Japan’s Restless Voters Could Throw the Rascals Out : Elections: A Socialist victory could be good for Japanese democracy, but the scandal-tainted ruling party will probably get a majority.

Japan is at a political turning point. More important, this turning point is a democratic one.

Being callous Euro-Americans--those U.S. citizens who find their intellectual identity in the culture of Europe--revisionist critics of Japanese politics have been keen to draw the fault line between Western and Asian civilization with a racial and nationalist cast. This error is compounded by their dogmatic insistence that contemporary Japan is neither liberal nor democratic--it’s merely a modernized version of the collective darkness of Asian misrule. The fact that Bush Administration policies toward Tokyo have been tainted by these unsober musings only highlights the dangers involved.

Japan goes to the polls today in a crucial parliamentary election. The stakes include control of the Japanese lower house, and thus the government. There is a small chance that Japanese voters will do the previously unthinkable: turn the rascals out. This would spell the end of 34 years of unbroken rule by the conservative and largely pro-American Liberal Democratic Party.

Japanese voters are certainly restless. A palpable irritation with the corrupt complacencies of the Liberal Democrats infuses the national mood. Nowhere do such feelings threaten to have greater impact than in the third voting district of Gumma Prefecture, near Tokyo. That is the stronghold of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone.

Despite Nakasone’s infamous remark about the intelligence levels of blacks and Puerto Ricans, he remains one of America’s most important friends in the Japanese Diet (Asia’s oldest parliament). Would his defeat mark a new maturity for Japanese democracy?

Nakasone was, by all accounts, deeply involved in the Recruit affair, the influence-peddling scandal that brought down Noboru Takeshita’s Cabinet and helped pave the way for the crushing defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party in last summer’s upper-house elections. The opposition, centered on the Japan Socialist Party, now controls the constitutionally weaker chamber for the first time since the Liberal Democratic Party was formed in 1955.

In the wake of the Recruit scandal, Nakasone quit the ruling party and abandoned leadership of his faction to atone for his perceived wrongdoings. The Tokyo Public Prosecutor failed to take him to court, but Nakasone now faces the possible humiliation of rejection at the ballot box.

If so, an iron law of Japanese electoral behavior--that political corruption is never punished at the polls if it is viewed as serving local interests--would have to be recast. Farmers will largely determine Nakasone’s fate. He may thus become a victim of a wider turbulence that has shaken the traditional political allegiances of Japan’s rural voters during the past year.

At issue is the central conundrum of modern Japanese social policy: How to bind the country’s traditionally disadvantaged rural communities to the body politic without derailing the nation’s economic advance? This quest is not idle. Farmer disaffection fatally undermined Japan’s prewar experiment with party democracy.

After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the American occupation tried to “solve” the rural problem with massive land reform. What Japan’s modernizers had failed to achieve in 60 years, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s bureaucrats managed in fewer than five. Though revisionists in the United States are fond of dismissing Japan’s American interlude as a sham, these land reforms and the subsequent overweighting of rural representation in the Diet made Japan’s farmers a power in the country.

As a consequence, Japan’s conservative politicians rushed to contain the most liquid moment in postwar rural politics. The resulting dependence of conservative parties--later, the Liberal Democratic Party--on rural voters has persisted. This factor will help decide whether the ruling party captures the minimum 257 seats necessary to maintain a majority in the Diet.

As support for the LDP has waned, the Japan Socialist Party has experienced a spectacular revival. Having carried only 85 seats in the last lower-house vote, the Socialists are too weak to take on the Liberal Democrats alone. But today they could win, by generous estimate, 152 seats (pessimists insist on a much lower figure). In coalition, the Socialists could take power.

A Socialist victory could be good for Japanese democracy. Like France in 1981 after years of Gaullist rule, Japan needs a change of party. Takako Doi, the first women to head the Japan Socialist Party, could be her country’s answer to Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist who ended a generation of French conservative domination.

The party, to be sure, has no recent experience of governing the country. It might stumble badly after taking power (as Mitterrand did). But nothing would awaken the Japan Socialist Party more sharply from its Marxist dreams and neutralist pretensions than a splash of bracing power. In any case, its more moderate coalition partners would block any radical nonsense.

Certainly Socialist rule would be a risk, but with the fundamentals of the Japanese economy so strong, it is one that Japan and the world can afford. The Liberal Democratic Party clearly needs a rest. More important, the full maturation of Japanese democracy is inconsistent with one-party rule--even if elected.

There are good reasons for thinking that this quiet revolution will not happen. Though it may lose 40 of the 300 seats it won in 1986, the LDP will probably retain at least 260 seats, yielding a majority, plus three. Even the wily Nakasone may keep his seat.

But the Socialists may come closer to real power than at any time since 1948. Whatever today’s outcome, they and their allies will dominate the upper house for the next five years. This makes some form of coalition politics almost inevitable.

But there is a larger point: The prospect of a peaceful ballot-box revolution, viewed in the light of Japan’s postwar embrace of democratic government, should make it clear to even the most prejudiced revisionist that Japan, democracy’s greatest (some would say only) East Asian province, cannot be cast into the outer darkness.

Making--and keeping--Japan democratic has been the central goal of America foreign policy in the Pacific during the postwar period. It is the Japanese who have made a success of their democracy, though we have helped. Sometimes, our help has been decisive. In Japan, as no where else in Asia, we have won hearts and minds in ways that honor our Founding Fathers and their democratic ideals.

As we start rethinking relationships with Japan, we must keep in mind this postwar achievement and our role in it. The Japanese have not forgotten; nor should we.