Criticism at the Polls

For Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, last week's upper-house elections could hardly have been more badly timed. Although production lines are humming faster than ever, Japan is going through a painful economic "readjustment" which in the past 16 months has wiped out thousands of small businesses, sent the stock market plunging 15% and consumer prices soaring. The government has been widely attacked for its open support of the U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam as well as for signing the long-overdue peace treaty with South Korea (TIME, July 2). Worst of all, Sato's Liberal Democratic Party--which, despite its name, is conservative--was trying to recover from one of the noisiest political scandals in Japanese history.

The scandal broke in mid-April, when police arrested Sadao Koyama, newly elected speaker of Tokyo's 120-man Metropolitan Assembly, on charges that he had bribed and extorted his way to the speaker's chair--and the $55,000-a-year expense account that goes with it. Before the dust cleared, 18 other assemblymen, all Liberal Democrats, had followed Koyama into jail, and a storm of public outrage forced the assembly to dissolve itself in shame. Little wonder that a nationwide public opinion poll late last month showed Sato's popularity at an alltime low for a Japanese Premier: 24.4% v. 49.9% when he took office in November.

Luckily for Sato, the Japanese electorate is conservative by tradition, and when all the votes were in, his Liberal Democrats had lost only four seats--nowhere near enough to shake their commanding majority in the Diet's 250-member House of Councilors. Even so, the results were bad medicine for the government. The powerful Socialist Party made significant gains, as did the Soka Gakkai, a militant Buddhist organization whose Komeito (Clean Government) party emerged as a major political force by preaching pacifism, reform and anti-U.S. nationalism. In scandal-rocked Tokyo, government candidates could not win a single seat.

Encouraged by their gains, leftist leaders talked hopefully of mounting a massive protest movement similar to the 1960 riots that toppled the government of Nobusuke Kishi. But for all his troubles, Sato still held the upper hand. His Liberal Democrats own a 53-seat majority in the all-important House of Representatives, and will not have to face elections until 1967.

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