Tokyo On File* - The Latest On Apologies (For Your Listening Pleasure)

As is our wont, Timothy Langley and I sat down and talked about a hot topic in Japanese politics. Last week we reviewed the Cabinet Statement on the 70th Anniversary.

The video is hard for me to look at due to my necktie's being askew. So I cannot recommend a viewing. However, the conversation is decidedly listenable, except for when I call Chairman of the National Safety Commission Yamatani Eriko "Minister Nakatani." Nakatani Gen is this blessed land's Defense Minister.



For those wanting to read about the Statement, I cannot recommend any analysis more highly than Kent Calder's essay reproduced in The Japan Times. He homes in on the most important failure: the Statement's lack of agency (Link). Interestingly this week Kitaoka Shin'ichi, the second-in-command of the 21st Century Commission that provided the prime minister with a framework for the Statement, complained that he wanted the Statement to be in the first person rather than in the passive voice. (Link - J)

In My Reptile Mind

A year ago, in a response to Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide's first submissions to what has become a lengthy list of things the Abe Cabinet is NOT thinking of doing, (e.g., NOT thinking of revising the Murayama Statement, NOT thinking of rescinding the Kono Statement) I posed a question about the nature of the beast doing the talking:

When a snake tells you it is not thinking of biting you, what matters more? That a snake told you, "I'm not thinking of biting you" -- or that it is a snake?

Over the first year and half of the second coming of Abe Shinzo and Friends, the answer to my question has been, astonishingly, "The former."

Which has me, a year later, composing another serpentine metaphor as regards militant-nationalist-revisionist-Sinophobe-conservative-right-wing-hawk Abe Shinzo:

In order for a snake to grow larger, it must shed its skin.

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Lest anyone think that my use of snake metaphors is pejorative, be aware that:

1) I love snakes, particularly the big bad aodaisho (Japanese rat snake - Elaphe climacophora - Link)

and

2) I admiringly referred to former Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko as "The Anaconda" -- at least until he betrayed himself, his party and the electorate with his still unexplained offer to Abe to dissolve the House of Representatives.

Photo: Abe Shinzo arriving at the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan's conference "Women in Business" on 27 May 2014

Photo credit: Jonathan Kushner on Facebook (Link)

The Sea Of Futility

Read James Przystup in Comparative Connections -- on the hopeless back-and-forth between the governments of Japan and China since March, with some informative detours along the ways. (Link)

A tragi-comedy in all its glory.

Przystup highlights Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's declaration on August 12 that revision of the Constitution remains his historical mission (Link - J). For those keeping score August 12 was my guestimate of the date Abe would pay a private visit to Yasukuni. It was also the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Friendship.

Abe's declaration of a continued, unshakable commitment to constitutional reform ("Facing the future, facing the revision of the Constitution, I go onward. Revision of the constitution is my historic mission...") flies in the face of the conventional wisdom, which was and is that constitution revision is off the table, replaced by a near-term program of gradual expansion of the activities judged constitutional by the Cabinet Legislative Bureau. The announcement of the appointment of Komatsu Ichiro, the new more malleable head of the CLB, had indeed been announced a week before Abe's declaration. (Link)

One has to discount the seriousness of Abe's words, at least in terms of the PM's schedule for the rest of the year. According to reports, the vow was made at a private dinner at an inn in the PM's nominal hometown of Nagato, Yamaguchi Prefecture. Attending the dinner were top members of his support group (koenkai). Abe probably felt he had to provide, along with actual food and drink, some political red meat. Pledging loyalty to the cause of constitution revision has been one constant in Abe's limited repertoire of political tricks. It is not surprising he dragged the magic act out one more time for his most loyal and biggest fans.

The article ends with a calendar of significant days. One crucial date that is not mentioned, either in Prystrup's article or in Michael J. Green and Nicholas Szechenyi's update on Japan-U.S. relations, is April 28, 2013 -- the first official Return Of Sovereignty Day (Do not bother looking for the event in the previous edition's Green & Szechenyi -- it is not listed there either). At the official ceremony, the first ever, the prime minister intoned portentous piffle of the purest, highest incoherence (Link). The speech was eclipsed, however, by the incident at the end when the Imperial Couple were making their departure from the stage. An impromptu and jubilant chorus of "Long Live The Emperor" (Tenno heika banzai!) froze their Imperial Highnesses in mid-step like two jacked deer.

April 28 seems to mark both the zenith and terminus of Abe's dalliance with history issues. A week later, when asked to clarify his remarks about the definition of shinryaku (invasion, aggression) in Diet session, Abe demurred. When a week later still Liberal Democratic Party policy affairs chief Taka'ichi Sanae claimed that Abe rejects the judgments of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Murayama Statement, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide rubbished her statements, saying she was jawboning her own views, not those of the Abe Government.

After the provocative ceremony and the banzais, something snapped.


Later - As regards the prospects for reinterpreting the constitution, Yuka Hayashi has just posted an interview with a frank Komatsu-san on JapanRealTime. (Link)

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Image: Surfers waiting, hoping for the least wave. Kugenuma Beach, Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture on 6 December 2009.
Image courtesy: MTC

Worthwhile Reads #2 - On Abe And The Revisionists

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it 'Riding the Gravy Train' - yeah...

Pink Floyd, "Have a Cigar" (1975)

Two good essays from yesterday on Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and the potential limitations on his freedom of action on the issues purportedly dear to him and his Friends:

Brad Glosserman, PacNet

Abe's dilemmas

Karl Gufstasson, East Asia Forum

Japanese Prime Minister Abe's U-turn on the Murayama Statement

Both essays hint at what appears to be a change in the way Abe Shinzo and his Cabinet operate. Both Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party squeaked into power in the LDP presidential and December House of Representatives elections, meaning that both faced pressures to produce results in the immediate term. However, for various reasons (the most convincing one I have heard: "the Japanese people are just tired of being in a bent over in a defensive crouch"), the man and the party have a mad surplus of political capital in the bank (Cabinet support, Party support). The July 21 (?) House of Councillors election will be a coronation.

Relieved of worries about July, Abe & Company can be insincere in every direction. They do not have to pander to a core constituency; they do not have to assemble a coalition of disparate forces. Instead they can play upon the neediness of particular interest groups by making what are head fakes toward their hot button issues, feigning commitment to a position, stirring up a fire storm of protest in response, then beating a hasty retreat. Tobias Harris has highlighted this stimulus-response-retreat pattern for the specific case of constitutional reform. However, the this-has-to-be-done/wow-why-are-folks-so-angry/oh-I-guess-it-can-wait model seems applicable to almost any policy initiative and constituency.

In terms of the red meat revisionist issues of Yasukuni visits, revising Article 9, war responsibility, the sanctioned brothel system and garrisoning the Senkakus, Abe and his Cabinet have the luxury of limiting themselves to gestures, signs and code words, signaling to their revisionist followers of their purported true beliefs, while going through desultory pantomimes of being held back by Japan's internal and external foes.

Of course, by making intermittent, sulphurous and maudlin shows of addressing an issue -- such as, let us say, securing the transfers of the remains of the deceased abductees and freedom of travel for the surviving relatives still in North Korea -- but never actually achieving the stated goals (or by constantly moving the goal posts further, which is effectively the same thing) -- the politician's gravy train rolls on.