Women Running Hard for Office : ‘Hell Hath No Fury,’ Japan Politicians Are Learning

The women of Japan have stood up. Feminine fury has been unleashed by a monumental corruption scandal and a tax reform imbroglio, and on the eve of Sunday’s crucial election, women are declaring that grave matters of state can no longer be entrusted to arrogant, prevaricating and morally deficient men.

But liberation and equality for downtrodden women are not at issue here. Rather, the prevailing campaign theme is that women are uniquely qualified for office because they are untainted, having passed their time safely outside the dirty corridors of corporate and political power.

Women did not receive payoffs in the so-called Recruit scandal, which drove former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita from office earlier this year. Nor, they say, do women patronize paramours, as Prime Minister Sosuke Uno stands accused of doing in the “geisha scandal.”

Most of all, women did not endorse the hated 3% consumption tax that was unilaterally imposed by the Liberal Democratic Party on April 1, three years after a campaign promise not to do so. As managers of Japan’s household budgets, women are perceived as the ultimate victims of this tax, and they are furious about it.

“Cast your one vote of anger” is the catch phrase of Takako Doi, chairwoman of the Japan Socialist Party, the leading opposition party, which is fielding a slate of a dozen women candidates in Sunday’s election for the upper house of Parliament.

Altogether, 146 women are running--one out of every five candidates, a record. All but 50 of these women are backed by a host of new mini-parties without significant support and thus stand little chance of winning a seat. But the moral outrage expressed by these candidates, echoing the opposition’s denunciation of the crusty Liberal Democrats, is expected to be a decisive force in the voting.

Women Voters in Majority

Women outnumber men among registered voters by about 2.7 million, and if the turnout on July 2 for the Tokyo Assembly election is any measure of their determination, they can be expected to cast their ballots with a vengeance.

“Women are now tying together their livelihood with politics,” said Michiko Matsuura, chairwoman of the Japan League of Women Voters. “Each individual is awakening to this connection, and they are prepared to put that awareness into action for the first time. The influence of women in Sunday’s election will be overwhelming.”

Indeed, the ruling conservatives are running scared. Although they have managed to place five women on the ballot under the Liberal Democratic banner, analysts say the party is likely to lose its absolute majority in the upper house, where half the 252 seats are at issue.

That prospect is bound to change the dynamics of legislative politics for years to come. A debacle Sunday could force Uno to resign and possibly leave his successor little choice but to call a snap election for the lower house, the more powerful of the two chambers because of its budgetary authority. The LDP, as the ruling party is popularly known, has controlled Parliament for 34 years.

Must Ponder Alliance

Now, the conservatives must ponder an alliance with moderate opposition parties to outflank Doi and her Socialists in building a coalition to rule Japan.

The Liberal Democrats have been so discredited by disclosures of unethical fund-raising and the bungling of the tax reform that they have retreated to a defensive campaign, abandoning substantive issues and appealing to voter instincts to maintain “stability.” Uno has been essentially muzzled in the campaign in an extraordinary attempt at damage control. Conservative candidates complain that they must spend most of their time apologizing.

The initiative, meanwhile, has been seized by what pundits derisively refer to as the “madonna brigade,” the core of women running for office for the first time.

The result is an altogether new tone in campaign rhetoric: Women on the campaign trail proudly proclaim their amateur status. Japanese television viewers have been exposed to a constant drone of sweet and cheerful oration, as women candidates take their places alongside men and receive equal air time as required by law.

Relegated to Sidelines

Japan has nurtured a number of sophisticated women politicians since universal suffrage was initiated by Allied occupation authorities at the end of World War II--Doi, a constitutional scholar, being the paramount example. But after making a strong showing in the first postwar election in 1947, women have been largely relegated to the sidelines as men continued to dominate politics as well as all other social arenas.

The entrenched attitude of male superiority was driven home early in the upper-house campaign when Uno’s minister of agriculture, Hisao Horinouchi, asked rhetorically, “Can women be any use in politics?”

Although Uno hastily ordered Horinouchi to retract his remark, he told a July 7 news conference that he does not think Doi is qualified to become prime minister because she is single.

“In the end, the woman’s task is to stay home and take care of her family,” he said.

Indeed, homebodies are in, and worldly ignorance would appear to be bliss under the “madonna” strategy. Take, for example, Yasuko Takemura, 55, a prominent Socialist candidate of the new breed running in the Hokkaido district in northern Japan.

According to a profile in a recent issue of the magazine Spa, Takemura has no regular occupation. In college, she studied radio announcing, and her hobbies are painting and gardening. Her “good point” is that she is “gentle-hearted.” Her campaign slogan is “flexible, passionate and strong.” Her favorite type of man? Peter Falk, the American actor famous here for his role as a rumpled television detective.

Comments by supporters, Spa reports, are that Takemura is “just like a grown-up child; she still keeps a childish mind.” Asked what she would do if she won $700,000 in a lottery, she said she would buy an island and turn it into a children’s playground.

Mustn’t Get ‘Too Moody’

The magazine predicts that Takemura has a fair chance of being elected “if she manages her campaign organization without getting too moody.”

“There may be many amateurs among the women candidates in this campaign,” conceded Matsuura of the League of Women Voters, “but all they need to do is learn and gain experience, and next time they will be pros.”

Women are also heavily represented in the 40 mini-parties vying for seats in Sunday’s election, which include fledgling one-issue groups such as the ecological Earth Club, the People Who Don’t Need Nuclear Power, and the Green and Life Network, modeled after the European Green parties.

In some cases, these parties get down to brass tacks in a manner uncharacteristic of the mainstream opposition parties. Although the platform of Doi’s Socialist Party calls for abolition of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, she has avoided touching on that topic, presumably because the vast majority of Japanese favor the status quo. But Hideko Araki, a woman running for office in Kanagawa Prefecture on the Green Party ticket, boldly advocated the withdrawal of U.S. troops in a televised speech Friday.

Araki said her district is “overflowing with U.S. bases” and added: “Already, we residents are being placed in danger. Women are raped by American soldiers, children are sacrificed, residents are tormented by noise pollution (from warplanes). This is not an independent country as long as we continue to be occupied by foreign troops.”

But on the whole, the women’s campaign rhetoric is limited to lighter stuff. Hisako Oishi, one of Araki’s rivals in the race for a seat in Kanagawa, adopted the posture of the innocent housewife in her campaign--even though she is an 18-year veteran of the local prefectural assembly.

Speaking in an intentionally breathless, schoolgirlish voice, Oishi told a recent rally in Kanagawa that “the woman’s sense of daily living must be brought into politics.” If the woman’s mind had prevailed, she said, “the consumption tax would never have happened.”

The Socialists, too, have emphasized the “women’s mentality” line in demanding an abolition of the consumption tax. Doi, for example, campaigned across the country by attacking the tax reform proposal for taxing furs and diamonds at the same rate as daily necessities that housewives must buy.

Monopoly on Morality

Doi also has pushed the line that women have something of a monopoly on morality, and warned that they have stood by passively too long while men made decisions that affect them, such as setting policy on national pension payments.

“Old age comes three times for women--when they care for their parents, when they care for their husbands and when they themselves become old,” she told one rally. “Women must speak up on policies on the aging of Japanese society.”

Drawing Women Into Party

Doi’s chief contribution to the Socialist Party since she became its leader has been to draw women into party activities. Without tampering with the party’s unpopular ideological baggage, she organized a nationwide series of “Associations to Become Friends Together With Takako Doi”--and these grass-roots support groups are now playing a vital role in the Socialists’ upsurge.

Even in the rural Fukushima area, 240 miles north of Tokyo, 3,000 women organized by the local “Association to Become Friends” were mobilized to hear Doi deliver a campaign pitch for a male Socialist. The candidate himself stayed away from the rally and, instead, sent his wife.