ABSTRACT
Incumbent Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro has provided his own set of surprises which also illustrate the element of unpredictability in Japanese politics. By far the most significant of these was the generally unanticipated outcome of the 6 July 1986 elections for the entire membership of the House of Representatives and half the members of the House of Councillors. While the LDP had been expected to do better than its dismal performance in December 1983 (see Chapter 2), in all of the pre-election surveys that the major newspapers and the Government-sponsored television and radio network NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai) had conducted, none had foreseen the dimensions of the governing party’s victory in the House of Representatives: 304 seats out of a total of 512. Even without adding former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei and former Parliamentary Vice Minister of Transportation Satō Takayuki-both of whom, while formally having been elected as “Unaffiliated (mushozoku),” would be members of the governing party except for their involvement in the Lockheed bribery scandals-to the list of this conservative party’s victors, the LDP had
returned to the kind of electoral performance that was considered routine in the 1960s.
