Patricia Maclachlan’s study of the Japanese postal system is a rich and engaging institutional history in the best tradition of such works. Rather than pursuing any single overarching hypothesis, the book delves deeply into the myriad facets of Japanese politics illuminated by 140 years of the postal system’s changing fortunes. Maclachlan highlights its vital role in Japan’s modernization: its changing social, economic and political contributions, particularly to Japan’s scantily populated rural areas; the social embeddedness and political centrality of the system’s 25,000 commissioned postmasters and their powerful political allies; the successful postal reform efforts led by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his key economic adviser, Takenaka Heizo, in 2005; and post-Koizumi efforts to blunt what rear-guard opponents identified as the worst impacts of those changes. Showcased is the postal system’s role in Japan’s modernization, its politicization, and eventually its privatization with a continual emphasis on the ongoing manifestations of institutional “stickiness.” Such stickiness allowed the “postal regime,” as Maclachlan refers to it, to delay for decades any major challenges to its prevailing powers and practices. Equally highlighted are the roles played by powerful political leaders at critical junctures. And throughout the book, as the phrase “people’s post office” implies, she provides a sympathetic portrait of the human ties fostered between postal officials and the citizens with whom they continually interacted.
As it was created in the early Meiji period by Maejima Hisoka, Japan’s postal system was an instrument of modernization facilitating the state’s successful penetration of the country’s many previously insulated regions and their integration into a single, unified, Tokyo-centric nation-state. Critical to its success was the fusion of three basic services—mail delivery, a postal savings bank, and the sale of postal insurance policies. And overseeing the local post offices were commissioned postmasters, typically men of local note willing to run these services from their homes or connected offices. During the period following World War II, these postmasters became special civil servants who took on classical interest-group characteristics; they were public servants holding private interests. Organizationally, they formed a key leg in an iron postal triangle along with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
Two key strengths were central to the long-running political power of the postmasters. Electorally, they mobilized votes for conservative politicians, a political service they could provide as the result of their deep community roots and their provision of local social services. Economically, they generated enormous and politically fungible financial resources through the postal system’s extensive savings and insurance programs. At its peak in 1999, the postal savings system accounted for roughly 260 trillion yen, or one-third of the nation’s total savings, and more than the four largest private banks combined. Similarly, more than five million postal life insurance policies were sold in 2001 alone. The bulk of the money generated by these programs was fed into the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP), widely identified as the nation’s “second budget,” and a fund capable of supporting favored off-official-budget projects.
Throughout its existence, the postal system has been a central player in some of Japan’s major political clashes. One of the earliest postwar struggles centered on the brutal left–right contest between postal workers’ unions, on the one hand, and the postmasters along with their government and LDP allies, on the other, a battle that was mirrored by similar unionization and anti-unionization struggles during the first two decades after the war. Subsequent political jousts mirrored the general struggles over bureaucratic turf in pitting the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications against the Ministry of Finance for control of the funds generated by the postal savings and insurance programs.
The central battle, however, and the one to which the final three chapters are devoted, centered on the various efforts at postal reform and the corresponding pushbacks by postal regime loyalists since the 1990s. Tentative reform efforts began under the Hashimoto government in the late 1990s, but at the heart of the postal reform story is Koizumi, an advocate of such reform as early as his unsuccessful campaign to head the LDP in 1995. As Koizumi saw it, the postal system was rife with inefficiencies as well as political quicksand. Postal privatization, he contended, would result both in better service and in a more globally dynamic Japanese economy. Moreover, he argued, if his party, the LDP, could extricate itself from its long-standing reliance on traditional rural constituencies and become more urban and consumer friendly, its longer-term electoral fortunes would be greatly enhanced.
Koizumi’s creative political and tactical leadership was central to the passage of Japan’s extensive postal privatization legislation in 2005. Astute manipulation of the media and his deft utilization of a number of administrative changes that had strengthened the powers of the Cabinet and the Office of the Prime Minister enabled him to flout longtime LDP party conventions. Throughout the reform process, he proved astute at outflanking the phalanx of old-guard opponents within his own party, who were continually torn between their desire to impede his reform efforts and their awareness that continuing to burnish Koizumi’s pro-reform image was vital to the electoral fortunes of the party.
In the end, Koizumi succeeded with most of his reforms after calling a snap election that denied LDP party recognition of his reform opponents, large numbers of whom were replaced by a cadre of new LDP parliamentarians who were typically younger, more media savvy, and unshakably loyal to his reform agenda. Not surprisingly, however, once Koizumi departed as prime minister, there was considerable pushback from the not-quite-dead postal regime led sequentially by Koizumi’s LDP successor, Abe Shinzo, in his crony-riven first administration and, ironically, by the notionally liberal and urban Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government (2009–12), which took power from the LDP in part through its embrace of the most hard-core opponents of reform.
These recent struggles over postal privatization in Japan mirror the much broader debates that have engulfed the country since the early 1990s. To what extent can and should Japan alter its long-standing political economy? What is the ideal balance between economic efficiency and social cohesion; between globalization and “rich national customs”; and between a politics of protection and a politics of risk? Maclachlan herself reflects these tensions. She shows an almost equal admiration for the political skills of Koizumi the reformer and the dying breed of postmasters he defeated, many of whom she knows and for whom she has an unmistakable empathy. As she writes: “The postal services may have produced economic inefficiencies that are the bane of classical economists, but they did much to enhance the social wellbeing of the Japanese people” (p. 148).
The People’s Post Office, therefore, is an extremely well-wrought study that will be of considerable value not only to students of Japan but to any political scientist concerned about the skills of political leaders as well as the painful trade-offs of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.”
