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Four Factioneers, Tribalists, and the LDP's Construction Caucus
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The Enigma of Japanese Pork

To what extent do the LDP's construction tribalists actually deliver the bacon to their home districts? If the LDP's construction tribalists do, in fact, funnel public works projects into their prefectures, then one would anticipate a positive correlation between positional influence and increases in public works spending. To examine this matter, I constructed a multivariate regression model to analyze data for the period from 1964 to 1988 (see Appendix D).


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The results of the analysis suggest that the LDP's construction tribalists do not funnel public works projects to their home prefectures, although public works spending does increase slightly beginning in the third year after the appointment of a local legislator to the post of construction minister. Still, the influence of construction tribalists in delivering pork to their home districts is much less than one might have expected.

In this regard, the politics of public works in Japan is enigmatic. Certain prefectures consistently garner higher per capita harvests of public construction allocations; while others reap consistently smaller relative yields. For extended periods, Niigata, Hokkaido, and Shimane ranked near the top for per capita public construction spending, while Tokyo, Saitama, and Osaka consistently found themselves at or near the bottom of the rankings.[10] The stability of these rankings leads one to wonder whether supposedly influential legislators exaggerate their power, so as to lure construction contractors into making large contributions, or, instead, whether construction tribalists dole out pork in even more particularistic ways, such as preferential treatment in zoning decisions, land acquisition, and bidder designation.

The most plausible explanation is that construction tribalists use their influence to ensure the funding of projects most dear to particular firms, and they see to it that contracts go to those firms that make substantial political contributions. Tribalists pay particular attention to protecting the budgets of certain planned projects, knowing that the "complex understandings" of the dango system often help determine the disposition of contracts years in advance. Thus, the designated bidder system encourages tribalists to meddle in decisions about projects reserved for firms outside the tribalist's district. For example, Kanemaru Shin allegedly pressured Governor Takeuchi to award the ¥200-million construction of the Oyama Dam in Ibaraki Prefecture to a joint venture of Tobishima Corporation and Kajima Corporation. Takeuchi's "voice of heaven" apparently produced the desired outcome, and Taisei Corporation, the original predetermined low bidder, was awarded the contract for a rock-crushing plant connected with the dam. Not coincidentally perhaps, approximately twenty of the country's largest general contractors, including Tobishima and Kajima, each funneled as much as ¥20 million a year in


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illegal contributions into Kanemaru's war chest.[11] With these generous contributions, contractors hoped to enlist Kanemaru's reputed influence in allocating public works contracts.


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Four Factioneers, Tribalists, and the LDP's Construction Caucus
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