Keeping An Eye On Ishiba Shigeru

Abe Shinzo should be in the clover right now. His cabinet and the Liberal Democratic Party are basking in high and rising popularity ratings. The LDP's nominal rival, the Democratic Party of Japan is in disarray on both the policy and public relations fronts. Abe's continued striking of poses dear to the right wing, albeit not when he is on center stage, steals the thunder of Ishihara Shintaro-Hashimoto Toru's Japan Restoration Association. Unless a set of scandals emerges to debilitate Abe II the same way the Matsuoka office accounts and pension records scandals did in Abe I, the man from Minami Azabu Choshu seems set to rule this land for a long time.

However, Abe cannot sit in complete comfort...and not for the reason you are thinking.

Despite the heavy presence of Friends of Shinzo in cabinet and sub-cabinet posts* Abe has only a tenuous hold over the party membership. It is not by coincidence that where there are not Friends of Shinzo there are Faction Heads Who See Abe As A Means Of Furthering Their Own Goals.

Abe led the LDP to victory in the December election. However, it was with candidates approved by the Tanigaki Sadakazu-Ishihara Nobuteru leadership regime, which, given Tanigaki's arrested adolescence, means that the freshmen are most likely tacit Ishihara Nobuteru partisans.

In July, Abe will again be leading his party into a battle, this time for control of the House of Councillors -- a battle he is sure to win. However, the new faces and many of the old faces in the races will likly again not be beholden to Abe. Instead they will likely be quiet allies of Abe's second-in-command and rival, Secretary-General Ishiba Shigeru.

Abe beat Ishiba for the LDP presidency in a runoff election last September in a count of just the votes of the then shrunken LDP Diet membership. Ishiba had won the first round where the votes of the local party chapters were included. Appointing Ishiba the party's secretary-general was necessary from the standpoint of maintaining party unity. However, from the standpoint of controlling the levers of party power, the move made zero sense ("Appoint the guy I beat on points to run the party while I have my hands tied running the government? Great idea!").

Abe has not been negligent as to the threat Ishiba poses. He has declared, as he did in 2006, the status of the post of chairman of the Elections Strategy Committee (Senkyo taisaku iinkai) to be equal to that of the posts of secretary-general, policy research council chairman and general council chairman, turning the sanyaku into the yonyaku. He has appointed fellow Yamaguchi Prefecture member Kawamura Takeo to the newly elevated position.

Though the election measures chair may now be the nominal equal of the secretary-general, responsibility for the outcome of elections remains with the secretary-general. It is difficult to imagine that the PM or his proxy Kawamura will prevail in a contest with Ishiba over candidate selection.

Those whom Ishiba cannot choose directly he can buy -- since the position of secretary-general also gives him control of the party's purse strings.

One of the major stumbling blocks between Ishiba and greater power, however, is unity of the faction heads and former faction heads in support of Abe -- even when as individuals they have had serious policy disagreements with the current party president (yes Komura Masahiko, I am talking about you).

Which makes a pair of proposals put forth at the February 6th meeting of the LDP Political System Reform Headquarters (Seiji seido kaikaku honbu) most interesting.

The body, chaired by Aizawa Ichiro, a fellow alumnus of former Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's in the Matsushita Institute of Management and Government's inaugural class, has proposed:

1) the move of all faction offices into the main LDP headquarters building, and

2) the banning of factional

a) searches for new candidates,

b) education of newly elected members of the Diet,

3) financial support for election losers,

4) distribution of party and government posts

(Link - J)

A list to which a faction head might respond drily, "Ummm, anything else you do not want us to do?"

Proposals to defang the factions have been tabled before, most importantly by former prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro, and reforms of the party structure have been undertaken that have weakened the influence of factions. Asking for the utter dismantlement of factions, the gist of the above proposals, is a serious throwing down of the gauntlet. The party is only just emerging from its longest, darkest period of relative weakness. An attack upon the party's structure coming from within after a major electoral victory is extraordinary.

While we are on the subject of Koizumi Jun'ichiro and factions, Koizumi Shinjiro (Koizumi Version 4.0), a better, if it can be believed, politician than his father (and so handsome he melts camera lenses), so controls the LDP's Youth Division (Seinen kyoku) as to be a defacto faction leader -- with a base of followers (81 Diet members are members of the Youth Division) that puts him at the front line of party powers.

A rising power that Ishiba hopes, possibly against hope, to coopt. (Link - J)

Not bad for a guy with a whopping two elections to the Diet.

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* For a fright, check out Asia Policy Point's translations of the prime minister's daily schedule (Link) for the amount of time the PM spends in the company of Seko Hiroshige, the "Stupidest Man To Ever Serve In The Kantei" until Hirano Hirofumi wrested the title from him in 2009.

Apples and oranges

Over at Global Talk 21, Okumura Jun has an excellent analysis up of the current political status of the prime minister, at least according to an exegesis drawing upon the public opinion polls of Fuji Television.

Okumura-san indicates that he has his doubts as to one of my recent assertions--that the prime minister can win back some of his lost popularity simply through having a run of good days either through accommodating the opposition in order to pass legislation or, when the lay of land is right, challenging the opposition when it adopts a transparently opportunistic policy stance.

Of course the Fukuda administration could always try to win on policy. But I don't think that sweating the small stuff, such as tinkering with the Late-Term Elderly Medical Care Insurance system, is going to have a major impact. I don’t believe that the Hokkaido SG-8 Summit and a squishy agreement on greenhouse gases or any other combination of diplomatic or national security issues are going to be winners either.

Okumura-san goes on to speculate that the only policy program likely to attract enough public attention to affect the popularity numbers is the budget agenda-setting reform package scheduled to be tackled in a lengthy extraordinary session in the fall.

Given that the number of days until the end of the regular Diet session is growing few indeed, Okumura-san is possibly right.


But taking the Fuji Television Cabinet support figures for the Cabinet of Abe Shinzō and comparing them with the Fuji TV figures of the present Cabinet, Okumura-san may be making a fundamental error.

The two sets of numbers may not be comparable.

The Fukuda Cabinet and the current leadership of the ruling coalition parties are unpopular for failing to understand the mechanics of how to cope with a functioning, if limited, opposition. The people are furious that the ruling coalition has tried to force legislation and appointments, knowing full well that the Democratic Party of Japan and its allies were going to oppose them in the House of Councillors.

The voters do not like to see their representatives engaged in contests over who can be the most pig-headed time wasters of all.

Abe Shinzō, his Cabinet and his administration became unpopular not because they were ineffective. Quite on the contrary, they became unpopular because they could do whatever they wanted...and they were running amok.

What did they decide was going to be their major task in in December, after the successful visit to China? Was it revealing the state of the pension accounts and promising to putting them to rights? Noooooo. It was

a) the establishment of a Ministry of Defense and
b) the readmission to the LDP of the exiles, the Diet members expelled from the party by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichirō for having opposed his plan to privatize the post office.

That second priority -- b) -- set off a detonation. The bald move repudiated the imputed will of the people, slapping them in their faces. The people had handed a landslide victory to Koizumi's LDP in the 2005 House of Representatives election...and now Abe was telling the voters that their judgment had been flawed.

This was only the first of a series of actions that Abe and his cabal foisted upon the nation not because they were popular or solved particular problems but because Abe and his long-denied fantabulist brothers and sisters finally had their hands on the tiller--and coalition majorities in both House of the Diet.

- Education reform emphasizing patriotism and order.

- The legal basis for a national referendum permitting amendments to the Constitution.

- Mandates, both open and secret, forcing the national broadcaster NHK to feature stories on the abductees at every opportunity.

At the same time, real scandals--in the pension system, in the offices of the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries--were left uninvestigated, shunted to the side because the ruling coalition had unbeatable majorities in both Houses of the Diet.

Throughout the regular Diet session, the government railroaded every single piece of legislation through. Not one concession was made to the opposition.

The voters saw what was happening...and Amaterasu bless them, in July of 2007 they said, "No more of this. You will not do whatever you want. You will have limits on your freedom of action."

In his current post, Okumura-san notes that Abe Shinzō's popularity rose with the Cabinet reshuffle in August 2007. What he leaves out is that everyone agreed that the Second Abe Cabinet was a cast of all-stars--far more experienced and moderate than the Cabinet it was replacing, its members far more likely to accommodate a revitalized and now constitutionally relevant opposition.

Guess what? For the most part, those all-stars whom both Okumura-san and I hailed-- these are the ministers we have now. The folks inside the ruling coalition just do not get any better--Minister of Law Hatoyama Yukio and the yonyaku, excepted.

The reason the Cabinet is unpopular now is that the yonyaku, not the Cabinet, misunderstood and mishandled every bit of legislation and every appointment since September. The yonyaku, trying to rebuild the LDP's relationship with its traditional client base, failed to cut deals with the DPJ, choosing instead to try demonstrate its worthiness through a show of the indomitability of the ruling coalition's will.

As if that was what the people wanted. Ever.

What the people wanted was for Fukuda to be Fukuda; for Yosano to be Yosano; for Kōmura to be Kōmura; for Masuzoe to be Masuzoe...for the men and women of good intentions and wisdom to work out compromises with the opposition.

That is what the Cabinet was expected to do. It is not popular now because its members were not given the chance to run the government based on the political situation--but based on what the grandees of the LDP wanted the situation to be.

There has been, all in all, a stunning lack of realism in the actions of the ruling coalition since its wounding in the 2007 House of Councillors election.

Hence my feeling that things are on the mend for the prime minister. Just doing what governments do every day--passing nice-sounding but meaningless legislation to cover everyone's backside, accepting legislative amendments proposed by the opposition, calling opposition leaders aside for private talks about potential political appointees, watching the calendar--will be a vast improvement over what we have seen over the last eight months.

If Fukuda Yasuo and the members of his Cabinet (pax Hatoyama) can just do government--not revolution, not shock therapy,just government--then there is a chance that the political climate in Nagata-chō could more clement for the PM. There is evidence that Fukuda has at least chucked the "thank you for all your votes at the party presidency election" persona in favor of a "I will keep my own council and if you don't like it you can find somebody else to be your prime minister"--something he should have done in January.

Which presages peace and stability until the autumn...when the postponed death of Tanakaism will have to be faced at last...and when the LDP will be forced to look itself in the mirror and decide what it is to become.

Later - Apologies for all the typos in the original version of this text.