This edited volume represents the homecoming of a scholarly odyssey lasting more than a decade and spanning 10,000 miles from one side of the Pacific to the other. We now find that our intellectual debts are so heavy and our creditors so numerous that we could not possibly repay or even mention them all. In terms of intellectual origins the book represents a confluence of at least two currents: In the study of Japanese politics, it can be traced to Haruhiro Fukui's pioneering interest in the gaps between formal rules and actual political behavior, resulting for example in his attempt to explain the “consistent inconsistencies” between the theoretically expected and the actual results of every change in Japanese electoral laws since the late nineteenth century. In the study of Chinese politics, although seasoned China-watchers have had an intuitive grasp of informal politics for some time, its methodologically self-conscious analysis dates from a debate between Andrew Nathan and Tang Tsou in the pages of the American Political Science Review and the subsequent intellectual fermentation of Tsou's teachings among his students (including Lowell Dittmer, Joseph Fewsmith, Peter Lee, and Ben Ostrov). These two currents converged in the Santa Barbara–based research project, “Informal Politics in East Asia,” codirected by Fukui and Dittmer and generously endowed with two-year funding (1991–1993) by the Pacific Rim Research Program of the University of California. This enabled us to put together a research team consisting initially of recruits from the UC campuses and later cross-fertilized by other interested scholars.

As suggested in the Introduction to this volume, informal politics both complements and competes with formal politics in complex and dynamic patterns of interaction. Recent Japanese Diet (parliamentary) elections illustrate this subtle but often powerful role that informal politics plays vis-à-vis formal politics. We examine in this chapter the power and pattern of informal politics primarily in Diet elections held in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the multiple-seat election district system, known as a single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system, as seen in three candidates' experiences. As we will argue, however, our arguments and conclusions also apply to the more recent Diet elections without any significant modifications.

Before we present the case studies and discuss their implications, it will be helpful to reiterate a cliché about Japanese politics in general and Japanese elections under the SNTV system in particular: They were both very expensive. As we pointed out in our previous discussion of a related topic, a candidate could legally spend only so much – a little less than ¥16 million on average in the 1990 lower house general election – during a legally prescribed campaign period of about two weeks. The amount was not insignificant, but neither was it totally beyond the average adult citizen's reach in a nation with a mean per-capita gross national product (GNP) of nearly ¥3.5 million in 1990. In reality, however, a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) candidate in a Diet election in the late 1980s and early 1990s typically spent between ¥100 and ¥200 million.

A PERSPECTIVE, DEFINITIONS, AND EXAMPLES

Politics is, in Harold Lasswell's elegantly spare definition, “Who gets what, when, how.” At the expense of its elegance of parsimony, we might embellish it a little as: “Who gets what, when, how, and at whose expense.” The last phrase is added to make it explicit that politics is concerned with the distribution not only of the benefits derived from the use or consumption of goods and services, but also the costs required for their production and supply. The “what” here is to be understood as primarily a public, as opposed to private, good or service. Since, however, who gets a public good or service, how, and at whose expense critically affects who gets a private good or service, how, and at whose expense, we would leave the “what” in Lasswell's original formulation alone.

We adopt this broad and open-ended definition of politics rather than David Easton's well known but more restrictive definition: “authoritative allocation of values.”

As we will attempt to explain in this introduction and the chapters that follow, we believe, for both ontological and epistemological reasons, that any allocation of the costs and benefits of the production, distribution, and consumption of public goods and services – whether authoritative or questionable, legitimate or illegitimate, legal or illegal, overt or covert – is fundamentally political and therefore a proper subject for investigation by the political scientist.

Politics in modern society is both a cause and an effect of socioeconomic change. Sometimes it is possible to discern and trace the causal link between the two; that is, a specific political action is seen to cause a specific socioeconomic change, and vice versa. More often, however, the direction of the link is fuzzy and difficult to determine. A political action is seen to result from a set of socioeconomic conditions and in turn to bring about a new set of socioeconomic conditions. The relationship between politics and socioeconomic change in postwar Japan is no exception.

During the twenty-eight years between the summer of 1945 and the summer of 1973, the Japanese society and economy underwent an obvious and far-reaching transformation. On the other hand, politics appear to have changed little, in fact so little that a casual observer might have missed it completely. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes evident that politics, too, underwent a significant change during the period, in a close and complex relationship with the change in the society's socioeconomic conditions. The unstable multiparty pattern that prevailed during the first postwar decade yielded to a short-lived quasi-two-party system in the second half of the 1950s and then to a stable one-party-dominated multiparty regime in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is thus possible, in terms of both socioeconomic changes and shifts in the balance and alignment among the political parties, to divide these twenty-eight years into two distinctive periods.