Orators Hammer at Issues; Japan’s Campaign Heats Up : Election: Drab political bosses are left to the past. Living standards are debated as Sunday’s vote nears.

Politics, customarily staid and stable in Japan, has been turned upside down in campaigning for Sunday’s election for the lower house of Parliament.

For the first time on both sides of the political fence, the campaign is being led by orators rather than the often drab, obtuse political bosses of yesteryear.

Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has been a debater since his student days, and Takako Doi, head of the Socialist Party, is a charismatic woman. And both are hammering at the issues, notably the shortcomings of standards of living in Japan.

“The imbalance between Japan’s gigantic economic power and the poor living standards of the people must be changed,” Doi says in her set campaign speech.

Meanwhile, Kaifu, whose party for years resisted liberalization of beef imports, is boasting about how imports have lowered the price of some beef by 30%.

“I want to be known as Kaifu the cost-cutter,” he declares, pledging to reduce the gaps between high prices in Japan and what consumers in other advanced countries pay.

Even Koshiro Ishida, chairman of the No. 3 Komei (Clean Government) Party, has taken up the theme, complaining that big companies are “buying gorgeous hotels in Hawaii while people in Tokyo are struggling to buy small homes.”

This new emphasis on living standards, in a country that in many ways is the richest in the world, is unprecedented in a Japanese political campaign. But it is just one in a series of changes.

Another is the reduced emphasis on Japan’s security treaty with the United States. Kaifu continues to defend the treaty as important, but no one regards it as a life-or-death matter. Doi, who earlier toned down the Socialists’ opposition to the treaty, now speaks of it with disdain.

Even the presence of Kaifu and Doi at the helm of the campaign underscores change. Both were surprise last-ditch candidates when their parties hit bottom and had no one else to turn to.

Deploying facts and figures, Kaifu appeals to logic. Doi relies on emotional appeals, urging reform and a new brand of politics without going into details.

In terms of logic, Kaifu appears to be winning. When Doi proposed to rescind a controversial 3% consumption tax and reinstate some excise taxes, Kaifu leaped to the attack, noting that the Socialists had complained of inequities in the old excise tax system. Doi was forced to say that her proposal was only a starting point for discussion.

In terms of emotion, Doi is clearly out in front. Crowds respond with cheers as she urges them to “move a mountain” and throw out the Liberal Democrats.

In every speech, she argues that the ruling party has collected more than $200 million in campaign funds from businessmen and declares, “A campaign based on money produces politics based on money.”

Only once before, in 1980, did the Liberal Democrats go into an election with its majority threatened, and it emerged on that occasion with a huge victory.

But this time the prospects have changed. A rebellion led by women voters against the consumption tax and “money politics” deprived the Liberal Democrats of their majority in the upper house last July, and pollsters are unanimous in forecasting at least a severe setback for the Liberal Democrats on Sunday.

Kaifu barely mentions the influence-buying scandal that tainted his party’s leaders and led to his being designated prime minister last August. Instead, he appeals to voters to reject the unknowns of a Socialist-led coalition.

Doi, who took over after her party’s poor showing in the lower-house election four years ago, tells voters that they rejected the unpopular consumption tax last July and that the Liberal Democrats “crushed your desire” by rejecting a bill to abolish the tax.

“Now is the time to make the lower house a chamber that will respect your decisions,” she says.

Popular opinion about the tax is deeply split. Here in Nagaoka, in Niigata prefecture, Kiyoshi Nakamura, 55, who sells tea and coffee, says his customers have grown accustomed to the tax. But Yuko Yoneyama, 32, who works in her father’s shoe store, says she intends to vote for “whomever convinces me they will work most strongly to get rid of it.”

In Koshigaya, a Tokyo suburb, a 21-year-old student who stood in the rain to hear Kaifu speak complained that he lives “in one room in a boarding house.” Said the student, who did not give his name, “My parents send me money, and I have part-time jobs, but I still find living severe.”

The advances that have raised Japan from the devastation of World War II to global economic leadership were achieved “by the hard work of the people,” he said.

His girlfriend, who also did not give her name, disagreed. “The Liberal Democrats have played a major role,” she said. “But the need for them has disappeared. It’s time for a change.”

Both said they had not decided how they will vote Sunday.