Results and discussion

(1) Political self The pronoun is often a key indicator in revealing political identification (Cheng, Reference Cheng2006; Johansson, Reference Johansson2008). Table 2 shows Koizumi's frequent use of the first-person pronoun I, representing a distinct shift in style in order to construct a more personalized image. This sharply contrasts with the traditional norms of Japanese politicians: the preference for authoritative, ambiguous, subject-less syntax to avoid overtly presenting a political identity (Azuma, Reference Azuma, Landtsheer and Feldman2000; Feldman, Reference Feldman2004; Maynard, Reference Maynard1994). This is in line with Azuma (Reference Azuma, Landtsheer and Feldman2000)'s observation concerning the emergence of a more Western-like rhetoric among politicians since the 1990s, in order to demonstrate their sincerity and involvement. Interestingly, Koizumi rarely resorted to the collective identities that other politicians preferred. His solitary identity, however, echoed his reputation as a ‘political individualist’ and ‘his unashamed willingness to stand out from the crowd’ (George Mulgan, Reference George Mulgan2002: 48).

Table 2.

Frequency of the use of the first person pronoun

The collective identities of the leaders could be expressed ‘exclusively’ to refer to the government or ‘inclusively’ to refer to the Japanese people as a whole (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough2000). Although it is understandable that Koizumi avoided being grouped with his unpopular party, it appears odd that he did not speak on behalf of the nation. However, this individualism pinpoints a new neoliberal direction that Koizumi was proposing for Japan: an ideology to encompass more autonomous, responsible individuals. This sharply contrasts with the long-valued homogeneity and collectivism that the LDP fostered as mainstream values in Japanese society. Crucially, this individual identity matched the new social values of emerging independent voters in the urban areas, who were the primary target of Koizumi's messages.

Koizumi has also frequently compared himself to a heroic reformer who fought against prejudiced traditionalists. The most famous instance of this occurred during the press conference that was held to announce the snap election in 2005, at which he compared himself to Galileo Galilei. In example (1), Koizumi introduced the words of Mencius as his motto, which he had quoted several times in previous speeches. The repeated confession of an inner struggle indicated his desire to reinforce his identity as a fighting hero. By disclosing his emotions and suffering, he also exposed his human side in order to gain sympathy from the audience. Fairclough (Reference Fairclough2000) argues that a leader often experiences tension due to being the public authority as well as a private individual. Linguistically, Tony Blair used code-switching strategies, i.e., switching between formal and informal language, in order to move between these two identities. Whereas Azuma (Reference Azuma2007) observes a similar code-switching in Koizumi's speech, his self-categorization as a fighting hero can also be seen as the manifestation of such private/public tension. Koizumi continued this speech with an anecdote about Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi (1929–31), another fighting reformer, who strove to rescue Japan from economic disaster and military expansionism. Since one of the leader's missions is to present a role model to which the public aspires, he indirectly encouraged the public to behave as courageous reformers in their own context and overcome their difficulties.

At the same time, since these anecdotes involved a clear moral positioning about who is good and who is bad, the populist stance encouraged the audience to see the world as a simple good-vs.-evil dichotomy (Otake, Reference Otake2003). This ‘populist’ framingFootnote ⁷ became more apparent when he labelled the intraparty rebels as resistance forces (teikou seiryoku) prior to the 2005 election. When he said, ‘I want to ask whether the citizens approve or disapprove of postal privatization’, this was by no means an invitation to make a fair assessment of the proposed policy, but a call for the public's moral judgment.

Overall, Koizumi's political standing was distinct from that of the traditional LDP politicians’ elitist or paternalistic attitude towards their loyal, organized supporters in rural areas. As long as the legislators insured ‘pork’ pipelines from the central government, there was little incentive for them to deliver any discourse to the general public outside their local network. Koizumi, being an urban politician and therefore unaccustomed to such pork-barrel strategies, was bound to establish a new type of relationship with voters, by means of using his rhetorical power as a tool to persuade them to support his policies. This stronger support meant more power, which he needed in order to advance his reform agenda in the government. Within such a context, the citizens are empowered as consumers who have the right to voice their wants and needs. This market-based environment also has a looping effect: the more citizens are treated as consumers, the more they come to identify themselves with the behaviour of consumption. Koizumi exemplified a consumer-oriented approach, which struck a chord with unorganized voters in urban areas, thereby maximizing his chance of winning the election.

(2) Citizens Let us now consider how Koizumi represented the nation or citizens (kokumin) Footnote ⁸ (see Table 3). First, unsurprisingly, he frequently made pleas to the public to trust and understand his policies, as well as called for a discussion about policy issues, which was regarded as a cliché by many political observers. However, his repeated use of the phrase the nation's burden, as in example (2), appears odd. Koizumi emphasized the importance of minimizing the nation's burden and bills for the future as a major aim of the privatization of the public highway corporation. By focusing on the tax issue, Koizumi reinforced the tax-payers’/consumers’ business-like, cost–benefit, analytical mentality that they have to pay for the public services they receive. The reduction of the nation's burden became a regular pretext to persuade the public to approve of a wide range of neoliberal issues, such as reductions in social welfare and pensions, in the process of moving to smaller government. Since unorganized voters often identify themselves as tax-payers and consumers, this would also match Koizumi's electoral strategy. What he excluded from the discourse was the fact that a small burden also equals a fall in the services that citizens receive. This would affect rural areas, aged people, and small businesses particularly badly – the very individuals and entities that used to be the greatest beneficiaries as well as supporters of the LDP's large government under patron–client politics.

Table 3.

Words that collocate with the term ‘the nation’

Note: ‘Total # of tokens’ indicates how many times a lexical item appears together with the target item (the nation). ‘Score’ incorporates an element of distance as well as frequency: how closely a word collocates with the target item.

Koizumi also repeatedly depicted a bright future that could be realized by an autonomous individual's efforts, as in Example (3). Although his optimistic words of encouragement have been taken positively (Takase, Reference Takase2005: 5), this celebration of individual empowerment is a common technique used by neoliberalists. Their interests usually lie in transferring public or corporate risk to individuals (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough2000), as we can confirm from his use of the expression: based on the spirit to help and discipline themselves. The veiled message here is that the citizens should make their own efforts to pursue individual success and happiness, suggesting that the time has come to end the old era when the citizens were protected by the state under the collective aim of catching up with the West. Since the secure but rigid lifetime employment system did not offer a second chance once an individual failed, the phrase they can challenge over again focused on the positive aspect of a more flexible labour market. Obviously, it would be over-optimistic to presume that all individuals can continue taking on challenges until they succeed. However, this type of emancipating discourse often sounds appealing to urban, highly educated white-collar workers. They had for a long time been restricted and frustrated by the LDP's distributive policies, through which taxes from their hard-earned salaries were transferred to less productive but politically strong groups in rural constituencies.

While admitting that our qualitative analysis is limited in terms of its generalizability, the data support both of our hypotheses. Koizumi appealed to unorganized voters by focusing on the benefits of tax-payers and consumers – long-standing victims under producer-oriented politics. Koizumi also promoted his laissez-faire ideology though adopting enterprise discourse. According to Abercrombie and Keat (Reference Abercrombie and Keat1990), the free-market discourse encourages individuals to acquire and demonstrate ‘enterprising’ qualities, such as personal responsibility, independence, and self-discipline. Individuals are promoted to internalize and nominalize these qualities, fostering moral values to break away from the protection of the large state. Koizumi's discourse is rich with these examples of valuing autonomous and enterprising individuals, directing the public's perception to embrace the order of political entrepreneurialism. In other words, Koizumi's discursive reform was not only a reflection of institutional and social change, but also constituted and constructed a new vision of collective reality, redefining the state–citizen relationship from the patron–client model as something that we may call ‘the business–consumer model’.

Results and discussion

(1) Political self One striking difference in the use of the first person pronouns lies in the incumbent Aso's preference for the plural form, we, as opposed to the singular form, I (88.1%, see Table 4), compared with Hatoyama (59.2%). In example (4), Aso emphasized the exclusive use of we, clarifying the position that he is talking for the party in order to represent the government. Not only did he use we to categorize the party and himself as an in-group, but also assumed that Hatoyama was a representative of the opposition party and of Hatoyama himself. Hatoyama, on the other hand, adopted a different strategy, defining the in-group by articulating the idea that he represented the nation, despite being no more than the leader of the main opposition party, as in (5). Although Hatoyama, too, made substantial use of the inclusive we to refer both to the party and himself, he scattered rhetorical messages throughout the debates that suggested he was speaking on behalf of the nation.

Example (6) further illustrates how Hatoyama challenged the incumbent by creating a binary image through the use of rhetoric, focusing particularly on contrast: the future of Japan should be centred upon the nation, or the tax-payers, as opposed to the current situation, in which the Aso administration was led by bureaucrats, or tax-eaters. By defining the LDP and bureaucrats as common enemies or outsiders, Hatoyama was attempting to strengthen the sense of unity inside the group.

As evidenced in example (7), Aso attacked Hatoyama's policies using the rhetoric of serial listing, naming three cases of being without, and using you to address the nation. In his speech, however, the nation never plays the role of an active political actor. The nation represents passive observers who are shown responsible policies by the government. Within such a framework, a sense of involvement cannot easily be developed.

Aso constructed his political identity as a paternalistic, responsible, and experienced figure. He took his mission to protect people and Japan, as in (8) and (9). He reminded the nation of its arduous recovery from World War II, to which the LDP had contributed tremendously. Aso's rhetoric here categorized the nation and himself into one group, and defined the relationship between the party/himself and the nation as in the traditional patron–client model. Aso's message, that the LDP, as a responsible protector, has been taking care of the citizens, and promises to continue to do so, is reminiscent of clientelism and patronage, the distinguishing features of the long-established LDP's governance. Although this rhetoric may have appealed to the LDP's traditional supporters, it was unlikely to be welcomed by cynical unorganized voters.

Hatoyama, on the other hand, attempted to create a new, pragmatic, and market-oriented self on an equal footing, as in (10), (11), and (12). The messages contained lexical items related to business, such as contract and service. The imagery that Hatoyama was creating suggested that, if you vote for us, we will listen to you and devote ourselves to providing you with good service, the content of which is guaranteed by a written public contract, i.e., the party's manifesto. In his world, the representation of the nation is that of active political consumers who have the right to tell the government what they want. Considering that it was mainly the unorganized mass in the urban areas that each leader had to persuade during the public discourse, Hatoyama's business–consumer approach perhaps matched better their social lifestyle and expectations than Aso's patron–client version.

(2) Citizens Next, we examined how the two leaders used the term ‘the nation’. Hatoyama's relative frequency of referring to ‘the nation’ out of the total number of words was 0.640%, which was much greater than Aso's 0.199%. As Table 6 shows, in Aso's case, the term was often used in relation to anxiety and safety (protect, responsibility, guarantee, security). This over-wordingFootnote ⁹ suggests that Aso was intensely preoccupied with the task of ‘protecting’ an anxious nation's life. When Hatoyama addressed the nation, on the other hand, he used honorific terms (e.g., kokumin no minasama), emphasizing that he showed respect to everyone. Hatoyama's frequent use of honorific expressions toward the nation was a novel feature of public discourse (Inada, Reference Inada2009), in line with a salesperson's talk, based on more equal and respectful power relations between a politician and the public. This empowerment was further emphasized through the association of the nation with terms such as initiative, voice, and sovereignty.

Table 5.

Frequency of the use of the first person pronoun in the leaders’ debates

Table 6.

Words that collocate with the term ‘the nation’

The LDP was also aware of the need to care for the growing number of consumer-conscious individuals. Aso, for instance, took over a bill to establish a Consumer Affairs Agency (CAA) from the former Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda. The number of consumer consultations increased from 415,000 in 1998 to 929,000 in ten years (Asahi, 18 May 2010), and there was an urgent need to promote consumer protection. The LDP proposed that the CAA should function as the hub to assign a corresponding Ministry to investigate and take action against accident cases in their own sector. This was considered problematic by the victims and the opposition, since the bureaucracy had long promoted the development of industry, and therefore may have a conflict of interest when it came to consumers. What was really required was an outside supervisory mechanism.

As shown in example (13), Aso abandoned Koizumi's entrepreneurial spirit in order to return to the familiar bureaucratic method of management, with consumers as the new clients. Ironically, since his government simply reversed the way of thinking, rather than being innovative, the core of the system remained the same bureaucratic way of handling consumers, prioritizing the preservation of bureaucratic power over consumer protection. Eventually, after lengthy negotiations with the opposition, the bill for the CAA was passed in May 2009. The bill included the establishment of the CAA, coupled with that of a private monitoring agency for the CAA, the Consumer Commission, both under the direct supervision of the Prime Minister's Office.

When a certain group of people are repeatedly represented, it indicates the speaker's intention to demonstrate special concerns about them or issues related to them. In Hatoyama's case, he repeatedly drew vivid descriptions of particular groups, some of which were anecdotal. All of the stories highlighted the younger generation, as in examples (14) and (15), or their parents. Apart from these two examples, he included the story of a pregnant woman who died after being refused by 19 hospitals, as well as that of young people in their twenties and thirties whose cause of death was suicide. The school in (14) is an odd case to represent his ideal community, supported by the spirit of interdependence, which contrasts sharply with Koizumi's imagery of the competitive marketplace. All other cases involved the victimization of people socially excluded by the LDP's policies, such as the abolition of lone-parent benefit or the continuous reduction of the number of doctors in service. The portrayal of these figures must have been effective because a victimhood message can use morality as a base from which to attack an opponent. This was also a way to connect psychologically to the younger generation, the parental generation, females, and the weaker parts of society, as well as to those who sympathize with the social value of helping others. Here, we can observe the DPJ's attempt to appeal to those who were long excluded from the LDP's policies:

In sum, in response to mounting criticism against Koizumi's entrepreneurial discourse, Aso adopted the reverse course to the bureaucratic patron–client model, involving massive spending to stimulate the economy. Aso reminded the public of the collective and harmonious values that Japan had once fostered under the patronage of the LDP and bureaucracy. This discourse was appealing to loyal organized voters, but failed to strike a chord with unorganized voters, who had cultivated more independent and egalitarian social values, as well as global perspectives over the previous few decades. This finding is in line with Tanaka (Reference Tanaka, Tanaka, Kohno, Hino and Iida2009)'s argument that Koizumi understood the pressing need to appeal to unorganized voters, but the LDP leaders who followed (Abe in the first term, Fukuda and Aso) were hardly aware of the changing structures of the Japanese electorate. They therefore did not fully grasp why Koizumi enjoyed such high long-term popularity. Hatoyama, on the other hand, lacked organized backing, and therefore carefully concocted the discourse to appeal to not only to consumers and tax-payers but also to all those who had been left out during the LDP's long reign. By talking about care, love, and attention to young people, mothers, and the weak, he represented himself as someone who could bring social morality and justice to the dog-eat-dog, free-market world.

Despite the initial excitement and anticipation surrounding the DPJ government, however, Hatoyama's reign lasted a mere eight months. His failure was caused by several factors: a financial scandal, the influence of the previous leader, Ichiro Ozawa, and a broken promise to remove part of the US military base from the small southern island of Okinawa. In the eyes of the voters, who anticipated a clear break from the LDP's patron–client politics, the financial scandal quickly suggested that Hatoyama might be another money-eager politician. Ozawa's aggressive actions in recruiting the LDP's former support groups under the patron–client model contradicted Hatoyama's consumer-oriented and social welfare discourse. The public felt cheated that Hatoyama, their elected agent, was simply a favourable ‘face’ for the election, whereas the actual body still belonged to the previous leader, whom they had once rejected. Eventually, Hatoyama's reckless promise to transfer a part of the US army base from one of the most deprived regions in Japan proved impossible to keep, which pointed to a lack of competence in his role as prime minister. Since language now forms a major link between the state and the public, a discourse of betrayal immediately leads to a loss of trust, invalidating the leadership qualities of the one responsible for the betrayal.