1. The role of parliamentary committees to investigate matters on behalf of the Japanese Diet
John David Garrett
This paper hopes to explain the process for conducting parliamentary inquiries on behalf of
the Japanese Diet (Parliament) by looking at explanatory material available via the Japanese Diet
and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and hopes to assess the strengths and weaknesses of that process
with the aim of suggesting improvements (House of Councillors, 2015; House of Representatives,
2015; Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2015a; Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2015b). The bicameral Diet is
the sole law-making institution of Japan, divided into the House of Representatives (Sangiin) and
the House of Councillors (Shugiin). The Emperor of Japan gives his assent to the legislation the
Diet creates, and the cabinet directs the acts of the Emperor and is responsible for those acts.
Executive power is made up of a cabinet of ministers chosen and headed by the Prime Minister, and
is the government that acts within a mandate granted by the Diet. The Diet creates parliamentary
committees as an oversight mechanism to make the government accountable to the people of Japan.
Both the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors have standing committees,
in relation to each ministry, and special committees, in relation to extraordinary issues, which may
work together in joint sessions. Additionally, the House of Councillors has: research committees,
dealing with long-term issues and proposals of laws; The Commission on the Constitution, which
researches issues/amendments/etc related to the Constitution of Japan; The Deliberative Council on
Political Ethics, monitoring ethical standards within the House of Councillors; and The Board of
Oversight and Review of Specially Designated Secrets, which determines what conditions would
legitimize the making of information secret by the government.
This paper will first address how parliamentary committee inquiries are initiated within the
Diet. The paper will then illustrate how the parliamentary committees go about conducting those
inquiries/investigations. In the third section, the apparent lack of reporting with regards to a
committee inquiry/investigation and the degree of inclusion (exclusion) of the public/stakeholders
at large will be addressed. The paper will then compare the process of parliamentary committee

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inquiries within the Diet to that of other countries. Finally, in discussion, an analysis of the Diet's
parliamentary committee inquiry process will be made in an effort to determine how it could work
more effectively.
How Parliamentary Committees of the Diet Receive Terms of Reference for an Inquiry
There are different circumstances that initiate a parliamentary committee to inquire into the
proceedings of the government. Inquiries may derive from the initiatives of individual members of
the Diet, or they may be required per reports from the government as stipulated by law. The House
of Representatives and/or the House of Councillors may, whenever they decide the need, conduct an
investigation into the workings of the government.
Generally speaking, both houses have oversight functions over the actions of government as
administered by the Prime Minister and the cabinet, i.e. the various administrative offices under the
control of the cabinet. They also both have budgetary oversight with regards to the proposed
government budget for the coming year and with regards to the final accounting of expenditures for
the present or past. Finally, both houses have oversight with regards to the foreign policy and
national defence policy of the government. In every case, a relevant parliamentary committee can
call the government to account.
With regards to the budget, both houses are required to take part in the adoption of the
budget proposed by the cabinet. Once the proposed budget has been accepted into a plenary session
for consideration by relevant committees, those committees may make an inquiry of the cabinet's
reasons regarding any part of the budget. This can apparently be made on the initiative of one or
more members of the committee concerned as they see fit. Though, both a proposed budget and an
auditor's report on expenditures must be submitted to the appropriate committees who may then be
compelled to question the government.
How Parliamentary Committees of the Diet Go About Conducting an Inquiry or Investigation
The cabinet is accountable to the Diet per Article 66 of the Japanese Constitution.

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According to Article 63 of the Constitution, the Prime Minister and other ministers must appear
before a parliamentary committee when asked to by that committee in order to answer a question or
give an explanation. That said, there seem to be three general situations in going about conducting
an inquiry or investigation of the cabinet: committee initiated hearings; committee missions to
government departments; and committee responses to government reports dealing with either the
budget or public corporations.
Regarding the actions of the government administrations, individual members of the Diet
may initiate an inquiry either orally within a plenary session, or in written form to the Speaker of
the house to which they are a member. Within a plenary session, the same subject cannot be
questioned more than three times. When a written inquiry is initiated by an individual Diet member
in either the House of Representatives or the House of Councillors, it must be approved by the
Speaker of that particular house. Once a written inquiry has been approved and sent to the cabinet,
the cabinet has seven days to respond.
Presently, each house has 17 standing committees, with between 20-50 members per House
of Representative committee and 10-45 members per House of Councillor committee. Committee
membership is proportional to strength of each political party in the Diet. In their deliberations
standing committees may act jointly, even between the House of Representatives and the House of
Councillors. Committee meetings are generally closed to the public at large, but may be open
media representatives, etc. Though, public hearings are usually held with regards to the budget.
The Absence of Reports Regarding Parliamentary Committee Inquiry Findings and the Low
Level of Public/Stakeholders Inclusion in the Inquiry Process
From the literature provided by the Japanese Diet and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, it
seems that there is little or no requirement to produce an official report with regards to
parliamentary committee inquiry findings via the Diet. While it does seem that documents are
made and distributed amongst committee members, there seems to be a tendency for access to this

4. 4
information to be restricted (Bazzell, 1998). Though, the construction of this paper was done
without use of research using material in Japanese, and may very well have missed important
documents that reveal a public account of the inquiry process.
Nevertheless, there does seem to be evidence that posits the system as quite exclusive, and
this seems to have been the stuff of ongoing controversy within Japanese domestic politics from
both the left and the right of the political spectrum (e.g., Hein, 2010; Neary, 2004). There seems to
be a common narrative in which the ministries are described as institutions that hold such power as
to put them beyond the reach of the Diet and the cabinet that is apparently responsible for actions of
the ministries. Therefore, the cabinet is in a bind were it needs to somehow walk a line between
what its local constituency wants and what the bureaucrats will agree to. The desire to keep
information disclosure to a minimum might seem a convenient way for cabinet members to escape
responsibility. In combination with the dominance of the bureaucracy, party councils seem to have
particular power in keeping a certain degree of party conformity that would make the bureaucrats
feel that they could do business with politicians. The role of the LDP's Policy Affairs Research
Council (PARC) has been greatly scrutinized as requiring complete obedience to the party
leadership (e.g., Hein, 2010).
How the Diet's Inquiry Process Compares to that of Other Countries
There seems to be a strong degree of party loyalty within Japanese domestic politics that
prevent politicians from effectively operating in a bipartisan manner within parliamentary
committees (e.g., Cox, 2000; Fujimura, 2012). This contrasts somewhat with the standard for most
advanced industrial countries, in which committee members may align themselves with the issue at
stake within the committee and put party loyalty to a lesser importance. This concern with party
loyalty had been noted as more apparent after the then long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
loss in the 1993 elections and the rise of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in the last 15 years.
How to deal with party factionalism has been a concern for Prime Ministers since Koizumi in 2001,

5. 5
with different approaches taken that either cater to or antagonize the status quo.
Though the Japanese political system is therefore said to be drifting towards a two-party
system, there are a higher degree of independent politicians within the Diet than is normal in other
parliaments (e.g., Neary, 2004; Owens, 2003). This would suggest that, per the party
proportionality requirements of parliamentary committees in the Japanese Diet, there would be a
greater ability for opposition parties to have voice and initiate inquiries/investigations. A mix
between bargaining for concessions and the need for consensus building per the norms of the
parliamentary culture, though, might soften the effect a true oppositional party might be expected to
have in other countries.
Additionally, the concept of 'accountability' within Japanese politics seems to differ with
other countries' understandings within the parliamentary committee inquiry/investigation setting.
Here, committees seem to focus more on bookkeeping and less on other matters as a means for
judging if a government is 'accountable' or not (e.g., Bovens, 2007; Lienert, 2005). Though, it has
been claimed hard to judge the sense of accountability as Japanese politicians apply it within the
Diet inquiry process, and suggested that from an international advisory role there should be a
'horizontal' evaluation that takes into account the Japanese traditional mutual interdependence and
respect between the politicians, the bureaucracy, and civil society (Norton, 2007).
In sum, when considering 'executive dominance' versus 'parliamentarian control' when
compared to other advanced industrial countries' parliaments, Japan seems to sit in the middle or
more towards/moving towards the 'executive dominance' side of the spectrum (e.g., Siaroff, 2003;
Talbot, 2006). The concern that developed after the 1993 elections for party loyalty could have the
effect of limiting bipartisanship within the parliamentary committees and thereby limit the
parliamentary committees entrusted role to provide oversight with regards to the cabinet's exercise
of its mandate as given by the Diet per the supposed wishes of the Japanese people.

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Discussion
I found it interesting in that over the past decade or so the number of popular referendums in
Japan has grown dramatically (Numata, 2006). It is also interesting, and disappointing, that the
political establishment has not seemed to react in a manner that would give referenda more political
weight in holding those in power accountable. Judging from what I have read with regards to the
parliamentary committee oversight role with the Japanese Diet, it seems that their needs to be more
public scrutiny that would force politicians within committees to act in a more bipartisan nature and
set aside party allegiances for the greater public good.
Though, greater bipartisanship seems almost against a certain sense even amongst the
electorate. When members of the LDP voted with the opposition against the LDP Koizumi
government, he took this as a vote of no-confidence against him (Rahaman, 2006). This might
suggest that strong party allegiance must be a norm that is deeply embedded within the psyche of
members of the Diet. It might therefore be particularly hard to change this situation even in the face
of strong constituency desires that are in opposition to a politician's party leadership agenda. What
might be needed is a strong 'outside force' that could push the party leadership to give in terms of
the stated objectives of the parliamentary committees in providing real oversight of government
administration.
Bazzell (1998) and Takeda (2001) both argued that the National Diet Library needed to be
provided with the means to better inform both parliamentarians and the public at large as to
information that would help direct policy formulation effected by the parliamentary committee
inquiry process. Not only might this provide for an 'outside force' by facilitating greater
mobilization of the public, it seems that it the National Diet is long overdue to serve the basic needs
of parliamentarians regardless of their allegiance to party leadership. Even for parliamentarians of
the same party as the cabinet who would be willing to resist towing the party line, it seems
unnecessarily tough to get information that would help guide them in making decisions that would

7. 7
serve the public interest.
Finally, I have to apologize for the deficiencies in this paper. First, it has been hard to get
information in English, and I have spent far more time digging through documents that offered me
nothing in terms of addressing the questions asked of me to answer. As mentioned previously,
research done using documents in Japanese would of course reveal far more. I would certainly have
coveted working with a researcher who was bilingual and having more time to do so. What I have
done has been done with a minimum of time, generally looking at articles on the train either going
to or coming from work. Therefore, I would ask that anyone interested in the workings of the Diet
understand that what has been written here must be far from a full and accurate picture of the
situation. That said, I have learned much about the Japanese Diet through this exercise.

8. 8
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