NEWS ANALYSIS : In Japan, Some Votes More Equal Than Others : Election: Lopsided apportionment favors rural areas over cities. But even under a ‘fair’ system, the ruling party would have won Sunday.

In the 4th District of Kanagawa Prefecture (state), a dormitory area for the Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolis, 1,347,435 voters elect four representatives to the House of Representatives.

Out in the Japan Alps 3rd District of Nagano Prefecture, 427,478 voters also cast ballots for four members of the lower house of Parliament.

Such are the anomalies of Japan’s electoral system, where one vote in the countryside can be worth three in the cities.

The lopsided apportionment is often cited by American trade negotiators, who for years have been trying to persuade Japan to open its markets to imports of rice and other farm products. Some U.S. officials even have charged that the conservative Liberal Democratic Party keeps itself in power by inflating the value of the rural vote.

So do Japanese critics. Newspapers and scholars routinely report that farmers’ support is critical to the Liberal Democrats’ maintaining their control of the government.

But an examination by The Times of the results in Sunday’s election for the lower house showed that, with Japan’s present system of multi-member constituencies--most with three to five seats apiece--Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu’s party would have won the election even if the chamber’s present 512 seats had been reapportioned to have roughly equal numbers of voters. It also would have won the last lower house election four years ago.

Both contests would have been much closer, however. Instead of finishing with a majority of 34 seats, the Liberal Democrats probably would have scraped through Sunday with the kind of razor-thin margin that political analysts initially had predicted.

Nonetheless, the analysis underscores one point made by the critics: distribution of seats in Japan’s multi-member constituencies is a mess.

With 90,578,761 eligible voters, a reshuffling that would assign one representative to each 176,911 voters--the nationwide population average for the 512 districts--would have produced a reapportionment in 99 of the 130 districts.

So out of whack is the system that only one of Tokyo’s 11 districts has the proper number of seats for its population. Six districts are under-represented, while four others are over-represented.

Because the number of candidates would increase or decrease depending on the number of seats at stake, any application of a one-man, one-vote analysis to an actual election can offer only an indication of a likely trend. But The Times’ examination showed that 44 Liberal Democrats won seats Sunday that should not have existed in over-represented districts. Fourteen other Liberal Democrats who lost would have won if their districts had not been under-represented.

The difference, or 30 fewer seats, theoretically would have trimmed the party’s victory to a four-seat majority. Four years ago, instead of a 54-seat majority, their margin would have been about 30 seats.

In earlier, nip-and-tuck elections, the result, indeed, would have been a defeat.

Ironically, the Socialists, who scored the biggest gains in their history, also would not have done as well Sunday. Socialist winners in 11 districts would have lost under a more equal apportionment. And no Socialist loser would have benefitted.

The biggest beneficiaries would have been precisely the parties that suffered the biggest setbacks: the Communists and the middle-of-the-road Democratic Socialist Party. Their power base is concentrated in urban areas.

While the farm vote is important--so much so that the Socialists have become more protectionist in their agricultural policies than the Liberal Democrats--the rural clout does not, by itself, explain the perennial conservative grasp on power.

Indeed, last July, far from sustaining the Liberal Democrats, the farm vote contributed to their defeat in an upper house election. Conservatives lost all of their seats in the rice-rich Tohoku (northeast) region and on the mikan (mandarin orange) island of Shikoku.

Hardly had vote counting ended Monday when 11 complainants in Tokyo and Hiroshima once again filed separate suits demanding that courts rule the Sunday election a violation of the constitution’s guarantee of equal representation. If past cases are a guide, the suits are unlikely to succeed.

Japan’s court system, prone to hand down judgments based more on custom and the status quo than on the letter of the law, has consistently refused to insist on reapportionment of seats.

Four years ago, the court ruled that a 2.99 to 1 discrepancy in population and a 2.92 to 1 imbalance in voters is acceptable. In 1986, Parliament reapportioned seats to reduce the maximum mismatch to 2.99 to 1.

Kaifu has promised to carry out another reapportionment as part of a political reform package to be presented on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Japan’s parliamentary system this fall. But no one is holding his breath.

Although everyone agrees that seats need to be reapportioned, no one is calling for a one-man, one-vote system.

Even the perennial opposition Socialists and Communists demand only that the discrepancy be reduce to less than 2 to 1.

JAPAN’S ELECTION FOR PARLIAMENT

NUMBER OF SEATS 1986 1990 Change Liberal Democratic Party 310 290* -20 Socialist Party 86 141* +55 Komei (Clean Government) Party 57 46 -11 Communist Party 27 16 -11 Democratic Socialist Party 26 14 -12 Minor parties 6 5 -1 Total 512 512

* Includes unaffiliated winners expected to vote with the party.