Fuji Sankei Sort Of Joins The Crowd On Collective Security

After the Yomiuri Shimbun pollsters stopped asking a triple option question regarding Japan's participation in collective self defense (CSD), replacing the previous options of

- Yes, Japan should do so fully
- Yes, Japan should, but only to the minimum extent possible, and
- No, Japan should not

with a straightforward Yes-or-No, the Fuji Sankei Group (Fuji Terebi and the Sankei Shimbun) became the last media organization still giving those wishing to not appear virulently selfish a false option of an undefined, vanishing responsibility to come to the defense of others.

Over the weekend, the Fuji Sankei Group came in from the cold, sort of, having its pollsters ask the one CSD question in a binary way.

The Abe Cabinet has reinterpreted the Constitution, delivering a Cabinet Decision approving the exercise of the right of collective self defense in a limited way. What do you think of this?

Approve 34%

Oppose 59%

Don't Know/Don't Care 7%

This looks a lot like the results found by all the other news organizations, with greater than 50% of the voters disapproving of the Abe Cabinet's actions as regards CSD.

However, the Fuji Sankei poll fails to disambiguate whether the voters are expressing displeasure with

a) the decision to approve CSD or

b) the Abe Cabinet's approval through the constitutionally suspect method of reinterpretation.

Other polling organizations have been separating the the two issues. They have generally found greater than 60% of those polled angry with the method while a smaller majority are upset with Japan's taking up the exercise of the CSD right.

While Fuji's fluffing (or fudging) of the question keeps Abe government opponents from claiming that "every poll shows the majority of the voters opposed to CSD," the general conclusion is clear: the Abe Cabinet or the CSD debate troika (in Mikuriya Takashi's conception) of Abe Shinzo, Komura Masahiko and Ishiba Shigeru have failed to make the case for the government's most radical effort to alter Japan's security architecture. Not event the Yomiuri's and the Sankei's sympathies with Abe's program could engineer a massaging of the polling results into even weak support for the government's actions.

So yes, Abe and Friends won the fight over Japan's exercise of the right of collective self defense -- but alienating a majority of voters in the process.

When, if ever, an opposition party works out a political program incepting the better parts of Abenomics, adding some truly sincere and mathed-up structural reform proposals, together with a greater respect for the intelligence of the average voter, that party could give the LDP some serious competition at the ballot box.

As Regards The Awards To Nagashima Shigeo And Matsui Hideki

Writing for The Japan Times, sports writer and longtime cultural observer Robert Whiting presents the stats and contributions to Japanese life arguments for the government's decision to bestow People's Honour Awards upon Nagashima Shigeo and Matsui Hideki. (Link)

Reading Whiting's article was refreshing, in that it was the first one I have come across with nice things to say about the government's decision -- if one ignores, of course, the obligatory puff pieces from The Yomiuri Shimbun, the mother ship that owns the Yomiuri Giants Japan baseball franchise. (Link)

The People's Honour Award is the government's most prestigious decoration for contributions to sport and culture. Since the first one was handed out in 1978 to O Sadaharu for besting Henry Aaron's career home run record, only 21 persons and one team -- the 2011 women's world cup winning squad -- have received the award. Seven of the decorated, including the Nadeshiko Japan squad, have been sports figures. The other contributors to Japanese culture receiving the nod have been musical composers (four), poets (three), singers Misora Hibari and Fujiyama Ichiro, film director Kurosawa Akira, manga artist Hasegawa Machiko (the creator of Sazae-san), actress Mori Mitsuko and explorer Uemura Aoki.

Uemura received his award following his disappearance on the way down from his solo ascent of Denali. Kurosawa's and Misora's decorations were also awarded posthumously, as was the most recent award, given last year to the all-time sumo tournament wins record holder Taiho.

There was some murmuring in 2011 about the appropriateness (and expense - the award is usually accompanied by a very expensive gift) of handing out the award to an entire World Cup team --despite the immense joy the Nadeshiko victory brought to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown-weary country.

However, this year's award was the first to be greeted by a chorus of "Huh? Why now? What for?"

As the Whiting article makes clear, both Nagashima and Matsui have made huge contributions to baseball, with Nagashima excelling with the Yomiuri Giants as a player and then as a manager and Matsui having a stellar career in both the Japan and Major Leagues, playing in each league’s marquee team.

However, world cinema giant Kurosawa, Taiho and Misora Hibari – persons who defined the era in which they lived – did not receive their People's Honour Awards until after their deaths, indicating just how hard prime ministers have thought about the qualifications for People's Honour Award status. The awardee cannot just be excellent at what he or she does. He or she must change the way the Japanese see themselves and the world sees Japan. For Takahashi Naoko to receive the award in 2000 it was not enough that she had been the first Japanese to win an Olympic marathon. She had to be representing an incredibly frustrated, marathon-mad country, stuck in the middle of a 20 year Olympic medal drought, who so thoroughly blew away the Olympic record that her time was not bettered until the Olympics were held in pancake-flat London in 2012.

The announcements of the awards to Nagashima and Matsui -- and the breaking of the news story about the awards by the tiny circulation Jomo Shimbun, the hometown newspaper of Gunma Prefecture -- led many persons to initially conclude the story was an April Fools Day prank. Once the Abe government confirmed that it was indeed honoring Nagashima and Matsui, a storm of speculation broke out as the ulterior motive behind the government's decision:

Maybe Nagashima is at death's door – Having failed to give Taiho the honor he so richly deserved during his lifetime -- his junior Chiyonofuji having received his People's Honour Awared in 1989 -- Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and minister for sports Shimomura Hakubun wanted to make sure that Nagashima got his award while he was alive. Nagashima had a stroke in 2004; Mori Mitsuko, the only living senior citizen to be granted the award in the last two decades, also received hers after a crippling stroke.

Matsui's award was just an add-on to make the attempt to beat the Grim Reaper less naked.

The government is pandering to Sixties Nostalgia – "The Giants, Taiho and fried egg (Jaiyantsu, Taiho, tamago yaki)– the three things kids like!" was a catch phrase of the 1960s. It was the golden era of Japanese male sports and also time of the Japanese economic miracle (which, since it has been replicated by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and China, is looking a lot less miraculous). Pandering to nostalgia for the 1960s, when the people were poor but virtuous and hard-working (Link - J) is one of the prime minister's favorite gambits and represents an attempt to mine the mountain of votes of those who were either children or young adults during those years of fast growth and order (and horrible pollution, and Okinawa still in under U.S. Occupation, and...)

Since O Sadaharu of the V9 Era Giants (when the team won nine championships in a row...yikes) received a People's Honour Award, why not hand out an award to Nagashima, his fellow superstar teammate?

Thank you, The Yomiuri Shimbun - Japan has two major conservative media conglomerates, the Fuji Sankei Group and the Yomiuri Shimbun Group. The Fuji Sankei Group follows a conservatism of principle, demanding that the government adopt strong defense posture, national pride (some would call it xenophobia), a philosophy of limited government and hands-off economics. In many ways, the Sankei Groups political stance echoes principles guiding the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal).

The Yomiuri Group, however, is the bullhorn of The Establishment -- and in the political world, The Establishment is the Liberal Democratic Party. During the three and half years the LDP was out of power, no media group worked harder to undercut the government and cross the line in between journalism and news manufacture than the Yomiuri's print and broadcast news arms. For the Yomiuri Group's meritorious service to the LDP's cause, the Abe government is handing out the nation's highest honor to former Yomiuri Giants players.

While the Fuji Sankei Groups traffics in 1960's nostalgia and the Sankei Shimbun did print an editorial congratulating the two ball players (Link - J) -- the newspaper did not turn a blind eye to political public relations aspect of the move. On April 3 Sankei Shimbun printed a cartoon of Matsui and Nagashima sitting in the bleachers at the ballpark as an eager Abe Shinzo, dressed as a concessionaire, offers them medals from out of a box marked "People's Honour Awards." The caption on the cartoon reads: "Are we being used for political purposes? Why now? Ah, let's just forget about it and celebrate!"

(The centrist Asahi Shimbun printed a similarly sarcastic cartoon of Abe, Nagashima and Matsui on its editorial page on April 3 as well.)

It is not as though the Abe government and the ruling coalition need the public relations fillip of hoisting Nagashima and Matsui atop pedestals. Even after damaging the value of yen, promising to monetize the budget deficit and grasping the twin nettles of accession to Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and a move of the functions of the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to a replacement facility within Okinawa (or perhaps, because of these actions) the Abe Cabinet's support ratings are at above 70 percent (Link - J video) and the LDP's popularity is at opposition knockout height.

An aside: Nagashima and Matsui will be the first basebal players in this baseball-crazy land to accept a People's Honour Award (Suzuki Ichiro has been offered the award twice and has twice turned it down) whose parents were both Japanese. O Sadaharu (Sadaharu Oh)'s father hailed from Taiwan, which was from 1895 to 1945 part of the Japanese empire ("O" is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese surname "Wang"). Kinugasa Sachio, who was the only other People's Honour Award honoree from baseball (he received his in 1990 for surpassing the consecutive game playing record of Lou Gehrig) never knew his biological father. From Kinugasa's features, skin tone and his tightly spiralling hair, however, it is clear that Kinugasa's father was an African American.

As Okumura Jun has previously noted (Link) for what is supposed to be a racist country (Link), less than perfect Japaneseness has mattered little in public recognition of sporting greatness. Taiho, the other human member of the 1960's trinity of "Giants – Taiho – fried egg" – had, like O and Kinugasa, only one Japanese parent. His father, Markyan Borishko, was a Cossack from Ukraine. Rikidozan, the professional wrestler whose flamboyant performances against designated loser American opponents were the guilty television pleasures of the early 1960s, was a citizen of North Korea (which is why today the most frequent Japan-North Korea cultural exchanges are tours of the DPRK by Japanese professional wrestlers).

As for Robert Whiting, he steered clear of politics and cultural criticism in his article on the Nagashima and Matsui awards. He will likely show no such restraint when he will be one of the featured speakers in a discussion of an incredibly hot button topic, "Does Japan have a violence problem in sports?" tonight at Temple Univerity Japan's Azabu Hall.

Sadly, I will not be able to attend what is likely to be a fascinating evening event.

The F-35 Decision, The Backlash

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.

China's Non-Existent Takeover of Japan's Refueling Mission in the Indian Ocean

It was OK when the Lowy Interpreter got taken in by this bit of Yomiuri Shimbun rigamarole. No damage done. However, when The Economist's Banyan blog reprints it, then one has to get out the intellectual herbicide, lest the garden of knowledge get completely overrun.

The original source of the fable of the Chinese Navy taking over Japan's refueling mission in the Indian Ocean was a January 11, 2009 front page story in the Sankei Shimbun. January 11 was Seijin no Hi, a national holiday and a traditional slow news day. Someone at the Sankei decided to take a few conversations with unnamed mid-level bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defense -- persons who have an incentive to invent threats, in order to justify the money we taxpayers are paying them -- dress up the result as leaks by unnamed persons "inside the government" that a serious likelihood exists of China taking over Japan's role in the Indian Ocean, supplying fuel to warships participating in Operation Enduring Freedom, and had a little fun.

So total was the ridiculousness of this idea, however, that not even the author of the piece could keep a straight face about it. Near the end of the article, there was an admission that the actual likelihood of Chinese ships refueling American ones was zero.

That is where is all should have ended. Unfortunately, as I noted here, the Yomiuri Shimbun seems to have lost all sense of shame since the Liberal Democratic Party's fall from power last year. The Yomiuri dressed up the Sankei's thinly-sourced bit of fun as fact, having not even the decency, as the Sankei had, to reveal that its "government sources" were in act, nobodies spouting irresponsible speculation.

The rest, as they say, is hysteria.

Later - Yes, it is demoralizing when a purportedly serious public intellectual like Takushoku University professor Morimoto Satoshi lends credence to this story by revealing his "fear" that China's "might" take over Japan's role.

Even later - Curiouser and curiouser. I could not find the online version of original Sankei Shimbun article because the title of the online version is completely unlike title of the printed version I read on January 11. On the other hand, the title of the original printed Sankei Shimbun article title is repeated nearly verbatim in the title of the Yomiuri Shimbun article that appeared five days later.

中国 引き継ぎ検討 (Sankei Shimbun, January 11)

インド洋での給油活動、中国が引き継ぎ検討 (Yomiuri Shimbun, January 16)

Cry plagiarism, Sankei Shimbun! Or at least bragging rights!

Media Shifts Make Japan A Harder Read

A note on sources of information...

I was watching the news on the resignation of Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa on Thursday night, flipping in between the various terrestrial channels. As I flipped back and forth, I was struck by how similar the reports were on the Fuji TV and Nippon TV networks. The two newscasts were nearly identical, except for the clothing and the sets. The editorial stance, the rumors, even the vocabulary were indistinguishable. If not for the bug in the corner of my television’s screen, I would not have been able to tell which network broadcast was which.

This is a new development. Until the election of August last year Fuji TV, which is a part of the Fuji Sankei Group, and Nippon TV, which is owned by the Yomiuri Shimbun, offered the news in distinct flavors. Fuji Sankei Group news, which includes the reporting in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper, offered conservative iconoclasm with a bias toward free markets and a gnawing worry about the growing power of China. As such, Fuji Sankei news reporting found itself frequently at odds with Liberal Democratic Party government decisions. Yomiuri-flavored news, however, was strictly conformist conservatism, in near complete agreement with the course of action of the current administration, save during the years when Koizumi Jun’ichiro was prime minister.

Since the ouster of the LDP from power, however, the two formerly separate identities have grown closer to one another. Tobias Harris has already documented the glee at the Sankei Shimbun when the editors realized that the LDP's election loss made the paper a candidate to be the voice of the opposition. The Yomiuri Shimbun, bereft of the government it had seen itself as serving, has seemingly reversed a previous caution about printing every rumor, plausible or otherwise, it has in the company inbox.

The consequences of this shift toward a unitary conservative reportorial voice are appearing in the non-Japanese press. The Economist’s article this week on the Fujii resignation and Blaine Harden’s Washington Post account of the purported emergence of Ozawa Ichiro from the shadows both show a lack of skepticism toward story elements being trumpeted by the emerging unified Fuji Sankei/Yomiuri opposition news. The explanation that Fujii quit because he had lost a policy battle with Ozawa, rather than one with his own frail constitution, and that he was terrified of being called to testify in the Diet about a financial scandal involving Ozawa, are reported as fact. That Fujii had sworn that he was giving up politics last summer, only to be begged by Hatoyama to run again via a campaigning-free position on DPJ proportional list, is ignored.

Harden is at least aware of the possibility that he may be passing on a skewed version of events, although he buries this admission down in the eleventh paragraph:

But Japan's two most influential newspapers -- which are not friendly with the new government -- have detected a new form of two-headed rule. The Yomiuri newspaper calls it "dual-governance." The Asahi suggests "there is another prime minister outside the cabinet."

The Asahi Shimbun's position in the new order is an ambiguous one. It is frequently characterized as being a center-left publication. In truth, it is aspires to being a non-partisan publication, modeling itself seemingly on The New York Times. Along with its affiliated but independent TV Asahi network, it has tried to maintain a near Olympian position, criticizing the current government for failing to live up to what most ordinary persons would consider impossible standards of achievement. In terms of its purported politicial bias, the Asahi should be gentle on the new government, having waged a long, bitter war against LDP rule. It has, however, been sharply critical.

In trying so hard to remain above political partisanship, however, the Asahi editors have had trouble avoiding the trap of false equivalence. Given the length of tenure of the new government, it is impossible that every DPJ foible is equal to the multitudinous sins of the LDP. However, by failing to take the extra step of saying “we remain suspicious of the current crop of leaders but they at least better than continued rule by their predecessors” the aggressively skeptical reporting of the Asahi has worked hand-in-glove with its now strictly partisan reporting of the paper's conservative competitors.

The strong anti-DPJ government stance of the working-class oriented Mainichi Shimbun is inscrutable, at least from a readership standpoint. The owners seem convinced that the antagonistic segment of the media market can support three players. Unfortunately, Yomiuri and Sankei are set to dominate this segment. An aggressive anti-government, anti-Ozawa line only threatens the Mainichi group with ever greater marginalization. That the Mainichi Shimbun still maintains a translation department, a peculiar luxury for a downscale news organization, has been granting the Mainichi's aggressive reporting and its editorials international stature out of proportion to the organization’s status in the domestic media market.

The shift in news reporting has not gone universally against the government. While The Asahi Shimbun and TV Asahi have struggled to find an admirable independent stance, the national newscaster NHK has surged forward and become the government's most supportive news conduit. This shift is not out of sycophancy to the new power in the capital, however. NHK lived in terror of government retaliation during the LDP years. As a consequence its reporters and editors did their very best to avoid offending the government. Freed by the election from a fear of retaliation from the LDP, NHK news has responded by working with the government to rapidly dismantle the intellectual edifice that kept the LDP in power and NHK cowed. NHK and its legions of talented reporters are now free to report what they know – and they know plenty.

Given the power of NHK’s 7 pm and 9 pm newscasts to determine the national conversation on the news, the relative durability of the Hatoyama Cabinet’s popularity becomes less perplexing. Someone just reading the translated reports from the major newspapers would come away with a vision of the popular mood in Japan as being fixedly anti-Ozawa and anti-Hatoyama and rueing the results of the August election. The truth is that despite serious ongoing investigations of financial fraud in the political offices both the prime minister and the secretary-general of the DPJ, the government and the party still enjoy a large measure of public support.

In an ideal world, foreign reporters with long memories would notice the rapid shifting about in the Japanese media and adjust their sourcing accordingly. However, with most non-Japanese media organizations cutting back staff or pulling out of Japan entirely, the world is relying more and more on unfiltered retransmission what Japanese media outlets are producing. Rather than giving a clearer view of what is going on in Japan, this direct transmission has instead reflected the prejudices and weaknesses of the original outlets, resulting in the broad dissemination of reporting which is potentially more harsh and negative than the on-the-ground reality would require.