A MOUNTAIN OF MONEY

Japan's Liberal Democratic Party

won last weekend's election. Murray Sayle

calculates the cost

Tokyo ASSESSING the feat of the combined opposition in wresting control of the Japanese upper house from the Liberal Democratic Party last July and thus partial- ly loosening the LDP's 35-year-old grip on power, the socialist leader Ms Takako Doi observed, 'The mountain has moved.' Last Sunday the scandal-soaked LDP was re- turned to power in the Japanese lower house with a reduced, but still comfortable majority. Has the mountain perversely moved back again? Has the LDP, like its near-contemporary the Chinese Commun- ist Party, simply reasserted the rule of the ancien regime? Have Japanese voters lost, or perhaps even come to, their senses?

Well, yes and no. Barring, if we can, a world depression, the LDP will be securely in office for the next five years. The bureaucracy will continue to run Japan, just as in the days of The Mikado and the Great Poo Bah. The opposition still holds the upper house and legislation of any consequence will have to be bargained through them, passage eased by appropri- ate payments, in freshly laundered notes, as required. Businessmen who want some- thing will have to come up with the money. Hirohito's in his heaven, and on the surface nothing very Japan-shaking hap- pened last weekend.

Just the same, it did. A closer look at the voting shows a pattern very different from that of the past; something new struggling towards the light. It's a bit early to say that a terrible Asian beauty is born, much less elected, but Japan has taken a first long step towards what could be, if we're lucky, a two-party system more like ours, a set-up that might mesh better with the world economy than any Asian state has so far managed to do. If we're not, there's always Japan's past to resurface (shots were fired in this election and candidates stabbed and clubbed, not, fortunately, with any serious result). The mountain is still there but it has at last coughed, cleared its throat, puffed a little pink smoke.

Not that Japanese politics much resem- ble the shapely symmetry of Fuji under snow. Despite some American tinkering, Japan's political system owes nothing to John Locke or Thomas Jefferson and a great deal to ancient Oriental statecraft. We are more usefully engaged in describ- ing it than in trying to decide whether it is democratic, authoritarian, or whatnot. Buckle on, then, our analytic crampons, and let us begin with the mountain's most obvious feature, the Liberal Democrats (300 lower house seats in the last parlia- ment, 275 in the new one, a loss of 25 seats but still a comfortable majority in a lower house of 512).

Spectator readers, unusually well in- formed about this unusual organisation (See 'A Shortage of Good Men', 5 August 1989) know that the LDP was hastily cobbled together in smoke-filled rooms back in 1955 in response to a similar move by the Socialist Party, its principal compo- nents being the depurged remnants of two pre-war parties (the 'Liberal' and the 'Democratic', financed respectively by Mitsui and Mitsubishi) and various odds and ends, including some fairly extreme right-wingers, all united by the fear, wide- spread at the time, that any politics left of centre would lead straight w the Gulag and enslavement by Red Chinese. The new party inscribed on its banners 'Perpetual Conservative Rule' and, with the first 40 years in sight, seems well on the way.

A long journey, not without incident. Readers will recall in particular the Lock- heed Problem leading to a former LDP prime minister convicted of trousering a £2-million bride being sentenced to four years in prison and more recently the Recruit Affair in which a Tokyo firm of that name privately released 687,000 of its shares to a select group of 78 influential people, among them the leaders of all the 'For the sake of Save the Children, I suppose', factions of the LDP and important figures in the opposition, all of whom promptly sold them for profits, (or were they bribes? The issue is now before the Japanese courts) 20 times and more the size of Lockheed's modest £2 million (see 'Playing Sneaks and Leaders', 21 January 1989.) The largely accidental disclosure of Re- cruit's generosity led to a waltz of the prime ministers last year, first Noboru Takeshita (12,000 shares sold for the equivalent of £100,000, plus £520,000 in Recruit gifts, a loan of £200,000 and the suicide of his finance secretary), then Sosuko Uno, caught going to floor with a garrulous 42-year-old geisha in Japan's first political sex scandal, and finally the genial Toshiki Kaifu, a previously obscure back- bencher whose standing in the LDP was judged by the shrewd Recruit management to be worth only £5,000, just within the limit for a legitimate political donation and these days the kind of money well-heeled Japanese golfers tip their caddies — a role, some heartless critics have charged, Kaifu is now playing for the LDP's big hitters.

Chief among these is another former prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone (29,000 shares, resold for £250,000) and a would-be prime minister, Shintaro Abe (17,000 shares and a wife on Recruit's payroll). The arrest of Nakasone, a par- ticular friend of the Recruit management, was often rumoured in the past year, each time leading to a blip in the irresistible rise of the Tokyo stock market index. Naka- sone remained free, however, to contest last weekend's election although a certain delicacy led him to resign from the LDP, which had quite enough troubles already, and run as an independent. Takeshita, Abe and Nakasone were all, as we shall see, comfortably re-elected.

With all these little local difficulties the LDP approached last Sunday's poll with an understanding trepidation. The Japanese press has widely denounced Kaifu as a mere bunraku puppet manipulated by Takeshita and Abe, both of whom control powerful factions within the party. In fact, Takeshita only became prime minister with the support of Abe's faction, on the understanding that Takeshita would direct his 71 votes to Abe when it came time for the latter's turn at the trough of office.

The word of a Japanese politician is, as we all know, his bond, especially when it comes to this type of deal which was, as it happened, sealed in the very geisha house in which Utio fell from grace. Takeshita and Abe, in fact, ran the election from not very far behind the scenes, and continue to run the country. They called the election without telling Kaifu, who was away prom- ising yen to the Poles, and then prevented him making the premier's speech custom- ary on the dissolution of the Japanese parliament in case the opposition might ask awkward questions about them afterwards. Before the poll it was widely assumed that Kaifu would be dumped if the LDP did

badly, to take the blame, and dumped if they did well, as no longer necessary. It may still turn out this way, but the election has brought many changes to the LDP's modus operandi or MO as they say at the Yard.

The way the party and its members raise money is one big change. Considering that the former boss of Recruit, the former head of NTT, the Japanese telecom- munications colossus, and sundry other businessmen, officials and politicians are also currently being tried for giving or taking bribes, the different factions of the LDP, essentially fund-raising operations, are now finding it almost impossible to extract more than the legal limit of £5,000 from an individual and £7,500 from a company per candidate, and this sort of chickenfeed will get no one very far in Japanese politics. Recruit has also, for the moment, put an end to the fund-raising party dodge, in which businesses were arm-twisted to buy tens of thousands of admission tickets for gatherings held over small trays of stale hors-d'oeuvres in hotel rooms capable of holding at most a couple of dozen squashed invitees.

But nothing in Japanese law as it now stands prevents whole industries giving as much as they can manage, not to individual politicians, or factions, but to the party as a whole. It has simply been that, with the Japanese emphasis on personal obligation and face-to-face gift-giving out of which the whole system of political parasitism developed, no one ever thought of it.

Someone has now. Ichiro Ozawa, 47, a Takeshita henchman, was given the thank- less job of party fundraiser after the LDP's disaster last July, a defeat itself partly caused by resentment of a flat 3 per cent VAT-like tax which has replaced pre- vious higher taxes on luxuries and no tax at all on food and daily necessities. Surveying the results of the tax Ozawa drew up an 'Ozawa List' of those who benefited from the new arrangements. Prominent are the Japanese car and electronics industries, both of which are booming in part because taxes on their wares are down to the fleabite 3 per cent.

As the election drew near Ozawa sum- moned (rather than invited) the bosses of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association and read off the names we know so well, Nissan, Toyota, Honda and so on down the motorway, with the con- tribution for which each had been assessed. Next the Keidanren, the Japanese em- ployers' federation, was called to the pre- sence and told to cough up, or else. The or else' was, for the car men, a threat to restore the old luxury tax or, if they tried any funny business (such as opening a dialogue with the Socialist Party, innocent- ly suggested by banker Takuji Matsuzawa as a preparation for possibly less rigid Japanese politics), an export tax on cars and electronics. With cries resembling, according to those present, the squeal of brakes or the wail of a mistuned hi-fl the industrialists reached for their cheque- books.

The take must sound to penny-pinched, election-fearing Western politicians like the wealth of Ophir. Ozawa's little list yielded 20 billion yen (£80 million). With other business contributions the party raised £120 million. The faction bosses could do no better than £4-18 million each, the individual politicians mere table scraps in the £500,000-£1 million range. Still, every little helps, and bank loans help more. All in all, the LDP won't get much change out of £200 million from last Sunday's election, double what it spent for its landslide in 1986. Guinness Book of Records, if you're listening, these must have been the most expensive elections ever held.

What di rd they spend it on? Election day itself is quiet in Japan. No paid political advertising is permitted on radio or televi- sion, in newspapers or on billboards. The most noticeable form of public campaign- ing consists of the candidates and their (hired) supporters cruising the streets in loudspeaker trucks chanting the candi- date's name, as if to induce a vote by Pavlovian reflex. Some candidates have taken to doing the same from hovering helicopters. Voters must write the name of their choice legibly in Chinese characters on the ballot paper, so candidates buy them strong drink sparingly, if at all, on polling day. A lot of political yen, howev- er, wind up with the brewers, as a rather touching example from the electorate in which I live will illustrate.

A week before the poll my local garage man attended a meeting of people of the district in his trade. It was a pleasant, convivial evening, I heard, devoted to a discussion of which candidate best under- stood the problems of the petrol pump. The group (Japanese tend to make such decisions in groups) concluded that on the whole the LDP man had the highest octane. Who bought the drinks? Well, they were 'just there. Another garagiste who organised the evening is a friend of a friend of the candidate, and a generous, public- spirited man. Or so I was told.

Informal networking like this is the stuff of Japanese politics, especially in small towns and the countryside. Barbers, bar- tenders, shopkeepers — and, on the new Ozawa plan, electrical retailers and car dealers — often tend to be talkative, convinced and free-spending supporters of the LDP, especially around election time. This is a subtle, low-pressure approach, the distinction between diligent constituency cultivation and vote-buying as fine and delicate as an Oriental scroll, and as difficult to haul into court.

As the poll approached, however, the gloves came off, the wallets out. From various hard-fought constituencies there have been reports of candidates handing out £2 telephone cards, envelopes contain- ing two thousand yen (a), ballpoint pens and neckties. These gestures are all elec- toral offences in Japan but again the intention is not quite so crude as buying a vote — which, the ballot being secret, would be easy to double-cross. Rather, the gift puts the recipient under an obligation of honour which, by Japanese ideas,

should be repaid as soon as possible, preferably in a nearby polling booth.

But then things got really tight. , . . On the day of the poll the secretary of the former Vice Education Minister, Kunio Takaishi, was arrested for handing out naked ten thousand yen (£40) notes from a large roll and pleading for a vote for his boss. Takaishi is out on bail in connection with an alleged Recruit bribe and was hoping that being elected would absolve him from blame. He missed out.

But the other friends of Recruit — Takeshita, Abe, and Nakasone in particu- lar — were returned, and the latter is claiming on behalf of the others that they have all been 'purified' by the voters, a Shinto religious ritual involving total im- mersion in a river or the sea to wash off guilt and stain. As some of them must, by definition, have used Recruit money to achieve their purification, the logic of this is difficult for straitlaced Western (and even some flexible Japanese) minds to follow. Nakasone, a former navy man, used a more familiar metaphor when he complimented those who voted for him on 'their steadiness under opposition fire'. Altogether, 2,900 people were held on polling day for violations of the electoral law and many more arrests are expected as the week progresses and protests come in.

But much else is new, jpst the same. For all its largesse, the LDP dropped 25 seats, a warning of things to come. The raising of huge sums by the party as distinct from its individual factions is new, and so is the bullying of industry for money, an open use of state power for politicial ends not previously seen in post-war Japan. The Japanese employers' federation has been trying to get its members out of overt LDP fund-raising for years, arguing that the party with its constant scandals and crises is unstable and bad both for business and Japan's image. The industrialists have been dragged back in (Seichiro Honda, for instance, of the car and motorbike firm, was dragooned into making his first-ever political contribution), introducing a divi- sive element of compulsion into what has been for decades the cosiest of rela- tionships, with politicians fawning on businessmen rather than the new style of showing them the whip.

On the opposition side there is less to say because less happened. The Japan Socialist Party ran only 149 candidates and got 136 elected, a gain of 51 seats and a stunning result, especially considering that the JSP raised only £8 million, less than a single sparsely funded LDP faction. The Socialist Party's success had little to do with social- ism, mentioned in the campaign only by the LDP, and then only as the doctrine espoused by Kim II Sung, Deng Xiaoping and the Ceausescus. The dominant figure of the party (and of the election) was the magnetic Ms Takako Doi, Japan's first master of political television, a natural who glows with quiet authority and whose emergence since she became the JSP lead- er in 1986 marks the first return of genuine intellectuals (she is a professor of jurispru- dence) to the dangerous Japanese politics they deserted in the 1930s. But the party's organisation is weak, its doctrines musty with the issues of the 1950s. The new Japanese trade union federation, Rengo, looking for candidates to back, could find only four JSP candidates ready to talk terms of support.

The Democratic Socialist Party, the rem- nant of a split in the Socialist Party as long ago as 1960, dropped 12 seats, from 26 down to 14 (its former chairman had 5,000 shares from Recruit). The Clean Govern- ment Party, growing rapidly until the 1970s and shrinking since, dropped 11 seats, from 56 to 45. Also involved with Recruit, the party is the political arm (although it denies it) of a religious organisation, the Buddhist Value Creation Society. The latter was, just before the poll, itself enmeshed in a complicated money scandal involving the ransoming of a kidnapped Buddhist priest for a suspiciously easily raised £3,200,000. The Japan Communist Party, although it fielded 131 candidates, saw only 16 of them elected, ten down from their pre-election strength of 26 seats.

What now? On the LDP side, Takeshita and Abe, the bosses of the party, are shortly off to Washington, following the post-war tradition that a new Japanese administra- tion always makes its first visit there. They will not bother to take Kaifu. The Japanese call this ritual sandai, 'visiting the Imperial Palace', the term that was used for the yearly journey of the Shogun to pay his respects to the Emperor in Kyoto — the joke of course being that the Shogun, and not the Emperor, was the real ruler of Japan. This suggests, however, that Kaifu may well see his term out until 1991 or even beyond, in the same role he has now, the lightweight front man for the real powers. This would be an elegant solution for one of the LDP's more pressing prob- lems, namely that their wily power brokers look exactly like that on television, and one more sign of the impact Ms Doi's television image is having on Japanese politics.

The collapse of the minor opposition parties will go further — the Democratic Socialists are already talking about dis-

banding, one remnant of the remnant going to the LDP, the other to the JSP. This will actually weaken the LDP's system for 'perpetual conservative rule' which, as Recruit's ecumenical gift-list showed, de- pended on having a gaggle of minor opposition parties who actually did no opposing but collaborated with the LDP in return for minor scraps of power and the flattery of being consulted. This is the 'harmony' and 'consensus' to which the sweetly smiling Kaifu said after Sunday's poll 'his' government planned to return. But social and economic changes are pushing Japan away from this cosy arrangement, as once again events in my own corner of the country demonstrate.

The multi-seat electorate designated Kanagawa Five, which extends from the foothills of Mt Fuji to the industrial sub- urbs of Yokohama, was until recently hard, reliable LDP territory, the fief of a political dynasty by the name of Kono. The LDP garageman's friends, already men- tioned, in fact set up those rounds in vain; he failed to get himself elected. The current Kono, a wavering LDP supporter, managed to scrape home, but the poll was actually led by one Mitsuo Tomizuka of the JSP, a car trade unionist supported by the Nissan company union. We thus had the management of Nissan (prominent on Oza- wa's little list) supporting, if none too willingly, the LDP's man and the same company's workers backing the JSP's. We can easily see here the class struggle that we know so well in the West, but in this simple and non-ideological form, the in- terests of boss v. worker, or producer v. consumer, it is quite new to Japan.

Japan thus seems to have taken a long step last Sunday towards a genuine two- party system which will be, if it comes to pass, the first in East Asia. It will not come about, as some expected, in the form of a split in the LDP, nor in a vast, ramshackle coalition of the current fragmented opposi- tion which, it is now clear, was never a runner. It will evolve (again, barring an international economic catastrophe) as a simple contest of those for the LDP's system versus those against, just about evenly divided last Sunday, with the alternation of a diminished LDP versus a modernised, augmented JSP (or, more precisely, versus the party led by Ms Takako Doi which will emerge from the party's showdown conference in April, when it may well unload its outdated socialist ideology). If this ever happens it could make Japan, with the first real voice for consumers in East Asia, a much more comfortable trading partner for everyone. At the moment this pleasing scenario depends very largely on the talents of the formidable, non-ferrous Japanese lady aged 61. Ms Doi has little chance of coming to power before 2000, the election after next, when she will be 71. Still, she radiates confidence in what she is doing, and as they used to say, faith. . .