Japan Opens Campaign for Upper House Election : Politics: The ruling party hopes to take first step July 26 toward regaining control.

A campaign began Wednesday for an election July 26 that will measure how big an interim step Japan’s ruling party can take to restore its power in the upper house of Parliament.

The ballot--for 127 of the 252 seats in the upper house--also shapes up both as a referendum on a law passed last month that will enable Japan to dispatch noncombat troops overseas and as the first nationwide test for Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, who took office last November.

“Without political stability, there can be no stability in the livelihood of the people,” declared Shin Kanemaru, vice president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who launched the party’s campaign in place of Miyazawa, who was in Munich. If the government is handed over to the Socialists and the Communists, he warned, “the nation and the people’s wealth and property cannot be protected.”

Makoto Tanabe, the Socialists’ chairman, accused the conservative ruling party of violating Japan’s so-called peace constitution of 1947 by enacting the law to permit the dispatch overseas of noncombat troops to participate in disaster relief and U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping organizations.

He appealed to voters to deny a majority to the combined forces of the Liberal Democrats, the Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party and the middle-of-the-road Democratic Socialist Party. Cooperation of the three parties made possible the passage of the law on peacekeeping troops.

Miyazawa’s party is fielding only 82 candidates--or five fewer than it would need to see elected in order to restore the majority it lost for the first time three years ago. It has set a target of winning more than half the seats up for election this time--a feat that, if repeated in the next election in 1995, would restore the Liberal Democrats’ command in the chamber. Such an outcome also would shore up Miyazawa’s stature.

The Liberal Democrats hold 114 seats, or 13 short of a majority. The Komei and Democratic Socialist parties control a combined 20 seats.

Approval of the upper house, or a two-thirds vote in the lower house to override the upper house, is required for approval of all bills except the budget and treaties. The Liberal Democrats hold only 54% of the seats in the lower house.

Keys to the outcome of the election lie in the fate of 22 candidates who registered under the banner of Rengo (the Japan Trade Union Confederation) and 16 entries fielded by a reform-minded conservative group, the New Japan Party.

Whatever gains the two groups might make are expected to come at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.

Despite dramatic gains in both the 1989 election and a 1990 ballot for the lower house, the Socialists are running 12 fewer candidates than they did three years ago.

In 1989, women, small shopkeepers and farmers rebelled in anger against enactment of a 3% consumption tax, a “stocks-for-favors” scandal, the opening of Japan’s beef and citrus fruit markets to imports and the revelation that the incumbent prime minister, Sosuke Uno, had kept a geisha as a mistress. The uprising stripped the Liberal Democrats of 23% of their holdings in the upper house.

But this time, the Socialists have only the overseas dispatch of noncombat troops as a strong issue. Sluggishness in the Japanese economy has traditionally helped the Liberal Democrats, who are regarded by many voters as the only party capable of running the government.