Never Get High On Your Own Supply Of Paranoia

"Who is the Prime Minister Fighting Against?"
"Prime Minister Abe has set off, lifting the banner of battle for his self-named 'Abenomics dissolution.' In two press conferences he has made reference to resistance forces -- but just who or what he is describing is unclear. Who is/are this/there enemy/enemies upon which he has fastened his gaze?"

There's no pretty way to say this: something has gone terribly awry in Abeland. (Link)

Let's talk image management here, shall we? If you really want to look so fearful as to be lashing out at butterflies with a sledgehammer, have your walking/talking id -- a.k.a., Hagiuda Ko'ichi -- write a letter to all the main commercial television networks asking/warning them they have to be fair, non-partisan and balanced (Fox News should sue) in their reporting on the election.

Or perhaps fulminate on Facebook that a college student's satire site is a part of an organized conspiracy against you. (Link - J)

While "certain elements of the media are congenitally against us" and "the misbehavior of some media outlets have severely wounded Japan" are standard applause lines of revisionist wingery, this latest outing by Team Abe is a saunter down a very dark, narrow and boggy path.

Lead editorials today in The Asahi Shimbun (no particular URL yet but try this) and the Tokyo Shimbun (Link - J) denounced the Hagiuda letter as a threat to press freedom. For the Asahi Shimbun, the threat is palpable: the Hagiuda letter alludes to the controversy over TV Asahi (The Asahi Shimbun is a main shareholder) reporting in the early 1990s that led members of the Liberal Democratic Party to threaten a revocation of TV Asahi's broadcast license.

As for the above picture with its semi-rhetorical questions pasted on it about where the prime minister thinks his enemies are, it comes from the Sankei Shimbun's online editorial section.

Hmmm....

When not even the Sankei Shimbun, a publication which specializes in the identification of enemies, both real and imagined, can guess who you think your enemies are, Mr. Abe, you have a problem.

Then again, when aides quip that your best friends in international politics are Vladimir Putin and Taycip Erdogan and you carry out fond Twitter mutual affection fests with Narendra Modi (Link), perhaps you just don't care.

Hell Freezes Over: Tamogami Toshio At Asahi Shimbun Event

Tomorrow, on Constitution Day, at a conference organized by The Asahi Shimbun's employees union on war and the Constitution, General Tamogami Toshio will be one of the featured speakers.

Let me say that again.

Tomorrow,

on Constitution Day,

at a conference organized by The Asahi Shimbun's employees union

on war and the Constitution,

General Tamogami Toshio (Retired)

will be one of the featured speakers.

You don't believe me? Look at the image above. Click on it if you want to see it in a larger size.

I called the number on the poster. It is the number of the employees's union. The event will take place tomorrow.

This is so wrong in so many ways one can only think that Hell hath truly frozen over.

And In Other News

I cannot say I am a huge fan of Martin Fackler's everything-including-the-kitchen-sink take on the travesty of Momii Katsuto becoming the president of NHK (Link). I much prefer Jonathan Soble's article on the ongoing collapse of the national public broadcaster's reputation. (Link)

To be frank, worrying out loud now about the deterioration of independence of the NHK news department seems almost coy. After years of simultaneously stolid and enervated reporting, NHK News loosened up and show some of its latent capabilities during the brief summer of the Democratic Party of Japan's turn as the party in power, pulling out of the vault some stories it had long shelved and allowing its reporters to take some liberties.

When it became clear that Abe Shinzo was returning to the premiership, however, NHK newscasts quickly became all but unwatchable. Not for obvious pro-government pieces but for the glaring lack of pieces critical of government.

"Amaterasu! Not another heart-warming tale of plucky Tohoku tsunami survivors trying to cope with the loss of their hometowns followed by cute animal tricks videos culled from the Internet. Aaarggh, switch me one of the commercial channels, quick."

The disastrous and highly visible train wrecks of Momii and Abe's choice for the NHK Board of Governors Hyakuta Naoki (click here to see Michael Penn's awesome photograph of Hyakuta at the problematic rally for Tokyo gubernatorial candidate Tamogami Toshio) are at least taking place in the public arena. Discussion of NHK News's retreat into quiet, problematic self-censorhip (How can one reliably quantify the stories and facets of the news a network has not reported? Long-time viewers and admirers can see the changes happening, but how to prove the existence of absences?) is relegated to the whispering of presumed fools and ideologues.

Far more serious for the serious news hound than NHK's managerial troubles is Tokyo Broadcasting's abandonment in March of the "Asa Zuba!" morning talk show newscast (Link). A new morning program, whose format remains a secret, with a pretty young thing from Nihon Terebi as the main co-anchor, will be replacing what has been, even in founder's Mino Monta's absence, the most consistently progressive, skeptical and entertaining newscast on television.

The Official Secrets Bill - The New York Times Gets In The Act

Here.

While the ideological cant of the gaiatsu is not unappreciated, a quibble about the title: to my knowledge pretty much all secrecy legislation is illiberal.

Koike Yuriko Sets The House Secrecy Debate On Fire

Former Minister of Defense (briefly), former Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party General Council and head of the LDP’s Communication Division Koike Yuriko has a reputation as a savvy media manipulator. A former television newscaster, she holds a degree in sociology from Cairo University. Thanks to her Arabic and English skills, she is a fixture in international circles. Publishing in English via Project Syndicate, she has disseminated anti-Democratic Party of Japan and pro-Abe Shinzo propaganda worldwide underneath the radar of the local representatives of the foreign press.

Despite a warm and inviting appearance, Koike holds hardline views on security and is seen as very much a kindred spirit of the prime minister's. Part of her hard defense posture may have developed out of her interaction with and study of the U.S. security community.

Part, however, arises from her political instability. She flitted during the first years of her political career from one political party to another, finally landing in the LDP. Her colleagues have labeled her a wataridori-- i.e., "a migratory bird" -- and were not complimenting her in doing so. She gained prominence under the sponsorship of maverick Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro, becoming the most visible and valuable of his "assassins." Under his encouragement, she moved from her fairly safe Hyogo district to challenge and eventually defeat postal rebel Kobayashi Koki in his Tokyo fiefdom.

Without roots in her district, her patron departed from active politics, her choosing to lean ever harder into militancy has made eminent sense. Her hardline views on defense, together with her earlier mobility prompted me to label her "the Iron Butterfly."

Yesterday, in Diet session examining the Official Secrets bill, the Iron Butterfly crash landed in spectacular fashion:

"Japan is a country stupefied by peace which has pretty much lost any appreciation of top secrets...Every day the newspapers are without fail printing at what o’clock, how many minutes, who it was that went in to see the prime minister and when they left. Doesn’t this transcend the [Public's] Right To Know?"

(Link - J)

The Prime Minister's Schedule (Shusho dosei, also called Shusho no ichi nichi) is an institution of Japanese life. Printed unobtrusively in every day's newspaper (page 6 on the bottom of my own daily paper this morning) it details, with extraordinary thoroughness, the prime minister's schedule of the previous day. With most of the machinations of Japanese government enwreathed in bureaucratic fog and shielded by the press clubs, the Prime Minister's Schedule has been one of the few means the public has had of getting even a glimpse of whatever the hell is going on.

From a security standpoint, Koike's objection to this time-honored practice would make sense if the Prime Minister's Schedule revealed the prime minister's intended movements. However, the Prime Minister's Schedule (I am not going to use an acronym, for obvious reasons) only details whom the PM met the day before. Since Japan has a defense-only military posture, foregoing warfare as a means of solving international political disputes, and the government generally does not engage in nefarious activities, there is little reason for the PM to hide the identities of the person he is meeting.

And the Prime Minister's Schedule already hides the identities of some of the persons the PM is meeting. Very often, only one or two names are listed, followed by a ra) ("and folks like that..."). It is almost certain that the PM's handlers only need to go over to whichever member of the press club is keeping the schedule that day and say, "Look, of those whom you just saw going in, can you keep quiet about Mr. X and Ms. Y? Thanks."

When the head of the LDP's press relations division takes aim at a small but important traditional news media window into the PM's actions, using the loaded terms kimitsu ("top secrets") and heiwa boke ("stupefied by peace") she sets off a red flashing light for a news media already deeply sceptical of if not adamantly opposed (Link) to the Official Secrets bill. If one wanted to create an atmosphere reinforcing the warnings of the critics of the bill, who have been claiming that the reach of the bill is unlimited, then attacking one of the new media's cherished prerogatives is a good way to start.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide, in with his usual diffidence, has said that the government has no plans to follow up on Koike's suggestion. "What the various news organizations are making public knowledge regarding the Prime Minister’s movements, these are not within expectations of what would be items of special secrecy under the Special Official Secrets Law."

Suga was trying to tamp down concerns. However, his use of sotei ("expectations"), a term strongly associated in the public mind with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (and the cynical question "you say what happened was outside of expectations but it really wasn't, was it? And the worst did happen, didn't it?”) indicates a deteriorating awareness of the press and the public's growing opposition to the Official Secrets bill. (Link - J and Link - J).

The news media has been extremely circumspect or even supportive during these first 10 charmed months of the Abe administration. The quiet, acquiescent press environment has indeed been one of the most striking differences between Abe's first term as prime minister and the current term.

Blunderbuss threats to press freedom -- the submission of the Official Secrets Bill and extraordinarily ideological moves against the management of national broadcaster NHK (Abe wants to appoint who to the management committee? The author who every so often interviews Abe for the revisionist magazine WiLL and the PM's childhood home tutor? Oh, you have to be joking -- Link - J) are testing the ceasefire. It may be that the Abe crowd is feeling its oats, believing that coalition majorities in both Houses of the Diet making it impervious to whatever an independent press thinks anymore.

Later - In addition to the translated Mainichi editorial linked to above, The Japan Times has editorialized against the official secrets bill. (Link)


Later still - The Mainichi Shimbun has published an English-language translation of its take on the story. (Link)

Just For The Effect

Even by the low standards of this blessed land's news media, the last night's NHK News Watch 9 (Nyusu uocchi nain) broadcast was an abomination.

The opening was a long feature on the start of the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Congress. After a segment on the leadership transition came a segment on the yawning divide between the rich and the poor, with a special focus on wealthy CCP cadres. The segment had three interviews, one with the owner-manager of an equestrian center, where the membership and registration fees are understandably many times times the annual salary of an urban worker, a South China businessman looking for an apartment in Hong Kong and a Hong Kong real estate agent who claimed that 30% of his customers are CCP cadres.

In the first interview, the owner-manager revealed that he had sent his daughter to study in the United States because he wanted her to know what it is like to live in a free country. In the second interview, the South China businessman said he was looking for a way to get himself and his family and money out of China because of the incredible corruption. He also said that hoped he could bring his two daughters aged 7 and 9 (?) to Hong Kong next year.

As I watched this segment, I thought to myself, "This is insane. I know that Japanese news media burn sources and interviewees -- but this is endangering the persons being interviewed and their families."

At the end of the segment, the extremely likable Okoshi Kensuke (Link - J) informed viewers that in the course of NHK's airing of the segment, censors in China had cut off the live feed.

This morning, competing major news organizations had features on the cutoff of the NHK broadcast. TBS broadcast images of a television set showing the NHK broadcast suddenly going black (Video - J). If the bug in the corner of the TBS segment is to be believed, the video of the cutoff of the NHK broadcast was produced by TBS for its late night news broadcast News 23 -- meaning that NHK had alerted its competitors in advance of its intent to air a segment on the extreme wealth of CCP cadres and the discontents of even the well-off members of society, with one goal being the testing of the censor's patience.

It is inconceivable that wealthy Chinese citizens would allow themselves to be interviewed on camera criticizing China's lack of freedom and its corruption, especially for a program to be broadcast by Japan's national news network. This would indicate that deception, either of the persons being interviewed or NHK, had featured prominently in the production of the segment. In the most hopeful case, the persons in the interviews were actors hired by video freelancers, who then provided the faked interviews to NHK. This scenario would, however, be contrary to NHK's modus operandi, which is to do everything, even technical development, in house.

Whatever the veracity of the contents of the program segment, the airing of the segment in the hopes that the censors would indeed cut off the feed, creating a new story to report, represents a breach of the public trust.

If the program did indeed feature real interviews with real people, I feel sorry for the equestrian center owner-manager. The feed was cut during the second interview, with the South China businesman in Hong Kong. The feed was restored during a segment on the Senkaku Islands problem. (Link - J)

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.