Commercial Whaling Deal In Peril

On the verge of the most important meeting of the International Whaling Commission in decades, when the body will be considered the possibility of revising its easily evaded moratorium on the hunting of large baleen whales and sperm whales in favor of a strictly limited and regulated commercial hunt, the key actors in the drama are going to be absent due to illness. IWC chairman Christian Maquieira, whose plan to bring all commercial whaling back under IWC control from out of the metastasizing exceptions that have been undermining the moratorium, namely

1) Japan's scientific whale hunts

2) Iceland's and Norway's self-exemptions from the moratorium on principle, and

3) South Korea's and Japan's increasing by-catch numbers, both legitimate and not-so

will not attend due to a personal illness. Japan's nominal top gun on whaling issues, newly-appointed Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Yamada Masahiko, will likely skip the meeting because his every waking moment tied up with the consequences of the still-not contained Miyazaki Prefecture outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

With all the leg work that has gone into preparing for the Morocco conference and all the recent acrimony over Japan's scientific whaling program -- not to mention the unnecessarily petty and hopeless International Court of Justice suit filed against Japan's Southern Ocean scientific whaling hunt by the government of Australia -- that it all might come to naught over of the unfortunate absences of a small number of key decision makers is distressing

It is unfortunate that in the political turmoil that has taken place over these past few weeks (remember three weeks ago? Back when Prime Minister Hatoyama was receiving the Chinese premier and the Liberal Democratic Party was polling ahead of the Democratic Party of Japan in the proportional vote for the House of Councillors?) the important opportunity provided by the June 21 Agadir, Morocco IWC conference to quarantine the lingering and debilitating debate over Japan's whaling has been lost from view. Japan needs a high powered individual at the Agadir meeting, a dealmaker and strategic thinker, rather than a pinch hitter sent by the MAFF. Right now, both the meeting's maestro and the crucial main actor will be absent from the scene.

Considering the depth of the wound the scientific whaling program inflicts upon Japan and the unique opportunity presented by the Maquieira proposal for Japan to wriggle is way out of it, all whilst retaining its international dignity -- cries out for some bold, even whacky improvisation. Prime Minister Kan should send a special ambassador, extraordinary and plenipotentiary, to the Agadir meeting to negotiate in Japan's behalf. This person would need to be of extremely high rank, considered an advocate of the MAFF yet also with a clear vision of japan's overall strategic position and the imperative sometimes, in order to improve that position, of radical shifts in emphasis.

The ideal candidate: Ishiba Shigeru.

Yes, the idea the idea is daft: the gentlemen is a member of the opposition. The idea that one could convince the policy research council chairman of the LDP to depart on a government mission on the eve of an election that is crucial to his party's very survival is...nuts.

Nevertheless, who else could one send? The man is the former MAFF Minister of the most recent LDP Cabinet. He knows the MAFF bureaucrats, their strengths and their weak points. He is also the acknowledged of grand poobah of the security affairs wonks, able to discern the strategic long-term interest of Japan in the slightest shift in the winds of international opinion. He could never, ever, despite whatever concession he might accede to, ever be tarred with the brush of having "sold out Japan" on the issue.

Ishiba's party would gag, but why not reciprocate? Send Democratic Party of Japan Policy Research Council Chairman Genba Koichiro and House of Councillors member for Tottori Kawakawi Yoshihiro as his deputies? Kawakami has experience as the head of the DPJ's Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Committee, and his attendance at the meeting, along with Genba's, would blunt the impact of Ishiba's not being able to campaign in his home prefecture on behalf of the LDP's candidate there or LDP candidates around the country.

Just a thought. Actually more of a wild, flailing gesture desperately trying to save the limited, shore-based commercial whaling proposal, which I have written about earlier here and here.

They're Off!

The 2010 regular session of the Diet closed down for good yesterday, on schedule but with a record amount of its business unfinished. Lawmakers of both Houses immediately scrambled for their prefectures to begin campaigning in earnest, if in advance of the official starting date for the elections period, which will begin on June 24.

The press and commentariat have been critical of the immense number of government bills left lying either out on the table in the House of Representatives or to die in the House of Councillor's docket. Delayed until further notice are the bills on establishing a bureau for national policy strategy and the rules governing the use of dispatched contract labor. Evaporated into nothingness are the bills on revisions to the postal reform law, the climate change bill and the bill revising the way bureaucratic appointments are made. In total, the Hatoyama and Kan administrations managed to push only 56% of the governmment-submitted bills through the Diet in the regular session -- a postwar record low.

Then again, with so many of these bills having being either blatant attempts to buy off consituencies in advance of the House of Councillors elections or simply ill-considered gestures at quickly fulfilling campaign promises made by members of the ruling coalition in 2009, that they are now either delayed or deceased should prompt hurrahs, not sniping and harrumphing.

What It Says

Over at Nejibana, more of the the same staggeringly excellent stuff.

House of Councillors Election - The Proportional Vote*

[* A formatting problem marred the original posting of this material. The original text is here reproduced sans the problem. - MTC]

So how will the various parties do in the proportional vote in July? Let's take a gander at the historical results for insights.

Year: 2004

Total votes: 55,431,789

Share of the vote:

DPJ: 37.7%
LDP: 30.3%
New Komeito: 15.4%
JCP: 7.7%
SDP: 5.3%
Women's: 1.7%
Green: 1.7%

Final number of seats, proportional vote in 2004

DPJ: 19
LDP: 15
New Komeito: 8
JCP: 4
SDP: 2
Women's: 0
Green: 0

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

Year: 2007

Total votes: 58,913,679

Share of the vote:

DPJ: 39.5%
LDP: 28.1%
New Komeito: 13.2%
JCP: 7.6%
SDP: 4.5%
JNP: 3.0%
PNP: 2.2%
Women's: 1.1%

Final number of seats, proportional vote in 2007

DPJ: 20
LDP: 14
New Komeito: 7
JCP: 3
SDP: 1
JNP : 1
PNP: 1
Women's: 0

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

How does the outlook for the July 2010 election look?

This week's Kyodo Tsushin poll of June 8-9, where the new Kan Cabinet received a hearty 61% approval rating, the DPJ's projected share of the proportional vote was astonishingly high.

When asked which party they intended to cast their vote for in the proportional vote, the respondents said:

DPJ: 48.3%
LDP: 21.6%
Your Party: 8.1%
New Komeito: 3.1%
JCP: 2.3%
SDP: 1.9%
PNP: 1.9%
Sunrise: 1.3%
New Renaissance 0.6%
The Spirit of Japan 0.1%
New Party Nippon 0.1%


Don't know 15.2%

Now if these numbers hold up until date of the July 11 elections, with the DPJ in the end receiving more than 40% or more of the popular vote, then the great dream of the DPJ's winning enough seats to have control of the House of Councillors seems assured (Alison, it seems you were right - MTC).

Much of the boost in the numbers for the DPJ (just four days earlier, the percentage of voters ready to cast their votes for the DPJ was only 34%) can be ascribed to exultation at the departures of Hatoyama Yukio, Shizuka Kamei and Ozawa Ichiro. However, 40% of the party line vote should be considered a floor for the DPJ in this coming election. In the decidedly heady August 2009 House of Representatives election, the DPJ's percentage of the proportional bloc vote ranged from a high of 46% in Hokkaido and Tokai to a low of 38% in the LDP bastion of Kyushu, with the median of all the blocks hovering around 42%. Since those August 2009 elections, the DPJ's main rival the LDP has been shedding many of its most attractive members; has watched professional group after professional group shedding its affiliation with the LDP; and has failed to come up with a convincing reason for the voters to cast their proportional ballots for the former party of government.

So what do the above Kyodo polling numbers foretell in the way of results in the proportional vote on July 11? Going out on a limb I would guess:

DPJ: 24 seats
LDP: 9
Your Party: 6
New Komeito: 6
JCP: 1
SDP: 1
PNP: 0
Sunrise: 1
New Renaissance 0
The Spirit of Japan 0
New Party Nippon 0

That my friends is a prognostication of the elements of a wipeout for the DPJ's rivals.

Hatoyama Yukio - Innovator

In 1992, President Alberto Fujimori of Peru, frustrated by an obstructionist Congress stymieing his every effort to battle both hyperinflation and the psychotic Maoist Shining Path insurgency, suspended Peru's constitution, granted all legislative powers to the executive branch of government and sent the Army to seize all members of the Congress opposed to him. For his use of the Army to lead a toppling of the constitutional order of which he supposedly was the apex, leaving himself in power, Fujimori was credited with having pioneered, or at least provided the textbook example of, a new form of government overthrow, the autogolpe or auto-coup.

Hatoyama Yukio deserves a similar honor for what he achieved on June 2 - 4. The newspapers have for the most part referred to what happen as Hatoyama's having "stepped down" (taijin - literally "withdrawal of the military encampment") from the post of prime minister - the standard term for a prime minister resigning voluntarily. However, in overseeing a friendly transfer of power to his fellow party co-founder Kan Naoto, securing the bloodless simultaneous political seppuku of his supposed political master Ozawa Ichiro, all with the retention of his entire Cabinet save four of the five really problematic/ferociously unpopular ministers and party executives (himself, Ozawa, Consumer Affairs Minister and Social Democratic Party leader Fukushima Mizuho and the Miyazaki Foot-and-Mouth Disease outbreak scapegoat Akamatsu Hirotaka. The fifth problematic minister, Financial Services Minister and People's New Party leader Kamei Shizuka, was left behind for disposal by Kan) Hatoyama should be considered the author of a political innovation worthy of its own technical term. For what happened was not so much a change of Cabinet as a Cabinet reshuffle, only one where the Prime Minister, realizing that he is part of the problem, reshuffles himself out of the Cabinet lineup.

Perhaps it should be called "The Pigeon Mountain Shuffle" -- that seems to be a sufficiently "loopy" name.

No Thank You Mr. Postman

Oh yes, wait a minute Mr. Postman
Wait...Mr. Postman

- The Marvelettes (1961)

On May the 23rd a contented Kamei Shizuka, Minister for Financial Services and leader of the People's New Party, was seated next to a beaming Ozawa Ichiro, Secretary-General of the Democratic Party of Japan, on the dais at the National Postmasters Association (Zentoku) convention. Both men promised the assembled that they would push the Diet to pass legislation rolling back the reforms. They then asked for the association's support in the upcoming House of Councillors election. Associate president Tsuge Yoshifumi, welcoming the pledge, responded that in order to realize the goals of the legislation, members of his organization would have to do their best to promote the election of candidates identified with Zentoku -- after the bill's passage of course.

Three weeks later, Ozawa Ichiro has resigned from the position of DPJ Secretary-General. The new Prime Minister of Japan, Kan Naoto, has decided to delay the passage of the bill, currently in the House of Councillors, to a fall extraordinary session of the Diet -- effectively killing the bill in its present form. In response, Kamei Shizuka has resigned as Financial Services Minister, only three days after the inauguration of the Kan Cabinet. A member of Kamei's party has taken his place as minister and the PNP is still nominally in the Cabinet, but the relationship between the two parties is broken in spirit.

The reversal of fortunes of the postmasters and its unionized workforce, from courted darlings to abandoned has-beens, in such a short span of time reflects the tactical and strategic shifts the DPJ has undergone since the resignation of former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichiro.

On a tactical level, the huge surge in popularity of the Cabinet and the DPJ after the resignations of Hatoyama and Ozawa and the selection of Kan as the new party leader wiped out the electoral significance of Zentoku and postal union vote. For a ruling party with support levels hovering around 20%, every vote counts, particularly in thinly-populated rural single-seat prefectures. In rural areas the post office is the predominant banking, insurance and package delivery institution, often the only one. The fear of losing a community's sole financial services institution is reason enough to vote for the party Zentoku supports. Having such support can mean the difference in between victory and defeat in prefectures where a move of even 10,000 votes one way or the other makes a huge difference.

The trade off was, of course, the loss of the party proportional support for the DPJ among non-aligned voters. Pandering to the postmasters, while not a crucial issue for most, contributed to the extremely negative image of the Ozawa-dominated DPJ as the party that was willing to grovel for every organizational vote pf the pre-Koizumi era Liberal Democratic Party electoral machine.

On a strategic level, the new Kan government has made it clear that it is abandoning efforts to stimulate economic growth through loosened lending standards -- policies strongly associated with Kamei. Reversal of postal reform was a part of this general reversal of the strictures imposed during the Koizumi era. Reversal of postal reform of course infuriated the nation's private financial institutions, which have quite rightly see the post office as a favored behemoth sucking trillions of yen out of the world's financial system. This in turn earned the DPJ the hostility of the financial press, which, for good or ill, is the primary opinion-shaping information source for much of the world's population.

Postal reform might have been saved if the PNP actually brought something of substance to the DPJ. However, in poll after poll, support for the PNP nevers hits even 1% of those polled. It is the party of zero, of nothing and nowhere. It is indeed such a weak entity that it cannot stomp off in huff, like the Social Democratic Party could do after the sacking of Fukushima Mizuho over the Futenma reversal. Instead, the PNP must cling to the skirts of the DPJ in the hopes of surviving as an official political party.

As for the once powerful Zentoku, it must contend with the consequences of having backed the wrong horses in the race for power in the nation's capital. Kan clearly takes his talking points on the economy and finance from Ministry of Finance bureaucrats and the banking industry -- the enemies of the post office. Zentoku could try to boost the fortunes of the PNP by a full court press to have its members vote for the party in the proportion vote -- but that would result in perhaps one or maybe two more seats for the micro-coalition, which has been, thanks to Kamei's overreaching and interference on many fronts, more of a hindrance than a help to the DPJ. More likely, however, it will free its members to vote as they wish, giving the organization political cover in the likely anti-post office mood that will prevail after the July House of Councillors elections.

The Kan Cabinet's First Scandal

A new Cabinet has just been announced. Predictably, one of the new ministerial appointees is discovered to have some rather odd entries in his accounting books. Just as predictably, members of the opposition demand that the minister in question resign. The newspapers take up the tune of Japan's being unable to escape its "politics and money" (seiji to kane) problems.

From 2002 to 2007, the official Tokyo address of State Minister for National Policy Arai Satoshi Arai's political organization was a longtime friend's Tokyo condominium (manshon). In the annual expenses accounts submitted by the political organization to the Ministry of General Affairs and Communications (Somusho) a total of 42 million yen was listed office costs associated with the address, including around 27.5 million yen in personnel costs, 4.6 million in equipment and software and 10.1 million for "costs associated with maintaining an office" (jimushohi). According the friend, who has spoken to reporters, the condominium served only as postal contact point. No staff worked there, no equipment was installed there nor was any rent paid. Aside from handing over to the Arai organization any mail addressed to Arai or his organization that arrived at the condominium, the friend had no responsibilities or contact with the organization.

Arai, in response to questions from reporters, has said that he had submitted his political organization's account books to Democratic Party of Japan lawyers and campaign funding specialists and that the DPJ's experts had found no problem with the accounting.

Liberal Democratic Party Policy Research Council Chairman Ishiba Shigeru has predictably drawn parallels between Arai's use of the address of his friend's condominium with the office expenses scandals that led former Ministers of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Akagi Norihiko and Ota Seiichiro to resign and Matsuoka Toshikatsu to commit suicide in 2007. He has says that Arai's having to resign is "a matter of course" and that Prime Minister Kan Naoto must take political responsibility for having named a tainted member of the Diet to his Cabinet. The LDP has said it is also looking at the Somusho reports of Education Minister Kawabata Tatso and Administration Reform Minister Ren Ho for similar odd assignments of offices expenses.

There is both less here and more here than meets the eye.

Political funding organizations are fluid and amorphous entities, with staff numbers and physical locations shifting with the political cycle, the career path of the member in question and that members financial resources. Expense accounts filed with the Somusho, however, need a legal permanent address for the organization. For some members having one's residence, the residence of one's parents or, as in this case, the residence of a friends serve as the nominal home of one's political organization is the only feasible option. It is an accounting fiddle, but a necessary and innocuous one, most of the time.

Whether Arai and Kan can stand the heat from both the LDP and the press will depend upon the level of detail in Arai's organization's books. Indications are that unlike Matsuoka, Akagi and Ota, who were knocked out by a lack of documentation or impossible-to-explain-expenses (Matsuoka's famous "water purification devices") the Arai organization seems to have kept all the necessary receipts for the expenses associated with the nominal office.

They Do So Get It

One of the common complaints one hears regarding the current Japan-U.S. alliance is that the United States is insensitive and brusque, so wrapped up in its own global strategic planning and timetables that it fails to honor or even appreciate the feelings of the Japanese people. This sense of Japan's being misunderstood is not a right-wing or left-wing issue: one hears it from both ends of the political spectrum. That the Americans do not understand is of course a major reason behind the current parlous level of communication between the two governments.

The problem with trope is that Americans, at least American academics, do get it. I would challenge any one reading Kenneth Pyle's essay "Troubled Alliance" -- the first of a collection of essays from the National Bureau of Asian Research available for free downloading here until July 31 -- to say that he or the other authors in the collection do not understand Japanese or even Democratic Party of Japan feelings. Pyle, the dean of American scholars on Japan's security policy, outlines very clearly the deep yet thwarted desire for jiei and jison that spans the ages and crosses political lines.

Pyle's views and the views expressed by the other authors are not government views. Still they are authoritative views regarding the Alliance. While members of the DPJ, members of the commentariat and a goodly portion of the public may believe that they have few friends in and enjoy little sympathy from Washington, they are possibly being too hasty in arriving at their conclusions.

Either that, or they are looking to the wrong Washington for understanding.

Background to the DPJ's Ongoing Counter-Reformation

Prime Minister Kan Naoto has nearly completed filling up the holes in the new line up of Democratic Party of Japan executives and the Cabinet. From announcements and speculation printed in the nation's newspapers, it is clear that the DPJ is undergoing a massive shift away from the course it has been following since 2005.

When Kan and former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio founded the DPJ in 1996, the party's core faith was that Japan suffered from an excess of government spending on slow growth or even loss-making endeavors. The key to reviving Japan's health was the removal of the control of spending from bureaucrats (who were supposedly using the budget compilation process to featherbed organizations and industries that would supply them with sinecures following their formal retirement from government service) and assaults on the system of subsidies and supports for industries and activities (agriculture, construction, package delivery) with close ties to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Under the classic DPJ paradigm, government would have a limited role in directing the economy, with the focus of policy on the cutting away of the relations of economic dependency. The goal was a more open, failure-tolerant structure, where a social safety net would catch those who fell out of those industries undergoing shrinkage.

Two major events post-2000 forced the party to junk this policy framework. The first was the wholesale larceny of the party's ideas by Koizumi Jun'ichiro, who ran against the traditional policies of his own party, the LDP, promising change almost identical to the changes proposed by the DPJ.

The second was the landslide loss in the 2005 House of Representatives election, where a glum Okada Katsuya seemed to be campaigning on the slogans of "no fun anymore, suffering for everyone." Against improbable optimism of Koizumi, Okada's grim warnings of disaster were a total electoral downer. Unsurprisingly, the party fell flat on its face, getting wiped out in urban and suburban districts, its supposed impregnable electoral fortresses.

Rather than switching to a Koizumi-like bon vivant with a taste for the spotlight, the DPJ opted for the leadership of Ozawa Ichiro. Like Koizumi, Ozawa had a flair for the irresponsible and insincere promise. Unlike him, he was disdainful of the press, preferring to build his political machine out of the knitting together a thousand normally mutually exclusive promises to a thousand different interest groups. Recruiting local worthies to his cause through patient courtship, he built up a huge electoral bank of persons he could run as candidates who were primarily reliant on his political wiles for their educations.

This was, of course, the classic LDP Tanaka/Takeshita faction's winning playbook. Under Koizumi, the LDP abandoned its traditional method of building coalitions of interest groups and patient local recruitment in favor of a media-driven presidential and national mode of rule. As the LDP set about "modernizing" itself, Ozawa moved into the gap, dragging the DPJ, kicking and screaming, in with him.

The new DPJ had a successful test drive in the 2007 House of Councillors elections, where it prevailed over the LDP. It can be argued, however, that the DPJ did well due more to latent disgust at the LDP (particularly over the pension scheme fiasco and other policy missteps ) than thanks to the DPJ's new look.

Ozawa's DPJ received its real test in the 2009 House of Representatives elections, where it completely flipped the country's districts from LDP to DPJ control. The touchstone of the election was the DPJ's policy manifesto, which contained so many concessions and promises to so many different constituencies as to be internally incoherent, and impossible to implement as a whole. A strategy of promising everything to everyone made perfect sense in political terms, however: the electoral map having been drawn by the old time LDP in such a way as to favor the party that could make the most improbable promises.

The results of the 2009 vindicated Ozawa and bolstered his standing in the party to immense heights. A grateful Hatoyama, who found himself in the position of being the party's candidate for Prime Minister thanks to Ozawa's having rigged the snap 2009 party leader election, granted Ozawa the position of Secretary-General and the ability to fully complete the transformation of the DPJ into his personal policy and elections machine.

Events, however, began eating away at Ozawa's authority within the party faster than he could remake the party to his own needs. The global economy began recovering from the 2008 crash much earlier than anticipated, reducing the intense need for the deficit spending tthat undergirded his promises to interest groups and shifting attention toward countries with seemingly unsustainable debt increase paths, of which Japan was one. Prime Minister Hatoyama's political finance difficulties turned out to be far, far worse than imagined, composed of hundreds of real, repeated criminal acts involving hundred of millions of yen. The Futenma base problem turned out to be insoluable, no matter that most of the country believed that the Okinawans had been shafted by previous LDP governments.

What seems to have broken the camel's back, however, was Ozawa's shutting down the DPJ's Policy Research Council. While nominally a move to concentrate policy formation in the Cabinet, the abolition of the Council looked like shutting down the only forum for anti-Ozawa elements to argue that the party manifesto was a laundry list of promises, not a plan -- and an electoral liability for a ruling party. Whether or not this contention was true on not is debatable -- but by abolishing the Policy Research Council, Ozawa seemed to be declaring that that debate would not ever happen.

While members from the DPJ's middle ranks fought with Ozawa over the elimination of the Council, it was likely that they did so under the supervision of senior members of the party, many of whom understood that their own influence was in danger of being usurped. Until the abolition of the Council, the claims that Ozawa sought to establish a dictatorship could be explained away as fanciful LDP scare stories. After its abolition, and the sidelining of dozens of longtime DPJ policy wonks, these scare stories seemed suddenly far less farfetched.

The turning point, it seems, was the Ubukata Affair. When Ubukata Yukio went to the media with the case against Ozawa, the party directorate announced that Ubukata would be stripped of his Deputy Secretary-General post. This decision did not last the weekend. Announced on a Thursday, the dismissal was rescinded on the following Monday.

Several weeks ago I wondered why the Seven Magistrates of the DPJ did not follow Ubukata's lead and rid themselves of their wounded and troublesome Secretary-General and his associates. At the time, I rationalized the inaction of Sengoku Yoshito, Edano Yukio and others as their decision to take the path of least resistance: clashing with Hatoyama and Ozawa head on was risky, picking up the pieces after a disastrous House of Councillors election would be child's play.

Following the collapse of support for the Cabinet and the Party in the wake of the Futenma climbdown and the dismissal of Fukushima Mizuho from the Cabinet, the Seven Magistrates found themselves in the situation where they could carry out the prophesied coup -- because, as every poll indicated, the House of Councillors election was lost.

[Yes, a paradox: anti-Ozawa forces could move in and alter the course of future events only after the course of future events was inevitable.]

Since seemingly winning over Hatoyama Yukio to their cause, the anti-Ozawa leaders have moved with staggering efficiency and dispatch to eliminate Ozawa's influence over both policy and party management. Fiscal conservatives are now in all the party's and the government's top policy setting positions (bureaucrat bête noire Ren Ho, who had been slated to take over for Fukushima at Consumer Affairs, will take over for Edano as Minister of Government Revitalization), the Policy Research Council is being revived and the PM has told former Secretary-General Ozawa to keep his thoughts and advice to himself.

Today's party position announcements and tomorrow's new Cabinet lineup will be sending a message, one that will have repercussions well beyond its already mesurable impact on the fortunes of Kan & Company in the upcoming House of Councillor's election.

The DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back.

One More Interesting Item on the Prime Minister

The recent spate of reporting on the background of newly-elected Prime Minister Kan Naoto has brought out a lot of stories of which I was unaware. The patented mahjong point counting machine was a pretty neat bit off previously suppressed personal history.

What has been rather surprising is how the English language media has failed so far to discuss Kan's relationship with his wife. Not in so far as foregoing rehashing the supposed affair he had with his media advisor in 1998 -- nobody has a problem going on about that, seemingly.

What everyone has either been ignoring, willfully or not, is that the PM and his wife are related.

Closely related.

First cousins, in fact. If online family trees are correct, Kan Naoto's mother and his wife Nobuko's father are sister and brother.

Whilst first cousin marriage is the most common form of marriage in pre-modern societies and was not at all rare in even urban areas in pre-war Japan, it has become a rarity in this modern, mass education, mobile age. While obviously legal (just barely) it has been driven out by a mass inculcation of the belief that first cousin marriage carries an unacceptable risk of birth defects, should there be children. Indeed, the prime minister and his wife's parents vehemently opposed the two marrying.

That the PM and his wife are so closely related might explain Nobuko-san's salty response to the news of Kan's having had an affair in 1998. Rather than demanding a divorce -- the normal way of handling a public report of an affair -- or suffering in silence, she famously berated him, "Your were careless in covering your flanks (waki ga amai) you a**hole (bakatare)."

Which is something you would tell your first cousin whom you have known all your life (Nobuko-san is a year older than her husband).