Despite Woes, Japan Voters Unlikely to Clean House

If Japan were like most countries, Naoto Kan would be a shoo-in to become prime minister Monday morning.

Poll after poll finds that the charismatic opposition leader is the best-liked politician in Japan, a crusader for change who consistently ranks No. 1 when Japanese are asked who should be prime minister. He is even the man deemed most likely to lift the leaden Japanese stock market.

Trouble is, the same polls predict that Kan, the leader of the new Democratic Party of Japan, will not fare well in important parliamentary elections Sunday and that the political status quo is most likely to prevail.

To understand why is to begin to grasp why rich and mighty Japan seems to be lurching about like a drunken sumo wrestler struggling to get a grip on its worst economic crisis since World War II.

Every bellwether shows that Kan, 51, is far more popular than incumbent Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, whose support ratings have plunged to unheard-of lows. A recent Yomiuri newspaper survey found that 85% of the public is dissatisfied with the state of Japanese politics, the worst since the survey began in 1976.

If Japan were like most countries, voters would stomp off to the polls Sunday and “throw the bums out.”

Despite political reforms, however, the Japanese electoral system remains nearly as tangled and opaque as the country’s debt-bound financial system. Unlike other nations, postwar Japan has not seen a link between economic performance and voter support for--or anger at--the party that delivered it, said Keio University pollster Yoshiaki Kobayashi.

Stability and strength are prized by voters above all. And neither Kan’s Democrats nor the other small opposition parties are seen as having the political heft or experience to succeed where Hashimoto’s Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, has failed in revitalizing Japan.

“Nobody has faith that the Democratic Party can fix the economy,” Kobayashi said of Kan’s party, a motley assortment of new-style citizen activists, old-guard Socialists and reformist defectors from the LDP.

Kan does have coattails in Tokyo, but in rural areas his personal popularity does not seem to be rubbing off on other Democratic Party candidates, Kobayashi said.

Construction Industry a Key Election Force

The construction industry--the LDP’s traditional support base--has been working feverishly to get employees, subcontractors and supporters to the polls and encouraging them to cast absentee ballots in record numbers to ensure an LDP victory, according to Japanese news reports.

“The worse the economy, the more important it is to vote for the ruling party, because if you vote for the opposition, you will not receive any public works spending,” Kobayashi said, referring to pervasive pork-barrel politics.

Moreover, while Japan’s crucial unaffiliated “floating voters” are three times more likely to support Kan’s Democrats than the LDP, 70% of them won’t go to the polls, Kobayashi has found.

Thus, recent surveys released by the major Japanese news organizations found no groundswell for dramatic change. All predicted that the LDP is unlikely to win the 69 seats it needs to regain a majority in the upper house of parliament, Hashimoto’s goal.

(In the Japanese system, the prime minister is chosen by parliament. The LDP already controls the more powerful lower house but has had to function in an awkward coalition to get legislation through the upper house. Half of the upper house seats are up for grabs in Sunday’s election.)

Most polls found that the LDP will probably manage to hold on to the 61 seats that it now controls, although it faces stiffer-than-expected competition from the Communist Party, followed by Kan’s Democrats and a record crop of unaffiliated candidates. While Hashimoto will face pressure to resign if the LDP wins fewer than 61 seats, it is not clear that anything but a larger and unexpected rout could force him from office.

But while Kan is unlikely to get near the prime minister’s residence this election season, he remains determined to build a party that could challenge the LDP in the next election, perhaps in 2000. The telegenic leader seems to be spending much of his time debating rivals on television talk shows, with the rest of his waking hours directed at stumping in support of party candidates.

On the campaign trail last weekend in Oyama, a small city 50 miles north of Tokyo, Kan’s campaign style seemed deliberately younger, fresher and more casual than the typical Japanese politician’s.

As is the ear-splitting custom here, he climbed aboard a sound-truck alongside the local candidate to blast his message to anyone within several blocks of the Oyama train station--but he was glove-less and tousled, in sharp contrast to the white gloves, hair grease, banners and corsages favored by traditional LDP candidates.

Populist Kan Attacks Japan’s ‘Iron Triangle’

Kan’s language is about as blunt and plain-spoken as polite Japanese can be, an obvious repudiation of the vague and florid rhetoric used by most Japanese politicians. And his pitch is populist, attacking the “iron triangle” of collusion between bureaucrats, politicians and business leaders that he blames for many of Japan’s problems--including the country’s Fuji-sized mountain of bad bank loans.

Noting that the United States had a massive savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, Kan said, “America solved its bad-loan problem in three years. How? They exposed everything!” But Japan is still struggling with the problem seven years after the “bubble economy” burst under the stewardship of then-Finance Minister Hashimoto, Kan said.

“All right, maybe we couldn’t have done it in three years, but we could have resolved it in four or five years,” Kan said. “Why didn’t we? Because everything was covered up! Who hid it?”

He went on to blame overpaid bank managers who compensated for their incompetence by making generous political contributions to their patrons in the LDP; Finance Ministry officials who failed to supervise the banks that were wining and dining them; and politicians who helped perpetuate a culture of cover-up.

Criticism of the “iron triangle” is not especially new, but Kan is uniquely positioned to exploit the issue because he is one of the few Japanese politicians who has dared fight collusion head-on and win.

Apology in HIV Cases Leads to Wide Acclaim

In 1996, as Health and Welfare minister under an LDP-led coalition government, Kan stunned the nation by forcing his own ministry to disclose its role in allowing Japanese pharmaceutical companies to continue to sell unsterilized blood products, instead of heat-treated products, long after the risk of HIV infection was known.

Kan then went on television, bowed deeply and apologized to the 5,875 patients who have contracted HIV as a result. When the mother of a hemophiliac who had died of complications from AIDS shouted at the minister to apologize to a photograph of her son, the minister fell on his knees with tears running down his face to do so.

The gesture--and the unprecedented acceptance of government responsibility for errors that are usually swept under the carpet--rocketed Kan to a fame that has yet to wear off.

Why, then, has his personal popularity not extended to his party?

“Rome was not built in a day, nor can a political party be,” Kan said. “In the last five years, Japan has seen many political parties be born and die. . . . We do not want to be a party that will appear and disappear in a day.”

Perhaps Kan’s biggest problem is the brilliant adaptability the LDP, which has survived for 40 years because of its nearly unerring ability to cater to the evolving public mood--and to swipe the opposition’s best ideas.

A fresh example came this week when, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Hashimoto finally endorsed the idea of a permanent tax cut just four days before the elections. The Democrats had made tax cuts a cornerstone of their platform since January and even before Hashimoto’s announcement had been having trouble distinguishing its economic policies from the LDP’s.

In an interview with The Times in May, Kan had anticipated the problem. “We call the LDP the ‘chameleon party’ because it changes color,” he said. “Because it changes color, it will be difficult for us to differentiate ourselves.”

With the Japanese economy in a tailspin, analysts say the timing could not be better for a real opposition party to emerge in Japan to challenge the LDP. For Kan’s Democrats, the real fight begins Monday morning.

“The [Democratic Party] has no history, and people do not yet have trust in its political stance,” said Jun Azumi, a party lawmaker. “The question is, can we rebuild the party before the next election?”