JAPAN: Bulldozer on the Skids?

KAKUEI TANAKA was the most startlingly fresh figure to appear in Japanese politics in a quarter-century when he became Japan’s eleventh postwar Premier six months ago. Suddenly, though, “the Computerized Bulldozer,” as he is popularly known, has begun to slip gears and, some say, lose direction. Tanaka’s standing is likely to slide further when the Diet reconvenes this week; a sharp devaluation of his abilities has already occurred in the corridors of Japanese political power.

“Today,” reports TIME Correspondent Herman Nickel, “it is the majority view among political soothsayers in Tokyo that Tanaka will not last through the normal three-year term as leader.” Members of his Liberal Democratic Party have begun to speak of Tanaka in the past tense. “Tanaka was good for the quick boost,” one former minister told Nickel last week. “None of our Premiers who have started out with a big fanfare have ever lasted long.”

For a while, it seemed that the bugles might blow forever. Tanaka wrapped up two major foreign policy missions that had eluded his cautious predecessor, Eisaku Sato: a reasonably successful meeting of the minds with Richard Nixon on U.S.-Japanese economic matters in Hawaii, and a historic summit with Chou En-lai in Peking. Tanaka was all over the headlines, the TV tube and even the bestseller lists -with an imaginative-sounding but ghostwritten book entitled A Plan for Remodeling the Japanese Archipelago, which offered some slick, idyllic proposals for controlling the country’s urban sprawl.

Things are now different. Raw, a self-made millionaire and youthful for a Premier, at 54, Tanaka is a political adolescent in Japanese terms. The theory behind his party’s choosing him was that only Tanaka knew the working-class mind well enough to deal effectively with the mounting challenge from the left. The Premier did lead the Liberal

Democrats to a victory of sorts in the Dec. 10 elections; nonetheless, the party lost 17 seats in the Diet (reducing its majority to 76) while the Communists, who won 38 seats, became a parliamentary force to be reckoned with for the first time in Japanese history.

The Communists plan to keep the Premier on the defensive. Presumably, they will try to goad Tanaka into disastrous faux pas. Presumably also they will needle him about his yeasty private business and personal interests; he has made questionable land deals and one Tokyo newspaper, the Mainichi Daily News, charged that some of those deals involved a former Tokyo geisha named Kazuko Tsuji, who is alleged to have been Tanaka’s mistress and the mother of two of his children.

Tanaka’s first budget, on which debate will begin next week, is disappointing. At $46 billion, it is 25% higher than last year’s-an inflationary increase suggesting that Tokyo’s crafty moneymen anticipate international pressures for another revaluation of the yen. More damaging, there is only token acknowledgment of the reordered priorities that Tanaka spoke of so feelingly before the election. What of the tax reductions that he promised would be “the largest in history”? They work out to $50 a year-enough to buy four bottles of beer a week-for the average Japanese salary earner struggling to support a wife and two children on $7,000 a year. Increased emphasis on social welfare? Partly because land prices have soared since Tanaka began talking about his sweeping environmental plans, the national housing agency will spend 27% more this year but build 10% fewer homes. Inflation curbs? Bus-and rail-system fares will rise 23%-an important increase for a nation of commuters.

Drift. Tanaka is not wholly to blame for his inability to bulldoze new paths for Japan. Power in Japan’s Cabinet system is largely in the hands of entrenched and often competing ministries over which the Premier has relatively limited control.

Even so, concern about Tanaka’s drift is beginning to trickle through the bureaucracies and into the once pro-Tanaka press. Says one Japanese journalist who attended his year-end press conference: “Again and again, whether he was asked about inflation, or land prices or what have you, he would say it was a very difficult problem and that it had to be studied. One didn’t get the feeling he knew where he was going.”

An impulsive extravert who is most effective when he can pummel audiences with sweeping generalities delivered in his raspy, staccato voice, Tanaka is not at his best when he is in a corner. But there is every indication that his political situation will grow even tighter in the coming months. His next hurdle, once the budget is out of the way, could be yet another economic confrontation with Washington. The U.S.-Japanese trade imbalance that prompted the Nixon economic shokku of 1971 stood at a record $4.2 billion at year’s end, and U.S. officials warn of further trouble unless “sure signs” of improvement appear in the next two or three months. Tokyo’s efforts to ease the imbalance have been complicated by the facts that the revaluation of the yen 13 months ago has been slow to take effect, and that the recovering U.S. economy is simply absorbing more Japanese exports. Before long, some bold steps may be necessary-the kind that Kakuei Tanaka once promised, but now seems less and less able to deliver.