More than six years ago, when we were organising The Peoples’ Declaration (Deklarasi Rakyat), I wrote and published an article entitled “Political, Economic Reforms – the Japanese Lesson” in my Blog, The Scribe.

In the October 19, 2016 article, I noted that Japan’s political and economic experience is a useful lesson for Malaysia. The parallel between its ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Umno is uncanny.

What the LDP had then been forging with its rivals for decades in order to stay in power is now being attempted by Umno.

Reforming politics, as the Japanese experience had shown, wasn’t ’t easy. The Japanese started theirs in the 1990’s and only now it is beginning to show results. Reforming the economy is even harder.

The 2016 Peoples’ Declaration and the political consensus that came out of it led to the toppling of Umno and its Barisan Nasional allies in the 2018 General Elections.

Reform was one of the key elements of the declaration. Part 37 of the Peoples’ Declaration states:

“We call upon all Malaysians, irrespective of race, religion, political affiliation, creed or parties, young and old to join us in saving Malaysia from the Government headed by Dato’ Sri Najib Tun Razak, to pave the way for much needed democratic and institutional reforms, and to restore the important principle of the separation of powers among the executive, legislature and judiciary which will ensure the independence, credibility, professionalism and integrity of our national institutions.”

In Japan’s case, the reform greatly affected the fortunes of political parties, especially the ruling LDP. It weakened the party in the initial stages but provided it with a glimmer of hope for long-term stability.

There was an uncanny similarity between LDP and Umno. The former came into being in 1955 through a series of mergers of post-WW2 political parties and it immediately gained power. Umno too was formed after the War – in 1946 – and in 1955 monopolised the results of the Malayan Legislative Council election.

The LDP stayed in power until it lost control of the lower house of the Diet (Parliament) in 1993 amidst internal squabbles over reforms. The Diet comprises the lower and upper houses, both on which are elected by the people.

In 1991, I visited LDP’s headquarters in Tokyo to talk to Tsutomu Hata who was tasked with reforming the party and wrote a report for my then newspaper New Straits Times.

In early October 2016, I visited Japan as a social media journalist at the invitation of Gaimu-sho, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and had the opportunity to revisit the Japanese economic and political scenes, among other things.

The LDP reform and restructuring were to be carried out in the context of the overall political and electoral reforms of the country. Sadly for Hata, he immediately became unpopular with the party’s warlords and their supporters.

Then, the LDP – very much like Umno – was about personal power, legacy and patronage. Many LDP’s MPs were third generation aristocrats and they used their position to make money by dispensing patronage. They were individually powerful but the party was weak and rudderless. Cash was king.
It was widely acknowledged that many LDP warlords were affiliated or linked to the Japanese underworld, the Yakuza, and Prime Ministers did not last more than three years on average due to infighting.

Umno exhibited the same trend in the run–up to its 2018 electoral defeat, characterised by warlordism, patronage, money politics and outright corruption. I had warned about Umno alienating itself from the Malay masses as early as 1999, when commenting on the election of Hishammuddin Hussein as the Umno Youth Chief.

Japan’s 1994 political reform made election more universal, the party structure more dominant and the cost for aspiring politicians to join the fray lower. But it cost the taxpayers more.

We are experiencing almost the same situation with the lowering of the voting age to 18, the automatic voter registration and conducting federal and state elections separately.

Umno resisted reforms and lost the 2018 general election. It was nearly decimated in the recent parliamentary election and still refusing to reform. Instead, to save its President and Deputy President, the reformists were sacked and suspended at will.

The year before the LDP lost the lower house election, there was considerable opposition to reform by the warlords and interest groups affiliated to them like the construction business, farmers and municipal workers.
Several reform-minded LDP leaders like Hata, Morihiro Hosokawa and Ichirō Ozawa left to form the Japan Renewal Party. They joined minor parties to form a coalition government at the end of 1993 with Hosokawa as Prime Minister.

The LDP lost the 1993 lower house election due largely to internal squabbles and the economic hardship brought about by the ending of the so-called miracle economy as well as an insider trading and corruption scandals that forced many prominent politicians to resign a few years earlier.

Unprepared to govern, the opposition soon found itself in crisis. On 28 April 1994, Hosokawa resigned and Hata became prime minister. However, when a coalition partner, Japan Socialist Party defected, Hata lost the majority in the Diet. Rather than facing a vote of no confidence, he resigned in June, after ruling for mere nine weeks, allowing the LDP-led coalition to claw back to power.

The LDP remained in power until 2009 through a series of wobbly coalitions and amidst continuing internal squabbles. In the meantime the economic situation worsened and Japan suffered the longest deflation ever in the history of a developed economy.

In the 2009 election, the LDP was roundly defeated – easily the worst defeat of a sitting government in modern Japanese history, and also the first real transfer of political power in the post-war era.

But once again the fractured oppositions fumbled and the weak LDP successfully made a comeback in the December 2012 general election. It won a landslide victory.

According to a New York Times report of Dec 16, 2014, the voters gave power back to the conservative party in a chaotic election crowded with new parties making sweeping promises, from abolishing nuclear power after the Fukushima accident to creating an American-style federal system. The LDP and its coalition partners prevailed with their less radical vision of reviving the recession-bound economy and standing up to China.

The popular nationalist Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, had been promising the Japanese people that he would extricate the economy from the two-decade deflation and put it back on the growth path. He went on to become the longest serving Prime Minister. He was assassinated on 8 July 2022 while in retirement.

Given the weak economy, the recovery options were limited. Abe opted to tweak the monetary policy. The Bank of Japan (BoJ) was tasked with raising the inflation rate by two per cent annually, which it had so failed to achieve because the Japanese people were not spending because they had no confidence in the recovery plan. They would rather keep the money in the bank and not earning any interest.

The LDP has been in power almost continuously since its foundation in 1955—a period called the 1955 System—except between 1993 and 1994, and again from 2009 to 2012 in the 2012 election, it regained control of the government.

After the 2021 and 2022 elections, it holds 261 seats in the House of Representatives and 119 seats in the House of Councillors, in coalition with the Komeito party since 1999. It has governing majority in both houses.

Japan’s political and economic experience is a useful lesson for Malaysia as we seek to tackle political instability and the economy that is recovering from Covid-19 induced recession.

The parallel between  the LDP and Umno is uncanny. What LDP had been forging with its rivals for decades in order to cling on to power is now being applied by Umno in its awkward union with the Pakatan Harapan.

The hope of Umno staging an LDP-type of comeback doesn’t look promising, however. The weekend purge of key leaders by the Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s faction has further fractured and weakened the party.