Re Stephen Frank: the last remark about Lowi is one key. The distributive arena, which is more-or-less budgeting (especially in Japan), is by definition not very conflictive because getting more money for something is not seen directly as meaning less money for somebody else. If it were it would be "redistributive" with different politics. Much of what we think of as the highly politicized areas, such as agriculture and public works, is just this sort of pork. Within the LDP it led to the leadership and backbencher relationship so well delineated by Ramsayer and Rosenbluth.
Anyway, chats about pork do lead to close ties between bureaucrats and politicians, and of course those ties become important in broader conflicts--i.e. they make the subgovernment stronger when fighting with other subgovernments about something other than the normal budgetary stuff.
My education example that you cite was not at all related to Schoppa's article on the Nakasone era reforms, which was a different kind of process. TJ Pempel's early work and the article by Rohlen in Conflict in Japan are the best on education conflict in the earlier period, I guess. The conflict was not within the establishment, it was the establishment against the left. Or to the extent it was within the establishment it was between the more ideological LDP education zoku (it was mostly ideology that got Dietmen interested in education back then) and the more technocratic bureaucrats in the MoE. But they didn't really disagree with each other much, they just were mainly interested in different things.
Finally, in my own later work, I got less interested in distinguishing ideology and material interests, or ideas and interests, and fastened on energy and ideas as the most basic dichotomy. I also started to look at the long-term development of policy in a particular area as a series of discrete policy-change processes.
All this (and more!) is in my How Policies Change book, which (I might have mentioned before--sorry) will be out in Japanese from Chuuou Houki later this month.