Upstart Doi Rallies Japanese Women With Wit, Charisma

At a New Year’s cocktail party early last year, a high-ranking official of the Japan Socialist Party was overheard to dismiss words of praise for his party’s charismatic chairwoman, Takako Doi.

“She may have charisma power,” the man said, “but she’s a little short on brain power.”

No Socialist--and few conservatives--would be caught making such disparaging remarks today about Doi, who led her party to a stunning victory against Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrats in Sunday’s election for the upper house of Parliament.

Created Political Machine

Using the force of her offbeat personality and sharp wit, Doi, 60, has transformed the Socialist Party from an ossified collection of organized labor bosses and Marxist ideologues into a broad-based political machine that has tapped Japan’s most undervalued human resource: women.

In doing so, Doi positioned herself as the first opposition leader in 34 years to have a chance at becoming prime minister of Japan.

That goal may prove ultimately elusive, but what is certain is that Doi has arrived as a significant political force. A few female politicians have held nominal Cabinet posts since Japan’s women acquired the right to vote after World War II, but none has wielded genuine clout as Takako Doi has done.

She took over as leader of the Socialists after their crushing defeat in the 1986 double parliamentary election--chosen by men as a feminist figurehead who might rejuvenate the party under what was cynically called the “madonna strategy.”

But Doi surprised the pundits by acting aggressively to build party support through grass-roots organizations of women. The effort paid off with a series of recent election gains, culminating in Sunday’s voting, which allowed the former university professor and constitutional lawyer to fully shed her image as a political lightweight and transcend her social status as a woman in Japan.

“She has become a powerful leader with the emergence of newly elected Socialist members of Parliament who are not union-based,” said Takashi Inoguchi, a political science professor at Tokyo University. “A mass party is being born.”

Doi, a doctor’s daughter from the port city of Kobe in western Japan, would seem an unlikely person to reshape the male-dominated political landscape in Japan. She never married and has been challenging the traditional constraints placed on women in Japanese society throughout her seven terms in Parliament.

As a young woman, Doi found her role model and decided on a career in law after seeing Henry Fonda in the film “Young Mr. Lincoln,” she said in a speech before the Japan Society in New York in 1987.

“I resolved to become ‘Honest Abe,’ ” she said.

One of the rare Japanese of the Christian faith, Doi graduated from Doshisha University, a prestigious Christian liberal arts college in Kyoto. She later taught courses there on Japan’s postwar “peace constitution”--the American-drafted document under which Japan renounces the right to wage war.

“My love for the constitution is so intense,” she told the Japan Society, “I remained wedded to it and have remained single.”

Since joining the Japan Socialist Party--because it is dedicated to protecting the integrity of the constitution from revision by conservatives--Doi has maintained an unorthodox, sometimes masculine image.

Obsessed With Pinball

She has appeared regularly on television, matching wits with celebrities on quiz shows and throatily singing ballads on variety programs. Her favorite song is “My Way.”

Doi is a baseball fanatic, rooting for the Hanshin Tigers, and she confesses an obsession for pachinko, a noisy, low-brow pinball game usually associated with the working class and the unemployed.

Doi is also famous for her fiery attacks on mumbling prime ministers in Parliament, where she is a vociferous critic of military spending and U.S.-Japanese security ties.

On the campaign trail, she wears pink suits and mesmerizes women supporters with her forceful demeanor.

A sampling of her campaign rhetoric suggests a revolutionary message that appears to be striking a sympathetic chord among Japanese housewives.

“Japanese women have persevered toward their fathers and their husbands, always walking several steps behind men,” Doi said on the stump last week. “But the time for an end to perseverance has arrived.”

The comparison may seem forced, in view of their radically different outlook on the world, but Doi is said to share the qualities of toughness and resoluteness with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain.

Indeed, the Socialist “Iron Lady” dubbed her voice in Japanese for that of Thatcher in a television drama about the hijacking of a North Sea oil rig that was aired on Japanese television three years ago.

During the upper-house campaign, Doi skillfully dodged the issue of the Socialist Party’s defense and security policies, saying the party would emphasize continuity rather that change if it took power in a coalition. But hemmed in by the party’s left wing, which espouses unarmed neutrality, she has stopped short of making badly needed clarifications.

“I feel we have to look at reality,” Doi said in an interview before making her first overseas trip as party leader two years ago, a highly symbolic visit to the United States. “Of course, we’re against the U.S.-Japan security treaty, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the fact that the treaty is in effect.”

Decries Food Prices

Doi has decried high food prices as burdensome to Japanese consumers, but in the campaign for the upper house she and her party attacked the liberalization of agricultural imports.

The uncertainty of the Socialists’ policy game plan has raised jitters in Washington and other foreign capitals at the prospect of Doi becoming prime minister. However, some political analysts note that whoever becomes prime minister would be captive to the onerous obligation of building national consensus before undertaking any change in course.

Much as the Liberal Democrats have failed to carry out their goal of revising the constitution during 34 years in power, the Socialists might be forced to accept the status quo on defense, indefinitely.

In her speech before the Japan Society in 1987, Doi attempted to set the tone for a new dialogue between Washington and an increasingly pluralistic Japan.

“In the United States, many people equate socialism with communism, so that even our party’s name creates some uneasiness in your country,” she said. “Nevertheless, the U.S. government has found that it can deal constructively with a number of West European countries where socialist parties have come to power, even when it did not agree with some of their policies.”

Times staff writer Sam Jameson contributed to this story.