What role did the nation's political parties play in the first round of the current nationwide local elections Sunday? True, the parties supported many candidates who ran for gubernatorial or mayoral posts in some prefectures or for seats in prefectural or municipal assemblies. But in most of those local polls, only the Japan Communist Party independently fielded its own candidates; this is, however, a well-known survival technique of the JCP.

Indeed, in some places, it was as if Japan had no established political parties, a case in point being Osaka Prefecture, where the incumbent governor, with no party affiliation, was re-elected without any competition to speak of. This represents a sort of meltdown of the role of party politics in a democratic society. If a political party is to be a responsible entity, it must put up specific policies on key issues and should seek voters' endorsement of its policies through elections. In a democracy, there are many more functions for a political party than simply winning in polls.

This is a textbook definition of some of the essential roles a political party should play. But Japan's major parties seem to have given up such basic roles, especially in local elections. Several reasons can be cited. Even in Japan, the demise of Soviet communism has fatally reduced the political appeal of both communism and socialism, causing most leftist parties to dissolve into liberal or neutral political entities. This has substantially diluted the policy differences between political parties. At the same time, this trend has been given further momentum by the aligning and realigning of parties since the end of the Liberal Democratic Party's one-party rule in 1993.