Election Campaigning Japanese Style: With a New Preface

Gerald Curtis introduces his classical study of election campaigning in Japan as follows: "For nearly a year and a half I was privileged to examine in microscopic detail the campaign of a candidate for the Japanese Diet. Living in the candidate's home, participating in campaign strategy meetings, visiting innumerable farms and mountain villages, talking for long and enjoyable hours with local politicians, newspaper reporters, and voters, I gradually saw emerge the pattern of campaign strategy and organization documented here." The politician was Sato Bunsei, a non-incumbent candidate of the ruling Liberal Demoratic Party (LDP), and the district where he campaigned was clustered around the city of Beppu in Oita Prefecture, in the northeastern corner of Kyushu. Sato is what Curtis labels a locally-oriented politician, having served for sixteen years in the Prefectural Assembly and failed once in the national election of 1963. In 1967, the enterprising Sato faced formidable rivals: not from the socialist opposition, whose electorate didn't overlap with the LDP's base, but from his own party's two incumbents, an ex-bureaucrat with ministerial experience and an old politician, temporarily purged after World War II, who at that time held the position of Speaker of the Lower House. As Curtis notes, "the combination of multimember districts with single entry ballots has a divisive effect on any party that runs two or more candidates in any one district. The intensity of intra-party rivalry may be best compared to that of a hotly contested Democratic primary in a one-party American southern state." Titled "The Birth of a Diet Member" for its Japanese edition, the book follows the candidate on his campaign trail, beginning with the politics of party endorsement and progressing through a detailed description of campaign organisation in rural and urban areas, analysing the structure and function of the koenkai or local support group, then showing how the candidate tried to gain the support of organized groups and moving to the climax of the short official campaign ending in victory for Sato, who defeated a more experienced incumbent by a large margin The book contains many gems. For instance, a series of graphics illustrate the "benefit of locality" by showing how each candidate obtained the bulk of his votes in areas surrounding his home town, with little overlap in areas of major support. In describing Sato's efforts to gather the women's vote, Curtis shows the pivotal role played by a Mrs. Kawamura, the president of the LDP's women division in Beppu, who designated a core group of women campaigners in each school district to support Sato's campaign. He hints at the role played by the underworld in passing the word for Sato among bar hostesses and resort employees in Beppu. He insists on the fundamental difference between pre-war political patronage in which landlords and community leaders gathered the vote, and the modern koenkai that organizes support