Shisaku

Comment Moderation

2012-01-28T09:18:00.001+09:00

I do this with regrets but due to a libelous statement made in one of the comments to this blog, I will now have to moderate comments.

Rocket Science

2012-01-27T08:07:00.006+09:00

James Saft, a columnist for Bloomberg, purportedly one of the world's most influential finance and business wire services, has a intersesting column out today. Interesting as in "How interesting it is that this piece got past the editors." (Link)

Saft offers a dire scenario that should give any possible foreign investor in Japan's government bond market pause:

At current very low interest rates - 10-year government bonds yield a paltry 1.0 percent - Japan has ample room for maneuver. Take that rate to 2.0 percent and Japan's annual interest bill doubles.

Call that bold; call it counterintutive. Call it 1+1=2.

(Many thanks to reader JM for putting the scenario into perspective for me.)

Very Kind Of Them #6

2012-01-24T15:07:00.007+09:00

The East Asian Forum has published an essay of mine on the reshuffle of the Cabinet (Link).

A few of my snarkier observations were wisely excised by the wonderful editors of the EAF. Unwisely, I will post them here.

Re: The consumption tax

Once the proposed hike in the consumption tax is complete, the tax rate will still be below European value added taxes and in line with Australia's and New Zealand's goods and services taxes. It will be unpopular because it is regressive and reaches out to tap the many elements of society who, though one subterfuge or another, manage to avoid or evade income taxes.

Re: Okada Katsuya

Known by his critics as "The Taliban" for his unswerving views, Okada reportedly refused the position of chief cabinet secretary when Noda formed his first cabinet on September 2 of last year. Okada purportedly preferred to stay out of the limelight in preparation for a challenge for the post of party leader at the next party leadership election, scheduled for September this year. Okada's unpopularity with middle-ranking members of the DPJ, who remember how he led the party to ignominious defeat in the 2005 House of Representatives election, also played a part in his decision to sit back and cool his heels for a while.

Re: Matsubara Jin

The appointment of Jin Matsubara, one of the rare foreign policy and security hawks in the DPJ, should probably be seen a sop to the families of those abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s. The families of the abductees and their supporters have felt that the DPJ has given them short shrift, as the during the 2 1/2 years the DPJ has been in power the abductees portfolio has changed hands seven times.

The appointment of hardliner Matsubara to the main homeland security and the abductees positions makes it unlikely that Japan will make a meaningful contribution to discussions among regional actors of new strategies of dealing with the DPRK in the aftermath of the passing of Kim Jong-il and his replacement by his son Jong-un. Instead, Japanese insistence on a "final resolution" of the abductees issue will continue to be throwing sand into the gears of any proposed shift in policies.

Re: Hirano Hirofumi

As for the appointment of Hirofumi Hirano, it is bald attempt on the part of prime minister Noda to curry favor with the group of DPJ parliamentarians loyal to former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama. Hirano put in a disgraceful performance as chief cabinet secretary during the Hatoyama Cabinet and was ineffective as a negotiator with his opposition counterparts during his recent stint as parliamentary affairs chairman.

Re: Ozawa Ichiro and the Kizuna Party

The two ministers who had to be replaced after being censured, Yasuo Ichikawa and Kenji Yamaoka, are close associates of Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's problematic former leader and major power broker. Ozawa, who is both under party disciplinary sanction and criminal indictment, still managed to attract 109 Diet members, most of them members of the DPJ, to an anti-consumption tax study group session he led immediately after the main DPJ party convention on January 16.

Rumors that Ozawa loyalists might turn against prime minister Noda in a no-confidence vote this spring or even form a new party in the near future gained considerably more credibility in the last days of December when nine members of the DPJ with strong bonds to Ozawa left the party and founded Kizuna, a new, anti-consumption tax, anti-Trans Pacific Partnership party.

Storm Clouds Gathering, But To What End?

2012-01-24T09:51:00.008+09:00

Today the Diet opens its 180th regular session. It promises to be a murderous one, with absolutely no quarter being given by or cooperation coming from the opposition Liberal Democratic, New Komeito and Your parties.

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko has emanated an aura of preternatural calm in advance of his policy speech today but it masks an intense amount of pressure upon him and his Cabinet. To every single piece of legislation or proposed legislation there is heated, almost hysterical opposition, not only between the ruling coalition and the opposition, but between the coalition partners and even between large segments of the Diet membership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. Even the budget, which would normally be guaranteed passage by the DPJ's huge majority in the House of Representatives, is threatened by its contents, most particularly the plan to restart construction of the Yamba Dam -- a plan that is anathema to what seems a clear majority of DPJ Diet members (just why the Noda government caved in to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism pressure on this issue late last year never made the pages or the programs of the mainstream media).

The Fall 2011 extraordinary session saw a miserable 34% passage rate among bills presented to the Diet, the worst rate of bill passage seen since the Heisei Era began. The upcoming regular session, with its series of extremely controversial and radical bills, may end up deadlocked at an even lower level of success.

The question on everyone's lips is whether or not a state of crisis in this upcoming session of the Diet will trigger a House of Representatives election.

Three scenarios predominate:

1) The House of Representatives refuses to consider or rejects the debt ceiling and law modification legislation necessary to implement the Fiscal 2012 budget, triggering a deadlock so tight the prime minister must call an election (a dream of the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party).

2) The Noda government negotiates a settlement with the LDP and the New Komeito whereby they will band together to pass the budget enabling legislation and the raising of the consumption tax in return for a dissolution of the Diet and an election (a dream of political journalists).

3) Internal dissension within the DPJ over the consumption tax rise grows so fevered that Prime Minister Noda, in a fit of pique, calls an election to rid the party of its of its anti-tax faction (the dream of those who believe Ozawa Ichiro is the black hand behind all of the DPJ's internal problems).

Arithmetic, Ozawa's ongoing trial and recent polling results would argue for deals being struck, possible leading to or made after the toppling of Tanigaki Sadakazu from his perch atop the LDP.

If an election were held prior to the predicted end of the regular session of the Diet and/or with no important legislation passed, the DPJ would lose a huge number of seats, particularly in the rural districts. It was a once-in-a-half-century change of heart on the part of voters that enabled the DPJ to capture these bastions of LDP power in 2009. The party would be loath to part with them.

As for the internal divisions of the DPJ, they are very much as "all bark and no bite" affair. The most loudly barking groups in the party are those most vulnerable to losing their seats in the next election (hence the volume of their barking). They know quite well that if they gum up the works on consumption tax legislation or Japan's entering into negotiations on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership so much so that Prime Minister Noda feels compelled to hold an election, they are electoral toast. The direct followers of or those ready to bend an ear to Ozawa Ichiro, who love to look around the room and admire their numbers whenever Ozawa deigns to bless them with his words of political wisdom, are also numbly aware that any breakaway party with Ozawa at its head or under his thrall will get thrashed in an election.

Furthermore, neither the DPJ nor the LDP want to go before the voters right now. In a stunning recent poll by the Mainichi Shimbun only 17% of the voters supported the DPJ and 16% supported the LDP (E). The two major parties are terrified of non-mainstream parties, either the Your Party or the proto-national party being formed by Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru (J). Even the normally lock-step the-LDP-is-my-party-right-or-wrong Yomiuri Shimbun is terrified of the prospects of a populist revolution and is counseling the LDP to get off its duff and cooperate with the DPJ-led government (E).

So much thunder and lightning will be evident today and through the next two weeks, as the governing and opposition parties get their turns at the rostrum.

Whether the typhoon will bear down upon the land, however, remains surprisingly uncertain.

The Second Tsunami

2012-01-22T08:27:00.004+09:00

"If the government treated us like adults…"

That is the killer takeaway phrase in Martin Fackler/Makiko Inoue’s piece in The New York Times this morning (E). If the government, that is to say the national bureaucracy, for politicians are (strangely) absent from this drama, would treat the rest of Japan's citizens as adults, or would at least presume that the Japanese citizenry over 20 years of age would act like adults, with adult levels of skepticism and caution, the collapse in trust in the national government now occurring might be avoided.

Several factors have delayed the onset of the wave of disgust in government that is now driving the country in unexpected directions. First and foremost was the shocking scale of the disaster and the need to focus all available emotional and psychological resources on the rescue, recovery and short-term remediation effort. Second was habitual passivity of the Japanese populace, inculcated by the education system and by rhythms of the workplace (it is neither neither unusual nor unexpected that political action has traditionally been concentrated in the pressing forward of the interests of primary industries or in consumer safety, for only those working in the primary industries and housewives have the downtime necessary for direct participation in political action). Third was the invisibility of the political classes in immediate discussions of the structural causes for the disaster. Prime Minister Kan Naoto remained burrowed in the heart of the Prime Minister's Residence in the initial weeks of the disaster, emerging only to face far-fetched, opportunistic and tawdry accusations of having exacerbated the Fukushima disaster (the venting controversy; the non-existent break in the flushing of the reactors with salt water, et cetera). Fourth was the at first admirable, then later lamentable, fear in the news media of spreading panic. Fifth was the successful application of lessons learned in the Great Awaji-Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. In the immediate, full-force dispatch of the Self Defense Forces, the immediate acceptance of rescue and recovery teams from all over the globe, the acceptance of the unfettered activities of non-governmental organizations and volunteers in the disaster zones, the quick supply of evacuation centers and the relatively quick supply of replacement housing and the focus on the mental health of the dispossessed, particularly the communitarian needs of the elderly, the national government showed a surprising level of competence, given the millennial scale of the disaster.

However, 10 months having passed since the triple disaster, anger over the inadequacies over existing forms of governance is spreading. Recovery from the disaster is running up against practices and mindsets that are clearly incapable of responding to the new needs of citizens. The Diet is absorbed in parochial interests, either of destruction of the opposing party or the implementation of plans inspired by if not fully drafted by bureaucrats. The bureaucracy itself, cast free of political direction, has failed to appreciate that the methods it heretofore applied to suppressing public participation in decisions is no longer appropriate or credible (E). Reconstruction in the Tohoku region and remediation of the radioactive fallout from the explosion of the Fukushima Dai'ichi plants remains passive or even non-existent, as governments on all levels – national, prefectural and local – wallow in wishful thinking and daydreaming, promising, for example, to quickly decontaminate 2 million homes in Fukushima (a pledge whose being honored would depend, one would suppose, on what one defines as "quickly"). By either promising too much or acting too little, government is losing legitimacy, as is demonstrated by the ridiculously low levels of support for any of the existing parties and the pathetic longing for a leader, even one so patently absurd as Hashimoto Toru, who has promised to take his authoritarian, regional, bureaucratic-bashing program national in time for the next House of Representatives elections (J).

It is not too late for both the ruling DPJ or the bureaucracy to rethink their positions vis-à-vis the citizens, to salvage what can be salvaged of their authority and legitimacy. However, the task is so much harder than it would have been several months ago, in the midst of the crisis, when the government was getting a free pass by the citizens to remake Japan – and more importantly, remake themselves.

The Socialist Party Slides Toward Extinction

2012-01-21T12:55:00.007+09:00

Though it hardly seems worthwhile to report on the political decline of a micro-party, the political news of the day is Social Democratic Party leader Fukushima Mizuho's certain reelection as the head of her party. Certain as in she is running unopposed and there will, as a consequence, be no vote for party leader at the party's congress on February 24.

Fukushima's victory comes as a result of both party rules and the SDP's continuing failure at the polls. Party rules state that a candidate for party leader must have the nominations of at least 4 Diet members. With only 10 Diet members in total, the SDP has only just enough members for two competing candidates, if every single Diet member plays along. Fukushima nailed down her fourth nominee on the 20th. Party policy chief Abe Tomoko, who had wanted to challenge Fukushima, managed to win the support of three of her colleagues but failed to win the endorsement of the last remaining Diet member before the nomination deadline today.

With her failure to gain enough support to challenge Fukushima, with whom she has clashed in terms of the SDP's unwillingness to work with other parties, Abe is left with a rather unpalatable choice: either stick around with Fukushima glaring daggers at her all the time or leave the party. "As a politician I have a decision to make and when I make it I will hold a press conference," was Abe's comment to the press (J). Unfortunately for Abe, she is a proportional seat member, meaning that she can only serve as independent, since those elected on a party list who defect from their party can only found a new one, not join an existing one. Abe cannot make the journey from relevance to irrelevance to relevance again trod by district seat holder Tsujimoto Kiyomi who lost her sub-cabinet post when the DSP left the ruling coalition over the Futenma relocation dispute. In revenge, Tsujimoto left the DSP, sat as an independent for a while to cool off, then joined the Democratic Party of Japan.

If Abe leaves, the full Diet membership of the DSP will drop down to nine seats, putting it at a par with the brand new and already much-loathed Kizuna party. If her three supporters in the leadership fight decide to leave with her, the party will be left with three House of Representatives members and three House of Councillors members, leaving it perilously close to the five Diet member limit for political organizations that wish to be identified as parties.

Even without this nasty split over party leadership, the Socialists and indeed all the micro-parties were already in peril. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan has said it will submit a bill in the next session eliminating 80 of the 180 proportional seats in the Diet, ostensibly as a cost-cutting measure but really as a sop to its own rank-and-file, who are ticked off at the party leadership for not making the least effort to carry out the proposals listed in the DPJ's 2009 manifesto and indeed backtracking on almost all of them. The measure has very little chance of passing, despite its attractiveness to the main opposition party the Liberal Democratic Party, since the new bill would decimate the numbers of the LDP's ally, the New Komeito Party. Any reduction of the number of proportional seats, however, would imperil the continued existence of the SDP in the House of Representatives. Simulations show that if the 80 seat reduction were to be carried out, all of the Socialist Party proportional seats, including the one Abe sits in, would vanish.

The disappearance of the Socialists would, of course, end a grand chapter in the history of Japanese politics, one with the cautionary lesson of never giving up one's ideals and policies for the brass ring of power. Once the number two party in the Diet, locked in a seemingly eternal love-hate relationship with the dominant LDP, institutionalized in what became known as "the 1955 system," the Socialists were already in alarming decline after the establishment of center-left alternatives to the LDP in the 1993 election. Real rot and rebellion did not set in, however, until after the Socialists made what they were to find out was really the deal of a lifetime: an alliance with the LDP that had a clueless Murayama Tomiichi become the first Socialist PM since the unifications of the two main parties in 1955. In order to win this prize, the Socialists shed virtually all of their major points of difference with the LDP's left-leaning members. Bereft of the mantle of the party of persons of conscience (because clearly the Socialists did not have one), the party rapidly lost its voting base to the rising DPJ.

The passing of the Socialists into history would not be of much consequence save that in its brief time as the coalition partner of the ruling DPJ-- and its departure from the ruling coalition over policy -- the SDP had regained some of the luster of being the party of conscience. It was its members, not the members of the DPJ, who really tried to find a workable alternative to the move of Futenma to Henoko promised by DPJ party leader and prime minister Hatoyama Yukio. When the coalition voted to backtrack on Hatoyama's promise to find an alternate site to Henoko, the SDP pulled itself out of the coalition (E).

Sic transit gloria Showa mundi...

At Last

2012-01-20T08:04:00.005+09:00

After 35 straight days without precipitation, the skies have finally delivered a bit of moisture to the parched Kanto Plain.

And it is in the form of snow.

The child inside me (who is not all that different from the child outside) says, "Yippee!"

Growth Neither Nominal Nor Real

2012-01-18T17:35:00.008+09:00

Over the last few days I have had the chance to fulfill a longtime wish: to read Aurelia Mulgan George's Power and Pork: A Japanese Political Life (2006).

It is sobering to read the book six years on, in light of all that has happened since.

At the time of the study's going to print, Matsuoka Toshikatsu, the subject of the study, achieved his life's goal of being named Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, requiring that Dr. George hurriedly insert a few paragraphs on his nomination into the last pages of her manuscript – all which was all to come to naught a few months later when Matsuoka committed suicide, this in order to avoid further Diet inquiry into just the sort of sordid accounting and fund-raising shenanigans Dr. George documents.

"A Political Life" turned out to be a grimly prophetic subtitle.

But it is not only Matsuoka's suicide that provides a somber coda to the work. Nakagawa Sho'ichi, Matsuoka’s predecessor at MAFF and a lifelong antagonist was himself to die at a young age (56) under circumstances that suspiciously looked like suicide, after his untreated alcoholism undid his life's dream of becoming prime minister. If Nakagawa's death was indeed suicide (the investigation into the actual cause of death was willfully unenthusiastic) it was repeat of the death of his father Ichiro, who committed suicide in 1983.

Ichiro's political secretary Suzuki Muneo, who comes across as the sleazeball mentor of Matsuoka, was sent to prison for his funding escapades, but is now rehabilitated as the leader of a regional political movement and a member of the House of Representatives allied with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan – a political marriage of convenience Suzuki parlayed into the chairmanship of the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs – the committee overseeing and investigating the activities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ministry Suzuki had so thoroughly and extensively perverted through intimidation and interference during the years covered in the study.

As for the misuse and misallocation of government funds perfected by Matsuoka and Suzuki during the "Lost Decades" that burned a hole in the Japanese government’s pocket, wasting trillions of yen on makework projects whose operations and maintenance costs far exceed any societal benefit derived from the support they gave temporarily to Japan’s GDP figures, "bad" economic stimulus that has left the country in an Alice in Wonderland state where the government has a net debt greater than 100% of GDP, funds half its budget through bond sales rather than revenues, deflation devours debtors and risk taking, government bond yields are but a shade above 1% despite massive debts and deficits and the current government's policy response – which it labels reform – is to cut spending and raise the consumption tax, despite ironclad economic laws mandating that such actions will shrink the size of the economy, thereby further reducing tax revenues, requiring greater bond issuance to fund the same size national government budget...while the reforms of the Prime Minister's Office's powers to determine policy have evaporated away, leaving Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko buffeted back and forth, a feather in the gale.

It leaves one crying, like the poor father at the end of Coup de Foudre/Entre Nous:

"Quel gâchis! Quel gâchis!"

Witless To History

2012-01-17T18:24:00.006+09:00

I was reading James R. Holmes' most recent post at The Diplomat (Link). For the most part the essay argues quite cogently that the United States should reduce the size and change the composition of the naval forces it has based upon its Atlantic Coast. Basically since there are no peer competitors or major zones of instability in the Atlantic, north or south, there is really not much point in having half of the U.S. carrier force based in Atlantic ports.

However, one line in the essay made me gag:

The 2007 U.S. Maritime Strategy calls on the U.S. sea services—the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—to stage "credible combat power" in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean for the foreseeable future, remaining the dominant maritime force in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Yet some 40 percent of the navy remains in the Atlantic, where it risks becoming a wasting asset. It’s high time to reallocate forces in to support the Maritime Strategy, and to back up President Barack Obama’s pledge to keep the U.S. military number one in this critical region. China’s People’s Liberation Army would be the yardstick for a new "one-power standard." Once concentrated in the Pacific—arrayed not only along the West Coast, Hawaii, and Guam but at forward bases in Japan and, preferably, in central positions like Australia—preponderant U.S. forces would dissuade China from mischief-making, much as Theodore Roosevelt’s "Great White Fleet" did vis-à-vis Imperial Japan a century ago.

Oh yes, great. We all remember how well that policy of prevention of "mischief-making" on the part of the Japanese Imperial Navy turned out in the end, do we not?

The key to an extended peace in the East Asian region is not trying to deter China from "mischief-making." First, it is unaffordable, as the means by which Chinese forces will achieve access denial capabilities in the Western Pacific are far, far cheaper than it will cost to counter these access denial capabilities.

Second and more importantly, the accession of China to a certain level of military power needs to be viewed as an inevitable and desirable corrollary of China's reemergence as a world politco-cultural-military center. Rather than the demeaning puffery of seeking to "defer mischief-making," the goal of the allied Pacific naval powers should be to smother the PLA Navy with collaborative and burden-sharing proposals. Diplomats and military experts traveling to Beijing or Qindao or Hainan should bring with them flash drives packed with great presentations on "The U.S. Navy can do this, the Maritime Self Defense Forces can do that, the Korean Navy can do this, the Aussies and Kiwis can do that and you can do this. Together, with each force providing a vital piece of the puzzle, we can solve this."

The key point to drive home is that the PLA Navy, even as it is currently constituted, can and should provide vital security services within its immediate area of operations and around the globe. The approach should be pro-active, with the navies of the Asia-Pacific showering the PLA Navy with positive actions for its burgeoning assets to perform.

With institutions as with individuals, nothing flusters, confuses and changes plans so much as being loved.

A Little Too Smooth

2012-01-06T09:10:00.004+09:00

Off topic, somewhat, but considering the nearly disrespectful rapidity of the transition of power and authority in the DPRK, particularly in favor of Chang Song-tak, who has twice been sent down for reeducation, and his wife Kim Kyong-hui, the sister of the late Kim Jong-il, it is possible that someone might have burked the Dear Leader on his train, before he might have a chance to further alter his succession plans?

For as the Chicago School would argue, where there are incentives, there will be action.

Just a thought.

Concentration, Concentration Now Begins

2012-01-06T07:12:00.001+09:00

What happens when your standard operating procedure takes 100 tons of trash, including plastics, and turns them into 99 tons of water and carbon dioxide and 1 ton of ash, with the latter to be either buried or recycled as paving and building material?

A recipe for a magnificent nuclear mess.

Kashiwa stops operation of incinerator again as radioactive ash fills up storage
Mainichi Online

KASHIWA, Chiba -- The municipal government here suspended the operation of one of its main incinerators again on Jan. 5 as a storage facility at the waste disposal factory was filled up with incinerated ash contaminated with radioactive substances emitted from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

The operation of the city's Nambu (south) Clean Center had previously been suspended for about two months from last September. It is not clear when the city can resume operation of the incinerator this time because it has not been able to secure new space to store incinerated radioactive ash.

According to the Kashiwa Municipal Government, the Nambu Clean Center is storing about 200 metric tons (about 1,049 waste drums) of incinerated ash whose radiation levels are higher than the national limit of 8,000 becquerels per kilogram for landfill. The storage space there is now filled with drums, and there is also about 30 tons of incinerated ash left in the incinerator. (Link)

Funny, this reduction in volume thing, which worked so well at solving the nation's landfill limitation problem (and heats so many municipal swimming pools) seems to create, post-3/11, a staggering radioactive waste problem.

You have to admit, the affected incinerator has a reassuring, chirpy name.

You Can Never Be Too Sure

2012-01-06T06:12:00.006+09:00

One of the outstanding features of the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, was that the scale of the disasters far exceeded any expectations (A double tsunami (E)? Four nuclear power plants blowing up?). The recent interim report of independent fact-finding commission in charge of investigating the Fukushima nuclear disaster mocked the constant repetitions by those with authority over the safety measures at the Fukushima Dai'ichi power station that the events of March 11 were "beyond imagining" (soteigai - J). However, that there have been only five 9.0 seismic events measured in the last century should be reason for cutting the disaster planning folks some slack (not all slack, mind you -- as accounts of the forward thinking and responses of the various branches and levels of government make painfully clear).

So one of the lessons of March 11 seems to be "think beyond what you believe to be the possible."

But there is soteigai, and there is, well, this:

Saitama Pref. to take tsunami countermeasures
The Yomiuri Shimbun

The Saitama prefectural government has begun work to include tsunami countermeasures in its regional disaster management plan, it has been learned.

This will be the first attempt by an inland prefecture to prepare for tsunami damage in its disaster preparations.

It is part of a review on possible damage after experts examining the impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake said a future tsunami could hit Tokyo Bay and travel up the Arakawa river that runs from Tokyo through Saitama Prefecture. (Link)

OK, so Saitama Prefecture has no coastline, is 20 kilometers upriver from Tokyo Bay and 100 kilometers from the open ocean.

Hmmmm...

I suppose I should look on the bright side. The prefecture investigating its tsunami preparedness at least is not Yamanashi.

Ozawa Ichiro Leaves His Bunker To Go On Holiday

2012-01-05T06:34:00.007+09:00

Ozawa Ichiro, the former leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and its main power broker, represents Iwate Prefecture District #4. Iwate Prefecture and its neighboring prefectures had a little problem last year in and around March 11.

You may remember it.

Well, Ozawa Ichiro sure did. In fact, on January 3, he forewent his usual New Years party at his house to visit the disaster zone.

For the first time since March 11.

In a whirlwind tour of five locations, he took the time to criticize the government's response to the crisis, saying that it was driven by bureaucrats and top-down thinking, rather than from local, on-the-ground authorities making the decisions. "Has the government forgotten what it was that the people expected of the change in ruling parties?" he asked rhetorically.

"And where the hell have you been?" one might reply, not so rhetorically. "Not in the capital plotting to overthrow the very government that was trying to deal with the catastrophe through a bald power play of joining hands with the opposition in a no confidence motion, hmmm?"

As one participant at one of these canned meetings suggested, trying to put the best face on the situation, "I think it would have been nice if he had come a bit earlier...but to hear he is enthusiastic [about reconstruction and recovery] is good." (J)

Yes, it is good to hear he is enthusiastic about reconstruction and recovery...and to hear from him that if only he had been in charge, implementing as he would be the manifesto of the 2009 elections, things might be better.

"Uncharitable" would be the word to describe my thoughts upon hearing this report. Since I probably am already in pretty hot water over the sea slug comment, I will refrain from finishing this sentence:

"Ozawa-san, you are a total..."

I Saw Him Standing There

2012-01-04T13:43:00.003+09:00

A few years ago, when a good friend was writing his first book, I chided him gently for the section (he had me reading the drafts) he had penned on matsuri (festivals). From what little training I had had in the social sciences, I knew that festivals were much more than just displays of colored lights, children running about with the gifts and treats they had just received, neighbors greeting neighbors, truly awful food and reaffirmations of local and national traditions. They were about power: who in my neighborhood clung to it, who wielded it and who would never have it. From the lists of the donors to who was pouring sake from the big bottle, the matsuri was a palimpsest of the writhing vines of power binding the neighborhood together in a way that mocked the constitutional equality of all attending.

Due to my own ignorance, I did not point out the most significant oversight: the lack of a mention of the presence of organized crime. As the Lawyer has explained to me since, "Where there are matsuri, there are yakuza.

So I should not have been surprised to see while on a January 1 hastumode at X Hachimangu a tall, heavy-set man in a black suit, short-cropped hair and a gold watch on his wrist matter-of-factly taking a fan of thousand-yen bills from the hands of a food vendor, not three meters away from where I was standing in line.

"Look," I said, "a member of the local criminal element taking his cut."

"Not necessarily," countered my companion. "He could be just a member of the organizing committee."

Uh, no.

It was 6 degrees out; we were in the shade of a grove of trees. Everyone else was in winter wear, stamping his or her feet from the cold. This guy was in a suit, no coat...and he walked over to another guy, short-set, punch-permed hair, in black suit, no coat, smoking a cigarette outside a closed tent marked "RESERVED SEATING."

The only such tent on the grounds.

The ousting of gangsters from the Kitazawa Hachimangu's autumn festival was national news (E) last year, making the evening news broadcasts on NHK. The Kitazawa Hachimangu is a tiny little place. I know; I have been there. That the National Police Agency should make such a hullabaloo about kicking the gangsters out of a postage-stamp sized shrine and its festival is indicative of a serious national problem.

In December, the city of Yaizu pulped its official 2012 calendars after a known yakuza was spotted in a photo of the city's summer festival. Please take a look at the size of the crowd in the photo. How in Amaterasu's name could there not be a yakuza in the picture?

I had my camera with me in line on Sunday. However, as I was going to pray for peace and good fortune in the new year, it is probably a good thing I did not surrender to the temptation to take the shot.

Notes From The Kohaku Gassen

2011-12-31T23:23:00.010+09:00

This year's song contest is the year of the furusato, the inevitably rural hometown of legend and memory. One could not expect otherwise, in the year when so many rural communities were ruined, either from the earthquake and tsunami, from the fallout of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster or the summer's devastating rains and typhoons. Images and messages from the disaster zones have dominated the telecast, while the song selection has avoided urban areas and conventions in favor of rural sentimentality.

A few personal and decidedly shallow questions have been answered.

Q: Could Perfume really perform "Laser Beam" live?

A: Yes, but only just. When the song ended, the members of the group bent over laughing in relief, as they clearly had never done anything but lip-synch in previous performances.

Q: Would Shiina Ringo behave, or go off-script?

A: The producers must have been crossing their fingers when the volatile singer took the stage with her backup bank Tokyo Jihen. She delivered a pedestrian performance of "Carnation," the song NHK wanted her to tear up, as it is the theme song to their daily serial drama. Instead, she and Tokyo Jihen tore into their 1950's big band number "Onna no ko wa dare de mo."

The producers probably sighed a sigh of relief anyway.

Q: What was Matsutoya Yumi appearing on the program for, decades after her last hit and for only the second time, singing "Haru yo, koi", a tune she penned in 1994?

A: One reason was that the song was appropriate for a country exhausted by the triple disaster of the Tohoku, the high yen, the prospect of tax increases, pointlessly feuding political parties and yet another government with its head seemingly in the sand. A call for spring to come soon, a spring unsullied by disaster as this year's was, seemed to hit the right notes, both physically and spiritually. NHK certainly made into a spectacle, having all the performers come out and sing "Spring come!" (Haru koi!). Then again, for a performer like Matsutoya, with her giant sets and stage shows including elephants, having everyone come out for her song was just a matter of course.

The sadder possibility is that Yuming's performing days may be over. From what I just saw, the greatest singer-songwriter of her generation seems to be suffering from some sort of degenerative nerve disease, possibly Parkinson's.

This may have been a last hurrah.

As for the results of the contest, the Red (female) side eked out a rare win in the national voting -- surprising as the votes of adolescent girls often overwhelm the votes of the rest of the population, handing the annual title to the White (male) side. However, given that aside from Nishida Toshiyuki's performance of "Ano machi ni umarete" ("Being born in that town"), a tune he made into a love song to his hometown of Koriyama, one of the cities hard hit by the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, the White performers' performances were duds, the very rare Red victory was not so surprising.

What Lies Within May Surprise You

2011-12-30T07:32:00.007+09:00

Lest it be thought from my post and comment on the restaurant chain in China employing persons with learning disabilities that those with such conditions are relegated to repetitive, unchallenging work, it should be noted that the calligraphy for this next season's Taiga Drama Taira Kiyomori (seen above) is by Kane Shoko, a 24 year-old master large brush calligrapher with Down's syndrome.

Here is her website and the page from it showing her in action.

Image courtesy: NHK

The Nine Defectors From The House Of Representatives

2011-12-29T10:33:00.008+09:00

Okumura Jun has produced a person-by-person analysis of the nine members of the Democratic Party of Japan's House of Representatives delegation who turned in their party badges yesterday (Link).

To Okumura-san's extensive research I would only add the observation that six of the nine were among the 16 legislators who left the Democratic Party Diet caucus in February over the then party leadership's then incipient decision to put Ozawa Ichiro on probation.

So one can assume that not a lot of tears are being shed at the defection of this particular group.

Hardship Duty

2011-12-29T10:08:00.007+09:00

I had heard that the air in New Delhi was the worst in the world -- but this is ridiculous:

When NHK showed Prime Minister Noda reviewing the color guard sent out to meet him, you could scarcely see him through the brown murk.

Now I have been extremely critical of the PM these last few days -- but for making this trip and just breathing (or at least trying to) he deserves an imperial decoration.

Image courtesy: TBS

Koike Yuriko Embarrasses Herself

2011-12-29T07:09:00.006+09:00

Koike Yuriko, the former newscaster, Defense Minister (veeerrrryyy briefly) and official attack dog of the Liberal Democratic Party in the English-language press has produced a "thought piece" on the political situation in the DPRK (Link). Having been warned by Janne Morén on the use of quotation marks, I nevertheless think them absolutely warranted here, as under no circumstances was Koike's brain ever actually engaged in the production of "North Korea's Samurai Rules." I was tempted to produce a post on "The Literary Crimes of Koike Yuriko" in an homage to Mark Twain's incomparable takedown "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" -- but frankly Koike's piece is not worth the effort. It would take hours to go through the errors, misrepresentations, mistaken notions, inconsistencies, self-defeating assertions and vain hopes populating this brief essay. My only hope is that some mean-spirited soul produces a Japanese translation of this exercise and disseminates it widely.

I will limit myself to a single scream of frustration: even a seven-year old knows that Hojo Masako was the wife of Minamoto no Yoritomo, not his daughter-in-law!

To think that this nonsense is to be reprinted in media outlets all over the globe makes the mind reel and stumble.

Tip o' the hat to Corey Wallace for posting the Koike piece on Facebook, where it has earned not a single "like" or comment.

And Then There Was One

2011-12-28T18:44:00.008+09:00

As noted in comments to a previous post, nine members of the Democratic Party of Japan's House of Representatives delegation have submitted their resignations from the party (E) in protest against a number of policies the government has recently rammed down the party's throat.

In a "let's all take a deep breath and wait before predicting the deluge" post at Global Talk 21, Okumura Jun noted that no House of Councillors members had headed for the exits (E).

Well, guess what? A few hours ago House of Councillors member Yokomine Yoshiro offered up his resignation from the DPJ (J).

Now Yokomine, the father of the golfer Yokomine Sakura, has been a huge pain for the party, being involved in a series of mishaps and ethical lapses since he was picked as a proportional seat candidate by party leader Ozawa Ichiro. His resignation from the party for what his political secretary called "personal reasons" may have nothing to do with the current party distress over the proposed rise in the consumption tax, the Yamba Dam restart declaration and the prime minister's hair-splitting and ultimately undone solution to winning party support for Japan's entering into discussions on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But the timing of Yokomine's resignation is, if not suspicious, then still bad for the image of the prime minister.

I am not going to say that I warned that that fission could happen...but I warned that fission could happen.

What I got wrong was the timing: I did not think the breakup would begin before the New Year.

Later - Over at σ1, Corey Wallace goes into some particulars as to why it is appropriate to think that "this time, it's different" (Link).

Analysis Not For The Faint Of Heart

2011-12-28T12:21:00.002+09:00

Kyle Mizokami tells it like it is...and it ain't pretty (Link).

Good to know that the human component of the III Marines Expeditionary Force will remain based in Okinawa for the foreseeable future, ready to save the day.

Yes, I am being somewhat sarcastic.

Take That, Perfidious Sea Slug!

2011-12-27T21:06:00.005+09:00

On Christmas Eve I likened Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko to a marine invertebrate, disgusted at his floopy defenses of awful, divisive decisions made by his government last week.

Well, it seems that an onslaught of feelings of disgust and dismay are washing about the prime minister right now, so much so it is hard for him to keep his head above the froth. How lucky that he spent the weekend in China and this evening hopped aboard a plane to India.

Where to begin?

- The F-35 decision - Liberal Democratic Party defense policy wonk Ishiba Shigeru, who has never been known to oppose any military acquisition before, promises in an interview with the Tokyo Shimbun (J) that his party will grill the government in Diet Budget Committee session. Ishiba quite clearly believes that the decision was a political one, to please the government of the United States when the Democratic Party of Japan has made such a hash of handling the Futenma Replacement Facility controversy. He is also convinced that the F-35 is simply the wrong plane to purchase at this time.

When you have lost a confessed military otaku as Ishiba over an order for a cutting-edge weapons system of primarily U.S. manufacture, you have really messed up.

- The Yamba Dam decision - DPJ Policy Research Council Chairman Maehara Seiji told the prime minister and the chief cabinet minister that a decision to restart the cancelled Yamba Dam project would not garner party support. DPJ Secretary-General Koshiishi Azuma echoed Maehara view. Acting Secretary General Tarutoko Shinji said the party will not support the decision. To this, Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu seems to have responded something on the lines of "What we have here is a failure to communicate." The three party officials threw up their hands and deferred to the government's wishes to restart the miserable project.

Well, what has happened, aside from every media outlet pointing out that the restart of the dam project represents a final turning away from the promises set out in the party's 2009 electoral manifesto? Nakajima Masaki, a proportional seat holder from the Northern Kanto Bloc has announced his intention to leave the DPJ, with support for his decision from the DPJ's district seatholders (J). In addition, Ishizeki Takashi, the party's Representative for Gunma District #2, is resigning from all of his party posts. In the party's Tax Committee meeting on Monday, which was supposed to discuss the government's various tax proposals including a rise in the consumption tax, two of the three hours of the meeting was taken up by opponents of the Yamba Dam airing their complaints about the decision.

- The Budget and Tax Proposals - The prime minister wants to have all discussions of the budget and tax rise proposals finished by the end of the year. A budget put together seemingly without rhyme or reason was approved on Saturday, with provisos to set in motion a rise of the consumption tax. The rush to push through all the decisions on these proposals before the end of the year has result in severe party discord. Three DPJ Representatives have announced they are leaving the party in a protest against the precipitous raising of the consumption tax. They hope to lead another seven to eight Representatives out with them and form a new political party (J). In another move, 89 first term members of the House of Representatives have sent a joint message to the party leadership that before the government can consider imposing a rise in the consumption tax on the citizens, the DPJ must follow through on its promise to cut the number of Diet members -- this even though the most of the seats to be cut would come from amongts those held by the first-termers.

Seems like some folks still have some spine and revolutionary spirit in the DPJ after all.

To be sure, the multiple rebellions and threats seems to be taking their toll on the heretofore unflappable PM. On the news tonight, his right eyelid was drooping, making the man look as though he needed a shave, a shower and a full night's rest.

Maybe he will get some sleep on the plane.

The Kiwi Does It Again

2011-12-27T12:23:00.002+09:00

Corey Wallace on the history behind the revision of the Three Principles regarding arms exports (Link).

Read it, dangnabbit.

The Food You Eat

2011-12-27T10:21:00.005+09:00

The Wall Street Journal's China blog ChinaRealTimeReport has a post up about a Chinese restauranteur's answer to tightening labor conditions and the incresing mobility of workers: hiring staff with learning disabilities (E).

In this, the Chinese entrepreneur is well behind Japan in this innovation. The food preparation business, with its emphasis on repetitive, unchallenging tasks, is probably the major employer of Japanese adults with learning disabilities. It gives persons that would otherwise be unemployable a job, a salary and often independence. It certainly also reduces the burdens on the parents and the state, which would otherwise be charged with entertaining and coping with these otherwise difficult to mainstream human beings...and given the almost total absence of the practice of amniocentesis for decades and its rarity even now, the population of intellectually challenged is not insignificant.

Even major chains have experimented with introducing those with learning disabilities into their workforce. I remember the shock and then admiration I felt at a visit to my local McDonalds when I noticed that a young woman with Down's Syndrome was taking my order. The experiment seemingly did not work, for the girl did not work at the outlet very long -- but it was a worthy effort by an organization whose scale and output volume tend to consign it to the category of unfeeling corporate behemoth.

So when you hear in the business press about how inefficient the food preparation business is in Japan, keep in mind that it provides work not only to those living in the economically bereft hinterlands but also for those who would otherwise be denied the dignity of a job.

Unwinding

2011-12-26T13:51:00.006+09:00

T'is the season of reviews and of looking to the future.

Sheila Smith of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York has a published her impressions of 2011 (Link). The piece is geared to an American foreign policy audience and hits most of the major points. I would have included a bit more on the virtual collapse of the chances for the construction of a Futenma Replacement Facility at Henoko among the foreign policy issues of note -- but then again, Dr. Smith has been writing about the hopelessness of the move of the Futenma U.S. Marines assets to northern Okinawa for years. She may be afraid of sounding like a broken record.

(English speakers have just got to concoct a more contemporary metaphor for this condition. Then again, the Japanese equivalent is "sounding like a broken tape recorder.")

Just one question, though: what how does the Nadeshiko Japan victory in the World Cup demonstrate the effectiveness of civil society in absorbing the trauma of 3/11? Is it not the opposite, that the country needed the victory to shake itself of a post-3/11 national depression?

Television and radio journalist Lucy Craft has put together a report for NPR (Link) that is going to get her into hot water with the knee-jerk Japan defenders. While it is true that she does not give equal time to any kind of scientific assessment of the dangers of longterm exposure to low-level radiation (one should perhaps, for example, note that Europeans living in houses made of stone, particularly granite, expose themselves to significant annual doses of radiation, while radon in basements is a worldwide radiation hazard), she does expose what we all have been doing, to a greater or lesser extent: avoiding products from near the Fukushima plants and wondering when the next shoe will drop.

And there are so many shoes to drop, like where all the incinerators and water treatment plants, whose standard operating procedures transform large quantities of waste into small amounts of waste now have to deal with the reality of that they are taking massive quantities of material with low levels of radiation and transforming them into concentrated high-level radioactive muck that has to be buried somewhere.

More to come on this score, I am sure.

What The Angels Sing

2011-12-25T07:30:00.003+09:00

Neither this nor this is a Christmas tune, nor has the least thing to do with Japan or Asia. However, the one is based upon the other...and J.S. Bach loved the melody so much he sprinkled it throughout his repertoire.

Let them be my little presents for those who come to visit.

It has been a long year, with many changes in the lives of the permanent residents of this sad and lonely little blue planet. However, this morning, Christmas morning, the sun is out over Tokyo, Mt. Fuji gleams with snow and a dusting of chocolate and a dollop of whipped cream flavor my morning cup.

Pax vobiscum.

Bah, Humbug!

2011-12-24T22:35:00.005+09:00

On Christmas Day, you can't get sore
Your fellow man you must adore
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four..."

- Tom Lehrer, "A Christmas Carol"

In an hour's time I will have to beam at all mankind a shining grin of blessed munificence. Before that hour strikes, however, I would like to wish a few lumps of coal upon those deserving them in their stockings.

To Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko: Shame on you for this week, where you proved through the F-35 decision, the decision to restart the Yamba Dam project and the budget proposal you delivered today, with its staggering 49% of intake from borrowing (this in order to deliver everything on every ministry's wish list, it seems - E) that you are not a flexible dealmaker, but a shambling, dissembling sea slug. Maybe it was a bad week for you -- but yowza, what a week it was!

To Ozawa Ichiro - for batting your eyelashes at Osaka City Mayor Hashimoto Toru when the latter came slouching up the capital to beg from everyone whose office door he found open to please, please, please let him turn Osaka from a "fu" to a "to" --although no sane person can explain what good that bit of bureaucratic paper shuffling will do: Osaka will still be Osaka, with nearly nothing to recommend it save the bunraku puppet theater and Janne Morén. Thanks Ozawa-san for tossing the DPJ into yet another round of self-doubt and suspicion as to you and your acolytes' intentions.

To Defense Minister Ichikawa Yasuo - for having accepted the offer to head a ministry about whose issues and history you knews zilch...and having the gall to remain in office after admitting you had no qualifications for the post, other than that you were a breathing human being with the proper citizenship.

To Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu - for never having a proper explanation of what it is the government thinks it is doing. Is there anyone senior to you in the party hierarchy to explain to you simply, so that you might understand, how important it is for you to know the answers to the questions being put to you, as you are supposedly the government's COO?

To Watanabe Yoshimi - for quitting a dying party out of principle, then wasting years not articulating what your new party stands for, other than for adolescent slacker narcissistic snark.

O.K., O.K., I think I hear sleigh bells on the veranda, so I had better stop here.

Merry Christmas, メリー・クリスマス, Joyeux Noël, Vesel Bozic!

Suicidal Tendencies

2011-12-23T19:25:00.004+09:00

Even though it goes against everything that the Democratic Party of Japan stands for and is sure to piss off millions of voters (E), the government today approved the appropriation of funds for restarting construction on the Yamba Dam. DPJ Policy Research Council Chairman Maehara Seiji warned the others present at the leadership meeting that the party will not support the decision. He now is resisting calls from well wishers that he resign (J) in protest of the government's decision.

The monthly childcare support payments for all? Halved, then limited to families below a certain income level, then cut again. Freeing up the expressway system? Abandoned except for temporary measures to aid those in the Tohoku Region. Reduction in the number of Diet members? Delayed indefinitely. Elimination of the "temporary" tax on gasoline is place since the 1970's? Forgotten.

With the Diet not in session and today a Friday and a national holiday, the government must have been thinking it can get away with this horrible reversal of policy.

Are they ever going to learn what a lousy political decision it is to spike the very last campaign promise kept...and if the DPJ fissions in the new year, the government can only blame itself for it.

The DPJ Cannot Trust The Bureaucracy To Make Its Decisions For It

2011-12-23T07:06:00.007+09:00

I had an American academic of great renown and insight tell me that the Democratic Party of Japan simply had to start working more closely with the bureaucracy. At the time I was horrified, not only because battering the bureaucracy into submission is one of the core tenets of DPJ identity but because it simply would not work.

This week we have had two examples of two horrible decisions made by the ministries, one of which was bullrushed through a Cabinet decision and the other which, as long as Maehara Seiji is breathing, will have a wooden spike driven through its black heart.

The first bad decision was the selection of the F-35 fighter as the replacement for Japan's fleet of aging F-4s. That the F-35 is a work-in-progress for the wrong mission at the wrong price has been hammered home repeated over the last few days, both in the Japanese press and English-language commentary - the most recent example of which is the opinion article by Alessio Patalano (who has more knowledge about the Japanese military in his pinky than I will ever know) in The Asahi Shimbun (Link).

The second slap-me-because-I-think-I-am-dreaming decision is yesterday's inexplicable announcement by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism to restart construction on the Yamba Dam (E). The cancellation of the Yamba Dam is item #1 on the DPJ's list of cost saving measures it will undertake to provide funding for the expansion of its social welfare spending. The September 2009 announcement by the then Minister of MLIT Maehara Seiji that further work on the dam was cancelled was the first clear indication that the newly-elected DPJ government was serious about its promises to reform the way Japan has been run. For a DPJ MLIT minister to earmark funds for a restart of the project, this with the collusion of Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu, boggles the imagination.

Luckily (for the citizenry and whatever shreds of credibility the DPJ has left) the now Chairman of the DPJ's Policy Research Council Maehara Seiji has told everyone within hearing distance that the project will restart only over his dead body.

In both these instances, the decisions coming out of the ministries have the fingerprints of bureaucrats all over them, largely in that they are politically deaf and seemingly profitable only to the members of the bureaucracy itself and a tiny circle of special interests.

Where is Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko in all of this? Is he not supposed to be leading, thinking about the national interest and the interests of his party?

A Government With Its Priorities Straight

2011-12-21T08:28:00.007+09:00

The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito have been giving the government of Noda Yoshihiko a lot of flack over its response to the announcement of Kim Jong-il's death. They claim that the government's response was lackadaisical and foolhardy and betrayed a lack of sense of crisis over the event.

The timeline on what happened on Monday morning went something like this (all times are JST):

10:00 The KCNA posts a bulletin that an important announcement will be made in two hours' time.

11:00 Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu is asked in his morning press conference whether he has heard about the DPRK announcement. Fujimura replies, "Yes, but we do not know what it is. So?"

11:59 The PM departs for a noontime rally promoting his vision of fundamental reforms and cutting government waste. He tells Fujimura, "If the announcement is anything important, call me back."

12:03 Fujimura learns that Kim Jong-il is dead.

12:05 Fujimura calls the PM; informs him of the situation. The PM's car is turned around.

12:09 The PM arrives at the Prime Minister's Residence.

12:10 The PM calls for a convening of the National Security Council.

13:01 The National Security Council is convened. Missing are Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro (in Washington) and National Public Safety Commission Chairman and State Minister for North Korean Abductions Yamaoka Kenji (in his Tochigi Prefecture constituency on a political tour).

13:30 Fujimura holds a press conference on the news.

Now it must be said that Yamaoka's not returning to the capital in time for the Security Council meeting looks incredibly bad. Then again, since he has been censured by the House of Councillors and is thus on track to resign from his positions in the government (perhaps now a near certainty, despite his being Ozawa Ichiro's right hand man), his absence was not much of a loss.

In truth, the Noda government's unperturbed attitude toward the surprise announcement of Kim Jong-il's death shows it has its priorities straight, not backwards.

First, the prospect of an announcement from North Korea did not drive the Prime Minister's Office into a tizzy. The Prime Minister and the government went about their business, until such time as a real security threat had been confirmed. Instead, the prime minister in particular concentrated on the important task of winning public support for his painful and fundamental reforms of the Japanese economy and public services, a herculean task.

Second, the absence of vital members of the National Security Council, indeed the members most directly involved with the response to national security threats, did not affect the functioning of the Council. Some effort was probably made to whisk Yamaoka back to Tokyo in time for the meeting but when it was clear he was not going to make it, the meeting went on without him.

This is a demonstration of a government in control, not out of touch. It focused on the nation's fundamental and chronic problems, not the sudden irruption of an event that it had no control over, had no obvious consequences and required no specific action (read the list of what the Japanese government committed itself to doing posthaste here - hat tip to Japan Real Time).

The LDP and the New Komeito are just barking -- but their barking will likely be heard by their friends in Washington, who are banking on the LDP-New Komeito coalition's return to power next year.

Later - In reconstructing what went wrong with the summoning of Yamaoka back to the capital following the DPRK's 10:00 a.m. alert as to a coming special announcement, the government has determined that the fault lay with the staff at the Prime Minister's Residence, who failed to contact Yamaoka in a timely fashion (J). Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura has apologized for this failure, absolving Yamaoka of any responsibility.

Lest anyone argue that this apology undermines my thesis, please note that this was clearly an error in execution, not in priorities.

More On That Damn Plane

2011-12-21T08:16:00.001+09:00

Like I have been saying (Link).

White elephant, pink elephant, millstone...whatever.

Another Long Journey Ended

2011-12-20T11:48:00.005+09:00

While the rest of the planet can mull over the deaths of writer Christopher Hitchens, freedom fighter, playright and leader Vaclav Havel and super-dictator Kim Jong-il, Japan can mourn the passing from TV land of Tokugawa Mitsukuni. After 42 years of wandering Japan in mufti, halting mayhem and doling out justice with the aid of his magical tobacco container -- or more properly the crest on his magical tobacco container -- Mito Komon will grace our screens no more. The TBS fictionalized life of the legendary second daimyo of the Mito han, the longest running TV drama in Japanese history, had its final broadcast last night.

On a night otherwise dominated by the death of Kim Jong-il, the old wanderer managed to garner a 14% audience share (J).

Not bad for a serious contender in the "hokiest show on Earth" contest.

-------------------------
Statue of Mito Komon in front of JR Mito Station, Mito City, Ibaraki Prefecture.

Photo by MTC

Oh Well, It's The F-35

2011-12-20T11:20:00.003+09:00

It is official now: the national security council and the Cabinet have both signed off on the procurement of the Lockheed Martin F-35 as Japan's replacement for the F-4 (J and E).

I would not hold my breath in anticipation of when the Air Self Defense Forces accepts its first delivery of the plane, nor of any of Japan's beset heavy industry giants getting much in the way of ancillary contracts.

Guess that the timing of this announcement is proper: near to the darkest days of the year and amidst a flurry of speculation about the situation in North Korea post-Kim Jong-il. This decision has all the attributes of a snowjob.

The Best Thing You Will Read On Kim Jong-Il's Death All Day

2011-12-20T08:47:00.005+09:00

The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability has always been best non-Asian source of information (pax the usual Russians) on what is going on inside the DPRK. It is not surprising, therefore, that www.nautilus.org has published the best flash review of the outlook on the transition of power following the death of Kim Jong-il.

Then again, if the death of the despot still leaves you with a wish to giggle, there is The Okapi Factor's take on the events. It is both funny and not so, as it leaves out of its list of potential sources of future tyranny the ability of companies, organizations and governments to vacuum up information on the individual, exposing all of us to the threat of character assassination, search with out probable cause, rewritten personal histories and seizure of property without any legal recourse.

Tyranny without the martial music, if you will.

Kim Jong-il And The Axis of Crazy

2011-12-19T13:33:00.007+09:00

Kim Jong-il is dead, or at least has been dead for a while, with the generals waiting until everyone was safely ensconced in his or her work unit this morning to announce his death.

Jong-il has died too early to complete the installation of his son as his rightful and suitable heir. The 2012 year of prosperity was to be the saddle of the transition, where Jong-il would hand off the reins to his third son Jong-un.

However much the progaganda department calls on the citizens of the Workers' Paradise to rally around Jong-un (E), the young man has none of the terrifying record of oft-deadly nuttiness that made Jong-il immediately legitimate in the DPRK's world of surreal institutionalized social violence. Recall that before taking over for his father, Jong-il had:

- signed off on the attempt to assassinate the South Korean cabinet. The bombing in Rangoon, Burma killed seventeen South Korean officials, including four cabinet ministers.

- ordered the bombing of KAL Flight 858 in order to disrupt the 1988 Seoul Olympics

- supervised the kidnapping of Japanese citizens for the purpose of teaching DPRK spies Japanese language and customs

- had South Korean film director Shin San-ok and his actress wife kidnapped in order to improve North Korea's film industry

Kim Jong-un, aside from growing his hair in the style of his revered grandfather Kim Il-sung, likely does not have what it takes to survive inside the North Korean system, despite the rumors that he was in some way in charge of the shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong. Even a man as bloodthirsty, ruthless and capricious as his father Jong-il needed three years to solidify his rule after the death of his father Il-sung, and this after having been in charge of the daily business of the government for more than a decade.

I would not count on the Young Leader's lasting long. The DPRK system rewards ambition, an ability to keep one's intentions hidden and utter heartlessness. Jong-un is a pup surrounded by wolves. Whether or not he stays in power depends on how firmly the other, older members of his family inspire loyalty and/or fear in the armed forces and the secret services.

The Okinawans Should Be Pleased With This Outcome

2011-12-19T10:44:00.007+09:00

While United States sources like Stars & Stripes do not have confirmation up on their websites, Japanese news sources are reporting that a longstanding grievance of Japanese who live near U.S. military bases has been resolved in a manner that dramatically extends the reach of Japanese law enforcement authorities (E).

Previously U.S. military personnel and Department of Defense civilians who caused accidents due to intoxication would have to be handed over to U.S. authorities if the accused could argue he or she was "on duty" at the time of the accident. Since the definition of "on duty" could be extended to off-base receptions and parties, dozens of U.S. service personnel and civilian contractors had had to be handed over to be U.S. base authorities, where the accused would be tried under the Uniform Code of Military Justice -- if the accused was a member of the armed services. Civilian employees tended to fall through the cracks, as they are exempt from trial in military courts.

The handing over of suspects has been a constant source of frustration for local law enforcement, local citizens, prefectural governments and the national government. The issue of immunity for civilian employees of the Department of the Defense reached a breaking point this past January, however, when a 24 year old DOD civilian returning from an offbase job and driving drunk crashed head on with a car, killing its 19 year old driver. Under the Status of Forces (SOFA) agreement the young American was handed over to U.S. base authorities, who decided that the proper punishment for causing a fatal accident was the suspension of the young man's driving privileges for five years.

The rage of Okinawan citizens and the government of Okinawa was intense. The Government of Japan, encouraged as always to act in order to keeping intact the possibility of moving Futenma Marine Corps Air Station assets to a replacement facility to be built at Henoko, sought either a revision of the SOFA (an unlikely prospect, as this would open the possibility of reopening all the SOFA's the United States has with governments all over the world) or a reinterpretation of the application of the SOFA that would mollify Okinawan anger.

Last month, Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro announced that the U.S. and Japan had negotiated a new, narrow formula whereby if a civilian DOD employee driving drunk caused a fatal or severe injury accident, and, after being handed over to U.S. base commanders, was determined by said commanders to be not prosecutable for a criminal offense, the said suspect would then be handed over to Japan prosecutors for trial under Japanese law (J).

It was under this tight bureaucratic fiddle that prosecutors sought an indictment of the 24 year old American over the January vehicular death of the 19 year old.

Despite the fiddle, U.S. military personnel arrested in drunk driving accidents off base would still be tried in U.S. military courts. Furthermore, the question of what would happen to a civilian in case of a drunk driving accident not involving death or a serious injury remained an open question, with the degree of severity of injury likely to be a point of contention.

On Friday, however, U.S. and Japanese negotiators came up with a sweeping solution to the problems of U.S. base personnel and drunk driving accidents. According to the new agreement, driving while drunk and causing an accident immediately ends one's ability to claim immunity under the SOFA, no matter whether one is an armed services member or a civilian employee or the accident has caused death or severe injury (J).

Rather than trying to find a work around a specific problem (a bureaucratic solution) the Japanese and U.S. sides were able to establish a principle by which present and future cases could be judged without question (a political solution).

Good for them...and good news for the people of Okinawa.

The F-35 Decision, The Backlash

2011-12-19T06:11:00.006+09:00

Last week, the Chunichi Shimbun Group (which includes the Tokyo Shimbun) came out with a strong editorial demanding to know why the government of Japan seemed set to procure the Lockheed-Martin F-35 as the replacement for Japan's aging F-4s (J). For the Chunichi, the issue was largely cost, which seemed likely to have no limits as to upward revisions.

At the same time on Friday, the Sankei Shimbun, which rarely has a problem with a program that strengthens Japan-U.S. military ties and interoperability and never, seemingly, has previously had a problem with Japan acquiring a new whizbang weapons system, also came out with an editorial (J) also asking the government to explain its decision. While admitting that the F-35 offers a counter to Chinese and Russian Fifth Generation fighters and the choice of the F-35 ensures better relations with the United States, the Sankei editors have the same reservations about spiraling costs the Chunichi editors do. They are equally unhappy with the many technical flaws that keep emerging, setting back the probable delivery date of the new fighters. Given the retirement schedule for the F-4s, there is the possibility of a sizable hole in Japan's air defense when it will have only the F-15s (which have only recently come back into service after having been grounded after one of them dropped a fuel tank on a residential neighborhood - E) and its few F-2s as its fighter component.

Now the Mainichi Shimbun, has come out with its own editorial asking many of the same questions as the Chunichi and the Sankei (J). In its editorial, the Mainichi points out the case of Australia, which, out of concern over the delivery dates of the F-35, has weighed acquiring several more F-18s rather than rely upon the F-35 for its defense needs (E). In addition, the Mainichi calls into question the supposed promises of technology sharing and local manufacture of F-35 components, this in the light of the Eurofighter consortium's promise to allow indigenous manufacture of its aircraft, with no technologies kept hidden from cooperating Japanese companies.

On the other side of the ledger, the Yomiuri Shimbun, which normally has opinions about everything including the actual color of the sky, has so managed to willfully ignore the F-35 decision -- which was, to be fair, rescheduled from Friday to sometime this week (My guess is that Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko did not want anything to detract from his press Friday press conference announcing the completion of the cold shutdown of all of the Fukushima Dai'ichi Power Station's reactors). The paper's coverage of the purported decision has been willfully uncritical (J).

So the left and the right do not like the plane and the conformist center-right is keeping its usually open mouth shut.

Interesting.

Compassion, Fear and National Interest

2011-12-17T08:43:00.003+09:00

It has been a weird week: running into the right wingers protesting the installation of the comfort woman statue in front of Japan's Seoul Embassy (what the members of the Diet had to do with that one I have no idea); seeing the hardcore nutcases charging the tent of the anti-nuclear protesters, yelling at them that they must all by Korean residents of Japan to have anti-nuclear views; and the rumors leaking out that the Government of Japan was going to purchase the F-35, an aircraft which has little value in the upgrading Japan's defense but would sure be great in attacking another country -- and the Tokyo Shimbun to wonder whether the Air Self Defense Forces were running policy decisions, not the civilian leadership.

Dealing or not dealing with the leftovers of the last war and preparing unnecessarily for the next one?

A Plane Without A Policy, Revisited

2011-12-16T13:00:00.009+09:00

Today's Tokyo Shimbun editorial "Making Japan's Next Generation Fighter The Unfinished F-35: Is This Safe?" (Jiki sentoki mikansei F35 de daijobu ka - Link) lists a series of problems with the rumored decision of the Government of Japan to procure F-35 Lightning II's as replacements for its aged F-4 fighters.

The Tokyo Shimbun's main arguments are not the usual ones about the range of technical problems and delays that have plagued the program so far. Instead, the editors worry about the way the cost of each plane will be calculated, if the heretofore undeployed aircraft can even be delivered to Japan at the promised time.

What makes the editorial bite, however, is its final paragraph, where the editors go out on a limb to point fingers at who seems to responsible for the F-35 decision -- and it is not the usual or proper policy makers:

「最新鋭機がほしい」という航空自衛隊のがむしゃらな突っ張りが日本をとんでもない方向に導くおそれが強い。

One has the strong fear that Japan is being led in ridiculous direction by the reckless defensiveness of an Air Self Defense Force that says, "We want a cutting-edge aircraft."

What was it that our current Defense Minister Ishikawa Yasuo said, that his ignorance of military affairs was the very essence of civilian control of the military?

The Comfort Woman Statue

2011-12-16T09:17:00.013+09:00

So now I know what was really ticking off the crowd of folks I ran into on Wednesday.

Statue Deepens Dispute Over Wartime Sex Slavery
The New York Times

The unsmiling teenage girl in traditional Korean dress sits in a chair, her feet bare, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the Japanese Embassy across a narrow street in central Seoul. Within a day, the life-size bronze statue had become the focal point of a simmering diplomatic dispute as President Lee Myung-bak prepared to visit Tokyo this weekend.

The statue, named the Peace Monument, was financed with citizens' donations and installed Wednesday, when five women in their 80s and 90s who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II held their thousandth weekly protest in front of the embassy, joined by their supporters.

For them and many other Koreans, the statue — placed so that Japanese diplomats see it as they leave their embassy — carries a clear message: Japan should acknowledge what it did to as many as 200,000 Asian women, mostly Koreans, who historians say were forced or lured into working as prostitutes at frontline brothels for Japanese soldiers.

The Japanese government's main spokesman, the chief cabinet secretary Osamu Fujimura, called the installation of the statue "extremely regrettable" and said that his government would ask that it be removed. South Korean officials said Japan cited international treaties that required host governments to help protect the dignity of diplomatic missions. On Thursday, South Korea made it clear that it had no intention of forcing the protesters to remove the statue...

(Link)

Well, OK, the statue is there to stay. Lest it become a permanent sore in Japan-South Korea relations and a focal point of anti-Korean sentiment in Japan (as it was on Wednesday) the Japanese Embassy should follow some good advice:

"Dont't get mad; get even."

- Robert F. Kennedy

"You say potato and I say potahto.
You say tomato and I say tomahto.
Potato. Potahto. Tomato. Tomahto.
Let's call the whole thing off."

- George and Ira Gershwin

If anyone had half a gram of sense in the Japanese Embassy in Seoul or at the Foreign Ministry in Kasumigaseki, there should have been a press release:

In Seoul today, opposite the Japanese Embassy, a peace statue was unveiled, commemorating the positve contributions of the Japanese occupation and annexation of Korea. The statue is of a young Korean woman, sitting in a chair. She is happy because she is attending her first day in class, an opportunity extended to her by the education policies of the Japanese authorities. Especially meaningful is that she can receive an education despite her poverty, symbolized by her bare feet. At the same time, the young woman is sad, as the chair beside her is empty. The empty chair represents the wasted lives of millions of young women held back by the repressive paternalism of Korean society."

And let it go at that.

Art is plastic, open to interpretation. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

The statue helps out in that it is ambiguous. The expression on the young woman's face is not unsmiling, as The New York Times states with conviction. It is at best blank, with a bias toward cheerful.

Lest anyone think I am being puckish and denigrating the comfort women's rights to an offical apology and compensation, I am not. They have deserved and have been denied the right to hold their heads up high in their communities, able to say, "I was never a prostitute. I was a prisoner of the Japanese Imperial military."

However, when there are situations and provocations too fraught with domestic political baggage to be resolved by diplomats, the only possible solution is an embrace of ambiguity non erit finis*.

Ambiguity and a resignation to the status quo are the salves and supports of East Asian peace. They keep Taiwan free of Beijing's control; keep the Senkakus Japanese territory; and keep the Russians and the Japanese from ever coming together to surround and thus render paranoid China (ambiguity also keeps the Republic of Korea and Japan from becoming close, despite their democratic governments. No thing is ever always a positive).

Making demands that the statue be removed are going to lead nowhere. The government of Japan should just insist, as it does in the Senkakus, the East China Sea and in the Northern Territories that it believes what it does about the situation, no matter what the other side says -- and let those on the other side cut off their own fingers in frustration at the GOJ's intransigence.

And then do its damndest to give the surviving comfort women what they deserve.

-----------------------------------------------------
* Not the World of Warcraft guild of the same name.

Image Courtesy: Yomiuri Online

A Plane Without A Policy

2011-12-15T13:10:00.007+09:00

Michael Auslin of AEI has produced an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal taking quite a different view of the likely Japanese government decision to purchase Lockheed-Martin F-35s than I did the other day. At least in terms of which direction the author's thumb is pointing.

As far as I can tell from the essay, the clear advantage for Japan in owning a set (and by a set I mean 40, the number of planes being jiggled about in the mainstream press) of F-35s is that the plane will be invisible to pilots of the current generation of Chinese and Russian attack fighters. Which is all very well and good up to the point where the F-35 actually fires something, when its presence will then become very much known.

Now the possession of F-35s could have a deterrent effect, making Chinese or Russian commanders less willing to invade Japanese airspace or attack a Japanese ship or aircraft in international airspace or waters on the chance that an F-35 could be nearby, ready to retaliate. However, in the event that such an intrusion or attack would occur, it would certainly only be carried out as a part of a coordinated and multi-asset planned attack, which the presence of F-35s would not deter.

An F-35 could ostensibly be used to loiter around in the wake of an attack squadron of F-15s and/or F-2s, serving as an invisible friend of these planes should they be set upon by more acrobatic Sukhoi 27 and Sukhoi 30 variants. However, not even the role of silent protector works out in terms of Self Defense Forces doctrine, because stealth is only really advantageous when given the chance to fire first, without warning, which no ASDF commander has the authority to order and no ASDF pilot is trained to do. Firing on the Sukhois after they have engaged the F-15s or F-2s may be psychologically rewarding, but will not bring back the lost F-15s and F-2s. Firing on the Sukhois while they are engaging the F-15s and F-2s will make a messy situation only messier (Missiles here, missiles there -- missiles, missiles everywhere...).

As for ASDF F-35s invisibly intruding into Chinese, Russian or DPRK airspace, what would be the mission? Destroying the opponents command and control systems? Destroying fixed missile sites? Destroying mobile missile launchers? Engaging fighters over the other country's territory? All of these acts are not just contrary to Japanese defense doctrine, they are unconstitutional -- and no seriously proposed revision to the Japanese constitution gets within even shouting distance of permitting such missions except as a response to an attack on Japan, which is already covered under the Japan-U.S. Security Arrangements -- i.e., it is a problem for the United States to handle, whereupon the F-35s that would be responding will be U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy planes.

No matter how one slices it, one cannot come up with a mission for Japanese F-35s to perform, save keeping the U.S. government happy and the reputation for paying exorbitant amounts of money for a small number of fighters intact.

As for the Russian and Chinese stealth fighter programs, which are themselves responses to the threat posed by the U.S.A.'s F-22s -- a threat that, every so often (twice this year, at least) does not exist -- neither of them are going anywhere soon, either because the generals are kidding themselves (the Russians) or the generals know damn well that test flying a prototype stealth fighter in daylight is not something a country with a serious stealth program does (the Chinese).

And if the policy problems were not enough to kill interest in the F-35, the plane itself, as Tobias Harris passes on in a Facebook link, has so far been a dud.

So I would agree with Michael Auslin in thinking a Government of Japan decision to acquire the F-35 has Tokyo taking security to another plane (Hardy, har har har!). Unfortunately, it is another astral plane.

Later - It probably means nothing...but it seems the announcement of the F-35's having won the contest to become Japan's next generation fighter has been delayed.

Strategic Industries In Peril from What?

2011-12-14T16:15:00.008+09:00

On a trip up the hill to the offices of the Diet members, I mistakenly took the route in between the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Ministry. I say mistakenly because it took me in between two sets of protestors: a tiny tent housing the handful of anti-nuclear activists camped out in front of the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry and an ear-splitting multitude of ~~right wing nutjobs~~ hyperpatriots bearing Hinomaru flags and a barrage of portable loudspeakers. In between the two groups was an army of police officers, struggling in a bored sort of way to keep the right wingers from rushing at the pathetic little anti-nuclear protest.

Apparently, from the hyperpatriots shrieks and grunts of "Zainichi, zettai zainichi" ("Korean residents, definitely Korean residents") and all kinds of imprecations of leaving Japan open to attacks from the DPRK, they were convinced that the anti-nuclear movement was a Korean plot. "How is this country going to survive, you idiots!" yelled one of the hyperpatriots at the knot of anti-nuclear protestors.

Later, my walking companion and I were treated to a very fine explanation from a very nice old lady that Japan is full of DPRK spies, this as she and the multitude were on their way, according to my walking companion, to a large gathering in front of the offices of the Diet members protesting the Big Lie that is the comfort women issue.

There have always been folks who have claimed that Japan's devotion to nuclear power development and the possession of all the elements of a fuel cycle represented an incipient nuclear capability, a backup for the day the U.S. suddenly withdraws its nuclear umbrella, leaving Japan naked and surrounded by nuclear armed states. What I did not know is that among the enemies to be crushed to protect this incipient deterrent was a bunch of old Korean women and their co-conspirators who pretend to be Japanese radicalized by the Fukushima disaster.

Amazing the things you can learn from just walking around.

Later - Someone better not tell this crowd that NHK's lineup for the annual New Year's Eve Kohaku Uta Gassen ("Red/White Song Battle" - always bet on White) includes not one, not two, but three K-Pop acts (KARA, Toho Shinki and Shojo Jidai - the last being a pop act based on the premise "the longer the bare leg, the better the song."). Because you know what all this means: we have to support Japan's nuclear power industry even more.

It's all connected, obviously.

Later still - Please click on comments to learn about the interesting characters I ran into, courtesy the Shingetsu News Agency.

Plenty O' Nothin'

2011-12-13T12:23:00.015+09:00

Way back in the distant past -- three days ago -- Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko was scheduled to pay a formal visit to Washington in early January, sometime prior to his policy speech opening the regular Diet session. Then came word yesterday that the prime minister's visit would be postponed (E), something of a pattern for this prime minister all of a sudden (E). Now we have word that Kurt Campbell in Washington has hopes the PM will come in April, during the time the cherry trees on the Tidal Basin are blooming, in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Japan's donation of the trees -- and expressed this desire to, of all people, the visiting Ishihara Nobuteru (J), the Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, who wants to shut down the government, force the downfall of Noda and the calling of elections in March (J).

Well, we can dispense with the official explanation of the postponement of the Washington visit -- that the two sides could not find a way to mesh the schedules of the two leaders. After all, the Noda government had been planning on the trip, at least until two days ago -- so something had been in the works for a long time.

Let us try to imagine, however, how a conversation would have gone between the two leaders, had the meeting taken place in early January.

************

O – "So now that the cameras are out of the room, what's going on with Futenma?"

No – "Wow, you just jump right into things, don't you? Can't we start on something simpler, like playful banter on which city is colder right now, Tokyo or Washington?"

O – "No."

No – "Oh."

O – "Seriously, what progress has been made?"

No – "Progress? Well, I can honestly report that to my knowledge, no one in the Defense Ministry has behaved as stupidly as Tanaka Satoshi or Minister Ishikawa did in the closing weeks of the Diet's extraordinary session (E)."

O- "And that's progress?"

No – "Given that Tanaka has been dismissed and Ishikawa has been censured by the House of Councillors, yes."

O – "OK, how about something simpler. Tell me about the progress made on the beef importation issue."

No – "Progress…well that is tricky. You see…in Japan…we have…what is the phrase I am searching for…it's two adjectives, an adjectival infinitive and a noun…"

O – "Xenophobic, paranoid, science-hating idiots?"

No – "Precisely the phrase I was searching for! How do you know about such things?"

O -– "You're kidding, right?"

No – "Oh, sorry. I forgot for a moment to which country's president I was speaking. Anyway, I would not be hoping for any movement on that issue in the immediate future. You see, I have a minister of consumer affairs who has absolutely zero credibility as a consumer advocate (E)."

O – "So get rid of him…or her."

No – "It's him. And I can't because I have an Ozawa problem."

O – "What does that mean?"

No – "Well, it's like your conservative majority on the Supreme Court problem. One gets to thinking sometimes that nothing is going to really change until someone is…I believe you say, 'Caught in flagrante delicto' or 'Sent to the hoosegow.' Not that I would ever dream of wishing such things on a person, of course. I cannot speak for other members of my party, however."

O – "I think I get it. Nice use of the vernacular idiom, by the way."

No – “"Not at all. I am famous for both my silver tongue and my humble, down-to-earth style."

O – "Let's try something even simpler. What do want to do about the TPP?"

No – "I want you to have your staff to quote me completely and without error. No deletions or paraphrases based on a compilation of public statements I may have made about the TPP. That is for starters."

O – "Oh, forget about the TPP. Since your government came in so late, you haven't an icicle's chance in hell of getting in on the rule making phase of the process anyway."

No – "Icicles? Does this mean we will be having our playful banter about the weather after all?"

O – "No."

No – "Oh."

O – "Tell me, because for some reason I am more patient than a lump of granite, what progress your government has made in loosening of its export rules on military technology our two countries have co-developed, so that the resulting technology may be sold to U.S. allies."

No – "None."

O – "None?"

No – "Mr. President, Japan is a peace-loving country. The renunciation of war and the promotion of peace are written into our constitution. If we were to allow the sale of these systems to other countries, they might actually be used. In war, you see."

O – "First, we are talking about sales of defensive systems. And second, from our intelligence community I know that the Nissan Pathfinder remains the transportation choice of half of the world's known terrorists*…and that from news photos half the Toyota trucks in Africa seem to have a machine gun bolted to the cargo bed."

No – "That is sooo unfair."

O – "This conversation is sooo over."

-----------------------------
* Not an actual statistic. C'mon, this is satire.

Oh, No. Not The F-35. Please, No

2011-12-13T05:20:00.002+09:00

So it seems the Japanese government is set to announce a decision to acquire the F-35 fighter, seemingly out of stealth envy (J)* and the possibility of the consortium tossing Japanese defense contractors the opportunity to manufacturer some of the plane’s parts, with technology transfer (J).

So Japan hopes to replace its aging F-4 fleet with a plane that is still only in the prototype phase and has seen action only in a Bruce Willis Die Hard flick. At some hazy future date when the F-4s have to be replaced now (Even the usually gung-ho Sankei Shimbun has reservations about this point). At a price that is giving the Finance Ministry angina.

As the French might say, “Quel bordel!”

-------------------------------------------------------

*Stealth technology? In an interceptor? Really? Is not the point for the other side, stealthy or not, to know you are there, waiting for them? Is there not some kind of doctrinal contradiction between Japan, an ostensibly peaceful nation, possessing have a weapons system whose main feature is the ability to attack, then sneak away, undetected?

Very Kind Of Them #5

2011-12-08T02:22:00.005+09:00

Shisaku will continue to be on hiatus for a bit longer. In the meantime, the very kind folks at Al-Jazeera English have published an essay of mine "Is Japan Cracking Up?"

See ya soon.

Tanaka Satoshi: The Aftermath

2011-11-30T10:28:00.006+09:00

As expected, from the way that the Japanese media interpreted Defense Ministry Okinawa Tanaka Satoshi's off-the-record gross comment (the Mainichi Shimbun's English version euphemistically refers to it as "indiscreet" (E)) Defense Minister Ichikawa Yasuo had no choice but to relieve Tanaka of his duties (E). Tanaka now claims that he cannot remember using the loaded term "okasu" in offering an explanation why there has been no announcement of the date of the release of the environmental impact report on the building of a Futenma Replacement Facility at Henoko (J).

As for the tenuous entente the Noda government was trying to establish with Okinawa Governor Nakaima Hirokazu (E) over the move of elements of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Henoko, it is now in tatters. "Moving Futenma is now impossible, isn't it?" the Mainichi Shimbun has a senior Ministry of Defense official saying (J).

Over in Washington, DC, the Japan Desks at the State Department and the Defense Department must be, shall we say, "perturbed" over the events of the last two days.

Ranting About Monozukuri

2011-11-30T08:52:00.005+09:00

One of the most infuriating obsessions of a certain generation of mostly male leaders is the concept that Japan must protect its manufacturing because of its monozukuri culture. At its base, the concept is that Japanese have an innate or learned ability to make objects. In its most admirable meaning, monozukuri is a dedication to time consuming, delicate or technically demanding manufactures. In its grossest form, the term means little more than "making stuff."

I probably do not have to tell you which end of the spectrum the Nippon Keidanren and the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry place their marks.

Hence the delicious irony in the wake of the flooding of the industrial parks of Thailand of the desperate demands from Japanese manufacturers with drowned Thai factories for thousands of temporary visas for their Thai workers. It turns out the Thai workers are the ones with the necessary manufacturing skills for the Japanese companies to keep operating, the Japanese workforce being the data managers. For the companies to survive, they needed their monozukuri workforce, which, for some reason, is Thai.

The devotion to the cult of monozukuri has also its flip side: "We Japanese are pathetic when it comes to services." Maybe unschooled, perhaps not rapacious -- but not pathetic, no. I can get so much done through my local convenience store that it frightens me sometimes. All the new owners of baseball teams are service industries, the latest being the DeNA software company, which is buying the truly pathetic Yokohama Bay Stars. Japanese financial institutions, after going through the wringer of the 1990s, are solid -- at least as long as Japanese government bond prices remain in nosebleed territory.

Monozukuri mania engenders such nonsense as "Japan must concentrate on cutting edge technologies and only the most painstaking technical tasks." Sorry to say this but that is where Japanese manufacturing is already. There is nothing north of the North Pole. As for biotechnology, nanotechnology, human-like robots...whatever...they are all fine and dandy...but give me further refinements of car navigation systems (Have you seen these darn things? They reproduce streets in 3-D, with renderings of the buildings. You could not get lost if you tried.)

The cult of making stuff is not just a Japanese phenomenon, of course. In the course of imitating the Japanese model of economic growth through exports, all the rapidly developing countries of Asia have, at least for some period during their development, obsessed about the percentage of GDP coming from manufacturing (Hong Kong and Singapore are now known for their services but initially they were major manufacturers).

When you are a developing country pushing hard to make stuff, you of course can sell some of your output at home. Being that yours is a poor country, however, the majority of what you manufacturer has to be sold to rich countries, which have to be open to your manufacturers. Throughout the postwar era, Japan and the countries of East Asia could benefit from a huge U.S. market and later on the markets of Europe.

Both of these regions are now in crisis, however. They are unlikely to pull themselves out of crisis for a long time. So where is all the previously valuable "stuff" going to go now?

It is refreshing, therefore, to read an essay like Suman Bery's Does India really need a National Manufacturing Policy?" offering an argument that making stuff -- especially in light of China's having taken the East Asian manufacturing model to its illogical conclusion -- may not be as important as some folks make it out to be.

As for Japan, until a certain generation and its ideas about the way Japan works passes on (Rakuten gave up on the Nippon Keidanren after the organization refused to support the separation of the transmission and power generation arms of utilities) we are stuck with a charming but dulling ideology, confusing government policy.

Wow, That's One Way To Not Make Your Boss Happy

2011-11-29T15:47:00.006+09:00

Tanaka Satoshi is the head of the Defense Ministry's Okinawa Bureau, a position of great responsibility and sensitivity.

Hence the not terribly thrilled response within the halls of government at the report that Tanaka, when asked why there is no release date for the environmental impact report on the Futenma Replacement Facility at Henoko, replied in a private meeting with reporters:

「犯す前に犯しますよと言いますか」

which, in context, means:

"When you are planning to rape someone, do you say, 'I am going to rape you' ahead of time?"

Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu in his morning's press conference said, "If this is true [that Tanaka said such a thing], this is something we cannot just let slide." (J).

Yeahhh, probably not...as it offends just about everybody...and makes difficult the government's job to present the Futenma-to-Henoko move in a positive light.

TPP In A Strategic Context

2011-11-26T10:03:00.006+09:00

Corey Wallace has published a long thought piece on the confusion among the major players in the parties over the strategic implications of Japan's participation or non-participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (E). The key takeaway is that the TPP does not detract from Japan's options as to strategic alignment but adds to them, forcing other actors within the East Asian drama to be cognizant of Japan's more varied ecosystem of strategic choice.

The Imperial Y Chromosome To Get Some Competition (Maybe)

2011-11-25T12:52:00.014+09:00

In the course of the debate during the Koizumi era on whether or not the Imperial House Law should be changed in order to allow Aiko, the only child of the Crown Prince and his wife Masako, to ascend the throne as a female empress -- a debate cut short by the birth of a son, Hisahito, to Prince Akishino and his wife Kiko -- one lawmaker declared the plan to have a female emperor an abomination due to the sacred nature of the imperial line's Y chromosome (E).

Well, it looks as though the holy Y-chromosome adherents are going to have a run in with a determined opponent: a bureaucrat concerned that he and his successors might lose control of a part of the nation under their supervision.

In this morning's press conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu revealed that Haketa Shingo, the head of the normally reflexively conservative Imperial Household Agency, has importuned Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko to lead a change in the Imperial Household Law to allow princesses to retain their nobility after marriage, making their children potentially eligible for throne. Currently, princesses who marry outside the imperial line -- which is all of them since the dramatic pruning of the Imperial line by the authorities of the U.S. Occupation to a pair of branches, namely the descendants of the Showa emperor and his brother, Prince Mikasa (still kicking around at age 95) -- lose their nobility.

Haketa's plea has a sound basis. Currently, the holy imperial Y chromosome is in desperate straits. While there are seven living heirs to the throne under the current law, only one, Hisahito, is under 45 years of age and only three, Hisahito, his father and the Crown Prince, are under 60.

On the other hand, the Imperial Family has been, for the last forty years, a prolific producer of daughters (the Yomiuri Shimbun has a helpful chart for all this on the side of its article on the subject here - in J only). There are currently eight princesses, six of whom are legal adults, the most recent addition being Akishino's eldest daughter, Princess Mako.

Fujimura, in his press conference, indicated that the government is unlikely to rush into revising the Law any time soon. He only spoke about the matter to confirm that the conversation had taken place.

Why this should be the top news of the moment, or of any consequence, is that pretty much alone among public institutions, the Imperial Family has performed flawlessly since the disaster of 3/11. The Emperor, not the Prime Minister, delivered a prime time address to reassure the nation in the aftermath of the disaster, the first time the Emperor had ever given an address to the country on live television. He and the Empress, despite their advanced ages and numerous health problems, have visited the disaster areas and displaced persons centers on numerous occasions, with the Crown Prince and Princess (a rarity in her case, as she normally stays cloistered inside the Crown Prince's Residence) and Prince Akishino and his wife performing similar public visits to comfort and encourage the survivors.

With imperial institution relevant again and with so many young women of marriageable age (the oldest, Princess Akiko, is 29), the bureaucracy, at least, has decided its time to dump the holy Y chromosome rigmarole and get the Imperial family's numbers up again.

One wonders whether one can hear the sound of black trucks with loudspeakers on them revving their engines...

Later - Reuters has noted the revival of the significance of the Imperial Family, if in a different context (E). Tip of the hat to Tokyo Times for this reference.

Really? Was There A Question Here, Really?

2011-11-24T10:21:00.006+09:00

In yesterday's newspaper, there was a report that Wakao Ayako (b. 1933) has been named a special adviser to the National Police Agency on the prevention of bank transfer fraud -- which means that Wakao Ayako will be featured on posters this year warning the elderly to not immediately wire money to persons claiming to be friends, relatives or bill collectors -- a burgeoning crime (at least in monetary terms, if not in the number of reported incidents).

Here is the photo that accompanied the story.

Check out the caption at the bottom.

If you are a Japanese speaker, you are probably, as I was, laughing your tail off.

For the benefit of the non-Japanese speakers, the caption reads:

"Named an adviser to the National Police Agency on preventing bank transfer fraud, Wakao Ayako (second from the right) and others. Photo provided by the National Police Agency."

No...Wakao Ayako is not the African American dude.

She's not the dog.

And she's not the middle-aged policeman.

Someone in the editorial offices has a very dry sense of humor...or no sense of humor at all.

Erratum Demonstratum

2011-11-24T09:08:00.011+09:00

On Tuesday, I stated that there has always been a loophole in the implementation of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), one that the government was in serious negotiations with U.S. officials to close. Under current procedures, when an member of the armed services or a U.S. defense department employee commits a crime or causes an accident while on duty, no matter if the person involved in the incident was chemically impaired (i.e., stoned or drunk) the arresting Japanese authorities had to turn over the suspect to the U.S side upon request.

The issue was especially fraught in the case of non-military personnel, the U.S. Supreme Court having ruled long ago that U.S. civilians cannot be tried in military tribunals. Whether the defendant will be turned over to a U.S. court for trial and whether, in the absence most of the time of the victims from the U.S. courtroon, the sentence will be commensurate with the crime has become a hot issue particularly in Okinawa. In the period 2006 to 2010 the U.S. Forces Japan exercised its jurisdiction over non-military personnel held by Japanese police 62 times. In 27 of the incidents, proceedings against the individuals transferred to U.S. custody ended with no charges being filed (J).

Anyway, I was wrong on the issue of "always." The problems with the implementation of the SOFA only began in 2006, when the U.S Forces Japan began issuing special "get out of jail free" documents for U.S. DOD civilian employees under the 2000 Military Extraterritoriality Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Prior to that time, the USFJ left civilians to be tried by Japanese courts, while taking into custody U.S. military personnel. In recent years, the final jurisdiction of the U.S. military member perpetrator has been negotiated on a case-by-case basis -- the bias being toward trial in a U.S. military tribunal, as the punishments there are almost always more severe than those meted out by Japanese courts.

The Asahi Shimbun, by the way, seems to have gotten ahead of itself on this story, claiming that the two governments have already pretty much sealed the deal and that the new procedures will cover drunk driving incidents by military personnel on duty as well as the civilian employees (J). Nobody else is reporting that the deal is done or that the USFJ is giving up its right to demand the transfer of U.S. military personnel to U.S. custody.

Into The Countryside Let Us Go

2011-11-23T14:27:00.010+09:00

I recently got involved in a tiff with a person over what would seem to be a rather simple question, "To what extent to rural votes still dominate over urban ones in Japan’s Diet?" Having some idea of the answer to the question would give one insight into some rather pressing current problems in Japan, in particular the Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s non-decision on participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a problem he seemed to have licked until the White House uploaded to its website a readout of the Noda-Obama meeting that had the prime minister putting all goods and services on the table. Period. A formulation that guaranteed the prime minister would face a buzz saw when he returned from Hawaii.

Anyway, I tried to answer the way the newspapers do, or at least did on October 27: by publicizing the degree of inequality in voting strengths between the smallest electoral districts and the largest ones – the results of which I blogged about last week. Of particular significance was the fact that based on the 2010 census data, 97 of the nation's 300 electoral districts had populations greater than 1.99 times the size of the nation’s least populous district – meaning that the voters in close to a third of the nation’s districts were disenfranchised to a level in excess of the constitutionally acceptable limits as described in a Supreme Court ruling of March of this year.

No, no, my interlocutor persisted, how much more representation do rural voters have in the Diet than urban voters?

Now that is a very interesting question…and one that is very difficult to pry out of the data without colliding with bias. Is a rural voter a farmer, fisherman or lumberman? Someone who works in the processing of the materials provided by the primary producers? Someone who lives in a prefecture where half the workforce is in primary industries? A third of the workforce? A fourth? Is it someone who lives in a city surrounded on all sides by a vast area of dark, foreboding mountains? Is it someone living in a district stretching like a ribbon, with one tail in city and the other in pure farmland, with an increasing/decreasing level of urbanization along its length? Is it someone working as a clerk in a branch of JA Bank?

Furthermore, in most countries, there are boundaries, city limits where one can say, "OK, now I am in X City." However, in the great Heisei Consolidation (J) so many cities swallowed up previously independent rural communities that the statement "I am in the city now" became almost meaningless in terms of the density of population on the ground in a particular locale.

One can make certain gross guesses, of course. One can guess that the 97 districts with populations in excess of double the population of the smallest district are probably "urban" under a general understanding of the term. One can also guess that the 100 smallest districts by population are probably "rural" by the self-same general understanding. However, for the 103 districts in between, where does one draw the line between rural and suburban, rural and mostly rural or mostly urban but with a large rural backyard?

The meaning of “urban” and “rural” is further muddied by land use laws which seek to protect farmland within what are ostensibly urban areas. This author lives in one of the 23 central wards of Tokyo, the hard urban core of the greatest urban conglomeration on earth. However, in front of the building where I live there is farmland, whose produce I can buy from a small streetside stand open three days a week. A three minute bicycle ride away is an apple orchard, where one can pick one’s own apples in the fall. A two minute bicycle ride away is a grape arbor, where, if one can remember the day, one can harvest grapes on the vine for one's table.

The urban harvest

August

October

As one heads out on one of the great arterial train lines or freeways, the size and number of these plots multiplies – all while one is ostensibly still in the city, as is manifested by the intense knots of urbanization around train stations, themselves surrounded by kilometers of low-level housing.

An aside, but this jumble of urban development, suburban sprawl and farmland is one of the main reasons the prime minister’s pledge to protect Japan’s "beautiful agriculture" (utsukushiki nogyo) from destruction by the TPP is so fatuous. Japanese agriculture is messy, indeed unsightly most of the time. One is hard-pressed to find a pretty valley or vista, as fields are cheek-and-jowl with so much suburban and semi-urban clutter. "Utsukushiki" for the most part it ain’t. We all know that the PM is a smoker…but has anyone checked to see what it is he is smoking?

This blending of urban and rural, or bleeding into of the rural into the urban, even in the capital, makes the definition of urban vs. rural voters so difficult to disentangle. Sure, this author lives in an urban area and thus an urban voting district. However, just down the street aways, in a sizable building, are the offices of JA Zenchu, the Central Union of Agriculture Cooperatives, for the ward. There are farmers in my neighborhood – mostly old, retired folks but nevertheless farmers, with produce for sale (though the corn crop this year failed, for some reason).

So how much pull do rural voters have over urban voters? Gosh, that would be an interesting question. However, one would have to make all kinds of arbitrary decisions, with significant consequences as to one's final result.

Suffice it to say that voters from districts where inefficient primary industries and inefficient secondary industries dominate have an inordinate amount of influence on the nation's decisions, due to their overrepresentation in the Diet, as compared to consumers and producers of the nation's surplus, who are crowded into districts with relatively poor levels of representation.

Trying to pin a number on the level of this misrepresentation, however, is a matter of individual judgment.

Closing One Loophole

2011-11-22T13:38:00.006+09:00

There has always been an odd loophole in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) regarding the handling of cases of traffic accidents caused by members of U.S. forces or Defense Department civilian employees. As long as the perpetrators -- for these are cases where who caused the accident is undeniably a U.S. national working for U.S. Forces Japan -- could argue that he or she was on official duty, then he or she would be handed over to the U.S. for prosecution. This was true even when the perpetrators were found to be drunk at the time of the accident.

This morning, Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro promised that he would meet with his U.S. counterparts on revising the SOFA so that in these cases or similar crimes committed by a chemically impaired U.S. Forces member or DOD civilian employee the perpetrators would lose the right to argue they were acting while on official duty, i.e. would lose their immunity from Japanese law. He also promised to visit Okinawa, where this has been a big issue, to meet with officials and explain the Japanese government's concern about this issue (J).

Now if only someone could figure out how to close the loophole on the American side -- where civilian employees cannot be tried in military tribunals, meaning that if one commits a crime while on duty in an area under Japanese juridiction, he or she gets off scott-free...

A Grand Performance

2011-11-22T07:12:00.005+09:00

This is from last week but it is also for the ages.

For aficionados of Japanese political theater, it is hard to beat last Wednesday’s performance by Katayama Toranosuke (J) in the House of Councillors Budget Committee hearing. In his brief time before the microphones, he cleaned the prime minister's clock with such thoroughness and ruthless humor it is hard not to clap. His is a show with everything: a comparison to leaders past, tireless boring in on his target, the arms spread eagle wide at one point in an appeal to speak on behalf of the citizenry and a Cheshire cat grin throughout.

Now I have to admit I have not always been an admirer of Katayama. When he was a member of the House of Councillors for the Liberal Democratic Party, I saw him as one of epitomes of what was holding this blessed land back. “Old Chipmunk Cheeks” I used to call him, making fun of his appearance. I cheered when he was knocked off his perch in 2007 despite his position as the #2 man for the LDP in the House by a newcomer (and a woman to boot!).

However, my opinion of Katayama changed last year in response to his brilliant revival of himself as the Sunrise Party’s (Tachiagare Nippon's) sole elected senator. He managed to leverage a sudden and one would suspect not terribly deep conversion to the party’s hard rightist ideology in order to draw on the votes of the sadly overzealous nationalists. To these he added the personal votes of his old support group (koenkai), and in a pirouette, bounced himself back into his old playground.

To watch the spectacle, go the Sangiin TV website (here) and click on the calendar for the 16th of November. The only show that comes up is the Budget Committee hearing. Click on that link to start the video. Katayama’s turn at the microphones starts up at 4:52 into the broadcast.

Then Again

2011-11-22T06:09:00.003+09:00

Then again, about yesterday's post, if Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times has revealed results of an internal investigation finding connections between Olympus overpayments and the Yamaguchi Gumi, facts that even the police and the Tokyo Prosecutors Office are loathe to divulge, then she may have pulled a Jake Adelstein.

We shall see.

Let Me Have A Look At That Memo

2011-11-21T12:52:00.005+09:00

A few weeks back I hailed Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times for her report on the Olympus investigation and the peculiar investment advice handed out by a pair of banker brothers, the Yoko'os (E).

Last week, Ms. Tabuchi produced a follow up article that makes the startling claims of not only vastly greater losses at Olympus but also the involvement of organized crime, namely the Yamaguchi Gumi. This second claim backs up a statement an annonymous commenter left on my earlier post about the relative paucity of local news coverage of the Olympus scandal, at least as compared to foreign financial outlets and the local coverage of the Daio Paper scandal. If organized crime organizations were indeed behind the coverup at Olympus, domestic reporters would understandably be very, very cautious in their reporting on the affair.

Now I would normally say, "Brava!" to any follow up article that finds even more dirt on Olympus (I have nothing against the company or its employees...well, at least its non-director employees). Only this time I cannot feel but holding back on my applause.

What worries me is the source of the accusations.

Billions Lost by Olympus May Be Tied to Criminals
The New York Times

[snip]

In a memo prepared by investigators and circulated at a recent meeting of officials from Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission, the Tokyo prosecutor’s office and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, officials say they are trying to determine whether Olympus worked with organized crime syndicates to obscure billions of dollars in past investment losses and then paid them exorbitant sums for their services.

The memo — a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times from a person close to the official investigation — appears to link the Olympus losses for the first time to organized crime groups...

Eeeek! A police memo, from a person close to official organization! And that "may" in the title!

The Olympus scandal "may" be linked to the Thai floods. The Olympus scandal "may" be linked to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ooooh, this is such a bad time to go all Japanese news media practice on a story. In fact, any time is a bad time to go all Japanese news media practice on a story.

When an internal police or public prosecutors memo is leaked to the press "by a person close to the investigation" one can be almost certain that what is about to ensue is a fishing expedition, wherein the investigators arrived with their cardboard boxes and clean out a building or several buildings.

Now given the size of the sums bandied about in last week's article (US $4.9 billion of unaccounted for funds) and the specific mention of the Yamaguchi Gumi, it is possible that the police targets this time are actual Yamaguchi Gumi offices. If so, the police are either a) out of their minds or b) determined to put the Yamaguchi Gumi out of business -- which is, of course, a variation of a).

There is no doubt that if the police and public prosectors did raid Yamaguchi Gumi offices, they would find in the course of their extensive search for evidence of crimes linked to the Olympus scandal enough evidence of other crimes to put hundreds of gang members behind bars - if Japan had the courtrooms and jails to try and house all the suspects, of course.

There is, of course, the possibility that the police memo is all nonsense, meant either to smoke out any leftover questionable acquisitions that Olympus officials may still be hiding, or embarass Ms. Tabuchi for blowing the whistle on the Yoko'os before the police could nab them (one of them at least seems to have disappeared).

We shall see.

Getting to "No"

2011-11-20T07:18:00.009+09:00

Oh for a screen capture of that map!

Bugger NHK for putting up online only the intro and the signoff of their flagship 7 o'clock news program, rather than the whole program -- even if it would be only for one day!

As it is I only could watch the ominous intro of the flag of the People's Republic of China blending into images of China's most threatening new military hardware, including the reconstructed Varyag aircraft carrier...

...in a report on President Barack Obama's visit to Australia and the announcement of a rotating deployment of up to 2,500 Marines to Darwin.

After the report from Australia on the summit meeting, the speech before the parliament and the visit to Darwin, announcer Takeda Shin'ichi walked over to the big wall of screens for the analysis portion of the segment. "So why Darwin, Australia?" he began.

On the big screen was an image of East Asia, with ripples spreading out from the contours of China. "Here is a map," he continued, "of the ranges of Chinese missiles. As you can see inside the limits is most of Japan, including Okinawa. Guam is also inside the range of the missiles."

"But here," he interjected, pointing at northern Australia, "is still outside the range of China's missiles. And here is Darwin," he said, pointing to the city.

Now there is nothing particularly new in the information NHK provided. However, it was the first time in memory that the 7 o'clock evening newscast, Japan's most watched news program, explicitly sought to undermine the 2006 Japan-U.S. Roadmap for Realignment of U.S. Marines forces. Though the thought was unstated, the clear inference from the presentation was that the fraught move of some of the Marines currently based on Okinawa to Guam and the construction of a replacement facility for Futenma in the town of Henoko were vain endeavors, since the redeployed forces would still be in Chinese missile range. While U.S. military planners may deny that the Darwin deployment is specifically tied to Chinese missile capabilities, that mattered little to the NHK producers.

Now, the Japanese public is about as far from stupid as one can get. If NHK puts up a map with Okinawa and Guam inside the range of Chinese missiles, and hears about the U.S. semi-basing Marines outside the range of the missiles, the public will ask, "Then what the heck are we doing knocking heads with the Okinawans over the construction of the Henoko base and what-is-more paying through the nose for a partial move of Marines to Guam, when the strategic vulnerability of these forces remains the same?"

One could be cautioned that one should not read too much into a single news broadcast. Still, when NHK's News 7 uses a sledgehammer to present a particular viewpoint on the deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia, it indicates a change is in the offing over the seemingly neverending merry-go-round over Futenma-to-Henoko -- that it is not just that the redeployment of forces is damned unfair to the Okinawans but that the redeployment might also be pointless.

A pivotal first step in the public sphere in the direction of "let us put an end to this farce."

Where You Stand Is Where You Sit - Addendum

2011-11-16T17:40:00.001+09:00

That Yamada Masahiko should be the leader of the opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership now makes a great deal of sense. Yes, he is a former minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, making him a logical candidate on an intellectual level. However, as the representative of Nagasaki District #3, the second smallest district by population in the country, Yamada is set to lose his official position. For no matter under which reform of the House of Representatives one chooses (Each party has at least one reform plan. The Democratic Party of Japan has two. The New Komeito, terrified of being relegated to the ranks of a micro-party, has three.) Nagasaki District #3 is set to disappear.

Challenging the central leadership of the party has no downside for Yamada, as it might for others. Yamada has literally nothing to lose.

Where You Stand Is Where You Sit?

2011-11-16T09:45:00.006+09:00

In parsing out the internal dynamics of the domestic fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is perhaps worthwhile to look at how the sides in the battle line up against the nation's electoral map.

On the 26th of last month, the Ministry of General Affairs and Telecommunications released its revised preliminary population figures from the 2010 national census. As usual, the boys and girls of the news media immediate set to work with their spreadsheets, comparing populations within the nation's 300 electoral districts, looking for the greatest levels of disparity within the country.

The highest level of disparity found was 2.52, meaning that a person voting in the least populous district had 2.52 votes for a legislator as compared to a voter in the most populous district.

The winner in this contest? Kochi District #3, a rural outpost whose largest urban center is the city of Shimon (pop. 40,000 and shrinking). It is represented by Yamamoto Yuji of the Liberal Democratic Party. Liberal Democrats also represent Kochi District #1 and #2, for those who are keeping score.

Who gets stiffed the worst? It is Chiba District #4, comprised entirely of the core of the city of Funabashi (pop. 600,000 and growing). Chiba District #4 is represented by a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, namely (drumroll please) Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko.

There are 97 districts with populations greater than double Kochi's District #3, which are thus unconstitutional under the ruling handed down by the Supreme Court in March of this year. This is whopping jump in the number of unconstitutional districts, as there were only 48 such districts based on the 2005 census figures.

Now what about Yamada Masahiko, the leader of the fight against Japan's participation in the TPP within the DPJ? He represents Nagasaki District #3, the second smallest district in terms of population after Kochi District #3.

Need I say more.

Just for completeness' sake, in the House of Councillors the greatest disparity can be found in between Tottori and Kanagawa Prefectures. A vote in Tottori is worth 5.124 times a vote in Kanagawa. Tottori is primarily rural prefecture, with the city of Tottori (pop. 197,000) as its largest urban center. Kanagawa is almost entirely urban and suburban (pax the Hakone Area and the Tanzawa Range) with the city of Yokohama (3.7 million) as its largest urban center.

The People's Prime Minister

2011-11-15T08:47:00.008+09:00

It was a small item, but it looms large in my imagination.

On October 14, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko visited a day care center in Yokohama, joining the children for lunch. Here is the photo of the PM saying "Itadakimasu" seated at table with what look like the five year olds.

Considering how small the chair he must be sitting on, the PM's placid, almost beatific composure is remarkable. He looks utterly at ease and in his element.

It is hard to imagine Noda's predecessor Kan Naoto, an incorrigible adult, being able to pull this off. It is flat out impossible to imagine Hatoyama Yukio in this pose, nor any of the trio of Liberal Democratic Party prime ministers who preceded Hatoyama.

Could Koizumi have pulled it off? With teenagers, maybe. But with small children, probably not. Koizumi was cool, not child-like.

In the coming months and quite possibly years, we will have keep a sharp eye on the low key, accommodating style of this prime minister. His common touch -- arising from his literally being from nowhere, or as close to nowhere as one can get (both his parents being the youngest child of a large family -- i.e., the inheritors of nothing -- and his father's being a Ground Self Defense Forces member, meaning that the family had no town to call its home) and his necessary reliance on the national safety net (of all prime ministers in history, he is the one with the fewest assets) is linked to an inspiring, if sometimes overwhelming, desire to get things done. The economist and former minister Takenaka Heizo has warned the Noda Administration that it is tackling too many issues at once, that it should concentrate on two or three main issues, so as to guarantee they receive the attention necessary for success.

Noda and his advisors are ignoring this sound advice, tackling issues both pressing like Japan's galloping demographic imbalance and ancillary, like the recent blowup over participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The PM and the Democratic Party of Japan's policy makers have proposed tax rise after tax rise, even grasping the third rail of Japanese politics -- the raising of the consumption tax to 10% -- and survived. To be sure, the prime minister's poll ratings are down from his initial numbers -- NHK's most recent poll (J) finding support for his cabinet at 45%. Considering how many different sacred cows the PM and his people have gored during his first two months in office, 45% is a very respectable number.

The Noda administration's success will depend on how well it can continue to impress with the themes of humility and sacrifice. Noda has already received a thumbs up review from a very hard-to-please senior figure as regards his low-key demeanor. His response to the provocative Obuchi Yuko speech in the Diet was admirable for its restraint. As for sacrifice, Noda, unlike his predecessor, seems to derive only benefits from calling attention to the needs of those displaced by the triple disaster of 3/11 (he also seems more than willing to wield the suffering caused by 3/11 to batter his opponents senseless). "Sacrifices have to made," has been his motto since his second speech at the DPJ congress that elected him party leader, and not even sacrifice-be-damned stalwarts like Kamei Shizuka, Hatoyama Yukio and Haraguchi Kazuhiro have been able to say much in response.

I would be pushing the envelope to call Noda "better even than Koizumi" -- the other prime minister who was able to call for painful national sacrifice with the populace backing him up -- but from what I have seen these first two months, Noda is certainly "the best since Koizumi."

Image credit: Tokyo Shimbun

Fudge Factor Looking Forward

2011-11-14T09:59:00.010+09:00

It is hard to argue with the brilliance of the fudge on participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership the Prime Minister concocted on Friday. The New York Times bought it (en). The U.S. government bought it until the Foreign Ministry told the USG that no, Japan had not committed to joining the talks, only to discussions with the member states of the pact about the pact...in response to which the United States side apologized for misstating the Japanese position (ja).

Now there is a classic move. Not only snookering the opposite side but getting the opposite side to apologize for getting snookered.

On the domestic side, the anti-TPP forces, which include all the opposition parties, the government's coalition partner, the agriculture and food production sectors (the bloody Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives collected, in only a matter of weeks, 11 million signatures protesting Japan's participation in the TPP -- in a country where there are no more than 2 million farmers), the Japan Medical Association, the Consumers Union of Japan and half the ruling Democratic Party of Japan's Diet membership, are all declaring victory for the Prime Minister's proposal to participate in talks without commitment (sort of like dating, but not going steady, on a national scale).

Just how long this salutary state of affairs lasts, once the PM returns from his Asia-Pacific ~~road~~ air trip with all his new-found friends (what a deal: APEC to ASEAN+3 to the East Asia Summit -- all together and with damn near the same lineup of leaders. Makes you wonder whether or not some brilliant PR person will dream up a midair race of all the leaders' jets, just for the hell of it) is a question. The time needed to negotiate with the various governments on Japan's participation in the TPP, with or without a final Japanese commitment, will be months and monthes, pulling the issue off the front burner.

The anti-TPP forces inside the DPJ have been mollified, at least according to the statements made by their leader Yamada Masahiko (ja). However, the PM will have to explain the meaning of his words fully to a joint congress of the DPJ caucus before heading off the ASEAN+3 meeting.

The opposition meanwhile, after having put every bit of its energy and credibility into stopping the prime minister from discussing the TPP at the APEC conference, has to parse out whether or not it succeeded -- but not in such a way as to interfere with with the passage of the third supplementary budget, which is slated for a House of Representatives vote sometime this month, despite the PM's being away from Japan an inordinate amount of time. They also have to worry about not jamming up the committee meetings on the enabling legislation for the third supplementary budget, which also need passage through the Diet before it recesses on December 9.

Just an aside, but from the looks of the calendar, the People's New Party will be continuing its role of "always the bridesmaid but never the bride" as regards its raison d'être, the counter-reformation of the Post Office. It is hard not to believe that the constant failure of the DPJ-led government to pass the PNP's postal reform rollback has not becoming a standing joke in the halls of the Diet.

Later - This comes courtesey Corey Wallace: Toronto's Globe and Mail bought into the misunderstanding of the Japanese government's true position vis-a-vis the TPP, it used Japan as the counterexample to the Canadian government's protectionism.

I would laugh but is just too sad.

In A Democracy

2011-11-11T06:35:00.005+09:00

The failure yesterday of Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko to come to a decision regarding Japanese participation in preliminary talks toward joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an embarrassing non-decision decision from points of view both domestic and international, should still be seen in a positive light. In the overall scheme of things, discussions of and decisions regarding globalization are controlled but those who benefit most from its spread and infiltration. The losers from globalization are given short shrift, as they are for the most part too busy scraping by to have the time to engage the elites and their facilitators in the news media and academia.

In Japan, however, due to skewed apportionment and a convoluted electoral system, globalization's likely losers have a platform from which they can shout out their fears about the future. Politicians and the news media have an interest in listening to these fears, and transmitting them to the loftiest corridors of power.

When confronted by the fears of globalization's losers, elites -- who have overwhelmingly benefited from globalization's march, socialize with each other, intermarry and raise new elites -- have had remarkably weak arguments for globalization's deepening. Having not pre-emptively addressed the rising levels of inequality in societies everywhere, even in a rigidly self-reinforcing egalitarian society such as Japan's, the elites should have better answers than "society in the aggregate benefits." Globalization's losers need to know that they, not just "society," will benefit and in clearly definable ways*.

Something for the frequent-flyer-and-meet-you-in-the-hotel-lobby class to think about on this day.

Just like Prime Minister Noda has had to.

---------------------------
* It is true that not all the potential losers are poor. One could hardly argue that the members of the Japan Medical Association are hurting for cash.

Something I Can Do In My Sleep

2011-11-11T05:56:00.002+09:00

This is from the Director of Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C.

Asia's Free-Riders
Foreign Policy
[Snip]

Washington policymakers in both parties seem to think that reassuring America's Asian allies is the best way to defend U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific. But instead of seeking to assuage their partners' anxiety, America ought to sow doubt about its commitment to their security. Only then will they be forced to take up their share of the burden of hedging against Chinese expansionism... (Link)

It seems that at a major Washingtong think tank, one does not need a knowledge of a region's history, its component countries's laws, their politics, demographics, economics, the deployment of U.S. forces, U.S. history or anything.

I so very much want his job.

Oh, You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

2011-11-10T19:03:00.007+09:00

Noda The Decider (Once I Have A Consensus) at work:

Japan postpones decision on whether to join Pacific free trade talks
Kyodo News

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda decided Thursday to postpone an announcement on whether Japan will join negotiations for a Pacific free trade agreement, heeding calls from the ruling party to make a decision in a cautious manner, the top government spokesman said.

The abrupt announcement to delay the decision regarding negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement to Friday came after senior officials of the government and ruling Democratic Party of Japan met at the prime minister's office.

"Please give me one day to think," Noda was quoted as telling the officials, according to DPJ policy chief Seiji Maehara. (Link)

Like what, the PM is going to have an epiphany in the midst of Diet Budget Committee questioning tomorrow?

This is not high drama; this is low comedy.

Hey Nippon Keidanren and METI, see what happens when you do not make an effort to make your case, failing to appreciate that this is a political battle to death, not a gentleman's/gentlelady's debate? You leave your prime minister befuddled, perplexed and finally an object worthy of ridicule.

Crunch Time For The TPP and Noda

2011-11-10T06:21:00.008+09:00

Today's the day when the heretofore Delphic Oracle of Nagata-cho, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, makes his "political decision" regarding Japan's participation in Trans-Pacific Partnership talks. I say the odds are still 50-50, despite the intellectual firepower that has been deployed in favor of participation. On the ground and over the airwaves, the actions of pro-TPP forces have been pathetic in their flaccidity, whilst the anti-TPP forces have marched unimpeded into the public consciousness.

With the DPJ neatly divided in two, the public (according to the latest polls) showing only a fractional majority in favor of participation and not just the opposition parties (Do you know how weird it is to see Oshima Tadamori, Shii Kazuo and Fukushima Mizuho sharing a stage at a huge rally, with all three of them wearing identical headbands?) but the government coalition partner the People's New Party against participation, the consensus builder Noda is facing the challenge of his life, at a time he would much rather be hammering out the details of the third supplementary budget, ferreting out the resources necessary to reconstruct the Tohoku region and mitigate the Fukushima disaster and pushing through a rise in the consumption tax to pay for Japan's mounting retiree and healthcare costs.

As for the Korean Example, which was supposed to goad the country into accepting the mixed bag of burdens that is the TPP so as not to fall behind the seemingly FTA-mad ROK, the opportunistic fight breaking out in Seoul over ratification of the Korea-U.S. FTA could not come at a worse time.

The world (well, at least the world investor class, which controls much of the way the world is portrayed) is screaming "Go" and the political situation at home is screaming "Stop."

No matter which path Noda chooses today, he loses.

Sympathy For The Devils

2011-11-09T12:49:00.006+09:00

Amidst the opprobrium being rained down upon the corporate leadership of Olympus, it is worthwhile to draw a distinction between the devils worthy of our sympathy and those not. Certainly the present president of Olympus, Takayama Shuichi, needs to be replaced as soon as possible. His denials over the last two weeks of the inappropriateness of the astronomically high payments to soon-disappearing Cayman Islands entities and the acquisition of clearly worthless companies for immense sums that one year had to be written down, only for him to come forth yesterday with an admission that whole kit and caboodle was a scheme to wipe off the books losses the company had been hiding for some time (he implied decades – I am not so sure it has been that long) immediately nullifies his capacity to serve as CEO. Who can ever trust anything he says now, when he could not/would not investigate payments that the rest of the planet saw as clearly beyond all reason?

As for those who cooked up the schemes -- former president Kikukawa Tsuyoshi, former vice president Mori Hisashi and their as-yet unnamed collaborators -- they deserve a measure of sympathy. True, they likely broke security laws and willfully stiffed shareholders of the information necessary to make a proper evaluation of the company. They were, however, simultaneously responsible for the continued viability of a profitable company that has 40,000 employees worldwide. The schemes that they cooked up also probably cost Olympus next to nothing, as the money paid out almost certainly made its way back to Olympus' accounts.

That the corporate leadership of such a valuable and value-creating entity might get confused as to whose interests they were supposed to be serving and the morality of their undertakings is understandable, especially within the confines of a corporate culture where shareholders are not given precedence among a company's stakeholders.

From the looks of it (the facts may change quickly, especially as regards the acquisitions of the three tiny profitless companies), the leaders of the company thought they had laid to rest a problem that had been handed to them by their predecessors, and in a manner that left no one the wiser and nobody hurt – until an outsider* came in and began asking some rather simple questions.

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* OK, so maybe it is a stretch to call a 30 year veteran of the company an outsider. Ride with me on this one.

Later - John Gapper of the Financial Times presents a refreshingly non-bombastic argument to the contrary (Link)

Up Against The Wall On The TPP

2011-11-08T11:08:00.008+09:00

Prime Minsiter Noda Yoshihiko has an insane schedule this week, and all over a project that he inherited, not initiated.

Noda will meet with Kamei Shizuka (I will admit it, I include the live link solely for the singing) the leader of the People's New Party, the Democratic Party of Japan's coalition partner. Noda and Kamei will confer on whether or not Noda should notify the leaders of other Asia-Pacific nations this weekend that Japan will enter negotiations to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Given that Kamei spoke out against such an announcement at a multi-party meeting yesterday (en) one can be fairly sure of the tenor of today's conversation.

The DPJ's TPP project team will wrap up their search for a common ground within the party on Japan's participation in TPP negotiations on Wednesday. They will then report their findings to the prime minister and the leadership of the DPJ. That they will report the party hopelessly divided on the subject of the TPP with no common ground to stand upon is a foregone conclusion.

On Thursday, the prime minister will consult with the Cabinet, coming to his final decision, yes or no, on announcing Japan's participation to the leaders assembling on Saturday. He will then give a nationally televised press conference explaining his decision.

On Friday, the PM will face the hostile questioning of the opposition in Diet Budget Committee session. Despite the session's being ex post facto it promises to be an absolute doozy, given that every opposition party except the Liberal Democratic Party has already declared itself against Japan's participation in TPP discussions.

On Saturday morning the PM flies to Hawaii for the APEC meeting, and his fateful meeting with President Barack Obama, who is expecting a "Yes" from the PM on TPP.

The PM's mad week is testament to the difficulties of the decision facing Prime Minister Noda.

1) This a binary decision, yes or no, thumbs up, thumbs down. Noda, however, is Mr. Compromise, always trying to finesse a middle position, as was demonstrated in the offer made yesterday to the LDP and New Komeito to have the Tohoku reconstruction bonds have a 25 year maturity. The DPJ had been insisting on a 10 year maturity; the LDP had insisted on a 60 year maturity.

For the TPP, there is no gray area in between.

2) Unlike in the Republic of Korea, where the political classes made sure to reform the electoral system, diminishing the political influence of agriculture before embarking on full-scale, multi-directional free trade agreement initiative, Noda is stuck with a Diet elected through an unreformed electoral system, giving farmers and the domestic food production industry -- an extremely inefficient industry that by definition provides a lot of folks with jobs -- an inordinate influence over lawmakers and the government (How many bureaucrats are there in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries? Uncountable multitudes...).

Even though electoral reforms stripping the rural prefectures of their representatives is mandated by decisions of the Supreme Court, the Diet has not quite found the time to pass these reforms yet. The cart, therefore, is before the horse.

3) Yamada Masayuki is not kidding when he is saying that there will defections from the DPJ should the prime minister decide to press forward with formal TPP negotiations. This will be a body blow to the prime minister, who made unity of the DPJ one of his core promises at the party leadership election in September.

4) As stated above, participation in TPP is not Noda's cup of tea, but something he had passed on to him. The situation is completely different from the one that brough Koizumi Jun'ichiro into conflict with the membership of his own party over the LDP's addiction to the votes garnered by the postmasters and the pork barrel projects funded by the fiscal investment and loan program (FILP). Koizumi had been railing against Japan Post for two decades prior to the final confrontation with the party in July-August 2005. He was willing to accept party defections because he was fighting for his own hobby horse.

5) The effects of participation in large multilateral economic structures does not necessarily guarantee the passage of the internal reforms necessary to put a country on a sturdy politico-economic footing. Just ask the Greeks about this.

6) One can be a paranoid anti-Chinese nutter and pro-military alliance with the U.S. enthusiast...and still see the TPP as the stake through Japan's heart. Just read Inada Tomomi's piece in the Sankei Shimbun (ja). Yes, it is that Inada Tomomi, the one who tried to lead a delegation of LDP Diet members to Ulleung Island, only to be denied entry to the ROK.

All of the above must be swirling around inside the prime minister's head, probably without the necessary ironclad belief in the law of comparative advantage.

Lots of folks are predicting that in the end, the prime minister has no choice but to go forward with an announcement that Japan will be an active participant in TPP negotiations. Then again, as Michael Sutton has pointed out in The Japan Times (Link) a lot of folks in the "inevitable" business enjoying getting their salaries, plane tickets, hotel rooms and meals paid for by the kinds of companies that benefit most from trade liberalization.

What will the prime minister decide? Hell if I know...and that is the only intellectually honest answer anyone can give.

A Departure From Precedent

2011-11-07T17:03:00.007+09:00

On Saturday, Speaker of the House of Councillors Nishioka Takeo died of pneumonia (en). In instances such as these I usually relate some charming anecdote or point to some significant contribution the deceased made to the national weal. Unfortunately, in Nishioka's case, nothing comes to mind – which may explain why the passing of a man has been marked with a collective national shrug – though Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko made a special trip to Nagasaki to be at his wake on November 5 and 2000 persons, including Nishioka's longtime patron Ozawa Ichiro, showed up for his memorial service in Nagasaki today.

For environmentalists, Nishioka will remembered as the chief Diet sponsor of the Isahaya Bay reclamation project: the most visible and needless environmental crime of the Japanese government against nature of the later quarter of the 20th century. The blocking of the entrance of Isahaya Bay and the consequent destruction of the wetlands there, in violation of Japan's international commitments to wetlands protection, remains the symbol of the imperatives of the Construction State running roughshod over decency and common sense.

For historians of the Diet, Nishioka will be remembered as a Speaker of the House elected with only the barest of majorities and the most blank ballots since the Lockheed scandal. The positions of Speaker and Deputy Speaker are filled by the choice of the ruling party and the top opposition party. The elections for these positions have been, or at least were, until Nishioka's election, mere formalities where the ruling and opposition parties vote en masse for each other's candidate. This tradition was preserved in the election of Deputy Speaker Otsuji Hidehisa of the Liberal Democratic Party. When it came time to elect Nishioka, however, members of the LDP and the New Komeito, incensed as they were at the selection of a candidate who had treated his peers in the opposition with contempt during his time as the Democratic Party's Diet Affairs Chairman, turned in ballot papers with nothing on them, if they showed up at all.

For members of the DPJ, Nishioka will be remembered as the Speaker who departed from the precedent of a Speaker's neutrality in order to lead a campaign of vociferous criticism of the government of Prime Minister Kan Naoto and its handling of the triple disaster of 3/11, criticism that proved to be without merit or substance when the Yomiuri Shimbun gave Nishioka the opportunity to write an open letter to Kan. The editors at the Yomiuri thought they had landed a whale when they won the exclusive right to publish Nishioka's criticisms. What they found at the end of the line, however, was a minnow: the only accusation Nishioka could muster was Kan's having departed from constitutional procedure in unilaterally ordering the dispatch of the Self Defense Forces to the disaster areas, rather than calling a meeting of the security council first.

For editorial cartoonists, Nishioka's passing means the loss of a politician whose ears and diminutive stature made him a subject of easy caricature. That Nishioka was forever in a snit about something made the drawing of him in an unflattering manner all the more justifiable.

In practical terms, Nishioka's death will mean that the DPJ will lose yet another seat in the House of Councillors, as the new Speaker, when he/she is elected, will resign from his/her membership in the party. If the DPJ wishes to limit the damage done by the election of a Speaker from out of the party's ranks in upper house does, it will bypass candidates for the post like former defense minister Kitazawa Toshimi or former METI minister Naoshima Masayuki in favor of Eda Satsuki, who has held the post once before and is therefore seen as being of too high stature to serve in a Cabinet post or major party post.

Japan Perhaps Not So Cool

2011-11-07T09:04:00.009+09:00

Akimoto Yasushi, the promoter behind the ubiquitous phenomenon that is AKB48, set out some time ago to look for expansion of his gynormous girl group concept outside of Japan.

After clearly a lot research into local music industries and deep reflection, he decided that the best place for the first foreign franchise of his idea would be...Jakarta (ja).

After tryouts, the initial core brood of what will be JKT48 was lined up before the cameras yesterday.

One has only to consider the promotional video of AKB48's most famous song "Heavy Rotation" (Link - warning NWSF) to question the wisdom of Akimoto's dream.

I cannot wait for the guys in white with the skullcaps to show up -- and the bomb threats.

Call me a prudish worry wart but this seems on a par with the Foreign Ministry's decision to send Fukushima agricultural products overseas as food aid as a main draw in the Hall of Very Bad Ideas.

Image courtesy: Hokkaido Shimbun

Later - It is worthwhile to follow the link to The Asahi Shimbun article on the unveiling, just to confirm how entirely nuts Akimoto is.

On the G20 Cannes Meeting - Two Classical Civilizations Meet At Last

2011-11-07T06:12:00.007+09:00

We live in a world where the question of whether or not the global economy tumbles into depression depends on whether or not the savings of Chinese peasants can be mustered to bail out Greek pensioners and civil servants.

Sometimes it is worthwhile to be on the sidelines -- as the Japanese government is laboring mightily to do -- and watch the circus parade go by.

Two Michaels Mikes on Futenma

2011-11-06T08:31:00.015+09:00

Over at CNN's Global Public Square, two of the ~~Michaels~~ Mikes -- Professor Mike Mochizuki of George Washington University and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute -- present the most cogent alternative I have yet seen to the Futenma-to-Henoko transfer of U.S. Marines assets (Link).

They do not make the point in their article but the current positioning of U.S. Marines forces on Okinawa, while marginally contributing to regional stability, makes the island a guaranteed magnet for Chinese intermediate range missile forces, likely pinning the Marines down and certainly putting Okinawan civilians at risk. If Chinese expansionism (if that is what the Chinese military build up represents) is to be deterred, then it has to be in a manner that is hard to attack.

Besides, what did the Okinawans/Ryukyuans ever do to end up at the receiving end of all this, aside from living on an archipelago positioned in between China and the Japan main islands?

Then again, that is the question everyone has been asking since, oh, around tail end of the 1970s.

Later - I have it on impeccable authority that Professor Mike Mochizuki is just Mike, not Michael. I suppose a major edit is in order.

Later still - While I am on the subject, Professor Mike Green of CSIS is supposedly in town...and Michael Penn's Shingetsu News has a stunning news report on the Foreign Ministry's program to ship Fukushima agricultural products out as foreign aid (Link).

The Spearpoint Of Stupid

2011-11-05T16:14:00.005+09:00

Oh, please. Tell me that Nagashima Akihisa, Special Advisor to the Prime Minister, did not say what he is reported as having said on Tuesday.

Arrghhhh. It is in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The quote must be accurate.

Here is what he supposedly said, in regards to the strategic importance of the Trans Pacific Partnership:

「日本が中国から見てなかなか手ごわいと思わせるような戦略的環境を整えていくことだ」

"Japan would be, seen from the point of view of China, arranging a strategic environment that [they] will see [us] as formidable." (ja).

Oh holy crap.

As Corey Wallace has reported, any hint that the TPP is an anti-China front will send the Australians and the Kiwis packing (en). Well, this is not a hint: this a damn declaration.

A few weeks ago I was asked whether or not Nagashima, or "Aki" as he is known in certain Washington circles where he is beloved, has an influence on Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's thinking.

For Amaterasu's sake, I sure hope not.

The Latest On Olympus In The Japanese Media

2011-11-04T09:35:00.009+09:00

For those who follow these kind of things, Peter Cave (whom I assume is the Dr. Peter Cave of the University of Manchester) and I have been going back and forth on NHK's treatment of the Olympus scandal.

Well, NHK recut its report of last night (ja - warning: time sensitive) for rebroadcast as a part of this morning's telecast, coming this time as close as it has to calling out Olympus for having engaged in multiple instances of questionable M&A practices and covering the matter up with cursory reports on the company's actions.

This is a huge improvement over the silence that has reigned on what looks more and more like a criminal enterprise masquerading as an internationally recognized camera and endoscope brand.

Still, the mainline non-economic Japanese news media should be ashamed that it is wading into this mud puddle a week and a half after non-Japan media blew the story wide open, complete with the names of the likely perpetrators.

The Shukan Daiyamondo's online version agrees (ja) with my initial assessment on the Japanese news media's coverage of the Olympus scandal, asking whether or not the domestic news media can be accused of just staring up at the sky.

The Black Ships Of The TPP

2011-11-03T06:58:00.005+09:00

When Prime Minister Kan Naoto raised the possibility of Japan's participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership, he likened it a "third opening" of Japan -- on a par with the transformation wreaked upon Japan by the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's black ships and the post-surrender Occupation of Japan.

Besides the tactical problem of trying to present the TPP in a positive, neutral light after describing it as commensurate with the two instances the United States forcefully dragged Japan into its vision of a world order (and boy oh boy, have the troglodyte nationalists and anti-American leftists gone to town on portraying the TPP as an American plot to destroy Japan...not that Japanese special interests are not slowly destroying Japan on their own without U.S. interference, thank you very much) is the question of the real value Japan can draw out of a further set of shocks to its system. What with the reconstruction of the Tohoku region, the continuing disaster that is Fukushima Daiichi (now they are finding evidence the melted fuel at the bottom of the reactor has gone critical...oh great), the soaring yen (pax Richard Katz and others who argue that the yen is not at an aberrantly high level), declining population and fertility and a looming mass of baby boom retirees landing on the pension system, the rise of highly competitive rivals in all tradeable goods, does Japan actually need any more shock treatment? The Nippon Keidanren (and when the history of the TPP fight is written, the Nippon Keidanren's complacency and sloth should be the subject of scathing criticism) and the government have not made the case that this is so.

A society can only take so much torsion before it breaks. It it should not surprise anyone that in the next week the Noda government packs it in on the TPP fight, realizing the country faces way internal challenges that only can be handled on an individual and idiosyncratic basis, rather than via a multilateral, all-encompassing template.

If the Prime Minister really believes that TPP participation is not beyond the pale, the next key date is November 8, when the Liberal Democratic Party is scheduled to release its position paper on TPP participation. Based on what the main opposition party says, the New Komeito having already come out against TPP participation, the government and the Democratic Party of Japan will map out their next moves.

Interesting Reads On Asian Politics and Economics

2011-11-02T12:02:00.007+09:00

Clyde Prestowitz, who is usually a bit too extreme for my tastes, has published some common sense about the stated United States policy of refocusing its military might upon the stabilization of the Asia-Pacific region -- which means saving the Senkakus for Japan, one would assume. His point about the already overwhelming U.S. military presence in the region seems right on the money to me.

Or maybe I am just a sucker for anything with a Takahashi Korekiyo* quote in it.

Over at The Diplomat, Rajeev Sharma updates us on a fast developing story -- the deepening of security ties between India and Japan -- though I am not quite sure he has a correct read on the role of the U.S. plays in the Indo-Japanese security dialogue.

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* The claim in the online short bio of that there is no long-form biography of Takahashi Korekiyo is no longer true. There most certainly is an English-language biography.

Oh, How Inconvenient!

2011-11-02T09:59:00.011+09:00

Former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, fresh from annointing Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko a worthy successor with an excellent chance of surviving a long time in office, must not be feeling too pleased with The Asahi Shimbun. It seems that the long lost records of the comfort station Nakasone set up as a Navy paymaster in Indonesia have finally come to light -- and contrary to his claims, there is now direct evidence that the comfort station had more than game boards inside as the answer to the the frustrations of the 3000 member 2nd Construction Division, Yabe Unit -- that indeed local women were recruited serve in the comfort station (ja).

Oh, how inconvenient!

Then again, given the former prime minister's advanced age, there is probably something of an inverse power law in effect as to how much of a hoot he gives at the discovery of the actual records of his having recruited comfort women.

Later - Ooooh! Akahata reported on this story last week (ja). So the records were found in Kochi Prefecture.

Who knows what other interesting records are to be found outside the confines of the Kanto Plain?

The LDP Goes Overboard

2011-11-01T15:16:00.006+09:00

It was freakish. It was macabre. And it indicated that something is seriously wrong with the Liberal Democratic Party.

Friday, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko gave his policy speech. Yesterday, the parties, including the DPJ, could send their representatives up to the rostrum to question the prime minister on the policy speech.

The Liberal Democratic Party sent up as its main representative LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu. He was his usual diligent but unimpressive self. However, in a surprise move, the LDP sent up Deputy Secretary General Obuchi Yuko as its other questioner.

Now Obuchi is all of 38 year of age. She has been elected to the Diet only 4 times. She is way down the leadership chart, being not even the highest ranking of the Deputy Secretary-Generals. While true she is a not unattractive young woman, her appearing as one of the LDP's two questioners made little sense, at least in terms of seniority or policy influence.

However, Obuchi's appearance was not about policy. Instead, it was a naked and very, very creepy extended personal insult directed at the Prime Minister.

Obuchi compared Prime Minister Noda to her father, former Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo. She said that there were those drawing parallels between Prime Minister Noda and her father, in that both men who adopted humble, low profiles. She noted that both were associated with lowly images, her father being "cold pizza" (The actual original phrase, coined by John Neuffer, was not that Obuchi himself was "cold pizza" but that he had "all the pizazz of cold pizza." Be that as it may.) and the PM as being “a loach.”

She acknowledged that the situations surrounding the two men's coming to power were somewhat similar, with her father having become prime minister at a time of a twisted Diet and where economy and the financial system were poised on the brink of disaster.

Obuchi argued that despite the twisted Diet her father, within two months of becoming Prime Minister, had ushered through the Diet legislation bolstering and reforming the financial sector, which was then in crisis. "What," she asked, "had the Cabinet of Prime Minister Noda done in its first two months?"

"Though one cannot deny similarities, the difference between [my father and Prime Minister Noda] is the distance between Heaven and Earth."

At this, those seated in upper tiers of the LDP’s side of the Diet, most clearly Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru, lolled about guffawing and clapping.

Gutter talk this was, with more than a little historical revisionism.

As I remember it, when Obuchi Keizo came to power, after Hashimoto Ryutaro's resignation in the wake of the LDP's defeat in the 1998 House of Councillors election, the rescue and reform bills which the new prime minister purportedly ushered through the Diet were opposition-authored bills, ones with provisions the LDP had fiercely resisted and had to swallow (nomikomi) wholesale. Obuchi had provided leadership by surrendering to the opposition. I also seem to remember that the humiliation of this experience was so great for Obuchi and those around him that they dispensed with all pride and common decency to put together The Coalition From Hell – a combination of the LDP and the Liberal Party, led by Ozawa Ichiro, unquestionably the man whom the LDP Diet membership and LDP rank-and-file hated most – a coalition that was later joined by the supposedly evil New Komeito, which the LDP had been bitterly criticizing only a few years earlier.

The "Heaven and Earth" remark, despite sounding pretty mild in translation, really stunned the political classes. Last night's news played up the remark and the morning papers all featured it.

Though Obuchi Yuko's calling up of the ghost of her father in a phrase was intent to provoke, the PM did not bite. He ignored the heaven and earth comparison, responding simply:

"That there those who find elements that are similar fills me with awe and humility. All I wish to say is how much warmth and respect I feel toward [former Prime Minister Obuchi].” (ja).

What has gotten into the LDP, that it would descend to such grand guignol actions? Do they really want people to reflect upon the chaos and decay of the Obuchi era? Do they not remember how the party leadership behaved when Obuchi died, the secret pact over his brain dead but still breathing body to make Mori Yoshiro, postwar Japan's all time least popular leader, the new prime minister?

Why do they want to go there? Could it be because in Noda, the DPJ has found its Koizumi -- a popular, effective administrator with a deft common touch, ready to ditch at a moment's notice his party’s purported guiding precepts -- and that this is scaring all the sense of the main opposition party?

Trouble In TPP Land

2011-11-01T09:02:00.008+09:00

In yesterday's post, I took a skeptical look at a Kyodo report of what seemed a supremely confident Democratic Party of Japan leadership leaking that, come what may, the Prime Minister was going to announce at the APEC conference his government's intent to become a participant in the Trans Pacific Partnership talks.

Well hold your horse, Daisy.

It seems that the government is having a hard time getting the membership of the Democratic Party of Japan, much less anyone in the opposition, to come together in favor of Japan joining in TPP discussions. At first, the government was going to halt internal discussions on November 2 (en). Then it announced that November 2 is too early but the DPJ project team will have definitely found intra-party consensus by November 4 (ja).

Well, guess what. It seems that the government has sort of had to let that November 4 deadline slide (ja). Instead there is now no deadline, save that the DPJ's leadership has to announce something by November 12, when the APEC conference starts.

Good luck guys (and why is it that you are all guys?).

Dia De Los Muertos

2011-11-01T05:27:00.009+09:00

Once upon a time, Tokiwa Takako was on television interviewing Sakamoto Ryuichi. The subjects of the hour-long conversation were music, stardom, the Yellow Magic Orchestra – all the subjects one want to hear about from Sakamoto-san save his views of Japan’s divorce laws.

Offhandedly, Sakamoto asked Tokiwa about the kinds of music she listens to.

"Well, mostly I listen to The Grateful Dead," she replied.

At this, Sakamoto had jerked upward with such force that he nearly tumbled out of the armchair he was sitting in (he walks now with a cane).

A startled Tokiwa cried out, "That's all right, isn’t it?"

"No, no," replied a now calmer Sakamoto, "It's all right. In fact, I think it's great. It's just that it was the last thing I thought you might say."

Well today, November 1, is the Day of the Dead in Catholic countries. So for Tokiwa Takako and Paul Scalise, the go-to man on TEPCO who rubbished The Dead on Facebook the other day, a list links to easy listening favorites:

Studio

Box of Rain

Casey Jones

Sugar Magnolia

The Wheel

Truckin’

Uncle John’s Band

Live

Franklin’s Tower

Ripple

Scarlet Begonias

Touch of Grey

Live Covers

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Not Fade Away

Quinn the Eskimo

Satisfaction (Image is of Bob Weir, but may be NWSF)

The Star-Spangled Banner

The Weight

Werewolves of London

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Notes:

1) Tokiwa Takako is appearing on NHK as the improbably beautiful and perfect wife of an impossibly handsome Matsushita Konosuke in the pretified biopic Kamisama no Nyobo. This is one of a mini-explosion of NHK programs on the wives of famous men, the most prominent being the current Taiga Dorama on Go, the wife of Tokugawa Hidetada and her equally prominent sisters, and last year's NHK morning 15 minute drama series Ge,Ge,Ge no Nyobo on the wife of cartoonist Mizuki Shigeru (Not such a bad deal, really. The NHK series on Mizuki's wife earned him and his wife an invitation to the Emperor's Autumn Party this year. Not that having a TV drama on his wife will do Matsushita-san any good, since he died in 1989.)

Sakamoto Ryuichi has his own program on NHK, Schola where he is shown each week teaching the fine points of various styles of music to students.

2) If you should ever go to Tokiwa Takako’s incredibly fey official website, you will mutter, "Yep, this is exactly the kind of site a Deadhead would dream up." Her production company must love her.

Give Up Now, You've Got Us Surrounded

2011-10-31T12:00:00.007+09:00

Kyodo has an interesting story, republished in The Japan Times purporting that the decision on whether or not the government of Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko will participate in Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations has already been made:

Noda to declare Japan will join TPP at APEC
November meet chosen to signal intent to play key role in FTA talks
Kyodo

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda plans to announce that Japan will join the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade talks during a meeting with his Singaporean counterpart at November's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit, sources said Saturday.

By choosing the APEC summit as the stage for the declaration, Noda will effectively turn Japan's pledge to participate in the TPP negotiations into an international commitment.

And by deciding to declare Japan's policy to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, whose country has from the outset been a key player in the negotiations over the multilateral free-trade accord, Noda is apparently signaling Japan's determination to play a leading role in the talks.

Noda and Lee will hold a bilateral meeting that is tentatively scheduled for Nov. 12, the first day of the summit in Honolulu, the sources said...[Link]

I always have a great deal of skepticism regarding Kyodo News scoops. Kyodo is an entity jointly owned by all of Japan's regional newspapers and as a consequence answers to no one authority.

My antennae really start quivering when a Kyodo story is attributed to "sources" unidentifiable. There is absolutely no way to tell how close these sources are to decisionmakers, save on trust in Kyodo's word that they are, which is not worth very much.

Furthermore, what Kyodo and indeed all the other mainline sources of news get from their sources is not so much scoops as trial balloons -- ideas floated in the media in the hope of influencing opinion.

In this case the opinions that the sources are trying to influence are not those of the public, which has little say in the TPP fight. Instead, the sources here seem to be trying to convince the politicians and interest groups fighting protesting against Japan's joining the TPP talks at this time that their efforts are futile, a decision has already been made, give up.

Unfortunately for the floaters of this trial balloon, the fight over whether the government of Japan can or cannot participate in TPP talks is very much undecided. If Yamada Masahiko's count of the number of DPJ members against an immediate pledge to join TPP negotiations (202 was his latest claim) is even close to accurate, that number with the recent about faces by both the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito on the TPP would guarantee that the Diet would reject any future legislation on TPP accession, whether it be enabling legislation or treaty ratification. Yamada has also warned the DPJ party leadership that if it goes forward with TPP negotiations without forging a consensus in the party aforehand, there will be resignations from the party (Yamada has cannily not said whether or not he would resign or even be an advocate of such resignations).

What we likely have here is less a revelation as a desperate swipe back by the pro-TPP side at the anti-TPP forces, which have been landing all the effective punches of late (ja).

One facet of the Noda government the story does bring up is the seemingly emergent strategy of making commitments at internatioal gatherings, then coming back home and facing down opponents of particular policies with a "Well, it's too late. We have made an international commitment. We will lose face and credibility before the world if we do not stand by our commitment." According to analysts, Finance Minister Azumi Jun used exactly this tactic in pushing forward the Noda government's perilously contractionary plans to reduce Japan's budget deficit.

Whether or not this represents a wise strategy is doubtful. Everyone can remember the firestorm Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio found waiting for him at home after he made his pledge at the U.N. General Assembly that Japan will reduce its carbon emissions by 25% by the year 2020. Industry went bananas, and the Hatoyama government had to waste precious weeks and hours on a crash program of settling whether the Hatoyama pledge was even technically feasible.

Trying to squeeze out your opponents by briging gaiatsu back with you as your omiage seems an incredibly risky strategy. That the cautious Noda would sign off upon such an approach would seem to say volumes about the difficult position the government finds itself in.

What's The Reason For The Difference in Coverage?

2011-10-30T06:36:00.006+09:00

I am trying to get a handle on why the non-economic news media complex is fascinated with the Daio Paper scandal while remaining virtually silent on the much, much larger Olympus scandal. Every night we are treated to breathless updates featuring snippets of the handsome, young former chairman of Daio, mostly walking down the steps of his home. Not that there is much to the story: little rich boy takes over Daddy's company, uses its cash reserves as his own personal piggy bank, blows the money in Las Vegas and other venues, finds that his own personal fortune cannot pay back even half the loan from the company's kitty. Even the Japanese press does not make any bones about this being a story of a company where the founding family treated the company as its own private possession, with their underlings obliging them (en).

By contrast, the Olympus story is rife with "you cannot make this stuff up" international skullduggery: a foreign president brought in to clean up the company uncovers a mega-sized scandal and is summarily sacked for doing his job properly; record advisory fees paid to a Cayman islands company that has since evaporated, acquisitions whose value Olympus had to write off in a year; a pair of mysterious banker brothers -- it is all just incredible (en - with a special double hurrah for Hiroko Tabuchi).

Yet in the mainline press and on television, nada. Just a rote announcement that the chairman who sacked the foreign CEO himself resigned on Wednesday due to "confusion over acquisitions" made by Olympus.

The scale of the robbery of Olympus is ~~50 times~~ 5 times the size of the Daio Paper scandal.

What gives?

Why I Still Think Calling The U.S. Post-Disaster Actions "Operation Tomodachi" Was A Bad Idea

2011-10-30T05:25:00.004+09:00

When I heard back in March that the United States military was calling its part in the relief effort after 3/11 "Operation Tomodachi" (Tomodachi sakusen) I cringed.

"Oh Amaterasu," I thought, "anything but that. Call it 'Operation Steller's Sea Eagle' or 'Operation Scrumptious Pantypacker' (OK, maybe that not that one). Just not 'Operation Tomodachi'."

Why?

Because the very first thing I thought of when I heard "Tomodachi" was...well... instead of me telling you, why not try just try a search on Google Images of "Tomodachi" in hiragana?

Just copy and paste in the bit below and see what you get.

「ともだち」

See that? That is the first thing I thought of.

If you are asking yourself, "What the hell is that?" what you are seeing is images of "Tomodachi" -- the masked, genocidal dictator of Japan in the wildly successful manga and film series Nijuseiki Shonen. In the chronology of the series, Tomodachi is to take over Japan in 2014 on the wings of the electoral victory of his "Friends Party" (the Yujinto - now there's a name!). Something that is called "Operation Tomodachi" in 2011 would seem to be part of the master plan.

Now I have had conversations and email interpellations with folks on this. Most responses I get back are polite rephrasings of "MTC, you are nuts."

Still, no matter the noble intentions in the selection of the name, "Operation Tomodachi" just grates upon the ears.

Does anyone else feel this way? And if so, for what reason?

On Musical Accompaniment

2011-10-29T08:39:00.012+09:00

Late last night on NHK I was watching a documentary on ninja. Entitled "The Last Ninja" (Rasuto Ninja -- yes, it was in katakana), it was exploration of a series of texts from the later 18th century purporting to reveal the secrets of the ninja and the historical use of irregular warriors in the period stretching from the late Sengoku to the Shimabara Rebellion. Most of the program was dedicated to trying to find out if the weirdest weapons described in the texts could actually be manufactured.

Fine...but why did the entire program have to be scored with music by Pink Floyd, drawn from Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here?

OK, sure, Pink Floyd's music is oft moody and ominous, with a driving drum beat. As a sound editor, you get to put in musical jokes, like having the section of the documentary on the payment of ninja scored with, of course, "Money" from Dark Side of the Moon*.

But did NHK pay even a yen's worth of royalties for an hour's worth of Pink Floyd? You have got to wonder...and you have got to worry for NHK. OK, sure, Syd Barrett and Richard Wright are no longer with us...but Roger Waters and David Gilmour are very much alive and VERY litiginous.

Which points up a possible reason (other than "it's better") for the near ubiquity of American and British music in public use. The music used in exercise classes, the ambient music in local government offices...all drawn from the English-language canon, even where the persons being served could not possibly identify the songs being played...all because no one is there to protect the rights of the original performers and composers. Play nothing but Frank Sinatra in your coffee shop? Fine. Play 15 seconds of an EXILE song (if you do not know about EXILE, count yourself lucky) and JASRAC comes around to make your life miserable -- or at least that is my understanding.

Which begs the question as to whether commercial Japanese music would be of better quality -- by which I mean more exportable to a global audience -- if those who spend all their time protecting the rights of Japanese music producers would just lay off a little and let folks use the music as the beat of their daily lives.

Of course, to find out anything about the Japan music business and rights issues one would have to query W. David Marx, now with YouTube Asia.

----------------------

* My all-time favorite sound engineer's joke? The TV Asahi's New Station breaking news report on Kanemaru Shin and the Sagawa Kyubin scandal, backed up in its entirety by "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.

Going Nowhere Faster and Faster

2011-10-28T21:48:00.006+09:00

The outlook for the Democratic Party of Japan's convincing members of the Diet and the general public of the necessity of Japan's being at the Trans Pacific Partnership table grows darker and darker. Tonight Yamada Masahiko, the former agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister who is leading the charge within the party against Japan's participation in TPP talks, claimed that he had the support of 202 members of the DPJ's Diet delegation (and, for good measure, 224 members of the former DPJ-led three-way coalition). If his claim is accurate, the government and the leadership of the DPJ hold a razor-thin 7 vote majority of DPJ members ready to support Japan's committing itself to participation in TPP negotiations.

If the government of Noda Yoshihiko seeks a silver lining in the present massing dark clouds, it would be in the weaker participation of DPJ members in the petition drive sponsored by the Central Union of Agriculture Cooperatives (Zenchu). Only 120 DPJ members crossed party lines and linked arms with members of the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito to provide Zenchu with 356 names on its petition (for the full list in Japanese, click here).

Still, 120 members is more than a quarter of the DPJ's Diet membership.

What is so nonsensical about the weakness of the DPJ leadership's efforts is that the tail is really wagging the dog here -- and it is an LDP tail to boot. Agriculture, forestry and fisheries, the interest group that simply will not budge on the TPP (How could rice farmers survive minus the 778% tariff protecting them?) produces but a tiny fraction of Japan's GDP. As for the Japan Medical Association (Ishikai) it was and is a paid-in bastion of LDP support.

That members of the Cabinet or DPJ supporters of TPP participation are not out in front of the TV cameras every day, explaining the benefits of the pact for the majority of the citizenry, demonstrates that two years and three prime ministers in, the DPJ executive still does not understand what it takes to lead a government and a country.

Everyone is focusing now on Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko and his stated preference to push TPP acceptance forward (en). Noda-san has so far charmed the Diet, the news media and the nation with an easy-going manner and a conciliatory stance. Admirers and critics alike have likened his leadership style that of a safe driver on the road. Just how these qualities are going to help him pull the TPP rabbit out of the hat, if he even cares about deploying them, remains a question.

A huge question.

One For the Sankei Shimbun Readers

2011-10-28T13:56:00.011+09:00

Over at The Diplomat, David Axe commits unholy mayhem on the hysteria about China's purportedly exploding submarine warfare capabilities.　It should be mandatory reading for Sankei Shimbun readers, or those who follow the Sankei Shimbun as representing the thinking of an influential fraction of Japan's power elites (Link).

The purported dramatic growth of China's capability to conduct access denial activities out beyond the "First Island Chain" -- the chain of islands stretching from Kagoshima's Cape Sata all the way down to the Spratly Islands -- pushed the government of Japan into extending the lifespans of its diesel attack submarines and consequently a natural growth of its submarine fleet to 22 submarines. The Japanese expansion of its fleet, when combined with the submarine acquisitions of other countries in the region, will likely more than match China's purported incipient threat.

Indeed, as Axe hints, the regional upgrade may be overkill.

What will be interesting is whether or not the heretofore limited propositions regarding the relaxation of the 3 principles on arms exports (en) will open the door somewhere way, way down the line for Japan to start selling its decommissioned boats, both surface and sub-surface (none of the Aegis ships, of course), to customers such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Again, that is way, way out from where the current government's thinking is on the subject.

However, for a domestic arms industry that had a collective coronary last month when the last F2 jet rolled off the production line, the prospects of foreign sales of the still functional retired vessels, and the likelihood of maintenance and upgrade contracts with the purchasing entities, the first tentative steps taken by the Noda government toward relaxation of the ban allow them to dream, just a little.

And, if you are an editor at the Sankei Shimbun, to dream a lot, facts notwithstanding.

Later - And for readers of sec mil porn like SAPIO, whatever I said goes double for you.

No, Japan Is Not Entering TPP Negotiations With An Option To Quit

2011-10-26T08:54:00.015+09:00

No, Maehara Seiji is not reckless. No, the government is not confused.

And no, you will not know any of this, even if you follow the news reports.

On NHK's Sunday 9 a.m. talk show, Maehara Seiji, the Democratic Party of Japan Policy Research Chairman, suggested that Japan could enter into talks to join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) only to skip out at a later date, if the elements of the pact turned out to not be to Japan's liking (ja).

The political background for making such a suggestion is clear: the outlook for the DPJ leadership pushing the Diet to give its nod to Japan participating in TPP negotiations is growing murkier by the hour. It was expected that agriculture, forestry and fisheries would be dead set against Japan participating in negotiations. As a consequence, their representative organizations were given a day to vent their grievances before the DPJ TPP project team. However, the Central Union of Agriculture Cooperatives (Zenchu) has upped the ante by employing a rarely used constitutional maneuver of petitioning the Diet in order to stop Japan’s participation in TPP talks, saying that it had the support of 350 of the Diet’s members (en). At the same time, all kinds of organizations that had been expected to remain on the sidelines have come out against Japan precipitously joining TPP negotiations, including the Consumer’s Union of Japan (Nisshoren) and the Japan Medical Association (en).

With the complexity and breadth of the TPP becoming wider known, causing more and more organizations to come out against Japan’s participation, Maehara and the rest of the DPJ’s leadership have under tremendous pressure to get as many of the DPJ’s fence sitters down on the side of the TPP as soon as possible. The temptation must have been great to drum up support now by saying that Japan’s participation could be considered contingent -- that Japan could begin negotiations only to pull out later with no harm, no foul.

Maehara's statement of course sent heads whipping around. That Japan could enter into talks with an expressed ambivalence or indeed insincerity challenged the government's and TPP opponents' common view that the fight is over whether Japan will be a committed incipient partner or will just not show up. What Maehara was suggesting was there was room at the negotiations for Japan to have some kind of special observer status, neither fully in nor fully out.

The problem with Maehara's gambit is obvious. If any entity were to enter into negotiations with Japan, it would have to consider the possibility that Japan would whip out its "option to quit" card from out its back pocket at the first sign of stress. With the possibility that the government might retreat, no nation or organization would ever want to negotiate with the Japanese government.

Being that he is no idiot, Maehara realized that he had misspoken in a big way. In a streetside interview after the end of the NHK program, he refined his statement, saying that when he was talking about Japan backing out of TPP discussions, it would be in the context of heretofore unknown facts about the pact came to light, or some other such surprise.

Pay attention to the time indication in the top right corner of this TV Asahi replay of the Maehara streetside interview (ja). Note that it says, "After 10 a.m." -- ie., after Maehara had walked off the set at NHK. Note also that TV Asahi completely ignores Maehara's nuanced restatement of his position in favor of its own narrative -- that DPJ policy chief Maehara Seiji has suggested Japan will enter into negotiations with a clear option to pull out.

Unfortunately for Maehara, what one says on Nichiyo Toron, NHK's showcase political talk show, matters far more than what one says on the street afterward. Not even for a television network that is a rival to NHK that broadcasts on its news program the video of one's restating one's position.

Since Maehara's remarks on Nichiyo Toron and his restatement of his position immediately afterward, the government has been fighting a losing battle with the news media over what is or is not Japan's position on participating in TPP negotiations.

Fully aware that under the reorganization of the DPJ's policy making process Maehara has an influence on policy second only to the prime minister*, the news media has whippped Maehara’s Nichiyo Toron comment into a confection of confusion inside the government and the ruling party. When Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu on Monday defended Maehara's restated opinion, and said there were past instances of Japan pulling out of negotiations with similar characteristics, the news media treated Fujimura's support as being support for Maehara’s original statement on the Nichiyo Toron program. When on Monday afternoon Fujimura said that Japan considers its promises to the United States weighty and important, the news media portrayed this as Fujimura reversing his position of earlier in the day (en). When on Tuesday, Fujimura again reaffirmed there are numerous historical instances of Japan pulling out of negotiations, the reporting made it seem that Fujimura had reversed himself yet again (ja).

Of course, the new media's misuse of Maehara's position opened the door for the opposition to criticize the ruling party and the government, with Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Ishira Nobuteru blasting Maehara and Fujimura for having no sense of how diplomatic relations are conducted (ja)

Even editorial cartoonists, who should know better, have had misguided fun at Maehara's expense. Here is the Tokyo Shimbun's Tuesday morning edition cartoon, drawing parallels between Maehara's stance on Japan 's TPP negotiations to Kim Jong-il's stance on participation in the Six Party Talks.

Panel 1 – Label: TPP
President Barack Obama : "Japan has to quickly commit to participation."

Panel 2 – Label: In and out, in and out
Maehara: "If we participate, there's the option of pulling out."

Panel 3 – Label: The Six Party Talks
Kim Jong-il to Maehara – "That's right. There's the option. There's the option."

Title: "Doing It The DPRK Way"

Poor Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro. He has had to go out of his way to reassure international partners that Japan is not entering into negotiations willy-nilly without any guarantee of sticking around (en). Not what he thought he would be doing when he accepted the job from Noda Yoshihiko, I am sure. Note also that the report on Gemba's refutation of the principle of Japan entering into negotiation with an option to pull out perpetuates the false narrative that Maehara and Fujimura are arguing for just such a right.

The press has bought into that narrative. The government and the citizenry are being swept up into it, no matter what anyone wants or does.

----------------------------------

* There have been further additions to the policy making diagram since I wrote about it, putting one more advisory council in between the DPJ Policy Research Council and the Cabinet. In general, however, Maehara's special status has been preserved.

Image: Tokyo Shimbun of October 25, 2011.

An Indefensible Decision

2011-10-19T09:55:00.005+09:00

I do not side with Communists very often as I do not believe, as they seem to, that nearly every one of Japan's problems can be solved by providing more day care centers for working mothers (not that providing more day care centers would help solve some problems, mind you).

However yesterday, the Communists in the Tokyo Metropolitan District Assembly were dead on when they tried to stop the passage of a resolution on an official invitation from the TMD Assembly to the International Olympic Committee for the TMD to be the host for the 2020 Summer Games (ja).

With the Democratic Party of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito, who are at each other's throats in the assembly -- the other major item of business yesterday was a no-confidence motion against the Speaker of the Assembly, Wada Muneharu of the DPJ, sponsored by the latter two parties -- all voting for the measure, the Communists' principled stand was doomed to failure. Nevertheless the Communists tried to appeal to their colleagues' sense of reason, arguing that the money spent on mounting a bid would be far better spent on bolstering Tokyo's disaster preparedness than on what is no more than a recurring vanity project of the ailing Governor Ishihara Shintaro.

Local public opinion polls generally show an even split on whether or not Tokyo should reprise its bid for an Olympic Games. The question, however, is always put to respondents in a vacuum, without ever acquainting the respondents with the likely costs associated with hosting an Olympics. If the cost estimates were laid out, the overwhelming majority of Tokyoites would likely scream "No! Never!"

Just to add insult to injury, the resolution states that Tokyo's holding the Games nine years after the triple disaster in the Tohoku will be a celebration of the nation's recovery and the sign that Japan is a safe place once again. If you think I am making this up, here is the link (ja).

I do not care if this bunch was just elected in April -- recall the whole blinking lot of them, Communists excluded.

TPP Thoughts

2011-10-17T15:32:00.008+09:00

Corey Wallace, who is in Japan doing research for his doctorate, has taken a moment to consider the Trans Pacific Partnership and its role Asia-Pacific trade policy.
(Link).

I would not have very much to add, save that in Japan there is a striking contrast between the elite representations of the TPP and the grassroots reality of opposition to Japan participating in even discussions about joining the pact.

The recent approval of the Korea United States Free Trade Agreement was portrayed by the media as proof that Japan was in decline in world importance, even with its most important/only military ally the United States, and that the country had better gets its britches hitched on and get going on negotiating free trade pacts, if only to not be bested by the South Koreans.

The news media's immediate solution to this problem, a salve really, for a gaping national wound, is the TPP. Discussion of bilateral free trade pacts or Amaterasu forbid the Doha round is pushed aside. The TPP, and Japan's having to be on board in time for the Hawaii APEC meeting, is all that anyone in medialand is talking about.

However, on the ground, the forces for and against participation are more than evenly matched. While the manufacturer-heavy and highly influentially Nippon Keidanren business lobby considers participation in the TPP of the highest national importance, an array of equally powerful political players -- farmers cooperatives, the pharmaceutical industry, labor unions -- are against Japan entering into negotiations on the very reasonable basis that once Japan has jumped in it will find it very costly to jump out again, should the content of the trade pact become politically unworkable.

As for the situation in the Diet, the gap between elite-sponsored perceptions of the importance, indeed the inevitability, of the government moving forward on participation in TPP discussions and reality were illustrated in the first open meeting of the Democratic Pary of Japan's Project Team on the TPP. After the members of the project team spoke, the floor was opened up for comment. The first person to pick up the microphone said, in a matter fact tone, "Hello, I am Yamada Masahiko, head of the 181-member group of DPJ Diet legislators opposed to Japan's participating in TPP discussion."

Kerpow! That number, 181, is within shouting distance of 50% of the DPJ's Diet representation. When the breadth and intrusiveness of the partnership agreement is better known, the number of doubters in the Diet is likely to grow.

What is going on, therefore, is a race, with the big business lobby, in collusion with a media complex transfixed by the narrative of Japan's relative decline, pushing hard for Japan's participation, against a range of less flashy, so far less organized and reactionary elements with a strong grip on the elbows of many legislators. The pro-TPP side, citing the looming spectre of the APEC conference and the disappointment the United States will feel should Japan, already in the doghouse over Futenma, ruin President Barack Obama's houseparty not committing to participation in TPP discussions, is trying to panic the anti-TPP side into surrendering to the TPP's inexorable force.

Will the pro-TPP fail in bum rushing the other side? Probably. They got a big boost from the KORUS receiving U.S. Senate ratification. There are no further big boosts on the horizon, and with every passing day, the arguments of those opposed to TPP participation get sharper and the ranks of persons aware of the challenges freer trade may pose grow more numerous.

Then again, there is nothing like the possibility that the South Koreans will run right past Japan economically to get Japanese minds focused on getting back into the fast lane.

Later - Yes, of course Masahiko Yamada is a former Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Did one even have to ask?

A Most Significant Meeting

2011-10-14T12:31:00.006+09:00

A very careful Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko took 15 minutes out of his busy schedule on Wednesday afternoon to pay a courtesy call on former prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (93) at Nakasone's think tank (en). The much younger Noda stayed mostly silent, preferring to listen to the wisdom the still influential elder statesman could impart.

In paying a visit to Nakasone on Nakasone's home turf, the Prime Minister showed appropriate deference to one of Japan's most significant postwar figures. Nakasone returned the compliment, declaring that the younger man had the qualities appropriate to a prime minister. He advised the PM that if stayed on the course he has been following, keeping his head down and not making enemies, he will have a long tenure in office.

That the still sharp Nakasone paid the PM compliments was not due to any obligation the old man had to a prime minister. Nakasone regularly rubbishes Japan's current generation of politicians, no matter their status, pointing out their flaws and weaknesses. That he sees in Noda qualities of humility masking political cunning is of tremendous interest, or at least should be.

In visiting Nakasone, the PM has crossed a few more T's and dotted a few more I's. He has insulated himself from attacks from the hard right wing of Japanese politics, most of whom hold reverential views of Nakasone. He has also received a not necessarily needed but still welcome imprimatur of leadership from a man who, at least in the public eye and in the history books, is pointed out as having been an exemplar it.

Nakasone gave the PM some advice on what has been a been a sore point for Japanese prime ministers: how to behave at multilateral summits. "Summits are the Olympics for prime ministers and presidents," Nakasone told the PM. "Should you talk for 30 minutes, you will know the weight of being the representatives of one's country. It is terrifying." He continued, "What is important is to make guarded but still weighty statements." (ja)

Good advice. We will see if the PM follows through on the suggestion at the APEC summit. Perhaps then he can live down the humiliation of delegates filing out in droves during his speech to the UN General Assembly (en).

[Hat tip on the delegate walkout to Japan Probe]

The Earth Does Not Like Japanese Automakers

2011-10-14T11:45:00.005+09:00

What are Japanese auto manufacturers supposed to do?

In order to serve the Southeast Asian market, have an alternate manufacturing center to plants in Japan which are liable to disruption due to typhoons, earthquakes and the occasional tsunami, and lastly to escape the export-depressing effects of the soaring yen, they invest in a second center.

And it is Thailand.

One would not be farfetched in thinking that at least this year, offerings made to placate the kami and petition them to shower the companies of Japan with prosperity were somehow deeply flawed.

Image courtesy: AFP/Getty Images

Later - The Japan Times has the Kyodo report on the economic disaster (en).

Those Damn Islets, Northwestern Edition

2011-10-14T11:17:00.004+09:00

For every step in the right direction toward closer and deeper relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, there is the ever spiraling nuttiness over Dokdo
/Takeshima/ the Liancourt Rocks.

In a piece for The Diplomat, Rajaram Panda of the Instite for Defence Studies and Analyses chides South Korea for spending money on a deep water naval pier for the island of Ulleung, the spot of dry land nearest to the DTLR (why not coin an acronym?). What is fascinating is not the article itself, which is a level-headed plea for level-headed thinking about the ROK's actual security needs. It is the comment string afterward, which demonstrates just how insanely worked up South Korean activists can get about a set of islets which Japan will never, ever do anything about, save make pro-forma statements about how they are a part of Japan.

India, of course, has recently completed work on an agreement nailing down its disputed border areas with its least threatening neighbor and moving now on to new, less lethal means of enforcing that border, all so that the Indian government can concentrate on its border disputes with the two countries that really matter to Indian security.

Seen from New Delhi, South Korean wackiness over the DTLR must look like a tremendous waste of money and emotion.

Why He Doesn't Just Do It

2011-10-13T09:41:00.015+09:00

One of the questions frequently asked about the Ozawa Ichiro situation is why, if he is as clean (keppaku) as he claims he is, does he not go before the Diet, either in camera in the Ethics Committee or before the cameras in sworn testimony, to tell his side of the story. For some, this reticence is evidence that he is indeed hiding something (en) -- that he is afraid something will pop out under the pressure of questions from the opposition.

I can think of one other reason why Ozawa Ichiro would see little reason for his appearing in the Diet: it benefits his rivals in the party. As long as he is around but not saying anything, the party's image gets tarnished and his rivals, who are the ones in control of the party and the government, struggle to get anything done. If he talks, no matter the outcome -- i.e., the testimony finds Ozawa without fault, finds him rife with inconsistencies or finds the smoking gun -- his rivals benefit, the cloud having been lifted off the party.

Put yourself in Ozawa's position. Given the chance that something heretofore ignored might suddenly come to the fore or that the only ones who really benefit from your testimony are your rivals in the party, would you testify?

As for Ozawa's attitude problem, as was demonstrated in his responses to questions at his press conference of October 6, the simplest explanation is that he is a certain part of the male anatomy. Whether he is congenitally a certain part of the male anatomy, or came to develop his certain part of the male anatomynishness under the tutelage of Tanaka Kakuei and Kanemaru Shin, both of whose certain part of the male anatomynishness was truly epic, or that his having to pass kidney stones (en) plays a part, the result is disastrous for his public image, no matter the merits of the case against him.

A Frequent Correspondent...

2011-10-13T09:07:00.010+09:00

...has reminded me that Temple University will be hosting a presentation by U.S. POWs of Japan on Monday the 17th at 18:00.

What makes the visit special in terms of U.S.-Japan relations is that is the first arranged by the Government of Japan as part of a program of visits by former POWs and their families. Prior to this, the Government of Japan visit program was restricted to U.K. and Netherlands POWs, for reasons no one could reasonably explain -- though unreasonably, it likely had something to do with the presence of U.S. bases in Japan and the absence of commensurate U.K. and Dutch bases.

Anyway, these men are very, very mature. If you want to hear their stories, you will likely not have another chance.

These are not on the whole angry men. However, they still have issues with Japanese institutions, even after the quiet and very limited apology made by Ambassador Fujisaki Ichiro in 2009. They are still demanding the back wages they are owed by the companies who employed them during their imprisonment. Neither the GOJ nor the U.S. government are supporting these claims, though the amounts, due to inflation, are now trifling.

So if you are free next Monday eve, there is a probably last chance to see some folks who lived history, rather than watched it pass by.

The Temple page on the event can be found at:

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=289113247781368

Full Map of the Cesium Counts

2011-10-12T15:03:00.008+09:00

I do not think the good people at the Tokyo Shimbun will mind too much if I offer a jpeg of their October 7 printout of the Cesium 134 and Cesium 137 counts of the Kanto Area, with a legend and color scheme that at least makes some kind of sense.

As the map shows, the town of Iidate, which was not a part of the original evacuation zone, just got plastered. So for several days after the disaster, the populace of the town went about their business, without precautions, though their environment was more sullied than most of the area within the 30-to-20 band where folks were advised to not leave their homes due to fallout. I would not surprised if "Iidate" does not become a metaphor for a total governmental failure (the SPEEDI data available to the Prime Minister's Office at the time of the disaster showed that the town was in danger. Nobody at the Kantei knew what to do with the data, however.)

Stunning also is the tongue of light green extending from the Miyagi border to the border of Tochigi, engulfing the major cities of Fukushima and Koriyama -- the prefecture's agricultural and industrial corridor. What a mess.

As for the other prefectures, well, the highland and alpine areas of Gunma and Tochigi are contaminated, even though they be 100 to 180 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, while the plains and lower hills are spared.

As to what happened to the area southwest of Tsuchiura, goodness knows. Must have been an unfortunate front of rain.

For a large reproduction of this map, click HERE.

As I Was Saying, About The Health Benefits Of Hiking

2011-10-08T06:10:00.004+09:00

The other day I surmised that the far northwest corner of the Tokyo Metropolitan District, where there are many places you can wonder "Is this really still Tokyo?", would be a cesium hot spot.

Well, now The Japan Times has confirmed it.

Let it be said that as compared to the mountains of Tokyo and Saitama, the mountain areas in Gunma and Tochigi Prefectures really got walloped.

Have a great three day weekend!

Committees for the Inquest of the Prosecution

2011-10-07T10:09:00.009+09:00

I have been trying to get a handled just how far and beyond the pale the current prosecution of Ozawa Ichiro is. The newspapers are either being slipshod or obscure in calling Ozawa's prosecution the first of its kind. I cannot tell whether they mean the first of its kind for a member of the Diet, the first of its kind under the 2009 revision of the law establishing the Committees for the Inquest of the Prosecution or the first of its kind for whatever reason.

The section of the Ministry of Justice White Papers on the subject of the dispositions by the Committees is not much help in this matter, though it does provide a very good review of the Committees in general.

For the Japanese language reader, the latest available White Paper is last year's, to be found here.

For the English-language reader, the latest available version is the 2008 White Paper, where the relevant section is White Paper on Crime 2008, Part 5, Chapter 2, Section 1.

Working from the English language 2008 publication, so that the greatest number of readers may benefit, one finds out that since the establishment of the Committees in 1949 through to 2008, 135,136 persons were recommended for prosecution by a Committee, 1,408 were prosecuted and 1,254 were convicted. One also finds out that the new law, which gives the Prosecutors Office a second crack at the evidence before the Committee submits a case to a judge, came into force on May 21, 2009 -- a rather odd date since most laws generally come into force on April 1 or October 1 of a given year. One also finds out that nationwide there are 165 Committees for the Inquest of the Prosecution.

Click on the pop out tables and matters start to get confusing.

In the first table 5-2-1-1, one learns that in 2008 2,039 cases were referred to the Committees, either by request of by an authority (what kind of authority would be doing this is unclear). Now the Committees probably have a backlog of work from previous years built up, so the number of cases they consider in a single year is not necessarily equal to the number they receive. In 2008, the Committees disposed of 2,366 cases, recommending 130 for prosecution.

Now what happened to those 130 cases?

T'is hard to tell because the second pop out (5-2-1-2) says that in 2008 151 cases were disposed of. One has to assume that this disposition was done by judges, though this is unclear. As with the actions of the Committees, the discrepancy between the number of cases disposed of by the Committees and those disposed of by the judges (?) must result from a backlog of cases from previous years or cases that did not make it to trial in the recording year.

Now it seems, though again it is unclear, that of the 151 cases brought before a judge in 2008 35 were actually prosecuted, the others being being dismissed by the court.

So what was the result of these 35 prosecutions? No way to tell, as the data does not report the conviction rates.

For the record, from the Japanese-language 2010 White Paper, 155,583 cases were referred to the Committees for the Inquest of the Prosecution in between 1949 and 2009, resulting in 1444 prosecutions and 1286 convictions.

Which indicates that in 2009, the courts started action on 36 cases and 32 cases ended in guilty verdicts. Furthermore, in comparing the data totals presented in both of the White Papers, 1 -- yes only 1 -- case ended in acquittal in 2009.

Gotta admit, that last number is not great news for Ozawa Ichiro.

Circus Maximus

2011-10-06T08:58:00.005+09:00

In an hour, the first hearing of the trial of former Democratic Party of Japan leader Ozawa Ichiro will open. He is charged with being a co-conspirator in the financial crimes of his former political secretaries Ishikawa Tomohiro, Okubo Takanori and Ikeda Mitsumoto (en).

The charges against Ozawa are bogus or at very worst unprovable. The Tokyo Prosecutors Office looked at the accusations twice. Both times the prosecutors decided that there was no case. That Ozawa is facing a judge today is due only to the efforts of the shadowy Association of Those Seeking The Truth in convincing the No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution (are these terms Stalinist enough for you?) that it should command a judge to appoint three lawyers as prosecutors.

The mainstream new media, which hates Ozawa, is having a field day...and will have several field months (the conventional wisdom is that the judge will issue a decision in April. I am not so sure the wheels of the law will grind so quickly) describing what will be dramatic exchanges of paper between the defense lawyers, the prosecuting lawyers and the judge.

Despite Ozawa's previous stint as the supreme authority in the DPJ and his behind-the-scenes running of the government during the brief Hatoyama Cabinet, it is unlikely that his trial will seriously affect the image of the DPJ or the proceedings of the Diet. The DPJ has quarantined Ozawa by stripping him of his party privileges: he is a Democrat in name only. As for the demands from the opposition parties that Ozawa explain himself, either behind closed doors before the Ethics Committee (the Socialists) or in sworn testimony before the Diet (everybody else), the Noda administration will simply reply that it has no intention to interfere with the actions of another branch of the government and can we get back to discussing the third supplementary budget?

And that will be it.

But on this morning, it is all Ozawa, though in a strangely very low key way.

Later - Here he is.

Ozawa Ichiro arriving at the Tokyo District courthouse at around 9:25 a.m.

Image courtesy: Yomiuri Online

Later still - An example of the kind of press puffery that has dogged Ozawa Ichiro for years, this from The Asahi Shimbun of September 29 (Link).

Landing On His Feet; Landing On His Face

2011-10-05T08:16:00.005+09:00

Proving that in Democratic Party of Japan Leader Noda Yoshihiko's world, failure and ill omens are not a barrier to appointment, Chairman of the Policy Research Council Maehara Seiji on Monday appointed Hachiro Yoshio the head of the PARC's project team researching Japan's possible participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (ja). This comes less than a month after Hachiro's spectacular flameout as Minister of Economics, Trade and Industry following only nine days in office.

That Hachiro has hardly had enough time to think about what went wrong the last time he was appointed to lead the government's efforts regarding the TPP and that he is still, as he was, a bizarre choice for this effort, given his connections to agricultural interests, seems to not be of litle consequence.

What qualities Hachiro possesses that he must be in charge of the DPJ's TPP strategy remain a mystery.

Meanwhile, in the House of Councillors and on the other side of the chamber, Liberal Democratic Party Caucus Leader Nakasone Hirofumi yesterday had to swallow his pride and appoint Koga faction member Mizote Kensei as his new party secretary-general (ja). Nakasone had hoped to appoint Konosuke Yoshitada as the replacement for departing secretary-general Kosaka Kenji. However, his choice of successor was opposed by the Machimura, Koga and Nukaga factions, which have been trying to improve their influence over LDP affairs as a whole.

Accepting Mizote as his deputy represents a significant blow for Nakasone. Whether the new lineup of LDP officers in the upper house means that the LDP will pull back from Nakasone's policy of saying absolutely no to every piece of legislation landing on the upper house's doorstep is now a very good question.

More Chess Moves

2011-10-04T11:57:00.004+09:00

Cut your losses. If you must lose material, lose as little as possible.
-Bruce Pandolfini, "The Ten Commandments of Chess"

So Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko visited the site of the disputed Asaka government housing complex.

For 15 minutes.

Based on this extensive review of the project which he had greenlighted after it was cancelled by the Government Revitalization Unit, he returned to Tokyo and called Finance Minister Azumi Jun into his office, this in order to command Azumi to suspend further construction activity at the site for five years (en).

One has to admit that this prime minister, even when he is forced by circumstances to reverse himself, does not forget to dot his i’s and cross his t’s, unlike his predecessor Kan Naoto, who did a lot of his policy making on the fly, upsetting the powers that be.

One also needs pay attention to how quickly and coldly this prime minister deals with every problem he faces. Ignore the charming self-deprecation and the common touch he can summon seemingly without the least effort: the man is all business. Sentimentality is a tool to win over his audience -- or at times just a single individual -- to be deployed, not felt.

Which is not to say that Noda is insensitive. Indeed, quite the opposite: one has to be acutely sensitive of another person’s or group’s wants and needs before one can beguile them with words that move and/or influence. And he makes the concessions necessary to seal the deals.

When I first considered Noda as prime minister, I figured that he would be put through the wringer just as his five immediate predecessors have been, leaving behind a desiccated husk after only a year in office. Now I am more inclined to see him as surviving the Democratic Party of Japan’s leadership contest next September and leading his party into the next House of Representatives election

Behind that roly-poly jiggle of jolly jelly is one tough customer.