From One Hatoyama to the Next

Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned!
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop
And heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over!

- Jim Morrison, "Horse Latitudes"

So Hatoyama Kunio goes over the gunwale in protest over the reappointment of Nishikawa Yoshifumi, who oversaw--if one could call it that-- the near criminal mismanagement of the disposition of Japan Post-owned Kanpō no Yado hostelery boondoggle:

Hatoyama Quits Aso's Cabinet Over Japan Post Struggle
Bloomberg

By Takashi Hirokawa -- Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso lost the third cabinet member of his administration ahead of elections that he must call within the next three months.

Kunio Hatoyama resigned as internal affairs minister after Aso declined to endorse his recommendation to fire the head of Japan Post Holdings Co., which runs the country’s post offices and is the world’s largest holder of cash deposits. Tsutomu Sato, head of the country’s National Public Safety Commission, will replace Hatoyama, Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura said.

"I decided to leave as the right thing is not being done," Hatoyama, 60, told reporters today in Tokyo.

Hatoyama sought to block the re-appointment of Yoshifumi Nishikawa as head of Japan Post after he tried to sell its resort operations to a company whose chairman was involved in the government plan to privatize the postal system. The internal affairs ministry is in charge of overseeing Japan Post’s transition from a government-owned entity.

I would give Hatoyama Kunio a milligram's worth of credit for showing some spine, just this once, in resisting the reappointment of Nishikawa -- who did little to earn a renewed mandate (Do you mean by this that he did nothing to earn reappointment? - Editor). I really would give Hatoyama a smidgeon of my respect -- I honestly would -- if he were not the total waste of a Diet seat that he is.

Of course with Hatoyama and now Health and Welfare Secretary Toida Tōru resigning from the government in protest, the pundit class will now wonder aloud, "Is this the beginning of the unraveling of the Liberal Democratic Party and the start of the Grand Realignment of Japanese Politics, with everyone in the party entering 'sauve qui peut" mode?"

Perhaps.

Fitting perhaps it would be if the beginning of the end should come over yet another dispute involving the privatization of Japan Post assets, eh? This Diet saw its birth in Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichirō's brilliant transformation of the fight over the privatization of Japan Post into cudgel for the previously disarmed LDP, allowing the LDP to bash the Democratic Party into irrelevance. The prime ministership of Abe Shinzō started its astonishing slide from juggernaut into dust heap with the rushed readmittance of the LDP rebels Koizumi had expelled from the party over their resistance to postal privatization.

The local post office -- the LDP's greatest friend and its eternal albatross.