What Is There To Not Understand Regarding The Rikuzankai Case?

I am still trying to understand the High Court ruling on the Rikuzankai case.

I am not confused by Justice Iida Yoshinobu's determination, following his throwing out evidence that could prove the contrary, that the determination made in 2011 by the trial judge had no errors in it. I mean, just look at Justice Iida's face.



Does this face not just scream, "Mind open to the possibility that the National Police Agency concocted this case out of perjured testimony, forced confessions and circumstantial evidence?"

I am confused by the underlined bits in this Yomiuri Online explanation of the appeal ruling:

The high court endorsed the judgment of the lower court that one motive for the falsification was to prevent secret donations from midsize contractor Mizutani Construction Co. from coming to light.

The judge accepted as credible the testimony of a former Mizutani Construction president that the company gave 50 million yen to Ishikawa to help the company secure a subcontract for a dam construction project.

The judge said Ishikawa falsified the political fund reports of the Rikuzan-kai fund management body of Ozawa, now leader of People's Life Party, in an attempt to conceal 400 million yen he lent to Rikuzan-kai to finance a Tokyo land purchase.

Iida said there were no factual errors in the lower court ruling from circumstantial evidence that the former secretaries deliberately falsified the reports in a conspiracy.

"This is a vicious crime that is against the Political Funds Control Law," Iida said.

The Tokyo High Court's not-guilty ruling for Ozawa, finalized in November 2012, recognized the falsification of the reports by the former aides but accepted that Ozawa may have not been given details of the land deal and may have been unaware of the illegality of the off-the-book treatment of the 400 million yen.

(Link)

Do you see the problem?

According to the determination of now two courts, Ishikawa committed two crimes.

1) He accepted a 50 million yen secret donation from Mizutani Construction, which he did not properly record

2) He falsely recorded a 400 million yen loan Ozawa made to the Rikuzankai

The problem is he cannot have done both. Because the Monday after Ishikawa supposedly receives a secret donation from Mizutani Construction, he deposits the 400 million loaned by Ozawa in Rikuzankai accounts. He does so by breaking up the 400 million into a number of smaller amounts, this in order, according to his explanation, to camouflage his boss' having 400 million just lying around the house to loan out to anyone without collateral or even a written contract.

One of the amounts of money that Ishikawa deposits is 50 million yen. This the prosecutors insist is not a part of the money that Ozawa loaned the Rikuzankai but is instead the secret donation from Mizutani Construction.

If that is so,

a) are prosecutors not arguing that Ozawa gave only 350 million, not 400 million, and

b) since 400 million was repaid to Ozawa a few years later, why have prosecutors not gone after Ozawa to return the 50 million amount allegedly received from Mizutani Construction?

Note that I am not even considering the glaring inconsistency of the prosecutors simultaneously asserting that Ishikawa was sneaky enough to split the entirely legal Ozawa loan into smaller amounts and too stupid to split up an illegal donation from Mizutani Construction.

No one denies the accounts were a mess regarding the 400 million Ozawa loaned the Rikuzankai, the emergency loan being necessary in order that Rikuzankai could in turn borrow from a bank the money needed to pay for the land for a staff dormitory near Ozawa's residence (the banker's rule being that if one wishes to borrow X amount, one has to show one has the full X amount in collateral).

Was the messed up accounting of the no-interest loan a crime? Only under criteria which, if applied to the loan officers of the country's financial institutions, would put hundreds if not thousands behind bars.

Ozawa, poised to become prime minister prior to the ridiculous arrest of his secretary Okubo Takanori on the charges that led prosecutors to seize the financial records of the Rikuzankai, enabling the discovery amid the tens of thousands of transactions this one bit of victimless funny business, now lords over a tiny rump party on the verge of annihilation. Oh, that and the 400 million.

Sic transit gloria? Not exactly.

The sad joke of the political application of the Political Funds Control Law now goes to a higher but not necessarily better place.

The Age Of Innocence

With the Democratic Party of Japan under the leadership of Noda Yoshihiko rolling back many of the changes the party promised in the 2009 manifesto...

1) the elimination of the child allowance (kodomo teate) and the reinstitution of the child support payment system (jido teate)

2) the proposed restart of construction of the Yamba Dam

3) the raising of the consumption tax without calling an election

4) permitting bureaucrats, in particular the head of the Cabinet Legislative Office, to testify in Diet committee session

...one could come away with the impression that there is not a yen's worth of difference in between living under the rule of the DPJ and living under the rule of the Liberal Democratic Party.

However, there is one major difference in the way the machinery of government functions now and the way it did under the previous regime -- and it is of such vital importance that persons of conscience must pray that some way, somehow, the DPJ wins back the support of the voters in the months ahead:

Under the DPJ, the organs of the law have not been used to capriciously imprison those who buck the system.

Under the LDP, the prosecutors office sent former Livedoor president Horie Takafumi to prison on charges that, if they had been applied to Japan's banking community, would have sent hundreds, if not thousands, of bank executives to prison. The confessions that were the sole pieces of evidence of Horie's complicity in misstating the value of Livedoor assets were extracted from his subordinates by placing them in solitary confinement in unheated cells during one of the coldest winters in the last half-century and threatening them with lengthy prison sentences should they not identify their employer as a co-conspirator.

The prosecutors office sent activist investor Murakami Yoshiaki to prison based solely on a confession police tricked a naive Murakami into making. Livedoor executives, who testified against each other in their own trials, were united in stating that Murakami was innocent.

Just when it seemed predestined that Ozawa Ichiro was going to be prime minister of Japan after the next House of Representatives election, the prosecutors moved in on Ozawa Ichiro political secretary Okubo Takanori for campaign funding violations, ostensibly for knowingly accepting donations from a private organization founded and funded by a mid-sized construction company for the purpose of evading campaign finance rules. The Okubo arrest meant Ozawa had to resign as DPJ leader, robbing him of his rightful chance to become PM. He was able to engineer the election of his ally/puppet Hatoyama Yukio as his successor but this was a poor substitute for actually winning the top prize.

Prosecutors used the Okubo arrest as a pretext for seizing the records of Ozawa and his funding organization, the Rikuzankai. They then proceeded to go on a fishing expedition, trolling through the records for something, anything to send Ozawa to prison.

What they found was a mis-recording in the 2004, 2005 and 2007 (but strangely, not the 2006) Rikuzankai accounts of a personal loan Ozawa extended to the organization. The loaned sum was used as collateral (tampo) for a bank loan (in Japan, unless you borrow from the consumer finance companies, you can only borrow money if you can prove you can pay the full amount of the loan back, immediately). The recording mistakes were such that if that were they found in the accounts of any other politician, they would have earned the perpetrators a stern verbal warning. Instead member of the House of Representatives and former Ozawa secretary Ishikawa Tomohiro and Ozawa secretary Ikeda Mitsutomo were arrested and convicted of campaign finance violations.

With Ozawa as the party with fiduciary responsibility in the case, his name and seal appearing on the first page of the account books, the prosecutors could certainly have gone after him next. However, somehow in the interim, something has dulled the heretofore zealous prosecutors office. It certainly had the right target: the most unpopular, least-trusted politician in the country; a man who behaves like a complete jerk toward even his ostensible allies; a person disappears from public view, only to reappear wearing a surgical mask, whenever things heat up; and a man with a seemingly inexhaustible, to borrow an image from Okumura Jun, ATM located in his home.

Nevertheless, the prosecutors refused to indict Ozawa on anything. It was left up to the never-say-die mugwumps of the "The Association of Those Seeking the Truth" (Shinjitsu o motomeru kai) to force the courts into appointing a trio of lawyers from the Tokyo #2 Bar Association (and boy, did it take a long time to find three lawyers willing to sacrifice their time, potential income and reputations on the case) to file an indictment of Ozawa not on the provable charge of fiduciary negligence but on unprovable charges of conspiracy to file falsified campaign documents -- unprovable because the sole piece of evidence was a confession forced from Ishikawa that he had told Ozawa about the misleading records, evidence that the judge in Ishikawa's trial threw out as a product of prosecutorial misconduct.

That the judge in the Ozawa case would also throw out the confession was nearly guaranteed (judges in Japanese courts looooovvvve precedent). He did indeed throw it out, pretty much ending the chances of a guilty verdict (the judge's verdict will be delivered on April 26).

Anyway, since the election of a DPJ-led government, we have seen nothing of the "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down" miscarriages of justice of the kind that sent Horie and Murakami and may still send Okubo, Ishikawa and Ikeda to prison. With the DPJ in power it is the nose-thumbers, the outcasts and the misfits (and the occasional mostly harmless loony) who have control of the asylum.

That is the way it should have been years ago. For this blessed land's sake, that is the way it should remain.

Ozawa Ichiro Clears A Major Hurdle

In his trial for purportedly overseeing the filing of false political funding organization accounts, Ozawa Ichiro today received a huge gift from the Tokyo District Court. The court threw out as evidence the confession investigators forced from Diet member Ishikawa Tomohiro, Ozawa's former political secretary. (J)

Ishikawa's confession was the one damning piece of evidence the prosecuting attorneys had against Ozawa. It had been thrown out of court in Ishikawa's own trial due to evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. Ishikawa was still convicted along with two other former or present Ozawa secretaries of filing false funding accounts based on other evidence.

Commentators agree with Ozawa's lawyers' contention that without the acceptance of Ishikawa's confession into evidence, the case against Ozawa falls apart (J). Only in Ishikawa's confession was there any statement that Ozawa unambiguously assented to the falsification of the recording of a personal loan Ozawa made to his political funding organization, the Rikuzankai.

Ozawa's full exoneration will not come until April, when the court renders its verdict. However, with an acquittal now a near certainty, Ozawa will have greater leeway to inject himself in the political fights within the DPJ, particularly the battle over the raising of the consumption tax (E). He can also be expected to cause headaches for Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko over whether or not he will lead his followers and allies within the party to join with the opposition in passing a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet, as he nearly last June did against the Kan Cabinet.

From all appearances, the big dog has slipped his leash.

Oh Yes We Did So Get It Right!

Kudos the Public Prosecutors Office. After questioning Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro on Saturday and his former political secretary Ishikawa Tomohiro on Monday, the prosecutors are reportedly going to reaffirm their decision to not prosecute Ozawa.

This is a surprisingly positive, if not entirely surprising, result. While the prosecutors were unlikely to reverse their decision to not prosecute Ozawa, on the grounds that such would have been an admission that they, the professionals, had failed to be sufficiently diligent in the performance of their duties the first time out...that is until a randomly selected group of average citizens showed them the error of their ways...they also did not take the cowardly route out of their predicament. Rather than come out and say, "Yes, we were right, there are no grounds to indict Ozawa," the prosecutors could have just sat on their hands for another 82 days, at which time the Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution could order its own prosecution, carried out by court-appointed lawyers. By tossing the case back to the Committee with the label "There is Nothing in Here" on it, the prosecutors are daring the Committee to grasp the nettle of actively interfering in the conduct of the House of Councillors election.

Now the case goes back to the Committee. Under normal circumstances, the Committee, having already come to a decision once to reject the judgment of the prosecutors, should have little trouble rejecting again. However, the reality that the Committee really will be ordering an extraordinary prosecution of the leader of the main party of government on the eve of a harshly contested election, may give Committee members pause. While those serving on the Committee have an interest in appearing consistent in their rulings, they also have an interest in not interfering too obviously in the political process.

The decision the prosecutors puts the Committee in the position to do just that -- be perceived to be messing with the election.

Just what the Committee will decide to do is very much up in the air; the disincentives are far to weak to inhibit a decision to second-guess the prosecutors again.

One matter is certain, however: there is a zero percent chance of Ozawa ever being convicted of the crimes of which he has been accused. The prosecutors, given a second chance at Ozawa, found nothing worth pursuing.

Members of the DPJ need to pray that Ozawa does not gloat at the Committee's failure to bullrush the Prosecutors Office into indicting him. Ozawa already was in high spirits after his questioning over the weekend, and on Monday seemed to be backing away from his earlier offers to appear before the House of Representatives Council on Political Ethics. An appearance before the Council, while superfluous given the prosecutors's decision not to indict, would put an exclamation point on the message that Ozawa has so far has failed to communicate to the public: that he has nothing, absolutely nothing to hide.

It is hard to overemphasize how lucky Ozawa has been in all this. Had just one of his former secretaries broken down under pressure and signed a statement that he had kept Ozawa fully informed of all transactions carried out by the Rikuzankai, it could have been curtains for the DPJ's Secretary-General.

Ozawa's Talking Cure

If media reports are to be believed, Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro is preparing to testify to the House of Representative Deliberative Council on Political Ethics (seiji rinri chosakai) regarding the real estate dealings of the Rikuzankai, his political fundraising organization.

Why this? Why now?

First and foremost, his party needs for him to do it. While he has so far escaped indictment as regards this case involving a piece of land bought in order to construct a dormitory for his small army of subordinates, his former secretaries have not. Given the strong presumption of guilt that goes with indictment and the belief that Ozawa is a hands on manager of all that touches him, Ozawa escaping the prosecutors' nets so far is seen merely as evidence of his craftiness, rather than innocence.

As the case against Ozawa and his aides has lurched forward, the DPJ has come under severe criticism for not ridding itself of its troublesome and seemingly troubled secretary-general. Some 83% of the public, according to Kyodo's latest poll, believes that Ozawa has an obligation to resign from his party post. Ozawa's continued tenure has contributed, along with the performance of Prime Minister Hatoyama, in a dramatic decline in popular support for the party, and a sharp drop in the percentage of voters who say they will vote for the party's candidates in this summer's House of Councillors elections. Where once there was yawning gulf of 20% between those like to vote for the DPJ and and those likely to vote for its chief rival the Liberal Democratic Party, a collapse in support for the DPJ now leaves a spread of less than 6% between the two parties, with a huge block of the voters (29%-to-45%, depending upon the poll) up for grabs as to whom they will support.

If the DPJ is to have any chance to grab the majority or even a plurality of these floating voters, Ozawa has to either come clean about his financial dealings or step aside.

So why would Ozawa be agreeing to go through the process now, rather than appearing before the Council earlier, before the controversy eroded away so much of the public's good will toward the DPJ?

While looking out for the party's interests is at the top of Ozawa's to-do list every day, he has a primary obligation to look out for himself. Appearing before the Council before talking to the prosecutors would have been stupid. Talking to the Council after the prosecutors had passed on indicting him would have been superfluous -- it would have given a chance for his many enemies to take pot shots at him, with little upside for Ozawa himself or the party.

Now that the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution (kensatsu shinsakai) has issued its condemnation of the prosecutors's decision not to indict Ozawa* , the prosecutors have asked Ozawa to come and talk to them again. This he will do -- but since they will be asking the same questions as before, he will be giving the same answers.

It is hard to say whether or not the prosecutors will indict Ozawa following questioning . Such a decision will be an admission that they that failed to do their jobs properly the first time around. If they do not indict Ozawa after what will be his third little go-around with them, or, what is more likely, they fail to take action within 90 days, the Committee will issue its own order to indict Ozawa.

With the prospect of further months and months of circus-like media speculation over the fate of Ozawa in the courts, the secretary-general should be looking for a way to at least clear the air.

So why clear the air in the Deliberative Council, rather than in a safer venue like a one-on-one interview with a sympathetic journalist -- if an Ozawa-sympathetic journalist could be found?

Strangely enough, submitting himself to questioning by his opponents within the confines of the Deliberative Council of the House of Representatives is probably safer for Ozawa than facing a member of the press.

First, he has already been through questioning by prosecutors. He probably knows every single item in the case against him and every single angle from it could be approached. It is unlikely that members of the opposition have anything new that could throw him off-balance.

Second, he faces no chance of any other action from the Council itself. It takes the agreement of at least 2/3 of those present to come to a decision. With a majority of Council members Democrats, the chances of Ozawa earning censure are less than infinitesimal. Indeed, the number of times that a Deliberative Council has condemned the member of the Diet appearing before it: zero.

Third, he will face no surprises from Council. This comes from the fact that in 1985, he himself wrote the rules governing the actions of the Council, which were perceived to be in need of revision following the conviction of former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei in the Lockheed Scandal.

Whether appearing before the Council will have any positive effect on the public's perceptions of Ozawa and/or the DPJ depends on whether or not Ozawa accedes to the concept that politics is as much theater as it is the accumulation of power. If the Council's examination of Ozawa is done in public (it can be done behind closed doors) -- he will have the chance to assert, as he has done time and time again, that there is no crime here --- that he has accepted no illegal donations, that he knows nothing about the accounting mistakes of his former secretaries and has no idea why they made them. If he acts as though his opponents are merely doing their jobs, and does not lapse into his harrumphing mode, he has a decent chance to score some political points for his team.

He has it in him to answer questions with civility and with smile. We have seen it before, as in his press conference after he talked the prosecutors.

All he has to do is want to clear the air badly enough.

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* There was never any question that the Committee would encourage the prosecutors to indict Ozawa. The whole point of bringing a case to the Committee's attention is to force the issuance of an indictment.

Dribs and Drabs

Thanks to The Asahi Shimbun we now know two more attributes of the mysterious "Association of Those Seeking the Truth" (Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai), the group of amateur Javerts who have been pressing the Public Prosecutors Office into investigating the finances of the Rikuzankai, Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's main political fundraising organization. According to Satuday's Asahi, the group has "around ten members" and these include "former teachers" (moto kyoshi). On Friday, the group filed an appeal asking that a citizen's review panel reverse the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office's decision to not indict Ozawa as a co-conspirator in a plot to violate campaign finance laws -- the third action the group has taken in the past year pressuring prosecutors into tying Ozawa to Rikuzankai violations of the law.

So the relentless, unsleeping nemesis of Japan's most powerful politician is "a citizen's group composed of former journalists, administrative scriveners and former teachers and the like with about ten members in it" -- and that is all that the whole media news complex colossus of Japan deems we need know about it.

Terrific.

The Dark Side Of the Moon

"The Association of Those Seeking the Truth" (Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai).

No one seems want to say much about who they are -- or if there is even a "they" there.

On February 5, the Asahi Shimbun printed the most extensive description of them so far:

Gyōseishoshi ya motoshinbunkishara de tsukuru Tōkyō no shimin dantai...

"A citizen's group of the Tokyo Metropolitan District composed of administrative scriveners, former journalists and the like..."

That's it.

That is all we know about the citizen's organization that filed the first request last year for an investigation of the relationship between the Rikuzankai and the Nishimatsu Construction Company...and that is filing a request to have a citizen's inquest into the decision by the Public Prosecutor's Office to not indict Democratic Party of Japan Secretary General Ozawa Ichiro over the misleading accounting of a loan Ozawa extended to the Rikuzankai, an accounting sleight of hand that has led to the indictments of three of Ozawa's former secretaries.

An organization that has plunged Japan into political crisis twice in the last ten months and is set to do so again, taking advantage of legal reforms whose intent had been to give citizens the ability to prod prosecutors into taking on the politically powerful.

Who are these activists seeking truth on the behalf of the citizens from out of the shadows? Cat's paws for the Liberal Democratic Party, trying to undo the via the Prosecutors Office what cannot be undone at the ballot box? A front for regressive elements of the bureaucracy, attacking the government throught the Trojan Horse of a concerned citizenry, forcing prosecutors into investigations without merit?

Would you not feel better if the Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai had a website? A published interview of one of its main members? A press conference?

Until such time as it turns out to be a handful of crochety, gray-haired former Waseda university graduates with too much time on their hands, permit me to feel scared out of my mind.

Kudos to Isabel Reynolds for bringing this group to world's attention.

Later - Many thanks to reader WA for pointing out the spelling and word usage errors.

Reds

One of the interesting little bits of information to emerge out of the flood of leaks from investigation into the financial dealings of the Rikuzankai, Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's political fundraising organization, was a notation in one of the day planners of one of his secretaries:

"Brought 400 million yen to Ozawa's home. Put it in the tatami room."

Ozawa Ichiro is the kind of person who has 400 million yen...in cash...in his tatami room. I hope he at least has the SECOM people working for him.

Then again, such a familiarity with money is rampant in the upper reaches of the DPJ. Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya's progenitors founded the AEON supermarket chain. Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio is an heir to the Bridgestone Tire fortune. When the investigation into his political funding organization called into question the deposits his mother, the daughter of the founder of Bridgestone, had made into the organization's accounts, Hatoyama agreed to pay back taxes on the donated amount...600 million yen in back taxes.

The Achilles heel of this administration has been the revelation of possible violations of campaign financing laws, laws which were designed to prevent the votes of Diet members from being bought by interest groups. Ironic, seeing as how nobody possibly could have near enough money to buy any of these guys.

As a bonus, could please explain to me -- in simple terms, so I can understand -- how anyone could have gotten away with labeling the DPJ a gang of "share the wealth" socialists?

Thank You, Martin Fackler

There, I have said it.

And this is why:

In Japan’s Scandals, a Clash of Old Order and New
The New York Times

TOKYO — It had all the trappings of a typical political scandal in a nation that has seen all too many of them: stacks of cash from construction companies, shady land deals and late-night arrests of grim-faced political aides widely seen as fall guys for their powerful bosses.

But the unfolding investigation into possible political finance irregularities by the kingpin of the governing party, Ichiro Ozawa, has also gripped Japan for a very different reason. It has turned into a public battle between the country’s brash new reformist leaders and one of the most powerful institutions of its entrenched postwar establishment: the Public Prosecutors Office...

Read the rest here. It is really good*.

That the prosecutors are out to get Ozawa Ichiro by hook or by crook does not excuse Ozawa from his responsibility to explain to the public where the mysterious 400 million yen originally came from...and if he has some time left over, the justification for the Rikuzankai's investments in illiquid assets like land and apartments.

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* I reserve judgment on the author's refusal to use the word "whom" when the reference seems to be to the direct object of the verb.

The Ishikawa Arrest

The Tokyo prosecutors have just arrested Ishikawa Tomohiro, DPJ member of the House of Representatives for the Hokkaido #11 District, the former manager of DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's political fundraising group. Unless I am mistaken, only three more days and Ishikawa would have been covered by parliamentary immunity under Article 50 of the Constitution.

A pretty desperate gesture...

Prosecutors are a rogue element, beyond anyone's control it seems, driven by self-righteousness that transcends common sense. They will stop at nothing to bring Ozawa down.

Now more than ever he and the DPJ need a media relations strategy...and they do not have one.