Kontextmaschine

25th April 2023

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 95 notes

So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).
If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)

@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?

Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”

The major elements were

Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies

So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.

Tagged: meanwhile in japan