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.

Bang On - Congrats To NHK And The Electorate

All's well that ends well: the responses to the NHK poll question trying to get some sense of whether or not the voters will show up on House of Councillors election day provided a precise, if not very accurate, answer.

Immediately prior to the 2010 election, 71% of voters told NHK they would be voting. 57.92% eventually did.

Subtract the 13% who were kidding themselves and you get the right answer.

Immediately prior to this election, 66% of voters told NHK they would be voting. 52.61% [Link] eventually did.

Subtract the 13% who were kidding themselves and you get the right answer.

Congratulations to NHK for yanking out a response that is consistently and reliably wrong as regards voter turnout.

Congratulations also to the voters. Despite an an underwhelming ruling party's holding an overwhelming and unchanging lead for months, making Sunday's election more of a coronation than a contest, they still turned out. At the third worst rate in history, to be sure, but well above the nadir number of 44.50% recorded in the 1995 House of Councillors election.

It takes a special sort of discipline and commitment to show up when the outcome is not in doubt and one person's vote, statistically and realistically, cannot count.

Bless the absurdly believing populace of this blessed land.

Are The Voters Set To Surprise The Cynics?

According to the NHK poll of July 13-15, 66% of the voters are expressing either a strong commitment to or an interest in voting in Sunday's House of Councillors election -- a surprisingly high figure. (Link)

Polls on intentions tend to overshoot actual voting by about 10%. For example, the NHK poll figure in the week before the 2010 election was 71%. The actual turnout rate was just under 58%.

With a 13 point drop off, the voter turnout this year will be around 53% -- a much better figure than the one I have projected.

Persons arguing for a decent turnout rate can also point to positve early voting figures. Over 4.5 million voters have already cast ballots in early voting, a 12% increase in early voting from only 3 years ago. (Link - J)

Higher rates of voting are usually seen as favoring non-machine parties over the voting machines of the LDP, the Communists and the New Komeito -- though given its current broad base of support, it is probably not accurate to refer to the LDP as a machine party.

Just which non-machine parties are set to benefit from increased voter participation is a BIG question. The support numbers or likely-to-vote-for numbers for the Democratic Party of Japan, the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party are all over the map.



To be fair, the figures for the LDP and the Communists are all over the map too.

So what happens in the case where, let us say 53% of the electorate shows up and votes in the proportional race slanting in the way the crazy Asahi Shimbun figures indicate, with me doling out the undecideds proportionately (with a little boost to the SDP for old times' sake)?

According to the d'Hondt calculator highlighted the other day, the proportional seat wins will be divided up thusly:

LDP 25
New Komeito 6
DPJ 4
Your Party 4
JRP 4
JCP 4
SDP 1
Other parties 0

While this result along with projected district wins gives the ruling coalition a safe majority in the House of Councillors, it still leaves the forces of constitutional revision out of luck -- unless, of course, there are sleeping constitutional revisionists in the ranks of the DPJ members of the House of Councillors just aching to join forces with the LDP, the JRP and the Your Party. The above distribution would, however, put the LDP over the 72 seats its needs to say hasta la vista to its coalition partner the New Komeito -- assuming that the LDP wins every district seat it is contesting, of course.

Getting back to the issue of turnout, there is another reasons to doubt it will be even close to what the NHK intentions figures indicate, in addition to history showing the predictions to be inflated. The 65% response rate to the July 13-15 telephone survey is way up from the normal 50%-55% response rate. Intuition tells us that a large number of respondents in the intentions survey were role playing, demonstrating interest in the political process because they feel they should be doing so. While demonstrating the proper respect toward democracy is laudable in a society where a faux contented conformance with the current operative reality is rewarded more strongly than it is in other societies, responding because you feel you should will skew results toward recent changes in momentum and atmospherics rather than reveal significant changes in voting decisions.

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.

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%

Afloat Upon A Raft Of Unusual Stability

Just how aberrant are the levels of support for for this Abe Cabinet, compared to the support ratings for the cabinets of previous prime ministers?

Here is the graph of the cabinet support ratings of the first year (in Hatoyama Yukio's case, the seven months) in office of every prime minister since Keizo Obuchi (1998-2000).



[Click on the image to see a larger version in a new window.]

Freakish? You bet. Not even the cabinet of fabled outlier Koizumi Jun'chiro (green dotted line) enjoyed the stability of support that Abe 2 (thick red line with nodes) has enjoyed over its first five months in existence.

The real sad sack tale? Kan Naoto (dotted yellow line). Starts out with 61% support in May; has 65% support in September.

What happens in between, in July and August? A collapse of support to 39% and 41% respectively -- just in time for the July 2010 House of Councillors election. The ruling coalition loses control of the House and thus control of the legislative agenda. Short circuited is the Democratic Party of Japan's plan to rule the country based upon a new set of priorities and principles. Kan and his successor Noda Yoshihiko must go hat in hand to the Liberal Democratic Party, begging the LDP to please, please, please vote for bills drawn from the LDP's policy program.

None of that kind of nonsense going on now, is there?

Data source: NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute

Do Not Study Too Hard, Hosono-san

Contrary to a heretofore unknown rule that cabinet members should not challenge the prime minister in party elections, Minister of (deep breath) the Environment, the Restoration from and Prevention of Nuclear Accident and Nuclear Power Policy and Administration (i.e. - the haaardest working man in the government), unfaithful husband and hot young hunk of political man meat Hosono Goshi is reportedly studying a run for the post of leader of the Democratic Party of Japan. It seems a host of front benchers from amongst the supporters of former Prime Minister Kan Naoto, Policy Research Coumcil Chairman Maehara Seiji and former Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Kano Michihiko, want Hosono to become the DPJ's face, giving the party at least a chance at fighting the brainless default vote for the Liberal Democratic Party or much worse, the as-yet unnamed and unfounded national party of 42 year-old Osaka wunderkind Hashimoto Toru.

"Studying" (kento shite iru/kento ni haita) in a political context usually means quite the opposite of the usual meaning of the word. When a government official or a party official says, "We are studying the matter" what he/she is usually saying is, "You have asked an incredibly stupid question about a wild hypothetical. I have not the least intention of answering your question you rancid excuse for a journalist. Now sit down and shut up."

However, in this instance, Hosono, whom we know can sometimes put his brain in park, may indeed be studying a bid for the party leadership in the usual sense of the word "study."

Why will Hosono, after his brief period of study (he will be making an announcement today) likely not challenge incumbent prime minister Noda Yoshihiko, who otherwise would have a lock on the DPJ leader election?

Having a fourth DPJ prime minister since August 2009 makes the party look stupid - This was the reason Maehara gave to his supporters when he met them at lunch yesterday (J). Unfortunately, Maehara group members went to Hosono in the evening and before the cameras presented him with a written request to run. Hosono received the request, responding, "The election of a party leader is to be approached with trepidation. In that, my feeling has not changed." (J)

Seen another way, were Hosono to run and win, he would be the fifth party leader since 2009, an even further indication of party flightiness.

Putting a new bright face on the party does not work - The LDP tried to save the House of Councillors election of 2007 by naming the young Abe Shinzo, a man with a history of underachievement, as the party's fresh face. It then revved up the public relations machine (remember the egregious Newsweek Asia edition cover story comparing Abe Akie to Jacqueline Kennedy?).

The result was not quite as salubrious as planned. (E)

Then there was Fukuda Yasuo's surprise resignation in 2008 in order to open the way for the happy-go-lucky, Akihabara-loving Aso Taro to be the face of the party in a snap election in the fall.

That did not pan out, due to a little something referred to as the Lehman Brothers Crash.

Then there was Hatoyama Yukio's sudden resignation as prime minister in June 2010, simultaneously purging himself and the scandal-hobbled Ozawa Ichiro from the leadership, allowing Kan Naoto, Mr. Clean, to take over in time to save the DPJ from a loss of its majority in the July House of Councillors election.

That did not work out as planned, either. (E)

Policies and party image, it seems, matter.

Why take the hit when you can pick up the pieces? - With the DPJ likely to suffer a crushing losses in the next round of elections, the leader, whoever he is, will have to resign to take responsibility for the defeats.

Why be that leader? Why not bide one's time and run for the party leadership in the aftermath of the electoral debacle, taking up the role of the architect of the party's resurgence?

Later - The news media are reporting that Hosono, unlike that fateful night under street lamp with Yamamoto Mona, is doing the sensible thing and not succumbing to flattering attention. (J)

Mr. Noda's Ambivalent Attitude Toward The National Bureaucracy

The conventional wisdom state that Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko is a tool/enabler of a resurrected national bureaucracy.

Signs of the return of bureaucratic power include:

- the reinstitution of the right of bureaucrats, particularly the head of the Cabinet Legislative Office, to testify in the Diet

- the full acceptance of a plan to raise the consumption tax to 10% -- a longtime dream of the Ministry of Finance (actually their dream is to send the consumption tax rate even higher).

This a corollary of Noda's having moved directly from the position of Finance Minister to the premiership. Former prime minister Kan Naoto made the same move in June of 2010, and seemingly the first words out of his mouth upon taking over as the country's leader were that taxes will need to be raised. This statement sent Kan's and the Democratic Party of Japan's popularity ratings southward and is credited as having been a significant factor in the the DPJ's losses in the July 2010 House of Councillors election -- losses that handed control of the House to the opposition, derailing the DPJ's ambitious plans to change the way the country is run.

In the popular view, any politician who serves as the minister of finance succumbs to that bureaucracy's mantras, becoming a glassy-eyed novitiate in the cult of raising the consumption tax ("Must-raise-the-tax. Must-save-Japan")

- the deceleration in the campaign to cut the funding of projects of questionable merit made by the ministries and the quasi-government entities that provide retiring bureaucrat with cushy sinecures

- the acceptance without question or amendment of the budget compiled by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, including spending for a restart of the Yamba Dam project -- the cancellation of which was the signal in 2009 that the new DPJ-led government was willing to go to the wall to effect change in the country

- the selection of the F-35 as Japan's next generation fighter, which seems to have no justifications other than simultaneously pleasing the United States government and satisfying the Ministry of Defense's lust for stealth -- even if Japan's beleaguered defense contractors get nothing out of the deal and the stealth technology remains entirely in the hands of the United States

[Please add to the list, if you can, in comments]

It is tempting to believe that the PM is allowing national bureaucrats (kokka komuin) to run amok because he needs them as allies or at least neutral parties. He cannot be fighting simultaneously on two fronts against both the bureaucrats and the political opposition, as the first DPJ prime ministers Hatoyama Yukio and Naoto Kan tried to do, with catastrophic results.

Evidence exists, however, that the above is only half of a double-sided game the PM is having with the national bureaucrats, the left hand taking while the right hand gives. Noda did nothing to stop his party from swallowing whole a New Komeito bill cutting bureaucratic salaries by an average of 7.8% for the next two years, with a retroactive cut of 0.23% for this year and no collective bargaining rights, the last item being a promise the DPJ made to the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), a crucial vote machine for the party. He has a government-appointed panel recommending a four million yen cut in the lump sum bonus bureaucrats receive upon retirement, as well as an accelerated program of early retirement buyouts. ( J)

Prime Minister Noda has said and done nothing about Deputy Prime Minister Okada Katsuya's staggering cuts in the intake of new recruits into career track positions, this taking place on top of previous cuts in the number of national bureaucrats:

Number of career-track hirees
by the office, commission, ministry and agency
April 2012 --> April 2013

Cabinet Secretariat 10 --> 4

Cabinet Legislative Office 2 --> 1

Cabinet Office 35 --> 20

Imperial Household Agency 32 --> 16

Japan Fair Trade Commission 37 --> 22

National Police Agency 164 --> 100

Financial Services Agency 42 --> 22

Consumer Affairs Agency 2 --> 1

Ministry of Internal Affairs
and Communications 120 --> 73

Ministry of Justice 1,475 --> 942

Ministry of Foreign Affairs 141 --> 80

Ministry of Finance 1,482 --> 929

Ministry of Education,Culture,
Sports, Science & Technology 66 -> 36

Ministry of Health, Labour
and Welfare 625 --> 298

Ministry of Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries 235 --> 120

Ministry of Economy
Trade and Industry 181 -- 107

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure
Transport and Tourism 1078 --> 682

Ministry of the Environment 34 --> 27

Ministry of Defense 575 --> 300

Source:
Ministry of General Affairs and Telecommunications

With these assaults on the income and the number of national bureaucrats (who will have to do the same amount of work as their predecessors, despite their reduced numbers) is it any wonder that the number of those taking the entrance examinations to become national bureaucrats dropped 13% in between 2011 and 2012? (J)

So is Prime Minister Noda just so much putty in the hands of the bureaucracy? The numbers do not seem to support that view.

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.

Freedom

Four years ago, in a weak moment, I wrote a tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek set of "rules for understanding news from Japan" for my amusement and I hoped the amusement of others. Since the time of their composition, some of the rules have become rather dated. On the whole, however, they have held up rather well.

This was Rule #6:

If a Democratic Party member claims something is true on television, it is probably not true. When it is true, it was political suicide for him to have said it.

So two cheers for Prime Minister Kan Naoto and his egregious introduction of the concept of a rise in the consumption tax based on a misreading of Japan as ressembling Greece and the charged atmospheres inside the Ministry of Finance and at the G20 summit. By introducing discussion of a hike in taxes three weeks before a national election, he has given himself and the Democratic Party of Japan a just-so story for why the party finished with so many fewer seats than expected in the House of Councillors on July 11. Just run the counter-factual: imagine the chaos inside the party right now if Kan had not talked about the consumption tax and they had suffered the same dispiriting defeat.

To the benefit of the Prime Minister and the party, they have now a "lesson" that they have "learned" -- and will no longer appear irresponsible if they shelve all ideas about a hike in the consumption tax until after mid-2013.

"Whew," the party members can now say, "We are off the hook on that horrible, unpopular, regressive, contractionary, deflationary pseudo-solution to Japan's fiscal and economic growth problems which the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Finance and their acolytes throw out like a spanner into the works of any reasonable discussion of Japan's economic future!"

Photo credit: MTC

Not So Long, After All

Rather than going through the trauma of breaking up the Cabinet after Minister of Justice Chiba Keiko's failure to win reelection to her Kanagawa seat, she will continue her service as minister as a civilian, at least until the September elections for the leadership of the Democrati Party of Japan.

So not gone, not forgotten is the minister of The Law.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Proportional Disaster

With 97% of the voted counted, the results in the proportional half of yesterday's election were:

In 2004, the DPJ won 21,137,458 of 55,931,787 votes.

In 2007, it won 23,256,242 of 58,913,679 votes.

Just over 18 million this time around.

Ouch.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - After Sunrise

1) Ho-Ho-Ho - After belittling the Sunrise Party of Hiranuma Takeo last night, saying that his party will not win a seat, late calculations have proven me wrong. The Sunrise Party (Tachiagare Nippon) won the hearts of 1.3 million voters, which is just enough (2.2%) of the vote to win one seat.

The New Renassance Party also managed to eke out 1.3 million votes and thus a seat. Unfortunately, the party had five of its members up for reelection.

2) Turnout - was a respectable 57.98% of the electorate. Nothing spectacular but not too shabby, given recent trends.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Early Morning Notes

1) Turnout - The earlier stories about abysmally low turnout seem to have been mistaken. Other reports are coming in of turnout of slightly over 57%-- which would mean just over 59 million votes.

So turnout seemingly was not a cause of the wipeout.

2) Koizumism is Back - Not only was Koizumi Shinjiro's fervent campaigning cited by every commercial television network as having bolstered the spirits, if not exactly the results of several of the LDP's candidates, his father's female "assassins" managed to fight their way back into the Diet. Katayama Satsuki and Sato Yukari both won seats off the LDP proportional list, while Inokuchi Kuniko captured one of the three Chiba district seats.

The DPJ's strategy of running against the legacy of the most popular Prime Minister of recent times will probably have to be rethought.

3) Not Stupid - Former DPJ party leader Ozawa Ichiro was severely critized by members of his own party for assigning a second DPJ candidate to two seat districts where the traditional split was one seat going to the LDP and one to the DPJ. His was a gutsy attempt to capitalize on the vote burning of 2007, when running a single DPJ candidates in two seat districts left hundreds of thousands of votes lying on the table as the DPJ candidates overwhelmed their LDP opponents.

Running two DPJ candidates in two-seat districts did not pay off: nowhere did the DPJ win both seats being contested. However, neither did it seem to have hurt the DPJ eithet; it has seemingly won at least one of the two seats in all of the 12 two-seat districts.

The only place where the DPJ was running two candidates only to suffer an unexpected loss was in Kanagawa Prefecture, where the lackluster Minister of Justic Chiba Keiko has lost her seat, finishing fourth behind the LDP, Your Party and other DPJ candidate. Given Chiba's almost invisible performance as minister of justice since her inauguration, she will not be much missed.

Her seat sure as heck will be, though.

4) Ren Ho, Superstar - Notwithstanding complaints from dinosaurs like Hiranuma Takeo -- whose Sunrise Party will win not a single seat -- that she is not "originally Japanese" Ren Ho (or Renho) is undoubtably the face of the DPJ. She demolished her opponents in the Tokyo district race, finishing over 500,000 900,000 votes ahead of her nearest rival in the most lopsided contest ever. She has been on all the network broadcasts this night, keeping a stiff upper lip and defending the Prime Minister in the face of clearly less-than-stellar returns.

Oh, if they had only listened to me in September...

House of Councillors Election 2010 - What It All Means

For a review of what this House of Councillors election was supposed to mean, please see my op-ed published at The Diplomat.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - Will Vote For Food (Discounts)

One of the results of the drastic review process of the Government Revitalization Unit (GRU) this year and last was a 20% reduction in the budget allocation used to promote voting and increase voter participation rates, which are currently stuck at around 54%-to-58% of the electorate. As a consequence, local authorities are looking for innovative ways to promote voting at at dramatically lower costs than before. The movement even has its own name, the "cheap-cheap strategy" (kechi kechi sakusen).

In some areas, local authorities are pairing up with retailers, promoting the election with stickers on food packages, or posters on the front doors reminding customers that Sunday, July 11 is the day of the vote for the House of Councillors.

It was thus with tremendous interest that I today received, together with my groceries at Peacock -- the supermarket division of the Daimaru retailing empire -- a flyer with a most intriguing offer printed on its lower extremity.

Here is an image of the flyer in its entirety, most of which is covered with announcements of special prices on a variety of goods going on sale on July 10 or July 11.

Here below, however, is the image of the lower extremity of the flyer, whereupon is printed the invitation, in diagonal white writing, "On your way back home from voting, please by all means come to Peacock!"

According to the offer -- and it is an offer -- if you present proof of having voted, you will receive a 5% discount on your final total* at the register.

I cannot for the life of me understand how this offer, which gives an actual financial reward for a person's having voted, manages to skirt Japan's Byzantine voting laws. Yet is somehow must, or at least will be assumed to do so until we see the prosecutors on Monday marching, cardboard boxes in hand, into Daimaru's headquarters.

------------------------------------------
* Certain products are not included in this offer, including cigarettes, salt, digital photo printing, gift coupons and dry cleaning.

Faith in Numbers (2)

Really don't mind if you sit this one out
Your words but a whisper...your deafness a shout!

- Ian Anderson, "Thick As A Brick" (1972)

It is the night of Tanabata, when the star-crossed lovers meet

When we left off 10 days ago, the DPJ was in a position in the proportional vote to at least repeat its performance of 2004, where it won 19 seats with 37.7% of the vote. Due to the proliferation of parties bursting out of the LDP these last few years, the DPJ will need only 35.7% of the final vote to match its 2004.

Number of seats from the simulation of the D'Hondt system apportionment.

DPJ 19
LDP 11
New Komeito 6
Your Party 6
Japan Communist Party 3
Democratic Socialist Party 2
Sunrise 1
_________________

Total = 48

With 19 seats from the proportional list, the DPJ is a third of the way from its ultimate goal of 60 seats, which together with the 61 seats it holds from the 2007 electoral cycle, would give the party 50% of the seats and thus control of the House of Councillors.

With control of the House of Councillors with the 307 out of 480 seats the party holds in the House of Representatives, the DPJ would be in the position to pass unencumbered most any piece of legislation it might desire. It would be able to do so for three years as the next House of Representatives election need not be held until mid-2013, when the House of Councillors has its next election.

Opening the door for:

1) a radical restructuring of Japan in line with the values of white collar suburban and urban voters, rather than rural or industry-based voting blocs

2) a great span of time for the opposition Liberal Democratic Party to further split into pieces

The DPJ certainly wishes to secure these two advantages. In order to do so, DPJ candidates have to win 41 of the 73 district seats up for election. The newspapers are laying down bets that the DPJ cannot possibly succeed in this endeavor.

While certainly difficult, it is not impossible, given:

1) Ozawa Ichiro's three years of wandering the hinterlands cultivating local primary industry, small business, professional group and religious order votes the DPJ had theretofore ignored.

2) the lack of a clear reason to vote for a specific LDP district candidate other than to prevent the DPJ from having a majority in the House of Councillors.

3)the end of official cooperation between the New Komeito and the LDP.

The end of the LDP-New Komeito coalition throws a monkey wrench into almost any calculation of potential results of this elections.

Here's how. The New Komeito has 8 million dedicated voters who will turn out on July 11, typhoon or shine. In the proportional half of the vote they will vote for the party or for particular members of the party.

However, except in Saitama, Tokyo and Osaka, New Komeito voters have no one to vote for in the district elections. This is because the party, mentally fried by the 2009 House of Representatives election where every single one of its district candidates lost his or her seat, has put up a district candidate only in those three prefectures. It has no official candidates anywhere else. Now a great fraction of New Komeito's total 8 million (about 13% of the likely final total national vote) live in just those three prefectures. Tokyo hosts about 825,000 New Komeito voters; Osaka about 790,000 and Saitama about 580,000. New Komeito voters are also extremely numerous in Kanagawa (690,000) and Aichi (580,000) Prefectures, but are not so numerous to able to elect candidates in these districts on their own.

Subtracting these huge numbers of Komeito voters living in these core city prefectures from the 8 million total, one is left with some 4.5 million votes, scattered around the remaining 42 prefectures in varying densities.

That's a lot of votes, and in prefectures where the margin of victory is 30,000 votes or less, the lack of New Komeito support could be fatal for the hopes of an LDP candidate.

The importance of New Komeito voters for the LDP was established in 2009. Except in the districts where the New Komeito was running its own candidates, the 8 million received divine guidance to vote for the LDP, and 7 million of them seem to have responded - providing the LDP with about a quarter of the votes in received in the district elections.

There is nothing wrong with this kind of vote swapping -- except that it turned out to have been pointless. In the 2009 House of Representatives election, even with the 7 million New Komeito voters voting for the LDP's district candidates, the LDP got slaughtered.

This time around New Komeito voters have been no clear, public instructions from on high as to whom they should vote for, other than the New Komeito candidates in the three districts listed above. The print media is saying that local prefectural branches of the New Komeito are leaning toward supporting the local LDP candidate.

The general theory being espoused is that by cooperating with the LDP again, the New Komeito will prevent the DPJ from winning enough seats to have a simple majority. Indeed, with the present sour mood toward the DPJ and the support of the New Komeito, the LDP and Your Party (Minna no To) could even steal seats from the DPJ's present totals.

With its seat totals far below what it needs to move legislation through the Diet smoothly*, the DPJ will have to go on a search for coalition partners. Your Party's Watanabe Yoshimi has stated his party will not form a coalition with DPJ. Which would leave the New Komeito as the bridesmaid of choice for the DPJ.

Do you see the problem with this theory, why is is dafter than Daft Punk?

Here is the supposed strategy

1) rule Japan in coalition with the LDP for 10 years
2) dump association with LDP after devastating 2009 House of Representatives losses by both coalition partners
3) make goo-goo eyes on television and in the Diet toward the DPJ
4) thank your lucky stars you are no longer LDP associates as the LDP sheds its most attractive members and fails to capitalize on the serious problems hounding the DPJ's top leaders
5) realize the Post-Hatoyama, Post-Ozawa New Look DPJ is into fiscal stringency and curtailing social welfare payments - which are poison to your party
6) surreptitiously cooperate with the LDP again in the district elections half of the House of Councillors election
7) either

a) watch the collaboration fail to make a change, as the LDP flames out in defeat
b) watch the collaboration succeed in preventing the DPJ from winning its sought-for majority

8) wait by the telephone patiently for the call that is sure to come from DPJ headquarters begging the New Komeito to become the DPJ's new coalition partner

...

It is step #8 that I am having trouble with right now. It is beyond my capacity to imagine that the DPJ, its hopes and dreams having been thwarted by an LDP aided by the New Komeito, will turn around and ask the New Komeito to be its partner.

So no matter what the evening sports newspapers are saying, the New Komeito cannot be reviving cooperation with the LDP -- not if it wants to be part of a post-election order...and if the LDP is going to try to defend its 25 current districts without the support of the New Komeito machine, it will fail.

So what are my predictions for the results for this election?

Worst case scenario - The DPJ defends the 36 district seats it now holds. Together with the 19 seats it will win the proportion vote, it will be at 5 seats short of the magical 60 it needs for a control of the House. It will gain that control through absorption of independents and breakaway members of other parties -- or by making Watanabe Yoshimi an offer he cannot refuse (Financial Services Minister?).

Best case scenario - the DPJ wins 60-to-62 seats -- 19-to-20 in the proportional and 41-to-43 in the districts.

Going at this backwards, the ultimate maximum for the DPJ in the districts is 61 out of the total 73 seats - the total number of district candidates the DPJ is running. The party has no candidate in angry Okinawa -- where the terms "DPJ candidate" and "snowball's chance in hell" would probably go very well together. The party is otherwise offering a candidate every other in the single-seat districts except Kagawa, where it, the Social Democratic Party and People's New Party are supporting an independent.

In its most audacious bet, the DPJ is running two candidates in all but 2 of the 12 two-seat districts: everywhere but Fukuoka and Niigata. In Fukuoka, the New Komeito branch seems to be cooperating openly with the LDP candidate, making his election a given. The DPJ seems to have conceded there was no point in fielding a second candidate. In Niigata, the DPJ's main opponent and likely top vote getter is a member of the former coalition partner SDP.

The DPJ is fielding two candidates in the three-seat districts of Chiba, Kanagawa, Saitama, Aichi, though only a single candidate in Osaka. In Tokyo, it is has two candidates vying for the five seats available.

So in its drive to secure control of the House of Councillors, the DPJ has to win two thirds of the seats it is contesting.

Or, looking at the same problem from the opposite direction, the DPJ can withstand up 20 errors in electoral strategy and still come out on top.

Against an opposition whose top member's claim to fame is that under its rule, the country was run into the ditch it finds itself in.

I think the voters will by July 11 figure out where their interests lie.

I have faith in their numbers.

_____________________________________

* "Smooth Diet relations" being an inexplicable fetish of media correspondents and commentators.

House of Councillors Election 2010 - The Raw Numbers

Number of eligible voters (as of June 23, 2010): 104,513,907
Number of female voters: 53,977,415
Number of male voters: 50,536,492

Greatest voting disparity (ippyo no kakusa) between two districts = 5.01 times
in between Tottori Prefecture (487, 893 voters - 1 seat) and Kanagawa Prefecture (7,328,018 voters - 3 seats)

Number of candidates: 438
Number of seats available: 121
Number of district seat candidates: 251
Number of district seats available: 73
Number of proportional seat candidates: 187
Number of proportional seats available: 48

Number of candidates in previous elections:

377 (2007)
320 (2004)
497 (2001)
474 (1998)
567 (1995)
640 (1992)

Number of parties participating in the proportional half of the vote: 12
Number of candidates on proportional lists, by party:

Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) 45
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 35
Your Party (Minna no To) 23
Japan Communist Party (JCP) 18
New Komeito 17
Sunrise Party (Tachiagare Nippon) 10
Women's Party 10
People's New Party (PNP) 7
Social Democratic Party (SDP) 6
Spirit of Japan Party (Nippon Soshinto) 6
New Renaissance (Shinto Kaikaku) 5

Minimum age for a candidate = 30 years of age

Number of female candidates: 100
By party (and out of...)

DPJ 27 out of 106
JCP 18 out of 64
LDP 14 out of 84
Your Party 8 out of 44
SDP 5 out of 14

Number of female candidates in previous elections

91 (2007)
68 (2004)
137 (2001)
110 (1998)
124 (1995)
123 (1992)

House of Councillors Elections 2010 - The Tokyo Quintilemma (corrected)

In politics, what you see is not always what you get.

Tokyo is blessed because it sends five Senators (yes, that is what they are called) to the House of Councillors.

Tokyo is cursed because it has to select five Senators for the House of Councillors.

First there is the list itself, with a staggering 24 names. Only Aomori and Kumamoto, each with 5 candidates vying for but a single seat, have more freewheeling level of competition, and then only fractionally. In Tokyo, recent candidate inflation rate is just out of control: in 2007, there were 20 candidates for the 5 seats, in 2004, there were 11 candidates for 4 seats.

And why not? House of Councillors member is a great job. A six-year position with a fabulous salary, extraordinary housing and transportation perquisites, basically three free meals a day, personal and family security, social status and very few responsibilities.

It is a wonder that there are not hundreds of aspirants.

Then there is the plethora of parties, mostly of the right. In 2007, voters had to contend with 6 parties offering candidates and a mass of independents. This year there are 9 parties, if one includes the Nippon Soshinto and the Happiness Realization Party, plus a lot of candidates from what claim to be parties.

Then there is the doubling up. The Democrats have two incumbents, Government Revitalization Minister Renho and the Democratic Party of Japan's top vote getter in 2004 Ogawa Toshio. They are being challenged by a pair of two LDP candidates: incumbent Nakagawa Masaharu and newcomer Tokai Yukiko, holder of a U.S. journalism degree.

-- An aside, but what is wrong with the LDP as regards its strong women candidates? Tokai's heavily photoshopped campaign posters immediately bring to mind the Katayama Satsuki disaster (Katayama, the former Mrs. Masuzoe Yo'ichi for those who are new to this game, is one of the candidates on the Liberal Democratic Party's proportional lists). The actual Ms. Tokai is somewhat less doe-like in appearance. Is it because she is taking on, in the person of Renho, a former model and Clarion Girl? And why do the papers fail to say diddly about her coming directly out of General Electric to run in this race, referring to her instead as "a former newscaster?" --

Then there are the guys with the movie star good looks and the scintillating resumes. First is the attractive and savvy Matsuda Kota, the man who brough Tully's Coffee to Japan. He is running on the corporate-sponsored Your Party (Minna no To) ticket (odd that). He is matched on the left by the Social Democratic Party's 37 year-old Morihara Hideki, a former international NGO worker.

Once past these six candidates, one crosses a over to the wrong side of the tracks, where one's associates cast a shadow upon one's image.

The candidate on Easy Street is Takeya Toshiko of the New Komeito (and yes, that fade in is creepy).
Even though Takeya's party has been for the last decade the LDP's coalition partner in government, selling out nearly every one of its core principles in order to hold onto a ministry, the New Komeito still has enough cadres dedicated voters in Tokyo to get Takeya elected no matter what. She has 790,000 to 800,000 votes in the bag, and in the 2004 and 2007 elections, the highest ranking failed candidates won 597,000 and 652,000 votes, respectively.

The hard-luck case is Koike Akira, who is himself not bats--t crazy but as a member of the Communist Party will be treated as such. One of the rare physicians in the Diet and blessed with a good sense of humor, he will be anathema to all but his party's faithful. He would have a decent shot at winning a seat as an independent, especially if he made a special effort to label himself an ex-Communist-running-as-an-independent. Instead, he should go down ignominious defeat with a 450,000 JCP loyalist votes.

After this, one crosses the Rubicon, from the acceptable to the bats--t crazy.

Back in the old days, when comedian/actors like Aoshima Yukio or prominent writers, architects, doctors or whatnot were on tail end of the ballot, one could toss a vote in their direction, certain one was at least giving the country a reason to smile, or, as it turned out in Aoshima's case, would have capped off a great double career.

What to do? What to say? It is right-wing fringe you like? Come on it -- so many different flavors one available could start up an ice cream store. Possibly sane independent one has never heard of before? The voters have at least nine to choose from.

Then there my personal favorite; the Wringer. Ogawa Shoji (小川昇志) has a name is so similar to the DPJ's Ogawa Toshio (小川敏夫) that one can has to think that Shoji-kun was either

a) hired by a member of the opposition to confuse DPJ voters about which Ogawa they want to vote for, resulting in a lot of votes going to Sho-chan that were meant for Toshi-kun

b) wanted to see if he could steal one of the last remaining seats thanks votes that were meant for Ogawa Toshio

c) filled with a hatred so intense for Ogawa Toshio he registered himself just to mess up Ogawa's otherwise fairly certain reelection.

d) Some mix of the above

So how to winnow out 5 winners from out of this mass?

My guess is that Renho is the top vote getter and Takeya Toshiko wins a seat on the Soka Gakkai vote. Ogawa Toshio survives but in only fourth or fifth place due to his obscurity relative his glamorous fellow party member and the other Ogawa's meddlesome presence. Nakagawa Masaharu was the top vote getter of all in 2004 but he will be fighting with his colleague Tokai Yukiko. He will grab the fifth seat, if an LDP candidate finishes in the running at all, the poor showing due to the collapse of the LDP's Tokyo party organization and the plethora of right wing fringe candidates on the ballot from tiny but still established parties. Of the pretty boys in the running, I am guessing Matsuda wins the last seat on both the media-zaikai tailwinds currently inflating the reputation of Your Party and his Matsuda's actual reputation for bringing in a business into Japan and making it a success.

My apologies to all the other candidates...but you are just not in this race. A Tokyo voter has five Senators, more than the citizens of any other prefecture (Hurrah!) and you are not going to be one of them. (And that does include you, Yamada Hiroshi. You should have never left your day job.)


With thanks to John de Hoog for his help.

Later - This post has been edited for clarity.