Contemporary Japanese Politics and Anxiety Over Governance

The Japanese public’s assessments of its government’s performance have been anemic for years, but Ikeda finds that the COVID-19 crisis crystallized an even more pessimistic attitude: the fear that the government is not capable of solving potential future problems, such as job insecurity, terrorism, and war. Analyzing numerous cross-national surveys, he shows that the public’s anxiety is more intense in Japan than in other countries when measured against actual COVID-19 infection rates, unemployment rates, levels of political violence, and similar objective criteria. The disproportionate anxiety over governance seems to derive partly from a weakening of the social networks traditionally used to mobilize voters and partly from the inability of the Democratic Party of Japan, during its brief stint in power from 2009 to 2012, to deal effectively with the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, followed by what voters perceived as a flat-footed response to COVID-19 by the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Japanese voters remain committed to democracy in principle. Yet 83 percent of respondents in a recent survey agreed with the statement, “I’d rather spend my time enriching my own life rather than pursuing political goals.”