Stop. Wait. Do You Know Who I Am?

I suppose I should not try to double-guess Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor Masuzoe Yo'ichi. He did, after all, navigate through rough political waters to victory in February.

However, I must confess puzzlement at Masuzoe's willingness to be used as a ratings prop by news organizations. He is supposed to be running the world's richest and most populous municipality. How can he have time to sit helpless in TV studios doing nothing as producers run 4 minutes long features and as snide and chirpy hosts bypass the governor to elicit comments from other guests of decidedly minor stature, meaning that their utterances will be remarkable not only their dearth of knowledge but their lack of significance and/or relevance.

Seeing Masuzoe imprisoned in chair on the Nihon Terebi (Yomiuri Shimbun Group) Saturday and Fuji TV (Fuji Sankei Group) Sunday morning shows had me asking, over and over again, "What is he doing there? Is he afraid that if we do not see him continuing his ring-around-the-talk shows tours, we will forget who is Tokyo's governor? Or is he merely trying to feed the media beast pre-emptively so that when crunch time comes, the conservative media conglomerates do not bite him?"

For any and all politicians, Fuji TV's Sunday morning show is a particular ordeal. The announcers and other guests just toss bait -- annoyances, insults or irrelevant nonsense -- at the main guest trying to get him or her to create a scandal by a provocative or merely poorly thought out response.

Than again, Masuzoe seems to need no prompting to toss sharp and not entirely well thought out remarks on his own. On Saturday he dismissed of the Akasaka Detached Palace where the Government of Japan houses and receives its most honored guests as "a sham Versailles" unworthy and unrepresentative of Japan (Link - J). His longing for a "more Japanese" building fror housing honored guests begs the question, "OK, Monsieur Pantalons-Astucieux," -- Masuzoe is a Francophone and has taught in Paris -- "where in the budget of either the GOJ or the TMG is there the money to pay for a substitute?"

Dites-moi.


Later - While we are on the subject of Japan-France cultural interactions, the openings of two local exhibitions of note:

- "Okamoto Taro and his Friend in Paris," at the Taro Okamoto Museum in Kawasaki (Link - J)

- "Fer et Cocon" ("Iron and Cocoons") at the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History in Yokohama (Brochure - J - pdf)

The Asahi Shimbun Embarrasses Itself Again

A few posts ago I showed disrespect toward the The Asahi Shimbun as regards the Yamamoto Taro letter affair. Alone among the major newspapers it had not released an editorial about the incident at the Emperor's autumn garden party, despite the intense and divisive constitutional issues involved. "[I]t is all so below them, I guess," I snarked.

Well, ten days after the incident, the editors of The Asahi Shimbun finally checked in -- with an editorial written from such an Olympian perspective that reading it gives us poor commoners a crick in the neck. (Link)

I will stop calling The Asahi Shimbun a political eunuch with absurd pretentions of being Japan's The New York Times when its editors get their duffs off their clouds and start tossing around some mud like the rest of us.

Want to be dispassionate? Fine. Want to be neutral? Don't. It's too close to neutered.

Abe Names His NHK Governors - A Postscript

As it turns quite everyone is willing to let Abe Shinzo's choices for governors of national broadcaster NHK go unremarked:

"He seem to wants to have people who more closely adhere to his vision of the national polity (kokkazo). Prime Minister Abe is the first prime minister in history to so baldly interject [his vision] into the public broadcaster.　I feel so sorry (ki no doku) for the viewers."

-- Kawasaki Yasushi, Professor, Sugiyama Jogakuen University, a former reporter for NHK


"We can see in this [set of governors] a posture of not including differing views...As the board of governors of NHK has broad authority, it is best that they have a higher regards of the viewers paying the annual fee..."

-- Hattori Takaaki, Professor of Media Law, Rikkyo University

Both quotes are from the Tokyo Shimbun of 9 November 2013, p.6

Abe Names His NHK Governors And No One Says Anything

The insurgency began
And you missed it...

- REM, "Begin the Begin" (1986)

Wow, is the below ever bad news for the folks working at NHK -- and great news for the commercial terrestrial networks.

Diet approves NHK governor nominees

Jiji Press

The Diet on Friday confirmed the government-chosen nominees for leadership posts, including NHK governors, at public organizations.

The House of Representatives approved the 29 nominees for 12 organizations by a majority vote at an afternoon plenary meeting, following a similar decision in the morning by the House of Councillors.

This marked the first Diet approval of public organization leadership nominees selected by the government since the Liberal Democratic Party's victory in the upper house election in July ended years of a divided legislature.

The Diet approved the appointment of five nominees for NHK governorships. Of them, author Naoki Hyakuta, former Saitama University Prof. Michiko Hasegawa, Japan Tobacco Inc. adviser Katsuhiko Honda and Naomasa Nakajima, principal of the Kaiyo Academy secondary school, will be newly appointed, while Kyushu Railway Co. Chairman Susumu Ishihara will be reappointed.

All four new appointees have close relations with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which has triggered speculation that Abe wants to increase his influence over the appointment of NHK's next president by sending the four. Current NHK President Masayuki Matsumoto's term ends in January, and his successor will be appointed by the board of governors.

Hyakuta and Abe grew particularly close following a magazine interview. Hasegawa, a conservative thinker, is a strong supporter of the prime minister, while Honda was Abe's tutor in his elementary school days.

Nakajima's school was established with support from Central Japan Railway Co., whose chairman, Yoshiyuki Kasai, advises the prime minister...

(Link)

First off, and the article alludes to this but does not spell this out, the capacity to nominate and approve any official they want was the one power outside the grasp of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his people prior to the House of Councillors election. The two thirds majority of the House of Representatives the ruling coalition won in December last year gave Abe and Co. the power to override any decision by the House of Councillors -- every decision that is, except a no vote on an appointed position.

Now that the coalition holds a majority of seats in the House of Councillors, any appointment at which the New Komeito can shrug its collective shoulders is now a done deal.

Second, to say that the highlighted quartet of new NHK governors are bad news is an understatement.

- The magazine for which the interview was conducted that brought Hyakuta and Abe together? The embarrassing revisionist hothouse WiLL (Link).

- Reactionary polemical professor Hasegawa? Author of such barn burners as What Is This Thing Called Democracy?" (Demokurashii to wa nan na no ka) which draws a direct line between the spread of democracy and the carnage of World War I and Our Truly Terrifying Constitution (Honto ni osoroshii nippon kempo) which argues that the three pillars of the 1947 Constitution - people's sovereignty, human rights and pacifism -- inevitably lead to revolution, the death of monarchs, the guillotine, terror and Japan's dismemberment.

A sort of well-groomed Japanese Glenn Beck-style world view is hers, it seems.

- As for Honda, what more needs to be said? He was Prime Minister Abe's katei kyoshi ("home tutor") when Abe was a boy (to be fair, member of the House of Representations Hirasawa Katsuei also did a stint as an Abe katei kyoshi). All fine and dandy until one realizes that the prime minister attended a second-class private escalator school, where advancement from one grade to the next and one division to the next was automatic. The PM indeed attended the same school from kindergarten to graduation from college -- meaning that the only entrance exam hell he ever faced was when he was all of four years old.

What need did he ever have of a tutor, then?

[For the record, after tutoring Abe, Honda became a lifetime employee at Japan Tobacco, rising through the ranks. He became president of the company in 2000.]

- What the heck is it with Kasai, whom we have discussed before? How is it that a chairman of a private railway company controls so many appointments at NHK, the national broadcaster? Matsumoto, whom Kasai now reportedly wants forced out, is a former Central Japan Railways executive and a former protegé. Kasai arranged to have him appointed president during the Democratic Party of Japan's time in power. Now with Abe we have the appointment of Nakajima, the principal of a school bankrolled by Kasai's company, to the board of governors.

In the name of all that is decent, what is going on here?

Now that the NHK appointments have received Diet approval, editorial independence and critical reporting might find senior management support wanting for a while.

Oh well, there will always be the great nature documentaries and the pedagogical programming of ETere, NHK's education channel.


Later - The Mainichi Shimbun gingerly editorializes against the new members of the board of governors. (Link)

Harrowing

That is what this brief video of Yamamoto Taro's press conference, as produced by Makiko Segawa and Michael Penn, is. (Link - video)

The Yamamoto letter incident, which Mari Yamaguchi has effectively covered for the Associated Press, including the all-important resonance Yamamoto's intemperate and simple-minded action has with the self-sacrifice of Tanaka Shozo at the beginning of the 20th century (Link), has been a real test for the news media.

The Yomiuri Shimbun, in default umbrage　at　everything　a　progressive　does, has demanded Yamamoto be severely punished. It also implies he should be either resign immediately or be deprived of his Diet seat (Link). Contrary to its image as the slavering mad dog of right wing vengeance, the Sankei Shimbun merely lays out the facts of the incident and the reactions triggered in the political classes, then only asks that Yamamoto's punishment be commensurate (so'o) with his offence. (Link - J)

[If the Sankei's request for a "commensurate" punishment brought to your mind the signature verse of "A More Humane Mikado" in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (Link video) -- what are you doing in this century?]

The Mainichi Shimbun, contrary to its recent more confrontational stance, sidestepped offering judgment, seeking instead to answer the question of whether or not Yamamoto's Diet colleagues can or will actually do anything significant to him (Link). The real world answer seems to be no, as according to news reports this morning, President of the House of Councillors Yamazaki Masaaki has decided to ban Yamamoto from attending any event in which the Emperor is a participant (pretty harsh, since one presumes this includes the Diet closing and opening ceremonies). Yamazaki seems to have had to act his own authority, as a punishment for the crime of handing a letter to the Emperor seems not covered by any House of Councillors rule. (Link - J)

As for liberal side of the ledger, the Asahi Shimbun has to this point avoided addressing the letter episode in an editorial (it is all so far below them, I guess...). By contrast, Tokyo Shimbun, which has elbowed aside the communist party organ Akahata as the go-to paper for the ticked-off progressive view, concedes that Yamamoto's actions were lacking in grace and imprudent, possibly hurtful to the very causes he espouses. However, the meat of the TS editorial is a blistering attack upon Yamamoto's Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party critics. "Excuse us," the editors write,"but do the members of the LDP and the DPJ who have been criticizing Yamamoto for 'making political use of the Emperor' have any license to condemn even the minimum ethical qualifications for a condemnation of him?" (Tada, Yamamoto-shi o hihan suru jimin, minshu ryoto ni 'tenno no seiji riyo' o danzai suru shikaku ga aru no ka? - Link - J)

The editorial points out that the Abe administration and the LDP used the Imperial Couple as props in the first public celebration of Return of Sovereignty Day. The Abe government also drafted Imperial Princess Hisako to be the keynote speaker for the presentation that sealed the deal for Tokyo's successful bid for the 2020 Olympics. As for the DPJ, the editors point out that　when it was in power it forced the Imperial Household Agency to arrange, against protocol, an intimate interview between the Emperor and then Vice President of China Xi Jinping.

If you think you have heard this list of recent naked uses of the Imperial Family for political gain before, you have.

As for Yamamoto, whose life story Penn explores in his most recent newsletter, he has stumbled more than a few times during a rough-and-tumble journey. The stress of his life since his anti-nuclear activities took flight has indeed caused his hair to fall out. However, this incident, like the odd bald patch on the side of his head, will just be one more mark of a person who really cares, and who, despite the forces arrayed against him, prevails.

Let us hope the radical, xenophobic rightists -- and whoever shields them from being properly investigated and registered as anti-social elements -- quickly lose interest in Yamamoto, the caravan of silliness rolling on to a new purported outrage.


Later - A thanks to reader Philippe for alerting me to my royal error.

The Fall Of The Mino Monta Brand

Television host and personality Mino Monta, who owns the Guinness Book of World Records title of the hardest working man in television, has agreed to pull his name off his flagship news programs for the TBS network, Mino Monta's Asa Zuba! and Mino Monta's Saturday Zuba! (Link - J). In so doing, Mino and the network are acknowledging that the Mino Monta brand is a net negative for what have been the most visible and lucrative anti-Liberal Democratic Party and anti-bureaucrat news franchises around.

The proximate cause for Monta's fall is the arrest of his second son on a charges of theft. In a truly bizarre incident early last month, the son, a soon-to-be former employee of Nippon Television, purported found a man passed out on the street, purloined the man's wallet and tried to withdraw cash from the man's bank account using the man's ATM card (Link). Monta (real name: Minorikawa Norio), in an act of contrition for his failings as a father, immediately took voluntary leave of his news program hosting duties and appearances in commercial advertisements. (Link - J)

Under normal circumstances, such self-abnegation would go a long way toward tamping down the reactions of Mino's peers in the news and entertainment worlds. Mino's taking immediate responsibility for an act in which he is only tangentially involved might even earn him a bit of sympathy.

However, Mino's anti-establishment populism, as well as a purported history, ostensibly swept under the rug, of being a little too familiar and/or brutish with the many attractive young women he has hired for his programs, made him a huge, easy target for the screaming scandal press, which plays an unofficial role of enforcer for the country's elites. Mino has been a rare strong voice, if an extremely imperfect one, against the status quo. His son's transgression has initiated payback time.

The vitriol hurled at Mino is not likely to destroy him. Television has made him rich, so no matter how many media company and sponsor executives get cold feet in their dealings with him, he is no danger of falling into penury. Much of the basis of much of the enmity is furthermore not ideology or partisanship but just plain old professional jealousy, felt by lesser would-be movers-and-shakers who have been unable to establish their own brand of populism to compete with Mino's mix of effrontery, affection for the little guy and intolerance for official stupidity. Gunning for Mino Monta also represents a welcome change of pace for the dregs of the press, supplanting the usual hounding of young women celebrities for not adhering to good girl stereotypes.

Mino will be back, as in Japanese media second and even third chances are commonplace. His proteges and staff will keep the new programs alive in the interim. Viewers missing Mino's little theatrical eruptions of anger or his ironic feigned perplexity will likely trigger a flipping of the arc of scandal, with the same organizations now drumming him out of town breathlessly promoting his comeback.

Mino's absence from the airwaves, for as long as it lasts, will be a plus for the Abe administration. Selling questionable policies will be easier without Mino's daily prodding of his knowledgeable guests (former Minister of General Affairs and Communications Katayama Yoshihiro is a regular) into calling b*******t on government rhetoric and rationalizations.

Unlike during their first stint in power, Abe Shinzo and his friends, old and new, seem to have all the luck.

Ignore What I Said. Please!

This morning the news organizations reported what is probably a non-story. Asking the rhetorical question, "Is he making light of the electorate?" the nation news providers pointed an accusative finger at Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General for the House of Councillors Waki Masashi, who told a gathering held in honor of the LDP's women legislators:

「今の制度は政党の段階で候補者の選び方が未熟だ。まず政党が本当に正しい意味で国会議員を選べるか。これさえしっかりしていれば、あまり大きな声では言えないが、選ぶ人がアホでも、選ばれる人は立派なんです。」

"The current mean of selecting party candidates, by the steps established by the parties, is immature. First, can the parties really select members of the Diet correctly? If we can deal decisively with this one thing, although one cannot say it in too loud a voice, even if morons are making the selections, the selected persons are impressive."

Given the audience at the reception, which included Prime Minister and LDP President Abe Shinzo (Link - J video), it is difficult to state with any certainty who it is Waki thinks deserves the label "moron" (aho). Nor can one easily discern who precisely the chosen persons (erabareru hito) are. Nor is it clear how "moron" selectors can chose "impressive" (rippa) persons.

Waki is a Tokyo University grad (Engineering) and a former national government bureaucrat -- albeit of the now demoted Construction Ministry. So despite being a card-carrying member of the LDP's Road Tribe, the Mos Eisley Spaceport of Diet groups, he cannot be assumed to be complete out of his senses.

So while it is difficult to ascertain what Waki thought he was saying -- and to whom -- an assumption that he was calling the voters "morons" is not plausible.

Two points:

One, this is the second major flareup over peculiar remarks about elected government by an LDP bigwig since the July 21 House of Councillors. The first was the brouhaha over Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro's suggestion to a Japan Institute of National Fundamentals-provided audience that those wishing to revise the 1947 Constitution should learn from the Nazi party's overturning of the Weimar Constitution. In that instance, initial transcripts left open the possibility that Aso was being sarcastic or ironic.  Recently, sound recordings featuring the audience reaction to Aso's remarks indicate that whatever his intent, the audience clearly thought a Nazi-like takeover of the present Japanese state hilarious (Link J - audio) -- showing that major news outlets were not being unfair in their framing of Aso's weird ramblings.

Two, chasing-after-gaffes journalism -- merited in Aso's case, unmerited in Waki's -- is back from the grave. We are in a time of turmoil, where serious issues and ideas are being debated. Nevertheless journalists are wasting their time and ours on revealing politicians to be idiots -- which is a lot like reporting breathlessly about zebras having stripes.

The second point is bad news for persons looking for a Japan with the wherewithal to lift itself out of its doldrums. Attention spans are limited, and if the people's eyes and ears are clogged with trivialities, the voters will not be the guides for the politicians that they will need to be, this blessed land having nothing resembling an opposition in the Diet. Grim and frightening it is to watch august news institutions like national broadcaster NHK roll over and become mere PR outlets for the government and select businesses (Last night's 7 pm broadcast actually began with the announcer chirping, "Tonight there is wonderful news (ureshii nyusu): the sites of the stations of the proposed high speed linear motor line have been chosen!"). If what little time that is left for critical commentary is wasted on parsing the semantics of the perspective challenged -- then we are all in the pot, ready to be roasted.

Later - Many thanks to commenter "TheStrawMan" for noticing my skipping over the phrase marked in red above.

Still left unanswered is how the party composed of mere humans can conjure up and approve a system of selecting candidates which is idiot-proof.

TBS Feels The Lash

Since the installation of the Abe Cabinet, most of the country's terrestrial broadcast networks have been noticeably chary of taking on the foibles of the government or the Liberal Democratic Party. If you are the national broadcaster NHK, keeping in tune with the government is a matter of life and death. If you are a commercial network, and your management is not in cahoots with the government (and most readers know exactly exactly which network that is), then keeping your head down is still smart.

The one network that has eschewed self-censorship since the change of governments is Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS - Link - J). Broadcaster of the acerbic Asa Zuba! morning show (Link - J) hosted by the tireless and at times volcanic Mino Monta, TBS has not lowered the temperature of its news broadcasts since the advent of Abe II.

Well, it seems that the whip has come down.

In response to an evening news report of June 26 which committed the sin of suggesting that the ruling coalition alone was to blame for the death of important bills at the end of the regular Diet session (since it is up to the Prime Minister and the ruling coalition to decide whether or not to extend the Diet session so that a bill might be passed, t'is not an unreasonable insinuation) the LDP informed TBS yesterday that no member of the party's executive council will be allow himself or herself to be interviewed by the network. (Link - J)

Really? Threatening a break off of relations on the first official day of the election campaign season, more than a week after the supposed heinous broadcast? Are you that bloody defensive and/or thuggish?

TBS has so far not apologized for its broadcast, though it is in negotiations with the LDP on a restoration of normal media relations.

One could hope, and it is likely a fool's hope, given what has happened in the past to networks critical of the government (see footnote 9 here) that TBS holds its ground. In a fantastical Japan, TBS takes the LDP lockout as an opportunity to give the opposition unlimited air time (and perhaps some hints on presentation) to lash out at the ruling coalition.

Later - Who owns TBS?

Master Trust Bank of Japan (11.2%)
Mainichi Broacasting (4.1%)
Mitsui Sumitomo Bank (3.8%)
Mitsui Fudosan (3.7%)
Mitsui & Co., Ltd. (2.8%)
Bicc Camera (2.7%)
Kodansha (2.5%)
Panasonic (2.0%)

(Source - J)

The July 21, 2013 Election - Those Damn Internets

This summer's House of Councillors election will be Japan's first full-fledged online and social media election. The rules on Internet communications have been loosened, albeit not banished (One example of a legacy rule, reinterpreted for the new age? How does "during the campaign, while it is not illegal to forward an email from a candidate, it is illegal to print out that email on paper and hand distribute the paper printout" strike you?) For example, the first face-to-face (and possibly only) debate between the party leaders took place not in a terrestrial broadcast studio or at the National Press Club, but on a glitzy and demeaning stage provided by the Nico Nico Douga streaming site. (Link - J)

We have travelled very far from the dignified, controlled political presentations of even just a few years ago.

Three consequences of the new, Net-based campaign:

1) It will be both easier and harder to track the campaigns of individual candidates and their supporters.

More of what the candidate is doing and saying will be available for everyone to peruse at near zero cost.

However, with the plethora of videos, blog posts and tweets means there will be all the more political dross to wade through.

2) Japan’s mainstream media, print and broadcast, will be fighting a desperate and futile battle to pull politics back into their orbits.
NHK tried its best during its morning’s newscast to highlight purported abuses of net communications and how they may have affected election outcomes in South Korea, where Web participation is higher and the barriers on Web campaigning are lower.

The problem -- and it is a huge one for the major news media conglomerates, who have heretofore retained their vitality and relevance in Japan -- is that prime minister Abe Shinzo is enamored of communicating through the Internet. The Net has allowed Abe to be himself (whining that no one pays attention to him; thundering at any who dare criticize him) with neither the presentation of his ideas nor his attitude being challenged by those damn, pesky, back-stabbing journalists.

Speaking of which (being enamored of the Net, not back-stabbing journalists) the PM has moved beyond the confines of Facebook and is now striding the halls of LinkedIn.

3) As with any new toy, there is little awareness of the limits or levels of safe play. The July 2013 elections will likely be the coarsest, most heated and most dispiriting in history, despite the outcome being largely decided (the latest Yomiuri public opinion poll results are accessible here) and the lack of divisive national issues. Already this year there have been a number of kerfuffles over government and political figures losing their all sense of decorum in social media. (For one example of twittery, see - Link) 

The levels of abuse and ranting in this upcoming campaign (which officially kicks off on the 4th) will likely change the views many hold of this blessed land's politics, yours truly not excepted.

A Saturday In The Showa Era

On Saturday, the Tokyo Shimbun (the capital district’s unabashedly lefty hometown newspaper) published a cryptic* senryu:

栄誉賞
つぎはボクだと
卵焼き

Eiyosho
tsugi wa boku da to
tamago yaki

The People’s Honor Award
Next on the list is me
Says fried egg

Of course, readers of my post on the response to the announcement of the government’s intent to bestow People’s Honour Awards upon Nagashima Shigeo and Matsui Hideki would know that the food item has reason to feel hopeful.

At noon, in the train, I checked my ancient mobile phone for news. In the headlines was the death from illness of Murata Katsushi, the Sumiyoshi-kai gangster who fatally stabbed Japan professional wrestling hero Rikidozan in 1963 (Link - J). Nearly a full 50 years had passed since the commission of the crime that killed the most prominent (albeit sub-rosa) and admired member of Japan’s North Korean community.

In the course of the afternoon in Odaiba, Tokyo’s urban beach (no swimming due to the coliform bacteria counts – though these high counts are probably the product of the huge numbers of waterfowl that reside there) I stopped in at Daiba Icchome, the Showa era retro indoor shopping arcade in the Decks Tokyo Beach shopping mall (Link). I did not enjoy the experiment, though it must be terribly convenient for populist and low brow media giant Fuji Terebi to have a mall of Showa junk just across the street ("Hmmm...we have an hour of airtime and no budget...hmmm...I know, let's go across the street and document our no name and no talent talent saying the word natsukashii over and over again!").

I only caught the tail end of the Showa Era, during the Bubble Years before the fall. Having departed a still hippy inflected Northern California, the late Showa seemed a time of noise-induced intellectual and spiritual catatonia, redeemable only by in retrospect** by ironic/proud singing of the Regain theme song. (Link)

For those like the prime minister, who is not only a child of the Showa but of privilege, the sights and sounds of the Showa evoke nostalgia. For me, they give me a headache, reminding me only of the cacophony, the hubris and the grime.

---------
* Cryptic according to Tokyo Shimbun standards, that is. The senryu that The Asahi Shimbun publishes are so allusive the paper publishes a key. Otherwise, the poems would be nearly indecipherable.

** Yuki no shirushi would not be released until the tail end of 1989, when the Showa Emperor had already gone to meet his ancestors. However, the song was the embodiment of the mad ethos of the last years of the Showa and became a hit song just weeks before The Bubble burst.

Image: Beach at Odaiba on April 13, 2013
Image courtesy: MTC

Things I Know Will Not Happen But I Still Wish Would

- NHK News providing access to even a fraction of its back catalog so that I might determine the exact day when the network's news announcers made the switch from pronouncing the name of the country as "Nihon" in favor of the current, enervating "Nippon."

- Spike reversing his decision to stop writing about his wanderings through down-at-the-heels Japan. (Link)

- Commentators ceasing to worry about how a misunderstanding in between the maritime constabulary forces (I must thank Alessio Patalano for that wonderful locution) of China and Japan could lead to an exchange of gunfire and a military crisis -- and starting to worry instead how the leaderships of China and Japan are using the Senkakus as springboards for their own careers, the needs and interests of their citizens be damned -- i.e., make plain that from the viewpoint of fostering or preserving democracy and prosperity in the region, the prophesied "Senkakus crisis" is already upon us.

- Folks who write up articles and reports about this blessed land doing a little thinking about their sources of anecdotes and comments, along the lines of "if I am talking to a smarter-than-average person about the way his/her society and government work, shouldn't I worry that what I am hearing is not what works but instead how things are supposed to work?"

Call it the yutosei problem, if you need a label for the idea.

Anthropologists have to worry all the time about whether or not what they are hearing from native informants is just a narrative the informant is selling or even worse believes is true.

The antidote is not that difficult to find: just tell the story you heard from Informant #1 to Informant #2, and then ask Informant #2, with the benefit of anonymity if he/she needs it, "OK, now what did Informant #1 get wrong?"

- People reading the new sections of Abe Shinzo's repackaged and expanded Toward a Beautiful Country, now entitled Toward a New Country, in order to get a taste of Abe Shinzo Thought in all its incurious, knee-jerk weirdness and without the filter of his fabulous media management machine he has acquired from Amaterasu-knows-where.

- Commentators about Japan's entering into Trans Pacific Partnership discussions not talking about the recalcitrance of Japanese farmers and starting to talk about the recalcitrance of U.S. light truck manufacturer executives and workers. At least Japanese farmers have the traditional rural environment and culture fig leaves to hide behind.

- Folks making more noise about the role that narratives of national weakness play in driving the countries in the region toward conflict. How is it possible that every single state in the region has a leadership promising greatness through strength and the pressuring of other countries in the region to understand the errors of their past policies and attitudes?

[For those who saw the "in terms of feminine totems of cults of past national weakness, Yokota Megumi is to Japanese political activists as the comfort women are to South Korean political activists" test answer, 100 points. For those who saw "Japan revisionists and Abe Shinzo promise solutions to the abductees problems, Dokdo/Takeshima dispute and the Southern Kuriles/Northern Territories claims because they know that there are no solutions to these issues, only endless opportunities to opine about how Japan must be strong again," 200 points. For those who asked, "How incredibly bad and illegitimate can the Chinese government be that it must beat its breast and swear to reestablish the supposed pre-Opium War borders of the Qing Empire as its own?" -- a seat in the front row.]

Abe Shinzo yesterday crowed about how persons his age (so full of vim!) are now in charge of China and South Korea and how the trio of himself, Xi Jinping and Park Geun-hye can, though vigorous (shikkari to) communication of their respective positions, work for the prosperity and peace of the region (Link - J). How he managed to avoid throwing in an even more nonsensical "and we all three are in no way are caught up fighting dead political battles and the legacies left us by our parents and grandparents" escapes me.

More On East Asia's Aristocracies

While political dynasties are a perverse development in democracies around the world, the case of East Asia is alarming. I have posted briefly and unremarkably here and here on the topic, which deserves far more attention. Over at the East Asian Forum, Julius Trajano and Yoes Kenawas bring me up to speed on the political dynasty situation in the Philippines, which I was aware of, and in Indonesia, which I was not (Link). Their analysis of the causes of dynasty formation and their proposed solutions indicate a parochial focus, though, rather than a broad-based comparative approach.

A big book to be written, or big conference to be organized. Problem: who will fund a deep look into such a discomforting subject?

Back in this blessed land, the members of the Cabinet revealed their assets yesterday, with caveats. As the Wall Street Journal reports, members of Abe II are by and large significantly better off than the members of the Noda Cabinet. (Link)

My morning dead-tree news delivery device devoted a full page to the members of the Cabinet and their holdings:

I had always wondered what was the juice behind Inada Tomomi, the card-carrying Friend of Shinzo and lawyer whose leaden pronouncements of doom have been a page-filler of the right wing press for the past decade. The answer seems to be her husband's diversified equity holdings and a bewildering number of small Tokyo rental properties the couple co-own.

In terms of landholdings, the very wealthy Taro Aso (whose dandyism is now a subject international commentary) and Prime Minister Abe Shinzo are the barons. In terms of number and variety of declared holdings, however, National Safety Commissioner and Abe family retainer Furuya Keiji puts all other Cabinet members to shame. He lists 62 real estate holdings, 9 of which are of less than 10 meters square. Three of his listed properties are only 1 square meter in size (total assessed value = 60,000 yen) while nine parcels of forest and field land are given an accounting value of zero (which means that the parcel is worth less than the cutoff point of 10,000 yen).

The person with the shortest report is, unsurprisingly, child of dire poverty Shimomura Hakubun. His holdings are not just small, but sadly unimaginative: his home, 200 million in bank savings accounts and 60 million in postal savings. Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide and State Minister for Declining Birthrate and Consumer Affairs Mori Masako, two of the Cabinet's coolest and most celebral members, are also asset-light.

Winners of the "we know what the rules are" awards are the earnest sons of privilege Sadagaki Tanigaki and Ishihara Nobuteru, both of whom list savings accounts with the guaranteed amount in them -- and not one yen more.

A Political Mystery

Only a few lines today due to an illness.

The other day I noted the Democratic Party of Japan boycotted a sudden emergency meeting of the Administrative Oversight Subcommittee of the House of Representatives Committee on Audit and Administrative Oversight. (Link)

The excuse the DPJ gave for boycotting this unusual out-of-Diet Session subcommittee meeting -- and for ordering ministry bureaucrats summoned to stay at their posts -- was that the party secretariat had not yet selected a Ranking Member for the subcommittee, which is chaired by a Liberal Democratic Party member.

However, the story behind the sudden call for a subcommittee hearing is not frivolous. It turns out that the supplementary budget drawn up to fund the recovery of the Tohoku region and Fukushima was crammed with pork, projects that could not be justified in the regular budget but suddenly became vital parts of the recovery effort.

The rightist press outlets have been all over this story, as can be expected. However, they have been taking their cues from the leftist and progressive press. The Tokyo Shimbun, a left-leaning paper and an avowed enemy of the Prime Minister for his having championed a rise in the consumption tax, has been plastering its front pages with nearly daily exposés of questionable items in the recovery budget, including:

- 7.2 billion, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to support its Japan-East Asia/North America Network of Exchange for Students and Youths

- 2.3 billion to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, to support pelagic research whaling overseen by the Institute of Cetacean Research

- 40 billion, to the Defense Ministry, for the acquisition of fixed wing transport and cargo aircraft

- 1.2 billion to the National Tax Agency, for maintenance on 12 of their dormitories

- 330 million, to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, for earthquake retrofitting of the National Stadium in Shinjuku

- 47.7 billion to the Ministry of Infrastructure, Land, Transport and Tourism for water control projects, only 30% of which are in the disaster zone

- 3.4 billion, to MLIT, for construction of national highways in Okinawa

and in what can only be the greatest of ironies,

- 10.7 billion to MEXT for the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, an agency promoting the use of nuclear energy. The budget outlay includes 4.2 billion for Japan's continued participation in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

Now just why all these questionable items are becoming political hot potatoes now, as opposed to several months ago, is a mystery. Of course, the compilation of a new budget and a new recovery budget, with the ministries putting forth their requests for the next fiscal year, may have stimulated the news media to ask, "And what exactly has happened to the money you already received?"

However, how was it possible that the uncovering of all these funny budget items seems to have been left to the national broadcaster NHK (Link), the mildest-mannered of the news networks? Why was the no stink made when the recovery budget was initially compiled?

Guesses...surmises...

1) So the new media outlets could put on their best Captain Renault act (Link), shocked at what was promoted as a budget to help the Tohoku being instead a minor festival of pork barrel projects? What country do they think they are operating in?

2) The LDP, in order to force the resignation of Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, called up their contacts in the news media with juicy bits from the recovery budget's internal working documents just when the government was about to enter into delicate negotiations with the major opposition parties about the extraordinary Diet Session?

3) Prime Minister Noda and the Cabinet, after ostensibly allowing the bureaucracy to run rampant in a bid to win its loyalty, instead gave the bureaucrats enough rope to hang themselves?

I have no clue.

The Morimoto Appointment

There are many stories to be chasing after.

There is the humanization of arrested Aum Shinrikyo fujitive Kikuchi Naoko in the news media and the implications the humanization of a mass murderer could have on the imposition of the death penalty in her case -- a given, considering the sentences handed out to the other members of the cult -- or even the death penalty's continued application. Can the state kill a person who has, during her life on the run, worked as an eldercare provider? Is there such a thing as redemption after committing great evil? And what of the National Police Agency's incapacity to capture anyone unless that person is handed to them on a platter* or in the case of Hirata Makoto, tries desperately (Link) to hand himself in on a platter? And what of the irony of the Kikuchi arrest coming the day after rededication of a monument to Sakamoto Kuniko -- the Sakamotos being the first of Aum's victims, whose killings, had they been investigated (it would not have been too hard. One of the cult members, horrified at what he and his fellow followers had done, left his Aum Shinrikyo badge at the scene of the crime) would have stopped the whole mad murderous machine in its tracks? (Link - J)

One talk about the flip side of the collapse of the economies in rural areas: that larger-than-one-would-imagine-in-a-country-with-a-population-as-big-as-Japan's tracts of uninhabited land are available for renewable energy resource projects -- nicely graded and leveled abandoned rice paddies, failed golf courses, unused rural economic development zones and perhaps even an underused airport or two make fine candidates for solar farms. (Link) **

However, the big story is the Cabinet reshuffle (Link) and the big story of the Cabinet reshuffle the appointment of academic Morimoto Satoshi as Minister of Defense.

For those looking for background on the appointment there is a wealth of material. Morimoto has been in the public eye for two decades as a public intellectual of the first rank, serving as the media's go-to conservative academic on matters such as the Japan-U.S. security alliance, the DPRK, defense systems, the revolution in military affairs and the rise of Chinese military power. If someone were looking for "gotcha" moments -- stunningly incorrect predictions, overblown rhetoric, rumor mongering, untenable analysis -- there are hundreds of hours of video and ten of thousands of words to troll through. Luckily for Morimoto and Prime Minister Noda, the organizations with the most reflexive tendencies to go trolling for items with which to embarrass Morimoto and the government -- the Yomiuri Shimbun and its Nihon Terebi terrestrial TV network and the Sankei Shimbun and its terrestrial network Fuji TV -- both have relied on Morimoto as the outside expert most likely to hew to their editorial line.

Morimoto is a hardline realist. He has little love for Article 9 and the limits placed upon Japan's ability to engage in multilateral security actions. A former Air Self Defense Forces (the most gungho of the services) officer and a graduate of the National Defense Academy, he has probably always dreamed of being Minister of Defense. Now he has the responsibility to be one. He will be the man in the cross hairs and the guy with his name on the dotted line when the government signs the contract for the acquisition of F-35 Lightning IIs, with the costs and delivery dates to be determined.

Morimoto has previous experience in government, having been appointed the first Special Advisor to the Minister of Defense after the position was created during the premiership of Aso Taro. As a former member of an LDP administration with no previously noted links to the Democratic Party of Japan, he represents a bit of wicked deviousness on Prime Minister Noda's part: after disgracing the position with two Ozawa Ichiro-nominated defense ignoramuses -- whom the LDP had the House of Councillors censure -- he gives the country a defense minister about whom the LDP can raise not a peep of protest.

Morimoto, despite his defense smarts, comes into office with severe handicaps that will limit his ability to transform his own ideas into action. First, he is a non-politician: he will facing the bureaucracy naked, without even a political secretary to back him up. Such support as he will enjoy will come from the Prime Minister's Residence (the Kantei) and in the person of the man who appointed him. Second, the cost of acquiring the F-35 threatens to upset the balance between the ASDF and the already beset Ground Self Defense Forces and the proud and dominant Maritime Self Defense Forces. After personnel costs and procurement costs, Morimoto will have little to spend on actual operations or any expansion of operations he might press the government to consider.

The appointment of Morimoto once again raises the question of whether or not Noda is his own defense minister. While he for once has less experienced in defense matters than person he has appointed as his defense minister, being only the son of an SDF man rather than a former SDF man himself, Noda still believes himself an expert in the nuts and bolts of defense policy.

The appointment seems more a tactical move rather than a strategic one. At a stroke Noda has neutralized potential LDP, right wing and center-right media and nationalist complaints about his support for a robust Japanese defense capability and outlook. Left-leaning and leftist news media have indeed been hopping up and down that the appointment of an academic rather than a politician means that the MOD bureaucracy and uniformed officers will be too powerful, undermining the concept of civilian control (shibirian kontororu***). He will win the applause of the American think-tank-political-appointee merry-go-round ridership, who will be thrilled by Morimoto's heretofore unshakable support of the Japan-U.S. alliance and his hardline security stances, ignoring Morimoto's rather weak bureaucratic and non-existent political support. He also removes from the commentariat one of his most potent and visible potential critics.

So Morimoto has the "right" views and the wrong attributes. We shall have to see which of the two initial conditions proves the more significant.


Later - And yes, I did notice. It was the first thing out of my mouth when I saw the Cabinet lineup in the paper this morning: "What? Again? Where are the women, you torpid [expletive deleted] sea slug?"


Later still - This post has been edited for greater clarity.

Way later - The Magnificent Kiwis have checked in -- Bryce Wakefield in Comments and Corey Wallace over at Japan Security Watch (Link) -- with far more intelligent things to say about the Morimoto apppointment than I have.


-------------------------------
* Until further notice, I will remain agnostic regarding the police story that a neighbor recognized Kikuchi and turned her in. The difference in appearances between the 1994 Kikuchi and the woman arrested on Sunday are significant (Link). It seems unlikely that anyone looking at her would see the chubby, smiling former runner, especially as Kikuchi, while living in Sagamihara, was, according to residents, always hiding her face by looking at the ground.

A more likely scenario is that her lover, exhausted by life on the lam, turned her in with a promise of clemency for himself and mercy for her, with police concocting the alert neighbor story to keep the public on the lookout for the last remaining Aum fugitive, Takahashi Katsuya.

** Note to The Economist: the title of your story about this subject has to be, "Huge...tracts of land..."

*** One critic whose opinions I value has said that whenever elites in this blessed land want to reduce the ability of citizens to understand certain concepts, they simply take the English word and transliterate it using katakana. The plague of katakana eigo terms in finance industry terminology (konpuraiansu, gabanansu...) would tend to support the "let's keep them in the dark" thesis.

Very Kind of Him - Reconstructing 311

A while back Ourmani Nabiko, the hardest-working human being I have ever met, asked me whether or not I would be willing to participate in a group publication attempting to draw some conclusions about 3/11, revisit some of the stories of the triple disaster or tell some of the untold stories. I said "Yes," without hesitation. Given his astonishing Quakebook project, I felt honored.

Well, Reconstructing 311 is now alive and kicking and available from Amazon.com.

Mine is the least of the contributions, in my humble opinion. It does go part of the way, however, in fleshing out the argument answering the criticism Michael Penn (a knowledgeable and astute analyst - if you do not subscribe to his newsletter The Tokyo Diplomat, you are missing out) levels against my assessment of Naoto Kan, outlined in my post on Thursday. The inimitable Jake Adelstein writes about what he knows best, those charming business facilitators in the loud suits and big cars. Philip Brasor illuminates how the public gets none of the information it needs, with or without commercials. Natalie Stucky meets up with the last man in the dead zone, whose zest for life, just life, is bracing...

I could go on and on but will stop here.

The Rehabilitation Of Kan

With the one year anniversary of 3/11 fast approaching, the reviews and reassessments of the crazed first few hours, days and weeks after the triple disaster have been coming in over the transom at a predictable yet indigestible rate. So much material is being released, so many seminars and commemorative events are being held that the mind can absorb only a fraction of the information bombarding it.

Nevertheless, from amidst the cacophony, one muffled truth of the catastrophe is at last being heard clearly: Prime Minister Kan Naoto performed his job up to what were the limits of what was humanly possible and kept focused on the important, whilst almost everyone around him lost his or her heads.

As of last week, the domestic news media was still failing to appreciate how it was taken in by its sources in the power industry and the national bureaucracy in campaigning against Kan's leadership during the crisis. As if reading from the same script, the papers and the broadcast media all claimed on Monday last week that a 400 page report (an English précis by the group's leader Funabashi Yoichi can be found here) by the Rebuild Japan Initiative (Nihon saiken inishiateibu) would offer incontrovertible proof that Kan's micromanagement and intrusion into so many aspects of the crisis, particularly the attempts to control the mushrooming disaster at the Fukushima Dai'ichi plant, contributed to confusion and bad decision making.

However, in the release of the report and in the press conference by the co-authors, the exact opposite was shown to be true. Kan's intense involvement and refusal, after the power company representatives and the bureaucracy failed him, to take anything being told to him at face value, turned out to be at worst unimportant and at best crucial for mitigating the catastrophe. What complaints there were about Kan's intensity came from bureaucrats who were dumbfounded that this damned politician was doing their jobs and appointing civilian advisers to aid him. That he had to do their jobs or appoint others to do them because they themselves were not doing them did not, according to the media's quotes from the report, ever cross the bureaucrats' minds.

The rehabilitation of Kan's reputation is being led, as was the investigation in the Olympus scandal, by outsiders, both domestic and foreign. The mainstream is still caught up in its own master narrative, that the Kan Cabinet's disaster response was a failure and Kan a self-deluded meddler. Some organizations are beginning to grasp how thoroughly they were led astray by their sources (J). Others are doubling down (J), committed to their narrative and their prejudices.

Since I myself have a reputation to protect -- of being one prone to extreme statements -- put me down as nominating Kan Naoto as Japan's greatest prime minister since Yoshida Shigeru. With little public support for his cabinet, the upper echelons of the national bureaucracy inert to the point of malfeasance, an opposition that only three weeks after the disaster was accusing him in Diet committee of having caused the explosions at Fukushima Dai'ichi and a pair of quislings in his party who came within centimeters of leading their followers into joining hands with the opposition in a no-confidence motion against his cabinet, he oversaw the largest ever mobilization of the Self Defense Forces, the most massive disaster rescue and relief operation in the country's history, the greatest evacuation, housing and resettlement operation of the postwar era and the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl -- and when he had no political allies or capital left, leveraged his resignation into a means of extorting from his many enemies the passage of three last vital pieces of legislation. (E)

Nakasone Yasuhiro and Koizumi Jun'ichiro retired from the scene with golden halos. Kan had to spin straw into gold -- and having done it, received not a thimbleful of credit for it.

Getting to "No"

Oh for a screen capture of that map!

Bugger NHK for putting up online only the intro and the signoff of their flagship 7 o'clock news program, rather than the whole program -- even if it would be only for one day!

As it is I only could watch the ominous intro of the flag of the People's Republic of China blending into images of China's most threatening new military hardware, including the reconstructed Varyag aircraft carrier...



...in a report on President Barack Obama's visit to Australia and the announcement of a rotating deployment of up to 2,500 Marines to Darwin.

After the report from Australia on the summit meeting, the speech before the parliament and the visit to Darwin, announcer Takeda Shin'ichi walked over to the big wall of screens for the analysis portion of the segment. "So why Darwin, Australia?" he began.

On the big screen was an image of East Asia, with ripples spreading out from the contours of China. "Here is a map," he continued, "of the ranges of Chinese missiles. As you can see inside the limits is most of Japan, including Okinawa. Guam is also inside the range of the missiles."

"But here," he interjected, pointing at northern Australia, "is still outside the range of China's missiles. And here is Darwin," he said, pointing to the city.

Now there is nothing particularly new in the information NHK provided. However, it was the first time in memory that the 7 o'clock evening newscast, Japan's most watched news program, explicitly sought to undermine the 2006 Japan-U.S. Roadmap for Realignment of U.S. Marines forces. Though the thought was unstated, the clear inference from the presentation was that the fraught move of some of the Marines currently based on Okinawa to Guam and the construction of a replacement facility for Futenma in the town of Henoko were vain endeavors, since the redeployed forces would still be in Chinese missile range. While U.S. military planners may deny that the Darwin deployment is specifically tied to Chinese missile capabilities, that mattered little to the NHK producers.

Now, the Japanese public is about as far from stupid as one can get. If NHK puts up a map with Okinawa and Guam inside the range of Chinese missiles, and hears about the U.S. semi-basing Marines outside the range of the missiles, the public will ask, "Then what the heck are we doing knocking heads with the Okinawans over the construction of the Henoko base and what-is-more paying through the nose for a partial move of Marines to Guam, when the strategic vulnerability of these forces remains the same?"

One could be cautioned that one should not read too much into a single news broadcast. Still, when NHK's News 7 uses a sledgehammer to present a particular viewpoint on the deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia, it indicates a change is in the offing over the seemingly neverending merry-go-round over Futenma-to-Henoko -- that it is not just that the redeployment of forces is damned unfair to the Okinawans but that the redeployment might also be pointless.

A pivotal first step in the public sphere in the direction of "let us put an end to this farce."

Ozawa's Talking Cure

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

Why this? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dribs and Drabs

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

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

Terrific.

But Ozawa Ichiro Is A Bad Man

You may recall among the purported crimes of Ozawa Ichiro, one so heinous that even the threat of having to explain it in the Diet helped convince Fujii Hirohisa to resign as Minister of Finance, was the pocketing of the leftover elections funds provided to Ozawa's Liberal Party under the public campaign financing law. Under the prevailing cant of January's reporting, Ozawa was clearly a dirty politician, for if he weren't he would have handed this money, which is specified as being solely for the financing of elections of a particular party, back to the national treasury.

Well, the folks over at the Chunichi/Tokyo Shimbun decided to take the radical step of actually checking whether or not handing the money back was what honorable men, or politicians for that matter, actually do.

The results of their research: of the seventeen parties that have received public elections financing under the campaign finance laws which either folded later or were absorbed into another party, not one has ever returned a single yen to the nation.

Not one.

The report can be found here.