Kaifu Shuffles Cabinet but Not Policy : Japan: It’s mostly a ritual change, but the justice minister who insulted American blacks is sacked.

Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu carried out a ritual reshuffling of his Cabinet on Saturday, sacking the justice minister who outraged black Americans with a racial slur in September but otherwise doing little to change the balance of power in his stop-gap administration.

Kaifu retained three key Cabinet aides--Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama, Finance Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and Chief Cabinet Secretary Misoji Sakamoto--and left unchanged the three top officers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party hierarchy.

Although he rotated the remaining Cabinet posts among senior Liberal Democrats, Kaifu resisted demands by party bosses that he open his Cabinet to lawmakers who have been tainted by allegations of corruption.

Yet Kaifu, viewed here as a fairly powerless prime minister, caved in to internal party pressure and staged his Cabinet shake-up a week earlier than he had planned. This made little apparent difference in the composition of his new team, but in the arcane world of Japanese clout politics, Kaifu was reminded of his weakness and the relative tenuousness of his position.

Perhaps no more than a byproduct of the realignment, but a significant one for some U.S. critics, was the dismissal of Seiroku Kajiyama, whom Kaifu had appointed as justice minister only three months ago.

Shortly after assuming his post, Kajiyama observed a police raid on foreign prostitutes in a Tokyo red-light district and remarked to reporters that he thought the prostitutes were just like blacks in America because they were ruining the neighborhood. Kajiyama later apologized for the slur, but both he and Kaifu had rejected repeated calls for his resignation.

Kaifu replaced Kajiyama as justice minister with Megumu Sato, a former minister of posts and telecommunications. He named Kajiyama, however, to a prestigious party job, chairman of the LDP’s Legislative Affairs Committee.

Kaifu also appointed a woman to his Cabinet, choosing Akiko Santo, an upper house member, to head the Science and Technology Agency. As a sop to angry women voters last year, Kaifu put two women in his initial Cabinet but dropped them both in his first reshuffle after the LDP won a major election victory last February.

The conservative, pro-American Liberal Democrats, though split into rival factions, have controlled the government continuously since 1955. Nearly annual Cabinet realignments are a means of redistributing the perquisites of power among senior members of the various LDP factions and rarely have anything to do with policy shifts.

Kaifu rose from obscurity to become a caretaker prime minister last year after the ruling party was badly shaken by a series of sex scandals and the sensational Recruit insider stock-trading case. Kaifu has survived adroitly in his seat-warming role amid a power vacuum, partly because of his clean image as a would-be political reformer. But Tokyo is filled with persistent rumors of behind-the-scenes machinations to unseat him before his two-year term expires next October.

In Saturday’s Cabinet reshuffle, Kaifu scored a minor victory by defying the LDP’s powerful factional leaders, who had reportedly hoped to test the water for their return to more formal power by rehabilitating some scandal-tainted politicians. The party bosses evidently sought Cabinet posts for Koko Sato, who was convicted in the Lockheed bribery case in the 1970s, as well as for LDP stalwarts linked to the more recent Recruit scandal.

But a ruling party lawmaker was indicted Thursday on tax evasion charges related to stock speculation, and that development seems to have given Kaifu the moral high ground for the time being.

The new Cabinet, meanwhile, can be expected to maintain the course set by past administrations.