The New Numbers

As is its wont, Kyodo has a run a poll immediately after the reshuffle of the Kan Cabinet and the selection of a new core leadership group for the Democratic Party of Japan. The public relations effects of the election campaign with Ozawa Ichiro, Ozawa's crushing defeat in the September 14 election and the selection of a strong Cabinet packed with Kan allies in high positions seem to have filled the populace with the sense of confidence about the prime minister.

Cabinet support (September 9-10 results in parenthesis)

Support 64% (55%)
Do not support 21% (32%)

What is really exciting about these figures is not just the turnaround -- the support levels of the previous Cabinet having dipped down to 32% in mid-July -- but that the new support level is higher than the initial support level of the first Kan Cabinet, which was 62%. Not even Koizumi Jun'ichiro, who saw his support soar, plummet, then soar again, managed to surpass his initial support level.

Support for the DPJ has also risen again, reaching a new high for the year, with the support of other major centrist and rightist parties for the most part dwindling.

DPJ 40% (38%)
LDP 22% (24%)
Your Party 9% (11%)
New Komeito 5% (4%)
Communist 2% (3%)
SDP 2% (1%)
PNP lss thn 1% (lss thn 1%)
Sunrise lss thn 1% (lss thn 1%)
New Party Nippon lss thn 1% (lss thn 1%)
New Renaissance lss thn 1% (lss thn 1%)


When you are being outgunned by the top party by nearly two-to-one, the chances of your calling for a dissolution of the Diet and a House of Representative election is likely to be...zero. So I do not foresee the LDP or the Your Party to be making too much in the way of "We need an election!" speeches. Not at least until those support numbers start coming down.

As for what interests the populace, it remains the economy-the economy-the economy. When subjects were asked to pick the top two issues the new Cabinet should be focusing its energies upon, the answers were:

Economic and employment measures 55%

Administrative reform, particularly the clean-up of wasteful spending 39%

Fortify the social welfare system, including reform of the pension system 27%

Reform of the civil service system, including the banning of amakudari 15%

Fiscal restructuring 10%

Fundamental reform of the tax system 9%

"Politics and money," particularly the banning of corporate political donations 7%

Foreign policy and security issues 7%

Transfer of authority from bureaucrats to politicians 5%

Reform of the constitution 1.5%


Note the tiny number for foreign policy and national security. Even with the supposedly looming threats of a nuclear-armed North Korea and an aggressive Chinese assertions of authority in maritime areas near Japan, the foreign policy brief gets less than half the interest of banning amakudari practices. As for the postwar bugbear of Japan reforming its constitution to become a major player in world politico-security arena -- well, my friends, the numbers are just not there.

The Miller Light Lite Election

Once upon a time in America, an advertising executive had an unenviable task: how to make customers feel enthusiastic about or ever remember what was, basically, watered-down beer. In a stroke of genius, the ad executive came up with a solution: have a heated showdown between two hyper-partisan groups arguing over differing attributes of the product. "Tastes great!" one side would holler. "Less filling!" the other side retort. And so it would go on, louder and louder -- "Tastes great!" "Less filling!" "Tastes great!" -- without resolution.

While nonsensical -- two sides coming nearly to blows over a product they both liked -- the campaign created an immense brand awareness. It furthermore bored into the brains of those watching the ads that there was something in this product worth the fighting for.

In Japan right now, we are seeing an echo of this strategy in the contest for leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan. The two antagonists are between Prime Minister Kan Naoto and Ozawa Ichiro, the two candidates for the party leadership. The product is the DPJ itself, with the antagonists each yelling out at each other differing aspects of the DPJ's main political and philosophical elements. "We will not lie to you!" yells one. "We will not pass the bill for our actions on to future generations!" shouts the other. "We will push decision making down to the local level!" chuffs one. "We will create a central control mechanism for coordinated national planning!" screams the other.

Normally when you have two politicians haranguing in this manner, the pair are from two different parties, each of them flinging at the public what is distinctive about his or her party's platform. However, both Kan and Ozawa are from the same party and what they are arguing over -- if you want to call it that -- is differing aspects of the DPJ.

The first element of genius of this passionate display of party disunity is that in the high-volume dispute between the two men the voices or even the existence of Japan's other parties -- the actual, real opposition -- are being smothered. No one can recall the last time anyone has asked Tanigaki Sadakazu, president of the Liberal Democratic Party -- which won big time in the July elections, thank you very much -- his opinion of anything except the exciting Kan-Ozawa battle. When was the last time anyone saw the leader of the New Komeito, the party that supposedly holds the key to the passage of legislation in the Diet, appearing on television?

The second and crucial bit of genius displayed by this campaign -- which, when one considers the amount of coordination between the schedules of the two men that is allowing them to appear together on television and in public, must be a decidedly less-than-totally-antagonistic affair -- is how deeply the policies of the DPJ are being drilled into the brains of the Japanese people. Whether it is Kan or Ozawa who prevails, the voters are going to be fully briefed on what the party hopes to achieve in the upcoming year, both in the extraordinary fall session and the regular winter-spring sessions of the Diet. With the various proposals very much in the public's mind due to this intense campaign, opposition parties may find it very difficult to oppose what the DPJ proposes, this despite opposition control of the House of Councillors. The public will be looking for action on employment, on the transfer of control from bureaucrats to politicians, on reworking the relationship between the central government and the local governments -- and largely within the binomial framework being outlined by Kan and Ozawa in their debates. For the most part, opposition will be forced to deal with the hands that the DPJ has dealt them, rather than being able to bring their own ideas to the table.

So the battle rages, with paradoxically but quite reasonably, the DPJ the big winner.

Does The Public Care About The 2009 Manifesto?

One of the major pillars of candidacy of Ozawa Ichiro to be leader of the Democratic Party of Japan is his stated faith that the party has lost its way. By pulling back from the promises that it made to the public in the 2009 party Manifesto, the DPJ has lost the public's trust and in such faces ruin. He insists that when he is elected party leader, he will return the DPJ to its true path of fulfilling the promises made in the run up to the August 2009 House of Representatives election, reviving the party's strength.

While the DPJ did sweep to power on a wave of public enthusiasm about what the party could do for the country, does the public really care about the exact promises made in the 2009 Manifesto?

Not according to the polls, they do not.

In the Kyodo News poll released on August 29, 2010, pollsters asked members of the public about specific programs listed in the DPJ's Manifesto - whether they felt the program should be carried out absolutely, carried out to a certain extent (aru teido ni) or not carried out at all.

The result of their questions were:

Supplemental child support payments

Absolutely 20%
To a certain extent 42%
Should not be carried out 35%

Income supplement payments to farm households

Absolutely 23%
To a certain extent 49%
Should not be carried out 17%

Removing the tolls from the nation's expressways

Absolutely 14%
To a certain extent 30%
Should not be carried out 52%

Cancellation of the temporary levy on gasoline

Absolutely 30%
To a certain extent 38%
Should not be carried out 23%

In every case except the removal of tolls from the nation's expressways (a really unpopular idea, the reason being that the expressways' outstanding debts would have to be nationalized) the indication is that the public is most often lukewarm about pretty much every one of DPJ's campaign promises and would be more happy if they were only carried out only partway.

Similarly, the Mainichi Shimbun, in its poll published on August 30, 2010, asked members of the public about the implementation of the promises made in the 2009 Manifesto. The pollsters asked:

"Inside the DPJ, in the face of a severe fiscal situation, there are those who are of the opinion that the Manifesto should be revised showing some flexibility while others are of the opinion that the Manifesto must be carried out strictly. What do you think?"

The responses were:

Should be revised showing some flexibility 70%
Should be carried out strictly 27%

So why Ozawa continues to bang on about carrying out the promises of the 2009 Manifesto when the public is not particularly interested in them is beyond me. Perhaps he cannot divest himself of the principle that a politician should above all avoid the appearance of having been lying. The public has only a moderate attachment to the promises made to them in 2009. These were promises made by politicians, after all -- and the public, after 53 years of LDP rule -- is not naive about what a politician's promise is worth.

Japan's Presidential Election

Japan is a parliamentary democracy, with the Emperor as titular head of state. That being said, the country is suddenly slambang in the midst of a presidential election. There are two candidates, each with a distinct ideological cant and consequent distinct set of policy prescriptions. Both have their core supporters who will vote for them come hell or high water, leaving the pair battling, quite publicly, for the allegiance of undecided voters. Unlike battles of the old days, where intra-party clashes were solved with promises of Cabinet and party posts or even exchanges of cash, the successful candidate in this election likely have to win the affection of those with the votes capable of putting him over the 50% line. To capture these hearts and minds, both candidates are taking to the airwaves. Prime Minister Kan Naoto was on the 9 p.m. evening NHK newscast last night; tonight it will be his challenger Ozawa Ichiro's turn.

This is what political realignment a la Japonaise looks like, folks.

On the one side of the ledger is Ozawa. He leads the fundamentalist wing of the party, those who believe that the party's fate and future are indelibly written down in the party Manifesto of 2009. Either the party follows through on what it promised, or it is finished, seems to be the belief.

There is, of course, a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem here. Ozawa personally recruited many of the candidates who following the election are now the members of his camp. He was also the final decision maker on what got into the 2009 Manifesto. To what extent his supporters' faith in the Manifesto comes from Ozawa's having been the 2009 Manifesto's primary author and where Ozawa's championing of the 2009 Manifesto makes him the candidate worthy of his supporters's support, is a question nobody really wants to ask.

On the other side of the ledger are the revisionists and their standard bearer Kan, known from the very first days of the party as "the pragmatic one." Kan voters are the members of the DPJ who believed from the outset that the 2009 Manifesto was provisional - a nice collection of mutually incoherent ideas that taken together could attract enough votes to the DPJ's candidate to win the party control of the country. Seen negatively, these DPJ members saw the Manifesto as facetious, a largely cynical means of fooling traditional Liberal Democratic Party voters and the undecided into abandoning the familiar and accommodating Liberal Democratic Party and instead trying out the Democratic alternative. Once in power, however, the revisionists knew thet DPJ would have to water dowm most the promises made in the Manifesto on the grounds that they were either fiscally irresponsible or simply illogical.

Currently the revisionists control the government and the party, holding virtually all the major posts. Their hold is tenuous, or more tenuous than it should be, due to Kan's having been suckered by the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Finance into talking about raising the consumption tax -- a not terribly unpopular plan now, but a few months ago political poison -- on the eve of the House of Councillors election. When the party did unusually poorly in that election, the fundamentalist wing found themselves with the ammunition necessary to attack Kan and his followers for having sunk the party's fortunes, losing the supposedly vital prize of coalition control of the House of Councillors.

That the battle for the House of Councillors probably had been lost months earlier, at a time when the fundamentalists themselves largely held control, due to the fecklessness of their prime minister Hatoyama Yukio and his and Ozawa's myriad legal troubles, has been neatly swept under the rug.

There is much good news to be found in this new-style presidential battle.

First, the battle is between centrist views. What Ozawa and the DPJ fundamentalists are insisting must happen is not radical change -- merely a reversion to the promises that the party has already made to the voters, ones which the voters ostensibly ratified in 2009 by their voting so many Democrats into office.

The revisionists, for their part, are not asking for a complete rollback of all of the DPJ's 2009 promises. What they are requesting is that the party be realistic, fulfilling promises to the extent that is justifiable both politically and fiscally.

Second, the battle is being fought out in the open over policy rather than in the private rooms of high-class restaurants over spoils. There are two crystal clear policy platforms, with little or no prevarication over what certain words mean or do not mean in terms of the election. Furthermore, although there is no direct voting, there is a huge chunk of vote -- 300 points for the party members and 100 points for local assemblymen -- will fall one way or the other depending expressions of public satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one candidate or the other.

Third, this is not a life-or-death struggle for the DPJ. The persons who have aligned themselves with Kan, the party moderates and fiscal conservatives, survived and even thrived under three years of Ozawa's leadership of the party. They thrived under the puppet prime ministership of Hatoyama Yukio. They are not going to bolt the party just because Ozawa is in charge again.

As for the Ozawa supporters, while they are fanatical in some senses, they are not stupid. Most are from marginal districts where the voters could just as soon switch back to voting for the LDP in the next House of Representatives election, as they did in this year's House of Councillor's election. Jumping ship with Ozawa following an Ozawa defeat could easily mean a quick fall into political irrelevance and electoral defeat.

Both sides in the presidential race, both fundamentalist and revisionist, furthermore cling to a main branch of mainstream DPJ philosophy. To the fundamentalist's credit, they hold fast to the belief that promises mean must something, that a pledge to the public is not just a tool to be discarded once the election is over.

The revisionists believe, on the other hand, that promises have to be grounded in a finite reality -- that one cannot promise one's resources, both financial and political, to one interest group, then turn around and promise those same resources to another group. They believe in tradeoffs: that one must sell sacrifice and offer promises in equal measure. In this, they have the support of the vast majority of the public, who when asked about the promises in the 2009 Manisfesto, would be satisfied if they were honored "to a certain extent" (aru teido ni).

Both of these line of thought -- that one must keep one's word to the people and one must limit one's promises to the achievable -- are part of the core set of founding principles of the Democratic Party. Even now they serve a useful contrasts between the values of the DPJ and those of its predecessor in power, the Liberal Democratic Party.

So when one sees quotations about the closeness of the Democratic Party is to fissioning, one should know that it will not be along ideological lines. Some agitators within the party's ranks may talk about unbridgeable differences. Such comments, however, should be viewed as merely the individual in question stuffing whatever comes to mind into the voracious maw of the media beast.

Moreover, while the image of some of the members of the revisionist camp may seem to be rigid "my way or the highway" types, they are for the most part patient, somewhat older members of the party, willing to bid their time after a reversal of fortune. They know that in politics what goes up must come down. Ozawa's allies and followers, while numerous, are for the most part decidedly lesser politicians than those in the anti-Ozawa camp. While the pro-Ozawa partisans will be insufferably triumphant in early days following an Ozawa victory, their own shortcomings and inadequacies will soon compell the party leadership to call upon the talents of the party's competent anti-Ozawa first-stringers.

The wild card in this presidential race and its aftermath is, of course, that one of the candidates is Ozawa Ichiro, Japan's least popular politician. If Ozawa prevails in the intra-party contrast, the populace at large will feel at least a sense of letdown, if not out-and-out disgust. The election as virtual president, not of the DPJ but, as Kan relentlessly points out, the nation, of a man who is broadly mistrusted and disliked, will likely leave the populace feeling cheated, no matter how legitimately the election is carried out under party rules.

Ozawa Goes For It

One can find English language accounts of Ozawa Ichiro's decision (as if, in a less-than-half-an-hour meeting, there was any internal debate on Ozawa's part) to proceed with his campaign against Kan Naoto's leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan here and here.

By far the best account, however, comes from Paul Jackson at The Diplomat. Ozawa's windup to his announcement of his decision to take on Kan was indeed "seemingly interminable," a stultifying 1283 characters of the most obtuse polite language, dragging along until finally reaching its spirit-crushing climax, "It has come to the point where I decided to do this thing known as running in the leadership election..." (daihyosenkyo ni shutsuba sure to iu ketsui o shita tokoro de gozaimasu). It was performance that, despite an intention possibly to inform, could only upset an already largely hysterically anti-Ozawa press. Had Japan any equivalent of America's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on any of its networks, the long-winded address would have been the subject of merciless ridicule.

Ozawa's overlong announcement of his decision after a highly abbreviated first meeting of the two power brokers of the same party since the July 11 elections -- a meeting Kan, the Prime Minister of Japan, has been asking for since July 12 -- only burnished the reputation of Hatoyama Yukio, adding "negotiating a settlement between political heavyweights" to the list of things he seemingly cannot do. For a man with a Ph.D. in Systems Operations, Hatoyama has an alarming tendency to miscalculate the way certain combinations of actions will interact and bring about suboptimal outcomes. What he thought he was doing when he invited Ozawa and his retinue of 100 up to the Hatoyama mountain retreat to mingle and drink along his own 60-member group, leading to a tipsy and embarrassing chants of "Kiai da! Kiai da! Kiai da!" ("Now's the moment! Go for it!") by the entire mass -- well, he will have plenty of time to think about it, now that his mediation efforts, turgid as they were, have come to naught.

That Ozawa and Kan will be facing each other directly in a contest for the leadership of the party is a good thing. Under the Liberal Democratic Party, too many selections of prime ministers and Cabinets took place out of the public eye, for reasons of power and money that cheapened the image of the prime minister and the government. Here two competing visions of Japan will clash publicly, as well as two personal political styles and sets of practices.

The terrible news is of course that Ozawa could win this contest. An Ozawa victory would be terrible for the country not because Ozawa is an ogre with policies that will break the nation (he is not) nor a sleazy politician on the verge being made to stand trial for his crimes (as far as anyone can tell, he has no connection to the accounting mistakes of his underlings). It is terrible because he has virtually no support among the public and in the party. In the most recent round of public opinion polls, the highest level of support recorded was 17% of the populace in the Mainichi and Nikkei Shimbun polls. His support level among self-identified Democrats was even lower than in the general population. Despite this, so many Diet members owe him favors that he could win the majority of the points needed for election from them whilst getting gored in the local assembly elections and wiped out in the 300 district elections.

To make matters worse, most of the DPJ's luminaries are in the anti-Ozawa camp. When it would come time for Ozawa to pick a Cabinet, he would be able to induce only a cast of B-list and C-list non-entities with little policy experience and even less political savvy to his side.

In addition, the policies Ozawa insists his leadership of the party will save from Kan's lack of enthusiasm are not all that popular with the public. Most of the promises made in the DPJ's 2009 manifesto engender only weak support, while others -- such as the elimination of tolls on the expressways -- are actively opposed by the majority of the citizens.

The press will have a field day.

The fate of the country thus rests on the shoulders of the Diet's youngest members, many of whom were handpicked by Ozawa to run in their districts. If they vote with not their cerebrums but with their limbic systems, writing down Ozawa's name in fear of upsetting their benefactor, they may be handing the country over to a man the people simply do not want as their leader. Whatever his personal and political attributes, that he will be seen and portrayed as one who taken the reins of the country through a sly manipulation of the DPJ's election rules, against the will of the people.

Trouble with a capital "T" -- to put it mildly.

So while Ozawa may be an elections genius and/or the only person with the ability to push legislation through the Diet due to his purported mastery of deal cutting, it will be a national tragedy if he wins this contest.

When the citizens handed the powers of government over to the DPJ last year, the elation was palpable. The voters, finally and without a doubt, had chosen a government, not had one imposed upon them. An Ozawa victory in the DPJ leadership contest would reverse this huge step forward for the Japanese electorate. It could easily snuff out the still fervent belief that, even after a year of DPJ missteps, the DPJ is the party of the people and the people are sovereign -- and that the people's views, feelings and votes are important.


Later - A belated tip of the hat to Okumura Jun for the link to the Ozawa announcement.

We Would Like To Caveat That

Over at sigma1, Corey Wallace has produced a review of the final version of report of the Council for National Security and Defense Buildup in the New Era (Arata na jidai no anzen hosho to boeiryoku ni kan suru kondankai), the non-partisan, non-bureaucratic advisory commission charged with drawing up an outline for the eventual the National Defense Policy Guidelines (for background see "Japan's National Defense Program Guidelines" and "Preparing for the NDPG", both courtesy of Twisting Flowers). The commissioners delivered their final version of the report to the Prime Minister last Friday (Photo).

Wallace quotes from the English summary, which lays out the basic points in the report. Unfortunately, the summary fails to give a sense of the push and pull that went into the preparation of the report. In particular, the summary fails to mention a big step outward taken in the original draft that subsequently has been largely withdrawn.

The topic in question is Japan's Three Non-Nuclear Principles - i.e.　that Japan will not possess, will not produce and will not allow the transit of nuclear weapons over its territory or through its territorial waters (motazu, tsukurazu, mochikomasasezu). Revisions of principles one and two were not on the agenda. However, number three -- non-introduction -- was on the agenda, as a part of Japan's ability to defend itself as a non-nuclear nation surrounded on three sides by nuclear powers (China, Russia and the DPRK, for those keeping score). It seemed odd to the authors of the report that Japan purposefully tie the hands of its ally, the United States, in responding to a threat posed to Japan's security by nuclear weapons, with a principle that American weapons platforms bearing nuclear weapons cannot even transit Japan's territories and territorial waters. It seemed to the commission a daft restriction to place upon an ally, so they wrote:

日本の安全保障にとって最も大切なことは核兵器保有国に核兵器を「使わせないこと」であり、一方的に米国の手を縛ることだけを事前に原則として決めておくことは、必ずしも賢明ではない。

"For the security of Japan, what is most important is that for those countries possessing nuclear weapons 'that they be forced to not use them.' So for us to unilaterally tie the hands of the United States and the United States only beforehand based upon a principle, is definitely unwise."

As the author of Twisting Flowers surmised back in July, the opening of of a back door for a weakening of the "will not accept the introduction" principle did not survive intact a review by the powers that be inside the Democratic Party of Japan. The sentence above still remains--but it is prefaced now by a declaration:

なお、「持たず、作らず、持ち込ませず」という非核三原則に関して、当面、日本の安全のためにこれを改めなければならないという情勢にはない。しかし、本来、...

"Emphasizing, in terms of the three non-nuclear principles of 'Japan will not possess, will not produce and will not allow the transit,' there is no situation compelling a revision for purpose of providing for the security of Japan at this time. However, at the heart of the matter...

So the Three Non-nuclear Principles remain inviolate in the eternal present...but at some future date indescribable except as being the time when applying the Third Principle will seriously damage the U.S. military's ability to protect Japan, the Third Principle will be extremely foolish to obey.

So that's that.

Ozawa Ichiro Is Not Popular

As expected, Kyodo conducted a snap telephone poll in response to Ozawa Ichiro's announcement on Thursday he would be challenging Kan Naoto for the leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan. Also as expected, Kyodo found that the public really does not think highly of Mr. Ozawa's idea:

69% of Japanese polled prefer Kan to Ozawa as DPJ leader
Kyodo News

A majority of Japanese people polled want Prime Minister Naoto Kan to stay on as leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, far surpassing those who support party kingpin Ichiro Ozawa, according to a Kyodo News survey released Saturday.

The telephone survey conducted Friday and Saturday showed 69.9 percent of those surveyed backing Kan in the Sept. 14 DPJ leadership election, compared with 15.6 percent for Ozawa... (Link).

That is really 70% for Kan versus 16% for Ozawa but who is counting? (Pollsters - Ed.)

The eye-opening number in the survey is that among Democratic Party voters Kan is even more popular and Ozawa less popular than amidst the public at large. A little over 82% of self-described Democratic supporters want Kan as the party leader and only 13% are in favor of Ozawa. While there is no such thing as a primary system, where members of local districts elect the candidates the party will be sending to the general election, the lack of support for Ozawa among core Democratic voters will have at least some effect on legislators who are wavering or even leaning toward supporting Ozawa. Nobody wants to discourage the core voters, as one needs their numbers and enthusiasm at election time. This is especially true for those Democratic members of the House of Representatives representing districts that have long been bastions of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Also bringing a crinkly smile to the lips is the dramatic jump in the Cabinet's popularity seemingly in the face of the threat of an Ozawa prime ministership. Two weeks ago support for the Kan Cabinet was at 39%, with the percentage of those not supporting the Cabinet at 45%. A month prior to that support was at 36%, with those not supporting at 52%. From the poll conducted Friday and yesterday, support for the Cabinet has rocketed to 48%, with those not supporting the Cabinet falling back to 36%.

The dramatic shift cannot be all about a fear of Ozawa -- but it sure as hell is mostly about him.

What Remains of His Days

They must come to him at night, standing around him as he awakens from a deep sleep -- or sitting round the table in the great tatami room, translucent and glowing in the darkness. Kajiyama Seiroku, Hashimoto Ryutaro, Okuda Keiwa, Nakagawa Sho'ichi with his head buried in his arms or leaning to one side...and always, at the head of the table or the foot of the bed, a stern, thick-lipped Obuchi Keizo.

Those who were and might have been.

Okuda died first, in 1998, aged 70. Then Obuchi in 2000-- Obuchi whom Ozawa betrayed, breaking up the tripartite LDP-New Komeito-Liberal Party coalition. He suffered a stroke and died two days later -- though his body was kept on a respirator, nominally alive and deteriorating, until the middle of May.

The Prime Minister as vegetable.

He was 62 years old.

Then Kajiyama, his bar code hair straight back and gleaming, died just five weeks after that - at 74 years of age a Methuselah for this group.

Then Hashimoto, horribly of septicemia, in 2006, aged 68.

And of Nakagawa what can be said? An hidden yet well-known alcoholic, never pulled aside to seek treatment for his disease. Disgraced by a drunken episode in Rome in February 2009, he loses his seat in August and in November is dead of...no one knows. No tries to know.

His father committed suicide, but Sho'ichi...

Nakagawa was all of 56 years of age.

Hashimoto, Kajiyama, Obuchi, Okuda...four of the Seven Magistrates of the Takeshita Faction (Takeshitaha shichinin bugyo). Two became Prime Ministers. One became Chief Cabinet Minister, the likes of which has not been seen since. Hashimoto, Obuchi, Nakagawa...who all whom got a head start in their political careers because their fathers' having died young.

Ozawa Ichiro must look at the fates of those like unto him and wonder.

Of the Seven Magistrates of the Takeshita Faction only he, Watanabe Kozo and Hata Tsutomu survive. Watanabe, The Talker, has had so many health issues the television news shows have to put subtitles on for people to make out what he is saying. And Hata, good old faithful Hata, has come out in support of Ozawa's bid even after the way he got burned in 1994.

Of those who jumped the to the head of the line in politics thanks to their father's getting out of the way, surviving are himself, Koizumi Jun'ichiro and Abe Shinzo -- and of them all it is Koizumi, the weirdo, the exception to the rule, who is the only one with nary a thing wrong with him.

Hata, Koizumi and Abe -- all of them have been Prime Minister.

Ozawa Ichiro has watched most of his contemporaries in the political world die off or be felled by health problems far earlier than normal for Japanese citizens. He himself is said to be dogged by ill health, hiding his condition from the public and confederates, taking medical vacations overseas.

He is 68 years of age. His father died at age 69.

Perhaps he has always been not like us. For him, perhaps now more than ever, there is no tomorrow -- there is only today. For those of us with expectations of living into our mid-eighties, his impatience, his willingness to smash the toy he has constructed because it would not do what he wanted it to, smacked of selfishness and conceit.

We see him that way still, and the polls this weekend will likely show our fellow believers are in the tens of millions.

Yet we should stop perhaps and consider what may have gripped him, what may haunt him, what may drive him to simply not care what we think -- that what remains of his days are few, and he seeks and has always sought a glittering prize -- one that decidedly lesser men have seized or had handed to them.

And but for a questionable investigation into a land registration issue that had it been anyone else's problem would have been dealt with by a simple fine and an expression of remorse -- except for this investigation that seasoned and publicity-seeking prosecutors have twice judged pointless to pursue -- the prize would already be his.

No matter what the cost to reputation of the the Democratic Party of Japan, no matter that it will look stupid - three prime ministers resigning in a space of 13 months -- Ozawa is racing the darkness.

We should perhaps judge him in that light.

Photo image: Sunset over the Imperial Palace on August 24, 2010. Photo credit MTC.

Later - This post has been edited for greater clarity

They Want More

The Japanese education system is plagued by its monsuta perantsu and its flabbbergastingly high levels of kids refusing to go to class -- even imperial princesses cannot stay in school.

China has problems seemingly on the end of the spectrum -- odious overachievers -- kids who are fantastic in their classes and unfortunately know it.

Off topic somewhat, but Jiang Xueqin's essay "When Good Students Are Bad" is a spectacular, must-read encapsulation of what may turn into a future business management and perhaps even public order issue for the world's most populous nation.

If Ozawa Becomes Prime Minister Can He Be Indicted?

Not according to the Constitution of Japan and nominal notions of reality, he cannot.

Article 75 -

The Ministers of State (naikaku kokumu daijin), during their tenure of office, shall not be subject to legal action without the consent of the Prime Minister. However, the right to take that action is not impaired hereby.

That prime minister himself is a minister of state is made clear in Article 66. So if Ozawa prevails in the DPJ leadership contest against Kan Naoto and is elected Prime Minister, the Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution can indict him until they are blue in the face, but to no avail, unless of course Ozawa decides that for the good of the country he should be subject to the indictment.

Which I am guessing he will not do.