OK, So I Am Surprised, I Really Am

Hey,

Hirano Tatsuo, my apologies, you really do know Iwate Prefecture.

When you quit the Democratic Party of Japan in April, I thought the decision daft or at least confused (Link). However, when the smoke cleared from the circular firing squad this Sunday night, you were the one still standing. Omedeto!

You in Iwate and Itokazu Keiko (running with Social Democratic, People's Life, Green Breeze and Communist support, of all the lefty things) in Okinawa kept the Liberal Democratic Party from sweeping all of the single seat constituencies.

May the LDP send more former college rugby coaches to run against you in the future.

Democratic Party of Japan, congratulations. Seriously.

Everyone knew you were a goner in the single seat districts. Everyone knew you were in dire straits in the proportional seat voting.

However, in the two- and three-seat districts, your candidates toughed it out.

This was a bad election for you, the party garnering fewer votes in the proportional side of the ballot than the New Komeito. Still, third place is far from a full blown catastrophe. With a new leader (Yes, Mr. Kaieda Banri, your time, though brief, is up) and some decent candidates, the party can revive to serve as an honorable opposition.

[An aside, but the most wicked bon mot of the morning? The commentator on the Asa Zuba! wide show who cheerily suggested to DPJ bigwig Nagatsuma Akira, "Well, now that there are fewer of you, it should be easier to smooth over differences of opinion."]

Your Party and Japan Communist Party, what happened to your supposed juice? You, the opposite ends of Japan’s economic policy prescription spectrum with your shared contempt for the bureaucracy, you were supposed to be the havens of protest votes forced to run screaming from out of the wreckage of the DPJ.

In the end though, you both came up short, with 4.7 million and 5.1 million votes, respectively.

This was your big day, your opportunity to do some damage on the proportional side. Your performance, however, was only OK, with strong district candidates bailing you out in the end.

Social Democratic Party, you live! Of course, by losing one of the two seats you were defending, you are now down to five seats, meaning that while you are still considered a party in Diet, you are at the five member limit.

So you live to die another day.

Anti-nuclear activists Kira Yoshiko (JCP) and Yamamoto Taro (independent), you not only won district seats in Tokyo, but shoved Takemi Keizo, an LDP Washington insider running as the representative of the health care industry into the fifth and final slot. You both now have six years to harass the nuclear industry and its supporters from the inside, rather than cacophonously from without.

Zing! No, Double Zing!

[How can anyone resist having a young (she’s only 30) Communist woman senator whose name is pronounced “Killer”?]

Japan Restoration Party, they must like you in the Kansai. They must really, really like you. At 6.3 million proportional seat votes, you are effectively half as popular nationally as you were seven months ago. With everyone was writing you off, though, winning six proportional seats must feel good.

It has been hard not to notice, though, that your two top vote winners in the proportional vote were:

1) a professional wrestler close to the Pyongyang regime and an eager participant in that regime's propaganda actions and

2) the militant anti-Pyongyang former finance ministry bureaucrat who has fought, fought, fought to win freedom and justice for those abducted by the DPRK

That these two are your #1 and #2 in the proportional vote reflects what we can only call awesome party message coherence.

Hirano Pulls The Ripcord

The announcement yesterday of the departure of former State Minister for Reconstruction Hirano Tatsuo from the Democratic Party of Japan was the top story of last night's evening news. The departure was not a surprise: Hirano had been discussing leaving the party for quite some time(Link). It just took him until yesterday to sit down in front of the cameras and spit out his intentions.

A former minister and leading light of the mid-career cohort (Link) is forced to abandon the DPJ four months before he faces reelection: the DPJ is coming apart at the seams – there is a narrative combo no political writer will be punished for reporting.

It is unclear, however, just how Hirano has improved his position by declaring himself an independent. He has, of course, his own base of support within Iwate Prefecture. However, at his press conference he expressed the hope that supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party will also vote for him (Link – J video). Given that the LDP has already got a candidate lined up for the Iwate seat (Link - J), Hirano's hope seems a rather vain one.

Hirano also cannot expect much help from his former mentor, the "king" of Iwate the LDP so very much wants to topple, Ozawa Ichiro – not that Hirano is seeking any connection with the man who set him up in national office. When asked about his former protégé's plan to leave the DPJ, Ozawa, who believes he still has cards to play with the DPJ, stuck in the knife and twisted:

"Since [Hirano] was a DPJ government minister until the end of last year, how likely are the citizens to accept this? Won't [Hirano's decision] be kind of hard for the voters to understand?"

(Link – J)

Ozawa has a gigantic blindspot as to his own unpopularity outside of Iwate. As to his read of the political climate inside his home prefecture, his views are hard to disrespect.

As for Hirano's own justifications of his decision, they sounded...confused. Whilst making a pitch for LDP support, he did not disavow a commitment to toppling the LDP from power. When asked how being an independent was better than being a member of the DPJ, Hirano argued that as an independent he could better push forward the post-tsunaumi reconstruction effort in his home prefecture – a rather interesting theory on the amount of leverage independents have in the Diet.

To the cynical listener (and one should not underestimate the cynicism of the voters), Hirano's reason for running for reelection as an independent boiled down to "I Deserve More."

We will have to see how the good people of Iwate respond to this assertion.