NEWS ANALYSIS : Despite Election Jolt, It’s Mostly Business as Usual in Japan--So Far

Japan’s Establishment lost nearly a quarter of its strength in the upper house of Parliament. The prime minister threw in the towel. No leader for the country was anywhere in sight.

And to top it all, the Japan Socialist Party, which advocates wiping out the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, got its foot in the corridor to power for the first time since 1948.

Yet Sunday’s election, the closest thing to a political revolution Japan has experienced since World War II, produced no shock and no alarm. Indeed, perhaps the eeriest thing in Tokyo on Tuesday was the calm that prevailed everywhere.

To the average Japanese and to the business community, the changes wrought by the election shaped up as far less sweeping in substance than in appearance--at least as far as domestic policies are concerned.

The Liberal Democrats’ 34-seat loss--23% of the party’s upper-house strength--and the Socialists’ 60% gain did not come about because the electorate abandoned its conservative ways. Even Socialist leaders acknowledged that the vote was not for them. It was against the Liberal Democrats and the arrogance, deceit and corruption that has seeped into the very structure of the party in 34 years of unbroken national election victories.

The new Socialist popularity represents a fragile blossom that Socialist Chairwoman Takako Doi seemed unwilling to nurture Monday. Once again, she refused to cast aside the Socialists’ advocacy of abolishing the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and adopting unarmed neutralism--a policy that remains the major obstacle to a Socialist-led coalition.

“Even if a Socialist-led coalition took over the government,” she said, “consistency in policy must be maintained. No drastic changes would be carried out immediately.”

A Socialist-led Cabinet, Doi said, would negotiate a step-by-step dissolution of Japan’s defense ties with the United States, “over, say, a four-year period.”

Not everyone shares this casual attitude toward the keystone of Japan’s diplomacy.

A banker, who asked not be identified by name, displayed confidence that the Socialists, because of such attitudes, are far from the inner sanctum of power. He predicted that the yen-dollar exchange rate will fluctuate only slightly, despite the election upheaval.

“But if there was any chance that Doi would become prime minister,” he said, “the exchange rate would fall to 200 immediately,” from the present level of 140 yen to the dollar.

Post-election polls by NHK, the semi-official radio and television network, showed that most voters wanted a system of checks and balances against Liberal Democratic excesses, not a Socialist-led government.

The calm in the business world appears to stem from the knowledge that Japan’s elite bureaucrats are still entrenched--with broad powers arising out of the vagueness of most laws--to guide the economy in the absence of political leadership.

Yoh Kurosawa, vice president of the Industrial Bank of Japan, told foreign correspondents that whatever concerns might develop overseas, Japanese businessmen have no worries about the economic impact of the election.

The biggest immediate change at home appears to be the injection into Japanese politics of “an enormous amount of fluidity and uncertainty,” Takashi Inoguchi, a Tokyo University political science professor, said Monday.

The No. 1 short-term question is whether voters will repeat their protest in elections for the powerful lower house, known as the House of Representatives, which elects the prime minister. The lower house’s term expires on July 5, 1990, and a conservative defeat in that chamber would start a new ballgame in Japanese politics.

In the election for the upper house, known as the House of Councillors, voters vented their grievances without risking established interests. But with control of the government at stake, a protest vote would be a dangerous indulgence.

Some political analysts suggest that the worse the results for the Liberal Democrats in the upper-house vote, the better they will be in a general election, when voters frightened by the prospect of an opposition-led government rush back to the fold.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the Liberal Democratic Party faces major problems, with little promise of solutions. An influence-buying scandal that tainted all the party’s major leaders and the stunning defeat Sunday has left the party crippled and leaderless.

“More than policy, it’s the structure of the party that is at issue,” said Takashi Kon of the Liberal Democrats’ election committee. “A new structure, a new beginning, is necessary to regain the voters’ confidence.”

The balance of political power has been altered for at least the next six years. So disastrous was the Liberal Democrats’ defeat that they cannot hope to recoup their losses in the next upper house election, in 1992.

With Sunday’s 36 winners remaining in office when half of the seats in the chamber are contested three years from now, the Liberal Democrats would need to win more than 70% of the seats to regain a majority--a political impossibility. Their best showing ever--58%--was in 1986.

Approval by the upper house, or a two-thirds majority in the lower house to override its veto, is required for all bills except the budget and treaties. The Liberal Democrats hold only 57% of the lower house seats.

In terms of ordinary legislation, little change is expected. As Prime Minister Sosuke Uno noted Monday in announcing his intention to resign, 77% of the bills that the government has submitted this year have been enacted, many by unanimous vote, even though Parliament was locked in turmoil from January through June.

Kent E. Calder, associate professor at Princeton University, said the Liberal Democrats are in the habit of compromising with opposition demands on about 30% of the bills the government submits.

But controversial laws and dramatic reforms, such as the one implementing a 3% consumption tax that contributed to the Liberal Democrats’ defeat, may no longer be possible.

Socialists Get Foot in Door

With their new strength, the Socialists have planted a foot in the corridor to power, if not the inner sanctum. The last time they influenced, rather than obstructed, decision-making was in 1947-48, when they headed two short-lived coalition cabinets.

Unlike the debilitated conservatives, the Socialists came out of the election refreshed. Thanks to Doi, the party that had been little more than a collection of union bosses has brought in new blood with a slate of winning candidates that includes lawyers, journalists, professors and women.

Rengo, the Private Sector Trade Union Confederation, a new body that is to embrace all the established confederations of organized labor starting this fall, made a splash with the same strategy, electing 11 of its 12 candidates.

Socialists ‘a Mass Party’

The Socialist Party has become “for the first time a mass party,” Calder said.

Some analysts called the election results an epochal change in voter consciousness. But Shigeru Aoki, head of the tiny Salaryman’s Party, noted that in Japan “democracy was rationed out (by the U.S. occupation authorities), not as in the French Revolution, in which it was won by the people with blood and fighting.”

“Many struggles among those with power have occurred in Japan’s history,” Aoki said, “but there is no example of those without power throwing out those with power. The people’s energy has never been the driving force of change in Japan.”

The Japanese newspaper Asahi said the election opens “a new page in Japanese political history.” Now the question is whether it will expand into a new chapter.

Times staff writer Karl Schoenberger contributed to this article.

HOUSE OF COUNCILLORS ELECTION

NEW 1986 ELECTED CARRYOVERS STRENGTH STRENGTH Liberal Democrats 36 73 109 143 Socialists 46 21 67 41 Clean Government Party 10 11 21 25 Communists 5 9 14 16 Democratic Socialists 3 5 8 12 Rengo* 11 1 12 -- Others 15 6 21 14 Vacant -- -- 0 1 TOTALS 126 126 252 252

* Pan-opposition candidates backed by Japan Private Sector Trade Union Confederation