Japan ‘Money-Power’ Politics Makes Strong Comeback : Reform: Ruling party is reasserting itself scant months after withdrawing from the spotlight over the Recruit scandal.

Corruption is out of fashion as an issue in Japanese politics these days, and cries for political reform have given way to an adage: It’s better for a politician to be a little dirty and get the job done than to be very clean but incompetent.

Sensing the changing currents in public mood, the old guard of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is reasserting itself only a few months after discreetly withdrawing from the spotlight amid allegations of unethical fund-raising and influence-peddling.

It was less than a year ago that the Recruit bribery case, one of Japan’s worst postwar scandals, toppled a prime minister, tainted the entire Liberal Democratic leadership and contributed to a humiliating defeat for the ruling party in the July election for Parliament’s upper house.

But as the campaign for the Feb. 18 lower house election gets under way, public outrage over “money-power politics,” as it is called here, appears to have dissipated. The candidates themselves are doing little to bring it back into focus, fearing that the theme could easily backfire.

The upshot of this sudden bout of political amnesia does not look promising for Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu. If his party loses the election, he would certainly be forced to resign. But even if he leads the Liberal Democrats to a decisive victory, he is likely to be bumped from office by autumn in favor of a politician with traditional clout, one perceived as more competent, political insiders and analysts say.

Shintaro Abe, the former foreign minister, Recruit scandal veteran and old-style party boss, is believed to be waiting in the wings to unseat Kaifu. This may actually be good news for Japan’s drifting foreign policy and the government’s paralysis in dealing with U.S.-Japanese economic friction.

Although Abe, 65, has been ill and is rumored to be suffering from cancer, he is considered highly “competent.” Kaifu, a relatively youthful 59, has a spotless record on graft, but he is a political lightweight who commands little respect.

“It’s extremely important to restore capability to the government so we can respond to the pressures of the U.S.-Japan relationship and the changes in the international scene,” said Masayoshi Takemura, a lower house legislator and a member of Abe’s faction in the ruling party. “We anticipate Mr. Abe will become premier by the end of the year.”

Takemura, who serves on the Liberal Democrats’ Political Reform Committee, conceded in a recent interview that Abe represents some of the more dubious traits in the system that his committee is ostensibly attempting to overhaul. Abe was the powerful faction leader who struck a back-room deal in 1987 with Noboru Takeshita, agreeing that the two would take turns serving as prime minister.

Takeshita’s turn came first, but it was cut short by the Recruit scandal, in which Takeshita and Abe--along with dozens of other ruling and opposition party politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen--were revealed to have reaped huge profits from shady stock trading.

“I know it’s contradictory,” said Takemura. “We need to eliminate factionalism and make politics more open and democratic, but at the same time I feel loyal to Mr. Abe.”

Abe already appears to have begun his machinations to grab power. He stole Kaifu’s thunder by making a dramatic trip to Moscow in mid-January to meet Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, just as Kaifu played to a small army of Japanese news cameras at the climax of his trip to Eastern Europe.

Kaifu’s virtuous agenda for political reform, meanwhile, has become the non-issue of the hour.

Eyebrows were raised momentarily when two criminal defendants in a bribery trial spun off by the Recruit scandal--one a former Liberal Democratic Cabinet minister and the other a former top-ranking bureaucrat--declared that they would run in next month’s election. Both stand a fair chance of being elected in the atmosphere of tolerance that prevails. Support for the LDP has risen steadily, opinion polls suggest, since it bottomed out last July. A recent survey by the Asahi newspaper gives the ruling party a 37% rating, hardly solid but still closer to a tenable level.

“Japanese are a very forgetful people,” said Minoru Morita, a political commentator. “I think 60% of the public has put the Recruit incident out of their minds.”

The opposition, meanwhile, has kept largely quiet on the topic of political reform, preferring to stick to its singular hobby horse: an unpopular consumption tax the Liberal Democrats rammed through Parliament a year ago.

Indeed, making a fight out of corruption would be a high-risk tactic for the opposition, which has some recent scandals of its own to sweep under the rug--involving even the Buddhist-affiliated Komeito, or Clean Government Party.

“It would be fatal,” said Seizaburo Sato, acting director of the International Institute for Global Peace. “People expect dirtiness in the LDP, but they’re very upset when they find the opposition is involved in the same kind of dirty business.”

Sato, whose think tank is affiliated with another Recruit-muddied machine boss, former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, summed up the popular sense of resignation about perennial LDP rule: “The Liberal Democratic Party is pretty bad, but without exception, the opposition is worse.”

In the end, the Recruit affair may fit neatly into a pattern repeated about once every 10 years since the Liberal Democrats took power in 1955. The ruling party has had a habit of getting into deep trouble over money scandals, then cleansing itself in a ritual of self-criticism and vague rhetoric on reform. Once voters absolve the party by voting to keep it in power, things go back to business as usual.

The old ways are justified because doing politics has gotten to be such an expensive proposition in Japan. The common wisdom of campaign finance is told in the phrase “goto, sanraku,” which literally means “five-win, three-lose,” implying that a candidate can expect to win a lower house seat spending 500 million yen, or about $3.4 million, but is certain to fail with a war chest of only 300 million yen, or $2 million. (Japanese count big money in units of 100 million.)

Takemura’s Political Reform Committee has proposed a number of steps aimed at containing the role of money in election campaigns, where the demands of spending can range from traditional gift-giving to illegal vote-buying.

One Liberal Democratic insider lamented, however, that the idea of political reform remains an abstract one to most voters, more often arousing simplistic images of white gloves on “clean” candidates rather than concrete revisions in institutions or procedures.

Unless the people demand reform, the party is not likely to carry it out, he said.

“A lot of us think the party is suffering from a kind of metal fatigue,” said the insider, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. “If we don’t repair this soon, we’re going to crash.”

Yet there seems little immediate prospect for substantial change.

“I don’t think the LDP will carry out fundamental political reforms no matter what happens in the election,” said Takashi Inoguchi, a political science professor at the University of Tokyo.