COLUMN ONE : Does Japan Ever Really Change? : The question is asked ever more frequently, even within the country. Amid economic tensions, it especially bedevils American policy-makers.

Tetsundo Iwakuni was a man at the core of Japan’s elite, a bright Tokyo University graduate who moved comfortably in international business circles as an executive in the London office of Nikko Securities.

But in 1977, Iwakuni stunned his company by rejecting a promotion in the home office and resigning in order to remain overseas and allow his daughters to achieve their dream of finishing their education in English.

“Separating from Nikko Securities meant separating from Japan society. . . ,” Iwakuni said. “Leaving a company? It’s almost like saying goodby to God, for a Japanese.”

In 1988, Iwakuni again astonished Japanese society. Resigning from a $500,000-a-year stockbroker’s job in New York City, he become mayor of Izumo, a backwater city of 200,000 near the Sea of Japan--at about one-fifth his former pay.

Yet, despite his two dramatic departures from the norm, Iwakuni said that if his children had been sons, he would have acted according to traditional standards.

“Certainly I would have thought that (sons) must go to Tokyo University--that they must work for a company like Mitsubishi or Hitachi,” he said. “I probably would have, willingly, accepted that promotion, and I probably would not have dared to leave Japanese society.”

Daughters, he reasoned, do not have to bow to the requirements of gakureki shakai-- a society based on educational records--by attending the best schools, the standard pattern for success in Japan.

And in agreeing to become mayor of Izumo, his hometown, he was repaying an obligation to townspeople who had helped finance his education at Tokyo University.

The story of a Japanese who can represent revolutionary change even while standing as a bulwark of tradition inevitably raises the question, “Does Japan ever change?”

It is a question asked ever more frequently by critics of Japan, especially by frustrated Americans in policy-making posts who must deal with economic frictions. Even some Japanese, who have been calling for change for at least two decades, are asking it.

UC San Diego Prof. Chalmers Johnson says that his files on Japan are filled with articles about “turning points,” “watersheds,” “fundamental change” and “new eras.” Yet Japan, he complains, never changes.

Chie Nakane, a noted sociology professor at Tokyo University, agrees.

“There are plenty of changes on the surface,” she says. “But the flow of thinking at the bottom never changes.”

Others insist, equally adamantly, that change is a way of life in Japan.

“Japan is constantly changing and will keep on doing so,” then-Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu said in 1990. “Japan has changed from a (country) concentrating on its own economic benefits to a major power (sharing) accountability in the management of the world economy. . . . The consciousness of our people is changing too.”

“Watch what Japan can do to change itself in five years,” Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa boasted to leaders of the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada at their Munich summit last July.

Both sides in the debate may be correct.

Just as Iwakuni, in his personal values, upheld tradition even while accepting fundamental changes in his life, “the miracle of Japan is its ability to absorb dizzying change without changing its core,” said Edward Seidensticker, a former Columbia University professor and Japan expert who has lived here on and off since 1945.

Indeed, in Japan, “innovation is tradition,” he said. But “the conservative core--the ethical systems, the modes of behavior, the notions of what’s right and wrong and what is duty--these are the sorts of things that hold.”

Nakane once compared the Japanese to an amoeba--a soft-body animal with no spine. You touch an amoeba, she noted, and it changes in shape, but not in content.

Changes in Japan are usually touched off by changes in the world around it or by new conditions at home.

In October, for example, Japan completed the dispatch to Cambodia of the first ground troops it has sent overseas since World War II--a breathtaking reversal of 47 years of “low-posture” nonintervention in international disputes.

The change was launched by Kaifu, who as prime minister in August, 1990, immediately ruled out sending Japanese troops overseas after Iraq invaded Kuwait. But opinion here changed after Japan’s contribution of $13 billion--but no personnel--to the Gulf War effort spurred international condemnations of “checkbook diplomacy.”

Asked why Kaifu underwent his about-face, Kaifu’s political mentor, Toshio Komoto, casually responded, “Because the world has changed.”

Gaiatsu , or foreign pressure, has proved an effective agent for change--producing what, on the surface, appear to be full-scale reversals.

Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived with a fleet of gunboats in 1853 and precipitated a switch, 15 years later, from 2 1/2 centuries of Tokugawa-era isolation to a drive to build a “rich country, strong army.” Japan’s devastation and defeat in World War II and the American occupation that followed spurred a transformation from authoritarian, militaristic rule to a pacifist democracy.

In the Tokugawa isolation and also in the changes of 1868 and 1945, the underlying motive was the same: to preserve Japan’s independence by adapting to global circumstances of the times.

As Seidensticker said: “Japan took on new forms in 1945, but it did not really change at heart.”

The post-World War II constitution, for example, may have guaranteed legal freedom of speech, but “the avoidance of being called different (remains) one of the most basic precepts of getting along in Japanese society,” noted Reiko Tamura, a free-lance political journalist. “When asked to state one’s opinion freely, the normal Japanese . . . will look furtively around the room and say nothing out of the ordinary.”

Now, foreign pressure is reinforcing Japanese calls for economic change that date back to the 1970s. This time, the calls are coming from such groups as the Keidanren (Federation of Economic Organizations), where they take the form of advocating kyosei-- variously translated as “coexistence” or “symbiosis.”

The message is that Japan has simply grown too competitive and that, to get along with trading partners, it must handicap itself by raising prices and boosting profits.

But at the top, where change occurs in Japan, only tentative signs of reform have emerged.

“The people have never participated in a change of the country. We have had struggles against those in power but no example of any of those succeeding,” said Shigeru Aoki, a former head of the Salaryman’s Party, a now-defunct political party that advocated a better deal for average workers. Ordinary citizens, however, have had plenty of reasons to press for change.

Even though Japan has a larger per capita income than any industrialized nation except Switzerland, a recent poll showed that two-thirds of Japanese do not feel that the nation’s wealth is reflected in their daily lives.

“The country is prospering, but I can’t say life has gotten any better,” said Tomio Murayama, 42, a university graduate who is a parts buyer for a construction machinery manufacturer.

Murayama makes more than $4,200 a month, including bonuses, but lives with his wife and two teen-age daughters in a corrugated iron house no bigger than a one-car garage. There is no indoor bath or shower, and the kitchen is the size of a small walk-in closet.

His wife complains that the living room is so small she has to crane her neck to watch the television perched atop a tall chest of drawers. The Murayamas take three-day vacations twice a year within Japan. That’s all they can afford, in a nation where lodging could easily cost $200 per person a night.

Yet few Japanese complain. “There is no point in thinking about what you can’t get,” Murayama says simply. “Anyway, all we really need is a roof over our head.”

Volumes have been written about the so-called shin-jinrui , the “new human beings” in their 20s who are seen as markedly different from older generations. Pleasure-seeking instead of diligence, and conspicuous consumption instead of frugality, are purportedly among the traits setting them apart.

Yet Seidensticker commented of the shin-jinrui : “People were saying exactly the same thing when I came here 45 years ago. When people become 40, they act just like everybody else at 40.”

As for frugality, household savings rose 8% from a year earlier to an average of $102,358 in September--notwithstanding the free-spending shin-jinrui. By comparison, the 87.5% of American families who held any savings had an average of $10,400 put away, according to Federal Reserve figures for 1989, the latest available.

In Japan, more people may be declaring bankruptcy these days because of reckless credit card spending, but Yoji Yamada, president of the Nihon Shinpan credit card company, says six of every 10 people who hold one of his company’s cards don’t use it even once a year--and 90% of some companies’ cardholders never use them at all.

Although Japanese rank among the world’s greatest students of foreign cultures and technologies, foreign ideas are inevitably compartmentalized.

“Japanese digest Western culture the way they eat sushi--in contained, definable blocks. It never gets into their chemistry,” said South Korea’s former ambassador to the United States, Kim Kyung Won, who is now director of the Social Science Institute in Seoul.

That’s why there is nothing unusual about non-Christian Japanese getting married in a Christian wedding ceremony. They like the form of the ceremony and think nothing about its substance.

Traditional beliefs remain remarkably immutable.

Vast numbers of parents consult fortunetellers (fortunetelling books also are plentiful) to choose names for babies that, when combined with the family name, will have the proper, or lucky, number of strokes in the Chinese characters in which they are written.

Toyota Motor Corp., Japan’s most profitable manufacturing firm, regularly consults fortunetellers in deciding factory locations. And a belief persists that Japanese, unlike all others in the world, can communicate without speaking to each other. Japanese call it ishin-denshin (“with the heart, transmit the heart”).

Yet vast substantive change has occurred.

Seidensticker notes that judicial harshness in the Tokugawa era was so severe that at least two people a day were executed at merely one execution site in Edo (now Tokyo). Today, suspended sentences abound, and no one has been executed in Japan for nearly three years.

Today’s mainstream economy is controlled by business managers, not by stockholders as it was until 1945, when single families owned whole groups of major companies. Now, stockholders have been locked out of decision-making to the point that Japan is no longer a capitalist society, said Koji Matsumoto, an official of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

The land of smooth labor-management relations, similarly, was a model of atrocious labor-management relations until after the American occupation forced companies to stop banning unions.

In the prewar days, 50,000 miners in the coal town of Omuta, for example, worked 14 hours a day without a day off all year. Thin boards in stable-like company barracks provided “booths” for families, with as many as seven households sharing a single barracks. Thugs kept workers in line by bullying or threatening them. Those who complained were jailed or replaced by convict labor.

Since the mid-1980s, successive Japanese governments have conducted extensive import-promotion campaigns to combat a “buy national” mental attitude. But until the late 1960s, consumers’ preferences for foreign--especially American--products were so strong that the government regularly conducted “buy Japanese” campaigns.

Well into the ‘60s, Japanese were criticized for a consistent lack of punctuality--so much so that foreigners spoke of “Japan time.” Japanese could be expected to show up for appointments at least 45 minutes late.

In those days, money meant more than time. Japanese, for example, would go through innumerable transfers on buses, subways and trains to get to an appointment. Cabbies were so desperate for fares that they honked their horns when they saw a foreigner walking along a street. Now, with affluence, time is more important than money, and most Japanese are punctual to a fault. The demand for taxis--to save even a few minutes--is so great that cabbies frequently pass by foreigners.

A penchant for adapting to new circumstances has been one of the most unchanging aspects of the Japanese character, and one can predict where some future changes might occur.

A growing labor shortage that will strike Japan in full force at the turn of the century, for example, already is nibbling away at traditional obstacles--although not prejudices--against the presence of women and foreigners in the work force.

“Our labor shortage will worsen (to the point that) probably 10 years from now, 60% to 70% of Japanese women will be in the labor market. Business will have to accept women’s grievances,” said Makoto Ato, director of population studies at the Health and Welfare Ministry.

“If the fundamentals of the economy change, society will change.”

Similarly, until the late 1980s, the idea of Japan accepting new waves of foreigners was inconceivable. Today, their ranks have expanded to nearly 500,000. The handwriting is on the wall.

“There is no way to send all of those people home. Japan will eventually have to accept them all,” predicts Takako Sodei, a professor at Ochanomizu Women’s University.

Yet one thing appears certain: Change will probably come in segments so small as to be barely noticeable over the short run.

Just the other day, for example, one government agency found that, yes, change is occurring in the Japanese household. Husbands now spend twice the time they did 15 years ago helping their wives with household chores--24 minutes a day, up from 12 minutes a day in 1977.