You Call This Change?

By Bruce W. Nelan

"Mr. Miyazawa is a Class C war criminal," said Seiichi Ota, a young member of the Liberal Democratic Party, in a coldly measured tone. Frowns of consternation crossed the faces of the party Old Guard at the head of the table. "The public detests the look and smell of the L.D.P.!" warned Jinen Nagase, a party man from western Japan. Defying the tradition that youth must respect age, junior members of Japan's long-ruling party turned last week's postmortem session about the historic loss at the polls into a brawl of nasty taunts and fraying tempers. It was time, they demanded, for the discredited elders to hand over power to the young.

It was all very un-Japanese, the climax of an election week that had tipped the natural order of things upside down. The arrogant old conservatives of the L.D.P. lost the majority they had used to run the government unchallenged -- and almost unsupervised -- for 38 years. At the same time, the permanent and futile opposition, the Marxist-oriented Social Democrats, lost almost half their seats and slid further toward irrelevance. Both parties suffered their worst electoral showing ever.

But Japan's domestic revolution does not translate directly into change where the rest of the world is concerned. Rearranging seats in the lower house of the Diet will lead only slowly, if at all, to new directions in the country's economic policies and social priorities. "I will believe in this talk of reform," says Makoto Sakata, a prominent Tokyo business writer, "when parties take up really fundamental issues like karoshi ((death from overwork)) and unpaid overtime."

Similar skepticism prevails in Washington, where Administration after Administration has pleaded, demanded and negotiated for freer entry into Japanese markets and a reduction of Tokyo's trade surplus -- $49 billion in $ 1992. Reflecting on those battles, most U.S. experts advise caution in appraising last week's election, even if it did downsize the Liberal Democrats, with 223 seats, into the largest minority party in the 511-seat Diet. What the election results suggest, says former Assistant Secretary of State William Clark, is "a voting public that is unhappy with the leadership of the L.D.P., but not necessarily with its policies."

When President Clinton visited Tokyo last month, he repeatedly implied that "change" could bring Japan smoother trading relations with the world, a more consumer-oriented society, a government concerned with its citizens' quality of life. U.S. officials have been pushing Japan to cut taxes and spend more government money to boost the sluggish economy and increase imports from the U.S. Even though the election results demonstrate an impulse toward change, says a senior Administration official, "we should not presuppose it is the kind of change that we think ought to happen."

There are good reasons for Washington to be circumspect. The Diet actually has more conservatives now than it had after the 1990 election. While the Liberal Democrats have lost 52 seats since then, most of them belonged to defectors who resigned over the series of gigantic corruption scandals that led to the government's downfall in June. The rebels formed two new conservative parties that won almost every seat they campaigned for. These parties call themselves reformist and advocate clean government, but they are still unlikely to shatter the "iron triangle" of partnership among politicians, bureaucrats and big businessmen who control Japan Inc. and make it so profitable.

Now that Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa has reluctantly bowed out, eight parties are trying to elbow their way into a new governing coalition. Whatever their maneuvering produces by the Aug. 16 deadline, it will have to be either a coalition led by a chastened, more tentative L.D.P. or an alliance of the inexperienced newcomer parties. Either way, that government is likely to be too weak to force through new economic policies or trim the regulations that keep out foreign competition -- even if it wants to.

Many experts believe the incoming government will provide no more than a bridge to another election in a few months. If so, the contending parties will not be eager to push for major changes that might alienate voters. Allowing imports of cheaper foreign rice, for example, would antagonize farmers, and reforming election-finance laws could disrupt the patronage system.

In these uncertain times, and even in more settled ones, control of policy goes by default to the bureaucrats in Tokyo's government ministries, who derive much of their power from enforcing complicated rules. The deadlock, says Takashi Sasaki, a professor of politics at the University of Tokyo, may lead to "domination by the bureaucrats and mean that no serious decision making will be done."

That prescription could apply to the trade talks with the U.S. that are expected to resume in September. Japan's negotiators seem to be getting ready to whisper "weak government" to their American counterparts to explain why, yet again, no progress is possible. The U.S. has often prevailed upon heavyweight politicians from the L.D.P. to force obstructive bureaucrats to compromise. The new political power game means that tactic, at least, will undergo change.

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo and Jay Peterzell/Washington