One Simple Answer To A Complex Question / A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

A Nagging Question: How is it that Japan's opposition parties, particularly the Democratic Party of Japan, are now so moribund? Did not the DPJ win a landslide victory in 2009? How can these once high fliers now be so irrelevant?

Something Like An Answer: Holding aside the New Komeito, which is an entirely different genus of political beast from anything else out there, there are only two parties in Japan with deep bases -- the Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party. Commitments to these parties are reliable, in the first case thanks to personal ties, self interest and a recognition of the durability of power elites, in the second in a faith in an ideology and notions of the family.

For the other parties, loyalty is largely a matter of the head, not the heart. In the specific case of the DPJ, its support, save among members of the Rengo league of labor unions, was at its height a kilometer wide and a centimeter deep. When the going got tough, public support evaporated.

As Pink Floyd asked:

Was it love?
Or was it the idea of being in love?

(Link)

During the DPJ's rise in popularity to where its leaders cobbled together a surrogate, but supposedly honest and trustworthy, big tent center-right party, public support arose from out of the latter: the idea of an opposition rather than the actual opposition party in question. The same seemingly holds true for the backing for the other non-Communist opposition parties -- their supporters are not in love with them, they are in love with the idea of being in love with them.

Reviving the DPJ (Link) is thus unlikely on a technical level -- for the most part, its supporters had a crush on it, not a relationship with it.

The Spoilt Democratic Vote (Nut, Meet Bags - A Reprise)

Thanks to the many who left comments on my last post on the depressing published number of persons voting for Suzuki Nobuyuki, a candidate for a Tokyo Metropolitan District seat in the 21 July 2013 House of Councillors election. Your attempts to put me at ease or encourage me to have a little perspective kept me looking at the impossible-to-believe purported 74,465 Tokyo voters who were so driven by intense xenophobia as to write down on their ballot papers the name of a candidate whose main proposal is the closure of Japan's borders to citizens of South Korea.

In my heart, I knew, just knew that that number had to be wrong -- that 1.4% of Tokyo residents could not be so marginalized and filled with blind, ethnic hatred as to vote for such a man.

As it turns out, I was right: the number is wrong. Provably so. The question is only to what extent.

Alert readers probably noted my awkward insertion in the first paragraph of two past participles: "published" and "purported." It is right to ask what is up with that.

A look at the actual results of the votes counted on election night shows that Suzuki Nobuyuki was not credited with having received 74,465 votes, as the news agencies reported. The Tokyo Metropolitan Election Committee credited Suzuki Nobuyuki with having won 74,465.376 votes.

Yes, you read that right.

According to the TMD's electoral authorities, Suzuki Nobuyuki received a non-whole number number of votes.

What?

By any chance did anyone else receive a non-whole number number of votes in Tokyo in this last election?

Yes. One candidate is credited with having received 552,714.570 votes.

Who?

The candidate for the Democratic Party of Japan: Suzuki Kan.

Same surname?

Same surname.

When two candidates share a name, whether it is a surname or a given name, ballots marked with that one name alone are set aside, rather than being destroyed as invalid (for those wondering, in this month's House of Councillors election 3.15% of district ballots nationwide were deemed invalid, 2.24% of district ballots in the TMD). These set-aside ballots are then counted up, with the total then divided and a proportion of the votes given in equal measure to the candidates sharing the name. This is true even when the number of these ballots not divisible by the number of eventual recipients, meaning that a last vote has to be divided into fractions of a vote.

So we know, based upon the official count, that persons wishing to vote for either of the two Suzukis on election day failed to fill out their ballots in a manner that clearly indicated which Suzuki -- the DPJ candidate or the xenophobe -- they were choosing. As a result they had their votes split up by the election committees.

Just how many folks wrote just "Suzuki" - in hiragana, in katakana, in kanji or some combination thereof -- and had their votes set aside and divided up equally between both Suzukis? One would have to ask each and every one of Tokyo’s election committees for their particular total of set aside vote totals.

All 62 of them.

That is a lot of phone calls (Professor Steven Reed of Chuo Daigaku, a project for one of your students).

The gist: for an unknown number of DPJ voters, writing down the surname and just the surname of their candidate would lead to their votes being divided in between their man and a far-right nightmare candidate.

Suzuki Kan's campaign tried to avoid this outcome by asking, not with a great deal of fervor, mind you, that voters write down his full name in hiragana -- i.e., すずきかん .

To his credit -- and credit is in very short supply here -- Suzuki Nobuyuki's campaign posters had his name in kanji - i.e. 鈴木信行. So some attempt at differentiation was made, even though, if only the surname was on the voter's ballot, the ballot would get tossed into the bin of set aside ballots no matter what the writing system used.

One problem is, of course, that writing a person's full name in hiragana feels wrong, especially when the surname is one as common as "Suzuki." Another is that Kan is a really, really, odd given name -- the mind rebels when even thinking about it, much less writing it.

Confusion of identical surnames was further heightened by proximity. By the most perverse of coincidences, the two Suzukis drew successive slots, #14 and #15, on the Tokyo district candidate list. This meant that on the campaign poster boards and in the voting areas, the two candidates out of the 20 on the ballot with two most similar names were right next to each other.

So there were two potential sources of the bleeding of votes from one candidate to the other:

a) ballots where the voter put only the surname and
b) ballots where the voter managed to put a full name down, only it was not the Suzuki he or she wanted but the full name that seemed right.

In the latter case, assuming that voters made personal name switching errors at a constant rate (i.e., setting aside the reality that Nobuyuki sounds pleasanter to the ear than Kan), for every vote Suzuki Nobuyuki lost to a mistaken vote for Suzuki Kan, he received over 7 votes in return (552,714 / 74,465 = 7.422).

How many hundreds or, in my estimation, tens of thousands of votes switched sides is not knowable. Just random error or not realizing there was another Suzuki on the ballot would lead to a significant flow of votes from Suzuki Kan to Suzuki Nobuyuki.

Detractors could point out that 2013 was not the only time the two Suzukis faced off against each other. Indeed, the two were on the ballot in the 2007 House of Councillors election. In that year, Suzuki Kan was credited with having received 780,662.470 votes, while Suzuki Nobuyuki was credited with 21,548.472 votes. The difference, a detractor could say, is that in 2007, Suzuki Nobuyuki was up against Tojo Yuko, the granddaughter of Tojo Hideki, for the maudlin, Japan-is-a-victim vote. With Tojo gone to meet her beloved grandfather, Suzuki was the one choice nut on the ballot.

Point accepted.

The two elections are not entirely commensurate, though. Suzuki Kan in 2007 was the beneficiary of awareness and coverage of DPJ candidates, making it harder for voters to vote for Suzuki Nobuyuki in error. The candidates were also not adjacent to one another, though at #13 and #15 on the 2007 list, they were still in general proximity of one another.

Whether one believes the resulting flows of votes great or insignificant, the presence of two Suzukis certainly means ballots were cast for the wrong Suzuki.

Funny thing about Suzuki Nobuyuki. Even though he was present at the creation of the Isshin Shimpu Party in 1995, was named leader of its Tokyo branch in 2005 and has been supreme leader since 2010, he seems to have run for public office only twice: in the 2007 and 2013 House of Councillors elections. He did not run for a seat in 2010. Indeed, Isshin Shinpu did not have a candidate in the 2010 election.

It seems the only times Suzuki wanted to run is when the DPJ's Suzuki was an incumbent seeking reelection. Hmmm...

Any guesses as to which party, or the supporters of which party, would pay encourage the Isshin Shinpu party to run a candidate capable of stealing votes away from the DPJ's candidate? Could it be the same folks who kicked in some cash encouraged the Isshin Shimpu to run a Matsumura in 2004, when the Communist candidate's name was Imamura?

The one bright, shining aspect of this narrative: unlike the alternative, a Tokyo where legions of subterranean xenophobes now lurk, the Tokyo of dirty electoral tricks -- the hiring of candidates to run in order to confuse voters regarding the identity of rivals -- is the Tokyo I know. It is the same Tokyo that in the 2010 House of Councillors election had two district candidates with the same surname, with fractional results in the end for both, where one of the candidates was an unknown independent and the other was...wait for it...a DPJ House of Councillors member seeking reelection.

I can live in city of silly confusion and trickery. A city of prejudice and jut-jawed ignorance (Suzuki Nobuyuki is a high school dropout) -- that I find hard to bear.

Do The Forces Of Constitutional Revision Have A Chance? (2)

[Part 2 of 2. Part 1 I published yesterday.]

Assuming that everything goes perfectly -- and I do mean perfectly -- for the Liberal Democratic Party in the district seat elections on July 21, and assuming its allies in constitutional revision the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party pick up the majority of the seats remaining after one subtracts the four seats the New Komeito must/will win, the combined forces of constitutional revision will control 123 of the 161 162 seats they need to have a 2/3rds majority in the House of Councillors.

Can the forces of revision win the further 38 39 seats they need to reach the magical 161 162 total?

In addition to voting for the district candidate, voters write either the name of a party member or the name of a party on a separate ballot. These votes are tallied according to party, with the vote for the individual counted as a vote for the party with whom he or she is affiliated.

The 48 seats up for election on this separate ballot are the proportional vote. Seats are divvied up using the d’Hondt method, meaning the vote totals are divided by one, then by two, then by three..with the largest remaining result getting the next available seat.

If you do not want to think to too much about the method but just want the results, here is a great calculator (Tip of the hat to Tobias Harris of Observing Japan).

The first guess one needs to make regarding the inputs, and it is a doozy, is how many folks will show up at the polling stations on July 21. As I insinuated in a post the other day major elections of the past year have featured record-breaking or close-to-record-setting low levels of voter turnout.

The causes of the low level of voter participation in 2013 are not hard to discern:

-a secular reduction in interest in elections since electoral reforms in the 1990s,

-a reduction in interest in politics after the collapse of the credibility of the Democratic Party of Japan as an alternative to the LDP,

- the exhaustion from having had a national election and a change of government only six months earlier and local elections only a few weeks ago,

- ridiculously high support ratings for both the Cabinet and the LDP in the public opinion polls (the demoralization factor) and

- the absence of real policy choice in between the parties.

The last items does not mean that the parties are indistinguishable, for they do offer different mixes of policies. However, none of these mixes is either inspired or inspiring, leading voters more likely to choose, when they show up, the parties that can enact any policies.

To these reasons for sitting out this election out we have to add the possibility of unpleasant weather on election day actively dissuading folks from leaving their homes to go to the polling stations (this summer has been naaaaassssty!).

The number of persons casting ballots I come up with, in a brutish, what-the-hell calculus, is 48,000,000 . That is a whopping 12 million voters down from the House of Councillors elections in 2007 and 2010. It is also a greater drop than the huge fall in between the 2009 and 2012 House of Representatives elections, when 10,000,000 voters who showed up in 2009 failed to show up last year.

The voting rate in this guestimate is nevertheless still more than 44.67% recorded in the 1995 House of Councillors election. The median age of the voters has risen since 1995, and older voters vote more, so that despite all the negative forces listed above, a turnout rate of 46% (based on the latest, July 8 figure from the Ministry for General Affairs and Telecommunications of 104,780,660 persons eligible to vote) seems about right.

Now, how will these votes be divided up?

Let us make two incredibly generous assumptions to critics who find me too solicitous of the LDP, one supposition regarding the DPJ based on atmospherics and one boneheaded assertion. The first is that the LDP does no better in the vote than its current 42% rate of support in public opinion polls, despite the concentration of power the drop in voter participation gives to vote machines. The second is that centrist voters, wary of giving the LDP too much support, will give their votes to the main center-right opposition DPJ, JRP and Your Party in about equal amounts. The third is that public trust in the DPJ has sunk to the point where the Your Party and the DPJ win exactly the same number of votes. The fourth, the dumb one, is that at least 7,000,000 folks plunk down for the New Komeito and its candidates.

The voting numbers I get, in aggregate, are:

LDP 20,000,000
New Komeito 7,000,000
DPJ 5,000,000
Your Party 5,000,000
JRP 4,500,000
JCP 3,500,000
SDP 1,800,000
Other parties 1,200,000

Plugging these raw vote totals into the D’Hondt calculator, the following proportional seat distribution pops out:

LDP 22
New Komeito 7
DPJ 5
Your Party 5
JRP 4
JCP 3
SDP 1
Other parties 0

The projection, biased upon the assumption of no last minute reversal of the decay of support for the DPJ, still only secures only 31 seats for the revisionists, 7 seats short of Constitutional Revision Nirvana.

The fly in the constitutional revision crowd's punch bowl is...surprise! (not really) the NEW KOMEITO. Unless the leaders of the New Komeito or That Which Cannot Be Named tell their voters to not show up on the 21st, their immobile mass will outweigh any projected "rightward shift" in favor of constitutional revision.

I invite readers to play around with the calculator, trying out higher voter turnouts and different support levels based on the public opinion survey the individual reader may fancy.

Fiddle as one might, the leap to the 161 162 seats needed for constitutional revision -- even when making assumptions equivalent to pretty much everything goes the revisionists' way on election eve -- remains just too far off.

Unthinking On Why Abe Will Visit Yasukuni In August

Once we are past the July 21 elections, Sino-Japanese relations will be in a sweet spot. Both China and Japan will have ostensibly new, legitimate leaders, with significant political succession campaigns far off. It will be years before either side has to gin up the paranoia/resentment machine to advance its political program. Both leaders, with their inherited political bona fides, would be in a position to find ways to work together to keep the bilateral relationship on an even keel. Given the tight intermeshing of the economies of the two countries, crippling relations over pride would be daft. This is doubly so because the Chinese economy is going to be entering a rough patch, with growth gearing down sharply from deleveraging and a shift from investment-led to consumption-led growth. It is trebly so because big business in Japan, which is invested in China up to its earlobes, has been an unquestioned and unquestioning backer of Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, Abe will toss the opportunity to make history into history's dustbin and go to Yasukuni in August. He not do so on the August 15 defeat day but on another day (I have bet that it will be August 12) -- not with a herd of lawmakers and flunkies in tow but quietly, without warning.

Why? Abe does not have to prove anything. The revisionist base loves him, whether he goes to Yasukuni or not. The collapse of the Japan Restoration Party means there is no more threat to the LDP from the right.

If Abe goes to Yasukuni there will be anti-Japanese riots in China. Xi Jinping will never come to Japan for a summit. Ship intrusions into the area around the Senkakus will skyrocket.

To which I can only respond, "And how will all these outcomes not fulfill the predictions regarding Chinese behavior that Abe and his fellow travelers have been making since...forever?"

In addition to the self serving opportunism of instigating exactly the kind of hysteria and overreaction in China the revisionist right has prophesied, Abe has purely personal reasons for going to Yasukuni in August. The first is psychohistorical: he has never forgiven himself for failing to go in August 2007. Second, since their accessions to power, Xi Jinping has made not the least sacrifice of political capital in order to reach out to Abe. Unlike Park Geun-hye, who has to be seen giving Abe the cold shoulder in order to bury talk of her father's service to Japan, Xi is free to extend the hand of friendship to Abe. For reasons of either cowardice or prejudice, Xi has done nothing.

He will do nothing.

A terrible error.

Abe has been wearing a mask of affability these past six months in line with the needs of his party in the run up to the House of Councillors election. Once past the election, Abe will let down the facade of buoyant happiness, reverting to his usual state of umbrage. We have already seen flashes of resentment creep out from behind the mask, the anger he feels toward anyone showing him disrespect, in Abe's Facebook attacks on anti-Trans Pacific Partnership demonstrators, Tanaka Hitoshi and Hosono Goshi. Once past the election, Abe's brittle edginess, shared by many in his Cabinet, will no longer need to be hidden away.

So many of the projects dear to the revisionists are closed to Abe. Garrison the Senkakus? Suicidal, stupid. Revise Article 96, Article 9 and the rest of the Constitution? Not enough votes in the House of Councillors for the necessary 2/3rds majority.

Going to Yasukuni is the default dream realization -- and Abe will revert to it once the election is over and done. Provocative, spiteful will the visit be, yet not threatening except in rhetorical terms.

After Abe takes the plunge world opinion will fault him for his lack of sensitivity and inability to appreciate the fragility of Japan's position in East Asia.

World opinion will, however be drawing a bead at the wrong target. Those lacking in sense and sensitivity are in Beijing. Those afraid of an objective accounting for the past are there too.

Can one fault the Chinese for failing to understand Japan? Not really. Power and wealth have muddled brains. A global fear of losing access to the China bounty has clipped tongues.

At the end of the day, at the very end, the interests of East Asia's princeling leaders are best served by conflict between the nations. Marginal territorial and history disputes are helpful distractions, turning the attention of citizens away from such questions as "Are the children and grandchildren of past leaders really the best persons for these jobs?" and "What is there in this aristocracy thing for me and my family, anyway?"

The July 21, 2013 Elections - By the Numbers

Total number of candidates: 433

Total number of seats up for election 121

Number of district seat candidates: 271

Number of district seats up for election: 73

Number of proportional seat candidates: 162

Number of proportional seats up for election: 48

Total number of candidates, by party:

LDP 78
JCP 63
DPJ 55
JRP 44
Your Party 34
New Komeito 21
Life 11
SDP 9
Green Breeze 8
Other 83

Support for the parties (NHK poll of 7-9 June 2013)

LDP 41.7%
JCP 2.2%
DPJ 5.8%
JRP 1.5%
Your Party 1.5%
New Komeito 5.1%
Life 0.1%
SDP 0.4%
Green Breeze 0.0%
Other 0.2%
None of the above 34.6%
Don't know/can't say: 7.0%

The number of seats "X would have to win in order to do Y"

- parties nominally in support of constitutional revision to have the 2/3rds majority of seats in the House of Councillors necessary to revise the Constitution: 100

- the LDP to have all by itself majorities in both Houses of the Diet: 72

- the LDP and the New Komeito to have majorities in both Houses of the Diet: 63


Voter turnout - the last time

- last time these seats were up for election (29 July 2007): 58.64%

- last House of Councillors election (11 July 2010): 57.92%

- last national election (House of Representatives, 16 December 2012):　59.32% (historical low)

- latest major election (Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, 23 June 2013): 43.50% (second lowest ever)


Voter Turnout - Lowest

House of Councillors: 44.50% (23 July 1995)

House of Representatives: 59.32% (16 December 2012)

Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly: 40.80% (6 July 1995)

[Complete revival of the (Lack of) Spirit of '95 will guarantee Abe a historic victory on the 21st. It will also put a permanent asterisk mark next to the victory, with the explanation "Earned But Not Merited"]


Demographics

% of candidates who are women: 24% (second highest % in last 30 years)

% of candidates who are younger than 50 years of age: 43%

% of candidates who are 60 years of age or older: 26%

The Fab Four on Tour

Chairman of the LDP Election Strategy Council Koga Makoto spent some quality time yesterday with the Yamanashi Prefecture LDP Prefectural League. It was the last stop on the seven-week "Extraordinary Contrition Tour" organized by Koga for the top four executives of the LDP in the wake of the devastating losses in the July 29 House of Councillors elections.

Koga, Secretary-General Ibuki Bunmei, Policy Research Council Chairman Tanigaki Sadakazu and Chairman of the General Council Nikai Toshihiro visited the prefectural party chapters, the prefectural Kōmeitō offices and the local offices of support groups such as the Japan War-Bereaved Association (sixty-two years and counting) in 42 prefectures .

O tsukaresama deshita.

It is really too bad that the LDP has not made a special effort to document and celebrate this fantastic tour of the Japanese outback. The boys have tried so hard.

So I am trying to help.

The Yonyaku - Magical "Must We?" Tour

Magical "Must We?" Tour
(I'm a) Fool With A Bill
Lying
Buru Jei Ue
Your Budget We'll Blow
I Am So Worthless

Hello (LDP) Goodbye (DPJ)
Protected Rice Fields Forever
Pretty Lame
Baby You're a Poor Sap
All We Need's Your Votes

But I have only a sophomoric sense of humor...and I don't have Photoshop.