To Japanese Public, Election Is No Match for Sumo Stars : Mood: Voters find better things to do than cast ballots. Reasons are many, but skepticism tops the list.

Japan’s parliamentary election Sunday was billed as the country’s most important in four decades. But to the Japanese public, the most compelling matchup of the day had nothing to do with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party versus a plethora of new conservative parties.

It was Akebono versus Takanohana, Japan’s top two sumo stars, who faced off in a riveting final match to decide who would win the Emperor’s Cup in the Nagoya Tournament completed Sunday.

Ratings for election coverage ranged from a high of 25.6% for the public NHK network to a low of 3.8% for the Tokyo Broadcasting System. But the sumo stars grabbed a 66.7% share, the highest ever for a sumo broadcast.

(Akebono, who was born Chad Rowan in Hawaii, won--his first victory as yokozuna, or grand champion. He donated $9,200 of his prize money to victims of last week’s earthquakes and seismic waves in northern Japan.)

The election’s low TV ratings mirrored the paltry voter turnout of 67.2%, the lowest ever for an election for the lower house of Parliament. Non-voters gave myriad reasons for their lack of interest, from the rainy weather to confusion over too many parties. But skepticism seemed to top the list.

“In each election, it’s said politics will change,” said Takayuki Miyazaki, 23, a company worker in Yokohama. “I didn’t vote because I didn’t think the election would make a difference.”

Still, some small measures of change were evident. The persistent cry to clean up dirty politics seems to have had a sobering effect on the nation’s sake makers in this campaign season. Usually, their sales boom as gifts of sake are passed between candidates and supporters.

But during this campaign, sales have been flat. People who used to routinely ignore prohibitions against such gifts during the official two-week campaign seemed carefully to observe it this time, said a spokesman for Ozeki Corp., a well-known sake maker. Mercian, a Tokyo wine and sake seller, said it used to bring gifts of sake to various politicians but stopped this year amid the climate of cracking down on corruption.

Change was touted not only in substance but also style by various candidates. Some of them, combatting the dirty image of money politics, emphasized instead their “stingy campaigns.”

One man, rather than relying on the standard sound trucks and young women hired as “nightingales” to chirp the candidate’s name repeatedly, mounted one loudspeaker on his bicycle and pedaled throughout the town. Another candidate raised her money solely from yard sales of such goods as miniature pickled onions and secondhand dishes. Still another displayed posters bragging about how little he had spent: just $55,420, a mere 17% of the legal campaign limit.

But the flashiest symbols of change were seen among candidates of the Japan New Party. As usual, Yuriko Koike, the former newscaster-turned-politician and self-described party cheerleader, led the blitz.

Traditional politicians celebrate their victory with a ritual called “Voices of Joy,” in which supporters gather around their candidate, fling up their arms and scream “Banzai!” (cheers) three times.

Not Koike. On election night, she gathered a row of young women and led them in a new cheer--in English: “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! Hey!”

Next to Koike, the woman who drew the most media attention was Takako Doi, the former chairwoman of the Socialist Party, who handily won in her multi-seat district in Hyogo prefecture even though her party suffered its worst ever debacle, losing half its seats. Because Doi and Koike were competing in the same district (along with five others, four of them men), many of the reporters tried to portray the race as a “Fight of the Madonnas.”

Other female candidates were similarly trivialized. But Doi, a blunt, no-nonsense university professor, had the last word when a male TV newscaster asked her about the “Madonna Fight” on election night.

“I’ve been repeatedly asked that question in this campaign. I would have thought you would come up with a new question,” she snapped, humiliating him before millions of viewers.

That force of character endears Doi to all manner of voters, from one gruff Tokyo taxi driver who praised her directness and compared her to Margaret Thatcher, to a group of young women hanging out at Tokyo’s hottest disco, Juliana’s, on election night.

Asked whom they wanted for their next prime minister, the Juliana’s bloc mentioned former Finance Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto for his movie-star good looks and Renewal Party leader Tsutomu Hata, for his boyish appeal. But Doi was unanimously named first.

Why, one sultry young woman clad in skimpy disco wear was asked.

“She reminds me of my mother,” was the reply.