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The Melancholy of Japan's Liberal Opposition: Politician-penned Books and Their Narratives of Redemption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Romeo Marcantuoni
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Abstract

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This article interrogates the ways in which two political books written by elites in the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) take different tacks to represent their party as trustworthy, responsible, and competent against the background of the liberal opposition's political difficulties since 2012. Focusing on two books published in the lead-up to the 2021 general election by former Prime Minister Kan Naoto and then-leader of the CDP Edano Yukio, it argues that the liberal opposition parties in Japan are, on top of the more commonly understood institutional pressures, constrained by demands that the narrative is a conventionally satisfying one when crafting claims about their viability as an alternative to government.

Keywords

Edano YukioKan NaotonarrativeoppositionConstitutional Democratic Party of Japanemotionpolitics
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , e2
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2024

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