A Minister Dies A Mysterious Death

Minister for Postal Reform and State Minister for Financial Services and People's New Party member Matsushita Tadahiro is dead. Police responding to an emergency call from his Tokyo home at about 4:45 p.m. found him "fallen down" (taorete iru). With disturbing speed, the news media complex is reporting that the police are investigating the death of the 73 year-old Matsushita as being a likely suicide. (J)

Now there may be good reasons to suspect the minister's having taken his own life. However, to see a report of an older, sickly man's death reported as a likely/possible suicide on NHK's prime time evening newscast only 2 hours and 15 minutes after the police were first called is damn peculiar. Recall this is the cast of clowns who could never come clean about the exact cause of death of Nakagawa Sho'ichi, when 1) his father had committed suicide, 2) he was an alcoholic, 3) he had suffered months earlier humiliation on a global scale (You Tube) which ended his political career and 4) he was found, lying down, at his Tokyo home, unresponsive.

If Matsushita did take his own life, he would be only the second Cabinet Minister to do so while in office since the promulgation of the present Constitution, the first having been the scandal-beset Matsuoka Toshikatsu in May 2007.

Requiescat in pacem.

What this death will mean for the implementation of the postal counter-reformation Ozawa Ichiro and Kamei Shizuka foisted upon us in order to please the hereditary postmaster's association and the postal unions, is probably not much. Speculation on this subject is also better left to institutions such as The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg, which tend to frame world events in terms of their effects on investment portfolios.