Goodbye, Detritus

In decidedly minor political news, Kobayashi Koki, one of the total wastes of human skin Ozawa Ichiro brought into the Democratic Party of Japan for possibly no reason other than to make himself look better by comparison, has declared he will vote for the pending no confidence motion and leave the DPJ. He has found intolerable the party's having submitted a bill raising the consumption tax. (J)

Koba-chan, your train left the station over a month ago.

So long you Tokyo University Faculty of Law graduate, former Ministry of International Trade and Industry bureaucrat, former Liberal Democratic Party district seat holder, expelled from the LDP by Koizumi Jun'ichiro for opposing postal reform and stripped of your seat by Koike Yuriko, only to be returned to the House of Representatives as a proportional list seat winner for the DPJ -- you will most certainly not be missed.

The End Game

The Democratic Party of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito, the only three parties that matter -- a state of affairs so grating to the other parties in the Diet that the three leftist microparties and the one libertarian miniparty are joining hands to protest the "price fixing going on behind closed doors" (J) -- are putting the final touches on a final agreement on the shakai hosho zei ittai kaikaku an, the bills enabling the combined reforms of social security and tax systems. (J)

There are some hurdles standing in the way of the three parties coming to an agreement by the Prime Minister's deadline of June 15. The LDP wants the Noda government to repudiate the DPJ's 2009 manifesto pledge to rewrite pension law so as to guarantee that all pensioners receive a minimun 70,000 yen per month from the national pension plan. The LDP and the New Komeito together want Noda to repudiate the DPJ manifesto pledge to repeal the special eldercare system for persons over 75 years of age, a terribly unpopular and initially confusing program of mandatory healthcare prepayment the two parties sweated blood to pass when they held the reins of government. The three parties are also at loggerheads over what, if anything, they should do to lessen the impact of the imposition of the consumption tax on those person living at or below the poverty line.

Now according to the news noise machine, Prime Minister Noda is desperate and willing to sacrifice the DPJ's identity (E) or prepared to discard policies intrinsic to the DPJ's unity (E) all for the sake of winning the LDP's and the New Komeito's votes in favor of the passage of the bills raising the consumption tax.

Maybe. It depends on what one believes DPJ policies are.

If one takes the simplistic route, that DPJ policies are all the policies listed in the 2009 and 2010 manifestos, then the above assertions are true.

If, however, one takes the position that the policies listed in the 2009 manifesto were the ones Ozawa Ichiro tossed together trying to buy the support of every special interest the LDP, in its internal shift to becoming a modern, urban-based party, had left lying in the dust, without any concern as to whether the resulting program was internally consistent or affordable -- i.e., LIES -- then:

a) the DPJ is a party of lies and liars, and thus their promises are worthless rhetoric, not policies, or

b) the promises made in the 2009 manifesto, which Kan Naoto tried desperately to render more concrete and believable in the 2010 manifesto, were never the policies of the DPJ, just electoral dandruff clinging to Ozawa Ichiro's jacket.

When Ozawa loyalist and true believer Kawauchi Hiroshi wails about the impending deal on the sheaf of bills reforming the pension and tax systems...

"The LDP's proposal is unacceptable. If we were to agree, the DPJ would become the LDP."

...he is not only showing that he is more a courtier than a politician but also a poor student of history. Fiscal consolidation, realistic pension funding schemes and a willingness to sacrifice growth for stability are core policy positions of the original DPJ. These were the principles undergirding the August 2005 party platform, under then party leader, now Deputy Prime Minister Okada Katsuya.

That DPJ co-founder Hatoyama Yukio forgets what he used to believe and defends the 2009 manifesto as holy writ (J) is neither implausible nor particularly significant. Like the White Queen, Hatoyama can believe a half a dozen impossible things before breakfast.

What the representatives of the DPJ, the LDP and the New Komeito are going to be banging heads over today are the remnants of the fight. The DPJ has a rather weaker position due to the PM's having set a deadline. This prevents the DPJ from exercising its ultimate weapon of extending the Diet session, forcing everyone to just sit on their tailbones until the LDP and the New Komeito fall into bickering in between themselves over just who is preventing the passage of their favorite bits of legislation. It should surprise no one that the DPJ has chosen this moment to float a trial balloon for a radical restructuring of both the LDP's and the DPJ's plans to reform the House of Representatives which hews close to what the New Komeito has been proposing and which would mess up the proportional seat voting for the LDP (E) -- just at the moment the LDP is showing strength in that half of the ballot.

All could go haywire at the last moment. Someone could say something untoward about someone else's sister, leading to a termination of negotiations.

All indications are, however, is that what we are seeing is the end game, one where the LDP and the New Komeito will wander away from the table having agreed to have their members vote with the government on a raft of bills, with neither the promise for elections nor the Noda repudiation of Ozawa Ichiro which the two parties had been demanding.

Very Kind Of Them #8 - The Neapolitan Edition

The nice folks at The Point have posted an essay of mine. It is about Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's two scoops of triple-flavored ice cream.

(Link)

The Nine Defectors From The House Of Representatives

Okumura Jun has produced a person-by-person analysis of the nine members of the Democratic Party of Japan's House of Representatives delegation who turned in their party badges yesterday (Link).

To Okumura-san's extensive research I would only add the observation that six of the nine were among the 16 legislators who left the Democratic Party Diet caucus in February over the then party leadership's then incipient decision to put Ozawa Ichiro on probation.

So one can assume that not a lot of tears are being shed at the defection of this particular group.

And Then There Was One

As noted in comments to a previous post, nine members of the Democratic Party of Japan's House of Representatives delegation have submitted their resignations from the party (E) in protest against a number of policies the government has recently rammed down the party's throat.

In a "let's all take a deep breath and wait before predicting the deluge" post at Global Talk 21, Okumura Jun noted that no House of Councillors members had headed for the exits (E).

Well, guess what? A few hours ago House of Councillors member Yokomine Yoshiro offered up his resignation from the DPJ (J).

Now Yokomine, the father of the golfer Yokomine Sakura, has been a huge pain for the party, being involved in a series of mishaps and ethical lapses since he was picked as a proportional seat candidate by party leader Ozawa Ichiro. His resignation from the party for what his political secretary called "personal reasons" may have nothing to do with the current party distress over the proposed rise in the consumption tax, the Yamba Dam restart declaration and the prime minister's hair-splitting and ultimately undone solution to winning party support for Japan's entering into discussions on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But the timing of Yokomine's resignation is, if not suspicious, then still bad for the image of the prime minister.

I am not going to say that I warned that that fission could happen...but I warned that fission could happen.

What I got wrong was the timing: I did not think the breakup would begin before the New Year.

Later - Over at σ1, Corey Wallace goes into some particulars as to why it is appropriate to think that "this time, it's different" (Link).

The DPJ Cannot Trust The Bureaucracy To Make Its Decisions For It

I had an American academic of great renown and insight tell me that the Democratic Party of Japan simply had to start working more closely with the bureaucracy. At the time I was horrified, not only because battering the bureaucracy into submission is one of the core tenets of DPJ identity but because it simply would not work.

This week we have had two examples of two horrible decisions made by the ministries, one of which was bullrushed through a Cabinet decision and the other which, as long as Maehara Seiji is breathing, will have a wooden spike driven through its black heart.

The first bad decision was the selection of the F-35 fighter as the replacement for Japan's fleet of aging F-4s. That the F-35 is a work-in-progress for the wrong mission at the wrong price has been hammered home repeated over the last few days, both in the Japanese press and English-language commentary - the most recent example of which is the opinion article by Alessio Patalano (who has more knowledge about the Japanese military in his pinky than I will ever know) in The Asahi Shimbun (Link).

The second slap-me-because-I-think-I-am-dreaming decision is yesterday's inexplicable announcement by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism to restart construction on the Yamba Dam (E). The cancellation of the Yamba Dam is item #1 on the DPJ's list of cost saving measures it will undertake to provide funding for the expansion of its social welfare spending. The September 2009 announcement by the then Minister of MLIT Maehara Seiji that further work on the dam was cancelled was the first clear indication that the newly-elected DPJ government was serious about its promises to reform the way Japan has been run. For a DPJ MLIT minister to earmark funds for a restart of the project, this with the collusion of Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu, boggles the imagination.

Luckily (for the citizenry and whatever shreds of credibility the DPJ has left) the now Chairman of the DPJ's Policy Research Council Maehara Seiji has told everyone within hearing distance that the project will restart only over his dead body.

In both these instances, the decisions coming out of the ministries have the fingerprints of bureaucrats all over them, largely in that they are politically deaf and seemingly profitable only to the members of the bureaucracy itself and a tiny circle of special interests.

Where is Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko in all of this? Is he not supposed to be leading, thinking about the national interest and the interests of his party?

It's Not LDP Lite, It's LDP Resurrected

If you are not already a subscriber to the SSJ-Forum, you might consider moseying on over to their subscription page and joining up. Once you are a member, you can wait for Greg Noble's tour-de-force post [SSJ: 6879] Back to the (bad old LDP) future, or necessary recalibration? (hurry up and archive it, people!) on the ways DPJ Party Leader and Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko is turning the clock back to what seems to be pre-Koizumi times.

T'is a stunner...and t'is depressing.

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.

Your Constant Companion

So Ozawa Ichiro goes to it.

Ozawa to challenge Kan in DPJ leadership race
Kyodo News

Ichiro Ozawa, one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party of Japan, told reporters Thursday morning that he will run in the ruling party's leadership election next month, challenging Prime Minister Naoto Kan for the party leadership...

Do your know what I love about this story? Paragraph three.

Hatoyama told reporters separately that he will support Ozawa in the race since he had been the one who had invited Ozawa to join the party. Ozawa joined the DPJ in 2003 when he and a small party he then headed merged with it.

Why do I love paragraph three so? Because it is followed by paragraph four.

The declaration of support by Hatoyama, who leads an intraparty group of about 50 lawmakers, came after he had told Ozawa during a meeting on Tuesday that he would back Kan's reelection as DPJ leader.

Proving once again the Nagata-cho political adage that the shortest distance between two points is the distance between the tips of Hatoyama Yukio's fingers and the wheels of a bus.

Inherit the Wind

Ozawa Ichiro's keeping quiet -- so he is following Prime Minister Kan Naoto's suggestion that he do so for the good of the nation, the party and himself.

It is seems the Old Toad has read the fine print, though. He was asked to keep quiet, not stay silent.

Whilst campaigning in Yamanashi Prefecture on Thursday for his buddy Koshi'ishi Azuma (Doesn't Koshi'ishi's website make just hop on the Chuo Line and go to Yamanashi right now?) Ozawa made a rather public visit to the grave of Kanemaru Shin, a rather interesting and embarrassing choice of local worthies to honor with a visit at election time.

After a roadside speech to about 40 local residents, Ozawa also uttered his first words of criticism of the new DPJ regime since its installation three weeks ago. They were hardly hair-raising quotes: he told reporters he thought Kan's goal of leading the party to winning "54 seat plus alpha" too weak, saying that the goal of a ruling party is to win a majority (which in the case of this upcoming election means 60 or more seats - a goal that Kan yesterday declared he would "spare no effort in achieving"). Ozawa also said that in order to improve the Japan's fiscal position, raising the consumption tax should not be done soon -- that the party's stated goal is to get rid of as much wasteful spending as possible first.

On Friday, up in Aomori, Ozawa got a little bolder, playing the concern troll regarding the decision to talk about raising the consumption tax in the run up to an election. He dangerously chose to play the city/country dichotomy card --- shining a light on the truth that cannot speak its name, that following this election the DPJ intends to terminate the countryside's dependency on largess and support from the center, forcing the countryside to either pull itself up by its bootstraps or fail -- saying, "The prime minister seems to talk continuously about [raising the tax to 10%] but out here in the countryside, as compared to the city, the economic situation is severe. If you talk out [in the countryside] about a 10% consumptipon tax, for myself this gives me tremendous worries."

Just to throw salt in the wound, Ozawa reminded listeners that under the Hatoyama Administration (of which he, of course, was the string puller) the DPJ had issued a public promise to not raise the consumption tax for three to four years.

Way to be a team player when your party needs you, Ozawa-san.

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For an explanation of the title, see Proverbs 11:29. For some photos of a few of Yamanashi's places to visit, check out a few selections from the Flickr site.

Background to the DPJ's Ongoing Counter-Reformation

Prime Minister Kan Naoto has nearly completed filling up the holes in the new line up of Democratic Party of Japan executives and the Cabinet. From announcements and speculation printed in the nation's newspapers, it is clear that the DPJ is undergoing a massive shift away from the course it has been following since 2005.

When Kan and former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio founded the DPJ in 1996, the party's core faith was that Japan suffered from an excess of government spending on slow growth or even loss-making endeavors. The key to reviving Japan's health was the removal of the control of spending from bureaucrats (who were supposedly using the budget compilation process to featherbed organizations and industries that would supply them with sinecures following their formal retirement from government service) and assaults on the system of subsidies and supports for industries and activities (agriculture, construction, package delivery) with close ties to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Under the classic DPJ paradigm, government would have a limited role in directing the economy, with the focus of policy on the cutting away of the relations of economic dependency. The goal was a more open, failure-tolerant structure, where a social safety net would catch those who fell out of those industries undergoing shrinkage.

Two major events post-2000 forced the party to junk this policy framework. The first was the wholesale larceny of the party's ideas by Koizumi Jun'ichiro, who ran against the traditional policies of his own party, the LDP, promising change almost identical to the changes proposed by the DPJ.

The second was the landslide loss in the 2005 House of Representatives election, where a glum Okada Katsuya seemed to be campaigning on the slogans of "no fun anymore, suffering for everyone." Against improbable optimism of Koizumi, Okada's grim warnings of disaster were a total electoral downer. Unsurprisingly, the party fell flat on its face, getting wiped out in urban and suburban districts, its supposed impregnable electoral fortresses.

Rather than switching to a Koizumi-like bon vivant with a taste for the spotlight, the DPJ opted for the leadership of Ozawa Ichiro. Like Koizumi, Ozawa had a flair for the irresponsible and insincere promise. Unlike him, he was disdainful of the press, preferring to build his political machine out of the knitting together a thousand normally mutually exclusive promises to a thousand different interest groups. Recruiting local worthies to his cause through patient courtship, he built up a huge electoral bank of persons he could run as candidates who were primarily reliant on his political wiles for their educations.

This was, of course, the classic LDP Tanaka/Takeshita faction's winning playbook. Under Koizumi, the LDP abandoned its traditional method of building coalitions of interest groups and patient local recruitment in favor of a media-driven presidential and national mode of rule. As the LDP set about "modernizing" itself, Ozawa moved into the gap, dragging the DPJ, kicking and screaming, in with him.

The new DPJ had a successful test drive in the 2007 House of Councillors elections, where it prevailed over the LDP. It can be argued, however, that the DPJ did well due more to latent disgust at the LDP (particularly over the pension scheme fiasco and other policy missteps ) than thanks to the DPJ's new look.

Ozawa's DPJ received its real test in the 2009 House of Representatives elections, where it completely flipped the country's districts from LDP to DPJ control. The touchstone of the election was the DPJ's policy manifesto, which contained so many concessions and promises to so many different constituencies as to be internally incoherent, and impossible to implement as a whole. A strategy of promising everything to everyone made perfect sense in political terms, however: the electoral map having been drawn by the old time LDP in such a way as to favor the party that could make the most improbable promises.

The results of the 2009 vindicated Ozawa and bolstered his standing in the party to immense heights. A grateful Hatoyama, who found himself in the position of being the party's candidate for Prime Minister thanks to Ozawa's having rigged the snap 2009 party leader election, granted Ozawa the position of Secretary-General and the ability to fully complete the transformation of the DPJ into his personal policy and elections machine.

Events, however, began eating away at Ozawa's authority within the party faster than he could remake the party to his own needs. The global economy began recovering from the 2008 crash much earlier than anticipated, reducing the intense need for the deficit spending tthat undergirded his promises to interest groups and shifting attention toward countries with seemingly unsustainable debt increase paths, of which Japan was one. Prime Minister Hatoyama's political finance difficulties turned out to be far, far worse than imagined, composed of hundreds of real, repeated criminal acts involving hundred of millions of yen. The Futenma base problem turned out to be insoluable, no matter that most of the country believed that the Okinawans had been shafted by previous LDP governments.

What seems to have broken the camel's back, however, was Ozawa's shutting down the DPJ's Policy Research Council. While nominally a move to concentrate policy formation in the Cabinet, the abolition of the Council looked like shutting down the only forum for anti-Ozawa elements to argue that the party manifesto was a laundry list of promises, not a plan -- and an electoral liability for a ruling party. Whether or not this contention was true on not is debatable -- but by abolishing the Policy Research Council, Ozawa seemed to be declaring that that debate would not ever happen.

While members from the DPJ's middle ranks fought with Ozawa over the elimination of the Council, it was likely that they did so under the supervision of senior members of the party, many of whom understood that their own influence was in danger of being usurped. Until the abolition of the Council, the claims that Ozawa sought to establish a dictatorship could be explained away as fanciful LDP scare stories. After its abolition, and the sidelining of dozens of longtime DPJ policy wonks, these scare stories seemed suddenly far less farfetched.

The turning point, it seems, was the Ubukata Affair. When Ubukata Yukio went to the media with the case against Ozawa, the party directorate announced that Ubukata would be stripped of his Deputy Secretary-General post. This decision did not last the weekend. Announced on a Thursday, the dismissal was rescinded on the following Monday.

Several weeks ago I wondered why the Seven Magistrates of the DPJ did not follow Ubukata's lead and rid themselves of their wounded and troublesome Secretary-General and his associates. At the time, I rationalized the inaction of Sengoku Yoshito, Edano Yukio and others as their decision to take the path of least resistance: clashing with Hatoyama and Ozawa head on was risky, picking up the pieces after a disastrous House of Councillors election would be child's play.

Following the collapse of support for the Cabinet and the Party in the wake of the Futenma climbdown and the dismissal of Fukushima Mizuho from the Cabinet, the Seven Magistrates found themselves in the situation where they could carry out the prophesied coup -- because, as every poll indicated, the House of Councillors election was lost.

[Yes, a paradox: anti-Ozawa forces could move in and alter the course of future events only after the course of future events was inevitable.]

Since seemingly winning over Hatoyama Yukio to their cause, the anti-Ozawa leaders have moved with staggering efficiency and dispatch to eliminate Ozawa's influence over both policy and party management. Fiscal conservatives are now in all the party's and the government's top policy setting positions (bureaucrat bête noire Ren Ho, who had been slated to take over for Fukushima at Consumer Affairs, will take over for Edano as Minister of Government Revitalization), the Policy Research Council is being revived and the PM has told former Secretary-General Ozawa to keep his thoughts and advice to himself.

Today's party position announcements and tomorrow's new Cabinet lineup will be sending a message, one that will have repercussions well beyond its already mesurable impact on the fortunes of Kan & Company in the upcoming House of Councillor's election.

The DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back.

Hatoyama and Ozawa Are Leaving The Stage

A pair of random questions and fragmentary answers.

Why is Kan Naoto the prohibitive favorite to replace Hatoyama?

Kan is the only senior member of the Democratic Party of Japan seen as being on a par with Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio. Kan and Hatoyama founded the party in 1996 and ran it for a time as co-leaders. He succeeded Hatoyama as sole party leader in 2002, serving in the post until May 2004. Following the inception of the wreckage of Ozawa Ichiro's Liberal Party in 2003, Kan, Hatoyama and Ozawa were seen as the "troika" running the party jointly. After stepping down from the position of party leader due to a very minor issue, a gap of a few months in his record of contributing to the national pension scheme, Kan has kept a much lower profile than his fellow troika members.

His recent relative detachment from the grubbier corners of the world of politics is all to his advantage now as the party and the country search for political smarts and party authority unblemished by a strong association with either the helpless Hatoyama and the fearsome Ozawa.

Will Hatoyama's and Ozawa's resignations help the DPJ in the House of Councillors election?

A definite yes. From the responses given to pollsters, it is clear that the populace is disappointed by Hatoyama and mistrusful of Ozawa. Disappointment in the Cabinet and the party since the inauguration of the Hatoyama government should have resulted in great slices of the citizenry rushing back to familiar embraces of the Liberal Democratic Party. However the opinion polls show the sections populace as either tentatively supporting the completely unknown default reformist Your Party or opting out of supporting any particular party at all.

With the problematic Hatoyama and Ozawa no longer in charge of the government and the DPJ, the 50% of voters who consider themselvers to be non-aligned should return to their voting stance of 2009: willing to entrust the reins of government to a new, non-LDP political force.

The Ubukata Dump

On Ubukata Yukio's home page, he still lists himself as a Deputy Secretary-General of the Democratic Party of Japan.

He is, however, no longer a holder of that title.

Ubukata had made a splash last month, joining with a group of DPJ legislators in demanding the revival of a intra-party policy research body to replace the abolished Policy Research Council. As a member of the party holding a fairly central post, Ubukata really did not have a reason to demand a voice in party policy making affairs. Nevertheless he went along with a number of mid-career party members who felt powerless the current power structure left too many powerless to affect party decisions.

For reasons that may become clearer over the next few hours, Ubukata has gone rogue. In television appearance after television appearance, he denounced the centralization of power under DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro and asked pointed questions why Ozawa has not been forced to explain in excruciating detail the story behind the arrest of three of his former political secretaries.

Unlike the Liberal Democratic Party, whose leadership has remained inert in the face of internal criticism of the party leadership and numerous defections, the DPJ apparatus mobilized with brutal efficiency and speed. The DPJ's Standing Officers Council met yesterday and stripped Ubakata of his party post.

What will be of interest is how this crushing of an admittedly out-of-order critic will play in the media and the public eye. Ubukata has portrayed himself as a paladin of the true DPJ, counter to the apostate vote-grubbing, power-grabbing opaque leadership of Ozawa. It is possible the public, which has an overwhelming dislike for Ozawa's continued tenure as DPJ Secretary-General, will applaud Ubukata's self-immolation as a heroic act of resistance. They also just might see it as merely Pyrrhic bonfire of vanity... or a minor key repeat performance of Hatoyama Kunio's defection from the LDP, minus, of course, all the money that Kunio has to spend to console himself whilst he wanders in the political wilderness.

Of course, with Edano Yukio, the State Minister for Administrative Reform and former chairman of the DPJ Policy Research Council reportedly weighing into the fray, the whole mess is getting a lot more interesting...

Accommodation with wolves

Tobias Harris, back in Japan for a spell, writes about the agreement between the leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeitō on revisions to the bill reforming the Basic Law on the Bureaucratic System (kōmuin seido kihonhō kaikakuan). The leadership of the ruling coalition, if not the rank and file of the ruling parties, has accepted many of the necessary revisions to the bill demanded by the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. The revised bill now goes to the House of Representatives.

A few points that need emphasis:

1) In agreeing to accept modifications to the bill suggested by the DPJ, the reformist wing of the LDP has compromised and made common cause with...the reformist wing of the LDP.

DPJ leader Ozawa Ichirō, his second-in-command Hatoyama Yukio and a much of those in the upper crust of the DPJ are LDP refugees. They differ from many of the reformists in the LDP only in having never jumped back into the LDP, having jumped out once.

Ideologically, centrist DPJ members are the blood brothers and sisters of the anti-patronage wing of the LDP. In a certain sense, Koizumi Jun'ichirō was the first DPJ prime minister: in terms of reforms he borrowed a lot of DPJ ideas and stances and in terms of the LDP...well, from the outset he promised to destroy it (albeit in an effort to save it) --all to the DPJ's black fury. That the reform-minded Fukuda & Friends segments of the LDP, the New Komeitō leadership and the DPJ to come together on trimming the wings of the ministries and the zokugiin should come as no surprise. What is surprising is that it took six months and a near death experience for the Fukuda Cabinet to understand who, in terms of domestic policy, its friends are.

Left fuming at this surrender deal are the recalcitrant, patronage-reliant elements of the LDP. They will have their vengeance someday but on the wording of this bill at least, the Prime Minister seems to have overidden (word choice intentional) his internal party opposition.

However (shikashi)

2) Having cut the legs out from under the LDP members that are both clients and patrons of various ministries and industrial sectors, Prime Minister Fukuda has to push this reform bill through both houses of the Diet--and soon.

Given how the zokugiin hate (a) reform in both the abstract and the concrete and (b) the DPJ-authored changes toughening up this particular reform bill, the chance that the government will be capable of cobbling together a two thirds majority for an Article 59 override, should the House of Councillors reject the government's bill, is close to nil.

Seen in the light of Prime Minister Fukuda's inability to push the bill through using a House of Representatives override, the enormity of PM's wager becomes apparent. He is placing his reputation as a leader and reformer on the line against one of the surest things in Japanese politics: Ozawa Ichirō's wish to topple an LDP-dominated government. As the video montage of the Monday night political hackfest Terebi Tackle (on the TV ASAHI network) reminded viewers, Ozawa has been merciless in both the building up and the demolition of political ententes--his ultimate, yet strangely forgotten act of destruction having been the late March 2000 abandonment of the tripartite LDP-New Komeito-Liberal Party coalition that likely triggered, on April 1, Prime Minister Obuchi Keizō's fatal stroke.

Despite this rather nasty shadow looming over his past, Ozawa must feel sorely tempted to instruct his House of Councillors members to reject the government's revised bill.

Should the bill fail to pass both Houses of the Diet, after the PM and the LDP leadership went the extra kilometer to accommodate the DPJ's demands-- and in so doing betrayed the LDP's zokugiin -- well, if that does not trigger immediate demands for Fukuda's resignation as party leader, I do not know what will. A Fukuda resignation over the session's fundamental reform bill could even blow the LDP apart.

With the DPJ riding high in many public opinon polls, Ozawa must feel tempted to ignore Fukuda's attempt to forge a trans-party reform consensus on reforming the bureaucracy. There may not be a better chance to attack a weak and exposed Fukuda, leaving hism naked and defenseless against the rage felt of his party's anti-reform and revisionist wings.

Were I to lay a bet on the outcome of this encounter, I would not want to be placing too much money on the PM's longterm survival.

It would be all too easy to just tip the balance...