Politicking in Japan Shifts Gears to Keep Up With Law

Election season here in rural northeastern Japan used to be a festive occasion: Free meals were served to voters who dropped by campaign headquarters, top-quality rice wine flowed freely, and in remote mountain areas some voters could take it for granted that envelopes containing up to $400 would be slipped under their wooden doors at night.

“My friend used to say that every election was worth two golf games,” said one middle-aged man, attempting to explain the political culture of rural Fukushima prefecture, where 12 people were arrested for attempting to buy votes during the last parliamentary elections in 1993.

Not this year. Sunday’s balloting marks the first national election conducted under a package of tough new campaign reform laws aimed at cleaning up Japan’s infamous system of money politics.

As a result of the laws, which were passed in 1994 and 1995 amid a groundswell of public disgust over big-money political corruption, public financing is paying for much of the election campaign, corporate contributions have plunged, vote-buying is said to have stopped cold, and companies that have in the past dispatched employees to campaign for candidates supported by management seem to be keeping their hands off the electioneering.

But politicians and analysts warn that these changes are still only superficial. They note that the campaign financing laws have gigantic loopholes and have not even begun to alter the structure of Japanese politics, with its deeply entrenched, lucrative links among businesses, bureaucrats and politicians.

“Money is moving behind the scenes,” said political consultant Takayoshi Miyagawa, president of the Center for Political Public Relations, a polling firm in Tokyo. “If corporate donations actually dry up, politicians cannot survive. You can be sure someone is giving.”

Nevertheless, residents of Iwaki, a poor former mining town, say this is the cleanest and least celebratory campaign they remember.

“In Japan, when people come to visit, you offer them dinner,” Hitoshi Sakuma, office manager for the New Frontier Party candidate in Iwaki, said with a shrug of resignation. “Now you can’t even do that anymore.”

Laws against buying votes and bribing politicians have been on the books--and flagrantly ignored--for years. What has made this election so different is a new law that holds candidates personally responsible for campaign law violations committed by paid staff or unpaid supporters.

If a campaign worker is found guilty, the law says the candidate must forfeit his ill-gotten office and can be barred from politics altogether for up to five years.

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To everyone’s surprise, Japan’s courts are enforcing the spirit and letter of the tough law.

In two separate decisions last summer, judges voided local election results and blacklisted the politicians for campaign crimes committed by their supporters.

In one case, in northeastern Aomori prefecture, the offender was a company president who, in the time-honored tradition, took executives from his subcontracting firm out for dinner and drinking and asked them to campaign for the candidate of his choice. The company president was fined, and the politician lost his seat.

In the not-so-distant past, fiercely loyal aides were sometimes willing to break the law to get their “masters” elected.

If arrested, they could claim that the candidate knew nothing of the wrongdoing and go to jail knowing their families would be looked after--a practice that will become impossible under the new law, the Mainichi newspaper noted.

Suddenly, well-oiled political machines are painfully shifting gears.

“We can’t go visit homes anymore,” complained Naonobu Nishiyama, secretary-general of the supporter group for the Liberal Democratic Party candidate from Iwaki. “People are afraid to become actively involved in the campaign system.

“We used to gather three-man groups and go door to door,” Nishiyama added. “To be honest, we’re not sure if it’s OK to do it anymore.”

In fact, home visits before and after the election have been specifically prohibited since 1950 because of concerns about such visits being the occasion for money to change hands, said Tadao Nishigori of the Iwaki City Election Management Committee office, which is plastered with posters that read: “Don’t ask. Don’t give. Don’t take.”

The election office has also found it necessary to print a booklet on election rules that devotes an entire page to condemning the evils of vote-buying.

“What was illegal remains illegal; nothing has basically changed,” Nishigori said--that is, nothing aside from an enforcement law with teeth, he acknowledged.

While vote-buying is a problem only in rural Japan, the exchange of campaign contributions for political favors is a nationwide blight. The new law aims to curb the practice by banning direct corporate donations to politicians.

Corporations may donate to parties or to individual candidates’ fund-raising organizations, but corporate donations in excess of $490 a year must be reported--down from the old limit of $9,000 a year.

The recession, as well as dislike of such disclosure requirements, have contributed to a steady decline in corporate political contributions, from a reported $405 million in 1990 to $150 million last year.

Public financing, which costs each Japanese citizen about $2.40, amounts to about half to two-thirds of the 1995 income of the political parties, the Asahi newspaper estimated. Funds are doled out based on how many votes each party receives; the Communist Party, however, has declined to accept the taxpayer money.

Individual candidates are required to comply with strict spending limits.

However, party spending is unlimited--a loophole that critics say is easily exploited.

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This election is also the first to be held under a complex new system that allows each citizen two votes, one to chose a local district representative to parliament and one to a party slate.

The new Diet will have 300 seats chosen by district and 200 seats allocated among the parties based on the proportion of the vote they receive.

This new election plan, together with the public financing law, was billed as one that would reduce the cost of campaigning, and thus reduce politicians’ financial dependence on corporations. This in turn is supposed to gradually reduce corruption and politics that benefit special-interest groups.

Politicians and analysts say it will take several election cycles to test this theory.

In the meantime, many complain that in practice, getting elected under the new system is proving no less costly than in the past.

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.