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The Bounties of Credit-Claiming

To improve their chances at the polls, legislators the world round practice credit-claiming, acting to promote the impression that they are "personally responsible" for the government having taken a particular course (Mayhew, 1974, 57).[12] Logically, credit-claiming should face steep obstacles in Japan's multimember electoral district system, because voters cannot easily determine which legislator delivered a given project. Yet the deeply entrenched systems of political clientelism in both Japan and Italy belie this logic.

Candidates in Japanese election campaigns frequently claim credit for roads, bridges, railway lines, and parks. "I delivered that bridge over there," "I brought in this road" are commonly heard boastings at election time. An MP who delivered an expressway is a "road representative," an assemblyman who brings a bridge to the prefecture becomes a "bridge representative," and a town councilor who secures cement covers for gutters lining neighborhood streets is dubbed a "ditchboard representative." Kanemaru Shin boasted to his supporters in Yamanashi that "to say that I was involved in the construction of 99 percent of bridges in this prefecture wouldn't be incorrect" (in Marshall with Toyama 1992, 37). A popular vehicle for credit-claiming is the koenkai newsletter. A typical newsletter might carry a headline proclaiming the government's decision to build a dam in the district and include photographs of the hardworking representative arguing the merits of the proposed project before key cabinet officials and government bureaucrats.

Over time, many conservative legislators have augmented their power resources through credit-claiming. During the early decades of prewar parliamentary democracy, Hoshi Tooru was among the first politicians to use pork-barrel politics effectively. Hara Kei fashioned a system whereby public spending served the interests of the Seiyukai party. In the early postwar years, former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru's "one-man road," a stretch of asphalt running from Tokyo to


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Oiso (where, perhaps not coincidentally, Yoshida's estate was located) and ending in Hakone, exemplified such a system. Ono Banboku, an LDP faction boss, secured a bullet train stop for a small town in his native Gifu Prefecture, and future Prime Minister Fukuda accomplished a similar feat with a railway stop at a small town in Gunma Prefecture. In addition to getting a local bridge named for him, Kanemaru brought a ¥200-billion project for a test line for a magnetic levitation bullet train to Yamanashi Prefecture.

But, without question, Tanaka Kakuei, dubbed the "Emperor of the Construction Ministry," was the greatest practitioner of pork-barrel politics. Among other things, Tanaka delivered to Niigata two superexpressways, a bullet train line (with three stops in small towns in his own district), a university and a techonopolis, and an atomic power plant. Tanaka's reign also brought a number of schools, cultural halls, hospitals, public housing complexes, roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, and river improvement projects to Niigata. The pièce de resistance was a tunnel that "liberated" Shioya Village and its sixty households from its traditional wintertime isolation—at a cost of ¥12 billion, or ¥20 million per household. As a resident of the prefecture observed, "When superexpressways and a bullet train took shape and appeared right before our eyes, we realized just how wonderful Mr. Tanaka is" (Fukuoka 1985, 200).

Among the most powerful of the "mini-Tanakas" is Amano Kosei, a long-time member of the LDP's construction tribe and chief of the public works subgovernment during the late 1980s. Elected to the Lower House in 1958, the same election that launched the parliamentary careers of Takeshita and Kanemaru, Amano felt obliged to become a construction tribalist because of Fukushima's undeveloped infrastructure. He took his first steps toward becoming a tribalist as a three-term member of the Fukushima Prefectural Assembly, when he labored to construct a track-and-field stadium and, later, railway lines and roads. Thanks to his discipleship under faction boss Kono Ichiro, Amano established strong connections to the construction industry. By the mid-1970s, incumbency in a succession of construction-related posts gave him even stronger ties to the construction bureaucracy. Amano claimed credit for channeling a number of public works projects, including the so-called Amano interchange in Motomiya, into


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the prefecture, and he presided over and claimed sole credit for a 20 percent increase in the 1987 public works budget, the first increase since the "ice age" in public construction spending in the late 1970s.

A final example concerns the influence of construction tribalist Nakamura Kishiro. In March 1992 MOC's Road Deliberation Council designated 6,111 kilometers of prefectural roadways as national roadways. One excluded stretch of pavement was an 18-kilometer roadway in Ibaraki Prefecture. Beginning in 1986, signals from MOC concerning the possibility of redesignation alerted residents of the neighboring areas. In March 1990, though, Nakamura was appointed acting chairman of the LDP's Road Research Council. A local politician who visited Tokyo to make a direct appeal reported that Nakamura had claimed that he, Kanemaru Shin (then chairman of the Road Research Council), and Takeshita Noboru would decide the redesignation of prefectural roadways. It so happened that the mayor of a town along the roadway supported one of Nakamura's LDP rivals in Ibaraki's Third District. In November 1991 the residents of another roadway town obtained over 10,000 signatures in support of redesignation. Unfortunately, the town stood solidly in the support bases of Nakamura's two LDP rivals in the district. "Because the local leaders along the roadway did not belong to his support group," argues a disappointed local politician, "Mr. Nakamura became annoyed" and blocked the decision. Even MOC officials admit that, despite a logical case for redesignating the status of the roadway, Nakamura so strongly opposed it that the zealous enthusiasm of the local residents could not alter the ruling (Asahi shinbun , 14 Mar. 1993).

Nevertheless, it is important not to exaggerate the influence of the LDP's construction tribalists. Even influential construction tribalists humbly plead for public works projects on occasion, and public works bureaucrats sometimes disregard explicit orders from their political overlords. A former Finance Ministry bureaucrat turned parliamentarian estimates that the Finance Ministry decides about nine-tenths of the public works budget, leaving MOC and the construction tribe to "play" for the remainder (pers. interview). An upper official of MOC estimated that tribalists influence only about 5 percent of decisions involving the allocation of public works projects (pers. interview). Thus policy tribalists "work with bureaucrats in the bureau-


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crats's system. They have not provided new channels for the LDP to put into effect policies reflecting broader, national interests that do not fit well into the bureaucracy's segmented world" (Schoppa 1991, 104). In the final analysis, members of the LDP's construction tribe owe their influence to their ability to work with the public works bureaucrats.


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