Abe Shinzo's Friends Indeed

"It is called the Unbegun Symphony. It used to be called the Pathetic Symphony. Now these names as you may know, like the Jupiter Symphony and the Eroica Symphony...now these names as you may know, they are usually not given by the composer. They are given by friends or the musicians and stuff. This name, the Pathetic Symphony, was given to the piece by some of my old friends.

(Pause)

Well, I have a new set of friends now...and we're calling it the Unbegun Symphony."

- Peter Schickele, "The Unbegun Symphony" (1966) *

Well, he has a new set of friends now...

When I hear Abe Shinzo arguing for a stimulus package (taking cash out of the national treasury and distributing it to politically important constituencies) in order to offset the likely downturn in individual and corporate spending after the consumption tax rise (raised in order to pay for the higher health and pension costs associated with a larger population of retirees) so as to not derail the economic growth associated with Abenomics monetary policy (which, by targeting inflation, will eat away at the spending power of those on fixed incomes and/or living off their savings, i.e., retirees) and fiscal policy (which by accelerating the rate of increase of the national debt, threatens jumps in interest rates demanded by borrowers, which will increase the percentage of the national budget consecrated to debt service, decreasing the amount of money available for everything else, most importantly pensions and healthcare for the elderly) all against the advice of economists Honda Etsuro and Hamada Ko'ichi, the two identified "fathers of Abenomics," whilst simultaneously trying to drum up support globally for an as yet unknown set of structural reforms to be decided on...soon...because the set of reforms his brain trust of supposedly market savvy and creative CEOs produced for the big June announcement were either trivial (Link) or so nakedly self-serving (Rakuten CEO Mikitani Hiroshi going so far as to threaten to quit Abe's industrial competitiveness council if the sales of drugs and medical equipment over the Internet were not in included in the June announcement) as to embarrass the PM -- I blackly remember Professor Schickele's sardonic, "Well, I have a new set of friends now..."

In his return to power a year ago, Abe Shinzo seems to have secretly made a deal with himself and his eminence grise Suga Yoshihide. Abe would nod in the direction of old coterie of supporters and allies, the so-called "Friends of Abe" like Taka'ichi Sanae, Furuya Keiji and Inada Tomomi -- and yes, even the duplicitous and too glib Aso Taro -- relying upon them as the backbone for his challenge to the status quo within the Liberal Democratic Party. The muscle and momentum for the takeover of the party and the government, however, would come from the zaikai, with new style but still establishment business moguls like Mikitani, Takeda Phamaceuticals CEO and Keizai Doyukai head Hasegawa Yasuchika, JR Central Chairman Kasai Yasuyuki, Fuji Film CEO Komori Shigetaka as a set of "New Friends of Shinzo" -- persons whom when you talked to them seemed full of ideas on how to transform Japan into an economic powerhouse, a state capable of paying for the kind of raw politico-military power Abe had seemingly previously thought could only come through the imposition from above of a hair-trigger patriotic, paranoid obedience to authority -- you know, like the mindset the Chinese seem to be fostering.

The New Friends seemed full of the promise of a revived fukukoku kyohei, but a fukoku kyohei for the Facebook Age -- with the New Friends of Shinzo providing the ideas and capital for the fukoku and the Old Friends providing the applause for the Abe/Suga duarchy's tentative tiptoeing toward the kyohei.

As I watch Abe's epic, manic, economic speedballing -- meeting everyone, asking everyone's advice, with resulting announcements of new economic policies off-setting the effects of previous economic policies offsetting the effects of yet earlier policies engaged to counter the consequences of even older policies, with frenetic searches for new statistics demonstrating earlier that the latest policies are indeed working (Link) or that the current policies need yet newer policies to offset them -- I find myself worrying, "Won't the pressures of finding a path through the bewilderingly numerous, numbingly complex and often mutually contradictory plans of the New Friends of Abe cause the man to break down -- just like the unseemly power-grabbing and intransigence of the Old Friends did?"

A disconcerting thought for a sunny day.


Later - It is not a sign of the Apocalypse, but when the Yomiuri Shimbun, which is as a rule sycophantic in its coverage of the policies of the LDP prime ministers, is like me in shaking its head at the PM's mutually negating proposals (Link) then the sum of the parts of the current administration's ideas is clearly less than a whole.

----------
* The album An Hysteric Return: P.D.Q. Bach at Carnegie Hall is available here.

Reflections On The Prime Minister's Award In Truck Driving

All politicians, even those in non-democratic states, have to participate on a regular basis in some strange photo opportunities.

This, I put to the readers, is one:

The Prime Minister Receives a Courtesy Call from the Winners of the National Truck Driver Contest

Thursday, May 30, 2013

(Source)

With the Prime Minister is Mr. Tetsuya Takashima of Himeiji, Hyogo Prefecture. Mr. Takashima won both the 11 Ton Division and the Overall Title in the 44th annual National Truck Driver Contest. He and the Prime Minister are holding the Prime Minister's Cup, one of many, many such awards bearing the Prime Minister's imprimatur.

Not all Prime Minister's Awards are backed up with a trip to the Prime Minister's Residence to meet with the prime minister -- who, in a linguistic tussle, never resides in the Residence. This particular prime minister, who officially hails from Yamaguchi Prefecture, does not even reside in the Prime Minister's Residential Quarters, preferring to live in his actual home in his actual hometown of Tokyo -- prompting the ineffectually puckish Democratic Party of Japan to ask for an official government determination on whether or not the prime minister is too afraid of ghosts to live in the supposedly haunted Residential Quarters, a jibe that has played well internationally (Link) but has failed to hit home in the domestic media.

Returning to the subject of truck driving, it is one of the few tests of skill graced with an actual Prime Ministerial photo op.

However, this has not been the case for most of the contest's history. It was only during the premiership of Koizumi Jun'ichiro that a Prime Minister's Award winner in truck driving actually received his award from the hands of a prime minister.

According to the conventional wisdom, the trucking industry has been a vital constituency for the Liberal Democratic Party, supposedly pushing the LDP in the direction (there was not much resistance) of overenthusiasm for costly and under-used high-speed toll roads. It is also a part of the conventional wisdom that Ozawa Ichiro's desire to capture the trucking industry's votes led to the DPJ to promise it would eliminate tolls on the toll roads, despite the ruinous effect such an abolition would have had on government finances and the credibility of government pledges to reduce carbon emissions. The promises to eliminate highway tolls in order to "buy" the trucking industry vote became a big fat target for the LDP to shoot at after the LDP was dumped into the opposition. The promised reductions, which the public knew were dubious, were never carried out, serving in the end only as examples of the DPJ's tendency to promise more than it could deliver.

Despite the importance of trucking votes in Japanese politics it took 33 years of Prime Minister's Awards before the contest winners were let into the Residence.

Part of the reason may be the contest's unusual pedigree. The sponsor of the first two contests was The Science Museum (Kagaku gijutsukan -- I am sorry but that is the organization's actual English name), presumably as a means of promoting truck technology.

After two years under the control of the national museum, sponsorship of the contest was taken over, and I am not making this up, by the Yomiuriland amusement park.

There is a story there that I have no time to look into.

After 10 years of being a part of the weird and wonderful world that is the Yomiuri entertainment and media empire, sponsorship of the contest was transferred -- and again, I an not making this up -- to the Japan Youth Center (Nippon Seinenkan) -- an organization established as a system of social control by the Home Ministry and the Ministry of Education in the 1920s. (Link)

It was not until 1995 that the national truck driving contest landed in the lap of the organization that now controls it, the Central Training Academy for Safe Driving (Anzen unten chuo kenshujo -- Link J) -- where, among other things, the national police go to learn their vehicle　handling skills. The Diet established the national Safe Driving Center in 1975. However, it seems the Center was not deemed the proper administrator of the national contest of safe truck driving until a score of years later. (Link - J)

Interestingly, the year after the contest winners were first received at the Residence, the government privatized the Central Training Academy for Safe Driving.

Coincidental? Hmmm...having some contest winners meet the PM for a few minutes for a photo op at the Residence hardly seems compensatory for being thrust into the cold world of the private sector.

Why look into all of this, aside from the inadvertent deadpan hilarity of the title of the event on May 30?

The National Truck Driver Contest took place in the beginning of November. It has been over six months since the winners were announced.

When did previous prime ministers meet the contest winners?

Noda Yoshihiko - 1 February 2012

Kan Naoto - no meeting recorded on Kantei website

Hatoyama Yukio - 23 February 2010

Aso Taro - 15 January 2009

Fukuda Yasuo - no meeting recorded on Kantei website

Abe Shinzo - no meeting recorded on Kantei website

Koizumi Jun'ichiro met the contest winners more than once, and each time within weeks of the contest.

At least from the evidence in the Kantei's photo pages, Prime Minister Abe is not alone among his predecessors in not letting the trucking association bask in his glow. Prime ministers Kan and Fukuda did not receive the truckers at all (though a meeting may have been in Kan's calendar for March 2011 -- who knows?).

When prime ministers have hosted the truck driving contest winners, however, they have done so in a timely fashion -- not six months after the fact.

What can be read from this tardy reception?

The pragmatists might say that Abe has been so preoccupied with the revival of the animal spirits of Japan's economy that he could not find the time to meet the truckers before now.

The strategist might say that the truckers have never been an important constituency for Abe. He has met them but only as a gesture on behalf of his party a month before the House of Councillors election.

The cynic might say that Abe's meeting the winners six month's late is an example of a profound lassitude, another instance of an item getting pushed down the domestic political calendar, like the startling delay until May 15 of the passage of the national budget.

One should perhaps be cynical. When one checks the legislation the Abe Cabinet has managed to push through the Diet, bearing in mind that the ruling coalition has a supermajority in the House of Representatives, one should probably come away unimpressed.

Even less impressive is the rhetoric of the current administration. It may be difficult to find a clearer demonstration of the contrast between a commitment to normalcy after 3/11 and exploitation of tragedy than Prime Minister Noda's remarks to the truck driving contest winners in 2012 (Link - J) and Prime Minister Abe's remarks on Thursday. (Link - J)

Grist for the mills of those who believe in a substantive difference between the parties.

Later - I have to be careful. Any more of this kind of archeology of the banal -- following the threads leading out of the apparently trivial, arriving at all kinds of unexpected destinations -- and I will drive away all of my readers.

Image courtesy: Prime Minister's Residence

Still Wrong

Kyōdō News just cannot help itself.

Emirates Airline may buy Mitsubishi Heavy small passenger jet
Kyodo News

TOKYO, March 25 - Emirates Airline may purchase Japan's first-ever passenger jet, to be produced by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., a source familiar with the matter said Tuesday.

The Dubai-based carrier, one of the world's fastest growing airlines, is in talks with the Japanese company about purchasing the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, which will seat 70 to 90 passengers, the source said, without elaborating.

-------------------------------------------------

Emirates denies plans to buy Japan's first passenger jet
AFP

DUBAI — Dubai-based airline Emirates on Tuesday denied reports it is planning to buy a new regional passenger jet under development in Japan -- the first such aircraft to be built in the country...

Entertaining the suspicion that someone might be trying to profit from the spread of such pie-in-the-sky rumors is, of course, preposterous.

Mitsubishi Heavy Shares Rise on Report of Jet Order
Bloomberg

March 24 -- Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., developer of Japan's first passenger jet, rose to the highest in more than two weeks in Tokyo trading on a report the company may sign its first overseas order with Vietnam Airlines Corp.

The shares gained 2.8 percent to close at 449 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the highest since March 6.

Kyōdō News - when you absolutely, positively have to disseminate partial truths, untruths and outright fibs.