One Stupid Move

Be aggressive, but play soundly. Don't take unnecessary chances.

- Bruce Pandolfini, "The 64 Commandments of Chess"

Yesterday, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko unveiled his reshuffled Cabinet (E). This follows on the heels of Friday's announcement of an extremely youthful but nevertheless competent line up of Democratic Party of Japan executives (E). Smirking critics could indeed call the newly appointed party secretariat the Attack of the Kiddie Korps, or perhaps for the more SF inclined "DPJ: The Next Generation." Aside from the reappointed secretary-general Koshi'ishi Azuma, the party secretariat is composed of what are in historical terms striplings, with Diet Affairs Chairman Yamanoi Kazunori the graybeard at 50 years of age.

Continuing on the SF theme, opposition party leaders and spokesmen are deriding the reshuffled cabinet as being nothing so much as the "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish" Cabinet. (J)

There is a grain of truth in the disparagement. Noda rotated in en masse the former party secretariat -- minus, it should be noted, the egregious Sengoku Yoshito.

The granting of all of the Second Generation of DPJ leaders a cabinet post hints that it is Dandy Don Meredith Time for the DPJ. The former American football player and announcer would croon, "Turn out the lights/The party's over" when the score and the time remaining in a game left no doubt as to which side was going to win.

That not a single one of the candidates who ran against Noda in the party leadership election received a post indicates that Noda does not give a fig about either Kano Michihiko's or Haraguchi Kazuhiro's supporters bolting from the party, triggering a political crisis as the DPJ falls into minority status in the House of Representatives.

That Noda would seeminly abandon his pledge to be a "no sides" leader of the party, meaning that all voices would be respected, only two weeks after winning reelection, indicates a certain fatalistic reckelessness has crept into his calculations.

Public opinion poll results after the Liberal Democratic Party presidential elections would certainly be grounds for Noda taking chances. Rather than sink upon the LDP Diet members' selection of an unstable and controversial Abe Shinzo as party president, support for the LDP soared, from 25% to 37% in a flash Nihon Keizai Shimbun poll (J); from 19% to 25% in a Mainichi Shimbun poll (J) and from 23% to 33% in a Yomiuri Shimbun poll (J).

The rise in the LDP's popularity over the last week is especially galling because

1) All three polls showed rises in the support levels for the Noda Cabinet

2) Abe Shinzo hardly lights the public's fire.

Q: Do you have positive expectations of Abe Shinzo?

Nikkei
Yes 38
No 49

Mainichi
Yes 40%
No 55%

3) Despite majorities polled feeling that the reelection of Noda as leader of the DPJ was a good thing, support for the DPJ declined:

Nikkei
August 21%
Sept 26-27 19%

Mainichi
Sept 15-16 13%
Sept 29-30 11%

Yomiuri
Aug 17-19 20%
Sept 28-30 18%

Worse news still in the most recent round of polls was the decline in interest in Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru's Japan Restoration Association. The official start of the national party on Friday was a low-key or no-key affair. There was no grand party at a major hotel, no shots of an office overflowing with a snow bank of congratulatory white orchids. The biggest news regarding JRA was Takenaka Heizo, the academic economist and former Koizumi banking and postal reform point man, accepting the invitation to be chairman of the committee selecting the JRA's candidates. (J)

With its support jumping, and the support of the DPJ sliding and support for the JRA plummeting, the incentive for the LDP in the upcoming Diet session is to be non-cooperative to the point of bringing Diet proceedings to a standstill, endangering the passage of a bond issuance bill funding the government's activities through the rest of the fiscal year. Abe and New Komeito leader Yamaguchi Natsuo are indeed making loud noises about holding Noda to the promise he made to former LDP president Tanigaki Sakakazu to call a House of Representatives election "soon" (chikai uchi ni).

Noda's and the DPJ's ace in the hole, however, remains the reform of electoral district boundaries. Unless some bill is passed bringing down the level of disparity in the voting strengths of the nation's largest and smallest House of Representative districts to less than 2 to 1, an election would be unconstitutional. If worse comes to worst, the game plan for the DPJ has been to lay out a draft electoral reform bill unacceptable to either the LDP or the New Komeito, and let them rail away until they are forced to vote in favor of the bond issuance bill.

Which is why one of the choices Noda has made for his new Cabinet looks like a huge mistake. As Eurasia Group Advisor Okumura Jun has noted, the new minister of Health, Welfare and Labour Minister Mitsui Wakio is the founder and owner of a pharmaceutical company and chairman of a private corporation running 3 hospitals and 2 retirement homes in Hokkaido (Link) -- a concantenation of conflicts of interest so naked that an unforgiving, persistent, frustrated and irresponsible opposition could tie up hours and hours of Diet Budget Committee time discussing them.

Now where could anyone find such an opposition?

When the obvious strategy for the new Noda Cabinet was to sit tight and let the opposition vent, why oh why give them a set of reasonable topics to vent about?

It's Noda In A Landslide

Prime Minister Noda has won reelection as Democratic Party of Japan leader.

He won in every facet of the election: in terms of the votes of party supporters, in the votes of local legislators and among the members of the Diet:

In the combined party supporter and local legislator vote, the point totals were

Noda Yoshihiko 389
Akamatsu Hirotaka 42
Haraguchi Kazuhiro 92
Kano Michihide Michihiko 27

In the Diet members vote which has just been announced, the totals are:

Noda 429
Akamatsu 81
Haraguchi 62
Kano 86

The point totals are:

Noda 818
Akamatsu 123
Haraguchi 154
Kano 113

The next stage in the continuing drama is an expected reshuffle of the Cabinet and the party leadership on September 28. It is somewhat difficult to guess what changes can be made in the major ministry postings without causing undesirable disruption of various policy programs. In terms of the party secretariat, Koshi'ishi Azuma, whose major raison d'être was smoothing relations within the party, particularly with the now departed Ozawa wing, can expect to be replaced with an elections specialist.

Just who that might be is the question. It sure as heck is neither Okada Katsuya nor Maehara Seiji, the two members of the party's Second Generation most clearly in line for an increase in influence.

As for the tradition of giving special consideration to supporters of defeated presidential candidates, this in order to heal the rifts that the campaign may have opened amongst the Diet delegations, one can expect Noda to follow it. First because in his thank you speech he repeated his pledge of last year to be a "no sides" leader of the party, taking into account the feelings of the marginalized. Second, and on far more practical level, the DPJ-People's New Party coalition is only 10 defectors away from losing its majority in the House of Representatives.

While the losers today's leadership contest got taken to the cleaners, they will be a force that will have to be handled with care on September 28.

The problem child will be Haraguchi. He clearly made an impression on the local chapters and local assembly members through his insistence that the party has to return to its commitment to the policies of the 2009 Manifesto. He is, however, unpopular with his fellow Diet members, who see him as an untrustworthy opportunist. Just how he and his supporters are to be integrated into the party hierarchy, or government appointive positions, will be a major headache for Noda.

Japan's Politics Stomps On The Accelerator

In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens entitles one of the chapters "TOO FULL OF ADVENTURE TO BE BRIEFLY DESCRIBED."*

I feel the same way about events in politics these past few days.

-- Liberal Democratic Party president Tanigaki Sadakazu faced reality yesterday, giving up on even running for reelection (E). That he waited so long, forcing his second-in-command Ishihara Nobuteru to forego advance preparation for his own bid for the presidency, either represents faith triumphing over observable fact, or payback for Ishihara's only half-hearted expressions of support for Tanigaki's running for a second term.

Though Ishihara appears to be on course for a victory in the presidential race, and, after the next House of Representatives election, the premiership, it bears noticing that historically his presidential bid is an aberration. Only two secretary-generals have taken over as president since the peaceful, negotiated transition from Nakasone Yasuhiro to Takeshita Noboru in November 1987.

The first was the closed-door, five person negotiated agreement for Secretary-General Mori Yoshiro to take over the premiership from the brain dead but still on life support Obuchi Keizo, three days after Obuchi suffered his fatal stroke.

The other instance of a secretary-general succeeding a party president was Aso Taro taking over for Fukuda Yasuo when Fukuda suddenly resigned on September 1, 2008. Aso had only been in office a month, having been named secretary-general in a leadership shakeup on August 1.

The Aso case points out the main reason why most secretary-generals cannot usually make the direct transition from the party #2 position to the presidency. Under normal circumstances, the secratary-general has been the right-hand man to the president, as much responsible for the daily decisions, right or wrong, as the man in the #1 spot. The secretary-general has also always been seen as bearing ultimate responsibility for the LDP's performance in elections. Many a leadership transition was triggered by the party having a poor showing in an election, mandating that the secretary-general resign and serve a brief stint in limbo.

However, in this instance, the abrasiveness and shallow party roots of Ishihara's main challenger, foreign and security policy specialist Ishiba Shigeru, seem to be showing a green light for Ishihara's election, possibly even in the first round vote of the LDP local chapters.

The other challengers in the LDP race -- former prime minister Abe Shinzo, Machimura Nobutaka and Hayashi Yoshimasa -- seem to be in the race for tactical or public relations reasons.

Hayashi is the Washington think tank candidate -- fluent in English and a familiar face in Washington. He is, however, a member of the House of Councillors -- whose members are seen as not having a personal investment in the party's performance in the House of Representatives.  Hayashi is seen as being only technically available to step into the position of prime minister.

Machimura is the faction head candidate, participating so that the list of candidates has at least one faction head in it. Machimura's candidacy presents another hurdle for Machimura faction member Ishihara, as he would normally count on the votes of his faction as the core of his support in the Diet members' round of voting.

Abe is entering the race for purely tactical reasons. He used to be both the ultra-conservative and Washington think tank candidate. His breakdown while in office, unsurprisingly cooled most Washington and national interest. He does remain, however, the most recognizable of the unapologetic, fantastic history-believing nationalists. He is thus probably running in order to play the part of kingmaker in between Ishiba and Ishihara, extracting a promise of accelerated militarization and anti-Chinese and anti-South Korean stances in return for the votes of his supporters.

-- The window for declaring oneself a DPJ leadership candidate closed yesterday. With Hosono Goshi having been talked out of running on Friday last, a field of four candidates-- deridable as "Noda Yoshihiko and the Three Dwarfs" -- now are set for a whirlwind campaign ending on September 21. (E)

As Okumura Jun has noted, the explosion of interest in a Hosono candidacy last week was prima facie evidence that the three remaining Noda challengers -- Haraguchi Kazuhiko, Akamatsu Hirotaka and Kano Michihiko -- do not inspire. In speeches yesterday, each of the candidates, whilst criticizing the prime minister and his policy of accommodation with the LDP-New Komeito alliance, revealed his particular weakness. Haraguchi fulminated about the public's loss of faith in the party due to the abandonment of the promises in the 2009 manifesto. Haraguchi seems unaware that 1) manifesto author Ozawa Ichiro and his most of his acolytes decamped a few months ago, leaving a very small audience, at least among Diet members, for the "we have forgotten our roots" message.

Akamatsu's and Kano's candidacies seem more tactical, given their comparatively advanced ages (Akamatsu is 63; Kano 70). Akamatsu represents the potential votes of the party's under-appreciated socialists, while Kano can offer the votes of his own group and the votes of the members with a visceral hatred/fear of a DPJ commitment to participate in the Trans Pacific Partnership. Kano already has a history of vote trading, his support having been a crucial component of Noda Yoshihiko's victory over the Ozawa-supported Kaieda Banri in the 2011 leadership election.

Both Akamatsu and Kano railed against the three-party agreement that made the passage of the social welfare and pension reform bills possible. Noda defended it, and defended the extension of the three party agreement into the fall extraordinary session. Both sides are just blowing smoke, however. The three party agreement has falls into abeyance with Tanigaki's withdrawal from the LDP presidential race and the automatic evaporation on Spetember 8 of the bond issuance bill and electoral reform bill.

-- Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru on Sunday hosted a symposium (E) introducing the ideas that will vault his regional movement into a national political party, the Nihon (or Nippon) Ishin no Kai (the Japan Renewal Party or Japan Restoration Party. By the way, forget about running a search on 日本維新の会 -- what you get is the Facebook page of a Haraguchi Kazuhiko study group of the same name). At the seemingly interminable meeting (five hours in real time) Hashimoto introduced the seven members of the Diet who will today (Tuesday) tender their resignations from their current parties in time for the the JRA's coming out reception on Wednesday. That three of the seven are House of Councillors proportional seat members of the Your Party indicates the prescience of Michael Penn's private circulation article, of August 27, "Yoshimi Watanabe's Your Party in Terminal Crisis."

Of the remaining four defectors, three come from the DPJ and one from the LDP. Matsunami Kenta of the LDP is a proportional seat member of the House of Representatives, and from the Kinki bloc where Osaka is located. That the majority of the JRA's Diet members are proportional seat members indicates the cautious attitude district seat holders are taking with towards to Hashimoto's leap into national politics. That the majority of the defectors are also from the House of Councillors, rather than the more volatile and politically significant House of Representatives, indicates a further lack of certainty among those dissatisfied with the status quo that Hashimoto has coattails.

Also attending and speaking at the meeting were the usual suspects of devolution of power to local governments: former comedian and Miyazaki governor Higashikokubaru Hideo and two of The Three Hiroshis: former Kanagawa Yokohama pretty boy governor mayor Nakata Hiroshi and former revisionist textbook inceptor and Suginami City mayor Yamada Hiroshi, whose Spirit of Japan Party (Nihon soshinto) went nowhere. (J)

That Hashimoto featured these pre-August 2009 election retreads at his talk fest, and indeed wants them to run as Nihon Ishin no Kai candidates, indicates that for all the media interest and public opinion poll enthusiasm for the new party, there is little meat yet on the bones.

-- The deployment of MV-22 Osprey aircraft to the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa received what was ostensibly a significant blow on Sunday from a mass protest (E). Organizers claimed 101,000 persons participated in the rally. Aerial images on television seemed to indicate the size of the crowd was closer to 20,000, though it is possible thousands were, like crowd at the July 16 nuclear protest, hiding under the trees from the blazing sun.

Given that signing off on Osprey operations is electoral poison, it is likely that the final OK will be given by a lame duck Cabinet after after the results of a House of Representatives elections are in. That the U.S. Marine Corps generally gets what it wants means that the effectiveness of the protest is about as doubtful as its crowd numbers.

-- The purported suicide of Financial Services and Postal Reform Minister Matsushita is still the top of the news -- as a such a rare occurrence should be.

I loathe conspiracy theories and theorists but the official narratives so far regarding this case do not hold together. We are supposed to believe that a man found toppled over had hanged himself, or strangled himself with cords of some kind. We are being asked to believe that his security detail did not have a key to his condominium, having to use Minister Matsushita's wife's key to open the condominium front door. We are being asked to believe that he left goodbye messages to his wife, Prime Minister Noda and the Cabinet. We are being asked to believe that the imminent publication of a Shukan Shincho expose of a purported mistress may have pushed Matsushita to take his own life. (J)

As to the last claim, when you are seventy-three, recovering from prostrate prostate cancer and are revealed to have engaged in extra-marital shenanigans, you are well past the "this will ruin my career" stage.

Next up should be revelations of the content of the purported three goodbye notes.

Do I expect to be seeing the actual texts, ever?

No.

-----------------------------------------------

* Demonstrating that British comic writing has been in the dead-pan, self-referential subversion of the narrative voice business for a very long time.

The Cabinet Goes Below 20; the DPJ and the LDP Switch

The Jiji Press poll is the first to show a drop of the support for the Cabinet falling below the usually lethal 20% line, fulfilling a tentative prophecy I made a week ago. Nearly two thirds of those polled (64%) said they disapproved of the Cabinet, a seven point rise from last month's poll.

In terms of which party the voters say they support, 17% said the Democratic Party of Japan, 13% said the Liberal Democratic Party, with the other smaller parties all polling at 4% or below.

As to which party the voters say they say will cast their vote for in the proportional vote in this summer's House of Councillors election, 18% said they were voting for the LDP and only 17% said the DPJ - the first time the polls show the DPJ falling below the LDP among likely voters since the takeover of the government by a DPJ-led coalition. Your Party, the default reformist party stands at nearly 8%.

Which party will you vote for in the proportional voting in the House of Councillors election?

LDP 18.3%
DPJ 17.3%
Your Party 7.8%
New Komeito 4.8%

While the numbers are very bad for both Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and the DPJ, not much will happen in response. The political markets have already largely factored in a drop in the PM's popularity below 20% as a result of his missing his self-imposed end-of-May deadline for a deal on the MCAS Futenma-to-Henoko transfer. The opposition may splash out with a no confidence motion in the House of Representatives. However, the motion will go precisely nowhere given the huge majority of seats the DPJ holds in that chamber.

With no one except perhaps Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro chomping at the bit to become prime minister, the chances of an internal move to replace Hatoyama are exceedingly small. We are less than one month away from the end of the regular Diet session and probably less two months away from a House of Councillors election (the most likely date for an election is July 11, with July 25 a close second). No DPJ member in his or her right mind wants to have the PM resign, a party election to replace him, the selection of a new Cabinet, an attempt to salvage bills from the regular session and then a campaign -- all in two months.

I Don't Know No Hatoyama Cabinet

The pollsters may ask selected voters over the weekend about whether or not they support it. The news media may report about its gatherings, or use its name as a shorthand for the government.

However, after yesterday's Cabinet meeting, the term "Hatoyama Cabinet" ceased to have anything but a technical meaning. The fight, short as it was, over Kamei Shizuka's draft of a law revising the Post Office privatization act, has broken it. You could tell by the body language. When a usually taciturn-to-the-point-of-morose figure like Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi is laughing and gesticulating like an albatross on nitrous oxide trying to take flight, you can be sure the event has hit the skids.

So deep was the wound in the collegiality of the cabinet inflicted by the Prime Minister by his forcing the acceptance of the Kamei draft that participants afterward did not even camouflage their jostling for position at a run for the prime ministership. Nakedly ambitious Internal Affairs and Telecommunications Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro -- a supporter of embattled Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro -- told reporters that what the PM had forced the Cabinet to approve was "the Kamei-Haraguchi bill." National Strategy Minister Sengoku Yoshito, the acknowledged leader of the anti-Ozawa wing of the DPJ and a fierce opponent of Kamei draft, explained his acquiescence to the bill in a calculatingly petulant verbal stiletto to the ribs of Hatoyama:

"Well, it's because I am in the Cabinet, isn't it?" ("Datte, naikaku ni irun da mon.")

Today Prime Minister Hatoyama will face off against Liberal Democratic Party President Tanigaki Sadakazu in Party Leader Question Time. A sad, bizarre, infuriating performance it will be: neither is the leader of anything.