Re Dr. Nakano's Sadness

Nakano Ko'ichi is a rarity in Japanese academia: a scholar with a brilliant command of the literature of his field, a disarmingly frank and reassuring manner, an ability to examine Japan's contemporary problems in the context of broader flows of world history and fluency both in his mother tongue and English.

And a man, without shading or hedging, of the Left.

He has published a stark and lucid essay on a potential harsh turn in Japan's economic and foreign policy at CNN's Global Public Square:

"Japan: Get ready for a rightward shift"

As is known, I reject the thesis that the "ditching most of its main campaign manifesto pledges and letting the country’s bureaucrats redefine the policy agenda" was the primary reason for the collapse in the popularity of the Democratic Party of Japan as reflected in public opinion polling. Instead, I lay most of the blame at the feet of Ozawa Ichiro and his inability to accept or understand the concept of "party over person" as inextricable to the process of running a party government. Collaboration with the bureaucrats on policy was forced upon the DPJ by the need to fight against the Liberal Democratic Party and its 50 year legacy of misrule. Ozawa Ichiro tried to fight both the LDP and the bureaucrats at once, with the inevitable result of allowing both to make up the huge losses of power and legitimacy they suffered in the elections of 2009.

The DPJ's current leadership had been much, much smarter in dealing with bureaucrats, ceding on some matters of policy, while inflicting deep cuts in salaries and recruitment.

These serious woundings of the bureaucracy have been insufficiently publicized because the DPJ still needs the bureaucrats in their corner. "Look at how we have roughed up the bureaucrats!" is hardly the message you want to be shouting unless you want the bureaucrats to undermine your every move.

As for Dr. Nakano's take on the relations between nationalism, deregulation and unraveling of the social fabric, I am still not convinced of the direct responsibility of government policy in a worsening of social inequality and social disfunction, or, conversely, the capacity of government to remedy the situation.

Take, for example, Dr. Nakano's citation of Japan's stunning suicide rate (which, if you consider it the murder of oneself, makes Japan one of the most dangerous places to live on Earth). The number of suicides soared in 1998, the year the financial system finally lost government support, leading to the spectacular failures of banks and Yamaichi Securities. The levels have stayed high ever since.

It is that "ever since" that has me skeptical. Certainly if unsteadiness of the economy was the trigger for rises in the suicide rate, improvements in the economy should lead to lower levels of suicide -- especially since the post-2008 rise has been almost entirely due to increases in suicides of men, women committing suicide at the same basically the same rate over the last 35 years.

Something else is going on...and the lead probably needs to be taken by non-profit organizations rather than the government.

As for income equality, I have greater faith in the ingenuity of the people of this blessed land than either Nakano or Finance Ministry bureaucrats seem willing to admit. In the absence of a tax registration number system -- the likelihood of the death of a bill establishing such a system, there is still a great deal of leeway for transfers of wealth across the generations, with the asset-rich older generations supplementing the income of their children and grandchildren, with the government's draconian estate taxes as all the incentive older citizens will ever need to hand down their wealth to their descendants.

I also think that international statistics on levels of Japanese poverty vastly underestimate the differences in price levels in between the urban and rural areas, skewing the estimates of rural poverty higher than actual purchasing power should reflect. I may be wrong on this point, however.

As for Hashimoto Toru's programs, Abe Shinzo's programs and Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's programs, lumping them together under the rubric of the exploitation of nationalism, you insults Noda's and Hashimoto's intelligence...and ascribes to Abe an intelligence he simply does not possess. As for the accusation that Prime Minister Noda is contributing to the escalation of territorial disputes with Japan's neighbors, that is simply untrue. He made a fairly admirable effot to calm the waters -- sending the Hong Kong activists home without charging them with anything, forbidding the landing of Ishihara Shintaro's land survey team upon the Senkakus -- while reiterating what are the existing policy positions of the government of Japan.

What Does the Election of Naoto Kan As DPJ Leader Mean?

- Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit

For only the second time in 50 years, the incoming prime minister will be a representative of a primarily urban or suburban district. The other such prime minister of the last 50 years? The fabulously successful Koizumi Jun'ichiro.

Having a PM coming from a district where the voters are almost all white collar salaried workers or members of the managerial classes will likely have a significant effect on economic policy. Urban and suburban voters tend to see government as a regulator and a guarantor of fairness rather than as a source of largess. Indeed, many urban and suburban tend to see the state through corporate lenses: when there is a shortfall in revenues or an economic slowdown, the correct policy response is cutbacks and restructuring, making darn sure that the only projects getting funded are the ones likely to have an economic return.

As Finance Minister, Kan has already demonstrated an easy acceptance of the MOF view that Japan's most severe economic problem is its burgeoning public debt, with budget cutting and increases in the consumption tax as the policy tools of choice. That such policies are likely to constrict economic growth is relegated to the realm of unfortunate details.

Kan's representing a bedroom community of Tokyo also improves his chances of remaining popular over the long-term (should he prevail in September's DPJ leadership election, that is). Kan speaks the language and thinks the thoughts of the 80% of Japan's population crowded in and around urban centers. Just by reflecting the views of the people who have been electing him since 1980, including in 2005 when LDP landslide left him the DPJ's only surviving district representative in the Tokyo Metropolitan District, will have him in sync with over three quarters of Japan's population -- something his immediate predecessors as DPJ party president could only be vicariously and insincerely.

- I Got Plenty of Nothin'

It should not be surprising that Hatoyama and Ozawa had problems with managing their campaign finances: they both had so much money to manage. In contrast to the vast sums his predecessors had to keep moving around, Kan's personal wealth or the amounts of money he controls are both minor. That he has a clean reputation may be simply a matter of a dearth of funds rather than a surfeit of personal virtue.

That Kan is seen as clean is hugely important to the reestablishment of the DPJ's image as a party that was simply better than the Liberal Democratic Party. Having the financial irregularities-plagued Hatoyama and Ozawa remaining ensconced in the two top party leadership positions these past few months has infuriated the voters, who gave the DPJ its chance last year not based on the likelihood that the party would deliver on all its campaign promises (in fact over 90% of the population doubted the DPJ would) but because the populace had simply had it with the scandal-riddled, vote-scrounging spectacle that was post-1993 LDP.

- Goodby Tanaka-san, This Time For Good

Ozawa Ichiro has played the electoral map as it exists as well as anyone ever has. He has made the deals and promoted the policies that made the DPJ into winners.

Unfortunately, the map and rulebook Ozawa has been working with had been drafted with the purpose of keeping the LDP in power. Not surprisingly, the DPJ that was prevailing in the LDP's place increasingly resembled the LDP.

The days of the current electoral map and rulebook have been numbered, however. The sudden collapse last month of the intellectual edifice prohibiting most Internet campaigning, the string of victories in the district courts of lawsuits asking for invalidation of the 2009 House of Representatives election due to the large number of districts with inexplicable deviations from the principle of one-citizen-one-vote; and full-scale assault over the last year upon the public corporations and non-profit entities whose vast armies of scarcely working employees and their retired bureaucrat managers has long been dependable voting banks for the LDP -- all are indicators of the end of the era of the LDP Dependency State. Further out, in response to the coming decennial census, a root-and-branch redistricting of the House of Representatives - the most profound transformation of Japan's political landscape since the replacement of multi-seat constituencies with single-seat districts in the mid-1990s -- is set to take place over the next few years.

Kan's intent to undo the changes Ozawa has made to the DPJ -- exemplified by his confident "for the good of the Japanese politics, the DPJ and himself, Ozawa Ichiro should be quiet for a while" comment and his promise today to reestablish the DPJ's Policy Research Council -- is not mere political theater undertaken with the intent of influencing the voters in advance of the House of Councillors election. Kan knows he must quickly demolish the structures and practices Ozawa seemed to be crafting in order to delay the full flowering of the grand transformation already underway, lest that flowering again be delayed because of a political master's fiddling.

Politics At the Summer Break – A Ceux Qui Nous Ont Offensés

Japanese politics is like politics in other advanced, media-drenched societies: a daily dose of nonsense and puffery, effrontery and speculation, tempests-in-teacups posturing and sputtering flaring-ups.

However, beneath the mounds of foamy political effluent, one can perhaps discern some solid ground:

Division Rules –

Both the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan have internal divisions as deep and raw as the divisions between the two parties. In economics each party has its cabal of liberal internationalists, its conservative pro-big business autarkists and its maudlin semi- or full socialists. In international relations, there are big nation internationalists, small nation internationalists, big power enthusiasts and semi-isolationists. In social policy there are Europhile social democrats, American-style neo-libertarians and Meiji State nativists.

The problem is not the breadth of the ideological spectrum in each party, however: a national, broad-based party must necessarily have a multiplicity of political drivers inside it. Nagata-chō's problem is that for every issue the membership of the Diet is divided into multiple ideological camps, each of which has fewer than 50% of the Diet as its members. Most commentators speak of realignment (saihen) as being inevitable, yet no one group holds a majority or even a dominant position.

Former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichirō managed to cobble together a dominant position within the LDP by convincing both economic liberals and nationalist-chauvinist elements that he was their champion. Abe Shinzō and Fukuda Yasuo have not been able to perform a similar trick—to the detriment of their party's unity, electoral chances and ability to stare down the DPJ.

Wait-and-See –

Since no ideological group can dominate, the basic instinct of the political classes is to postpone the inevitable. "The Study Group Rush" as the Nihon Keizai Shimbun calls it, the sudden explosion in the number of single issue groups with memberships that cross factional and party boundaries, is symptomatic of a constipated political system. Ideology has become a hobby one pursues as a private diversion with like-minded other members of the Diet outside of chambers. Inside the Diet chambers, with rare, inevitably unprincipled exceptions, Diet members are biding their time, voting the party line.

Everyone knows that if the Democratic Party of Japan manages to seize power in the next election -- a long shot possibility -- the Liberal Democratic Party will blow apart. Every LDP member also knows that if he or she jumps the gun, leaving the party now to run as an independent, he or she would be committing electoral suicide. Against a Democratic Party challenger, the escapee from the LDP will go unto his or her personal Waterloo.

So everyone in the ruling coalition is sitting, head bowed, looking at the back of his or her hands, waiting for the next election.

Structural Advantage to Dishonesty -

In a representative democracy, dishonesty and gross bigotry can prevail in the short run. In the long run, however, the parties and individual politicians will tend to fall into a default position of honesty and liberal rule - as hypocrisies are exposed and unsound policies blow up in faces of their authors, dishonesty become a high maintenance, energy-sapping stance.

However, in an unrepresentative democracy, lies and unsound policies take on lives of their own, their existences prolonged beyond all standard measures of usefulness by the support of privileged interest groups.

Japan is one such unrepresentative democracy, where the parceling out of representation in the Diet reflects the population distributions of 40 years ago--or even earlier. Diet members and their districts live in anachronistic symbiotic relationships, the Diet member delivering largesse to clients in the diminished bailiwick and these clients delivering in return their supercharged votes.

Any individual or party wishing to interrupt the cycle of elections and budget allocations must either restructure the system or supersede it. Since sitting Diet members control the rules under which their own districts are drawn and oversee the redistricting procedure, remedies to electoral inequality have, rather unsurprisingly, not been forthcoming. If this is the case, then the only path to electoral success is to tailor one's every utterance and action to surpassing your opponent in flattering the over-represented voter.

Tobias Harris has written eloquently and in admirable detail about the Democratic Party's ongoing struggle over how far it should go in pandering to the voters in rural areas. I would differ with Mr. Harris's depiction of the situation only in his assessment of Maehara Seiji's rebellion. Mr. Harris sees Maehara's denunciation of his party's making impossible-to-keep promises as a misguided attachment to principles. I would condemn it more forcefully as plain vanilla stupidity: Maehara is attacking DPJ Party Leader Ozawa Ichirō for the crime of trying to make the system work to the advantage of Democratic Party of Japan.

Maehara is taking aim at the wrong target and in the wrong sequence. The problem is the system, not Ozawa. That Ozawa is lying through his teeth, cozying up to the most irresponsible of fiscal inanities, is a function of the game board on which he must play. In order to win enough seats to topple the ruling coalition the DPJ has to beat the LDP at its own game in the rural districts. Actually keeping any of the promises made to the LDP's clients is a problem for the future, not now. The DPJ must outbid the LDP, seize power, then blow off the rural districts -- in that order.

So for the foreseeable future it may be hard to see the difference between the white hats and the black hats. All members of the political order will be lying, lying, lying and then lying some more. No surprise here -- the system rewards those able to pull off the most dishonest, two-faced, logically inconsistent performance possible.

Just who is who -- and who won -- will only be clear after the election, as the victors take to the acts of governing and crafting legislation.

So it might be good to forget what is in the manifestos for a while.

The tyranny of numbers

According to this morning's Nikkei Shimbun, the folks at the Social Insurance Agency are a bit behind in making the Liberal Democratic Party's deadline, set in July of last year just before the House of Councillors election, of reuniting over 50 million "lost" pension records with their owners by March 31, 2008.

As of February 14, 2008, the Agency has managed, through Herculean effort, to reunite

3.85 million accounts

with their owners, leaving only

47 million accounts

still floating, unattached.

Good luck, and Amaterasuspeed to you, you poor unloved sods.

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Sardines drying at Kanaya Port
Futtsu City, Chiba Prefecture
February 26, 2006