Big boss to the pig-box

Murray Sayle

.Tokyo

Korean assassinations, atom bombs and even the trade surplus are far from Japanese minds this week. The news has been dominated by an event closer to home, and more important, perhaps, for Japan's future. After a leisurely seven-year trial, former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, 65, has at last been convicted of taking a bribe of 500 million yen, or £1.5 million, from the Lockheed Corporation, fined the same amount, and sentenced to four years at hard labour.

Not that the dapper Tanaka is, as you read, callousing his hands in some Oriental equivalent of a quarry on Dartmoor. On conviction, he made only a symbolic ap- pearance in the cells, or `pig-box' as Japanese bad lads call it. Within the hour Tanaka had lodged an appeal, and was sprung on bail. His appeal is expected to wend its weary way through the Japanese courts for another five years, give or take a year or two.

Nor is paying back his bribe going to bankrupt the boss. He still owns some of the biggest construction companies in Japan, and these in turn are only a saido bUinesu, or 'side business' alongside his main source of money, politics. There is no sign, even, that his bloated parliamentary faction of 119 members, one-third of the voting strength of the ruling Liberal- Democratic Party (from which Tanaka himself resigned when he was first indicted) is growing restive under the rein of a con- victed felon.

The excitement, and the inch-wide headlines, reflect a simpler reality. Con- victed or not, Tanaka is still the most powerful man in Japan. He has dominated the Japanese political scene for a decade, and dominates it still. It was Tanaka, for in- stance, who put the current Japanese prime minister in office, and if Tanaka says Nakasone goes, he goes. This exercise of power from behind the scenes is nothing new in Japan, and is not in itself a cause for public complaint. Japanese have learnt from long experience not to be too in- quisitive about the private lives of the powerful, and the boss's guilt has been widely assumed from the moment the Rockheed no mondai, or 'Lockheed pro- blem', erupted in January 1977. A criminal conviction is, however, another matter, and even the pragmatic Japanese may baulk at the idea of their country being run from a prison cell. We are not, in short, anywhere near the end of the Tanaka era.

However, the boss's trajectory, from penury to the premiership to the pig-box, has much to tell us about modern Japan, its triumphs and its troubles. He hails from and continues to represent Niigata on the coast of Japan facing Siberia, smothered in snow three months of the year and poverty- stricken the rest, a region the Japanese themselves call the 'backside of the nation'.

Niigata is, however, also famous for beautiful women, reportedly the result of regularly rubbing their faces with snow, and pugnacious men, who develop this trait fighting over the sparse opportunities the area offers (Admiral Yamamoto, who brought us Pearl Harbour, was also a Niigata man.) Tanaka's father was a village cattle-dealer who half-presciently named his only son `Kakuei', meaning something like 'righteous prosperity'. Tanaka senior signally failed to achieve this objective himself, going bankrupt over a forlorn scheme to import Dutch milking cows (Japanese still drink little milk) and dying broke when Tanaka junior was 12. In the Japanese manner, his son thus became head of the household, with five sisters to marry off and a widowed mother to support. At 15 Tanaka junior was already at work, labouring on the snowy roads of Niigata with a construction gang.

But not, however, for long. In less than a year he laid down pick and shovel for life, or most of it, scraped together the fare to Tokyo and got a job clerking •with a building firm, and at night studying the Japanese equivalent of quantity surveying. Tanaka's formal education was over by the time he was 16, but he had, by this time, ac- quired the elements of costing a construc- tion job, a skill on which he was to base a dazzling business career.

In 1939 Tanaka was called up for the old imperial army and sent to China, where he contracted pneumonia and was invalided out just before Pearl Harbour. He returned to Tokyo, took lodgings, married his landlord's daughter and borrowed from his father-in-law to set himself up in business. At 24 Tanaka was president of his own con- struction company.

The war was the making of Tanaka, as of many another shrewd Japanese. At first there were military building jobs, then, as things started to go badly, repairs on bomb- ed and burnt-out houses. Tanaka was the man to contact for cement, roofing iron or window glass, all practically unprocurable as the ring closed around Japan. Seeking permits and pull, he made friends with junior bureaucrats, men who are now high in the Japanese hierarchy. He used Korean labourers, and made contacts in Korea later to prove invaluable. It was during the war years that Tanaka developed his characteristic style of working through per- sonal contacts, outside official channels, and developed his philosophy, 'Money talks'. When the war ended he was 28 and owner of the third biggest Tokyo construc- tion firm.

In the smoking ruins of post-war Japan politics was, in general, not an attractive career. The politicians of the war years were subjected to a mass purge by the American occupation authorities, and some of them were in prison as war criminals. Such in- tellectuals as remained on the political scene were uniformly on the Left. Access to the government, however, meant import licences and building permits. Tanaka was one of the young businessmen who were tempted into politics by the smell, however remote, of power and money. On the urg- ing of Tadao Oasa, a purged minister in the wartime Japanese government, Tanaka ran for the Japanese diet in the first post-war elections, in 1946, missed narrowly, and was elected the next year from Niigata, his home district.

He learnt the ways of Japanese parlia- mentary life fast. In 1949 Tanaka was arrested and charged with taking a bribe of one million yen, then about £3,000, from the Japanese Coalmine Owners' Federation to oppose the nationalisation of the mines. In the next cell was a certain Kenji Osano, charged with running a black market opera- tion in petrol. Osano began buying and sell- ing used cars from American servicemen just after the war, moved on to big transportation contracts in Korea and Okinawa, and is today one of the richest men in Japan and a brother-defendant, with his friend Tanaka, in the Lockheed case.

Tanaka himself was soon sprung from the pig-box, although the case against him dragged on until 1951. He was investigated again in 1955 on bribery charges connected with a building deal in his constituency. In 1957 he got his first ministry, Posts and Telecommunications, which included supervision of Japanese radio and the infant TV industry.

In this post Tanaka made an instant hit, especially with younger Japanese and women voters newly admitted to the fran- chise. Japanese cabinet ministers tend to be p0-faced former bureaucrats who speak in upper-class accents and avoid offending any interest or committing themselves on any subject. As the responsible minister, Tanaka took to appearing on radio and TV in person, telling jokes and singing Japanese folk-songs in a passable baritone while accompanying himself on the samisen, a kind of Japanese mandolin. He developed the trade-mark outfit he still affects on non-legal public appearances, a Western business suit worn with Japanese wooden sandals. As a combination of Lloyd George and George Formby, Tanaka brought an original new style to Japanese politics, and, his business interests pro- viding a steady flow of cash, he began to be talked about as a future prime minister. At this point, the aspiring Japanese politician launches his own parliamentary faction. Tanaka calls his the 'Thursday Club', from the day of its regular weekly meeting.

All organisations which have politics, from disarmament movements to dart clubs, have factions — centres of potential power, led by individuals, around which the outs cluster to get in, and the ins clump together to keep them out. Japanese political factions are different only because, like most Japanese relationships, they are highly structured, follow strict rules of hierarchy, and are more or less permanent.

The glue in a Japanese political faction is money. Japanese politicians do not, of course, live like monks, but neither do they maintain Swiss bank accounts or strings of racehorses. They need money to get elected, and re-elected, and the ultimate recipients are Japanese voters, who must surely be the most pampered in the world. To stay in business, a back-bench member of the Japanese parliament needs £90,000 to £180,000 a year. For a first election cam- paign, he needs to have £1 million in the kit- ty, as a minimum, with £300,000 for re- election — and all this in what we yen- pinching Westerners call a 'safe seat'.

The minimum that a sincere candidate can provide is free drinks and transport to the polls. The approach of election in Japan is thus signalled, especially in marginal seats, by the opening of offices in temporary buildings and empty shops where rows of sake bottles are lined up like silent ma- jorities, songs praising the candidate are sung, and buses wait to conduct suitably en- thusiastic voters to the polling-booth. A favourite theme for campaign songs is a poetic description of the schools, roads, bridges, old people's homes, hospitals and power stations the candidate claims to have had built, or plans to have built at public expense in the constituency, a result of the influence he has with powerful bureaucrats. Anyone who can persuasively promise that the famous bullet train is coming to his con- stituency can expect a landslide.

This bribing of the voters, as it sometimes appears to unsympathetic outsiders, is not of course carried out by the candidate himself, which would be in plain violation of the strict Japanese electoral laws. The in- strument is his support association, or 'society to encourage our member to run at the next elections'.. This society nominally has no connection with the candidate, ex- cept to invite him to address its meetings. It is the society which in principle puts the political bite on businessmen, who dread the approach of elections as much as the voters look forward to them. However, pumps need priming, if not filling, and special value thus attaches to off-the-books political contributions, or 'back money' in Japanese parlance, which, suitably used, can keep the enthusiasm of the support association at high pitch. Tanaka's support association is the biggest in Japan, the bullet train goes to Niigata, piercing the mountainous spine of Japan with what is believed to be the most expen- sive feat of railway engineering in the world, and Japanese government spending in Niigata is two and a half times the national average. 'We don't care where he gets his money,' Tanaka supporters are often quoted, 'as long as he spends it in Niigata.' Small wonder that the boss, in and out of jail, continues to be re-elected by overwhelming majorities. Often his home district and his faction have benefited simultaneously from the same ingenious deal. In 1966, for instance, a Tanaka property company bought 40,000 square metres of a stony river bed in Niigata for 15p a square metre. Three months later the Japanese government announced plans to build an atomic power reactor on the site, and requisitioned the land at £3.90 a square metre, a gain of 2,500 per dent. Tanaka, who was director of the planning commission of the Liberal Democratic Par- ty at the time, cleared some £600,000 on the deal, a useful windfall for the funds of his faction, while the reactor generated power and jobs for his electorate.

It was during his time at the planning commission that Tanaka produced his book, Remodelling the Japanese Archi- pelago, a grandiose plan to shift the Japanese government from overcrowded Tokyo to a new city to be built on the slopes of Mount Fuji, clean up polluting in- dustries, and relocate a good slice of the Japanese population from the coastal plains to the all-but-uninhabited mountains. The scheme was, in essence, sound, and some of its ideas have been put into effect. Many minds contributed to the book, but Tanaka directed it and took the credit (as Napoleon did for his Code we might recall), and his claim on the premiership was widely ad- vanced as the prosperous Sixties unrolled and Japanese real incomes more than doubled in the decade.

This was not, however, the way things were supposed to work. When prime minister Eisaku Sato, a former bureaucrat, resigned in July 1972, the Japanese version of Buggins' turn pointed to another ex- bureaucrat, Takeo Fukuda, as the next in- cumbent. Tanaka, 53 at the time and a beardless boy by Japanese standards, rallied his faction, distributed £8 million to the members of other factions, and boldly bought the bauble for himself.

The boss was an energetic and, at first, popular prime minister. He recognised communist China, opening the way for trade which has not, however, proved as lucrative as many Japanese hoped. Restric- tions on imports were eased and foreign luxuries not seen in Japan since the 1920s, Scotch whisky, English shoes and French neckties, came flooding in. It was about this time, too, that Lockheed, the American aircraft makers, decided on an energetic world-wide sales campaign for their new TriStar airliner, fitted with whisper-quiet Rolls-Royce engines. Throughout 1973 Japan was losing foreign exchange at the rate of £450 million a month, but elections were due and the boss wanted the good times to keep rolling.

Then, in October 1973, the first oil crisis struck Japan, hardest-hit of all the in- dustrial countries. Tankers headed for Japanese ports from the Middle East were diverted in mid-passage for the United States and Europe, an experience Japanese remember to this day. Tanaka reacted energetically, and in line with his conviction that 'money talks' sent emissaries to offer the Arabs credits totalling $170 billion, pro- bably the biggest bribe in human history, if they would turn the oil back on. The crisis passed withoift the need for such heroic measures, but the Japanese economy, totally dependent on imported oil, fell into roaring inflation. Land prices trebled and quad- rupled, and the word went out that Tanaka had bought it all up, to be resold at astronomical profits when his remodelling scheme got under way. Public opinion swung violently, and the boss was ripe for toppling.

He was brought down, in fact, by a magazine article, `Kakuei Tanaka, His Money and His Men,' published in the lit. crit. magazine Bungei Shunju in October 1974. The article, with its vignette of Tanaka men stalking the corridors of the Japanese parliament handing out banknotes packed in shopping bags from Mitsukoshi, the Harrods of Tokyo, (the Liberal Democratic Party spent some £150

million on the mid-term elections of 1974, half of it coming from Tanaka and his fac- tion), is an unrivalled, and never-challenged portrait of a Japanese political boss at work. After an unhappy session with foreign cor- respondents the Japanese press, normally respectful of authority, took up the chase, adding such unforgotten details as the boss's pair of stud goldfish worth £3,000 each. Tanaka was forced to resign, to be succeeded by a dark horse candidate, Takeo Miki, no friend of Tanaka or his political methods.

The information on which the fateful ar-

ticle was based came, it is generally thought, from the Finance Ministry, whose bureaucrats had reportedly wearied of see- ing Treasury funds flowing into Tanaka's private concerns. The out-manoeuvred Fukuda, a former Treasury bureaucrat and finance minister, is believed, at least by Tanaka's followers, to have been the con- duit. The rivalry between the two has all but paralysed Japanese politics for the past decade, with the first victory going to Fukuda in the election of Miki to the premiership — for Miki was still in power when news came through that Tanaka's name was listed in documents published by Lockheed in the United States as receiving 500 million yen for directing all Nippon Airways to buy Lockheed's new wonder plane, the TriStar.

By chance — or was it? the justice minister who ordered Tanaka's arrest, Osamu Inaba, also comes from Niigata, and under the peculiar Japanese system of multi-member constituencies is therefore a rival of Tanaka's for the same Liberal- Democratic votes. Referred to by Tanaka's men as a 'class A war criminal', Inaba has been a steady target of Tanaka vengeance ever since. By financing candidates to run against him and flooding meetings with hostile hecklers, the Tanaka faction was finally able to engineer Inaba's defeat in the 1980 elections, an example to all Japan of what happens to those who cross the boss.

Tanaka's trial, marked by comedy and tragedy, has been the running Japanese story of the decade. The prosecution have argued that the money was paid, not to Tanaka personally, but to his secretary and co-defendant; one Toshio Enomoto, in four instalments. Tanaka's defence has been an alibi, that neither he nor his secretary was at the places mentioned by the prosecution at the specified times and so could not have trousered Lockheed's cash. The information placing the secretary at the relevant places came originally from Masanori Kasahara, Tanaka's driver, who killed himself two days after he had given the police an account of his movements — caught, apparently, in an impossible con- flict between loyalty to the boss and his duty as a citizen to co-operate with the machinery of justice (although the dead man's mother believes her son was killed or driven to suicide to keep his mouth shut).

Weakened by the death of this critical witness, the prosecution's case was then reinforced by the intervention of Enomoto trilled to waiting reporters, 'A bee became an instant celebrity by testifying that her husband had confessed to her over the breakfast rice that he received the money from Lockheed on behalf of Tanaka. Outside the courtroom, Mrs Enomoto trilled to waiting reporters, 'A bee stings once and dies', before flouncing off on the arm of A. N. Other, whom she subsequently married, and then divorced. This flighty lady, who has recently posed nude for the Japanese edition of Pent- house, probably did more than anyone else to put the boss behind bars.

When he was arrested, Tanaka was heard to murmur, 'I only did what others did', and this is, of course, true enough. The gigantic sums spent on politics in Japan come main- ly from businessmen, who naturally want, as I. F. Stone once remarked, some quo for all of that quid. Taking money from foreigners for Japanese political causes makes Japanese feel uneasy but, Japan hav- ing no substantial aircraft industry, a strict application of this rule would deny their politicians some of the richest and easiest of all pickings — and the TriStar is, after all, generally regarded as a safe and reliable air- craft.

Tanaka's real offence, in the eyes of his political enemies at any rate, is that he violated the fundamental rules of the game. Instead of accepting money from businessmen, as his rivals did and do, he cut out the middleman and made money himself directly from politics.

At the same time, Tanaka is the great lost opportunity of post-war Japanese politics.

He is easily the ablest man in the Japanese parliament, a forum not exactly studded with the country's finest minds, and the early Seventies still linger in memory as the last time Japan had an energetic govern- ment which actually appeared to be getting to grips with some basic problems — the bloated export industries which are distor- ting Japan's development at home and causing steadily rising resentment abroad, for instance, and the stubborn farmers who refuse to modernise, or admit any serious foreign competition. With his own sburces of money, however shady, Tanaka was at least free to take decisive action in these areas. His successors, dependent on farmers for votes and businessmen for funds, can- not afford to offend any interest in Japan,

and so flit from one ludicrous expedient to another — like this week's offer, in the face of a $25 billion trade surplus with the United States, to liberalise imports of grapefruit juice.

Tanaka's money politics are a natural outgrowth of the years of Japan's heady economic growth, and without something like his methods, there seems to be no way in which a dynamic and self-confident Japanese 'leadership can emerge. With a faction strength of only 58, for instance, the current Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, will be lucky to survive the pre- sent turn in the Tanaka struggle, and he is certainly in no position to broaden the ex- port structure, increase agricultural imports, raise taxes, or do anything much except abuse little-liked Russians and hope that this will pacify indignant Americans on the trade issue. The alternative to boss rule, Tanaka- style, seems to be a politics of drift for Japan, made all the more dangerous by the dynamism of the export industries. But, as long as he has enough faction strength to block anyone else from decisive power, and his enemies have enough strength to keep boss Tanaka out of office, and headed in the general direction of the pig-box, the long stalemate goes on.