Where's Shinzo? - The Snow's Fallin' Edition

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo on the telephone with Olympic gold medallist Han'yu Yuzuru on 15 February 2014. Image courtesy The Prime Minister's Residence.

The great snowstorm of this past weekend is becoming, albeit weakly so far, a Katrina moment for the Abe Administration. The damage is stunning, particularly to homes and Japan's winter food production infrastructure. An astonishing number of communities remain cut off five days after the snow began falling in earnest. The entire prefecture of Yamanashi entered Monday without a single surface transportation link to connect it with the outside world, this despite decades of loving attention from the Liberal Democratic Party's Road and Construction Tribes.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s whereabouts and actions during the storm and its aftermath have become a matter of controversy and criticism both in Diet sessions and on the Web. (Link)

For the record, here is my annotated translation of the prime minister's schedule as it appeared in my morning newspaper, detailing where the prime minister was and what he was doing the day the storm arrived and the two days afterward:

Friday, February 14
Morning
7:58 leaves Prime Minister's Residential Quarters for Prime Minister's Residence
8:02 Arrives Prime Minister's Residence.. Chairs meeting of the Headquarters for the Promotion of Social Security Reform (Link)
8:22 Cabinet meeting
8:36 meets with Minister of State for Gender Equality Mori Masako
10:46 meets with Paddy Burke, Chairperson of the Senate of the Republic of Ireland (Link)
Afternoon:
12:01 meets with Minister in charge of Trans Pacific Partnership Amari Akira
12:58 arrives Diet Building
13:02 arrives at plenary session of the House of Representatives
13:03 meets with Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Ishiba Shigeru
13:22 arrives Prime Minister's Residence
14:02 meets Saiki Akitaka, Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs
14:13 meets Kozuki Toyohisa, Director-General of the Division of European Affairs, MOFA
15:41 meets Thomas Enders, CEO of The Airbus Group
16:01 meets Kitamura Shigeru, Director of Cabinet Intelligence
16:31 meets Minister of Defense Onodera Itsunori and Administrative Vice Minister for Defense Nishi Masanori
17:12 chairs meeting of the Council for Science and Technology Policy (Link)
18:20 summit meeting with Christopher Loeak, president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Link)
18:49 joint press announcement with President Loeak
19:01 Arrives at Prime Minister's Residential Quarters. Formal dinner with President Loeak
20:24 Bid farewell to President Loeak. Returns to Prime Minister’s Residential Quarters.

Saturday, February 15
Morning:
Receives no visitors, stays at the Prime Minister’s Residential Quarters
Afternoon:
14:25 interview by members of the domestic broadcast media
14:31 telephone call with Han'yu Yuzuru, gold medallist, men's singles figure skating, Sochi Olympic Games (Link)
14:54 Arrives at personal residence in Tomigaya, Shibuya City, Tokyo

Sunday, February 16
Morning:
Receives no visitors, stays at his personal residence in Tomigaya
Evening:
17:49 Dinner with supporters (unnamed) at Akasaka tempura restaurant Rakutei.
20:05 Returns to personal residence in Tomigaya

If the Democratic Party of Japan had half a gram of political sense it would have its members hogging every microphone, preening before every camera and tying up Diet proceedings, demanding that the Prime Minister explain his and his administration’s dilatory response to the weather catastrophe -- no matter how petty, superficial, crass, exploitative and petulant it makes the DPJ look from afar.

Because as we know from what happened after 3/11 that is exactly what the LDP would be doing, if it were still the main opposition party.

Thinking About The Weather

I get a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather...

-- Natalie Merchant, "Talk About The Weather" (1987)

The Yomiuri Shimbun is reporting that the typhoon fast approaching the Kanto Area is a "once-in-a-decade strength storm." (Link - J)

Which leaves me not entirely confident about Diet question time happening tomorrow, at least not as scheduled.

To those who argue against the reality of human agency accelerated climate change, please change your minds...or get your first one, if you have heretofore lived without.


Later - Thirteen confirmed dead; 51 missing. With all the advance notice, work stoppages, robust infrastructure and media near-hysteria one could ask for. (Link - J)

And as this is typed, a bright, warm sun shines upon the aftermath.

Image of Typhoon #26 courtesy: Japan Meteorological Agency

On Hashimoto Toru's Limited Return

As Okumura Jun has noted, Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru is tweeting on Twitter, after a 10 day period of silence following the publication of a report detailing his affair with a bar hostess from 2006 to 2008.

What prompted his breaking his silence was his attendance last Thursday of a bunraku performance, after he swore in 2009 he would never attend another one.

The upshot of this second chance for the puppet theater, for which he had cut off public financial support when he became mayor: he hated it just as much as he did in 2009.

The bunraku theater's choice of having the mayor attend a performance of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinju) was baffling. The story is a complete downer; the motivations of the main characters obscure; their actions nonsensical; and their deaths pointless.

Not what you want to show a man who cut his teeth in the Osaka television entertainment complex.

So he returned to tweeting in order to pontificate on the bunraku and his idea of popular culture, which evolves and thrives without government subsidy.

For five whole days.

Admittedly, there was a brief interlude where he considered an Asahi Shimbun report on his reforms of Osaka's bureaucracy. Otherwise it was all bunraku, all the time.

Finally, on August 1, Hashimoto shifted gears and started bashing one of his more usual great bugaboos: the Board of Education. He then shifted to a discussion of the powers and responsibilities of ward mayors in the city of Yokohama, a part of his own greater discussion his reform of the internal organization and responsibilities of the wards of Osaka City. Not coincidentally, on August 1, Hashimoto held a ceremony at Osaka City hall handing out the mayoralties of 21 of the 24 wards of Osaka, 16 of which were handed out to private citizens -- a step toward his grander scheme of converting Osaka from a prefecture to a metropolitan district. (J)

[An aside: one mystery has always been why, aside from Osakans having a huge chip on their shoulders regarding the Tokyo Metropolitan District, Hashimoto has been so obsessed with this conversion. One possible explanation is that transforming Osaka into a metropolitan district makes it the presumptive candidate for the proposed backup capital to Tokyo, with mirrored national goverment functions in the event Tokyo is destroyed or critically disabled by a natural or human-caused disaster.]

After the Yokohama ward mayors discussion, however, it has been nothing but more bashing of the Board of Education and the freedom the education system from control by elected officials, who represent the will of the majority [A bit of leap there, Toru-kun, given the voter turnout for mayoral elections - MTC].

From his Twitter feed, however, one would never learn that Hashimoto handed off to his protégé Osaka Governor Matsui Ichiro the honor of announcing that Hashimoto's brainchild, the Osaka Ishin no kai, will be participating in the next House of Representatives election as a formal political party (E). To expedite this process, Osaka Ishin no kai will be recruiting five sitting members the Diet to form their own Ishin no kai subsidiary, which Osaka Ishin no kai would then absorb in a reverse merger. (J)

This is huge political news, something that Hashimoto, if his ego were as gargantuan as portrayed in the media, would reserve for himself.

Unlike Ozawa Ichiro, however, who never accepted the political reality that for his reforms to succeed he had to step back and let others run them, Hashimoto acknowledged himself as too damaged by his marital problems to be the man at the microphone at the ceremony announcing the big change.

The reason for the Osaka Ishin no kai's change in course, from a political movement -- which has done extremely well, seizing the Osaka governorship, control of the Osaka prefectural assembly and the Osaka City's mayor's office -- to a full-fledged party is the same reason why Ozawa Ichiro's People's Life First Party seems on a course toward implosion: money.

There are many benefits to being a formal party, due to this blessed land's absurd electoral regulations. As a political party, Osaka Ishin no kai could legally distribute campaign literature, It would be legally empowered to broadcast political ads. With five Diet members as in its embrace, Osaka Ishin no kai would have the ability to have its candidates double listed, as district candidates and on the proportional party list.

The real benefit is, however, the ability to receive money. At present, Osaka Ishin no kai is forbidden from receiving funds from corporations and organizations. It is also, of course, ineligible for public campaign financing (J). It has been sidling up to the small- and medium-sized business owners of the Kansai region, asking them for private donations. However, the prospects of financing a national movement this way are poor. The movement has also had to jump through legal hoops, at one point establishing a non-profit organization with the sole purpose of absorbing one industrialist's gift of 100 million yen. (J)

Just do not ask Hashimoto about the details regarding all this. Oh he knows them; he just will not talk about them. He will refer you to Matsui.

So Hashimoto's back -- but in a truncated form, for the time being.

Armageddon Can Ruin Your Whole Day

The most hilarious line I have read in a long while:

"If Japan's finances collapse, social order would collapse as well. That would be a tough environment to raise children."

You can find it a huffing-and-puffing Reuters piece on a heretofore unknown sweeping social trend: Japanese buying overseas real estate and non-yen currencies in order to have a safe haven to which they will flee prior to Japan's descent into chaos. (Link)

I know that it is in the writ of wire journalists to alert their most important readers (private investors and money managers) as to emerging social trends. That way said readers can get in on the opportunity before everyone else does. It is in the writ of editors, however, to cool the jets of journalists with "Uhhhh, how sure are we that we are not being sucked into someone else's marketing scheme?"

As for the book whose sales supposedly validate the trend of Japanese seeking security oversees, Escape from Japan (Nippon dasshutsu), check out the home page of its publisher, Asa Publishing (Link - J).

Yes, there's the link, that jittery thing on the right.

After the Storm

A monstrous typhoon has passed through the country. A few unfortunates lost their lives; many more people suffered injuries, several dozen lost their homes. The power went out in many places as wires ripped from their moorings. Most of the country's jets were grounded; most of the express train runs were cancelled. Yet much of the country's transportation and distribution network still functioned, despite the heavy rain and the wind. A staggering percentage of the labor force commuted work. Television crews, sent out to document the projected devastation, had little to capture in the way of storm dramatic storm damage. The slathering of the coastlines and riverways in concrete, the aesthetically asinine replacement of wood frame houses and public buildings with steel-framed, ceramic tile encased strongholds, lamented often enough here, seems to have preserved the populace from suffering catastrophic losses.

As, I suppose, they were designed to do.

Would it not be ironic that in the aftermath of the defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose passionate intertwining with the construction sector led to the birthing of uncounted thousands of public works projects costing uncountable trillions of yen transforming Japan into a fortress against nature, leading to the party's being shackled to reputation of environmental and fiscal nihilism -- that the purportedly wasteful and pointless flood-control and wave-action defenses actually turned out to be crucial to beat back rising seas and supertyphoons?

That Japan, courtesy the LDP, would turn out to be the only country prepared for the consequences of climate change?

Re the Akihabara Massacre

For good and ill, Japanese emergency medical personnel have very little experience in treating weapons trauma victims.

Later - I stand corrected as to the incident in question. Two of the physicians responding to the emergency were specialists from the country's top emergency response medical corps. What time they arrived on the scene is unclear--and the NHK video did not show them treating victims--but they were there.

Even later - Well, that was instructive. I visited Japan Probe and found I was "blaming" EMS workers...for what, the link does not say.

In comments (and boy they are not fun to read!) Anonymous #1 says that the TBS broadcast claimed a full DMAT response.