Lone Voice No Longer, Japan Gadfly Catches On
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
New York Times
June 18, 2000TOKYO, June 17 -- Crowds build ever so slowly around Zensaku Sakurai, a sidewalk crusader who berates Japan's leaders for what he calls their arrogance, corruption and failure to serve the needs of real people.
Political apathy has long been the norm in this country.
But with Mr. Sakurai's followers brandishing political banners and charts that purport to track the failings of members of Parliament, people stop one by one to listen these days.
Many nod in approval or even volunteer to join the movement. But in a country where direct criticism of others -- even public figures -- strikes an uncomfortable chord, there are always one or two people who jeer him and denounce what he is doing as "un-Japanese."
The hecklers are not the only people jarred by Mr. Sakurai's movement, known as the Rakusen Undo, or blacklist campaign, the most successful of several grass-roots movements that are catching fire here.
Members of the governing party and its coalition partners, who are already on the defensive as hotly contested national elections scheduled for June 25 draw near, have shown their anxiety by crying foul.
"Movements like these are not democratic," Muneo Suzuki, campaign director of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for 43 of the last 45 years, told the daily Asahi Shimbun. "There is a fear that opposition candidates may take advantage of this campaign. Their criteria are not clear, and it is not appropriate for the media to report about it."
Its aim is to encourage people to vote against politicians who receive low ratings from the movement. The unlikely figure at the center of the campaign, Mr. Sakurai, is a lifelong, but until now mostly solitary, activist who operates from the kitchen in his modest suburban home.
"As a people, the Japanese are deeply reluctant to criticize others, and always mindful of harmony, we never want to stick out," said the salt-and-pepper-haired 65-year-old retired insurance company employee. "In general that means that people don't express their thoughts," he said, "especially in politics. The result is a perpetuation of the status quo."
If that were not enough, over the years the government has created rules that seem intended to stifle insurgencies by reformists. Independent candidates, for example, are sharply limited in the number of campaign posters they are allowed to put up.
Recently the government outlawed partisan campaigning on the Internet. And there is already talk about sharply limiting, or even barring, movements like the blacklist campaign.
Mr. Sakurai cut his teeth in dissent in the loneliest of ways, taking the leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party to task for corrupt schemes like the Lockheed scandal, a defense contract kickback scheme in the early 1980's. He has also long railed against what he sees as the party's gradual encroachment on the Constitution.
How his movement has gained steam, finally, is an illustration of the unpredictable nature of political cross-fertilization brought about by technology, particularly the Internet.
South Korea's far more vibrant civil society successfully introduced the theme of fighting corruption in politics into the most recent legislative elections with a similar blacklist movement. More than 50 politicians who were targets of the campaign were defeated at the polls.
Mr. Sakurai is unabashed in acknowledging that he is imitating the South Korean effort. He says he more or less copied wholesale the South Korean
model of using the Internet to generate voter complaints about politicians in the interest of barring the worst of them from re-election.
"We may not be as successful as the Koreans," Mr. Sakurai said. "But they showed us how to trigger something."
He seems to be attracting interest. There have been well over 100,000 hits on the blacklist campaign's Web site, a very high number for Japan.
And the group has been inundated with complaints about politicians. There are so many volunteers these days that Mr. Sakurai said he no longer recognizes all of them.
The change comes after Japan's years of economic drift and a string of blunders by the new prime minister, Yoshiro Mori.
"For such a long time the Japanese people have been prohibited from thinking for themselves," Mr. Sakurai said. "This is the legacy of the prewar imperial system in which people were trained merely to accept and not to ask questions. I feared that we were going back to that system. The purpose of our campaign is to make the voters realize that they possess our sovereignty."
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