Support for Hashimoto's cabinet reshuffle plunges

Japanese politics are nothing if not unpredictable. Recently Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto appeared to be placidly coasting towards a second successful term as LDP president and prime minister. But one crucial appointment, our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin reports, has sent his cabinet's approval ratings crashing. Worse than that, it seems to have exacerbated the apathy which Japanese voters feel for their politicians and political parties.

TOKYO (JP): Less than a week after Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto appointed his new cabinet, support for it has plunged dramatically, revealing a rising disillusion with politics among the electorate.

These conclusions in fact come as no surprise. Hashimoto's reshuffle came just after the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) regained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since it lost it in the 1993 general election. From the voters' viewpoint, no sooner did the LDP achieve a majority (via a defection from the opposition Shinshinto or New Frontier Party) and it was once again exuding the arrogance of power which had been its 1993 downfall.

The most vivid illustration of this was Hashimoto's appointment to the cabinet of a convicted criminal, Koko Sato, who, after receiving a two-year prison term, was given a three year suspended sentence (he never went to prison) for receiving bribes in the famous Lockheed Scandal, which also brought down former LDP leader and prime minister Kakuei Tanaka.

Not only that, but Hashimoto made Sato the head of the Management and Coordination Agency, thereby placing him in charge of reform of the administration, a task which Hashimoto has previously claimed was among his top priorities.

The Japanese public have registered a strong disdain for this cynicism and arrogance with surprising speed. Normally support for Japanese cabinets grows or declines slowly and incrementally. But a Kyodo News Agency poll taken two to three days after the new cabinet was appointed saw support for the new cabinet steeply decline to under half that of the previous cabinet.

In July, the previous cabinet had a 59 percent approval rating, high by Japanese standards. In the Kyodo poll approval of the new cabinet had sunk precipitously to a mere 28 percent. A surprising 59 percent said they did not support the new cabinet. No less than 74 percent of those polled disapproved of the Sato appointment. Only 25 percent thought that Hashimoto would accomplish his goal of administrative reform.

As it happens Hashimoto's appointments may also involve the new cabinet in another ongoing scandal since an Osaka oil dealer, who is already charged with bribery, recently told reporters that he had given funds to politicians, among them two who were reappointed to top LDP party jobs in the reshuffle.

So, out of the 59 percent who disapproved of the new cabinet, no less than 37 percent gave problems of ministerial ethics as the main reason for doing so.

A further increase in the Japanese electorate's political apathy is the likely result indicated by the Kyodo poll results. Asked to approve or disapprove of a plan to streamline the bureaucracy, a clear majority of 54 percent said they did not care either way.

Worse than that, Japanese loyalties to political parties are clearly waning. A minority of 27 percent said they supported the LDP. All the other parties garnered single figure support with the Japan Communist Party coming second with six percent. Shinshinto, which as the main opposition party still has around 150 seats in the lower house, came in third with five percent.

Worst of all, a majority of 52 percent said they did not support any particular political party.

One poll does not necessarily record a long term trend -- though Kyodo's polls tend to be more reliable than those conducted by various newspapers, which always seem to produce poll results which fit in with the newspaper's editorial line. But this sharp decline in the cabinet approval rating plus the attendant increase in apathy towards politics both reflect badly on Hashimoto's leadership.

He slipped back into the old arrogant LDP ways at the very moment when he was getting good, and probably exaggerated, plaudits for the way he was conducting affairs, and, as a consequence, had easily earned another two-year term as LDP leader and prime minister. The appointment of Sato and the reappointment of politicians who may well be involved in the Osaka bribery scandal could turn out to be costly mistakes, depriving him of his second term momentum.

Apart from anything else, the LDP has too easily assumed that, since it has a slight majority in the lower House of Representatives, it now controls the Diet. In fact it still needs the odd and seemingly contradictory alliance with the Socialist Party and the Sakigake (New Pioneer Party) which made possible the LDP's return to power in 1994. This is particularly so in the upper House of Councilors, wherein the LDP by itself is about 15 seats short of a majority.

In the wake of the new cabinet and the public reaction against it, the two LDP allies have demanded the resignation of Koko Sato as the price for their continued partnership with the LDP. Whether they will carry out their implied threat to end the alliance remains to be seen, but the threat itself is deeply ironical.

Hashimoto, in forming his new cabinet, clearly made it a priority to appoint those who favored continuing the alliance with the Socialists, as against those in the LDP who would prefer to forget the socialists and form a fresh alliance of like-minded conservatives with the Shinshinto, itself partly composed of those who defected from the LDP in 1992-1993.

Koko Sato is a close associate of former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and it was Nakasone who prevailed upon Hashimoto to appoint Sato to the new cabinet in the first place.

Whether or not Nakasone did this in order to deviously drive a wedge in the alliance with the socialists, there are not lacking those Japanese who believe this was the motive of the old master- politician. Again it reflects badly on Hashimoto that he fell into the trap -- unless he himself also wanted an end to the alliance.

Hashimoto is supposed to have set himself the target of passing a wide-ranging program of reform in his next two years. Theoretically, it might be much easier to get those reforms enacted if a conservative alliance was developed between the LDP and Shinshinto. An LDP-Shinshinto alliance would likely have a clear, probably irresistible, parliamentary majority in both houses.

Whatever the precise chain of move and counter-move, the reason for the deepening public apathy is plain for all to see. The old pattern of complex LDP factionalism is reasserting itself and reform may well be forced to take a back seat to those machinations. LDP factions, it should be noted, were all ostensibly disbanded in the wake of the 1993 defeat. To some, all along the disbanding appeared to be the tatemae (outward show) while retention of factions in all but formal name was the honne (inner substance). Events are proving this to be a correct estimate.

As a Japan Times editorial tartly observed on Sept. 13 -- "A British politician once famously observed that 'it is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation' but Japan is apparently another country".