TOKYO — Pedigree matters in a country where politics is often a family business.
Take a look at the top echelon of Japanese politics: Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is the son of a prime minister. His predecessor was the grandson of a prime minister. So was the man he defeated to win his party's leadership last fall. And when he looks across the aisle in parliament, he sees yet another second-generation politician leading the opposition.
They are just the tip of Japan's hereditary iceberg. America has its Bushes and its Kennedys, but it does not come close to matching the pervasiveness of family ties in Japanese politics, where local party machines are handed down like heirlooms from father to son -- and very occasionally to a daughter.
"Dynastic politics provides candidates with the three things they need to get elected: access to a local machine, access to money and a well-known brand name," said Kazuhiro Furuyama, director of the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management.
The result is a parliament in which more than 30% of elected members from all parties are second-, third-, fourth- or even fifth-generation politicians. The fourth generation of the Hatoyama family boasts two brothers who hold senior positions in rival parties: Kunio, the current justice minister, and his older brother Yukio, a leading spokesman for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.
The percentage of the seshuu giin (hereditary members of the Diet, or parliament) is even higher within Fukuda's long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has always recruited heavily from the political dynasties. Nearly 40% of the LDP's 308 members of the lower house are the sons, daughters or in-laws of politicians.
The seshuu giin have been contesting and winning elections in significant numbers since the 1960s, but critics argue that their power has increased in recent years. In a 2005 article titled "From Technocracy to Aristocracy: The Changing Career Paths of Japanese Politicians," American academic Christopher Titus North argued that the seshuu giin have acquired more clout than the bureaucrats who have long been seen as the guiding hand in Japanese politics.
Second-generation politicians have usually defended their inheritance as a way to sustain a bond between lawmakers and constituents. But the public appears to be growing impatient with a political class that behaves more like a private club than a profession. Japan's current political drift has led to a chorus of complaints that politicians seem more intent on jockeying for power than on fixing the country's sluggish economy and festering social problems.
