Political seismographs in Japan in the past month have registered a series of increasingly serious shocks to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and particularly to Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, 56. Inflation, the slowing of the postwar economic boom, which the Japanese had come to take for granted, and Tanaka's failure to halt factional fighting within the L.D.P. were the immediate causes of the tremors. In this month's election of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the national legislature, the L.D.P. lost six seats instead of breaking even as expected. That gave it only 128 seats in the 252-man...
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