Electoral System to Test Japanese Quest for Change

Ask Japanese homemaker Tomoko Yamashita, 40, what she wants from politicians as her nation prepares to vote for the first time under a new electoral system Sunday, and she starts on a roll.

“I’m sick of these old guys,” she says, adding that the 70-year-old Liberal Democratic Party representative of her Tokyo district for the last 24 years has values entirely different from hers.

They eat fish and soy sauce; her generation eats wieners and eggs, she says. Raised in prewar poverty, they hoard useless things; she throws them out. They ply politics through personal visits, well-timed favors and humble head-bowing to vast networks of supporters, without a whit of the policy vision demanded by younger, more cosmopolitan Japanese, she says.

Yamashita is clear: It is time to make way for the bright, 44-year-old challenger from the opposition New Frontier Party.

But as much as Yamashita desires change, Tokyo clothing shop owner Takeo Tanaka wants stability--and he makes his case with equal passion.

“I’m sick of this confusion,” Tanaka complains.

Tanaka says the LDP’s split in 1993 into two conservative forces has made life miserable for shop owners such as himself because they no longer know whom to approach for business favors.

He expects to back the LDP in a vote for order.

For the moment, the desire for stability appears to be winning out over change. A growing number of polls indicates the Liberal Democratic Party is poised to win big--and perhaps even regain the majority it lost in 1993, when the party split and renegades formed a coalition promising reform under the leadership of political aristocrat Morihiro Hosokawa.

The Hosokawa government lasted eight months, but it pushed through the landmark electoral reform law being tested for the first time Sunday.

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The law aims to reduce corruption and establish a two-party system by introducing public financing, stricter limits on campaign contributions and single-seat electoral districts for 300 of the 500 seats in the House of Representatives. The remainder will be elected by proportional representation.

So far, as candidates circle Japan’s bustling cities and verdant farmlands in vans topped by loudspeakers blaring their names, political skeptics say little change is evident--and that an LDP victory will restore the status quo.

Others, however, say the LDP’s historic split and the emergence of a new electoral system have increased competition and begun to influence Japan’s obtuse political culture.

That culture, critics say, has long allowed unelected bureaucrats to promulgate most policies and collusive triangles of business, government and politicians to forge back-room deals, a setup blamed for breeding protectionism, discouraging accountability and delaying decision-making.

“Everyone says this is not an important election, but it is the beginning of significant change,” argues Tomoaki Iwai. The Tokiwa University professor says people began losing patience with the old political order after the end of the Cold War.

Dutch author Karel van Wolferen, who was blasted as a Japan-basher for a 1989 book about the lack of political accountability, says the notion of accountability is spreading. His subsequent work suggesting ways that the people can empower themselves has garnered praise from top officials here.

“The euphoria surrounding the Hosokawa administration has evaporated, but the idea that political reform is necessary has never disappeared,” he says.

Whether they believe it or not, the parties today feel compelled to offer the Hosokawa coalition’s political rhetoric of accountability and reform.

In a recent meeting with grass-roots activists, Democratic Party leader Naoto Kan--the popular health minister who uncovered an AIDS scandal among his bureaucrats--signed a contract with citizens to carry out jointly crafted policies.

New Frontier leader Ichiro Ozawa, taking a page from the Republicans’ “Contract with America,” has pledged five programs ranging from a tax cut to bureaucratic streamlining and promised to retire from politics if he fails to deliver.

Even the stuffy Liberal Democrats say they have changed. Skeptics dismiss that as campaign rhetoric, while Iwai and others argue that the new era of competition will force Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto to carry out the party’s public pledges of reform.

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While touting their stability and experience, the Liberal Democrats have chosen as their campaign slogan the English word “open” and called themselves “the New LDP.” Their political literature assures voters that “people who use the power of money for something can’t be found.”

“Under the old system, a party’s electoral platform had almost no meaning,” says Norihiko Narita, a law professor and Hosokawa’s former top aide, who crafted Hosokawa’s political reform law. “But now all parties are nervous and are pledging administrative reform because they think voters support it. After the election, I think they’ll have to carry it out.”

Every party is advocating trims in Japan’s sprawling central bureaucracy of 840,000 people in 19 ministries who, behind the scenes, wield enormous power as the real shapers of national policy.

The once-respected bureaucrats have been badly sullied by a chaotic performance during the 1995 Kobe earthquake, recent financial scandals and disclosures that they knowingly allowed HIV-contaminated blood to infect--and ultimately kill--scores of people.

While no one seriously believes that politicians can replace bureaucrats as policymakers--at least not until they gain the staff, resources and access to information afforded their U.S. counterparts--parties here are touting plans for major streamlining and more political oversight of their activities.

The key question is whether Hashimoto, if reelected under an LDP-led government, would pursue bureaucratic and economic reforms or allow his party to degenerate into its collusive old ways.

The LDP does not necessarily stand for regression: The last successful bureaucratic reform occurred under then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and his powerhouse LDP Cabinet in the early 1980s. Nakasone named Hashimoto as the party’s bureaucratic reform chief then and is advising him today to form a superstar reform committee packed with political heavyweights capable of wrestling down the bureaucrats.

Realistically, analysts say, only a strong prime minister backed by a rock-solid party can push through such a tricky reform that would potentially jeopardize jealously guarded turf and hundreds, even thousands, of jobs. It took Nakasone a long tenure, a powerful party system and the clout to fire a top bureaucrat to privatize the national railways in the early 1980s. But Hosokawa’s lack of all three attributes led to his ultimate failure to carry out anything beyond electoral reform despite his sky-high public popularity, Narita says.

Once, an enraged Hosokawa tried to fire an aide blocking his reform plans but was simply ignored, Narita says.

Such episodes raise questions as to whether Kan, similar to Hosokawa in both public popularity and political weakness, can deliver on Democratic Party reform promises, Narita and others say.

“To cope with the bureaucracy, a strong ruling party is required,” Narita says.

The new system has also given birth to Japan’s first full-scale negative campaigning and the beginnings of debate on an actual policy issue: whether to raise the consumption tax to 5% from its current 3%.

Provoking genuine debates based on policy differences among parties is one aim of the law, since the old system promoted campaigns based on personal ties and airy notions such as peace and welfare. Although the consumption tax was also an issue when first introduced in 1989, the opposition New Frontier Party is offering voters supply-side economics featuring a massive tax cut to stimulate the economy.

Political debate remains superficial, however, with the media here delivering little of the detailed argument over national tax policy that Ronald Reagan’s supply-side policies provoked.

But New Frontier leader Ozawa’s pledge to freeze the tax hike--after trying to push through an even higher one with virtually no public debate in 1993--has provoked tabloid charges of his being a “big liar,” LDP attack ads featuring cartoons of him wielding a whip over elderly people and counter-ads showing a smiling Ozawa with arrows harmlessly zinging off his face, saying: “Unless you’re talked about, you can’t change anything.”

The new system has also ushered in what may prove to have one of the greatest long-term effects on Japan’s political culture: a redistricting plan that partly corrected what had been a nearly 3-1 disparity in voting clout between urban and rural districts.

Rural votes still enjoy more than twice the weight of urban ones. But the LDP is scrambling to shore up its weaker urban support base by developing more policies to appeal to Japan’s city dwellers, who show more desire for change.

In the poor, coastal northern Japanese city of Iwaki, LDP candidates still excel at rural politicking: Stump speeches there assert that the Liberal Democratic Party is the only party able to bring home badly needed pork-barrel projects. The city gets 35% of its budget from the central government, but “other parties do not care about the provinces,” LDP candidate Naoki Tanaka recently warned the audience of gray-haired voters, many of them fishermen and farmers.

But in Tokyo’s trendy Shinjuku area, Democratic Party candidate Banri Kaeda recently railed against bailout subsidies for rice farmers and rural pork-barrel projects.

“It’s time to enrich the life of those of you who live in the cities,” he said.

Not to be outdone, Kaeda’s LDP rival, Kaoru Yosano, calls himself a “city-born policy man”-- and advocates a revision in the “irrational, unfair” urban property taxes.

For now, however, voters such as Tanaka just want action.

“I want politicians to get their act together,” the shop owner says.

Times staff writer Sonni Efron and Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.

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Guide to the Election

Japan will use a new system to pick its lower house of parliament on Sunday.

UPPER HOUSE

252 members

Half elected every three years for fixed six-year terms.

The prime minister must be a member of the Lower House.

LOWER HOUSE

511 members*

Decisive parliamentary chamber; ratifies treaties, passes state budget bills.

NEW SYSTEM

Under the new electoral system, 300 Lower House members will be elected in single-seat districts and 200 chosen through proportional representation in 11 regional blocs. At polling stations, voters are given two ballots, one for a candidate in the constituency and one for a party in the regional blocs. The 300 single-seat districts replace 129 multi-seat constituencies of the old system.

PARTY RANKINGS

Seats in outgoing lower house:

Liberal Democratic Party: 211

New Frontier: 160

Democratic Party of Japan: 52

Social Democratic Party: 30

Others: 58

* Under new system, number of members will drop to 500

Key Issues

These are some key issues in Japan’s general elections Sunday:

* Sales tax: The bungled introduction of a 3% sales tax on all goods and services cost prime minister Noboru Takeshita his job in 1989. Since then the tax has become more or less accepted by the public but the controversy is back with a scheduled increase to five percent in April.

* Bureaucracy: All parties have made streamlining government a plank in their campaign platforms following a series of bank failures and mortgage firm scandals and complaints that the Health Ministry allowed hundreds of hemophiliacs to be infected with HIV through contaminated blood products.

* Okinawa and U.S.-Japan security: An outcry against the concentration of U.S. bases on Okinawa was triggered by the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl last year by three U.S. servicemen. The parties are seeking further reductions in U.S. bases on Okinawa, though they vary on how much.

RESULTS TIMEABLE

Polls open: 3 p.m. PDT Saturday

Polls close: 2 a.m. PDT Sunday

First exit polls: 2 a.m. PDT Sunday

Final results: At approximately 10 a.m. PDT Sunday

Source: Reuters