This Is So Not The News

"Mr. Prime Minister, if I could have a moment. The members of the House of Councillors of the Liberal Democratic Party, in protest of your decision to not fire the two ministers the House censured, are not attending committee sessions examining major pending bills."

"That's right, they're not."

"So even though this is boycott is preventing the discussion of major parts of your policy program, you are not planning to fire the two ministers."

"The two ministers are reflecting deeply on their actions. So as to the following up on the demands to fire the pair, I'm not going to do it."

"Despite the deadlock in the Diet and the demands from the opposition for elections, or whispered plans of a quid pro quo where you dissolve the House of Representatives and call for elections in return for opposition votes on the bills establishing the legal basis for a rise in the consumption tax, and of course your inability to establish any kind of internal consensus within the Democratic Party of Japan on these bills, you are not planning to call elections, correct?

"I wish to strengthen the unity of the government and the opposition in grappling with these issues, so no, I am not planning to hold elections at this time*."

"Well, there you have it folks. From Dulles Airport, Commonwealth of Virginia, all the news that is not going to happen."

That is the gist of this article posted by the Yomiuri Shimbun.

For no apparent reason.

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* NHK announcer Okoshi Kensuke, in a special live interview on the 9 o'clock news, managed to squeeze out of Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko the admission that the current electoral districts for the House of Representatives are unconstitutional. Okoshi could not, however, pressure the prime minister into admitting that it was impossible to call an election. (J). Instead the PM launched into the same rigmarole as in the main text, about the many important bills to be considered this session.

This is what is called "staying on message."

Hatoyama and Hashimoto, Hatoyama and Ozawa, Hashimoto and Ozawa

Oscar Wilde once described the proper English gentleman on horseback chasing after a fox as "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable." Yesterday on television, we had "the unbelievable examining the undoable" -- Hatoyama Yukio criticizing the "Ishin no Kai Version of Eight Policies From The Ship" (Ishinkaihan no sennchu hassaku). (J)

Nominally, having Hatoyama offering his opinions about the Osaka Ishin no Kai's long-range vision for Japan is a former prime minister calling upon his collected wisdom and practical knowledge to point out the flaws in the policy program of a popular protest movement whose emergence has jolted the political realm. In reality, it is having a man who does not know his own mind commenting about persons who are quite out of theirs.

Why go through this agony? Since Hatoyama has no opinions of his own, he might be channeling the thoughts of his ally/former puppeteer, Ozawa Ichiro. Just what Ozawa is thinking about the Ishin no Kai and its leader Hashimoto Toru is of great interest, as Hashimoto's movement and Ozawa Ichiro's plans for himself and his followers inside the Democratic Party of Japan (the "Is-he-in-or-is-he-out?" question) are the two most glamorized sources of potential disruption of the political sphere.

[Whether or not the two are the most interesting or likely sources of disruption is not relevant. Hashimoto and Ozawa are simply the easiest subjects to write about. In a sense, this concentration of attention is mostly about journalistic sloth.]

Hashimoto and Ozawa coming to some sort of quid pro quo regarding the toppling of the Noda government and the construction of a new political order after a snap House of Representatives election* has been the subject of fevered speculation (E). Just how Hashimoto's corporatism (the next person who calls it "populism" needs to find out how to use a search engine or a dictionary) meshes with Ozawa's Liberal Democratic Party socialism ("Ice cream for everybody now! We'll think about paying for it tomorrow!") has not been clarified, perhaps because elucidating a basis for these two autocrats reining in their colossal egos long enough for a coordinated overthrow of the current, constipated regime is asking too much of the domestic political wind machine.

Finally, for a bit of fun, check out the website for the newest buddy comedy crime thriller Osaka Ishin no Kai (Link). Yes, it does look like a movie version of what a website of a upstart political movement should look like.

As in the life of Hashimoto Toru, politics and entertainment blur.

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* Yes, I know that holding elections at this time would be unconstitutional.  So do all the national political writers and politicians.  However, they still they write and talk about it.

It's Complicated

Of course, it is not only the spring days of Chinese diplomats which are being ruined by blunt instructions from the ministry back home. Japanese diplomats based in New York are also being told to issue dumb statements, inflaming issues best left alone.

It seems the brilliant strategic campaign being waged on the Palisades Park, New Jersey comfort women monument, briefly described in a long post earlier this week, has, in the immortal words of the Showa Emperor, "developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest."

Or so says The New York Times (Link).

Many, many thanks to read MK for the follow up on this misguided adventure.

This Will Damage Japan's Own Security As Well

Nice going, Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Japan.

I can imagine the cable back to Beijing:

"A protest letter! A great idea. I cannot agree more. We have to make clear our position to the hosts of the meeting of the traitors and thieves falsely claiming to speak for the loyal Uighur citizens of Xinjiang.

Could not agree more with the idea of sending the letter to the offices of the members of the Diet misled into supporting the Uighur terrorists and splitists. After all, these Diet members are to be speakers and guests at the meetings.

(By the way, that works out to over 100 letters. Could we talk about a bumping up of the postage budget in the next cable?)

I love the text. Brilliant! However, any possibility of our deleting that one little phrase? Japanese is such an indirect, suggestive language. Expressing ourselves in such bald terms will seem uncouth. The rest of the text makes our point clear anyway. The phrase is just superfluous.

Thanks in advance for your consideration of this request."

And I can imagine the response from Beijing:

"Send out the letter as is, or I will have you stamping passports in Yinchuan for the rest of your career."

Well, Ambassador Cheng Yonghua did as he was told and sent out the letter, with this killer sentence in it:

中国への内政干渉で、日本自身の安全にも害がある。

Chugoku e no naisei kansho de, Nihon jishin no anzen ni mo gai ga aru.

This is interference in the internal affairs of China and will damange Japan's own security as well.

(Link - J)

Way to sway the opinions of Japanese legislators, PRC leadership!

As 90 of the 100 or so Diet members who received this charming missive are members of the Liberal Democratic Party, it is should not be surprising that LDP headquarters hosted a little show-and-tell party today, releasing the text of the response to the Ambassador's letter (J - personal blog）, complete with the signatures of 46 members of the Diet on it.

You have to admit, it is an effective document. When you would expect it to scream, it hisses, to devastating effect:

独立主権国家の国会議員への書状としては、著しく適切性に欠いているといわざるを得ません。

Dokuritsu shuken kokka no kokkai giin e no shojo to shite wa, ichijirushuku tekisetsusei no kaite iru to iwazaru o emasen.

We must tell you that sending such a document to the national legislators of an independent sovereign state shows marked lack of a sense of propriety.

Ouch!!!

I tend to give the LDP lots of hell...but this is the epitome of cool.

That Unanswered TEPCO Question

Now that the government of this blessed land has taken a majority stake in the technically bankrupt Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), phased in the replacement of the chairman and the president (E) and seen to a housecleaning of the board of directors. (E)

Many questions arise from the government's takeover as the main shareholder and appointer of executives and board members. What intrigues me is what will happen when the government and the new board members, particularly the outside board members, go through the books at TEPCO? Specifically, what are they going to find -- and once they find what they find, what are they going to do about what they find -- when they go through the accounts on how electricity costs are compiled?

From my understanding of the research done by Dr. Paul Scalise (and if Dr. Daniel Aldrich, if your research has identical findings, I apologize in advance for the sin of omission), a stunningly large fraction of the cost of TEPCO electricity cannot be explained by labor, capital or fuel costs. Indeed, if memory serves, the largest fraction of the costs of electricity is listed as simply "Other" -- and the amount listed in this category has remained unchanged, even as the costs of the various other inputs has either declined over time or has fluctuated in line with world energy prices.

What is this "Other"? To this point none of the electric power companies has been very upfront about the contents of this grab bag accounting entity. A certain fraction of this amount has always been assumed to have been payoffs to local communities, farming and fishing cooperatives and other business organizations with their facilities in the vicinity of power plants. Just how much of this other can be accounted for in this way is something the government can now, in theory find out, along with the rest of what has been lumped in to the category of "Other."

Of course, does the government want to know? Does it cut the subsidies to the local parasitic claimants, many of whom no longer can live and work in the vicinity of Fukushima Dai'ichi anyway, in order to lessen or forestall the rate hikes TEPCO has announced (E)? Do they keep them in place, as a sort of disaster recovery fund-by-default? Do they open up the accounts for public debate, or try to bury the truth in order to hide the complicity of regulators and politicians in the payouts? Or what if the government and the new board members find even more damaging reasons for the classing of certain costs as "Other"?

If the government owns TEPCO it not only owns company's problems but its secrets too.

What lies in between the covers of its account books?

Catching up with Toru and Yoshihiko

At little less than two weeks ago, I wrote:

The goals for the Noda Cabinet and the DPJ, if it can hold together as a party, are [snip] hope that after exerting every possible effort to restart the Oi reactors and other reactors feeding into Kansai Electric Power (KEPCO)'s grid, their efforts fail.

The last is a cynical but seemingly necessary failure of the imposition of national will over local governmental authorities. Any responsible national government, looking at the predicted shortfalls of generating power in the Kansai, would be proceeding as the Noda government has proceeded. The politicians and the citizens of the Kansai region, particularly the voters of Osaka City and their mayor, Hashimoto Toru, have perversely been those most opposed to the restart of the reactors, despite KEPCO's assertions that it faces a crushing lack of generating capacity of nearly 20% this summer.

Hashimoto and the voters of Osaka have a deep mistrust of KEPCO, extending back to last year. KEPCO's management has been far from transparent about its power capacity and rate calculations. However, this blessed land dodged a bullet last year, the summer being rather mild and the nation's tolerance for energy saving being exceptionally high. This year may be very different, and will almost certainly be most different not in the capital region or the region hardest hit by the earthquakes and tsunami but in the Kansai and Hokkaido, where the power companies were most deeply committed to nuclear power.

Should Hashimoto and other local leaders persist in hampering the restarts of reactors, and the resulting lack of power generating capacity lead to blackouts, either planned or unplanned, the Kansai's current regionalist challenge to Tokyo control will be severely damaged. Hashimoto's political ambitions may indeed be seriously set back, if the government can pin the blame for the power cuts on him, saying, "We told you so, we told you so, we told you so...and you just wouldn't listen."

(Link)

Well, guess what appeared in The Japan Times yesterday?

Kansai power crunch just political rivalry?
Oi reactor factor tied to Noda's Hashimoto feud

By ERIC JOHNSTON - Staff writer - OSAKA — The confrontation between the central government and Kansai area leaders over the restart of two nuclear reactors in Oi, Fukui Prefecture, has more to do with the growing power struggle between Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto and Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda than with safety or objective attempts to determine how much electricity will be available this summer.

Since February, Kansai Electric Power Co. has revised downward its projected electricity shortages after being grilled by Hashimoto-appointed critics.

On Tuesday, Kepco said that while it currently stands by its projection of a 15 percent shortage, a combination of purchasing electricity from other suppliers, ramping up natural energy use and instituting curbs on power use might actually shrink the projected shortage to 5 percent.

Meanwhile, the governors of Kyoto and Shiga as well as Hashimoto are critical of the way Noda's administration is pushing for the Oi reactors' restart without addressing their detailed safety concerns.

They are also angry the administration and Kepco announced blackout preparations without first consulting independent outside experts who might offer different views.

The reason for these actions, Hashimoto's supporters and critics suggest, is pure politics.

"Right now, the central government says that, depending on the circumstances, it will have to cut power this summer and that if so, it will be Hashimoto's fault. But Hashimoto is not responsible for the Oi reactors. The central government and Kepco are," Tetsunari Iida, head of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, said in a recent local media interview. He is also a Hashimoto adviser who serves on an Osaka city committee challenging Kepco over its projections of electricity shortages if the Oi reactors remain idled.

"Tokyo is growing increasingly worried about Hashimoto's rising popularity. Warnings of shortages from politicians and bureaucrats critical of Hashimoto have convinced many in Kansai that Noda's real aim is to do whatever he can to halt or at least slow Hashimoto's rise," said Yuji Yoshitomi, a local freelance journalist who has written critically of Hashimoto...

(Link)

The funny/sad aspect of this whole KEPCO vs. Hashimoto struggle, with the Noda government playing the role of concern troll, is that Osaka City is the top shareholder in KEPCO. In theory Hashimoto and the Ishin no kai should be pressuring the KEPCO executives to at least pay attention to their ideas and answer their questions. They are failing, in part because the Osaka stake, while large (9%), is still far from controlling.

Let the game of chicken (or as we say in this blessed land, chikin gemu) roll on!

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend

The World Uighur Congress is holding its triennial conference in Tokyo this week, the first time the conference is being held outside Germany or the United States, the home-in-exile of the movement's leader and former delegate to the People's Congress Rebiya Kadeer (Link). The Chinese government is, true to form, completely beside itself over Tokyo's hosting this conference. The conference's opening , along with the recent waking up sleeping dog that should be left to lie, the status of the Senkaku islets, poisoned the atmosphere at the weekend's vitally important trilateral meeting. (Link - J)

It is hard to not feel some sympathy for the Uighur cause. A host of nation states emerged out of the collapses of the Chinese, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in the period 1912 -18, only to be reabsorbed in their successors in the world-wide descent into madness of the late 1930s and 1940s. Almost all of these absorbed nations have since been reestablished as independent and autonomous states, with the exceptions being the continental Asian states on China's periphery: Tanu Tuva, Tibet and East Turkestan. The Tibetan and Uighur claims on their homelands are being undone by the irrational (the Cultural Revolution) and rational (urban development) destruction of the physical traces of their distinctive cultures and mass Han Chinese immigration into these formerly undesirable areas. That the Han immigrants, sick of the altitude (in the case of Tibet), the lack of water and isolation will likely move out again in a few generation's time is pretty much a given, but hardly a salve for the present generation of Uighurs and Tibetans. (Link)

[The Tuvans, due to the extreme isolation of their land, the lack of a demographic need for ressetlement of Russia's population -- which is indeed collapsing at an alarming rate -- and the lack of Russian government interest in stirring up trouble with any of its dozens of ethnic oblasts or republics, given what has happened and is still happening in the Caucasus Region, have shown zero interest in reestablishing their independence, limited as it was.]

However, the Uighurs are courting real disaster by coming to Tokyo. Their hosts here are not a coalition of conservative and liberal organizations and individuals, as would be the case were the conference being held in the U.S. or Germany. Instead, their hosts and likely underwriters of the costs of holding the Congress in Tokyo -- where the hard yen would blow the budget of any normal non-profit - are the most retrogressive of this blessed land's hard right wing. The above linked article's mention of:

"Several members of the Japanese political opposition participated in the opening session and expressed support for the Uighur cause."

is a very bad sign. Arch-conservatives parliamentarians Hiranuma Takeo (Link - J) and Fukuya Keiji (J - personal blog) and three other Diet members have been reported as having attended sessions of the conference. Fellow traveler Yamatani Eriko (possibly one of the attendees) and other MPs have hosted their own gatherings publicizing the Uighur struggle for self-preservation and self-determination. (Link - J)

[Incidentally, several of these MPs made a Golden Week pilgrimage to Palisades Park, New Jersey, to buttonhole the mayor there into removing a monument commemorating the Comfort Women (Link). All the members of this expedition into enemy territory -- ironic really, given that during the Bubble Years, Palisades Park and its neighboring town of Fort Lee were home to the expatriate Japanese community -- documented this brave endeavor (Link - J and Link - J), part of the GWOSG (the Global War On Symbols and Gestures*). Given that the present population of Palisades Park is 50% Korean-American, the mayor told the visiting members of the Diet they were wasting their and his time. (Link -J)**

These same Diet members were flabbergasted when they visited Washington, this time to publicize the plight of the families of the DPRK abductees, only to be greeted by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and the Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell telling them, "We here in the U.S. have our own abductee problem of young American citizens being abducted to Japan, often against the custody rulings of U.S. courts (Link - J)." Hiranuma's blood pressure probably hit the roof, which is bad for him, as he has already had one debilitating stroke.]

As for the claims that disgraced Air Self Defense Forces Chief of Staff Tamogami Toshio has attended conference sessions or that members of the attending Uighur delegation visited Yasukuni Shrine, these seem to be inventions of Chinese news organizations (I invite evidence of my being wrong here).

[Later - Reader MP has pointed to the Channel Sakura coverage of the conference (Link J and U - You Tube). Not only was Tamogami Toshio present, he addressed the conference, as did Hiranuma, plus a long list of the usual suspects: members of the House of Representatives Shimomura Hakubun and Takaichi Sanae and author and critic Sakurai Yoshiko. Tamogami clocks in at 7:28 into the broadcast.

As for the visit to Yasukuni, it is hard to argue with the video of Kadeer's visit to the shrine starting at 10:45 in the broadcast.

Interesting how the mainstream media did not report these two stories.

To the members of the Chinese news media, my apologies.]

The association of Japan's ultra right and Islamic nationalism goes back a long way. As scholar of Japan's historical relations with Islam Michael Penn reminded me in a private communication, Japanese support Islamic self-determination movements was a staple of 1930s Japanese involvement in Asia, though by private rightist organizations, not the Imperial government (Link). This support was often carried out under the rubric of Pan-Asianism (Yoshikawa Yukie has produced a comprehensive survey in English of pre-1945 Pan-Asianist writing. Scholars of China will likely fault the paper for its unfortunate indiscriminate switching from pinyin to Wade-Giles and back again) which a cynic would, in the Uighur case, put down to a de facto desire to keep China weak.

One hopes that Kadeer and her movement realize that joining hands and accepting the support of Japan's right, because of historical resonances, is a one-way ticket to illegitimacy.

The signs, however, are that she does not:

"The 63-year-old leader said the international community seems more interested in trade with China than in human rights. But she noted that Japan’s support in hosting the general assembly illustrated a growing awareness of the Uighur issue."

Not exactly, Madame President.

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* To which South Korean organizations, with their crusades to rename the Sea of Japan and their bolstering of South Korea's de facto hold on Tokto/Takeshima through full-page ads in U.S. newspapers, are hardly strangers to.

** Which is not to say that the visit of the arch-conservatives to Palisades Park did not have any affect. According to the Sankei Shimbun, the government of Japan has lodged a formal protest against the monument. (Link - J)

This Morning

Yesterday's rains have washed away every hint of whipped up dirt (the same storm that produced the tornadoes left tiny half-moons of soil on my windows, once the drops had evaporated), pollen and what little industrial pollution (mostly diesel exhaust) as besmirches the air. Mt. Fuji, the snow of its ridges now melted away, seems just a arm's length away.

Sometimes, living in the Tokyo Metropolitan District is really not all that bad.

Mt. Fuji over the rooftops. May 16, 2012, 5:30 a.m.

Photo credit: MTC

He Always Has Something Interesting To Say

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun at one point chose Peter Tasker as the best equities analyst in Japan for five years running. That is not the best foreign analyst of equities. The best analyst of Japanese equities markets, period.

In an essay for the Financial Times, he proposes a very, very long-term solution to Japan's debt and stagnation crises.

Always a worthwhile read.

In Lotus Land

Thank goodness for The Tokyo Diplomat. Without it I would never have been alerted to Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor Ishihara Shintaro's spectacularly weird suggestion that nuclear power plants be built on Nokogiriyama in Chiba Prefecture ("There's a lot of empty land up there," the governor claims), under the reasoning that if the Greater Tokyo Area is the consumer of the power produced by nuclear power plants, it should host a few. (J)

Guys, and Kannon-sama, Ishihara-chiji thinks you need some big time engineering company.

Black-tailed gulls (Umineko - Larus crassirostris) over Nokogiriyama.


Kannon of the Nippon-ji.
Nokogiriyama, Chiba Prefecture.


Jigoku nozoki ("The Glimpse Into Hell").
Nokogiriyama, Chiba Prefecture.


One of the 1,500 Rakkan.
Nokogiriyama, Chiba Prefecture.


The Great Buddha of the Nippon-ji
(carved 1783-6 and until 1984 the largest Buddha figure in Japan).
Nokogiriyama, Chiba Prefecture.


Face of the Great Buddha of the Nippon-ji.
Nokogiriyama, Chiba Prefecture.

All photos: MTC