In few hours Prime Minister Abe Shinzo will unveil his new lineup for the top party posts of the Liberal Democratic Party and a new Cabinet. From hints that have been leaked to the new agencies so far, Abe seems to be proceeding on the assumption that loyalty and closeness to him, not competence, experience or judgment, should be his main selection criteria.
LDP Party Secretariat
Replacing the seriously injured Tanigaki Sadakazu at Secretary-General will be Nikai Toshihiro. Leader of a medium-sized faction, Nikai was long seen as a potential rival of the Prime Minister. During his stint as chairman of the Diet Budget Committee Nikai was extremely solicitous of opposition members pounding away at the Abe government and the prime minister himself. In the last year or so, however, Abe has made a special effort to woo Nikai, kicking him upstairs into the special post of Chairman of the General Council and visiting him in his home district. The Wakayama legislator has reciprocated with pledges of loyalty and friendship, the most dramatic of which was his recent post-election expression of support for an extension of Abe's presidential term past the party rules-determined 6 years.
[For those with issues as regards Japan's killing of cetaceans, it's panic time. The whaling fleet's mother ship is homeported in Abe's district. The Taiji dolphin-killing "cove" is in Nikai's.]
The appointment of Nikai means that once again the LDP's day-to-day management will be in the hands of a politician with links to China. Tanigaki's ties were largely emotional, his affection for Chinese poetry being one of his remarked-upon traits. Nikai's ties, however, are much more nuts-and-bolts. He is probably the active legislator with the deepest and broadest network of ties with officials and politicians of China. His appointment will likely both please and pain the CCP. If Nikai asks to come across the water and meet with a few old friends, how can the Chinese government refuse?
Ostensibly keeping an eye on Nikai will be Hosoda Hiroyuki, who will take over Nikai's chairmanship of the LDP General Council. Hosoda is the leader of the Seiwakai, the largest faction and the faction to which Abe belongs. It is a measure of Abe's respect for and wariness of Nikai that he has asked his faction leader to step in and run the party’s main meetings.
Moving out of her party position of policy chief and into the Cabinet is Inada Tomomi, a protégé of the Prime Minister's and a fellow Seiwakai member. She will be taking over the defense portfolio – a symbolic, not substantive choice, as Inada has heretofore not been seen as taking a particular interest in defense issues (her own interests can be gleaned from the name of her personal Diet member group, "The Tradition and Innovation Association"). She is also something of an arriviste in party circles, having only served four terms in the Diet. She will be leapfrogging over some 70 LDP legislators who 1) have more elections to the Diet than her and 2) have never served in a Cabinet post.
Taking over her spot as chairman of the Policy Research Council and rising ever so slightly in party rank will be Motegi Toshimitsu. Motegi was the chairman of the party's elections strategy committee and thus nominally the architect of the party's wins in the Hokkaido #5 by-election and the July 10 House of Councillors election this year. However, since the LDP is fighting what is still a prostrate and disarmed opposition, Motegi's actual motivational and organizational strengths remain in question.
Motegi seems to be one of Abe's most important cultivated allies. The Harvard master's degree holder and former McKinsey consultant is a frequent guest and golf partner of the PM. He also has as many elections to the Diet (8) as the PM. Motegi would seem a possible a dark horse candidate to step in to the premiership, should the PM need to suddenly step down. However, Motegi did not start out his political career in the LDP, having first won his seat as a member of the opposition Japan New Party (Nihon Shinto).
Showing posts with label Nikai Toshihiro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nikai Toshihiro. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 03, 2016
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Very Kind Of Him #57 - The Flip Side Of My Remarks
Jeffrey Kingston of Temple University Japan has quoted me copiously in an opinion article published in The Japan Times (Link: Abe gets negative reviews ahead of U.S. visit). The quotations are certain to make me persona non grata in the Kantei.
I am grateful for Professor Kingston's quoting me. The quotes are verbatim.
However, I disagree with characterization that my overall assessment of Abe is negative.
Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is not really the majority of the population's idea of a dream date. The PM lacks most of the commonly recognized personality traits and qualities of a successful politician. Nevertheless, his Cabinet is the most reliably popular one for three decades. Abe is also fully back from the political Siberia his illness banished him to in September 2007. For four years he wandered the halls or slumped in his seat in the upper reaches of the House of Representatives, a weird ghostly figure. His resurrection and return should be the stuff of legends.
Abe has also fulfilled the proposition I set forth in February 2013: that he and his team will provide Japan with stable government (Video and Slides). The political opposition remains, three years out from the Noda Yoshihiko Self-Destruct Dissolution, an afterthought, a mosquito buzzing around the ruling coalition -- annoying but easily crushed. Heck, the opposition could not even snatch the Hokkaido governorship in today's first round of the Unified Local elections. (Link - J)
Abe, of course, has not just kept the opposition down and irrelevant: he has outmaneuvered and marginalized almost every potential political rival inside the LDP. The last possible holdout against "Abe's Way Or The Highway," LDP General Council Chair Nikai Toshihiro, a frequent critic of several key Abe administration policies, declared in an article published this week that "all of the holders of the top leadership posts of the LDP" is in support of Abe's reelection as party president this fall" -- meaning himself included. (Link - J)
As for "Abe Magic" and the "Abe Paradox" in the article -- again, correctly recorded -- these simple phenomena observable in the public polling data. They are also two manifestations of a single astonishing achievement: the conjuring up of a sense of inevitability to Abe's continued rule despite his inability to convince the majority of the voters to support whatever it is he is planning to do. Are the voters so starved for stability in the prime minister's spot that they are willing to say they support a Cabinet whose policies they do not like?
Seemingly.
Not at lot has gone really right in Abe's second stint. The economy is still weak; the monetary carpet bombing of the land with yen has not resulted in zero inflation; the collective self defense proposals are a spaghetti bowl of promises (and way behind schedule); Okinawa is in open revolt.
However, it is year three, Abe is still here and he is sticking to his much delayed agenda. He is letting all the hardships, bad news (the Algerian gasworks attack; the Hiroshima landslides; the murder of Goto Kenji) and missed targets roll off his back. Of course, a PM with a majority in the House of Councillors and a supermajority in the House of Representatives should be invincible. Abe's successors, from both LDP and Democratic Party of Japan, have shown how it is possible to fail in this blessed land's top office despite controlling more than the requisite number of seats in both Houses.
Abe succeeds despite himself. That is not negative. It is amazing.
I am grateful for Professor Kingston's quoting me. The quotes are verbatim.
However, I disagree with characterization that my overall assessment of Abe is negative.
Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is not really the majority of the population's idea of a dream date. The PM lacks most of the commonly recognized personality traits and qualities of a successful politician. Nevertheless, his Cabinet is the most reliably popular one for three decades. Abe is also fully back from the political Siberia his illness banished him to in September 2007. For four years he wandered the halls or slumped in his seat in the upper reaches of the House of Representatives, a weird ghostly figure. His resurrection and return should be the stuff of legends.
Abe has also fulfilled the proposition I set forth in February 2013: that he and his team will provide Japan with stable government (Video and Slides). The political opposition remains, three years out from the Noda Yoshihiko Self-Destruct Dissolution, an afterthought, a mosquito buzzing around the ruling coalition -- annoying but easily crushed. Heck, the opposition could not even snatch the Hokkaido governorship in today's first round of the Unified Local elections. (Link - J)
Abe, of course, has not just kept the opposition down and irrelevant: he has outmaneuvered and marginalized almost every potential political rival inside the LDP. The last possible holdout against "Abe's Way Or The Highway," LDP General Council Chair Nikai Toshihiro, a frequent critic of several key Abe administration policies, declared in an article published this week that "all of the holders of the top leadership posts of the LDP" is in support of Abe's reelection as party president this fall" -- meaning himself included. (Link - J)
As for "Abe Magic" and the "Abe Paradox" in the article -- again, correctly recorded -- these simple phenomena observable in the public polling data. They are also two manifestations of a single astonishing achievement: the conjuring up of a sense of inevitability to Abe's continued rule despite his inability to convince the majority of the voters to support whatever it is he is planning to do. Are the voters so starved for stability in the prime minister's spot that they are willing to say they support a Cabinet whose policies they do not like?
Seemingly.
Not at lot has gone really right in Abe's second stint. The economy is still weak; the monetary carpet bombing of the land with yen has not resulted in zero inflation; the collective self defense proposals are a spaghetti bowl of promises (and way behind schedule); Okinawa is in open revolt.
However, it is year three, Abe is still here and he is sticking to his much delayed agenda. He is letting all the hardships, bad news (the Algerian gasworks attack; the Hiroshima landslides; the murder of Goto Kenji) and missed targets roll off his back. Of course, a PM with a majority in the House of Councillors and a supermajority in the House of Representatives should be invincible. Abe's successors, from both LDP and Democratic Party of Japan, have shown how it is possible to fail in this blessed land's top office despite controlling more than the requisite number of seats in both Houses.
Abe succeeds despite himself. That is not negative. It is amazing.
Monday, September 22, 2014
Oh, The Persons You Will Talk To!
This was the scene in the Liberal Democratic Party cafeteria on Friday, the first of the "Whale Meat Fridays" demanded by General Council Chair Nikai Toshihiro and other scientific pelagic whaling-supporting party members.
In the center is Nikai, a representative of the Wakayama district that has in it the infamous town of Taiji, where the residents conduct coastal harvests of dolphins, porpoises and small whales not covered by the International Whaling Commission ban. He is holding aloft a hunk of sei whale (iwashi kujira - Balaenoptera borealis) a species which can only be harvest on the deep ocean. The meat has been deep fried Tatsuta style -- one of the two ways whale was being served on Friday (the other was in a whale meat curry). Former Defense Minister Onodera Itsunori (Miyagi, another whaling prefecture) is among the other politicians visible preparing to have their Sei.
"Whale in an irreplaceable part of Japan's food culture. If foreigners come [to this cafeteria] we will shower them with whale!" crowed Nikai. (Link)
Friday's very public eating of Sei whale conflates and confuses coastal whaling, which is traditional for communities with very little flat, arable land like Taiji or Chiba Prefecture's Wadaura -- and which I support -- and industrial pelagic whaling, which has no traditional basis and is a ward of the government -- a point conceded in the Yomiuri Shimbun's pro-pelagic whaling editorial of yesterday (Link).
Because it is my nature to never leave any dishonest and poorly thought out thing well enough alone, I decided to have a bit of fun on Twitter at the expense of Nikai -- whom I like immensely -- and the other politicians pictured.
A cheap shot, perhaps. However, given the absurd bravura of Nikai's lofting of his whale-laden fork, a not entirely inappropriate cuffing of the chin, metaphorically.
Well, since having loosed the above, you can imagine the number and variety of folks of all persuasions have been blessing me with their opinions. Or perhaps you cannot. Anyway, it has been a lot of folks, some of whom did not see the humor intended.
In the center is Nikai, a representative of the Wakayama district that has in it the infamous town of Taiji, where the residents conduct coastal harvests of dolphins, porpoises and small whales not covered by the International Whaling Commission ban. He is holding aloft a hunk of sei whale (iwashi kujira - Balaenoptera borealis) a species which can only be harvest on the deep ocean. The meat has been deep fried Tatsuta style -- one of the two ways whale was being served on Friday (the other was in a whale meat curry). Former Defense Minister Onodera Itsunori (Miyagi, another whaling prefecture) is among the other politicians visible preparing to have their Sei.
"Whale in an irreplaceable part of Japan's food culture. If foreigners come [to this cafeteria] we will shower them with whale!" crowed Nikai. (Link)
Friday's very public eating of Sei whale conflates and confuses coastal whaling, which is traditional for communities with very little flat, arable land like Taiji or Chiba Prefecture's Wadaura -- and which I support -- and industrial pelagic whaling, which has no traditional basis and is a ward of the government -- a point conceded in the Yomiuri Shimbun's pro-pelagic whaling editorial of yesterday (Link).
Because it is my nature to never leave any dishonest and poorly thought out thing well enough alone, I decided to have a bit of fun on Twitter at the expense of Nikai -- whom I like immensely -- and the other politicians pictured.
Because nothing says, "Traditional Japanese culture" quite like eating whale in a curry or deep-fried using a fork pic.twitter.com/w1dKvgzLIl
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) September 20, 2014A cheap shot, perhaps. However, given the absurd bravura of Nikai's lofting of his whale-laden fork, a not entirely inappropriate cuffing of the chin, metaphorically.
Well, since having loosed the above, you can imagine the number and variety of folks of all persuasions have been blessing me with their opinions. Or perhaps you cannot. Anyway, it has been a lot of folks, some of whom did not see the humor intended.
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