Freedom

Four years ago, in a weak moment, I wrote a tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek set of "rules for understanding news from Japan" for my amusement and I hoped the amusement of others. Since the time of their composition, some of the rules have become rather dated. On the whole, however, they have held up rather well.

This was Rule #6:

If a Democratic Party member claims something is true on television, it is probably not true. When it is true, it was political suicide for him to have said it.

So two cheers for Prime Minister Kan Naoto and his egregious introduction of the concept of a rise in the consumption tax based on a misreading of Japan as ressembling Greece and the charged atmospheres inside the Ministry of Finance and at the G20 summit. By introducing discussion of a hike in taxes three weeks before a national election, he has given himself and the Democratic Party of Japan a just-so story for why the party finished with so many fewer seats than expected in the House of Councillors on July 11. Just run the counter-factual: imagine the chaos inside the party right now if Kan had not talked about the consumption tax and they had suffered the same dispiriting defeat.

To the benefit of the Prime Minister and the party, they have now a "lesson" that they have "learned" -- and will no longer appear irresponsible if they shelve all ideas about a hike in the consumption tax until after mid-2013.

"Whew," the party members can now say, "We are off the hook on that horrible, unpopular, regressive, contractionary, deflationary pseudo-solution to Japan's fiscal and economic growth problems which the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Finance and their acolytes throw out like a spanner into the works of any reasonable discussion of Japan's economic future!"

Photo credit: MTC

Not So Long, After All

Rather than going through the trauma of breaking up the Cabinet after Minister of Justice Chiba Keiko's failure to win reelection to her Kanagawa seat, she will continue her service as minister as a civilian, at least until the September elections for the leadership of the Democrati Party of Japan.

So not gone, not forgotten is the minister of The Law.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Proportional Disaster

With 97% of the voted counted, the results in the proportional half of yesterday's election were:

In 2004, the DPJ won 21,137,458 of 55,931,787 votes.

In 2007, it won 23,256,242 of 58,913,679 votes.

Just over 18 million this time around.

Ouch.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - After Sunrise

1) Ho-Ho-Ho - After belittling the Sunrise Party of Hiranuma Takeo last night, saying that his party will not win a seat, late calculations have proven me wrong. The Sunrise Party (Tachiagare Nippon) won the hearts of 1.3 million voters, which is just enough (2.2%) of the vote to win one seat.

The New Renassance Party also managed to eke out 1.3 million votes and thus a seat. Unfortunately, the party had five of its members up for reelection.

2) Turnout - was a respectable 57.98% of the electorate. Nothing spectacular but not too shabby, given recent trends.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Early Morning Notes

1) Turnout - The earlier stories about abysmally low turnout seem to have been mistaken. Other reports are coming in of turnout of slightly over 57%-- which would mean just over 59 million votes.

So turnout seemingly was not a cause of the wipeout.

2) Koizumism is Back - Not only was Koizumi Shinjiro's fervent campaigning cited by every commercial television network as having bolstered the spirits, if not exactly the results of several of the LDP's candidates, his father's female "assassins" managed to fight their way back into the Diet. Katayama Satsuki and Sato Yukari both won seats off the LDP proportional list, while Inokuchi Kuniko captured one of the three Chiba district seats.

The DPJ's strategy of running against the legacy of the most popular Prime Minister of recent times will probably have to be rethought.

3) Not Stupid - Former DPJ party leader Ozawa Ichiro was severely critized by members of his own party for assigning a second DPJ candidate to two seat districts where the traditional split was one seat going to the LDP and one to the DPJ. His was a gutsy attempt to capitalize on the vote burning of 2007, when running a single DPJ candidates in two seat districts left hundreds of thousands of votes lying on the table as the DPJ candidates overwhelmed their LDP opponents.

Running two DPJ candidates in two-seat districts did not pay off: nowhere did the DPJ win both seats being contested. However, neither did it seem to have hurt the DPJ eithet; it has seemingly won at least one of the two seats in all of the 12 two-seat districts.

The only place where the DPJ was running two candidates only to suffer an unexpected loss was in Kanagawa Prefecture, where the lackluster Minister of Justic Chiba Keiko has lost her seat, finishing fourth behind the LDP, Your Party and other DPJ candidate. Given Chiba's almost invisible performance as minister of justice since her inauguration, she will not be much missed.

Her seat sure as heck will be, though.

4) Ren Ho, Superstar - Notwithstanding complaints from dinosaurs like Hiranuma Takeo -- whose Sunrise Party will win not a single seat -- that she is not "originally Japanese" Ren Ho (or Renho) is undoubtably the face of the DPJ. She demolished her opponents in the Tokyo district race, finishing over 500,000 900,000 votes ahead of her nearest rival in the most lopsided contest ever. She has been on all the network broadcasts this night, keeping a stiff upper lip and defending the Prime Minister in the face of clearly less-than-stellar returns.

Oh, if they had only listened to me in September...

House of Councillors Election 2010 - The Failure

My predictions for 58 seats to the DPJ is getting hammered.

1) Turnout seems to have been abysmal. The number that just flashed upon the screen was 43.25% of the eligible electorate voting.

When turnout is that low, a huge number of voters are confused as to how their votes will matter -- and they stay home.

The DPJ lives and dies on convincing the non-aligned voters to turn out. In the total destruction of meaning in this election, a huge number of the non-aligned seem to have decided to sit this one out.

2) Though it is still unclear, the indications are that activities of local chapters of the New Komeito have condemned the party to the policy wilderness. If, as the press has reported, many of the local chapters have told their voters to support the LDP candidate in the single-seat and double seat districts, then the party has guaranteed the DPJ will never choose the New Komeito as a coalition partner.

The historical significance of this decision cannot be overemphasized. Since 1993, the Komeito and its sucessors have always sought to ally with the party either in power or capable of winning an election, as it did as a part of Ozawa Ichiro's conservative-conservative New Frontier Party in the 1995 House of Councillors election. The party has not at any time in the last 27 years ever strayed from a drive for power. Even though the NFP lost only 4 seats in the 1996 House of Representatives election, and was still a huge force in the House with 156 seats, the Komeito halted the full absorpton of itself into the party after Tsutomu Hata and his followers left to form the Sun Party (Taiyo no To).

It is unclear what the New Komeito thinks it is doing, having put itself into a position where the DPJ has reason to hate it ever more than it hates its main rival the LDP.

There is just no accounting for political auto-ostracism.

Election Day - A Respite From

In the spirit of the rule of the day, which is that all campaigning is done and finished on Election Day, a slide show of placid images from a Golden Week visit to Chichibu, in Saitama Prefecture.

Happy Voting!

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Last Call

The author of Twisted Flowers has laid down his marker: the Democratic Party of Japan will top out at 52 seats tomorrow, far from the 60 it needs for independent control of the House of Councillors.

It is indeed almost certain the DPJ will fail to achieve its goal of 60 seats. However, the party should get within striking distance, doing far better in the district elections than projected.

Markers laid down for Sunday's results:

District seats (73)

DPJ 39
LDP 27
New Komeito 3
Your Party 2
SDP 1
Independents 1

Proportional seats (48)

DPJ 19
LDP 11
New Komeito 7
Your Party 7
JCP 3
SDP 1

Final totals (121)

DPJ 58
LDP 38
New Komeito 10
Your Party 9
JCP 3
SDP 2
Independents 1

Voter turnout: 56,000,000

Voters on some of the outer islands have already dropped their ballots into the ballot boxes (they vote early so that bad weather will not prevent the delivery of their sealed ballot boxes to the counting centers) and over 15% of the likely final turnout has already delivered its verdict through early voting at the ward and local municipality offices.

It has been a long road to Election Day...and the game is afoot.

The wild card is voter turnout. If turnout exceeds 58,000,000, rabbits will be pulled out of hats.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - What It All Means

For a review of what this House of Councillors election was supposed to mean, please see my op-ed published at The Diplomat.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Will Vote For Food (Discounts)

One of the results of the drastic review process of the Government Revitalization Unit (GRU) this year and last was a 20% reduction in the budget allocation used to promote voting and increase voter participation rates, which are currently stuck at around 54%-to-58% of the electorate. As a consequence, local authorities are looking for innovative ways to promote voting at at dramatically lower costs than before. The movement even has its own name, the "cheap-cheap strategy" (kechi kechi sakusen).

In some areas, local authorities are pairing up with retailers, promoting the election with stickers on food packages, or posters on the front doors reminding customers that Sunday, July 11 is the day of the vote for the House of Councillors.

It was thus with tremendous interest that I today received, together with my groceries at Peacock -- the supermarket division of the Daimaru retailing empire -- a flyer with a most intriguing offer printed on its lower extremity.

Here is an image of the flyer in its entirety, most of which is covered with announcements of special prices on a variety of goods going on sale on July 10 or July 11.

Here below, however, is the image of the lower extremity of the flyer, whereupon is printed the invitation, in diagonal white writing, "On your way back home from voting, please by all means come to Peacock!"

According to the offer -- and it is an offer -- if you present proof of having voted, you will receive a 5% discount on your final total* at the register.

I cannot for the life of me understand how this offer, which gives an actual financial reward for a person's having voted, manages to skirt Japan's Byzantine voting laws. Yet is somehow must, or at least will be assumed to do so until we see the prosecutors on Monday marching, cardboard boxes in hand, into Daimaru's headquarters.

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* Certain products are not included in this offer, including cigarettes, salt, digital photo printing, gift coupons and dry cleaning.