but to create a personal base of support; thus the proliferation of koenkai . The number of political organizations (seiji dantai ) registered with the Ministry of Home Affairs increased nearly 250 percent between 1976 and 1988 (Iwai 1990, 81). But rivalry among LDP candidates in multimember districts does not in itself account for the boom in koenkai . Rather, the main impetus was a 1975 revision to the Political Funds Control Law (PFCL) that imposed contribution limits on individuals, corporations, and political
organizations. Annual donations by a citizen or a corporate entity were
limited to ¥10,000 per political party and ¥1 million per political organization or fund maintenance organization (shikin kanri dantai —e.g., the LDP's
Peoples' Political Association); political organizations could contribute no more than ¥1 million to another political organization. Because there was no limit on the num-
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ber of political organizations to which a donor could contribute, candidates and donors could circumvent the spirit of the law through multiple
organizations linked to a single candidate. Some senior LDP legislators have come to oversee networks of as many as three hundred separate personal support organizations.
Another useful loophole in the PFCL concerns fundraising parties: Candidates are not required to report the proceeds of these parties as long as a
registered political organization sponsors the event. Political fundraisers, it is worth noting, did not become a conspicuous facet of Japanese political life until after the 1975 revision of the PFCL. It is not unusual for these festive gatherings to require an attendance fee of ¥50,000 or more per participant, and some fundraisers draw more than 30,000 people. There is pressure for corporations to purchase large blocs of tickets to these functions, and even government officials often feel compelled to purchase tickets. Over the course of several years, for example, prefectural bureaucrats in Miyagi Prefecture siphoned enough public money from faked travel vouchers to purchase nearly ¥10 million in tickets to fundraisers organized on behalf of Governor Honma and other LDP candidates (Asahi shinbun , 28 Nov. 1993).
In 1988 the Recruit scandal forced the LDP to declare a policy of "self- restraint" with regard to political fundraisers. For several years, fewer fundraising parties were held. By 1991, however, the fundraisers were becoming larger and more frequent.
Beyond all these technically legitimate funding schemes, vast sums of unreported political funds have been delivered into the coffers of LDP candidates. As illuminated by the Recruit scandal, some candidates gained preferential access to preflotation shares of corporate stock, which they sold for a handsome unreported profit. Politicians have also raised money by having paper companies under their control purchase tracts of land in areas about to acquire special zoning designation; when the land values soar, the politician disposes of the property for a sizable profit.
According to a senior executive of a large general contractor, almost all
governors accept illegal contributions. with regard to former Miyagi Governor Honma, the official said: "It is pitiable to be arrested for taking [a mere] ¥20 million. Virtually all governors do it. A first-
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term governor who takes ¥20 million is relatively clean. Some first-termers take in ¥1 billion, and, in the case of four-termers, the take can be as high as ¥5 billion" (K. Matsumoto et al. 1993).
Changing the Rules of the Electoral Game
Japan's current electoral institutions have their roots in the Election Law of 1889, the nation's first attempt at parliamentary democracy. This law created a system of plural voting in small-sized districts, the majority of which elected a single-member delegation.[14] SNTV first arrived in Japan in 1900 with a package of major revisions that also established a secret ballot and districts that elected as few as one representative or as many as thirteen. A driving force behind the reforms of 1900 was the oligarch
Yamagata Aritomo, who feared that SNTV in small districts might permit a political party to grasp an absolute majority of parliamentary seats, thus challenging the autonomy of the state bureaucracy in policymaking. The extension of suffrage to all adult males in 1925 ushered in the first
incarnation of Japan's unique system of SNTV in middle-sized districts. In 1945, as part of the package of sweeping reforms intended to democratize a defeated Japan, the U.S. Occupation imposed a conditional plural vote
system in large districts. When independents and candidates of the Communist Party did better than expected in the 1946 election, the Occupation authorities reluctantly acceded to pressure from conservative parties to restore the SNTV system in middle-sized districts.
The electoral district boundaries created in 1947 survived with only cosmetic revisions for over forty years. During that period, however, the portion of the population residing in rural areas dropped from two-thirds to less than one-third. By the early 1980s the inequality between the most
overrepresented and the most underrepresented districts reached levels approaching five-to-one, generating a welter of court cases and
appeals.[15] In 1986, in response to a Supreme Court ruling that set the maximum disparity at three-to-one, the parliament passed the "plus eight, minus seven" law. This reform added one seat to each of the eight most underrepresented districts, and took one away from the seven most overrepresented districts. The tinkering
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sufficed to bring the results of the 1986 general election under the court- mandated maximum disparity, but the 1990 election produced a discrepancy of 3.18-to-1 and set off a new wave of lawsuits.
The single event that pushed the issue of reform high on the national agenda was the Recruit Cosmos scandal, which forced the resignation of Prime
Minister Takeshita in April 1989. The magnitude of the scandal and the LDP's disastrous showing in Upper House elections that summer forced the party's leadership to promise an attack on institutionalized political corruption. The viability of both the Kaifu and the Miyazawa administrations was explicitly dependent on the enactment of electoral reform. The Sagawa scandal
brought an additional impetus for change as it toppled kingmaker Kanemaru and led to the fracturing of the Takeshita faction in late 1992. Due to
intraparty discord, the LDP's four leaders declared on 15 June that the party would not endorse a meaningful reform bill. Three days later, a
parliamentary vote of no-confidence in the Miyazawa cabinet was passed as a result of the strategic defection of Ozawa and his followers. The July 1993 general elections left the LDP far short of an absolute majority, and, on 9 August, eight parties combined to form the Hosokawa cabinet, the first non- LDP cabinet since 1955. The coalition government vowed to "smash the union of the legislators, bureaucrats, and industrialists," "grant importance to the interests of consumers," and "enact a political reform bill by year's end." Opinion surveys taken in early September gave the Hosokawa cabinet a 70 percent approval rating, the highest in the postwar era.
The path to the passage of a reform bill, however, remained steep and treacherous. On 18 October, the Lower House passed a reform package sponsored by the Hosokawa cabinet, but the package was defeated in the Upper House, primarily owing to the defection of some Socialist legislators.
The following January, when all appeared to be lost, a joint committee, composed of ten members from each house, agreed on a package of reform bills. Most importantly, the agreement called for the creation of a Lower House electoral system based on 300 single-member districts and 200
proportional-representation districts divided into eleven regional blocks. The accord also modified the PFCL to allow candidates to maintain one
organization for the
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purpose of receiving donations of up to ¥500,000 a year for the next five years from corporate and other donors.