How did the public opinion poll become a symbol of democracy and shape postwar political culture? This chapter addresses this question through the dynamic relationship among the Allied Occupation, the Japanese government and polling experts during the Occupation years. This period was characterized by disagreement over survey methods, the distinction between opinion research and propaganda, and the involvement of the state in polling. I argue such disagreement was not merely an ephemeral effect of the adoption of a new political technology, but indicative of how polling continued to stir up and channel public debate throughout the postwar era.

Introduction

Japan is one of the most heavily polled nations in the world. Every year thousands of surveys are conducted in hopes of yielding insight into the changing values, habits and voting intentions of the Japanese population in aggregate and the countless subgroups into which it can be divided. The five largest pollsters—all affiliated with major news media corporations— regularly survey around five hundred thousand citizens in the lead-up to national elections.

The ever-increasing frequency of calls from pollsters employing random digitdialing technology has given rise to concerns of survey fatigue driving response rates down. Today over one hundred polling firms compete for the attention of a shrinking population in an industry worth hundreds of billions of yen.

Such figures hardly do justice to the significance of the opinion poll to discussions of postwar Japanese political culture. Regular reporting on fluctuating cabinet approval ratings has long been a quotidian symbol of postwar democracy. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) strategically timed Upper House elections to maximize favorable public opinion poll results throughout its long postwar reign. Powerful norms have surrounded the public treatment of these polls by the media and prime ministers, who have long faced pressure to step down or call a snap general election once their approval rating slips below 30 percent. Abe Shinzō's seeming imperviousness to such pressure when his approval ratings dipped fed into concern over the future of democracy during his time as prime minister. Reconciling norms regarding aggregate public opinion with the notion that politics in Japan is dominated by factional interests has long been generative to theories of Japanese cultural uniqueness as well as prognostications of gradual change.