Japanese Focus on Wallets, Not War : Elections: The issue of overseas troops fails to galvanize the population. Instead, voters look closer to home--at the economy.

Three years ago, Socialist candidate Kinuko Ofuchi stopped women in their tracks with impassioned campaign speeches opposing a highly unpopular 3% consumption tax. Campaigning as “just a housewife,” the political novice rode the anti-tax fever to an upset win that helped push the ruling Liberal Democrats from control of the upper house of Parliament for the first time.

Today, as Ofuchi barks out her campaign message to voters along winding rural roads and emerald rice paddies, the issue for the pacifist-minded Socialists is the newly enacted law allowing Japan to dispatch noncombat troops overseas for the first time since World War II.

This time, Ofuchi gets a different response to her pitch. Few people bother to listen to her, much less to stop when she stumps on the street.

Her two campaigns are a metaphor for the state of mind--and the historical change--among voters as they prepare for a July 26 upper-house election. While polls show voters regard the troop-dispatch law as a key election issue and candidates of all parties are debating its propriety, “it’s just not the strong issue that the consumption tax was,” Ofuchi said.

For Japanese voters, the passions are again coming from the pocketbook, not polemics. One poll by the Yomiuri newspaper showed 47% of voters concerned about the economy--compared with just 28% who cited the troop-dispatch law.

But this time, economic issues will benefit the ruling party instead of the opposition. It holds the power to shape economic policies--and pass out goodies from the pork barrel. In their campaigns, ruling party candidates are talking up public works projects, more housing, better parks and pension and welfare policies.

The message seems to be hitting home. In Japan’s most virulently anti-militaristic prefecture of Okinawa, where 70% of voters opposed the peacekeeping bill, a Liberal Democrat candidate is expected to win based on his promises of a major economic development plan, predicted Yoshiaki Kobayashi, political science professor at Keio University’s law school.

On the campaign trail, even Makoto Tanabe, the Socialist chairman who insisted that the troop issue was of prime importance, began advocating a $16-billion tax cut to stimulate the economy.

“The Liberal Democrats talk about roads and bridges; the Socialists talk about the constitution and peace. To the voters, roads and bridges are more important than the constitution,” Kobayashi said.

Japanese who once treated issues of war and peace as crises pronounce themselves stunned.

“That a bill such as the (troop-dispatch) law could be debated in Parliament without stirring up any citizens movements shows that there is no sense of crisis among the people,” Ryoko Ozawa, 55, told the newspaper Asahi. She was an activist against the Vietnam War who later served four terms as a politician in local assemblies.

Even incumbent Socialists viewed the party’s recent vote-delaying tactics against the peacekeeping bill as a setback for the party. “It may have been a plus among those Japanese who want to insist on peace and abiding by the constitution, but it did not win the support of the middle class,” said Kenji Yoshioka, a Socialist member of the lower house.

Certainly, some voters are worried, even alarmed, by the troop-dispatch law--and plan to vote their fears. Tsugino Nakazawa, 42, who runs a Niigata jewelry shop with her husband, has voted for the ruling party in the past but won’t this time.

“I don’t want to send my children to war,” said the mother of two teen-age sons. “Little by little, I’m afraid (the Liberal Democrats) will change the interpretation of the law and move toward remilitarization. Now Japan is well-off economically, but if we walk down the road to war again, we’ll be in real trouble.”

Ofuchi, the Socialist candidate, repeated that message over and over as she stumped in her district. Yet polls show that fewer women (22%) than men (38%) rank the troop-dispatch as the most important issue, Kobayashi said.

Unlike in the United States, where some say 1992 will be the year of the woman, 1989’s “Madonna Typhoon” of Japanese female candidates has clearly blown away. Although Ofuchi is likely to win, fewer women are running.

In 1989, a record 22 women were elected--after 14 postwar upper-house elections in which never more than 10 had won. Yet it was less of a revolt by women voters than it appeared. Among all voters who cast ballots for Socialists three years ago, 52% were men, said Kobayashi, who added that even the “Madonna candidates” got 53% of their votes from men.

The realization that women voters played less of a distinctive role in 1989 than originally believed has spurred a return to the old attitudes of politics.

“Female voters are hysterical and moody,” said Iwao Watanabe, vice secretary general of the ruling party’s Niigata headquarters. “They don’t argue policies logically. I felt (Ofuchi’s victory) was a hysterical phenomenon, and I was worried about the future of Japanese politics.”

Three years ago, the conservatives won only 29% of the seats at stake. Now attention is focused on whether Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s party can win more than 50% and lay the foundation to allow it to recover its majority in the 1995 upper-house election.

Major Japanese media polls foresee the Liberal Democrats winning 67 of 127 races. Such a result, combined with the carry-over of legislators not up for reelection, would give Miyazawa’s party 107 seats, 20 shy of a majority. If they are as successful in 1995, they would win a majority.

There are two wild cards.

* A reform-minded New Japan Party, inaugurated by a conservative renegade, has created some interest among voters.

* And a batch of opposition candidates--jointly supported by the Socialists and the middle-of-the-road Democratic Socialist Party running under the banner of Rengo (the Japan Trade Union Confederation)--is challenging Liberal Democrats in 23 election districts.

Voters “don’t trust either the Liberal Democrats or the Socialists very much,” said Nobuo Tomita, a Meiji University political science professor. “What most voters want is a Liberal Democrat government with the forces in Parliament divided almost in half.”

Kobayashi observed that “voters who didn’t like what the Liberal Democrats were doing in 1989 turned to the Socialists.” But with the Socialists unable to offer reasonable alternatives, “it was like entering a restaurant where no one ever brings what you ordered.”

As a result, the ranks of voters who don’t find any party to their liking “are growing bigger and bigger,” Kobayashi said. In an Asahi newspaper poll, 36% of all voters--and nearly 50% of voters up to the age of 35--said they supported no party.

Chiaki Kitada, a researcher in the Times’ Tokyo bureau, contributed to this story.