand his popular support during the spring by announcing a series of decisive moves, including appointing monetary expansionists to the Bank of Japan (BOJ) and bringing Japan into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade talks. By the time that he led his party into the upper house election in July, he was enjoying much higher popularity ratings. Meanwhile, rivals on both the left and the right suffered further setbacks. Support for the DPJ continued to decrease, to the point that it was able to win just 13.4% of the party vote in the July election. In addition, Mayor Toru Hashimoto of Osaka, a leading figure on the right, lost support after he stated that the use of “comfort women” (Korean and other Asian women forced into prostitution) during World War II had been a necessary evil.
The LDP won stable control of the upper house, even though only half of the chamber’s seats were being contested and the party’s members not up for election constituted less than a majority. The new LDP total was 115 of 242 seats, with New Komeito holding 20 more, giving the coalition a total of 135 seats. It was the first time that the LDP had working control of both legislative houses since 2007, when Abe—in his earlier, brief stint as prime minister—lost control of that chamber and resigned.
One lesson the prime minister had learned from his earlier term in office was the critical importance of keeping the focus on economic issues—as opposed to 2006–07, when he devoted much of his energy to changing Japan’s defense policy. This time Abe was relentless in his intention to reform the economy, styling his plan as a “three arrows” policy. The name was based on a story dating to samurai times, in which a feudal lord presented his three sons with three arrows. He then pointed out that, separately, each could be broken, but that together, in a bundle, the arrows were too strong to break.
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Abe revealed details of the launch of the first two arrows soon after taking office. Concrete manifestation of the first arrow, fiscal stimulus, was Abe’s announcement in January of some $115 billion in new public spending, of which more than $40 billion would be directed to disaster prevention and reconstruction. The LDP was no stranger to stimulus spending, since it had long won support in rural areas through pork-barrel projects such as dams and roads. The new spending marked a restoration of patterns that had prevailed before the DPJ government came into office in 2009 on a platform that had called for an end to wasteful spending.
The vigour with which Abe fired his second arrow was more surprising. He had signaled before his election that he was critical of the BOJ for its overly timid approach to deflation. The bank had set an annual inflation target of 1%, but it remained tentative in its asset purchases. Abe announced that he wanted the target raised to 2% and expected the BOJ to pursue the target with all available means. To make that happen, Abe announced in February that he was nominating Haruhiko Kuroda, an early advocate of inflation targeting, to replace Masaaki Shirakawa as the BOJ head. By also appointing two additional deputies with similar sympathies, Abe guaranteed that the central bank would pursue monetary stimulus with quick and unprecedented actions.
The cabinet was slower to make clear its plans for the third arrow: structural reform. In many ways it was the most important component of Abe’s program, because whereas monetary and fiscal stimuli were designed to prime the pump in the short term, structural reform was needed to stimulate the productivity improvements required for long-term economic growth. The Japanese public was forced to wait until June to learn what was on Abe’s structural-reform agenda. A series of committees that met during the spring floated some far-reaching reforms of labour-market and farmland regulations, but when the government released its official strategy document on June 5, those items were missing. For example, although the document did call for regulatory reforms that would allow online pharmaceutical sales to compete with pharmacies, the government gave in to pressure and placed restrictions on several popular drugs—causing Hiroshi Mikitani, head of the internet company Rakuten and a member of the prime minister’s reform commission to threaten to resign and sue the government if the restrictions remained. Analysts widely panned the third-arrow reforms and continued to raise questions about whether those programs could turn Japan’s economic performance around without further-reaching changes.
The other domestic issue that again preoccupied Japanese leaders in 2013 was the future of nuclear power. During the preceding year, Prime Minister Noda had taken the politically painful step of ordering the restart of two reactors at the Ohi complex to meet peak summer electricity demands in west-central Honshu. That region was the most reliant on nuclear power, but the entire country had been struggling to meet energy demand since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex and resulted in the shutdown of every reactor in Japan. Abe had indicated during the 2012 campaign that he believed some reliance on nuclear power was necessary to meet Japan’s energy needs, and many expected him to move to reopen more reactors during his first year in office. Instead, as further problems with the cleanup and containment effort at Fukushima were revealed, the two Ohi reactors were once more shut down for maintenance. Late in the year, Japan again had no operating reactors.
Instead of recommitting to nuclear power, the government continued to implement reforms of the electric power industry, which included incentives to invest in solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources. The rates set under the DPJ government for those feeding electricity into the power grid had propelled a rapid pace of growth in installed solar capacity, resulting in a projected doubling from the 2012 level of 7.4 gigawatts. Meanwhile, in November the Diet passed a law implementing the first stage of the reform of a power industry that had long been dominated by regional utility monopolies. With the creation of an independent entity that would be in charge of coordinating power supply and demand nationwide, the stage was set for the liberalization of the retail market and the separation of the utilities’ power-generation and transmission businesses by 2020.
The Japanese economy generally performed better in 2013 than in previous years, growing at an annual rate of 4.1% and 3.8% in the first two quarters, respectively, but dropping to 1.1% in the third. The earlier growth was propelled by a high rate of public investment as the government spent heavily on earthquake reconstruction in northeastern Honshu, with an added boost from Abe’s stimulus spending.
The performance of the economy in 2013 was also supported by a weakening of the value of the yen in response to the government’s support for aggressive monetary stimulus. The yen began to depreciate in anticipation of the monetary policy shift in late 2012 as Abe campaigned for office on a platform calling for a higher inflation target, reaching ¥87 to the U.S. dollar at the beginning of January. The depreciation continued in the wake of the announcement on April 4 by newly appointed BOJ chief Kuroda that extraordinary monetary easing was to continue until the economy produced a 2% rate of inflation. In response, the yen reached a rate slightly above ¥103 per dollar in mid-May, marking a roughly 30% depreciation against the dollar in just six months. The currency remained near or just below that level for the remainder of 2013.
The boost in the competitiveness of Japanese exports, provided by the currency shift and by the healthy rates of GDP growth announced in the first half of the year, helped propel the Tokyo Stock Price Index (TOPIX) to a peak of 1,276 on May 22, up by 75% since November 2012. Concern that Abe’s third arrow was not likely to provide the needed long-term stimulus to the economy perhaps partly caused the index to fall back sharply in late May and early June. The index began a slow recovery after the prime minister’s June 5 announcement of relatively limited reforms. By the end of the year, however, it had exceeded its May peak. The unemployment rate in Japan largely mirrored the movements of the stock market, falling steadily over the first half of 2013 until it reached a low of 3.8% in July before rising to 4% late in the year.
The main development in fiscal policy was Abe’s decision, announced in October, to go ahead with the first of two planned increases in the national consumption (sales) tax. Under legislation that had been passed by the previous DPJ government, the tax was slated to rise from 5% to 8% on April 1, 2014, but only if the government could certify that an “economic upturn” had taken hold by then. Although the economy was growing, many observers were concerned that the improvement was not strong enough to counteract the negative effects of the tax increase. Abe nevertheless chose to proceed on schedule with the tax hike, despite calls from some of his advisers to put it on hold. At the same time, however, he also announced that an extra fiscal stimulus budget of some $50 billion was planned to offset most of the adverse effects of the tax increase.
The consumption tax hike was motivated by continued concerns that the government was bringing in only enough revenue to cover about half of its annual expenditures. The fiscal year 2013 budget, passed in the beginning of the year, authorized expenditures of about $925 billion but projected revenues of just $470 billion. The consumption tax increase was expected to raise tax revenues by about $80 billion for the 2014 fiscal year. Abe’s plan to boost stimulus spending meant that Japan would not significantly close its budget gap in 2014. The plan, however, was to rely on the tax hike (and another increase to 10% scheduled for 2015) to begin reducing Japan’s dependence on bond-financing before its debt—already at 220% of GDP—triggered a rise in borrowing costs.
The most-forthright step that Abe took early in his term—indeed, Japan’s boldest foreign-policy move during 2013—was his decision in March to bring Japan into the ongoing TPP trade talks. The proposed agreement was designed to create a free-trade area encompassing 12 countries—including the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Mexico—that collectively constituted nearly 40% of the world’s GDP. The pact held the potential to expose inefficient sectors of the Japanese economy (notably agriculture) to external market forces and thereby drive productivity improvements. Even as he brought Japan into those talks, however, Abe revealed how hesitant he was to embrace structural reform.
Abe signaled his determination for Japan to join the TPP talks in February after he visited with U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. Those discussions laid the groundwork for Japan’s entry into the trade negotiations. Abe emphasized at a postsummit press conference that Obama had reassured him that the U.S. would not insist on a prior commitment from Japan to eliminate tariffs in all areas. For much of the rest of the year, Abe insisted that Japan would stand firm in opposing the elimination of tariffs on the country’s five “sacred” farm products: rice, wheat, beef and poultry, dairy products, and sugar.
When the TPP partners gathered in Malaysia in July for the 18th round of talks, just ahead of the House of Councillors election, the Japanese delegation’s continued insistence on a deal that protected all five sectors raised concerns that Japan’s entry into the talks would delay agreement beyond the year-end target of 2013. Just a few months after the election, however, Koya Nishikawa, the chairman of the LDP’s TPP committee, announced that not all of the 586 specific tariff lines in the five sacred categories could be protected, given the emerging consensus that the TPP partners needed to eliminate (over time) tariffs on 95% of all products. If Japan protected all items in the five categories and gave up protection in every other area, it would reach only 93.5%. Japan appeared to be positioning itself to give up just enough protection of farm sectors that if other countries could be persuaded to make concessions on some of their own sacred issues, a possible agreement might be reached by early 2014.
Japan’s relations with its neighbours, especially South Korea and China, continued to be strained during 2013. South Korea’s newly installed president, Park Geun-Hye, refused to meet with Abe over unresolved historical issues. There were objections after Abe’s December 26 visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine (where Japan’s war dead, including those convicted of war crimes, were enshrined)—the first such visit by a prime minister in office in seven years—and concerns that he might revise Japan’s earlier apology for the treatment of wartime “comfort women.” The Japanese Coast Guard and various vessels from China and Taiwan continued to play risky games of cat and mouse near the disputed Senkaku (Chinese: Diaoyu) Islands in the East China Sea. Although no Chinese or Japanese nationals were able to get close enough to land on the islands, the Chinese continued to test the limits of what maneuvers they could carry out near the archipelago, including a 28-hour continuous deployment in August and—over the strong objections of Japan—the imposition of an air defense identification zone in the region in November. Meanwhile, Japan sent a larger vessel there to bolster its territorial claim.
By far the highlight of the year in Japan’s foreign relations was the announcement in September that Tokyo had been selected to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. The city won the International Olympic Committee’s balloting with ease over rival contenders Madrid and Istanbul after Abe assured the international community that the cleanup at Fukushima was on track. The prime minister described his feeling of joy upon hearing the news as “greater than when I won my own election.”
|Area: ||377,950 sq km (145,927 sq mi)|
|Population ||(2013 est.): 127,260,000|
|Symbol of state: ||Emperor Akihito|
|Head of government: ||Prime Minister Shinzo Abe|