It Could Have Been A Lot Worse

In yesterday's post, I lamented that the August 15 anniversary of the end of World War II was the worst of days, due to the absurd nationalist and ehtnocentric emotions the anniversary raises.

However, we have made it through to Thursday, Amaterasu be praised. A lot of bad, stupid events took place and dumb things were said, but all turned out pretty much for the best.

- The fishing boat full of Hong Kong activists, despite the Japan Coast Guard's vigorous efforts to encourage -- and by "encourage" I mean this...

to not try to make landfall at any of the Senkaku Islands, could not take the subtle hint and proceeded close enough to the shore of Uojima for seven of the activists, carrying inexplicably the flags of both the PRC and the ROC, to wade ashore.

CCTV, in a breaking news flash, depressingly referred to the charade as a "successful landing."

On shore, the seven were met by a company of JCG personnel and Okinawa Prefecture police -- a blend of security forces the activists should have thanked their lucky stars for, as coast guard personnel tend to play rough. They are the proud cowboys of Japan's security establishment and have a very short list of rules of engagement.

Despite the reduced chance of their being harmed, two of the activists turned around and immediately swam back to the boat. Perhaps they lost heart; perhaps they had a live interview wairing for them. The remaining five were relieved of their flags and arrested on violations of immigration laws.

Later, after night had fallen, the Coast Guard took control of the fishing vessel, arresting the nine remaining activists on board.

No one got hurt; the Chinese got their testosterone shot. If Japanese authorities learned anything from the Chinese fishing boat collision case, they will put the activists on a flight to Hong Kong, deporting them for being particularly unsuccessful illegal immigrants.

- President Lee Myung-bak, who threw a wrench into Japan-South Korea relations by visiting Dokdo on August 10, doubled down on his diplomatic faux pas by inviting the Heisei Emperor to visit South Korea on the condition that the emperor issue a contrite apology to the peoples of the Korean peninsula for Japan's occupation and annexation of the land a hundred years ago (E). That the Emperor did this the last time he visited the ROK Prime Minister Kan Naoto did this on the 100th anniversary of Korea's annexation seems to have not satisfied President Lee's critics.

For a guy born in Osaka, Lee sure is tough on his original home. Then again, for the suspicious act of having emerged from a uterus in Japan, the president of the Republic of Korea is a presumed puppet of Japan.

Lesson: choose your uterus wisely!

[Choosing the right uterus is only half the story, of course, even in these oligarchical times. The Hatoyama Brothers, Yukio and Kunio, made an excellent choice, only to proceed through their own particular brand of solipsism to make a hash of their advance placement in life.]

- The demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul attracted 300 persons, according to Japanese news reports. In the pouring rain, the famous statue of the young seated girl looked as though she were crying,

While particularly a effective and affective work of art yesterday, the statue has to be moved to a less provocative location. It is, of course, a stand-in for the sex slaves themselves, who cannot, due to their advanced age, keep up the weekly protests much longer.

However, the statue, in its permanence, closes minds. From the point of view of a Japanese diplomat or a Japanese politician, the statement "We will always be here" provokes the response, "Fine. We will always ignore you."

- The two members of the Cabinet who paid their respects at Yasukuni yesterday did so in a private capacity, as they had promised, lessening somewhat the fallout from the visits. They also demonstrated, in their press availabilities after their visits, that neither would make it past the first round of an "evil genius" competition.

- After reporting on the rest of the day's sordid events, NHK's 9 p.m. broadcast a special segment on a heretofore little-publicized facet of the Pacific War: the dispatch of eleven agents from the infamous Nakano military intelligence school to the outer, tiny islands of the Okinawa chain in last year of the war. The goal: to infiltrate local society in preparation of convincing the islanders to sacrifice themselves for the defense of the main islands.

The piece focused on the effort of two sisters to record, as long as persons of at least a certain age in 1945 are still alive, memories of a school teacher who arrived in January 1945 and soon became renowned for his kindness and competence.

The school teacher, was, as it turned out, one of these agents.

When Allied forces arrived near the island, the teacher was one of the local authorities who convinced islanders to retreat in to the forests. Once in the forest, the teacher, who had heretofore been known only for his sweet disposition, suddenly began talking about everyone preparing for a glorious death in battle (gyokusai - literally "a crushing of a jewel"). The islanders, in their good sense, thought he had gone insane and ignored him.

Some time later, after the war was over, Allied intelligence found the agent still at work on the island, arrested him, and took him away.

It was the last anyone on the island saw of him.

Now for the sisters, the recording of the activities of the agent, who went on to live a life of obscure normalcy as a middle school teacher on Honshu, has a deeply personal cast. While on the island, the teacher started living with a local woman, impregnating her. She later gave birth to a son.

That woman was the sisters' aunt and the boy their cousin.

The message repeated throughout the piece was the way the leadership in Tokyo considered the inhabitants of Okinawa expendable (sute ishi - "stones tossed away"). Their value. at least as regards the male inhabitants, was as a potential guerrilla force tying down the Allies, inflicting casualties, and slowing the Allied advance as the main islands prepared to repel an amphibious invasion.

Insufficient reflection on the wrongs done in the war, both on the small and the vast scales?

Not exactly.

Photo image credit: Yomiuri Online

Pondering Yosano's Moves

"Rely on your own powers. If you can't see the point of your opponent's move, assume there isn't any."

From the time I first read this rule of playing chess, one of 64 basic rules proposed by the American chess master Bruce Pandolfini , I have always thought it the one least applicable to daily life. It seems reasonable to assume you can see everything there is to see on an 8X8 board. However, hacking through the thickets of quotidian mendacity and obfuscation with the razor of "if I cannot make sense of it, it must not make sense" seems a direct path to a misapprehended reality.

The phrase --"If you can't see the point of your opponent's move, assume there isn't any" -- has been echoing in my head these past few days. I have been trying to make sense of Yosano Kaoru's declaration of his intent to leave the Liberal Democratic Party in order to co-found a new party with Hiranuma Takeo. What could be the point of this spontaneous vernal defection? Yosano previously turned down an opportunity to leave the party at the invitation of Hatoyama Kunio, who has more than enough money in his pockets to bankroll anything the pair might want to achieve. There is already a micro-party in the Diet (the Your Party) devoted to fighting for of government fiscal discipline -- so a Yosano liberated from the LDP has nothing to offer the public on that score. On the other side of the ledger sidling up to Hiranuma, one of the giants of historical revisionist camp (a not surprising stance, considering he is the adopted son of this guy), means that from the git-go, the new party has to give up any hope of pretending to be the torch bearer of prudent, business-centric conservatism. Yosano did not even have five Diet members lined up and ready to go, the bare minimum one needs to receive state election campaign funding.

So, no identifiable ideological stance, no money and an insufficient handful of uninspiring old faces. Over at Twisting Flowers, the erudite Ethan Chua has been similarly flummoxed.

After several days of staring, the best explanation I can come up with is that Yosano wants to close out his career as his own man. Sick of being beholden to the LDP, he will present himself as a candidate for one of the ten Tokyo Metropolitan House of Councillors district seats, five of which are up for election in July. Too physically weak to run as an independent, he is drafting a sympathetic bunch of ageing LDP war horses (or former LDP war horses) in order to

1) get the public to pay for his last campaign and

2) have a backstop of winning a seat through the proportional party list, if his attempt to win a district seat fails.

I am just guessing here; I have no proof that this whole brouhaha is meant only to win good old Kaoru a seat from which he can rail at the various mediocrities one sees occupying otherwise valuable space in the political realm. I refuse, however, to believe Yosano Kaoru would ever make a pointless move. Improbable, yes, but not pointless.

Later - Sigma1 has made an excellent point in a comments: having Hiranuma as the co-leader will likely entice right wing voters into supporting the new micro-party, with a consequent further erosion of the support base of the LDP.

Later still - This post has been edited for greater clarity and diction.

Third Time's The Charm - LDP Edition

It was another tough Sunday press event for the increasingly haggard-looking Tanigaki Sadakazu. The Liberal Democratic Party's president, on a probably poorly thought-through visit to Nago City in Okinawa, had hardly finished his canned demand for Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's resignation when he was asked to comment on the other Hatoyama, younger brother Kunio, who in a televised interview announced he would be leaving the LDP and forming a new party, with his estimated date of departure sometime during the Golden Week holidays. Kunio became the third well-known LDP member in last two weeks to issue a threat to leave and form a new party if Tanigaki did not not himself resign.

Tanigaki, so far from home and so close to becoming a footnote in Japanese political history, could only sputter that he was not informed as to the content of H. Kunio's announcement.

(Not an issue to hang one's hopes on, I am afraid. The discovery of content inside a Hatoyamo Kunio announcement would be a thing of wonder.)

Coming on the heels of Masuzoe Yoichi's appearance at the Foreign Correspondent's Club and Yosano Kaoru's essay for Bungei Shunju, both of which resulted in no appreciable punishment for the perpetrator (Masuzoe was replaced at the last minute as lead questioner in the House of Councillor's budget committee interpellations, which meant that the LDP had a lesser mortal asking the Cabinet the LDP's questions) H. Kunio's announcement pushes the core LDP leadership group to the brink. The party's most popular, most respected (at least in bureaucratic and business circles) and richest members have all now threatened to jump ship and form new parties if Tanigaki does not step down. It is inconceivable that the party leaders can just hunker down and hope for the storm to pass. They have to either expel the rebels, strip them of all party privileges or accede to their demands.

All in all, it looks like it is going to be a very interesting Monday at LDP headquarters.

The Hatoyamas Have Things Made Up

A distinguished professor of Japanese Studies emailed me a while ago asking me about one bit of Prime Minister Hatoyama's policy speech which he found incomprehensible, rather than just reprehensible.

"Urakudari (裏下り）?" the good professor wondered, "I am unfamiliar with this term." He asked me whether I had come across it.

I confessed that I had not. A cursory search of the Internet turned up no definitions.

The good professor was flabbergasted. Surely the PM would not use a made-up word in his official policy address to the Diet?

Well, I have some good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, yes, there was no such term as urakudari.

The good news is that everything has been all cleared up. Based on an inquiry from Yamauchi Koichi of the Everyone's Party -- who like the professor wanted to know what the heck he is supposed to think urakudari means -- the Cabinet passed an official proclamation (kakugi kettei) on Friday determining that henceforth urakudari means "reemployment that cannot be confirmed to be amakudari conducted via the good offices of government ministries and agencies but that nevertheless cannot help but raise suspicions that it is amakudari conducted as a matter of routine through these good offices."(「府省庁によるあっせんは確認されていないが、事実上の天下りあっせん慣行と疑念を抱かせる再就職」).

So there.

Oh Hatoyama-san. Isn't it great to have a Cabinet that can retroactively define the words you make up?

Too bad the Cabinet does not have a similar power to retroactively erase Yosano Kaoru's astonishing line of questioning in the Diet on Friday, when he used a story he heard from your gnat-brained brother to accuse you of being not just "the king of tax evaders" but also guilty of lying to the Diet and the populace about your knowledge of your mother's donations to your political funding organization? He also called you a yakuza for having your underlings take the fall for crimes you pushed them to commit -- but that was more a theatrical flourish than a crippling accusation.

Wow, talk about a blindsiding by a member of the Diet who until Friday was known for his geniality, perspicacity and tact...and betrayal by another stupid man (for it is a stupid man indeed who places party above family) whom until Friday could smilingly call you aniki.

All that is destroyed now. No Cabinet proclamation can repair the damage that has been done.

Apples and oranges

Over at Global Talk 21, Okumura Jun has an excellent analysis up of the current political status of the prime minister, at least according to an exegesis drawing upon the public opinion polls of Fuji Television.

Okumura-san indicates that he has his doubts as to one of my recent assertions--that the prime minister can win back some of his lost popularity simply through having a run of good days either through accommodating the opposition in order to pass legislation or, when the lay of land is right, challenging the opposition when it adopts a transparently opportunistic policy stance.

Of course the Fukuda administration could always try to win on policy. But I don't think that sweating the small stuff, such as tinkering with the Late-Term Elderly Medical Care Insurance system, is going to have a major impact. I don’t believe that the Hokkaido SG-8 Summit and a squishy agreement on greenhouse gases or any other combination of diplomatic or national security issues are going to be winners either.

Okumura-san goes on to speculate that the only policy program likely to attract enough public attention to affect the popularity numbers is the budget agenda-setting reform package scheduled to be tackled in a lengthy extraordinary session in the fall.

Given that the number of days until the end of the regular Diet session is growing few indeed, Okumura-san is possibly right.


But taking the Fuji Television Cabinet support figures for the Cabinet of Abe Shinzō and comparing them with the Fuji TV figures of the present Cabinet, Okumura-san may be making a fundamental error.

The two sets of numbers may not be comparable.

The Fukuda Cabinet and the current leadership of the ruling coalition parties are unpopular for failing to understand the mechanics of how to cope with a functioning, if limited, opposition. The people are furious that the ruling coalition has tried to force legislation and appointments, knowing full well that the Democratic Party of Japan and its allies were going to oppose them in the House of Councillors.

The voters do not like to see their representatives engaged in contests over who can be the most pig-headed time wasters of all.

Abe Shinzō, his Cabinet and his administration became unpopular not because they were ineffective. Quite on the contrary, they became unpopular because they could do whatever they wanted...and they were running amok.

What did they decide was going to be their major task in in December, after the successful visit to China? Was it revealing the state of the pension accounts and promising to putting them to rights? Noooooo. It was

a) the establishment of a Ministry of Defense and
b) the readmission to the LDP of the exiles, the Diet members expelled from the party by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichirō for having opposed his plan to privatize the post office.

That second priority -- b) -- set off a detonation. The bald move repudiated the imputed will of the people, slapping them in their faces. The people had handed a landslide victory to Koizumi's LDP in the 2005 House of Representatives election...and now Abe was telling the voters that their judgment had been flawed.

This was only the first of a series of actions that Abe and his cabal foisted upon the nation not because they were popular or solved particular problems but because Abe and his long-denied fantabulist brothers and sisters finally had their hands on the tiller--and coalition majorities in both House of the Diet.

- Education reform emphasizing patriotism and order.

- The legal basis for a national referendum permitting amendments to the Constitution.

- Mandates, both open and secret, forcing the national broadcaster NHK to feature stories on the abductees at every opportunity.

At the same time, real scandals--in the pension system, in the offices of the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries--were left uninvestigated, shunted to the side because the ruling coalition had unbeatable majorities in both Houses of the Diet.

Throughout the regular Diet session, the government railroaded every single piece of legislation through. Not one concession was made to the opposition.

The voters saw what was happening...and Amaterasu bless them, in July of 2007 they said, "No more of this. You will not do whatever you want. You will have limits on your freedom of action."

In his current post, Okumura-san notes that Abe Shinzō's popularity rose with the Cabinet reshuffle in August 2007. What he leaves out is that everyone agreed that the Second Abe Cabinet was a cast of all-stars--far more experienced and moderate than the Cabinet it was replacing, its members far more likely to accommodate a revitalized and now constitutionally relevant opposition.

Guess what? For the most part, those all-stars whom both Okumura-san and I hailed-- these are the ministers we have now. The folks inside the ruling coalition just do not get any better--Minister of Law Hatoyama Yukio and the yonyaku, excepted.

The reason the Cabinet is unpopular now is that the yonyaku, not the Cabinet, misunderstood and mishandled every bit of legislation and every appointment since September. The yonyaku, trying to rebuild the LDP's relationship with its traditional client base, failed to cut deals with the DPJ, choosing instead to try demonstrate its worthiness through a show of the indomitability of the ruling coalition's will.

As if that was what the people wanted. Ever.

What the people wanted was for Fukuda to be Fukuda; for Yosano to be Yosano; for Kōmura to be Kōmura; for Masuzoe to be Masuzoe...for the men and women of good intentions and wisdom to work out compromises with the opposition.

That is what the Cabinet was expected to do. It is not popular now because its members were not given the chance to run the government based on the political situation--but based on what the grandees of the LDP wanted the situation to be.

There has been, all in all, a stunning lack of realism in the actions of the ruling coalition since its wounding in the 2007 House of Councillors election.

Hence my feeling that things are on the mend for the prime minister. Just doing what governments do every day--passing nice-sounding but meaningless legislation to cover everyone's backside, accepting legislative amendments proposed by the opposition, calling opposition leaders aside for private talks about potential political appointees, watching the calendar--will be a vast improvement over what we have seen over the last eight months.

If Fukuda Yasuo and the members of his Cabinet (pax Hatoyama) can just do government--not revolution, not shock therapy,just government--then there is a chance that the political climate in Nagata-chō could more clement for the PM. There is evidence that Fukuda has at least chucked the "thank you for all your votes at the party presidency election" persona in favor of a "I will keep my own council and if you don't like it you can find somebody else to be your prime minister"--something he should have done in January.

Which presages peace and stability until the autumn...when the postponed death of Tanakaism will have to be faced at last...and when the LDP will be forced to look itself in the mirror and decide what it is to become.

Later - Apologies for all the typos in the original version of this text.

But Before That All Happens - The DPJ Has Loyalty Issues

In the vote for or against the nomination of Watanabe Hiroshi to become the Vice Governor of the Bank of Japan, the Democratic Party of Japan had three of its members defy the party by giving "yes" votes to the nomination:

Watanabe Hiroshi, a former Minister of Posts and Telecommunications (fat chance of him being a reformer)

Ōe Yasuhiro, a previously recognized traitor and

Fujiwara Masashi, a former Kansai Electric executive

all of whom are at-large proportional seat councillors--and thus players with constitutional fire.

Watanabe and Ōe are lost causes, incapable of of displaying respect for party discipline. They should have been canned by DPJ leader Ozawa Ichirō long ago. That they are troublemakers Ozawa himself brought into the party--both are former members of Ozawa's Liberal Party--makes their continued presence a black mark on Ozawa's leadership ledger.

A further two DPJ members abstained and three absented themselves (one of the absentees is actually a member of the DPJ-allied Shinryokufūkai) from the vote.

The various rebellious actions required DPJ floor managers to be a little more active than usual, as the DPJ leadership's margin of victory in the "Nay" vote narrowed to only 6 votes. In the case of the Mutō Toshirō rejection, the margin had been 23 votes; in the Tanami Kōji vote the margin had shrunk to just 13 votes.

DPJ Party Secretary General Hatoyama Yukio shrugged off the desertions as "One of those things that are bad but cannot be helped."

In a sense he is right--the defections by Watanabe, Ōe and Fujiwara in the end signified nothing. Indeed, the defections could be seen as an ruse, a means of giving the ruling LDP/Komeitō coalition a false hope that they are only a few votes short of winning back control of the House of Councillors--when in fact, they are a few votes short of winning back control of the House of Councillors.

Then again, Hatoyama may not be the person to be asking about his extra-party activities, especially today--as today marks the opening of the Hatoyama Juku, the school for aspiring politicians Yukio has co-founded with his brother, LDP member and Minister of Justice Hatoyama Kunio.

Inside the Hatoyama Mind

My favorite quote of the week:

「もう一度、語学の勉強をしたほうがいい。」

"It would be a good thing for him to go back and do language study one more time."

That was former National Police Agency bureaucrat and House of Representatives member Kamei Shizuka's assessment when asked about Justice Minister Hatoyama Kunio's contention on February 13 that the infamous Kumamoto vote buying case could not be called enzai (冤罪)—a false prosecution.

(An aside, but Kamei Shizuka's emergence as a severe critic of the excesses of the criminal justice system, including his steadfast opposition to the death penalty, is becoming distressing. Pleasantly distressing, that is.)

The Mainichi Shimbun, echoing the feelings of many within the LDP, calls Hatoyama Kunio's continued presence in the Cabinet "the government's Achilles heel." His tenure in the country's most somber post even after hilariously bizarre statements ("my friend of a friend who is an Al-Qaeda member has entered Japan on numerous occasions using false identities" "Does a death warrant really need my signature—can't we make the process more automated?") have made it impossible to fire anyone for anything.

The anti-government coalition is currently calling for the resignation or dismissal of Minister of Defense Ishiba Shigeru as a response to the MSDF Atago's collision with a fishing vessel. Were Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo to try to can Ishiba, however, someone could very easily ask:

"Is this really a firing offense? What about Hatoyama Kunio?"

To which there is no adequate response.

The February 21 Mainichi article speculates that Hatoyama Kunio's continued survival might be attributable to the Democratic Party of Japan's refusal to press for his departure...and that the DPJ's lack of enthusiasm for a Hatoyama Kunio resignation arises from a wish to spare his brother, DPJ Secretary-General Hatoyama Yukio, further embarrassment. The article notes that the two brothers intend to open a training center for future politicians in April—and guesses that no one in the DPJ wants to undermine the inauguration of the center.

Just what either of the Hatoyamas, both of whom are prone to politically tone-deaf utterances, thinks he could teach to aspiring politicians escapes me:

"Please sit down. Welcome to your first day at the Hatoyama Institute. How does one become a successful politician? If my many years in politics have taught me anything—and my brother will back me up on this observation—you need to be born into an extremely wealthy household--this first of all--and your father has to be head of a major political party.

After you have these basics down, you can then move on to the more esoteric qualities..."