Well now, here we are--the big day, the day when we get to see whether Kōno Tarō will pull a lion's head out of a top hat, or whether he is all bluster and no votes.
(Seriously, if he had not gone to Georgetown, would anybody still be listening to him? Well, O.K., I will admit, the liver section donation thing was very impressive...)
On the other side of the aisle of treason, Sunday Mainichi says 15 Democratic Party of Japan lawmakers in the House of Councillors are poised to jump ship over the party's opposition to road construction and other fiscal goodies. No doubt Ōe Yasuhiro and Watanabe Hiroshi already have both feet out of the party -- I swear one of the newspapers told me that Ōe went so far as to voice support for the LDP candidate in Sunday's Yamaguchi by-election, mirroring Watanabe's support of the non-DPJ candidate in Niigata one election back.
However, I still do not see how they could leave the party when their seats are a regional bloc seats assigned according to a position on a party list.
Can one walk out with a proportional seat? Or leave with it under one's arm after being expelled from the party?
In Sweden, where you vote for a party list of candidates similar to a Japanese proportional seat, the seat belongs to the seat holder once assigned. It is rare but defections and similar have happened (especially at the local level), and the defector keeps the seat even if thrown out of the party. I suspect the same thing holds in Japan.
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