Social Science Japan Journal Advance Access originally published online on March 24, 2006
Social Science Japan Journal 2006 9(1):1-18; doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyl002
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Social Science Japan Journal 9:1-18 (2006)
© 2006 Oxford University Press
Storming the Castle: The Battle for Postal Reform in Japan
Patricia L. MACLACHLAN is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Government at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism (Columbia University Press, 2002) and the co-editor, with Sheldon Garon, of The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (forthcoming from Cornell University Press). She is currently writing a book on the politics of the Japanese postal system from the early Meiji period to the present.
She can be reached by e-mail at pmaclachlan{at}mail.utexas.edu.
This article explores the ideas and power struggles that have shaped the ongoing battle to privatize the Japanese postal services. For years, a coalition of commissioned postmasters, postal workers, bureaucrats and politicians resisted postal reform in part by appealing to the ‘traditional values’ symbolized by the state-run system and playing to the fears of ordinary citizens. Against this backdrop, Koizumi struggled to win the public over to his vision of a privatized postal system and, more broadly, a political economy based on free market principles. Koizumi was ultimately successful in passing his postal privatization bills in October 2005 not because he had won the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of the general public but because he managed to marginalize his opponents by changing the political and electoral rules of the game. Now, Koizumi faces renewed pressures from his opponents to dilute the market-oriented dimensions of the new postal regime as the government prepares to implement the privatization legislation.