COLUMN ONE : Women in Japan Get Political : They’re emerging as an electoral wild card as quality of life becomes a more pressing issue.

After 10 years dutifully playing the politician’s wife, Makiko Hamada stunned the conservative establishment last month by declaring she would run for a seat in Parliament herself--as a reformist, against her husband’s wishes and against his ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

She has been busy campaigning ever since, telling voters in a district neighboring her husband’s constituency that she lost her faith in the Liberal Democratic Party because it is corrupt and incapable of reforming itself.

Still, Hamada, 47, finds time to rise at 7:00 each morning to prepare a breakfast of rice, miso soup and natto (fermented soybeans) for her husband, Takujiro, a former Finance Ministry bureaucrat who has been a ruling party lawmaker for a decade.

Takujiro Hamada was furious when he first learned of his wife’s decision to seek office, “but he’s getting used to the idea,” Makiko Hamada said.

“Eventually, I think my action will help my husband,” Hamada said in an interview at her home in Saitama prefecture, or state, north of Tokyo. “If we don’t reform our political system, his talents will go to waste. I think it’s the woman’s role to point the way when society is in confusion.”

This woman is no revolutionary. Hamada, who is running as an independent, describes herself as a “pure conservative” in the mold of Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As her homemaking chores suggest, she has muted her audacious challenge with a demure tone, practicing the balancing act required of many Japanese women who dare to enter the world of their men.

But the curious political schism in the Hamada household may be subtle evidence of a sea change now occurring in Japan’s postwar democracy. Sensing that the male establishment is corrupt, out of touch with the popular will and paralyzed with indecision, women are starting to pull and push the political levers like never before.

Angry women, rallying against a hated new consumption tax, were a decisive factor when the Liberal Democrats got clobbered at the polls last July and lost their majority in the upper house of Parliament. Next month, Japanese will vote in an election for the more powerful lower house, which Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu is expected to dissolve Wednesday amid a crisis of confidence in Japan’s sclerotic political leadership.

Pundits and opposition leaders are saying that the Liberal Democratic Party stands a good chance of losing absolute control of Parliament for the first time since 1955. The party seems likely to retain control of the government by picking up independents or forming a coalition with moderates in the opposition.

There are worse-case scenarios of an opposition coalition taking power, however. And female voters could once again emerge as the electoral wild card.

“Women’s influence is going to be very big from now on because the Japanese are more and more concerned about their livelihoods,” Takako Doi, the charismatic chairwoman of the Japan Socialist Party, said in a recent interview. “Our quality of life is not only affected by politics, it’s now providing the focus to change politics. And that energy comes from women.”

Doi spearheaded the opposition victory in last summer’s upper house election with a strategy of castigating the Liberal Democrats for unilaterally imposing a 3% consumption tax--widely perceived as burdensome, regressive and unfair. Women have especially resented the sting of the tax, which went into effect last April 1, because they control the finances in most homes.

Compounding Doi’s tax revolt was a fit of outrage over the geisha sex scandal that embroiled then-Prime Minister Sosuke Uno. The Liberal Democrats’ fortunes also suffered gravely from an outpouring of public disgust with pervasive corruption in politics. The most notorious villains in the Recruit Co. scandal, an affair involving insider trading and influence-peddling that climaxed early last year, occupied leadership positions in the ruling party.

Even Makiko Hamada’s husband was implicated in questionable financial dealings with Recruit, which an aide to the lawmaker defended as ethically sound but distorted by the press. Hamada, for the record, insists that her husband is clean. Only the Liberal Democratic Party, which she tried in vain to persuade him to quit, is dirty.

Hamada said she admires Doi, but she has no use for the Socialist Party and thinks its chairwoman has already outlived her usefulness.

“She has played her role,” Hamada said. “She taught people how to vote with their own will, but that’s all.”

Yet the consumption tax and corruption issues remain unresolved, and both can be expected to cast a long shadow on next month’s voting. The Kaifu government has made only limited proposals to revise the tax, and the Liberal Democrats have moved little beyond rhetoric with their promises for political reform.

“It’s like snow building up quietly,” said Teiko Kihira, former chairwoman of the Japan League of Women Voters who won an upper house seat in the last election as an unaffiliated progressive. “There may have been a blizzard last July, but the anger is piled up now. It’s not all that noticeable, but it’s very deep.”

Doi, the Socialist leader, said she expects the rancor over the tax to broaden now to other economic concerns, such as astronomical costs for land and housing and the large discrepancy between consumer prices in domestic and foreign markets--even for goods made in Japan. Recent government surveys indicate Japanese pay as much as two to three times more than U.S. shoppers for many basic commodities.

“We do not have a standard of living that’s commensurate to our economic power,” Doi told The Times. “A sense of dissatisfaction about this is gradually coming to the surface.”

As an agent for change, however, the Japanese woman remains an enigma.

No one illustrates the delicate and contradictory art of feminine ambition in this culture better than Mayumi Moriyama, a former Labor Ministry bureaucrat and veteran Liberal Democratic member of the upper house whom Kaifu appointed last August as chief Cabinet secretary. Holding the rank of state minister in a post that might be described as the prime minister’s right-hand person, Moriyama has risen higher in elected government than any women before.

It was no accident. Moriyama replaced Kaifu’s first chief cabinet secretary, Tokuo Yamashita, who was forced to resign after 16 days in office because of his involvement in yet another sex scandal.

Since then, Japan has witnessed its first sexual harassment law suit, filed by an aggrieved “office lady” in Fukuoka, and an intense debate over seku-hara, a neologism for sekushuaru harasumento , has played itself out in the media.

Moriyama conceded in an interview the other day that she is a “token” of the ruling party’s “notice of women’s influence” in politics.

“But it’s not a joke,” Moriyama said. “They are serious. The situation was so serious at the time they felt they had to do whatever they could to give a better image to the government. If they found me as a token and decided to use me, it’s my honor.”

Yet Moriyama, who briefs the media twice a day as the prime minister’s official spokeswoman, has not remained content to be mere window dressing. She recently provoked a furor, for example, by asking the Japan Sumo Assn. if she could enter the ring--where women are prohibited by tradition--to award the Prime Minister’s Cup at the end of the New Year’s sumo tournament.

While the sumo establishment was in a state of near-panic and preparing to reject her radical proposal earlier this month, Moriyama quietly withdrew the challenge.

“I wanted change, I didn’t want a fight,” Moriyama said in flawless English, a rare facility for a Japanese politician. “In this country, it’s not clever to push as hard as possible if you really want to have a good effect.”

Indeed, women may prove to be a revitalizing force in the voting booths next month, but they are not pushing very hard to get on the ballots.

Doi and her Socialists are backing only a dozen women out of about 160 candidates who have declared so far. The ruling party expects to put up only two or three, Moriyama said.

This is in sharp contrast with last year’s election, when half the seats in the upper house were contested. A record 143 women ran for office and won 17% of the seats at stake. Women now occupy 33 of the total 252 seats in the upper house and hold a mere seven out of 512 seats--or 1.4%--in the lower house.

The sudden shrinking away from the campaign trail by women may reflect the hardball politics associated with the lower house, which has far more clout than the upper chamber, since it controls the budget and names the prime minister. Voters, as well as party bosses, tend to be more demanding on credentials in this chamber. Winning a lower house seat comes only at extraordinary expense.

“Frankly speaking, there are too many men candidates running already, so there’s no room for women to squeeze in,” Moriyama said of the Liberal Democratic ticket. “But there are some who are lucky, or brave enough, to run.”

Hamada, the housewife who rejected the Liberal Democratic Party, said she plans to run her campaign with a war chest of about $140,000, all personal savings from the import-export business she has run for the past 12 years. That is a fraction of what conventional wisdom says a newcomer needs to finance his--or her--way into Parliament.

But Hamada, who worked a year as a Japan Air Lines flight attendant before entering elite Tokyo University, where she met her husband, thinks the media hoopla surrounding her candidacy will win enough votes that there will be no need to taint herself with “money politics.”

In fact, she said she feels liberated from the onerous burden of giving ritual gifts and offering congratulatory or condolence cash to her network of social acquaintances, a practice common to all Japanese but recently frowned upon for politicians because it bears a distinct resemblance to vote-buying.

“The election has been good for me,” Hamada said. “I can go to a funeral now and not leave an envelope. People don’t expect that any more. They’re not poor.”

Some seasoned politicians, however, are dismissing Hamada’s campaign tactics as naive.

Kihira, the lawmaker and former League of Women Voters official, said Hamada may be making a “big political mistake” by relying on a kind of celebrity status to draw votes.

“It’s not clear what her candidacy means,” Kihira said. “She feels inspired, but you can’t practice politics on inspiration. Intuition is a feminine virtue, but politics requires knowledge and experience.”

Moriyama agreed.

“It’s not easy to win an election . . . image and fashion are not enough,” she said. “First of all you have to win the election within the system. Otherwise, men will never respect you, and you won’t be an equal in Parliament.”

Does Doi, a seven-term veteran of the lower house, qualify to serve as Japan’s next prime minister?

“I’m sorry, but she won’t have a chance,” Moriyama said. “She’s doing very well in her capacity as an opposition leader, but I’m afraid she’s not good enough to be leader of the country--yet.”