The new buzzword in Japanese politics these days is "manifesto." The Japanese language does not use capital letters, but if it did, you can be sure "manifesto" would be written with a capital M to convey the weighty tone with which it is pronounced by those who believe it is the answer to Japan's political problems. It is so simple: Once political parties and party presidential candidates issue their manifestos, politics will become party- rather than personality-centered and issues and principles, rather than constituency service and opportunistic compromise, will dominate political debate. Once a manifesto is produced, politicians who do not subscribe to it will have no choice but to leave the party and form their own. The result will be a reorganization of the party system and the revitalization of politics.

What's wrong with this manifesto picture is that there are no politics in it. The manifesto-inspired image of governance is of a kind of idealized bureaucratic state. In this ideal system, parties offer lists of specific policy promises. These promises are called manifestos, that term written in katakana to suggest something new, foreign and profound. Voters decide what party to vote for based on the concrete policy promises made in the manifesto, and then that party's elected politicians implement those commitments. When the next election comes around, voters will be able to judge how true the party in power has been to its manifesto. Politics, in other words, ends when the prime minister comes into office armed with his manifesto. After that, governance is simply a matter of implementing the promises made in the manifesto.

There is no democracy in the world that operates in this way, including the United States and Britain. When the Democratic Party or the Republican Party holds its national convention to nominate its presidential candidate, it also convenes a platform committee to prepare the party's policy agenda. The platform is always a product of compromise. Party zealots try to get extreme demands into the platform. The presidential candidate's supporters often try to get more centrist language into to it in order to appeal to floating voters or they play up some demand for radical change that is popular with the voters, no matter how unrealistic its adoption as policy might be. The idea that the party's presidential candidate decides what his party's platform is going to be and that the party's members in Congress then simply implement his promises has no basis in political reality.