Golf Is Just A Four Letter Word

It is 4:35 a.m. I am wondering whether the paper man has left my morning paper in the mailbox.

Yes, I still get news the old fashioned way. Though perhaps not for long, for as of August 1, the Tokyo Shimbun has electronic delivery.

If and when I do go downstairs, I will turn to the inner pages, ignoring the immense tragedy in my old hometown, the humble city of Hiroshima.

One of the ignored aspects of the rural-vs-urban struggle in Japan is the number of medium-sized cities like Hiroshima with insanely high quality of life. Hiroshima is a modern city, with a reasonable economic mix and a fairly stable outlook where hiking trails and verdant seclusion are a 30 minutes's walk from midtown. Unlike most of Tokyo and the central Kanto, the mid-sized cities have retained, like Kamakura and Zushi, the forested hills, sending green fingers deep into the residential and even business areas.

It was, of course, these hillsides that came crashing down on the valley floor housing in the downpour two days ago.

But I digress.

My purpose in going downstairs would be to open the paper to the inner folds, where, in a tiny feature, the full listing of the prime minister's day yesterday will be printed. The PM is on vacation right now, up at his villa in the lakes region of Yamanashi Prefecture. Vacation time means barbecue, hanging out with allies, working out the details of the September 3 Cabinet reshuffle and golf.

Lots of golf.

Damn near daily rounds of golf.

Monday was an exception. The PM and Akie-sama spent the morning at the villa, with probably a smattering of security officers and aides milling about. Just after lunch the PM went for a soak at the local hot springs, coming home just after 3 p.m.

Just before 5, the pace at the villa kicked up into another gear entirely. Tanaka Kazuho, the head of the Ministry of Finance's budget bureau, showed up in advance of what an early (5:36 - probably a barbecue) dinner of with Abe and his aides. The group was joined at 5:43 by Honda Etsuro, one of Abe's two main economics advisors and a fervent critic of Finance Ministry thinking fiscal consolidation. Discussion of next year's budget and the economic outlook, with probably a pretty intense debate over the advisability of a further rise of the consumption tax went on for hours afterward. Most of the guests left just after 10:30, with Honda the last to leave at 10:47.

Those of the "growth first/tax rise whenever" persuasion might want to take heart in Honda's having the last ten minutes of the prime minister's attention to himself and presumably the last word on the subject of the consumption tax rise.

However, Prime Minister Abe in his second run has been extremely savvy as regards the management of personnel. Giving special attention to an advisor is just as often an indicator that Abe will be ignoring that advisor's counsel as he will be taking special heed of it. Remember that in the midst of the initial staged "debate" on whether or not to go forward with the rise of the consumption tax, Abe made the time to have a private lunch with Honda and Hamada Ko'ichi, the PM's other big economics advisor who like Honda was against the 3% jump in the consumption tax scheduled for April this year. Abe gave the pair a big chunk of face time. In the end it seems it was only so the two would not feel humiliated by their inevitable defeat in the rigged contest of ideas.

Knowing how to let people down without alienating them: a really important skill for someone wishing to stay in power a long time.

Just to hammer home the point on collegiality and remaining friends, the next day the prime minister and Akie-sama brought Honda, Tanaka, and Hie Hisashi, the CEO of Fuji Television, together for a round of golf.

In the evening, the PM attended what one should call, I suppose, the gathering of the tribe at the villa of Sasakawa Yohei, the head of the Nippon Zaidan. Also at the dinner pow wow were:

Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro
METI Minister Motegi Toshimitsu
Senior Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Kishi Nobuo (also the PM's brother)
Senior Vice Minister Nishimura Yasutoshi
Cabinet Parliamentary Secretary Kato Katsunobu
Representative Hagiuda Ko'ichi (the PM's August 15 offering carrier to Yasukuni, just like last year)
Representative Yamamoto Yuji

as well as Fuji TV's Hie-san.

The PM arrived back at the villa from the party just after 10 p.m.

Rounds of golf occupied most of the PM's waking hours on the weekend as well. On the first day of his vacation, Saturday the 16th, Abe was out on the golf course with his closest political aides. Why he should spend his first day off with all the same persons he spends his every working day with is beyond me (then again, much is beyond me).In the evening he had dinner with his mother and his wifein the restaurant of a members only resort hotel.

Considering the ludicrous packing of Abe schedule the day before, the end-of-war day (no, he did not have his hair done after the memorial service like last year) his kicking back and hanging out with his family and underlings on his first day of what is projected to be a near postwar record length prime ministerial summer vacation deserves an "OK, so he's kind of dull" shrug.

The next day, Sunday the 16th, was a full day of Abe 2.0 recreation strategy at its purest. In the morning the PM was on the golf course with:

Chairman of Nippon Keidanren, former chairman of Toray Industries Sakakibara Sadayuki

Former chairman of the Nippon Keidanren (Sakakibara's predecessor but one), chairman and CEO of Canon Mitarai Fujio

Honorary advisor and former CEO, JX Holdings Watari Fumiaki

Wait a minute, you might be saying, each of these hefty executives has made his name in the past few years using his position to preserve/resurrect the foreign investor-suspicious, government coddled and coddling Japan Inc. big business model. Does a foursome like this one not send a terrible message to the outside world what kind of economy Abe favors? Is not Abe also setting himself up for having a very skewed view of his country's path forward, too?

Yes and yes.

Dinner in the evening was a relatively restrained affair, with the PM and Akie-sama joining Hie-san and Kato-san for dinner at a French dining area of the Hotel Mount Fuji.

Wait a minute, longtime readers of this blog might be again saying, this is exactly the same group of cronies and power brokers Abe vacationed with last year. (Link)

Yep.

Indeed, in his first four days of vacation, Abe has spent quality time with virtually all of his tight circle of cronies and family member. And basically no one but his cronies and family members.

Which is why I am itching to go downstairs and fetch the paper, to find out the answer to my impertinent question:

"OK, but does the prime minister have any new friends?"

[Pause]

But upon picking my newspaper up, and checking the political news, I learn that yesterday for Abe, like for Mori before him, golf became a four letter word. (Link - J video)


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N.B. The title is an allusion to the Robert Allen Zimmerman song making an even more provocative assertion. (Link)

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.

Noble And Obvious And China Will Still Go Bananas About It

According to news reports, the Abe government has decided to dispatch a force of up to 1,000 Self Defense Forces personnel to the Philippines to help in the rescue and recovery effort in the aftermath of 2013 Typhoon #30 --- a.k.a, Typhoon Haiyan, a.k.a. Typhoon Yolanda. For those who have been looking at the photographs and video footage of the disaster zones and thinking, "Isn't this humanitarian catastrophe exactly what the Japanese government and the SDF have been arguing the Osumi and the other helicopter carriers were built to handle?" you are vindicated -- the dispatch includes the Osumi, the Ise and the oiler Towada. (Link - J)

As for the Chinese response to the projected presence of 1,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors either on the ground in Leyte or on ships carrying out operations inside the territorial waters of the Philippines -- well, one can imagine that the military-security folks in Beijing must be rather busy this morning -- for all the wrong reasons, one might add.


Later - An earlier version of this post contained the extraordinary number of 10,000 SDF in the Philippines. Whether that was a bleary-eyed misread or an actual reading of a later corrected report, I cannot say.

Apologies for the confusion.

Later still - Arrghhh! Corrected the wrong place in the above. The current government plan involved 1,000 SDF. 1,000.

As you were.

And even later - Many thanks to reader "Brodie" who alerted me to the mistaken correction. Caught it I did before I read his email...but all corrections are always welcome ("And needed" - Editor).

And yet later still - As for the obvious question, "Why is it that the MSDF helicopter carriers have not already departed for the Philippines?" one can only guess that without their blessed Security Council to gather up their attention and focus it, neither the Prime Minister, the Chief Cabinet Minister nor the Defense Minister could possibly have the mental discipline to make the connection in between the likelihood of desperate need and the dispatch of relief ships.

Thankful should we be that the Liberal Democratic Party, the experienced, proactive, outward-looking party committed to wrenching Japan out of its passivity in order to transform it into a greater force for global good, is back in power.

Or so we have been told, so many times...

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

You Can Never Be Too Sure

One of the outstanding features of the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, was that the scale of the disasters far exceeded any expectations (A double tsunami (E)? Four nuclear power plants blowing up?). The recent interim report of independent fact-finding commission in charge of investigating the Fukushima nuclear disaster mocked the constant repetitions by those with authority over the safety measures at the Fukushima Dai'ichi power station that the events of March 11 were "beyond imagining" (soteigai - J). However, that there have been only five 9.0 seismic events measured in the last century should be reason for cutting the disaster planning folks some slack (not all slack, mind you -- as accounts of the forward thinking and responses of the various branches and levels of government make painfully clear).

So one of the lessons of March 11 seems to be "think beyond what you believe to be the possible."

But there is soteigai, and there is, well, this:

Saitama Pref. to take tsunami countermeasures
The Yomiuri Shimbun

The Saitama prefectural government has begun work to include tsunami countermeasures in its regional disaster management plan, it has been learned.

This will be the first attempt by an inland prefecture to prepare for tsunami damage in its disaster preparations.

It is part of a review on possible damage after experts examining the impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake said a future tsunami could hit Tokyo Bay and travel up the Arakawa river that runs from Tokyo through Saitama Prefecture. (Link)

OK, so Saitama Prefecture has no coastline, is 20 kilometers upriver from Tokyo Bay and 100 kilometers from the open ocean.

Hmmmm...

I suppose I should look on the bright side. The prefecture investigating its tsunami preparedness at least is not Yamanashi.

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?

Totalitarianism Ain't What It Used To Be

TV Asahi's evening broadcast had a very interesting snippet from a government press conference on the conditions in earthquake affected Sichuan Province. According to the translation, the young Chinese woman reporter asked government officials, in a live broadcast:

"We have seen so many collapsed schools but very few other severely damaged government buildings. To what would you attribute this difference?"

Whoa. I am guessing the officials on the spot wanted to think before answering that question. Only problem was, they were on TV, where you do not get any time at all to craft a ideologically and politically savvy response.

The national leadership sure does not look as self-confident as and the people sure look less cowed than I have been told they are due to the new flowering of Chinese patriotic nationalism. The local officialdom seem to be unable to suppress what is going on--at least, not to the extent I have heard they can.

The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be.

I wonder what Sakurai Yoshiko and Komori Yoshihisa are thinking Japan should do in this, the Chinese people's time of trial? Which is it, action or inaction, the Golden Rule or the Silver, that best serves Japan's national interest?

Because the national interest is so easily defined, yes? And China is a monomaniacal behemoth, bent on crushing Japan's freedom, yes?

Oh, let't be honest: the whole fearmongering cabal has nothing to teach us. To heck with the whole lot of them.