Episode 406 - The Contenders, Part 1

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we're beginning a four-part retrospective on the rise and fall of Japan's most successful postwar opposition party: The Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ. This week: how did two veterans of the tumultuous politics of the early 1990s come together to found this scrappy little party, and what forces led to the DPJ becoming the largest of Japan's opposition parties?

Show notes here.

Transcript

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1:09.5	Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 406, The Contenders, Part 1.
1:17.3	On September 29, 1996, a political phoenix emerged from the ashes of one of the most unusual
1:24.4	eras in Japan's political history.
1:33.0	Just three years earlier, the country had been racked by a massive political earthquake.
1:39.1	A combination of scandal, economic malaise after the real estate bubble burst,
1:44.0	and general disillusionment with the governing structures that had once been credited with making Japan into one of the world's most successful economies, saw the political landscape flipped on its head.
1:51.1	The Liberal Democratic Party, which had ruled Japan without any serious challenge since 1955, and whose predecessors had functionally dominated the government since 1947, had lost the
2:03.5	1993 general election and lost control of the national diet.
2:10.3	But even that defeat was a bare thing.
	...

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