Interest Groups: Strong Silent Partner at Bush-Kaifu Talks : Japan: Trade reforms may test the interplay between organizations and a pervasive ruling party. It is a system that makes some ponder Japanese democracy.

The Liberal Democratic Party’s victory in last month’s elections for the lower house of Parliament is a burden as well as a blessing for Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu as he meets with President Bush in California.

The blessing is the boost that it gives to Kaifu’s tenuous leadership of the faction-ridden party.

The burden is the promises that Kaifu had to make to about 2,000 interest groups in the campaign.

Indeed, the focus of the Rancho Mirage talks appears to be on how Kaifu can balance the interest groups’ demands with Bush’s demands for reforms that might ease the U.S. trade imbalance with Japan.

So powerful are the interest groups, and so tenacious is the Liberal Democrats’ grasp on power, that Japanese have begun to join foreign critics in complaining about the status of democracy in Japan. They argue that Japan has the trappings of democracy but little of its substance.

In the view of Shigeru Aoki, an adviser to the tiny Salaryman’s Party and a former member of the upper house of Parliament, democracy exists in Japan but is immature because it was “distributed, like handouts of food,” after World War II.

“In our history,” Aoki said, “we have had struggles against those in power, but no example of any succeeding.”

Minoru Tada, a commentator and former political editor of the newspaper Yomiuri, has said that the Japanese have experienced no change of government, are not thinking of one now, and are unlikely to see one in the future.

Even Kaifu has joined the debate, though from the other side of the fence.

“Appeals by the opposition to follow the example of East Europe and oust a one-party dictatorship are ridiculous,” he said in a campaign speech. “The Liberal Democrats have stayed in power because we have won the support of the people in election after election.”

Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen asserts in his book “The Enigma of Japanese Power” that Japan maintains “an administrator-controlled political system untroubled by such unpredictable political factors as genuine entrepreneurs and genuine politicians.”

He says in effect that permanent one-party rule is assured not by authoritarian rule but by the “system.”

Only last July, influence-buying and sex scandals, combined with a taxpayers’ revolt and rage over liberalized farm imports, precipitated an unprecedented defeat for the Liberal Democrats in an election for the upper house of Parliament.

Yet in the Feb. 18 lower-house election, as if nothing had happened, Japanese voters again lined up behind what cynics call the Seiken Tanto Kabushiki Kaisha-- the Corporation in Charge of Running the Government.

The about-face can be traced to voter mentality, the power of Japanese bureaucrats and the fact that neither the interest groups nor the bureaucracy pays much attention to the upper house.

According to Aoki, the Salaryman’s Party official, people voted according to their attachment to the interest groups, which work through the ruling party to win a hearing with the bureaucrats.

In Washington, lobbyists represent their clients’ interests, but in Tokyo the lower-house legislators serve as lobbyists. They lobby the bureaucrats, who draft most of the laws and in such a way as to leave much to the discretion of the bureaucrats who carry them out.

Upper house members, commentator Tada declared, lack the power to influence bureaucrats. Thus, angry voters could safely vent their frustrations against the Liberal Democrats last July. But when it came to the lower house, it was a different matter, as Takeo Tanaka, owner of a children’s clothing shop in the Kameiri section of Tokyo, acknowledged.

Last summer, he said, he and other shopkeepers voted against the Liberal Democrats in order to express their anger at the party’s high-handed implementation of a controversial 3% consumption tax. But in the lower-house elections, Tanaka conceded, he and his colleagues would have to go back to the Liberal Democrats, who have formed every government in Japan since 1948.

“When we want a favor, we have to go to the party in power,” he said.

Small shopkeepers like Tanaka resist the encroachment of large supermarkets and department stores, which stock more imported goods. Kaifu promised in his campaign that he would not revise a Large Retail Store Law, under which those applying to establish new stores must wait as long as 10 years for approval.

So far, Japan has promised only to shorten approval procedures to two years--an offer that upset American negotiators in a recent series of trade talks and spurred Bush to ask Kaifu for the California meeting.

Akira Kume, a Liberal Democratic official, estimates that the party has close ties to 2,000 “friendly organizations.”

By contrast, the Socialist Party and the other opposition parties represent groups--including labor unions--with dwindling membership. Bureaucrats who can allocate funds for a road or a bridge in a member’s constituency, or draw up a bill providing preferential treatment for an interest group, do not even bother to meet with them.

“What we have,” said Yukio Suzuki, a professor of economics at Yokohama University, “is a pork-barrel system linked to the interest of government ministries, politicians and pressure groups.”

Deference to the Liberal Democrats’ interests has grown so widespread that all kinds of groups help the conservatives at the polls.

Taxicab firms, for example, postponed a request for higher fares until after the lower house election. Breweries delayed planned increases in the price of beer.

In principle, beer prices are not government-controlled, but the Asahi newspaper quoted a brewery executive as saying that if the National Tax Agency, which administers all alcohol business, “says ‘wait,’ there is nothing to do but wait.”

On Feb. 26, eight days after the election, Sapporo Breweries announced price increases.

Whatever the character of democracy in Japan, voter participation is much higher here than in the United States. In the recent lower house election, 73.6% of the eligible voters cast ballots. Scarcely 50% of U.S. voters turned out for the 1988 presidential election.

And despite all the special interest groups, nearly half the voters did not back the Liberal Democrats, suggesting strongly that there actually may be an opportunity for a two-party system. The fact that disgruntled voters ignored lesser opposition groups and turned to the Socialist Party for the second election in a row indicated that the opportunity is growing.

Indeed, the 64% jump in the number of Socialist-controlled seats was a historic rise for them.

Journalist Van Wolferen, without offering any evidence, concludes that the “system” has made it clear to “the realists among the Japanese left that there was very little, if any, chance that alternative political forces would ever be allowed to take over.” But he appears to accept that the alternative must somehow be leftist.

If so, the increasingly conservative voters themselves, not the system, will stand in the way of a change of government. Most analysts and voters say the Socialists remain too unrealistic to be trusted with the reins of government.

Van Wolferen appears to underestimate Japanese voters in writing that the “ de facto one-party system of Japan guaranteed that there would be no messy parliamentary democratic processes.”

The political turmoil of the last two years has already taken a toll on the system that will last at least until 1995--the earliest the conservatives can hope to recover a majority in the upper house.

There is talk that within a year another general election will be called to give the centrist, Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party a face-saving method of aligning itself with the Liberal Democrats in a coalition.

If that happens, another group will have been absorbed by the system and harnessed to its aims.

But in the meantime, “messy parliamentary democratic processes” are in the forefront of Japan’s political agenda as the Liberal Democrats search for a way to enact legislation in the upper house they no longer control--as well as to meet U.S. demands for reform.