Why Can't the People at the Top Put a Stop to It? Reflections on the Fukuoka Prefectural Assembly Scandal

Lately, it feels as though every time I turn on the television, there is another story about the Fukuoka Prefectural Assembly.

There have been allegations of vote-buying in the election for the assembly chair.

“That never happened.”

“There is a recording.”

“The audio was generated by AI.”

Then came reports about a political fundraising party held when an earthquake struck, unexplained expenditures, criticism of overseas inspection trips, and even an ill-considered remark from one of the participating assembly members that “Nepal was paradise.”

With one controversy following another, many people must be wondering:

“What is the party headquarters doing?”

“Why doesn’t the prime minister step in?”

But after looking into the system, I realized that it is not nearly that simple.

Even the Prime Minister Cannot Control Local Assembly Members

National and local lawmakers do not have the kind of relationship that a company president has with a department head.

Local governments are autonomous institutions. The prime minister and a political party’s national headquarters cannot simply give direct orders to local assembly members or discipline them at will.

Even when they belong to the same party, the party is not a single organization in which every decision can be made at the top.

This distinction is surprisingly easy to miss when following the news.

Not So Different from the Edo Period

The structure reminded me of Japan during the Edo period.

The shogun exercised authority over the regional daimyo. As a rule, however, he could not directly command or punish every retainer serving within their domains. Each domain had a degree of autonomy.

Perhaps Japan has long preferred to let separate organizations manage their own affairs to some extent, rather than running one enormous organization as a single, unified body.

Of course, I am not suggesting that modern local government and the Edo-period domain system are identical. Still, they share a certain structural similarity: the people at the top cannot decide everything.

I Have Seen the Same Structure in Business

This is not only a political issue. The same pattern is common in business.

There may be a parent company and a subsidiary. From the outside, they look like one company. Once you work inside the organization, however, you discover that the subsidiary does not automatically act simply because “the parent company said so.”

The subsidiary has its own circumstances, and its frontline teams have their own rules.

A new president at the parent company will not transform the subsidiary’s culture overnight. In fact, it is not unusual to encounter an attitude closer to, “What happens at headquarters has nothing to do with us.”

As a result, problems within a subsidiary can remain unaddressed for years.

The Public Still Blames the Top

Institutional independence does not mean that the public will pay attention to every detail of the organizational structure.

When something goes wrong, criticism usually reaches the name at the top first. In this case, the controversies damage the image of the Liberal Democratic Party as a whole. Even if party headquarters says, “These are local assembly members, so this has nothing to do with us,” many voters are unlikely to see it that way.

The same is true in business.

After the recent Kumamoto earthquake, there was extensive reporting about an employee who was caught in a secondary disaster after being instructed to return to a store and place its sales proceeds in a safe.

The store itself was operated by a separate company, but the public first associated the incident with the parent company that owned the brand.

From a customer’s perspective, questions such as these are beside the point:

• Was it a local subsidiary?
• Was it a separate operating company?
• Did the parent company have the authority to issue direct orders?

If the business operates under a company’s name, consumers tend to see the incident as the responsibility of the entire company.

Politics works the same way. Even when a local assembly member causes the problem, voters see the party label: the Liberal Democratic Party.

Institutional responsibility and the responsibility perceived by the public do not always align.

So Who Can Stop It?

If the central leadership cannot directly control local representatives, who can ultimately apply the brakes?

The answer is the local electorate.

Local autonomy also means that local communities must take responsibility for what happens within them. If voters judge local elections only through the lens of a national party’s popularity, they may lose sight of what they should really be examining.

Watching the news day after day, my first thought was not simply, “Politicians again.” Instead, I found myself thinking, “Japan has been structured this way for a very long time.”

Power is not concentrated in one place.

That arrangement helps protect freedom. At the same time, it means we cannot always expect someone at the top to step in and fix a problem.

There is rarely such a thing as a system that is convenient in every situation.