Tokyo Election Yields Gains for Women : They Win 17 Local Assembly Seats as Ruling Party Is Humiliated

TOKYO —  When the vote counting was finished Monday, women had emerged as the undisputed winners in the weekend’s Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election, which had been intensely scrutinized for its trend-setting role before crucial balloting for the upper house of Parliament later this month.

The major political shock of the election was that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 20 of its 63 seats, in the equivalent of a state assembly. A setback for the conservatives had been widely anticipated, however, after a year of scandal and steadily eroding public confidence that already had been registered in several by-elections.

The real surprise was that female candidates took an unprecedented 17 seats in the 128-member chamber, after entering a record 30 candidates. These gains may seem modest, but they are significant in a country where women are typically relegated to the political sidelines.

Women also voted in greater numbers than men in an already high turnout, which suggests that their political clout had been galvanized by two contentious issues: the economic pinch of an extremely unpopular 3% consumption tax imposed by the ruling party in April and moral outrage over a sex scandal that has plagued Prime Minister Sosuke Uno since he took office a month ago.

Uno said he thought a female protest of the consumption tax was behind the ruling party defeat.

“I saw the candidates on television, and a lot of them said they fought on the issue of the consumption tax,” Uno told reporters.

Asked whether he thought female voters had a particular influence on the outcome, Uno added, “Women take things emotionally, and I guess you could say they echoed each other on the consumption tax.”

But Takako Doi, chairwoman of the Japan Socialist Party, said the balloting was the result of pent-up anger over the Liberal Democrats’ policies during the 34 years that it has dominated national politics.

Couldn’t Remain Silent

“People could no longer remain silent after such a long time of one-party control,” Doi told a news conference. “Each vote was a firm rejection of a program that is fundamentally unacceptable in our daily lives.”

Doi’s Socialists reaped the largest benefits from these purportedly angry citizens. Although it is the leading opposition party at the national level, the Socialist Party generally trails Komeito, or the Clean Government Party, at the local level, as it did before Sunday’s vote. But the Socialists boosted their seats from 11 to 29 and backed seven winning independent candidates to come very near to challenging the ruling party’s plurality of 43 seats.

Whether the anti-Liberal Democratic momentum will continue in the campaign for the July 23 upper house vote, which begins Wednesday, is anybody’s guess. But ruling party leaders, showing signs of contrition, are staking out a defensive posture.

“There’s nothing we can say other than that we truly regret the results” of Sunday election, said Ryutaro Hashimoto, general secretary of the ruling party. “The public’s mistrust of politics has been concentrated on the Liberal Democratic Party.”

Hashimoto lashed out at party dissidents who have been calling for Uno to step down to clear the decks for a more upbeat campaign, unburdened by the stigma of their leader’s alleged peccadilloes.

“What the party must do now is unify its forces,” Hashimoto told reporters.

Uno has denied reports that he tried to resign in a fit of depression last Tuesday and now seems determined to attend the Paris economic summit in the middle of the month.

TAX REVOLT A consumption tax has outraged Japan. Business, Page 1