Can This Piece of ...Not Fully Considered Legislation

So close...but no.

The latest edition of The Economist does the great service of alerting its readers as to what is becoming the bugbear of the extraordinary Diet session: the Liberal Democratic Party leadership's desire to pass an Official Secrets bill. Unfortunately, the article misses more than it hits. (Link)

The crux of the matter is whether or not the country even needs the legislation. As the article points out, there are already laws on the books meting out special, long (in Japanese terms) sentences for leaking military secrets -- the most important class of secrets. However, the instances of SDF personnel intentionally leaking or stealing classified information that we know of are few and pathetic. The police thought they had a huge case in 2007 when the pick up of a Chinese national on a passport violation led to the discovery of Aegis radar data on the laptop of her husband, a Maritime SDF officer. However, the case against the MSDF officer collapsed in confusion over whether or not the data was a file miscopied in an exchanges of pornographic images done with other SDF officers or indeed was a part of the openly available teaching materials of an MDSF training facility in Hiroshima Prefecture. Eventually the officer, who was facing a possible 10 years in prison, was given a four year suspended sentence. (Link)

As for other government employees, as the cover up of the Green Cross HIV-tainted blood product sales and the refusal of successive governments to acknowledge the existence of the three so-called secret accords on the Okinawa turnover demonstrate, Japanese officials, even retired ones, have no problem keeping secrets. In the latter case, officials continue to protect the secrecy of the accords even after the U.S. copies of the documents in question could be viewed in U.S. government archives (Link). That one would become unemployable, lose one's pension, be ostracized from one's social networks and be liable for arrest on even a minor charge of mishandling public information has been more than enough of a deterrent against leaking information in need of protection.

Indeed, as the case of the Green Cross HIV-infected blood products showed, the problematic tendency is that Japan's public servants do not, indeed, serve the public. Health, Labour and Welfare ministry officials refused to acknowledge the existence of documents supporting the assertions of HIV-infected claimants until a crusading, non-LDP minister of health named Kan Naoto forced his subordinates to cough up the documents the bureaucrats had claimed either did not exist or could not be found. (Link)

The proximate stimulus for the current bill -- the contents of which, in a bit of trial baloonery, the LDP has assured friendly reporters is "largely settled" (osuji goi shita) with the LPD's cautious coalition partner the New Komeito (Link - J) -- seems to be the prosecutors office's inability to find a serious crime in the incident three years ago of an irate Japan Coast Guard officer's uploading to video sharing sites of the recordings demonstrating conclusively that a Chinese fishing ship had been steered into collisions with two Japan Coast Guard vessels. The then DPJ-led government had desperately sought to suppress the videos in an effort to prevent the spiraling out of control of a diplomatic crisis over the arrest of fishing vessel's captain.*

The government (actually, if we are going to be pointing fingers, the preening, tone-deaf and self-adoring Chief Cabinet Secretary of the time) had sought to cover up the facts of the case against the captain. However, a maniac had viciously attacked Japanese government employees. In the case of the rear ending of the JCG Yonaguni, the Chinese captain rammed his boat into a manned vessel that was neither in his way nor moving. Covering those facts up, or even trying to, never should have been accorded the mantle of realist diplomacy. It was a dereliction of an elected politician's duty to protect Japan's national interests -- or at very least, the health and welfare of Japan Coast Guard personnel. It was also, as the Banyan blog argued at the time, a politically costly insult to the intelligence of the Japanese public. (Link)

Which highlights the reason why the Abe government should abandon the secrets bill -- or if some tightening of the legal consequences of information leakage has to be passed in order to please the intelligence communities of Japan's partners, why the government should scrap the current bill in favor of one drawn up by a cross-party team of the smartest legal minds in the Diet, including, most importantly, legal experts of the Communist Party: the legislation will not be used to protect secrets. Instead it will be used most often, if not exclusively, to declare secret, either pre-emptively or ex post facto, horrible mistakes and crimes.

Ask former prime minister Kan Naoto, who was not only the hero in the Green Cross scandal but the unfortunately hands-off prime minister at the time of Chinese boat captain incident and the hero again in his shaming of the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company and central government bureaucrats trying to keep him from getting a handle on the situation at the Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power plant. Mr. Kan can probably talk from dawn until dusk about the obstruction, lying and malfeasance done in the name of the greater public good.

Later - The press is reporting that the New Komeito's project team on the Official Secrets bill (in J. - Tokutei himitsu hogo hoan) has given its a approval for a revised version of the bill that purportedly has provisions guaranteeing the freedom of the press and the people's right to know. When one considers how much those principles were trampled when officials lacked an ability to class certain information as officially secret, one is left to wonder how these new countermanding rights are supposed to be engaged and enforced. (Link - J)

----
* One largely forgotten part of the Chinese fishing vessel story: the captain was not initially arrested for ramming the JCG vessels. Instead he was arrested on the charges of illegal fishing. While this is standard Japanese law enforcement practice -- arresting a suspect on a laughable minor charge until the suspect confesses or evidence can be collected proving the existence of a major crime -- charging the captain with illegal fishing was an assertion of sovereignty charge, which the Chinese government could argue violated a mutual understanding that it had with the Japanese government to merely encourage fishing rules violators to run back to their home countries, rather than a violation of the free and safe use of the seas charge, which was the actual crime of the Chinese captain.

The Washington Establishment Gets Worried, Boards Aircraft

Reading the below report makes me sigh:

In Asia Trip, U.S. Group Will Tackle Islands Feud
The New York Times

October 19, 2012 - The visit, backed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, follows a naval exercise by China on Friday to support its territorial claims and talk by a prominent candidate for prime minister in Japan about stationing personnel on the islands to improve security.

"As each side tries to assert its position, there is a risk of an inadvertent escalation of tensions and even confrontation,” said James B. Steinberg, who served as the deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration and is one of those on the trip. "The question is, how we get back to the relative stability in which the islands were in dispute but people were not trying to change facts on the ground."

Other members of the group include Richard L. Armitage, who served as deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush; Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security adviser; and Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former Pentagon and intelligence official in the Clinton administration.

The group is scheduled to meet with Japan's prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, on Monday and to visit with the Chinese leadership on Tuesday. China has not informed the group with whom they will be meeting.

The trip was arranged after Mr. Steinberg and other members of the group discussed what might be done to tamp down the tensions over the islands, which are called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

After the idea of a visit was pitched to State Department aides, Mrs. Clinton endorsed it, giving it a quasi-official status...

(Link)

Out of respect to the principle that if one has real problems with a person, one should keep one's opinions to oneself, I will refrain from saying what I think of these individuals. The exception would be Hadley, about whom I know nothing, save that he served on the Bush White House national security team, whose provision of nationial security was...mixed?

If the group is coming to the Prime Minister's Residence to deliver the message that the assertions heretofore made by the U.S. government -- that the Senkakus fall under the writ of the Japan-U.S. Security Arrangements -- are true only in theory, that would be something Prime Minister Noda needs to know immediately. As to any other ideas the quartet might present, the PM probably will listen to them and digest them -- not necessarily for what they say on the surface (one has to leave open the possibility someone in the quartet knows something about China the GOJ does not), but for what they say regarding the prejudices and preoccupations of the slices of America's transnational policy elite each member of the quarter of represents.

This Cabinet and the rest of the Japanese government are not the gang of uniformed innocents America's permanent foreign policy establishment believes them to be.

[An aside: one of the favorite demeaning tales with which members of the American policy elite regale themselves is the "amateurish" attempt by the Kan government to prosecute the Chinese fishing boat captain who rammed two Japan Coast Guard vessels off the Senkakus in 2010. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Kan government, the JCG and the Japanese judicial system behaved as true professionals, handling in an open, formal and neutral manner a situation no one had considered before as regards the Senkakus: an unprovocked attack on Japanese government personnel by a foreign assailant in an area under the administration of Japan. What was amateurish was rice-eating surrender monkey and then Chief Cabinet Secretary's Yoshito Sengoku's interference in the judicial process in the face of ham-handed Chinese pressure, then his denial of having done so.]

I cannot help but smile at the seeming pointlessness of the itinerary, at least as it is described in The New York Times. They do not know whom they are meeting in Beijing. I do not know what other folks do -- but when I walk out my front door I try to know in advance whom it is I am going out to meet. And even if the quartet did know, Beijing is in the midst of a leadership transition thrown into chaos by the Bo Xilai affair and Xi Jinping's mysterious disappearances. The quartet have no idea whether or not Madame Secretary of Ministry X will, come December, be Madame Nobody.

As for meeting with the Anaconda himself -- oh, why give the secret away...


Later - A much belated afterthought...but if there were a way for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to broadcast her lack of confidence in the skills and contacts of Ambassador to Japan John Roos and Ambassador to China Gary Locke, and all the other diplomats working in those embassies, it would be to give official recognition to an ad hoc Track II mission with only half an itinerary.

One Stupid Move

Be aggressive, but play soundly. Don't take unnecessary chances.

- Bruce Pandolfini, "The 64 Commandments of Chess"

Yesterday, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko unveiled his reshuffled Cabinet (E). This follows on the heels of Friday's announcement of an extremely youthful but nevertheless competent line up of Democratic Party of Japan executives (E). Smirking critics could indeed call the newly appointed party secretariat the Attack of the Kiddie Korps, or perhaps for the more SF inclined "DPJ: The Next Generation." Aside from the reappointed secretary-general Koshi'ishi Azuma, the party secretariat is composed of what are in historical terms striplings, with Diet Affairs Chairman Yamanoi Kazunori the graybeard at 50 years of age.

Continuing on the SF theme, opposition party leaders and spokesmen are deriding the reshuffled cabinet as being nothing so much as the "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish" Cabinet. (J)

There is a grain of truth in the disparagement. Noda rotated in en masse the former party secretariat -- minus, it should be noted, the egregious Sengoku Yoshito.

The granting of all of the Second Generation of DPJ leaders a cabinet post hints that it is Dandy Don Meredith Time for the DPJ. The former American football player and announcer would croon, "Turn out the lights/The party's over" when the score and the time remaining in a game left no doubt as to which side was going to win.

That not a single one of the candidates who ran against Noda in the party leadership election received a post indicates that Noda does not give a fig about either Kano Michihiko's or Haraguchi Kazuhiro's supporters bolting from the party, triggering a political crisis as the DPJ falls into minority status in the House of Representatives.

That Noda would seeminly abandon his pledge to be a "no sides" leader of the party, meaning that all voices would be respected, only two weeks after winning reelection, indicates a certain fatalistic reckelessness has crept into his calculations.

Public opinion poll results after the Liberal Democratic Party presidential elections would certainly be grounds for Noda taking chances. Rather than sink upon the LDP Diet members' selection of an unstable and controversial Abe Shinzo as party president, support for the LDP soared, from 25% to 37% in a flash Nihon Keizai Shimbun poll (J); from 19% to 25% in a Mainichi Shimbun poll (J) and from 23% to 33% in a Yomiuri Shimbun poll (J).

The rise in the LDP's popularity over the last week is especially galling because

1) All three polls showed rises in the support levels for the Noda Cabinet

2) Abe Shinzo hardly lights the public's fire.

Q: Do you have positive expectations of Abe Shinzo?

Nikkei
Yes 38
No 49

Mainichi
Yes 40%
No 55%

3) Despite majorities polled feeling that the reelection of Noda as leader of the DPJ was a good thing, support for the DPJ declined:

Nikkei
August 21%
Sept 26-27 19%

Mainichi
Sept 15-16 13%
Sept 29-30 11%

Yomiuri
Aug 17-19 20%
Sept 28-30 18%

Worse news still in the most recent round of polls was the decline in interest in Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru's Japan Restoration Association. The official start of the national party on Friday was a low-key or no-key affair. There was no grand party at a major hotel, no shots of an office overflowing with a snow bank of congratulatory white orchids. The biggest news regarding JRA was Takenaka Heizo, the academic economist and former Koizumi banking and postal reform point man, accepting the invitation to be chairman of the committee selecting the JRA's candidates. (J)

With its support jumping, and the support of the DPJ sliding and support for the JRA plummeting, the incentive for the LDP in the upcoming Diet session is to be non-cooperative to the point of bringing Diet proceedings to a standstill, endangering the passage of a bond issuance bill funding the government's activities through the rest of the fiscal year. Abe and New Komeito leader Yamaguchi Natsuo are indeed making loud noises about holding Noda to the promise he made to former LDP president Tanigaki Sakakazu to call a House of Representatives election "soon" (chikai uchi ni).

Noda's and the DPJ's ace in the hole, however, remains the reform of electoral district boundaries. Unless some bill is passed bringing down the level of disparity in the voting strengths of the nation's largest and smallest House of Representative districts to less than 2 to 1, an election would be unconstitutional. If worse comes to worst, the game plan for the DPJ has been to lay out a draft electoral reform bill unacceptable to either the LDP or the New Komeito, and let them rail away until they are forced to vote in favor of the bond issuance bill.

Which is why one of the choices Noda has made for his new Cabinet looks like a huge mistake. As Eurasia Group Advisor Okumura Jun has noted, the new minister of Health, Welfare and Labour Minister Mitsui Wakio is the founder and owner of a pharmaceutical company and chairman of a private corporation running 3 hospitals and 2 retirement homes in Hokkaido (Link) -- a concantenation of conflicts of interest so naked that an unforgiving, persistent, frustrated and irresponsible opposition could tie up hours and hours of Diet Budget Committee time discussing them.

Now where could anyone find such an opposition?

When the obvious strategy for the new Noda Cabinet was to sit tight and let the opposition vent, why oh why give them a set of reasonable topics to vent about?

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!

Sengoku Yoshito Continues To Bring Joy To His DPJ Comrades

Despite a reputation of being one of the chief thinkers/heavy hitters of the Democratic Party of Japan (E), former chief cabinet secretary and current Acting President Sengoku Yoshito continues to be his own worst enemy.

The denouement of Sengoku's most recent publicized case of self-wounding came on Tuesday, when the judge in his libel suits against Shukan Shincho and Shukan Bunshun ruled in favor of the defendants.

In January of 2011 both magazines reported that Sengoku had sexually harassed a woman reporter in a 2010 end-of-the-year celebration at the Prime Minister's Residence. Rather than going the smart route of doing nothing, only noting that neither of the publications is a friend of the DPJ and neither is very scrupulous about printing the truth, Sengoku pulled an Oscar Wilde, filing libel suits against the publications, demanding 10 million yen from each.

On Tuesday, the judge ruled that far from being libelous, the accounts of the incident at the Residence were indeed truthful -- that Sengoku had said something to the woman and that that something was sufficiently vulgar and demeaning as to constitute sexual harassment. (J)

So, as of Tuesday, Sengoku is no longer a stumble bum and possibly a cad. He is now a stumble bum and definitely a cad.

Sengoku is considering filing an appeal.

In the meantime, Sengoku -- the DPJ's point man on the restart of the Oi nuclear reactors and the nuclear industry in general-- met yesterday with his counterparts in the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito to finalize the details on the legislation establishing a new regulatory system for the nuclear power industry (J). He is also leading the drafting of the DPJ's new policy manifesto. (J)

Good to see that the DPJ is not entrusting Sengoku, who has a demonstrated tendency to trip over himself, with any important tasks.

Reputed: On Sengoku And Hatoyama

大飯なる
茶番に怒り
通り越し

Oi naru
Chaban ni ikari
Torikoshi

Anger over
The grand farce of Oi
We pass it by

Alternate (see the below acknowledgment)

The grand farce of Oi
Leaves me beyond anger

This morning's Tokyo Shimbun has an exclusive report with a screaming banner headline stretching across the whole top of the broad sheet:

「チーム仙谷」再稼働主導　首相・閣僚４者協議　形だけ

Leading the (Reactor) Restart Is "Team Sengoku": The Prime Ministerial Council of Four is a Figurehead

(Link -J)

The article purports that the four-man (yes sadly, all men) council charged (pun unintended) with deciding whether the nuclear reactors of Japan, starting with Kansai Electric Power Company’s Oi Power Station Units #3 and #4, will restart or not, has been superseded by a five-man team (ibid) led not by the prime minister but Sengoku Yoshito, the Acting Chairman of the Democratic Party of Japan’s Policy Research Council.

One part of the shock value of this report is supposed to come from the revelation that the prime minister is not primarily responsible for leading a decision of such immense magnitude and significance. The other is that the real leader is a person of operating from a post of relatively minor status, nominally far below those of the ministers he is leading.

The membership of the Council of Four is Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu, Minister of Economics, Trade and Industry Edano Yukio and Minister of the Environment and State Minister for the Nuclear Accident Settlement and Prevention Hosono Goshi. "Team Sengoku" is supposedly composed of Sengoku, Edano and Hosono together with State Minister for National Policy Furukawa Motohisa and Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Saito Tsuyoshi.

According to the report, Noda and Fujimura are so busy with ushering through the legislation needed to raise the consumption tax to 10% that they have ceded formal operation of the Council to this unofficial group.

If this report is accurate, the ceding of the restart decision to a group led by Sengoku seems great news for advocates for a quick return to nuclear power. Sengoku is seen as the great pragmatist, with an overarching view of national goals far beyond immediate politics and traditional stances. According to the report, he also in his years in the opposition was close to the power industry, a closeness he maintained during his time as the head of the national strategy office and as Kan Naoto's Chief Cabinet Minister.

However, opponents to nuclear power should take heart from the report as well. Despite his much lauded smarts (E) Sengoku has a black thumb: everything he touches seems to turn to mud.

Like Liberal Democratic President Tanigaki Sadakazu, Sengoku has a reputation for policy brilliance that outstrips his achievements. Unlike the featherweight Tanigaki, however, Sengoku's stumbles have had serious consequences. His almost indescribably bad resolution of the Chinese ship captain arrest crisis, carried out while Prime Minister Kan was out of the country, not only made him a marked man (the House of Councillors eventually censured Sengoku, forcing his resignation as Chief Cabinet Minister) but fatally wounded the Kan administration.

Sengoku's farsightedness, while admirable in isolation, possibly makes him blind to present day reality.

Speaking of reputations, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio has got himself into a heap of trouble with his ill-considered private visit to Iran.

Hatoyama on his own after 'private' Iran trip
Kyodo

The administration distanced itself Tuesday from the brewing controversy stemming from a visit by former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to Iran, which was carried out over government objections.

Hatoyama was quoted by Tehran as criticizing the International Atomic Energy Agency for "applying double standards" to the country in his talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the former prime minister denied making such comments after he returned to Japan on Monday…

(Link)

Admittedly, "ill-considered" is superfluous in a sentence about Hatoyama. One strains to remember a decision he has made which has avoided descent into the "ill-considered" category. One may laud his decision to resign as prime minister and his commitment to take Ozawa Ichiro with him as "salutary" – but was his decision in that instance "carefully considered"? No.

As for the Iranians, all congratulations to them. Clearly they have been reading up on Hatoyama. They knew that they could print whatever passel of nonsense they could dream up, fully aware that when Hatoyama returned home and complained that he had never said anything of the things attributed to him, no one would believe him.

Regarding the senryu at the head of this post, it comes from what was an excellent batch printed in the Tokyo Shimbun three Saturdays ago. The last two weekends have been disappointing, with little to share in terms of topicality or clever word play.

The key in the above is oi naru. Oi is written in the kanji of the Oi nuclear power station. Naru would then be a classical version of the modern no. However, oinaru, if written only in kana (おおいなる) or with the kanji dai means "great" or "grand" (大いなる) becomes the adjective oinaru, meaning "great."

So oinaru chaban is at once "the Oi farce" and "the grand farce."


Later - Credit where credit is due: the senryu above is by Tezuka Tatsuo, a resident of Yachimata City, Chiba Prefecture. Printed in the Tokyo Shimbun of 12.03.24.

Later still - Many thanks to reader AG who has pointed out that if you curl around the last line break and add the article o, you get the phrase ikari o torikoshi, which means "beyond anger"

The JNN Poll of February 4-5 - A Quick Review

This is a "catch it while you can" post.


TBS has put up the results of its telephone public opinion poll taken February 4-5 (J).

The key takeaways from the post are:

Support for the cabinet has declined to 32.2%, while the percentage of those not supporting the Cabinet has risen to 66.6%. The decline in the Noda Cabinet's support numbers have been uninterrupted since the cabinet's inauguration, with no bounce at all from the cabinet reshuffle of January 13.

This news would be terrible news for Noda if it were not for the conveniently provided numbers for the Kan Cabinet, which stood at 28.3% at the time of the opening of last year's regular session of the Diet. Of course at the time the Kan Cabinet was reeling from the horrible mishandling of the Chinese fishing boat collision and subsequent leak of the video of that collision (a pair of extraordinary blunders that Sengoku Yoshito walked away from with a censure from the House of Councillors. That Sengoku is now in charge of drafting the DPJ's new electoral manifesto shows that some folks and organizations never learn).　Kan received a bump due to his efforts post-3/11 but never regained the popularity Noda enjoys now.

As for the reasons why voters do not support the Noda Cabinet, the tired old "Because we have no hopes for his policies" occupies the top spot with 42% of all those not supporting the Cabinet. The reason why this is tired and old is that "no hopes for his policies" is always in the top spot, that or "no hopes for improving the economy" -- something a prime minister nowadays has almost no control over. As for not implementing policies, in a previous post I have indicated that there is, quite on the contrary, a great deal of movement toward the implementation of policies, if not quite the policies of the DPJ per se.

- As for the fraught legislation raising the consumption tax from 5% to 10% by fiscal year 2015, a majority of those polled, 56% are in favor, with 46% opposed. This is good news for the Noda government, for which the passage of the consumption tax legislation is the highest hurdle in its agenda for the current Diet session.

- Demonstrating that "by the year 2075" has not yet stuck in the voters heads as the height of absurdity, the further 7.1% rise in the consumption tax projected to be need by that date in order to pay for the 2009 manifesto promise of a floor of 70,000 yen per month in national pension payments is unpopular with 72% of the voters. These voters want the DPJ to reconsider its 2009 pledge -- no matter that only a small fraction of those offering this opinion will still be alive in 2075.

- Demonstrating that the sudden burst of activity in regionalist politics is having an effect on voters, 75% of those polled believe it desirable that regional parties participate in national politics. Unsurprisingly, the top vote getter among politicians that the voters find themselves drawn to is Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru, the poster child of the regionalist movement. Number two on the voters' mind is Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor Ishihara Shintaro, who has allied himself in name with Hashimoto's proposed administrative reforms in Osaka Prefecture. Coming in in third place is current Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko.

Though it does not appear in the above linked report, the JNN poll found the support numbers for the main national parties still on a downward slide, with the popularity of both the DPJ and the Liberal Democratic Party below 20% and falling from last month's reading. The continuing decline in DPJ and LDP numbers is good for the country as it reduces to nil the enthusiasm of either party to face the voters in a snap election. These figures and the sudden irruption of interest in the regional parties going national are strong incentives for the two main national parties, along with the LDP's alliance partner the New Komeito, to produce a solid record of achievement in the current Diet session.

Whether the DPJ and the LDP follow these incentives, or find themselves getting sidetracked yet again by new developments in the ever-shifting saga of Ozawa Ichiro and his convicted lieutenants (one of whom, Ishikawa Tomohiro just got married to a former television presenter -- demonstrating that even future jailbirds still got wings to fly), remains the big question.

Image courtesy: TBS

Later - Here it is the next day and the link to the TBS report has already been removed from the Web.

As I said, catch as catch can.

Righting What is Wrong With This Country Right Now - A Fantasy

Someone needs to go the Prime Minister, place his/her left hand on the PM's shoulder, look into into his eyes and tell him:

"You know the loss of seats in the House of Councillors' election? It was not your fault. The presence of Minna no To candidates in the districts cost the Democratic Party between five and eight seats. Cooperation between the New Komeito and Liberal Democratic Party -- cooperation that was almost certainly the result of threats that Ozawa Ichiro has been making for years against the numbers of proportional seats in the Diet -- cost the DPJ probably at least another four seats. The reason why Minna no To represented an attractive non-DPJ, anti-LDP alternative in the proportional vote? The accounting crimes of former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's aides and the media pogrom against a single Ozawa real estate deal. That and Hatoyama's inability to take a stand upon anything during his brief tenure.

You need to stop blaming yourself for what happened. You always go overboard in taking responsibility for matters that an objective third party would declare to have been outside your control. As regards the consumption tax you said something tactically stupid but strategically wise.

Laugh off the loss and start cracking the whip.

Oh, and another thing - the Finance Ministry bureaucrats you and Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito have been relying upon as Japan's ultimate realists? Think of them as Japan's Taliban. Sure it is an unfair and outrageous depiction, but you need an extra strong aversion to their seeming mastery of the numbers. Otherwise you will not lead, you will be led. Minus a visceral negative mindset you will fail to resist their depressed and depressing certitude."

And the Home of the Brave

Just four weeks ago, we were looking, with not an insignificant amount of despair, at a 2010 House of Councillors election being fought over whether or not the PM is such a dufus that did not actually know how $14,000,000 of donations from his mom were handled in his accounts; whether Ozawa Ichiro is or is not Richard III; over whether the Democratic Party of Japan should be castigated for making promises it could not keep (because they were fiscally unsound) or for not keeping those promises; over how far backwards the DPJ was willing to bend -- to the small-scale farmers, to the trucking industry, to the postmasters and the postal unions -- in giving them what they wanted to the detriment of the national weal.

An ugly, dispiriting exercise, in other words.

Now, just a few weeks later, with Hatoyama Yukio, Kamei Shizuka and Ozawa Ichiro sent to the sidelines, the public is being hit with a hard, inconvenient truth -- the country takes in too little revenue to pay for the services the public has come to expect, meaning that taxes will have to be raised -- and that the voters will have to make their choices in the election booth based in large part on the soundness of their plans the various parties have put forther confronting that inconvenient truth.

On May 2, just a month and a half ago, the Tokyo Shimbun ran an explainer article, a little Socratic dialogue about the struggle inside the ruling coalition over when the subject of raising taxes will be broached: before the election, after the election or never.

Q: "So if the experts and the politicians both are thinking the same way, then it is in fact already decided that tax rates will be raised?"

A: "No, no, no. While you are likely to hear expressions like 'We will have to with haste grapple with fundamental reform of the tax system, including the raising of the consumption tax", nobody is brave enough to say what the new tax rate will be or when it will come into effect. Because whatever the government's plan is, it will be in effect a part of the DPJ's manifesto for the House of Councillors election."

Q: "And the DPJ has made a public promise to raise the consumption tax before, hasn't it?"

A: "Yes, in the DPJ's 2005 House of Representatives election manifesto the party put forth a plan to raise the consumption tax rate exclusively in order to stabilize the pension system. However, in that election, the DPJ suffered a landslide loss."

Nobody is brave enough...while it is true that Prime Minister Kan Naoto, DPJ Secretary-General Edano Yukio and Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito are calling the bluff of the Liberal Democratic Party, which had challenged the ruling coalition to show some guts and talk about raising the consumption tax to 10% - a number the LDP never dared mention when it was in power save as a hypothetical -- it is not hyperbole to say that they have proven the Tokyo Shimbun wrong. The DPJ's new core leadership knows that talk of raising taxes is political poison. The party has taken a body blow (as did the LDP before it under Takeshita Noboru and Hashimoto Ryutaro) for talking honestly about Japan's fiscal situation and the unpleasant business of rebalancing the whole.

Let the tough talk continue. Hurrah.

(This post has been reedited for clarity, based upon a reader's comment. - MTC)

Background to the DPJ's Ongoing Counter-Reformation

Prime Minister Kan Naoto has nearly completed filling up the holes in the new line up of Democratic Party of Japan executives and the Cabinet. From announcements and speculation printed in the nation's newspapers, it is clear that the DPJ is undergoing a massive shift away from the course it has been following since 2005.

When Kan and former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio founded the DPJ in 1996, the party's core faith was that Japan suffered from an excess of government spending on slow growth or even loss-making endeavors. The key to reviving Japan's health was the removal of the control of spending from bureaucrats (who were supposedly using the budget compilation process to featherbed organizations and industries that would supply them with sinecures following their formal retirement from government service) and assaults on the system of subsidies and supports for industries and activities (agriculture, construction, package delivery) with close ties to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Under the classic DPJ paradigm, government would have a limited role in directing the economy, with the focus of policy on the cutting away of the relations of economic dependency. The goal was a more open, failure-tolerant structure, where a social safety net would catch those who fell out of those industries undergoing shrinkage.

Two major events post-2000 forced the party to junk this policy framework. The first was the wholesale larceny of the party's ideas by Koizumi Jun'ichiro, who ran against the traditional policies of his own party, the LDP, promising change almost identical to the changes proposed by the DPJ.

The second was the landslide loss in the 2005 House of Representatives election, where a glum Okada Katsuya seemed to be campaigning on the slogans of "no fun anymore, suffering for everyone." Against improbable optimism of Koizumi, Okada's grim warnings of disaster were a total electoral downer. Unsurprisingly, the party fell flat on its face, getting wiped out in urban and suburban districts, its supposed impregnable electoral fortresses.

Rather than switching to a Koizumi-like bon vivant with a taste for the spotlight, the DPJ opted for the leadership of Ozawa Ichiro. Like Koizumi, Ozawa had a flair for the irresponsible and insincere promise. Unlike him, he was disdainful of the press, preferring to build his political machine out of the knitting together a thousand normally mutually exclusive promises to a thousand different interest groups. Recruiting local worthies to his cause through patient courtship, he built up a huge electoral bank of persons he could run as candidates who were primarily reliant on his political wiles for their educations.

This was, of course, the classic LDP Tanaka/Takeshita faction's winning playbook. Under Koizumi, the LDP abandoned its traditional method of building coalitions of interest groups and patient local recruitment in favor of a media-driven presidential and national mode of rule. As the LDP set about "modernizing" itself, Ozawa moved into the gap, dragging the DPJ, kicking and screaming, in with him.

The new DPJ had a successful test drive in the 2007 House of Councillors elections, where it prevailed over the LDP. It can be argued, however, that the DPJ did well due more to latent disgust at the LDP (particularly over the pension scheme fiasco and other policy missteps ) than thanks to the DPJ's new look.

Ozawa's DPJ received its real test in the 2009 House of Representatives elections, where it completely flipped the country's districts from LDP to DPJ control. The touchstone of the election was the DPJ's policy manifesto, which contained so many concessions and promises to so many different constituencies as to be internally incoherent, and impossible to implement as a whole. A strategy of promising everything to everyone made perfect sense in political terms, however: the electoral map having been drawn by the old time LDP in such a way as to favor the party that could make the most improbable promises.

The results of the 2009 vindicated Ozawa and bolstered his standing in the party to immense heights. A grateful Hatoyama, who found himself in the position of being the party's candidate for Prime Minister thanks to Ozawa's having rigged the snap 2009 party leader election, granted Ozawa the position of Secretary-General and the ability to fully complete the transformation of the DPJ into his personal policy and elections machine.

Events, however, began eating away at Ozawa's authority within the party faster than he could remake the party to his own needs. The global economy began recovering from the 2008 crash much earlier than anticipated, reducing the intense need for the deficit spending tthat undergirded his promises to interest groups and shifting attention toward countries with seemingly unsustainable debt increase paths, of which Japan was one. Prime Minister Hatoyama's political finance difficulties turned out to be far, far worse than imagined, composed of hundreds of real, repeated criminal acts involving hundred of millions of yen. The Futenma base problem turned out to be insoluable, no matter that most of the country believed that the Okinawans had been shafted by previous LDP governments.

What seems to have broken the camel's back, however, was Ozawa's shutting down the DPJ's Policy Research Council. While nominally a move to concentrate policy formation in the Cabinet, the abolition of the Council looked like shutting down the only forum for anti-Ozawa elements to argue that the party manifesto was a laundry list of promises, not a plan -- and an electoral liability for a ruling party. Whether or not this contention was true on not is debatable -- but by abolishing the Policy Research Council, Ozawa seemed to be declaring that that debate would not ever happen.

While members from the DPJ's middle ranks fought with Ozawa over the elimination of the Council, it was likely that they did so under the supervision of senior members of the party, many of whom understood that their own influence was in danger of being usurped. Until the abolition of the Council, the claims that Ozawa sought to establish a dictatorship could be explained away as fanciful LDP scare stories. After its abolition, and the sidelining of dozens of longtime DPJ policy wonks, these scare stories seemed suddenly far less farfetched.

The turning point, it seems, was the Ubukata Affair. When Ubukata Yukio went to the media with the case against Ozawa, the party directorate announced that Ubukata would be stripped of his Deputy Secretary-General post. This decision did not last the weekend. Announced on a Thursday, the dismissal was rescinded on the following Monday.

Several weeks ago I wondered why the Seven Magistrates of the DPJ did not follow Ubukata's lead and rid themselves of their wounded and troublesome Secretary-General and his associates. At the time, I rationalized the inaction of Sengoku Yoshito, Edano Yukio and others as their decision to take the path of least resistance: clashing with Hatoyama and Ozawa head on was risky, picking up the pieces after a disastrous House of Councillors election would be child's play.

Following the collapse of support for the Cabinet and the Party in the wake of the Futenma climbdown and the dismissal of Fukushima Mizuho from the Cabinet, the Seven Magistrates found themselves in the situation where they could carry out the prophesied coup -- because, as every poll indicated, the House of Councillors election was lost.

[Yes, a paradox: anti-Ozawa forces could move in and alter the course of future events only after the course of future events was inevitable.]

Since seemingly winning over Hatoyama Yukio to their cause, the anti-Ozawa leaders have moved with staggering efficiency and dispatch to eliminate Ozawa's influence over both policy and party management. Fiscal conservatives are now in all the party's and the government's top policy setting positions (bureaucrat bête noire Ren Ho, who had been slated to take over for Fukushima at Consumer Affairs, will take over for Edano as Minister of Government Revitalization), the Policy Research Council is being revived and the PM has told former Secretary-General Ozawa to keep his thoughts and advice to himself.

Today's party position announcements and tomorrow's new Cabinet lineup will be sending a message, one that will have repercussions well beyond its already mesurable impact on the fortunes of Kan & Company in the upcoming House of Councillor's election.

The DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back.

The Ozawa and Hatoyama Resignation Charade

When God is trying to punish you
He answers your prayers

National Strategy Minister Sengoku Yoshito is reckoned to be one of the smartest and most reputable members of the Democratic Party of Japan's top leadership. He gets great press. The public also seems to hold him in high regard. He has won the mantle of a bold and steadfast politician the hardest way: by consistently opposing DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's policies and party power mongering.

Sengoku Yoshito is fretting nowadays, however. Not because he and his allies might fail in their long war against Ozawa -- but that they might succeed too soon.

In a bit of irony, Sengoku and his party allies Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Minister Maehara Seiji and Government Revitalization Minister Edano Yukio are finding themselves suddenly having to hit the brakes on their criticism of Ozawa and Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio. They have realized that in the plummeting popularity of the Cabinet, the public's frustration with Ozawa's seeming stonewalling and pseudopopulist pandering and the Prime Minister's failure to achieve even a minimal amount of progress toward the acceptance, by any group or person, of the government's plan for moving MCAS Futenma -- the current DPJ duarchs might just "do the honorable thing" and resign their positions at the end of the month.

Such a double resignation, or a even resignation by Ozawa alone, would throw the anti-Ozawa camp in the DPJ into chaos. The anti-Ozawa forces would have to choose a new secretary-general from amongst themselves -- there is little likelihood they would countenance a replacement of Ozawa with his youthful protege, Internal Affairs and Communications Haraguchi Kazuhiro. They would then have to sell their idea to the party rank-and-file, which is packed with Ozawa loyalists. The new secretary-general would then be responsible, in tandem with current prime minister Hatoyama or his most likely replacement current Finance Minister Kan Naoto, to try lead the DPJ to victory in the summer's House of Councillor's election -- on a ticket comprised almost in its entirely of candidates chosen by Ozawa.

Faced with such a prospect, it should be unsurprising that Sengoku, Maehara, Edano and party curmudgeon Watanabe Kozo suddenly are finding merit in making excuses for Prime Minister Hatoyama's failure to meet his own deadline for "solving Futenma." They have realized that last thing they want is to suddenly receive what they have been asking for all these months -- Hatoyama's and/or Ozawa's exit stage left.

In a delicious bit of irony, the anti-Ozawa forces in the DPJ find themselves in somewhat the same boat as Tanigaki Sadakazu and the Liberal Democratic Party. Tanigaki and the LDP have been taunting the anti-Ozawa forces in the DPJ into taking on Hatoyama and Ozawa. However, the last thing the LDP wants is to face a DPJ led by anyone aside from Hatoyama and Ozawa. Droning on and on about money problems of the DPJ's ruling duarchs and Hatoyama's tendency to debate with himself out loud are the LDP's only election weapons. Should Ozawa and Hatoyama step aside, the LDP's goose would be truly and utterly cooked.

So despite months of muttering and pontification to the contrary, those in the political world opposed to Ozawa's influence finds they have one thing in common -- they need him to refuse to answer their prayers.

I Don't Know No Hatoyama Cabinet

The pollsters may ask selected voters over the weekend about whether or not they support it. The news media may report about its gatherings, or use its name as a shorthand for the government.

However, after yesterday's Cabinet meeting, the term "Hatoyama Cabinet" ceased to have anything but a technical meaning. The fight, short as it was, over Kamei Shizuka's draft of a law revising the Post Office privatization act, has broken it. You could tell by the body language. When a usually taciturn-to-the-point-of-morose figure like Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi is laughing and gesticulating like an albatross on nitrous oxide trying to take flight, you can be sure the event has hit the skids.

So deep was the wound in the collegiality of the cabinet inflicted by the Prime Minister by his forcing the acceptance of the Kamei draft that participants afterward did not even camouflage their jostling for position at a run for the prime ministership. Nakedly ambitious Internal Affairs and Telecommunications Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro -- a supporter of embattled Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro -- told reporters that what the PM had forced the Cabinet to approve was "the Kamei-Haraguchi bill." National Strategy Minister Sengoku Yoshito, the acknowledged leader of the anti-Ozawa wing of the DPJ and a fierce opponent of Kamei draft, explained his acquiescence to the bill in a calculatingly petulant verbal stiletto to the ribs of Hatoyama:

"Well, it's because I am in the Cabinet, isn't it?" ("Datte, naikaku ni irun da mon.")

Today Prime Minister Hatoyama will face off against Liberal Democratic Party President Tanigaki Sadakazu in Party Leader Question Time. A sad, bizarre, infuriating performance it will be: neither is the leader of anything.

As Regards the DPJ's Policy Making Assignments

Tobias Harris has a post up lauding the Democratic Party of Japan leadership's squelching of a request that the party rebuild its internal policy-generating apparatus. The proposed plan, put forth by a contingent of middle-ranking members, asks for reestablishment of the party policy research council, with sub-committees mirroring each of the ministries.

Policy research divisions mirroring the ministries provides the framework for the emergence of DPJ "tribesmen" (zoku giin)-- permanent advocates within the party of the interests of the ministries. As such, it is indeed a good thing that both DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro and DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio responded so negatively to the proposals.

However, keeping talented and creative individuals sitting on their hands, contributing nothing to the policy development process, seems a pointless waste of human experience. It also seems to guarantee the emergence of anti-mainstream study groups of mid-level party members in the DPJ, counterparts to the study groups that bedeviled (and still continue to bedevil) the Liberal Democratic Party.

Furthermore, maintaining the current concentration of the crafting of policy in Ozawa's hands is not desirable. The man is far-seeing but he is not omniscient. The party needs to have a means of generating alternate lines of thought as regards policy, so that the leadership is at least choosing from amongst a number of potential viable options.

However, Ozawa's insistence that freshman DPJ Diet members forget about contributing to policy making is quite reasonable. Ozawa caught no end of grief last fall for having pulled the freshmen off the Government Revitalization unit panels at the last minute. His insistence that the freshmen had far more important work to do getting themselves acquainted with their electoral districts seemed ridiculous given that the last House of Representatives election had taken place only three months earlier. Many of these freshmen appointed to the panels had expertise in finance, accounting and public administration. For many, it seemed that Ozawa was stripping the GRU panels of needed personnel merely in order to spite his intra-party critic, the then-state minister for revitalization Sengoku Yoshito.

However, there is a method in the madness of Ozawa's forcing talented freshmen to give up policy in favor of politicking...and it has nothing to do with concentrating policy making in either the Cabinet or in his hands. Having the freshmen and other fairly fresh DPJ members in their home districts, week after week, meeting and greeting their constituents, forces the LDP into having its Diet members and potential Diet members doing the same. The LDP has found it difficult to mount an effective counteroffensive in part because its forces are pinned down in defensive actions. It takes all the LDP's efforts and resources to simply match the efforts of the DPJ's cohorts, whose travel expenses and salaries are paid for by the taxpayer.