Oh You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

Politics is such a glamorous profession...

Half the people are stoned
And the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned
And the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.

- Paul Simon, for Leonard Bernstein's MASS (1971)

Hey everybody!

Remember way, way back, you know, like a month ago, when folks used to think Prime Minister Abe Shinzo should wait until the December revision of the third quarter GDP figures came out before he made a final decision on whether or not to approve the second rise in the consumption tax? If you cannot remember, this was back before the November 3 Shukan Bunshun article revealed Abe's and Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide's tumescent desires for an election (that's with an "l") and the whole world's going nuts over the November 17 preliminary release showing a 1.3% decline over the previous quarter, making Prime Minister Abe's announcement of a Diet dissolution in the evening on November 18 almost an afterthought.

Well...

Japan's third-quarter recession seen milder than feared as capex grows
Reuters

TOKYO - Japan's fall into recession between July-September could turn out to be less severe than feared, with new capital expenditure figures out on Monday suggesting revisions will put the third quarter in a slightly more positive light.

The 5.5 percent year-on-year rise in capital expenditure over the third quarter reported on Monday followed a 3.0 percent annual increase in April-June, which could ease concerns about recovery from a sales tax increase earlier this year.

"The revised data will show a smaller contraction in GDP that could be close to zero," said Hiroaki Muto, senior economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management Co...

If the revised GDP figure for the third quarter turns out to be close to zero, meaning that all this panicked action was for nothing, then there will be hell to pay. If anything is going to tick off Japanese voters it is a Diet dissolution and an election for absolutely no reason.

And for folks like the urbane, serious and admirable House of Representatives member Kono Taro (LDP, 6 elections to the Diet) who has been posting hilarious and sad photos of his bedraggled, lonely self campaigning in the cold late autumn rains (the above photo is from yesterday) learning that this was all for nothing will make future relations with Abe and his confidants a bit...testy, shall we say?

Photo image courtesy: Kono Taro's Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/konotarogomame)

Good Morning, Nagata-chō!

Well now, here we are--the big day, the day when we get to see whether Kōno Tarō will pull a lion's head out of a top hat, or whether he is all bluster and no votes.

(Seriously, if he had not gone to Georgetown, would anybody still be listening to him? Well, O.K., I will admit, the liver section donation thing was very impressive...)

On the other side of the aisle of treason, Sunday Mainichi says 15 Democratic Party of Japan lawmakers in the House of Councillors are poised to jump ship over the party's opposition to road construction and other fiscal goodies. No doubt Ōe Yasuhiro and Watanabe Hiroshi already have both feet out of the party -- I swear one of the newspapers told me that Ōe went so far as to voice support for the LDP candidate in Sunday's Yamaguchi by-election, mirroring Watanabe's support of the non-DPJ candidate in Niigata one election back.

However, I still do not see how they could leave the party when their seats are a regional bloc seats assigned according to a position on a party list.

Can one walk out with a proportional seat? Or leave with it under one's arm after being expelled from the party?