Things to Pay Attention To...

...in retrospect.

The party affiliations of the last three ministers of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, for example.

Reaching out from the base to cultivate a whole new set of clients, perhaps? Or transforming clients into the base, even?

Without their votes in the Diet, the government falls just short of a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives.

And we wonder why Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo could not bring himself to go the last kilometer and shift all the gasoline tax revenues to the general fund this year, as the Democratic Party asked him to...