Looking At The Election With The Glass Half Full

True to its Watanabe Tsuneo-set mandate of being the Liberal Democratic Party's house organ, The Yomiuri Shimbun paints a picture of opposition parties in a hopeless, riven position requiring desperate actions on the eve of Tuesday's official start of the campaign:

Poll prompts opposition to eye merger
TheYomiuri Shimbun

Movements to restructure and consolidate opposition parties will likely intensify after the upcoming House of Representatives elections, as the Democratic Party of Japan, the main opposition party, has decided not to seek a change of government in the elections for the first time since its inauguration, observers said.

DPJ Secretary General Yukio Edano told the press in Osaka on Saturday that his party will not seek a change of government at the upcoming lower house election.

"We would like to win sufficient seats this time so that voters will consider our party a possibility for government at the next election," Edano said.

DPJ leader Banri Kaieda also told the press on the same day, "We will try to increase the number [of our seats] to bring a feeling of tension to the Diet." Kaieda apparently meant that the DPJ would virtually concede the continuation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's administration and seek a chance to return to power at another lower house election in the future.

It is the first time since the DPJ's inauguration — in 1998, with the merger of the former DPJ, the Good Governance Party and others — that it has not sought a "change of government" as its goal in lower house elections.

As of Saturday, the DPJ had fielded only 178 candidates for the upcoming elections, far fewer than the 238 required to claim a majority in the 475-seat lower house. Its final number of candidates is expected to be about 200, including those in the proportional representation section. Even if all of them were elected, the DPJ would not be able to form a single-party administration.

In the 1993 lower house elections, the Japanese Socialist Party, which was the main opposition party at that time, the Japan Renewal Party — a breakaway group from the LDP — and the others fought, calling for formation of a government with other parties opposed to the LDP and the Japanese Communist Party. Consequently, the government of Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa was formed after the elections under eight non-LDP political parties and groups.

However, the upcoming elections are unconventional compared to those of the past. They lack the option of a government based on cooperation among non-LDP parties since the DPJ this time has not revealed a plan to form a coalition government with the Japan Innovation Party or other opposition parties.

Meanwhile, the Japan Innovation Party had fielded only 81 candidates as of Saturday.

Phantom new party

Alarmed by Abe's lower house dissolution for a snap election, members of the opposition parties have come up with the idea of unifying non-LDP forces to create a new party.

Former DPJ leader Seiji Maehara secretly met Japan Innovation Party coleader Toru Hashimoto in Osaka on Nov. 15 to propose a plan to form a new party.

"Let's form a new party with the DPJ, the Japan Innovation Party and Your Party," Maehara was quoted as telling Hashimoto. "That will enable the opposition to win more seats than the ruling coalition parties at the next House of Councillors election to create a divided Diet."

Both Maehara and Hashimoto are considered advocates for reorganization of the opposition parties, and are sufficiently close as to hold frequent meetings with one another...

(Link)

OK, first of all, the silly stuff. "The opposition" is not eyeing a merger, Maehara Seiji is. Maehara, Amaterasu bless him, cannot get through breakfast without thinking of establishing a new, streamlined, conservative breakaway opposition government party with like-minded elements of other parties. He just never gives up on this kind of transparent, pathetic machination. He is the dog who will not stop bringing you a stick for you to throw even after you close the front door on him.

As for not having a "change in government" as the Democratic Part of Japan's goal -- what is wrong with having realistic goals? If you do not have enough candidates running to form a government and have had no negotiations with other parties on forming a coalition , would not setting a goal of a change in government be an invitation for anti-opposition figures like, oh let's say, the editors of The Yomiuri Shimbun, to accuse the DPJ of attempting to defraud the voters, enticing them with a promise the party cannot, in fact, deliver upon?

Talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Furthermore, the analysis at the beginning is backward. Restructuring and consolidation will not take place after the election is over. The period of restructuring and consolidation is now, in the run up to tomorrow's opening of the campaign. An impending election has forced parties and individuals to decide whether to stay put, move in another direction or get out of the game entirely. Once the election is over, the pressure for change will be off, and off for a long time.

As for the tone and structure of the article, which posits simultaneous states of panic and resignation in the opposition, well, the nicest way to dismiss this depiction is say, "Amaterasu, this was sooooo two weeks ago! It's December 1 baby! Think of how much more the opposition will get its act together over the next two weeks!"

For the opposition has gotten it's act together after the inevitability of a Diet dissolution sank in over the second week of November. The DPJ has 177 candidates for the districts, up from 149 two weeks ago. The Japan Innovation Party has 81 candidates, up from 49 two weeks ago. There is some overlap in the candidacies -- the two parties will both be fielding candidates in 22 districts. However, that number is down from over 40 overlaps only two weeks ago.

Furthermore, fielding candidates in 236 out of a total 295 single-member districts is hardly running up a white flag of surrender. About 20% of the districts, mostly in Kyushu and the Chugoku regions of western Japan and the prefectures along the Japan Sea in eastern Japan, are so hopelessly dominated by Liberal Democratic Party machines that putting up candidates in them would be a waste of human and financial resources. Better to marshall the resources one has to contest the truly competitive districts, leaving the LDP strongholds alone.

The Yomiuri's account surreptitiously argues that the Abe administration and the LDP are invincible in this election. If one is talking about coming out on top numerically on December 14, this take is probably not wrong. However, to assume that Abe and Co. can come out this hastily arranged election with a strengthened capacity to govern and dominant position in Japan's political firmament is probably not right at all.

By The Way, Okada Katsuya Is Still Dull

"I see you have brought a card with you, Mr. Okada. Please tell us about your card."

The Democratic Party of Japan, the once and possibly future alternative to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, will today be having a joint meeting of its members of both Houses of the Diet.

The party has some big issues to face - existential ones. (Link)

Though the agenda may have other items on it, there is really only one major topic of discussion: should the current party leader Kaieda Banri be forced to hold an early leadership election? A year ago, after the party's defeat in the House of Councillors election giving Abe Shinzo and his party control of both Houses, Kaieda asked to be given a year to turn party fortunes around. By any measure, he has failed to make even minor progress in that direction. The DPJ is the main opposition party again but only because its potential rivals - the Japan Restoration Party of Hashimoto Toru and Ishihara Shintaro and the Your Party of Watanabe Yoshimi -- have fissioned into ever more strangely-named pieces. Kaieda gained a slight boost from the victory of the anti-Liberal Democratic Party, former DPJ MP candidate Mikatsuki Taizo in the Shiga governor's race two weeks ago. However, in order to win that race Mikatsuki and his many DPJ helpmates pointedly avoiding mentioning the candidate's DPJ ties, worrying that association with the DPJ would torpedo his chances.

Sincere and learned, Kaieda has failed to inspire as a party leader. He has little aptitude in playing to the public's or the news media's expectations and foibles. He has also failed to chart the party a new ideological course, choosing instead to peddle the traditional DPJ solutions to Japan's problems -- as though the Global Financial Crisis and Abenomics had not reshuffled the world's and Japan's decks.

The problem with replacing Kaieda with someone else is...who is going to be that someone else? If the party is going to press him to go, it has to make a clear, clean break -- or else the exercise will look like what it is, a desperate attempt to generate interest in the party through a coup. Kaieda comes from the DPJ's liberal wing, so reasonably the pendulum must now swing the other way, with a new leader selected from out of the party's conservative wing.

Unfortunately, none of the handful of top conservative candidates for the party leadership -- Noda Yoshihiko, Maehara Seiji, Edano Yukio, Gemba Ko'ichiro, Azumi Jun and Okada Katsuya: a collectivity the Yomiuri Shimbun refers to "The Gang of Six" -- has significantly greater electoral appeal, intellectual flexibility or party support than Kaieda. Former prime minister Noda has the gravitas. He has not, however, shed the status of "Class A War Criminal" he earned throught his inexplicable calling of the House of Representatives election of December 2012. Maehara is derided as an LDP clone and is always reminded, when he makes noises about challenging the leadership, of a little incident involving a fake email. The younger or at least younger-seeming trio of Edano, Gemba and Azumi have failed, over Kaieda's year of trial, to create the impression they are more than just former ministers and power brokers of the DPJ's fat years.

This leaves Okada, the stolid and fabulously wealthy (Link) veteran who led the party to ignominious and overwhelming defeat in the 2005 summer snap House of Representatives. To be fair, Okada had the misfortune of being asked to outsmart and outmaneuver the greatest political wizard of the age, Koizumi Jun'ichiro. This Okada failed to do -- even though Koizumi, by expelling the postal reform rebels from the LDP and running candidates against them, was fighting the election on two fronts. Like a white Toyota Corolla, Okada was sensible and dependable and safety conscious and simply got blown off the road by the red Ferrari that is Koizumi.

Okada has been feisty and crisp, however, in recent appearances. He forcefully pinned down the prime minister, for example, in the debate over collective self defense (Link). He has for the past few weeks been making a lot of reasonable-sounding noises about the necessity for a change in the party leadership, creating the impression he has decided he should be Kaieda's replacement.

In something of a dress rehearsal for a leadership challenge, Okada appeared this last Saturday on Tahara So'ichiro BS (not what you think) program to debate the Cabinet Decision on collective self defense. His debate opponent was Watanabe Tsuneo -- not the all powerful Abe-supporting media emperor Watanabe Tsuneo, the Japan Foundation's quiet researcher Watanabe Tsuneo -- who is also the son of DPJ elder statesman and legendary quote machine Watanabe Kozo.

The bad news from Saturday's debate? Even against a friendly or at least neutral opponent (Watanabe has no political ambitions -- he refused to take over his father's seat in the Diet after his father retired) Okada could not debate the issues effectively. Time after time Okada would toss up a point only to sit morosely and watch Watanabe swat it back.

Losing a debate on a minor cable channel against a researcher would not be such a big deal. However, Okada's talking points were for the most part spot on correct. Watanabe's were, by contrast, largely non-sequiturs. If one cannot smash an avuncular BS (what you are thinking) spewing individual who feels no particular emnity toward you, then you are not ready for prime time.

Okada has got to be hoping his friends and allies were not watching on Saturday. From the Twitter feeds of DPJ types and unfortunately for Okada, it seems that they were.

So don't be surprised if the big development at the DPJ headquarters today is Kaieda surviving what should be a lethal general meeting. Kaieda is terrible...but his potential replacements are not much better. Instead of Kaieda offering himself up for the good of the party, it is party secretary-general Obata Akihiro who offing himself (Link - J) ostensibly to try to make amends for what a lousy leader Kaieda has been.

Okada Katsuya's being still dull opens the door a bit wider, however, for an eventual run for the top post by Hosono "Get Lucky" Goshi -- whom we know is anything but boring. (Link)


Later - The editors of the Mainichi Shimbun largely concur. (Link)

The Two New Ministers For Mr. Abe

On Friday Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, on an official visit to Papua New Guinea, told accompanying reporters of his plan to name a State Minister for Regional Revitalization (chiho soseiso). This comes in addition to his previously voiced intent to appoint a special minister in charge of shepherding the raft of legislation needed to realize the Abe Cabinet's decision to declare the heretofore unconstitutional exercise of the right of collective self-defense constitutional. (Link)

Appointing a minister in charge of revitalizing the regions seems like overkill, seeing as how the function of most of the district members of the Diet has been the extraction of revenues and contracts from the government (i.e., from the taxes on the surpluses created by the densely populated urban prefectures) for redeployment to the areas in chronic, decades-long demographic and economic decline. The slow recovery of housing and businesses in the annihilated areas of the Tohoku has been largely due to politicians being unable to honestly answer the question, "What is the point of resurrecting communities that were dying well prior to the waves washing everything away?" -- because to do so would generate the follow-up, "And how does that make the Tohoku different from so many other areas in Japan?@

Despite the existing, institutionalized transfers of wealth from the the haves to the shouldn't bes, the government feels it needs to at least seem to care about the decay in the parasite prefectures. In large part this is due to commentariat being in a frenzy over the so-called Masuda Report, published by the former Minister of Internal Affairs Masuda Hiroya (Link - J) and his Nippon Sosei Kaigi ("Japan Rebirth Society," bizarrely translated as the "Japan Policy Council"). The Masuda Report claims that the depopulation of the rural areas, heretofore seen as debilitating, will indeed be calamitous. According the projections in the report, hundreds of currently struggling municipalities collapsing by 2040. The key to the new, more alarming projections is the accelerated movement by women of childbearing age to urban areas, both robbing the rural communities of their "baby-making machines" (a phrase for which Yanagisawa Hakuo was too blithely criticized, given that he was speaking metaphorically) and moving them to prefectures where live-births-per-woman are hover at or around one.

Today's 7:00 a.m. NHK newscast, for example, had a conference on the Masuda Report as its main story, this two months after the Report came out.

The other reasons why the PM, the LDP and the New Komeito are worying about appearing to neglect the nation's non-urban areas are the 2015 unified local elections. These elections, no longer unified due to the LDP's self-serving neglect of the county's laws on terms-in-office, will be taking place in April of next year. Though the outcomes are mostly determined by local issues and local patronage networks, the unified local elections will nevertheless be viewed as referenda upon the Cabinet and the ruling coalition. With the Cabinet's poll ratings in decline due to the Abe entourage's poor management on of the public relations push for key reforms to Japan's security and economic structures, local members of the LDP and the New Komeito must be expressing some concern, if not outright impatience, with the national branches of the ruling parties. With Abenomics not having, nor likely to have, any visible impact on the non-urban areas except higher taxes and fees, the local LDP bigwigs are probably issuing ultimata on the order of "Give us something and someone to talk about or we are dead meat in April next year."

The creation of two new ministerial positions will have downsides. The Abe government has heretofore said it will not increase the number of ministerial positions, currently tacked at 22. Adding two new jobs, none of which overlap with the main job descriptions of the current Cabinet, means that some pet LDP causes will have to be abandoned. The need for technically adept and savvy folks in the two posts means that there will be only two fewer Cabinet positions to the political riff-raff the factions will try to foist on Abe and his advisors. The rural revitalization position will come into being without staff members to guide the political and economic adjustments necessary. Rather, it will seem as if the minister will be left on his/her own, wandering the hall of Kasumigaseki looking for underemployed ministry bureaucrats willing to sacrifice a portion of their careers and cleverness to a lost cause without guide stars.

Who also will Prime Minister Abe pick to fill these two new positions? One hears talk of Abe confidants wanting LDP Secretary-General Ishiba Shigeru to take the security legislation portfolio. He has the requisite gravitas and knowledge of security affairs. One also hears of Ishiba allies and loyalists screaming that Ishiba will never (and should never) accept a mere State Minister's posting -- especially one where the office holder will likely become the most hated person in Japan.

As for the rural revitalization position, who would want to be shackled to and issue which all the Emperor's horsemen and the all the Emperor's men have failed to remediate, despite forty years of trying? Masuda, himself, maybe. However, his having served as the General Affairs minister in a Democratic Party of Japan-led Cabinet probably makes him ineligble.

LDP Vice-President Komura Masahiko, the architect so-to-speak of the government's rationalization of the approval of the exercise of the right of collective self-defense, is the most likely appointee, this despite his having served in the exalted post of Minister of Foreign Affairs. Another possibility is a hard power respecting Democrat like Maehara Seiji or Nakashima Akihisa whose service in an LDP-led Cabinet would both give the process the sheen of bi-partisanship and terminate their association with the DPJ.

Of course, deciding after the fact that one needs special ministers to take care of issues you had not really thought through before coming to a conclusion on an issue is not a sign of seriousness. Instead, it sends the message that you are making things up on the fly,

Betrayal By The Smart Puppies?

Today will be a very interesting day.

Today the first termers, the old lefties and the rural representatives in the Democratic Party of Japan will be asking Prime Minister if the news reports of this morning, with their claims that the PM has decided to dissolve the Diet this month and lead the DPJ into a campaign waving the banners of participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership and a cut in the number of proportional seats in the House of Representatives -- are just something the media dreamed up, led astray by anonymous sources, or an accurate description of reality. (Link - J)

They are likely as not to be listening to his response with their heads tilted to one side, trying to see if the picture looks any better when seen askew.

As a rule of thumb, leaders of political parties care about the parties that selected them as leader. Koizumi Jun'ichiro, in his campaign for the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party and his snap election call in 2005 did declare an intent to destroy his party from within. However, Koizumi's intra-party warfare was more on the LDP's decayed traditions than on the party per se. His intent was not to kill the LDP but drag it, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.

The fate of the LDP after Koizumi's retirement, with Abe Shinzo signaling a return to business as usual through his welcoming back into the party the Koizumi postal reform rebels, presaged an era of rapid decline in the party's popularity, culminating in its ouster from power in August 2009.

If this morning's news reports are correct, then Prime Minister and Democratic Party of Japan leader Noda Yoshihiko has seized upon Koizumi fetishism (Link) of the highest order. If the prime minister intends to drive the non-reformist elements out of the DPJ in order to save the DPJ, he is as nuts as his Minister of National Strategy and fellow Matsushita Institute of Management and Government alumnus Maehara Seiji. Maehara has a book coming out on Friday entitled "I Want To Bring To Realization A Conservative Realignment" (Hoshu no saihen o jitsugen shitai - Link - J). He has also been making statements deviating from the policies of the DPJ mainline leadership, including a call for an early election. (Link)

It has been easy to dismiss Maehara as a deviant. Despite or perhaps because of his conservative bona fides, he has again and again shown a remarkable lack of common sense (Clicking on the tag below or putting "Maehara" in the search window directs one to some of Maehara's most embarrassing moments). However, if today's headlines hold up, Maehara may be less the village idiot and more the town crier.

If the conservatives in the party are calling an election to force realignment -- i.e., the destruction of both the DPJ and the LDP -- they better have their ducks lined up. Maehara has been a fixture in non-partisan study groups bringing together free market liberals and defense wonks, so he at least has strong ties to like-minded legislators inside the LDP and elsewhere (primarily in the Your Party and People's Life First). If they blow up the DPJ in order to run in the next election as a rump centrist party ready to join a conservative coalition, the rump may be just the part of the body where they will find themselves post-election.

Everything I have written about the DPJ, including the crazy stuff (Link) has been based upon the premise that the party leadership is unified in wishing the party to survive -- which, I hope the reader agrees, is not an unreasonable assumption. However, if the DPJ conservatives dream, as Maehara is dreaming, of a realignment along ideological lines, then the DPJ is already gone.

Noda, Maehara, Diet Affairs Chairman Yamanoi Kazunori, Minister of Foreign Affairs Gemba Koichiro and Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications Tarutoko Shinji are all Matsushita grads (click here for the full J-list of all 37 members of Diet who are alumni of the Institute). If they have talked themselves into rebelling against themselves, then I hope the Matsushita Institute had a little Hogwarts in it -- for it will take magic to survive the aftermath. The voters of Chiba District #4, the House of Representatives district with the highest population and thus the least enfranchised electorate, may not take kindly to their representative, a certain Mr. Noda Yoshihiko, selling them out in order to run on a neo-liberal platform and a prayer that his neo-liberal counterparts in the LDP jump ship to join him in a new conservative alliance.

One can be too smart by half.

DPJ Secretary-General Koshi'ishi Azuma is likely in a state of shock. If all that is purported to be true is true, then he fought for Noda's reelection as party leader only to be rewarded with a knee-capping.

In Defense of Noda Yoshihiko's Leadership

Two analysts whom I respect greatly yesterday issued negative assessments of Prime Minister and Democratic Party of Japan leader Noda Yoshihiko's leadership.

In a post to his blog GlobalTalk 21, Okumura Jun writes:

The October 22 evening edition of Nikkei has a chart listing the ministers that resigned or were dismissed during the three years of the DPJ regime. It tells us that Hatoyama lost two, Kan lost four, while Tanaka is Noda’s second loss. So one head better than par for the course? Not quite.

[Snip]

Noda's two losses by contrast were precipitated by political and legal misdemeanors by obviously under-qualified if personable politicos being rewarded for their political attributes.

But that's not all. Prime Minister Noda in what must be a national record has conducted three cabinet reshuffles in little more than a year in office. This is not exactly mitigated by the fact that two of those reshuffles were actually pretexts to get rid of a couple of appointees in each case who had exposed their lack of political toilet training and had to go.

Six incompetents kicked out, or three cabinet reshuffles in little more than a year. Pick his poison; whichever explanation you choose, he makes Hatoyama look good and Kan look at worst average as far as personnel management goes. And that’s probably not an easy feat to accomplish.

(Link)

In a comment to my post of the wee hours of Monday, October 22 on Maehara Seiji’s act of political arson (Link), Corey Wallace of σ1 writes:

As for the main argument of your piece, I guess my point really is, yeah Maehara is a prat, but he hasn't really blown up any "plan" mainly because the plan was a pointless and ineffective one the moment that Noda chose the cabinet he did (irrespective of the Tanaka issue) and the party's leadership essentially sacrificed the middle and younger ranks of the party by signaling that they would turn over on the electoral redistricting. Maehara has made it easier for the LDP etc to badger them during the temporary session. But it may be for the best. It seems the senior leadership's plan is to extend the life of the administration as long as possible, even if it leads the party into even more devastating annihilation in an election. As long as they survive, the rest of the party be damned (and yes, Maehara is part of the senior leadership). A look at the opinion polls tells you what the public want, and the current Noda's administration survival is the lowest on the list for what they want to see happen over the next few months, perhaps only above the government running out of money.

My friends, respect you both I do, but you are both wrong.

As to the charge that Noda has a bad record of personnel management, consider the DPJ Hatoyama and Kan left him and what he has been able to do with it. Beside (because he most certainly not under) Hatoyama Yukio, Ozawa Ichiro managed to grab every atom of policy making power to himself, alienating the entire middle tier of the party's membership. The struggle reaching a climax in the Ubukata rebellion (Link) that ended in a humiliating stepdown by the imperious Ozawa.

When Hatoyama stepped down, and took Ozawa in a headlock down with him, Kan Naoto took over a party with a major image problem and deep internal fissures. Kan decided that Job One was the restoration of the party's reputation and mollification of the party’s middle ranks – most of whom had been in the party longer than Ozawa. This meant an openly declared policy of "de-Ozawafication," quarantining Ozawa – a process considerably aided by Ozawa's indictment on political funding fraud charges – and also trying to salvage a workable policy program from out of the mountain of impossible-to-fulfill promises made in the Ozawa-drafted 2009 policy manifesto.

However, Kan could only go so far in the de-Ozawafication process, as Ozawa still had sway over at least 150 legislators. So while Kan kept his Cabinet largely clean of Ozawa acolytes, he had to always be cognizant that he and his allies stood on the precipice as regards party unity, that a step too far could split the party in half. Had not 3/11 intervened, Kan could have indeed presided over such a split.

The recovery and reconstruction effort, and the absolutely disgraceful attacks on Prime Minister Kan by members of the Liberal Democratic Party and others in the opposition, submerged for a while the internal battle between the Ozawa followers and the DPJ main line.

However, Ozawa's frightening hold upon his followers and their willingness to follow him even on the most self-destructive of paths was demonstrated in the election to replace Kan. In a move that strains credulity even today, Ozawa picked as his champion Kaieda Banri, a man who had not only written a book denouncing Ozawaism but one month prior to the leadership election had broken down in tears during Diet testimony (Link). Despite the history of bad blood and real possibility of electing an emotionally unstable man party leader, Ozawa's followers provided the lion's share of 143 votes and a top-place finish Kaieda received in the first round of voting.

Noda eventually prevailed in the runoff, 215 votes to 177 – but what to do about those 177 votes? Noda, in his own attempt to keep the party together despite Ozawa’s machination, promised to be a "no sides" leader, willing to share power with Ozawa followers and allies.

Noda made good on his promise, appointing Ozawa allies Ishikawa Tatsuo and Yamaoka Kenji to his Cabinet – ministers who almost immediately came up croppers. Both were censured and had to be replaced in January 2012. (Cabinet Reshuffle #1)

In June, Noda, facing an uphill battle to get the LDP and the New Komeito to the altar on voting for the package of bills including the consumption tax, decided he little choice to but to rid his Cabinet of four vulnerable ministers, two of whom had been censure by the House of Councillors. (Cabinet Reshuffle #2)

The reshuffle did its job, which was to shut the LDP and the New Komeito up about the Cabinet, so that Noda could get down to the difficult business of working with the opposition to pass the tax rise, knowing that if he succeeded on the policy front, Ozawa and his closest followers would jump ship.

Which they did on July 2.

In September Noda breezed through a required leadership election (Link). Since he had won so convincingly, he had no overt reason to reshuffle his Cabinet. However, to do nothing would have been very poor public relations, especially given the low public popularity ratings for the Cabinet. So he moved his most important young allies around in a game of musical chairs in between the power positions in the Cabinet and party leadership. As for the second- and third-ranking Cabinet posts, he handed them out to all the different groups inside the DPJ, whilst deftly avoiding giving anything to any of the three men who had had the temerity to challenge him in the leadership race (try to get away with that trick, LDP presidents-elect!).

For a man with a less-than-10 vote majority in the House of Representatives, the handing out of minor Cabinet posts to the champions and princes of the various sub-groups inside the party was not just smart but necessary.

The opposition called Reshuffle #3 a travesty. Watanabe Yoshimi of the Your Party came up with a trio of epithets: the "Warehouse Clearance Sale Cabinet," the "Goodbye Memorial Cabinet" and the "Graduation Photograph Cabinet" (Link - J). Even I who tries to avoid running with the herd got carried away and called it the "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish" Cabinet. (Link)

That Tanaka Keishu should have snuck in is hardly surprising. He is the standard bearer of the old Democratic Socialist Party (Minshato) that merged with the DPJ in 1998 but still retains a group identity within the confines of the party. Tanaka of course had a huge warning sign flashing over his head: he had lost his Diet seat in 1990 as a result of the Recruit Scandal. However, he is an old man, with no Cabinet posts under his belt and a much-interrupted and probably doomed Diet career. He was, as I have suggested before, the Prime Minister’s one selection made out of pity.

Politics, however, is a pitiless business.

As to idea that Prime Minister Noda is merely extend his stay in office is a misreading of Noda's approach to politics. With a razor thin majority in the House of Representatives, the Opposition blocking the passage of legislation in the House of Councillors, Cabinet and party support ratings in the cellar and with only nine months left in the terms of the Diet members, he is by definition playing an end game.

But what an end game it has been! He fooled Ozawa Ichiro into walking out of the DPJ with only a half a bushel of followers and no money in his pockets. He drove LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu into humiliating retirement, whilst extorting from him the votes he needed to pass the consumption tax. He maneuvered the LDP to vote for a censure motion condemning itself. He told current president Abe Shinzo, in their first meeting after their respective reelections, to go acquire carnal knowledge of himself should he press on the issue of early elections -- hence the magnitude of betrayal in Maehara’s Seiji's musings on Sunday. (Link)

For the DPJ, the war is lost. The party will be swept away in the next elections, in both Houses. There is nothing that the party can do, nothing that its individual members can do to avoid the deluge. So why not go down fighting, tooth and claw, with devastating tenacity, until the very end?

Unless, of course, Noda and the party choose the Unimaginable Alternative...

These Stars Collide

A Manic Monday for the Noda Cabinet and the Democratic Party of Japan

- The "Let's Demoralize The Embassy Staffs By Sending A Handful Of Old White Boys To Talk Turkey (shichimencho) With Those Quarelling Asiatics" roadshow (Link) rolls into the Prime Minister's Residence for a meeting with the Anaconda himself. I shudder to think who else the Washington Quartet will be meeting today -- though shadowing them the whole day would provide a resourceful journalist with a list of the influence peddlers and weak points inside the Japanese establishment. Knowing the group leader, the quartet are starting out their morning with a sushi breakfast in Tsukiji.

- The ripples of Maehara Seiji's tossing his expectation of a Diet dissolution by the year's end into the pond of Diet politics will spread out everywhere. Already, Democratic Party of Japan's Acting Secretary Azumi Jun has had to, on a Sunday when the Diet is not in session, tell reporters that Maehara's private views are not those of the party (Link - J). Liberal Democratic President Abe Shinzo, probably thinking his visit to Yasukuni (Link) is being rewarded earlier than even he could have imagined, pounded away last night on the theme that when a minister of Maehara's standing says that the prime minister has no choice but dissolve the Diet by year's end, it places a huge burden of expectations on the PM. (Link - J)

Does it ever.

- The heat from the staggering drops in the Cabinet popularity and party popularity figures recorded in the weekend's public opinion poll results could evaporate the DPJ-People New Party's slim majority in the House of Representatives.

The Asahi Shimbun

Cabinet support

Support 18% (-5%)
Do Not Support 59% (+3%)

Which party will you vote for in the party list section of the next House of Representatives election?

DPJ 13% (-4%)
LDP 36% (+6%)

(Link -J)

Fuji News Network

Which party will you vote for in the party list section of the next House of Representatives election?

DPJ 11.6% (-5.2%)
LDP 32.4% (+0.3%)

(Latest figures -J and previous figures - J)

- The pusillanimous and scandal-tarred Minister of Law Tanaka Keishu (Link), still hiding out in his hospital, refuses to resign. (Link - J)

What a way to start a week, eh, Prime Minister Noda?

Maehara Blows Up The Plan

In the 1994 movie Speed, antagonist and bomb maker Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) shouts over the phone to bomb squad officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) to forget about trying to outsmart him:

"Jack, nothing tricky now. You know I'm on top of you! DO NOT attempt to grow a brain!"

After what Minister for National Policy Maehara Seiji said to reporters today, I can imagine the normally imperturbable prime minister Noda Yoshihiko screaming into a phone to Maehara:

"At what point, since you graduated from pre-school, did you think you had GROWN A BRAIN?"

Maehara is, like the prime minister, a graduate of the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management. He should ostensibly be of somewhat better than average intelligence and education.

Nevertheless he manages to get into scrapes that leave one wondering, "What was he thinking?" -- which one then immediately repunctuates, "What? Was he thinking?" or even "What? Was he...thinking?"

Prime Minister and Democratic Party of Japan leader Noda Yoshihiko was coming off a very successful Friday meeting with Liberal Democratic Party President Abe Shinzo and New Komeito leader Yamaguchi Natsuo -- successful in that despite the warnings put to DPJ Secretary-General Koshi'ishi Azuma throughout the week by his counterparts in the LDP and New Komeito that if Noda did not offer a date for a House of Representatives election in line with the promise the PM made to former LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu to have an election "soon" (chikai uchi ni) the Friday meeting would be pointless -- the PM, when pressed by Abe and Yamaguchi, told them, "Sorry, can't say when the election will be."

Asked about his promise to Tanigaki, Noda explained, "I have been focusing on taking responsibility for the weight of the words 'Putting matters to the voters soon.' However, for me to make that decision requires preparations of the environment in various ways. I have no intention to extend the life of this administration through dilly-dallying." (Link - J)

That dilly-dallying, stalling, procrastinating, whatever you many want to call it is exactly what the prime minister and the DPJ have been doing (Link) and want to continue doing is, of course, the whole point.

Abe and Yamaguchi stormed out of the meeting, furious at the PM for having the gall to desire a forestalling his own and his party's execution at the hands of the voters...

[A bit of anachronism, but this weekend's polls, partly due to the deeply embarrassing Tanaka Keishu Affair, have been an across-the-board disaster for the Cabinet and the DPJ. The Asahi Shinmbun poll shows Cabinet support diving to 18% and the LDP slaughtering the DPJ in the "Which party will you vote for in the party list half of the ballot?" question (Link - J)]

Harrumphed Abe and Yamaguchi, "We heard nothing from the PM about 'soon'!"

To which any jaded political observer would say, "Yes. Your point being...?"

All of the prime minister's carefully choreographed insouciance as regards the personal appeals of the leaders LDP and the New Komeito is in tatters, however, after Maehara's truly bizarre swerving off of the script on Sunday. In a discussion of the semantics of "soon" on a morning talking show, then an even clumsier attempt to make up for the earlier blunder by attempting to polish the prime minister's reputation, he detonated a landmine under the PM and the DPJ.

On Fuji Television's morning talk show, Maehara said, regarding the concept "soon":

"If I am to relate my own feelings, if the Diet is dissolved after the beginning of the New Year, that is not 'soon.'"

(Link -J)

Ay Caramba, you maniac! Have you looked at calendar recently? Do you know what the date is today? Are you aware that under the election laws there have to be 12 days between the presentation of the list of the names of the candidates and the holding of an election? Have you forgotten also that the current electoral district boundaries are unconstitutional and that no real DPJ plan to rectify the unconstitutionality has yet seen the light of day? And that the DIET IS NOT IN SESSION YET?

But did Maehara stop there? No, he had to dig deeper. Way, way deeper.

Speaking to a reporters' gaggle after his startling Fuji Television performance, he said:

"One cannot say that having a dissolution of the Diet after New Years is 'soon' -right? I for one believe that the prime minister is the kind of person who keeps the faith taking responsibility for his own words."

(Link - J)

Hold it right there. Let me see if I have this straight. If there is no dissolution of the Diet by the end of the year, the prime minister, in your opinion, Mr. Maehara, is not "the kind of person who keeps the faith taking responsibility for his own words"?

Holy moly, one would hardly have thought it possible when this weekend began, but Maehara may be out of the Cabinet earlier than Tanaka Keishu.

In one of the most delicious of ironies, if one plugs Maehara's phrase for "keeps the faith" (shingi o mamoru) into Eijiro, the best regarded of the free online dictionaries, out pops the following quote from Chapter XVIII of Machiavelli's The Prince:

"Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer."

Read your damn Machiavelli, Maehara-san, whether or not you are still around a few hours from now. If you are not, then you will have plenty of free time to study of this the most basic text on political survival.

Keep the faith, brother you jackass.

Thought Over Coffee -- What Is Different About The Current Senkakus Dispute

With the Chinese authorities dialing down the protests and violence inside China, not permitting the departure of 1000 fishing vessels to challenge the 12 nautical mile territorial waters limit about the Senkakus, instead limiting itself to dispatching an admittedly large (12 vessels) contingent of its Maritime Surveillance and Fisheries Administration vessels to conduct annoying forays into the territorial waters zone, it is worthwhile to consider what is could be so different in between the 2010 dispute over the Senkakus, where the Chinese entities escalated their anti-Japan actions daily until the Prosecutors Office in Naha, Okinawa released the Chinese pirate fishing boat captain -- and the current standoff, where the Chinese government is pulling back to florid rhetorical posturing (J) with the Japanese government ceding nothing.

Some analysts might point to the quick deportation this time of the Hong Kong activists who landed on Uorijima as the key difference. However, the violence against Japanese interests in China began after the activists arrived home, and even after the return of their vessel to Hong Kong. The quick resolution of the Hong Kong landing indeed made some hopeful that Japan and China had reached a certain level of entente over Senkakus issues. (J)

Violence erupted later, all over China, and the Chinese government went into patriotic pronouncement overkill -- this over the Japanese government's preventative move of purchasing the available islands in order to keep them out of the hands of agent provocateur Ishihara Shintaro.

The government of China could have gone one of two ways in defusing internal anger over the Japanese national government's move. It could have argued that while distasteful, the GOJ's purchase was the lesser of two evils. The Chinese government could have also dismissed the GOJ's action with contempt -- i.e., "If the Japanese government wants to waste Japanese taxpayer money in a bid to acquire title over lands that are not even in Japan, great!"

So why take the unpredictable and potential global PR disaster route of unleashing the anti-Japanese activists and common folk against Japanese targets inside China? Why not play it cool, treating the Japanese like Lilliputians not worth China's time? Certainly the dry tinder of the patriotic education policy exists -- but why set a match to it, only to snuff it out a few days later?

Two answers come to mind.

The first is that the leadership transition in China has been so fouled up by the Bo Xilai Affair and its aftermath that everyone is grasping at symbols of loyalty and patriotism. The disappearance without explanation of president-in-waiting Xi Jinping during the height of the crisis indicates that something has gone very wrong in what is supposed to be an orderly and heavily foreshadowed process.

With Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are cleaning out their desks and stepping back from the management of daily affairs, and as yet no one officially in place to wield power, nobody in Beijing or elsewhere knew what the actual PRC government policy is as regards the Senkakus islands purchase. As a result there was a sudden burst of policy entrepreneurship, with different parts of the government flashing green lights in the hope of securing their reputations.

The other possibility is that the Chinese government thought it was, and then quickly realized it was not, still dealing with Sengoku Yoshito.

I can be accused of conducting verbal drive-by-shootings of government and party officials. Targets of multiple rounds of my ire include former prime minister Hatoyama Yukio -- who on the 17th announced a correction (shusei) of his previous intimations he would leave the DPJ should party leader Noda Yoshihiko win reelection on September 21 (J) -- and LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu -- though I maintained a long ceasefire in my campaign against him after his wife's passing. I have also been upset time and time again at Ozawa Ichiro out of a profound sense of disappointment at his having spent the last 20 years demolishing every vehicle of progressive reform he has built through his stunning lack of awareness of his vulnerabilities.

Sengoku Yoshito is one of the politicians about whom I find it hard to have a nice thing to say.

He is first of all a bully, his tongue getting him into scrape after scrape. Just last week a judge tossed out, on a technicality, a hefty misuse of office lawsuit filed against him by a member of the LDP, whom Sengoku, when he was Chief Cabinet Secretary, dismissed in a press conference with a "I have no intention of paying the least bit of attention to the crap that a craphead says." (J) In June Sengoku lost a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a female journalist against him for remarks he had made about her, prompting some of the DPJ's women Diet members to ask the party to ostracize him.

If Sengoku's disdain for the rest of humankind were not problematic enough, he has an uncanny ability to misapprehend when he is in an advantageous position. He styles himself a hard-headed realist, not understanding that what he is is, to borrow a phrase from Homer Simpson, a rice-eating surrender monkey.

Sengoku is the presumed architect of the release of the Chinese fishing boat captain in 2010, pressuring the Naha District Prosecutors Office in Prime Minister Kan Naoto's absence to release the captain on the novel legal grounds that a prosecution is impossible because the arrest was becoming an international incident. Sengoku then implausibly denied that he had put any pressure on the Naha Prosecutors Office. He tried to suppress the public viewing of the Japan Coast Guard video of the collisions at sea involving the Chinese ship, despite the images being definite proof the Chinese captain willfully rammed the JCG vessels – when the public release of the video would have redounded to the government’s credit and whose failed suppression became a huge embarrassment when a coast guardsman posted the videos up on YouTube.

More recently, Sengoku was the source of a bizarre story that Prime Minister Noda was ready to accept the LDP’s electoral reform bill, the so-called +0/-5 bill, without reservations or modifications. That the DPJ would throw away its ace card, the ability to draft an electoral reform bill to its liking due to the Supreme Court's having ruled the current electoral map unconstitutional, was sheer lunacy. This did not prevent Sengoku from going on Yomiuri Television (a fine, pro-DPJ news outlet, to be sure) to repeat this nonsensical assertion. (J)

Sengoku is currently Acting Policy Research Chair of the DPJ. While this is a grand-sounding title in English, it is actually a middle-ranking position. It is far enough from the central secretariat to keep Sengoku from meddling in policy formation but is high enough that Sengoku, who has an inflated opinion of himself, does not feel slighted. It also keeps Sengoku at close enough range for Policy Chairman Maehara Seiji to keeps tabs on whatever mischief Sengoku may be up to.

Sengoku has also been given the seemingly crucial task of drafting the party's electoral manifesto. Handing Sengoku this responsibility would seem a risky decision for the party secretariat to make. However, prime minister Noda's habit of issuing statements of policy with adverbs, where the careful insertion of an adverbial phrase undermines the statement just enough that the careless listener believes he has heard what he wanted to hear while the careful listener realizes the PM has not committed himself to anything – guarantees that Sengoku's task of composing a coherent, up-to-date document is a Sisyphean one.

Anyhow, Sengoku, who was one the Diet members and former Diet members scheduled to depart on a special friendship visit to China on September 26 – a visit that has been cancelled (J) -- is not around to wave his white flag of courage in the face of Chinese violence and provocations. Instead, the Chinese government has to deal with with Noda, Foreign Minister Gemba Ko'ichiro and Maehara, who was Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism – the home ministry of the Japan Coast Guard – at the time of the Chinese fishing boat collisions.

Eeek! Sound the retreat!

The Emperor After The Fall

Today is The Big Day -- when the judge in the Ozawa Ichiro trial on violations of the Public Funds Control Law Political Funds Control Act hands down his verdict and if Ozawa is found guilty, his sentence. The news is full of analysis of the meaning of the Ozawa verdict, including these two pieces by Toko Sekiguchi (E) and Aurelia George Mulgan (E).

I hate to be the grump in any instance -- but the verdict today is largely irrelevant. As Sekiguchi points out in her piece, Ozawa will appeal if he is found guilty. If he is found not guilty, the Association of Those Seeking the Truth (Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai) will have failed in its quest to milk the arrest of Okubo Takanori for some evidence to put Ozawa away. Given that the members of this group, whoever they are, all seem to be in retirement and thus with plenty of time on their hands to cause mischief (the Devil makes work for idle hands, after all), it is likely the Association will just find another blind alley to send prosecutors running down.

(An aside: the slavering anti-Ozawa weekly Shukan Bunshun decided that yesterday, the eve of the verdict, was the perfect day to release an exclusive story about a heretofore unknown child Ozawa fathered out of wedlock. Classy rag, that Shukan Bunshun.)

Whatever the purported goals of the cases against Ozawa and his aides, the political purpose has been served. The arrest of Okubo forced Ozawa to resign as head of the Democratic Party of Japan on the eve of the election that was to push the Liberal Democratic Party off its perch and install a DPJ-led coalition government. The resignation as party leader prevented Ozawa becoming prime minister. While Ozawa was able to engineer the election of his ally-puppet Hatoyama Yukio as his replacement, with Ozawa taking the role of effective party leader through the post of DPJ Secretary-General, Ozawa was denied the prize which he had long desired and had long labored to seize. As for the arrests of former aides Ishikawa Tomohiro and Ikeda Mitsutomo, on the basis of evidence of violations of the Public Funds Control Law found by the prosecutors after a proctological search through the documents seized in relation to Okubo's arrest, these weakened Ozawa's position in the party, making it possible for middle-level legislators to challenge his stranglehold on party policy making.

Ozawa's indictment on January 31, 2011 (E) gave the anti-Ozawa members of the DPJ, including prime minister Kan Naoto, the leverage needed to force party secretary-general Koshi'ishi Azuma, an Ozawa ally, to suspend Ozawa's party privileges.

Stripped of all formal party positions and even access to party funds for his own reelection. Ozawa had to exercise influence indirectly through the first-term and second-term legislators in Houses of Representatives and the House of Councillors whom he had hand-picked as candidates, and through the largely second- and third-grade legislators who had followed him through party after party. These nominal disciples number about 150 legislators, a third of the DPJ's membership in the Diet.

However, without his hands on the money spigots of the party, particularly the public financing provided to finance elections, Ozawa has had to rely on the bonds of affection, loyalty and his own funding apparatus to keep his allies faithful. This bond has weakened, however, as Ozawa's time in internal exile has dragged on. On issues of policy, such as opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the rise in the consumption tax, he has had to ally himself with other disaffected elements of the party, such as Mr. No To Everything Yamada Masahiko. He also found himself, in June 2011, on the verge joining hands with the LDP, the party he had worked so hard to unseat and dismantle, in a vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Kan. Only a last-minute and ultimately empty face-saving compromise worked out by the feckless Hatoyama prevented Ozawa from fulfilling the media's negative portrayal of  him as a selfish destroyer of parties and governments.

Even this indirect influence over party policy making has evaporated, however. In a show of principle and utter political naïveté, Ozawa's allies in the DPJ dragged out the party debate over the legislation raising the consumption tax from a projected 3 days to 3 weeks. Exasperated, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko cut off debate, giving the final decision on the legislation to Policy Research Chairman Maeda Maehara Seiji -- an outcome that effectively negated the entire three weeks of debate. In response, four of Ozawa's acolytes in government positions and 30 in party positions resigned their posts. Eager to preserve party unity, the party leadership refused to accept the resignations, giving the legislators and Ozawa a chance to reconsider their actions. After six days of waiting, the government accepted the resignations of the government appointees on April 5 (E). It still left the door open, though, for those who had resigned party posts.

The party, however, very quietly shut that final door on Monday (J,) accepting resignations of the Ozawa allies who had resigned their party posts.

So as the political commentariat and twitterati await the verdict with bated breath, the political impact of the outcome is less significant than political observers will admit. Ozawa is now more shadow than shadow shogun. The current leadership group, knowing his tendencies, will not permit his appointment to any position of power. He will not be allowed near the party's pot of political funds. His followers have abandoned the positions they could have used to influence or if necessary gum up policy making.

Ozawa has been the most influential, hated and fascinating politician of the last 30 years. However, whatever happens today will not shake the political world to its roots. Its branches may shiver a bit -- but that is all.

 Later - My apologies for the HTML failures that led to half the original text being swallowed up into the ether.

Still later - Many thanks to alert readers O.J. and M.P. for catching the errors.

On Kiuchi Takatane's Departure From The DPJ

The top news this morning regarding the consumption tax is the first departure from the Democratic Party of Japan since the Cabinet's approval of the government bill raising the tax to 10%, an event that blew apart the DPJ's coalition partner, the People's New Party.

The departing MP is Kiuchi Takatane, a first-time district seat holder from the Tokyo #9 constituency. According to his blog, he has tendered his resignation from the party on the grounds that he ran on the program of changing the way government conducted its business. He wants the government to cut back on its own spending and the losses incurred through the various quasi-governmental organizations living off the public purse. However, the Noda government, rather than focusing on putting the government and the social welfare system on a more sustainable course, is simply swallowing the consumption tax rise cooked up by the Ministry of Finance, without considering the significant economic impact the tax rise will have on the Japanese economy. (J)

Now this is the basic Ozawa Ichiro line regarding the Noda government's approach to the consumption tax. In terms of political optics, the Ozawa approach is the smarter one: pass bills cutting the number of legislators and their wages, carry out the recommendations of the Government Revitilization Unit (GRU), then go to the people asking for more of their hard-earned yen. A group of 33 first-time legislators indeed presented a letter to DPJ Policy Research Council Chairman Maehara Seiji on the 29th begging him to move forward on a bill reducing the number of proportional seats in the House of Representatives from 180 to 100 -- even though this cut would eliminate the reelection chances of some of those with their signatures on the letter.

However smart this plan in terms of electoral politics, it is unworkable in terms of Diet politics and the Cabinet's hopes of implementing any changes in government policies. The New Komeito, and by extension its ally the Liberal Democratic Party, will not countenance a bill cutting the proportional seats in the House of Representatives by any significant number on the grounds that all of the New Komeito's seats in the House of Representatives are proportional seats. As for carrying out the recommendations of the GRU, Prime Minister Noda seems to realize that despite the DPJ's historical antipathy toward the national government's bureaucrats, he cannot fight wars on two fronts simultaneously: one against the opposition parties in the Diet and another against the bureaucrats. Not that Noda not willing to stick it to the bureaucrats when the opportunity presents itself, as the passage of the bill cutting bureaucratic pay by an average of 7.8% indicates. However, this cut was a New Komeito proposal, meaning that Noda had to expend almost no political capital in winning its passage through both Houses of the Diet.

There is, of course, the other problem with the Ozawa program in its being irrelevant to the actual budgetary problems of Japan. While there is tremendous waste of government resources, the squeezing of ministries and the quasi-governmental organizations will result in risibly small savings.

So why is Kiuchi first out the door?

Undoubtedly because Kiuchi can afford to be. He is a former Mitsubishi Bank executive who left the bank for stints in the securities departments of Deutsche Bank and UBS, finishing out his finance career as the managing director of investment banking at Merrill Lynch Japan. (J)

In other words, Kiuchi does not rely on his Diet member paycheck to maintain his lifestyle. For him, it must look like pocket change.

Ozawa was smart in choosing his followers, targeting not only telegenic young candidates but also local worthies of independent means, for whom politics was not a career or a job but a passion.

Kiuchi will not be joining the Kizuna Party (J), the party founded by mostly Ozawa loyalists who defected from the DPJ late last year in opposition to the government's plans regarding the consumption tax. Shinto Kizuna has proven to be something of a political Siberia, unable to work with the government of course, but unable to join the opposition either. (J)

The party has the smell of death about it.

Instead Kiuchi will be, or in his eyes already is, an independent. Running as an independent is a bit of a gamble as his opponent is the former LDP holder of the #9 District seat. Kiuchi beat his LDP opponent 47% to 42% in the August 2009 elections. Come next election, Kiuchi will have no institutional support or anti-LDP wind at his back. He will also be the incumbent when the electorate may be in a "throw the bums out" mood. On the plus side, Kiuchi can run as the anti-tax candidate.

Will many other member of the DPJ be following Kiuchi's example, putting pressure on the government to abandon its plans of a quick vote on the consumption tax bill in the House of Representatives? Possibly, though few can boast the ability to support oneself available to Kiuchi.

Will the defection of Kiuchi and others make it easier for LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu and New Komeito leader Yamaguchi Natsuo to pretend to ignore Noda government entreaties to have their parties' members vote for the bill in the House of Councillors? Sure, for at least a while. Given Ozawa's political smarts, after having delivered the double punch on Friday of the resignations of some 20 his stalwarts from their government and party posts, he will likely have defections of his followers coming out in dribs and drabs so to have the news of the DPJ's coming apart dominating the political narrative. The longer the blood letting goes on the harder it is for Noda Yoshihiko to offer a credible front in his bargaining with the opposition.

The Usual Suspects; The Usual Outcome?

They were supposed to wrap things up on Friday but they could not come to an agreement.

They were supposed to come up with some neat ideas over the weekend to patch up the yawning fissure in between the two sides. However, there were no realistic ideas, just a lot of wishes expressed.

Monday was supposed to be the day when the final offers were made...but...you can guess the outcome.

Finally, in the wee hours of this morning, the chair of the Democratic Party of Japan ad hoc committee trying to forge an intra-party consensus on the conditions for the raising of the consumption tax declared the debate over. Those opposed to the raising of the consumption tax raised a fuss...but that is what they were going to do anyway.

So the drafting of the final language of the bill is handed over to (ichinin suru) Policy Research Council Chairman Maehara Seiji, which is tantamount to this multi-week debate's never having taken place.

The Noda Yoshihiko led-executive did offer some last minute concessions. The first was the mentioning of economic growth targets in the body of the bill as a necessary consideration for reconsideration of the appropriateness of the timing of the tax rise, without actually having those targets serve as triggers. What was promised was sort of "It would be nice if we have nominal growth of 3% and real growth of 2% when the tax is raised. It we do not have these levels of growth we will be vewy, vewy sad." Opponents to the tax rise have been demanding the numerical triggers. They were, shall we say, less than impressed at the leadership's offer.

The other concession was the elimination of the article in the bill which left the door open for further raising of the consumption tax beyond 10% after 2014. Both sides of the debate, however, knew from the outset that that particular article was a sacrificial lamb, so its elimination is more an insult than a concession.

So the bill is set for approval by the Cabinet this Friday, meeting a deadline set in a 2009 bill for reforms of the consumption tax. Will the anti-tax group, most of whom are either supporters or past supporters of splitists (borrowing the Chinese pejorative) Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio, go so far as to break away from the DPJ?

No.

Why say that with such conviction? These folks have been staying up late (last night's session lasted 7 hours), night after night, doing their darndest to stymie the leadership from offering to the Diet its own version of the bill.

Yes, and after all that effort, they did not manage to do diddly, did they?

Let us surmise that this was a debate with a pre-determined outcome, a pantomime show put on for the benefit of those either hoping for

1) a break up of the DPJ,
2) a halt in the raising of the consumption tax,
3) evidence of real, considered policy debate within the ruling party,
4) an intra-party political drama keeping the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito off the nation's TV screens and political news pages, or
5) any combination of the previous four elements.

The first hint that this was a set piece was the players. In a real debate, there would be twists and turns, unforeseen heroes, impromptu memorable quips. However, in this show, we saw the same seven characters:

Policy Research Chairman Maehara Seiji
Tax Committee Chairman Fujii Haruhisa

in the pro-tax corner

Azuma Shozo (now with a beard)
Kawauchi Hiroshi
Yamada "Mr. No To Everything" Masahiko

in the anti-tax corner

with Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio catcalling in from undisclosed locations, never from within the confines of the committee room itself (the place was packed last night, with 200 legislators attending)

saying the same darned things one would expect them to say.

The second hint was that this debate was framed as an "Ozawa vs. the Leadership" smackdown. By now we should have learned that when push comes to shove, Ozawa does not have the numbers to back up his either dominating the DPJ or breaking it. The closest he came was in September of 2010, when he ran directly against Kan Naoto for the post of party leader. At least among the Diet membership, Ozawa came tantalizingly close to beating Kan in the voting. The takeaway from that date, however, is that despite having so much of the present membership of the Diet indebted to him for their seats, he still failed to win a majority of the votes of the Diet membership. As for the votes of the assembly members and the party supporters, Ozawa got snowed under.

When Ozawa had the chance, nine months later, to put Kan away by leading his followers in voting "yes" for an LDP-sponsored no-confidence motion, he demurred, not even bothering to show up at the Diet chamber for the vote.

So when the fight is billed "Ozawa vs. the powers that be" we should be suspicious, even with the big dog about to slip his leash.

Of course, there is a major problem looming for the leadership: Kamei Shizuka's opposition to the consumption tax hike. Friday's Cabinet approval has to be unanimous. If the People's New Party's representative in the Cabinet, Financial Services Minister Jimi Shozaburo (who is kind of busy right now) does not vote for the proposal, it cannot be offered to the Diet as a government bill. Oddly, the commentariat is largely silent on the possibility that Noda will have to fire Jimi in the same way as Hatoyama had to fire Consumer Affairs Minister Fukushima Mizuho when she refused to sign off on the Futenma-to-Henoko decision. If Noda fires Jimi, then the PNP will likely follow the Democratic Socialists out of the government.

While the departure of the PNP would not mean much for the Noda government in terms of lost votes in the Diet, the optics of such a break up would be poor.

Since Kamei has been talking on and on about the establishment of a new "true conservative" party, however, it is possible that the PNP is already dead. Jimi can thus be ready to vote "yes" for the bill on Friday, making the PNP's moribund state official, and allowing Noda to move on to the next phase: corralling either the LDP or the New Komeito into voting for the bill.

Politics And Society In Comic Verse – Senryu of March 3, 2012

Haiku has a bastard cousin, senryu. If haiku takes a moment and seeks to make it poignant and timeless, senryu takes a subject, comments on it in the present time, then gleefully evaporates into nothingness.

Relentlessly topical, senryu have a lifespan of about two weeks, or sometimes even less. There are no schools or traditions to follow. Authors, invariably non-professionals with a gift for word play and a brazen willingness to tell bad jokes in public, take the basic 17 syllable verse unit – with some leeway as to how one defines 17 syllables — and run with it. Punning, rhyming, assonance and slipping parentheses are applauded, as are references to popular culture and most importantly, politics.

You can probably guess which poetry form I prefer.

Here is a selection of senryu from the Tokyo Shimbun of Saturday, March 3.

日本丸「八策」よりも「金策」急
Nihonmaru
hassaku yori mo
kinsaku kyu

The Japanese ship of state
Rather than the "Eight Proposals from the Ship"
Has to hurry up with "the scramble for cash"

Here the apposition is between the policy program of Hashimoto Toru's Ishin no kai which the proto-party has pompously called the “Eight Proposals from the Ship” (hassaku) in reference to Sakamoto Ryoma’s reform proposals of the same name — and the grubby search for revenues, including seizing dormant bank accounts, currently gripping the government (kinsaku). Both hassaku and kinsaku have the same second Chinese character. "Nihonmaru" is here used both as a common metaphor for Japan and specifically as a ship reference, as Sakamoto composed his eight proposals while onboard a vessel.

お馬鹿キャラクイズに弱い防衛相
Obakakyara
kuizu ni yowai
boeiso

Our idiot role-player Minister of Defense
Who is weak at quizzes

or

Our Minister of Defense who is weak
At even quiz shows for idiots

Minister of Defense Tanaka Naoki has been an absolute disaster in parliamentary committee meetings. He has been constantly providing laughable interpretations of law, misunderstanding questions, pathetically stalling for time and coming back from gaffe after gaffe with apologies for either providing false information or no information. In this he is like an obakakyara, an archaismic version of the obakatarento, the “idiot celebrity,” the likes of whom have been infesting the airwaves en masse since five years ago. These are individuals, usually pretty young women, who have absolutely nothing in between their ears. Their abject stupidity is their charm. They are popular guests on certain quiz shows, or at least get booked on them, precisely because the answers they concoct are so idiotic.

再建に記憶絞れよエルピーダ
Saiketsun ni
Kioku shibore yo
Erupida

In restructuring
Let's extract some memory, shall we?
Elpida

The word play is in the phrase "extracting memory" (kioku shibore) since Elpida, which filed for bankruptcy last week, is a memory chip maker. The writer is hoping that Japan's powers that be learn something from the experience of trying to cobble together and prop up a national champion manufacturer in an industry where Japan has no clear national competitive edge.

言うだけの番長やがて腰くだけ
Iu dake no
bancho yagate
koshi kudake

The gang leader who just talks tough (iu dake no bancho)
Has at last had to take a fall

On the 23rd of last month, Maehara Seiji, the Democratic Party of Japan's policy research chairman, took the extraordinary step of banning from his press conferences the right-wing national Sankei Shimbun. The Sankei had it coming, as it is, to be polite, a "fact-challenged" newspaper. The Sankei raged, the other newspapers tut-tutted, but Maehara stood firm. Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, when asked what he thought of the brouhaha, did not say that he supported the action. He did say, however, that he would leave the matter up to Maehara. After five days, Maehara let the Sankei back in. When the Sankei reporter asked his first question — "Why did you ban us?" – Maehara shot back, "You wrote things not based on facts. As the questions and answers you had in your text never took place, I refused you entry." (J)

What is interesting here is the author takes the Sankei's view of the incident – which is all the more interesting as the Tokyo Shimbun is a card-carrying lefty paper. He (and it is a he, as the names of the authors along with the towns they live in are listed alongside the verses) says that Maehara had to bend at the hips and fall (koshi kudake) which, given the broadside Maehara shot off at the Sankei reporter (which all the other papers dutifully and merrily reproduced) is a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the outcome. He also uses a slightly modified version of the Sankei's personal epithet for Maehara, the "gang-leader who just talks" (iudake bancho) which is itself a near homophone of a famous manga series Yuyake bancho (You Tube video). The first four syllables of the poem (iu dake) also rhyme with the last three syllables (kudake).

Here is one for the Japan-U.S. alliance fans, one which is also blessedly straightforward:

普天間と辺野古動かぬ千日手
Futenma to
Henoko ugokanu
sen'nichite

Futenma and Henoko
The endless series of non-moves

Sen'nichite, according to my dictionary, is a term from shogi describing "a potentially endless repetition of moves leading to a draw." Which, 15 years into the process, is a damn accurate description of the Futenma mess.

If you have persevered this far, time for some serious play.

ハシズムもいつかはシズム時がある
Hashizumu mo
itsu ka wa shizumu
toki ga aru

Hashism
Will also have its time when
It will sink

or

Hashism will also have its time

Those skeptical of or antagonistic toward Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru’s blend of enforced patriotism, browbeating opponents and lacerating bureaucrats deride his political program as hashizumu (“Hashism”) a play on fascism (fuashizumu).

The joke in this poem is in the way shizumu, “to sink” is written in katakana, rather than in kanji and/or hiragana,. It follows the topic marker wa, written as it should be with ha of hiragana. Together, the wa and the shizumu together become hashizumu, repeating the first word.

Then there are the senryu that, try as I might, I am at a loss to understand.

原発は嫌とムンク「叫び」たり
Genpatsu wa
Iya to Munku
"Sakebi" tari

Ok, we have the reference to Edward Munch's "The Scream." We have folks screaming that they hate nuclear power plants. How it all fits together, seeing as how there are only six syllables in the middle line, defeats my meager powers of interpretation.

Anyone willing to have a go at it?

The DPJ Cannot Trust The Bureaucracy To Make Its Decisions For It

I had an American academic of great renown and insight tell me that the Democratic Party of Japan simply had to start working more closely with the bureaucracy. At the time I was horrified, not only because battering the bureaucracy into submission is one of the core tenets of DPJ identity but because it simply would not work.

This week we have had two examples of two horrible decisions made by the ministries, one of which was bullrushed through a Cabinet decision and the other which, as long as Maehara Seiji is breathing, will have a wooden spike driven through its black heart.

The first bad decision was the selection of the F-35 fighter as the replacement for Japan's fleet of aging F-4s. That the F-35 is a work-in-progress for the wrong mission at the wrong price has been hammered home repeated over the last few days, both in the Japanese press and English-language commentary - the most recent example of which is the opinion article by Alessio Patalano (who has more knowledge about the Japanese military in his pinky than I will ever know) in The Asahi Shimbun (Link).

The second slap-me-because-I-think-I-am-dreaming decision is yesterday's inexplicable announcement by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism to restart construction on the Yamba Dam (E). The cancellation of the Yamba Dam is item #1 on the DPJ's list of cost saving measures it will undertake to provide funding for the expansion of its social welfare spending. The September 2009 announcement by the then Minister of MLIT Maehara Seiji that further work on the dam was cancelled was the first clear indication that the newly-elected DPJ government was serious about its promises to reform the way Japan has been run. For a DPJ MLIT minister to earmark funds for a restart of the project, this with the collusion of Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu, boggles the imagination.

Luckily (for the citizenry and whatever shreds of credibility the DPJ has left) the now Chairman of the DPJ's Policy Research Council Maehara Seiji has told everyone within hearing distance that the project will restart only over his dead body.

In both these instances, the decisions coming out of the ministries have the fingerprints of bureaucrats all over them, largely in that they are politically deaf and seemingly profitable only to the members of the bureaucracy itself and a tiny circle of special interests.

Where is Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko in all of this? Is he not supposed to be leading, thinking about the national interest and the interests of his party?

Oh, You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

Noda The Decider (Once I Have A Consensus) at work:

Japan postpones decision on whether to join Pacific free trade talks
Kyodo News

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda decided Thursday to postpone an announcement on whether Japan will join negotiations for a Pacific free trade agreement, heeding calls from the ruling party to make a decision in a cautious manner, the top government spokesman said.

The abrupt announcement to delay the decision regarding negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement to Friday came after senior officials of the government and ruling Democratic Party of Japan met at the prime minister's office.

"Please give me one day to think," Noda was quoted as telling the officials, according to DPJ policy chief Seiji Maehara. (Link)

Like what, the PM is going to have an epiphany in the midst of Diet Budget Committee questioning tomorrow?

This is not high drama; this is low comedy.

Hey Nippon Keidanren and METI, see what happens when you do not make an effort to make your case, failing to appreciate that this is a political battle to death, not a gentleman's/gentlelady's debate? You leave your prime minister befuddled, perplexed and finally an object worthy of ridicule.

No, Japan Is Not Entering TPP Negotiations With An Option To Quit

No, Maehara Seiji is not reckless. No, the government is not confused.

And no, you will not know any of this, even if you follow the news reports.

On NHK's Sunday 9 a.m. talk show, Maehara Seiji, the Democratic Party of Japan Policy Research Chairman, suggested that Japan could enter into talks to join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) only to skip out at a later date, if the elements of the pact turned out to not be to Japan's liking (ja).

The political background for making such a suggestion is clear: the outlook for the DPJ leadership pushing the Diet to give its nod to Japan participating in TPP negotiations is growing murkier by the hour. It was expected that agriculture, forestry and fisheries would be dead set against Japan participating in negotiations. As a consequence, their representative organizations were given a day to vent their grievances before the DPJ TPP project team. However, the Central Union of Agriculture Cooperatives (Zenchu) has upped the ante by employing a rarely used constitutional maneuver of petitioning the Diet in order to stop Japan’s participation in TPP talks, saying that it had the support of 350 of the Diet’s members (en). At the same time, all kinds of organizations that had been expected to remain on the sidelines have come out against Japan precipitously joining TPP negotiations, including the Consumer’s Union of Japan (Nisshoren) and the Japan Medical Association (en).

With the complexity and breadth of the TPP becoming wider known, causing more and more organizations to come out against Japan’s participation, Maehara and the rest of the DPJ’s leadership have under tremendous pressure to get as many of the DPJ’s fence sitters down on the side of the TPP as soon as possible. The temptation must have been great to drum up support now by saying that Japan’s participation could be considered contingent -- that Japan could begin negotiations only to pull out later with no harm, no foul.

Maehara's statement of course sent heads whipping around. That Japan could enter into talks with an expressed ambivalence or indeed insincerity challenged the government's and TPP opponents' common view that the fight is over whether Japan will be a committed incipient partner or will just not show up. What Maehara was suggesting was there was room at the negotiations for Japan to have some kind of special observer status, neither fully in nor fully out.

The problem with Maehara's gambit is obvious. If any entity were to enter into negotiations with Japan, it would have to consider the possibility that Japan would whip out its "option to quit" card from out its back pocket at the first sign of stress. With the possibility that the government might retreat, no nation or organization would ever want to negotiate with the Japanese government.

Being that he is no idiot, Maehara realized that he had misspoken in a big way. In a streetside interview after the end of the NHK program, he refined his statement, saying that when he was talking about Japan backing out of TPP discussions, it would be in the context of heretofore unknown facts about the pact came to light, or some other such surprise.

Pay attention to the time indication in the top right corner of this TV Asahi replay of the Maehara streetside interview (ja). Note that it says, "After 10 a.m." -- ie., after Maehara had walked off the set at NHK. Note also that TV Asahi completely ignores Maehara's nuanced restatement of his position in favor of its own narrative -- that DPJ policy chief Maehara Seiji has suggested Japan will enter into negotiations with a clear option to pull out.

Unfortunately for Maehara, what one says on Nichiyo Toron, NHK's showcase political talk show, matters far more than what one says on the street afterward. Not even for a television network that is a rival to NHK that broadcasts on its news program the video of one's restating one's position.

Since Maehara's remarks on Nichiyo Toron and his restatement of his position immediately afterward, the government has been fighting a losing battle with the news media over what is or is not Japan's position on participating in TPP negotiations.

Fully aware that under the reorganization of the DPJ's policy making process Maehara has an influence on policy second only to the prime minister*, the news media has whippped Maehara’s Nichiyo Toron comment into a confection of confusion inside the government and the ruling party. When Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu on Monday defended Maehara's restated opinion, and said there were past instances of Japan pulling out of negotiations with similar characteristics, the news media treated Fujimura's support as being support for Maehara’s original statement on the Nichiyo Toron program. When on Monday afternoon Fujimura said that Japan considers its promises to the United States weighty and important, the news media portrayed this as Fujimura reversing his position of earlier in the day (en). When on Tuesday, Fujimura again reaffirmed there are numerous historical instances of Japan pulling out of negotiations, the reporting made it seem that Fujimura had reversed himself yet again (ja).

Of course, the new media's misuse of Maehara's position opened the door for the opposition to criticize the ruling party and the government, with Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Ishira Nobuteru blasting Maehara and Fujimura for having no sense of how diplomatic relations are conducted (ja)

Even editorial cartoonists, who should know better, have had misguided fun at Maehara's expense. Here is the Tokyo Shimbun's Tuesday morning edition cartoon, drawing parallels between Maehara's stance on Japan 's TPP negotiations to Kim Jong-il's stance on participation in the Six Party Talks.


Panel 1 – Label: TPP
President Barack Obama : "Japan has to quickly commit to participation."

Panel 2 – Label: In and out, in and out
Maehara: "If we participate, there's the option of pulling out."

Panel 3 – Label: The Six Party Talks
Kim Jong-il to Maehara – "That's right. There's the option. There's the option."

Title: "Doing It The DPRK Way"


Poor Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro. He has had to go out of his way to reassure international partners that Japan is not entering into negotiations willy-nilly without any guarantee of sticking around (en). Not what he thought he would be doing when he accepted the job from Noda Yoshihiko, I am sure. Note also that the report on Gemba's refutation of the principle of Japan entering into negotiation with an option to pull out perpetuates the false narrative that Maehara and Fujimura are arguing for just such a right.

The press has bought into that narrative. The government and the citizenry are being swept up into it, no matter what anyone wants or does.


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

* There have been further additions to the policy making diagram since I wrote about it, putting one more advisory council in between the DPJ Policy Research Council and the Cabinet. In general, however, Maehara's special status has been preserved.

Image: Tokyo Shimbun of October 25, 2011.

Sovereignty Matters

The Chinese government called off a meeting between Premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto at the last minute yesterday. The Chinese side held that the atmosphere for the talks had been ruined by certain statements by Japanese diplomats.

China says talks with Japan have been 'ruined'
CNN

A summit involving Japan and China was in jeopardy Friday after a Chinese foreign ministry official accused Japanese diplomats of making statements that violated China's sovereignty, according to the Chinese state-run news agency.

China and Japan are participating in a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Hanoi, Vietnam, but Japanese representatives made "untrue statements about the content of a meeting between Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers held earlier in the day," the Xinhua news agency said.

Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hu Zhengyue said that "the Japanese move ruined the atmosphere for leaders from the two sides to conduct talks in the Vietnamese capital."

Japanese media are framing the dispute a different way, saying that Hu told Hong Kong media that Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji was directly responsible destroying the mood that could have led to a summit meeting.

"The truth was that the diplomatic authority of Japan, in cahoots with other nations, tried to create (noise) on the issue of the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea in the lead-up to the summits between ASEAN and its partners," Xinhua reported. (CNN -ibid)

"Creating (noise)" is not quite the word that the Japanese press is reporting. The Chinese phrase is translated as mushikaesu -- "to reheat" -- an issue.

It is not hard to figure out which nation the Japanese diplomatic authority was "in cahoots" with the most in reheating the issue of who has authority over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands:

QUESTION: (Via interpreter) (Inaudible) Deguchi with Kyodo News Service. First a question for Secretary Clinton, and this is about security. Recently – this is about Senkaku Islands, which has (inaudible) spat between Japan and China. And I wonder if the security treaty between Japan and the United States will be applied.

[snip]

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first let me say clearly again that the Senkakus fall within the scope of Article 5 of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. This is part of the larger commitment that the United States has made to Japan’s security. We consider the Japanese-U.S. alliance one of the most important alliance partnerships we have anywhere in the world and we are committed to our obligations to protect the Japanese people...

[snip]

FOREIGN MINISTER MAEHARA: (Via interpreter) There was a question about the Senkaku Islands and rare earth minerals. As I have been saying, Senkaku Islands, in terms of history and international law, are inherent territory of Japan and have – we have had (inaudible) control over the islands and will continue to do so.

Today, Secretary Clinton repeated that the Senkaku Islands would fall within the scope of the application of Article 5 of the bilateral security treaty. That was very encouraging.

All these quotes are from the press availability Maehara and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had on October 27 in Honolulu. No shading of meaning, no "nothing has been fully resolved" as regards sovereignty. Just a clear and blunt statement to the Chinese that for the United States at least the Senkakus are Japanese territory -- no, ifs, ands or buts about it.

It is perhaps not fair that Maehara is blamed for destroying the mood in advance of the summit. After all, he was not the one who asked the question and he had no control over how Secretary Clinton chose to present the U.S. position.

Nevertheless, he should know that he is the focal point of Chinese attention, after having called the Chinese government response to the September 7 fishing boat captain incident "hysterical." He clearly did not have to stick the knife at the end of the press conference as regards China's on-again, off-again embargo on the exports of rare earth elements to Japan:

With regard to the rare earth minerals, as Secretary Clinton stated earlier, even if this problem did not exist, to rely for 97 percent of the – these resources on China, as we look back, was certainly not appropriate and therefore we have to diversify the sources of rare earth minerals. And here again, Japan and the United States will closely cooperate with each other in order to engage in more diversified rare earth minerals diplomacy.

While cheering on Japan-U.S. cooperation probably won Maehara kudos in Washington, it could have only made the Chinese steaming (the mushi of mushikaesu means "to steam") mad at the foreign minister.