Not Among The Undecideds

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo filling out his absentee ballot for Sunday's House of Councillors election on Tuesday, July 16, 2013.

Have the secretary post a photo image taken with a mobile device on the Facebook page to remind the true believers and only the true believers of the absentee ballot option.

Smart.

Image courtesy: Abe Shinzo page on Facebook.

An Acid Aside On East Asian Culture Clashes

I sometimes take part in personal or email conversations where very knowledgeable participants write, "The Korean view is that..." or "The consensus view in China on Japanese attitudes is..."

I find the categorizations irritating. Not, as the usual critical view would have it, because the use of these broad national descriptions masks heterogeneity within the respective societies, with minority views running counter to the main narrative being ignored. That societies are heterogeneous I can live with, for in every society there is a power structure determining which views are important and which ones are important to persons looking for a place to apply French critical theory. In between winners, would-be-winners and perennial losers, one can talk about nation states and attitudes to associate with them.

No, what I find annoying is the whole concept of national identities in East Asia. There is not a single place in the region where anyone can start to say anything definite about national identity without blundering into a word, thought, turn of phrase, religious conception or symbol system borrowed from another country in East Asia. Japanese cannot think about being Japanese without using a language made up of Chinese ideograms expressing concepts received from Korea. No Chinese can write about anything more modern than a waterwheel without falling into universe of technical terms taken from Japanese. As for Korea, aside from hangul (a brilliant innovation) and kimchi, what the heck is there that is not a variation on some Chinese or Japanese theme?

[Lovers of things Korean, feel free to castigate me. I am being unnecessarily provocative out of the purest of intentions. Furthermore, given what my surname means in Korean, what else could be expected?]

It is all right for elites and their apologists to argue over this being that and whose is what, with culture becoming just one more item to be fenced in and exploited (Link). But academics, reporters and everyone else not in power should sit the fight out, keeping an eye on their self-proclaimed betters and their nationalist poses.

A watchful, wary eye, not a sympathetic one.

Every nationality in the region is a concatenation of elements consciously or unconsciously borrowed from other nations in the region...meaning that every nationalism in the region is an inadequately treated fit of delusions.

Are The Voters Set To Surprise The Cynics?

According to the NHK poll of July 13-15, 66% of the voters are expressing either a strong commitment to or an interest in voting in Sunday's House of Councillors election -- a surprisingly high figure. (Link)

Polls on intentions tend to overshoot actual voting by about 10%. For example, the NHK poll figure in the week before the 2010 election was 71%. The actual turnout rate was just under 58%.

With a 13 point drop off, the voter turnout this year will be around 53% -- a much better figure than the one I have projected.

Persons arguing for a decent turnout rate can also point to positve early voting figures. Over 4.5 million voters have already cast ballots in early voting, a 12% increase in early voting from only 3 years ago. (Link - J)

Higher rates of voting are usually seen as favoring non-machine parties over the voting machines of the LDP, the Communists and the New Komeito -- though given its current broad base of support, it is probably not accurate to refer to the LDP as a machine party.

Just which non-machine parties are set to benefit from increased voter participation is a BIG question. The support numbers or likely-to-vote-for numbers for the Democratic Party of Japan, the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party are all over the map.



To be fair, the figures for the LDP and the Communists are all over the map too.

So what happens in the case where, let us say 53% of the electorate shows up and votes in the proportional race slanting in the way the crazy Asahi Shimbun figures indicate, with me doling out the undecideds proportionately (with a little boost to the SDP for old times' sake)?

According to the d'Hondt calculator highlighted the other day, the proportional seat wins will be divided up thusly:

LDP 25
New Komeito 6
DPJ 4
Your Party 4
JRP 4
JCP 4
SDP 1
Other parties 0

While this result along with projected district wins gives the ruling coalition a safe majority in the House of Councillors, it still leaves the forces of constitutional revision out of luck -- unless, of course, there are sleeping constitutional revisionists in the ranks of the DPJ members of the House of Councillors just aching to join forces with the LDP, the JRP and the Your Party. The above distribution would, however, put the LDP over the 72 seats its needs to say hasta la vista to its coalition partner the New Komeito -- assuming that the LDP wins every district seat it is contesting, of course.

Getting back to the issue of turnout, there is another reasons to doubt it will be even close to what the NHK intentions figures indicate, in addition to history showing the predictions to be inflated. The 65% response rate to the July 13-15 telephone survey is way up from the normal 50%-55% response rate. Intuition tells us that a large number of respondents in the intentions survey were role playing, demonstrating interest in the political process because they feel they should be doing so. While demonstrating the proper respect toward democracy is laudable in a society where a faux contented conformance with the current operative reality is rewarded more strongly than it is in other societies, responding because you feel you should will skew results toward recent changes in momentum and atmospherics rather than reveal significant changes in voting decisions.

Do The Forces Of Constitutional Revision Have A Chance? (2)

[Part 2 of 2. Part 1 I published yesterday.]

Assuming that everything goes perfectly -- and I do mean perfectly -- for the Liberal Democratic Party in the district seat elections on July 21, and assuming its allies in constitutional revision the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party pick up the majority of the seats remaining after one subtracts the four seats the New Komeito must/will win, the combined forces of constitutional revision will control 123 of the 161 162 seats they need to have a 2/3rds majority in the House of Councillors.

Can the forces of revision win the further 38 39 seats they need to reach the magical 161 162 total?

In addition to voting for the district candidate, voters write either the name of a party member or the name of a party on a separate ballot. These votes are tallied according to party, with the vote for the individual counted as a vote for the party with whom he or she is affiliated.

The 48 seats up for election on this separate ballot are the proportional vote. Seats are divvied up using the d’Hondt method, meaning the vote totals are divided by one, then by two, then by three..with the largest remaining result getting the next available seat.

If you do not want to think to too much about the method but just want the results, here is a great calculator (Tip of the hat to Tobias Harris of Observing Japan).

The first guess one needs to make regarding the inputs, and it is a doozy, is how many folks will show up at the polling stations on July 21. As I insinuated in a post the other day major elections of the past year have featured record-breaking or close-to-record-setting low levels of voter turnout.

The causes of the low level of voter participation in 2013 are not hard to discern:

-a secular reduction in interest in elections since electoral reforms in the 1990s,

-a reduction in interest in politics after the collapse of the credibility of the Democratic Party of Japan as an alternative to the LDP,

- the exhaustion from having had a national election and a change of government only six months earlier and local elections only a few weeks ago,

- ridiculously high support ratings for both the Cabinet and the LDP in the public opinion polls (the demoralization factor) and

- the absence of real policy choice in between the parties.

The last items does not mean that the parties are indistinguishable, for they do offer different mixes of policies. However, none of these mixes is either inspired or inspiring, leading voters more likely to choose, when they show up, the parties that can enact any policies.

To these reasons for sitting out this election out we have to add the possibility of unpleasant weather on election day actively dissuading folks from leaving their homes to go to the polling stations (this summer has been naaaaassssty!).

The number of persons casting ballots I come up with, in a brutish, what-the-hell calculus, is 48,000,000 . That is a whopping 12 million voters down from the House of Councillors elections in 2007 and 2010. It is also a greater drop than the huge fall in between the 2009 and 2012 House of Representatives elections, when 10,000,000 voters who showed up in 2009 failed to show up last year.

The voting rate in this guestimate is nevertheless still more than 44.67% recorded in the 1995 House of Councillors election. The median age of the voters has risen since 1995, and older voters vote more, so that despite all the negative forces listed above, a turnout rate of 46% (based on the latest, July 8 figure from the Ministry for General Affairs and Telecommunications of 104,780,660 persons eligible to vote) seems about right.

Now, how will these votes be divided up?

Let us make two incredibly generous assumptions to critics who find me too solicitous of the LDP, one supposition regarding the DPJ based on atmospherics and one boneheaded assertion. The first is that the LDP does no better in the vote than its current 42% rate of support in public opinion polls, despite the concentration of power the drop in voter participation gives to vote machines. The second is that centrist voters, wary of giving the LDP too much support, will give their votes to the main center-right opposition DPJ, JRP and Your Party in about equal amounts. The third is that public trust in the DPJ has sunk to the point where the Your Party and the DPJ win exactly the same number of votes. The fourth, the dumb one, is that at least 7,000,000 folks plunk down for the New Komeito and its candidates.

The voting numbers I get, in aggregate, are:

LDP 20,000,000
New Komeito 7,000,000
DPJ 5,000,000
Your Party 5,000,000
JRP 4,500,000
JCP 3,500,000
SDP 1,800,000
Other parties 1,200,000

Plugging these raw vote totals into the D’Hondt calculator, the following proportional seat distribution pops out:

LDP 22
New Komeito 7
DPJ 5
Your Party 5
JRP 4
JCP 3
SDP 1
Other parties 0

The projection, biased upon the assumption of no last minute reversal of the decay of support for the DPJ, still only secures only 31 seats for the revisionists, 7 seats short of Constitutional Revision Nirvana.

The fly in the constitutional revision crowd's punch bowl is...surprise! (not really) the NEW KOMEITO. Unless the leaders of the New Komeito or That Which Cannot Be Named tell their voters to not show up on the 21st, their immobile mass will outweigh any projected "rightward shift" in favor of constitutional revision.

I invite readers to play around with the calculator, trying out higher voter turnouts and different support levels based on the public opinion survey the individual reader may fancy.

Fiddle as one might, the leap to the 161 162 seats needed for constitutional revision -- even when making assumptions equivalent to pretty much everything goes the revisionists' way on election eve -- remains just too far off.

Do The Forces Of Constitutional Revision Have A Chance? (1)

Though campaigning on constitutional revision has died down, except for the noises emanating from the candidates of the Japan Restoration Party and fringe rightists in the pro- and the Japan Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party in the anti-camps, commentators outside Japan are still talking about a post-election push for constitutional revision by a radically empowered Abe Shinzo.

Assuming the desirability of actual revision (If the opposition is annihilated and the constitution changed, who then can be blamed for continued failure and drift?) is such an outcome even technically possible? Do the forces for revision have the technical means of achieving their seat targets -- i.e. do the parties in favor of revision have enough candidates in the right places?

First, how many seats do they need? Mathematically, 2/3 of 242 is 161.333…. Ostensibly, the three parties would have to end up with 162 seats.

However, the Speaker of the House and Deputy Speaker, who are selected from the two largest caucuses, are under extreme pressure to behave in a non-partisan fashion. Symbolically, they take leave from their party membership during their terms in office. The Speaker in particularly would almost certainly abstain from a constitutional vote.

[Sorry MTC - but that the Speaker of the House would abstain would increase, not decrease the number of seats needed. The constitutional requirement is 2/3rds of the members of a House, not 2/3rds of those present at the vote. 162 is the number and will always be the number, at least until such time as the number of seats in the House of Councillors gets changed - Ed.]

So the actual number of seats the parties must have is 161 162.

The three major parties on record in favor of revising the Constitution are the JRP, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Your Party. They currently hold seats 61 not up for reelection this cycle:

Seats Not Up For Election: District

LDP 38
JRP 0
Your 3

Seats Not Up For Election: Proportional

LDP 12
JRP 1
Your 7

So in this cycle the three parties need to win 100 101 seats to have the barest minimum of the seats necessary for changes to the Constitution.

In the raw numbers, the three parties have sufficient candidates -- 78 for the LDP, 44 for the JRP and 34 for the Your Party.

Candidates For Seats Up For Election: District

LDP 49
JRP 14
Your 17

Seats Not Up For Election: Proportional

LDP 29
JRP 30
Your 15

However, are these candidates dispersed in meaningful or effective way?

To simplify matters, let us assume that all of the district candidates of the LDP all win election. T'is not an unreasonable assumption, in light of the election of all the LDP candidates in last month's Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election. The assumption of dominance glosses over the potential for bastions -- where particular opposition parties cannot lose due to long time support of particular political families. However, given the the overwhelming national support (>40% in most polls) for the LDP, the viability of any of these bastions is called into question. Furthermore, since we are calculating the total number of seats in favor of constitutional revision, if the winner is the JRP or Your Party candidate then the LDP loss is irrelevant to the total.

So after all the LDP district candidates win, how many district seats are left?

Normally, one would say 24 (73 totals seats - 49 LDP wins = 24). However, the LDP's coalition partner, the New Komeito, which is chary of constitutional revision, is running candidates in 4 multi-seat prefectures: Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa and Osaka. These candidates will win handily, meaning there are 20 open seats for opposition parties, in the following distribution:

Hokkaido 1
Miyagi 1
Ibaraki 1
Saitama 1
Chiba 1
Tokyo 2
Kanagawa 2
Niigata 1
Nagano 1
Shizuoka 1
Aichi 2
Kyoto 1
Osaka 2
Hyogo 1
Hiroshima 1
Fukuoka 1

Now here is that same list, with competition between the candidates running on pro-revision JRP and Your Party tickets and the anti-revision Democratic Party of Japan ticket.

Hokkaido 1 (YP, DPJ)
Miyagi 1 (YP, DPJ)
Ibaraki 1 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Saitama 1 (YP, DPJ)
Chiba 1 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Tokyo 2 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Kanagawa 2 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Niigata 1 (JRP, DPJ)
Nagano 1 (YP,DPJ)
Shizuoka 1 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Aichi 2 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Kyoto 1 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Osaka 2 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Hyogo 1 (JRP, YP, DPJ)
Hiroshima 1 (JRP, DPJ)
Fukuoka 1 (JRP, YP, DPJ)

Your Party leader Watanabe Yoshimi made a great show of breaking off election cooperation with the JRP after JRP co-leader Hashimoto Toru's idiotic remarks as regards the sex slaves of the Imperial era and the need for U.S. Marines to frequent Okinawan sexual services establishments. However, despite the acrimonious breakup the two parties largely do not work at cross purposes in eastern Japan, which is Watanabe's region. They do get in each other's way a lot though, in western Japan. The three parties are locked in a death struggle in over a single seat in Chiba, Shizuoka, Kyoto, Hyogo and Fukuoka prefectures.

The DPJ, despite its severely weakened state, will win a few of these remaining district seats. The Japan Communist Party has also a decent chance, given its strong showing in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly elections, to win a seat in Tokyo. A tiny number might go to independents and other parties.

If the DPJ can win 5 of the 20 seats and the Communists, other parties and independents win 2, the opposition forces in favor of revision walk away with 13 district seats. When added to the 49 wins by the LDP, the running total is 62.

Which means the LDP, the JRP and Your Party have to win 38 39 seats in the proportional votes to reach the magical 100 seats level.

How realistic is 38 39, out of the total 48 proportional seats up for elections?

(to be continued)

Failure To Atone

Pew Research's Global Attitudes Project has published its latest global survey of Asia Pacific attitudes toward Japan and Japan's government. (Link)

The results are pretty much as one would expect...and pretty depressing. Chinese and South Korean citizens and their respective governments are locked in a feedback loop of anti-Japanese hatred (I would write antipathy, but why equivocate?) from which no easy exit is visible...nor any exit at all, really. Prime Minister Abe is seen unfavorably in equal measure in the two countries -- 85% unfavorably -- at very high levels of certainty (only 6% of Chinese and 2% of South Koreans do not feel they know enough to make a call on Abe).

Were I Abe (and boy are you ever not him - Ed.) I would look at these results, look at my August schedule, shrug and pencil in my Yasukuni visit. "Look at these numbers. Seriously, how much worse could it get?" he could ask -- and he would be right.

Do check out Joelle Metcalfe's article that first alerted me as to the publication of the Pew Research findings. (Link)

Among The Things We Do Not Know

What is the reason for the second Abe Administration's high support ratings seven months out?


(Click on image to open up full size in another window)

Support for the Abe Cabinet in the NHK poll has dropped these last three months, from a high of 66% in April to 57% last week. However, the cabinet's numbers are down only 7 percentage points from December, when Abe took office.

How aberrant is this stability? One has to go back to the tenure of Obuchi Keizo (30 July 1998 - 5 April 2000) to find a prime minister who was fewer than 7 points down seven months into his tenure.

The figures for the Obuchi Cabinet were truly wild. It started out in deep fried territory at only 38% support, fell to the cabinet collapse level of 20%, then rose up to nearly its starting numbers. The Obuchi Cabinet finished out the year more popular than when it was announced.

Getting back to support numbers for Abe II (look the red lines - Abe I and Abe II started out at exactly the same level) they are simply not comprehensible...unless, of course, there is dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers direct correlation in between equities markets and Cabinet popularity.

But how could that be, if the country has only a weak private equities ownership culture?


Later - The theory that 30% of the voting age population was whisked off the streets in December and replaced with an army of Abe-loving replicants grown and indoctrinated in a vast biocomplex located underneath Liberal Democratic Party headquarters, while improbable, at least has the virtue of being consistent with the polling data.

Oh, How To Play This One!

Judging from the responses when searching Google News in Japanese, the domestic media has not yet reported on this story:

Fourth star for Harry Harris
Pensecola News Journal

Pensacola becomes the home of lots of military brass, and this area also produces its share of high-ranking officers.

Harry B. Harris Jr., a 1974 graduate of Booker T. Washington High School, has been nominated by President Barack Obama for his fourth star as a Navy admiral, the Pentagon announced on Tuesday.

With the promotion, Harris, a vice admiral who is now assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to be assigned to command the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Navy said.

As commander of the Pacific Fleet, Harris will oversee the world’s largest sea operation, encompassing more than half the Earth’s surface and including about 1,100 aircraft, 200 ships and submarines and roughly 140,000 military and civilian personnel.

Harris, 56, is the son of a Navy enlisted man and a Japanese woman who worked for the military as a civilian translator...

(Link)

So after the local mediaverse gets off its duff, how will this country's bloodline-conscious interpret a hafu's taking over as proconsul for the Indo-Pacific?

Wow, do I ever see the opportunity for misunderstandings here...oh, and a lot of images of excruciatingly bad gift swaps too.

It is just after 4:30 in the morning. What are the chances that NHK has a camera crew in Harris's mother's nominal furusato right now, interviewing seniors who would rather be watering their plants?

Tip of the hat to Paul Giarra for the link.


Later - Yes, I agree. It will be interesting to see this news is parsed in China.

Unthinking On Why Abe Will Visit Yasukuni In August

Once we are past the July 21 elections, Sino-Japanese relations will be in a sweet spot. Both China and Japan will have ostensibly new, legitimate leaders, with significant political succession campaigns far off. It will be years before either side has to gin up the paranoia/resentment machine to advance its political program. Both leaders, with their inherited political bona fides, would be in a position to find ways to work together to keep the bilateral relationship on an even keel. Given the tight intermeshing of the economies of the two countries, crippling relations over pride would be daft. This is doubly so because the Chinese economy is going to be entering a rough patch, with growth gearing down sharply from deleveraging and a shift from investment-led to consumption-led growth. It is trebly so because big business in Japan, which is invested in China up to its earlobes, has been an unquestioned and unquestioning backer of Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, Abe will toss the opportunity to make history into history's dustbin and go to Yasukuni in August. He not do so on the August 15 defeat day but on another day (I have bet that it will be August 12) -- not with a herd of lawmakers and flunkies in tow but quietly, without warning.

Why? Abe does not have to prove anything. The revisionist base loves him, whether he goes to Yasukuni or not. The collapse of the Japan Restoration Party means there is no more threat to the LDP from the right.

If Abe goes to Yasukuni there will be anti-Japanese riots in China. Xi Jinping will never come to Japan for a summit. Ship intrusions into the area around the Senkakus will skyrocket.

To which I can only respond, "And how will all these outcomes not fulfill the predictions regarding Chinese behavior that Abe and his fellow travelers have been making since...forever?"

In addition to the self serving opportunism of instigating exactly the kind of hysteria and overreaction in China the revisionist right has prophesied, Abe has purely personal reasons for going to Yasukuni in August. The first is psychohistorical: he has never forgiven himself for failing to go in August 2007. Second, since their accessions to power, Xi Jinping has made not the least sacrifice of political capital in order to reach out to Abe. Unlike Park Geun-hye, who has to be seen giving Abe the cold shoulder in order to bury talk of her father's service to Japan, Xi is free to extend the hand of friendship to Abe. For reasons of either cowardice or prejudice, Xi has done nothing.

He will do nothing.

A terrible error.

Abe has been wearing a mask of affability these past six months in line with the needs of his party in the run up to the House of Councillors election. Once past the election, Abe will let down the facade of buoyant happiness, reverting to his usual state of umbrage. We have already seen flashes of resentment creep out from behind the mask, the anger he feels toward anyone showing him disrespect, in Abe's Facebook attacks on anti-Trans Pacific Partnership demonstrators, Tanaka Hitoshi and Hosono Goshi. Once past the election, Abe's brittle edginess, shared by many in his Cabinet, will no longer need to be hidden away.

So many of the projects dear to the revisionists are closed to Abe. Garrison the Senkakus? Suicidal, stupid. Revise Article 96, Article 9 and the rest of the Constitution? Not enough votes in the House of Councillors for the necessary 2/3rds majority.

Going to Yasukuni is the default dream realization -- and Abe will revert to it once the election is over and done. Provocative, spiteful will the visit be, yet not threatening except in rhetorical terms.

After Abe takes the plunge world opinion will fault him for his lack of sensitivity and inability to appreciate the fragility of Japan's position in East Asia.

World opinion will, however be drawing a bead at the wrong target. Those lacking in sense and sensitivity are in Beijing. Those afraid of an objective accounting for the past are there too.

Can one fault the Chinese for failing to understand Japan? Not really. Power and wealth have muddled brains. A global fear of losing access to the China bounty has clipped tongues.

At the end of the day, at the very end, the interests of East Asia's princeling leaders are best served by conflict between the nations. Marginal territorial and history disputes are helpful distractions, turning the attention of citizens away from such questions as "Are the children and grandchildren of past leaders really the best persons for these jobs?" and "What is there in this aristocracy thing for me and my family, anyway?"

The July 21, 2013 Election - Abe, His Boots Are Made For Walkin'

These boots are made for walkin’
And that's just what they'll do
One of these days these boots
Are gonna walk all over you...

- Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" (1966)

In real life, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is flying to and being driven around the country. On Saturday, he campaigned in four prefectures -- Kyoto, Nara, Shiga and Osaka -- after starting out the day in the departure lounge at Tokyo's Haneda Airport with what looks like -- horrors! -- a Nikkei Shimbun on his lap. (Please don't tell Watanabe Tsuneo -- Link)

In the world of the Liberal Democratic Party, however, Abe Shinzo is walking around the country, or more properly, in and around Tokyo and its neighboring prefectures. (Link - YouTube)

Why does he walk with his back to us, aside from the practical reason that it is easier to have a hair double than a face double? Is he our boss and we his underlings, trailing in his wake? Is he our leader, whom we must follow, despite our being at times in not quite the right outfits for the surroundings?

With the great man's head of hair, still jet black at 58 (How does he do it? - question is facetious) we visit a modern office complex, vegetable plots, what looks like an iron ore facility, mixed farmland and suburban housing (it looks like Kanagawa Prefecture, near Oiso or Odawara), through the halls of the Prime Minister's Residential Quarters (See? He isn't afraid of ghosts!), down a Tokyo back alley (I would say in Tokyo's Minato Ward) and in the company of two Special Police officers in a parking structure (What is he trying to say here? No fear of assassins?).

We see Abe's face for the first time, from below (where else could we be, in relation to him?) as he strides through the gray awfulness that is Japanese bureaucrat offices (I would say this inside the Finance Ministry...but I have never been therein). Then we are back behind the man, going up what looks like a staircase out of the subway at Kasumigaseki, running upward with him toward the light.

In the last part of the commercial we are very definitely in Minato Ward, on a rooftop in high-rise condominium-clogged Shibaura (the area on Tokyo's bayfront where a glut of these high-priced condos led to a fierce competition in between realtors which came to be known as "the Wangan Senso"). The view is toward the Rainbow Bridge and Odaiba -- though there is no obvious candidate for the building from which the shot is taken.

Over the scene appears the promise that "the feelings of progress and growth, with those hands" -- meaning the the hands of the viewers, not the PM -- that the people will be able to sense the results of current government policies, soon.

[The prime minister is fixated upon on people's own hands. His repeated wish regarding constitutional revision is to have a document written "by our own hands."]

We end the trip with a backdrop of the view in the opposite direction, toward Roppongi Hills, with the PM again facing us.

Then there is the PM's voiceover through the commercial.

"A new Japan is beginning to move."

"Step by step, with assurance."

"In health and vitality, with strength."

"Toward a safe Japan."

"We will protect Japan."

"We will push Japan forward."

"We will take Japan back. The LDP."

Is it just me, are the promises of security a little overdone? Progress one can promise -- but safety? (Trying telling that to the Pacific and North American plates.)

And are the promises of health and strength, aren't they just a little too self-referential for Abe, with his record of debilitating ulcerative collitis? Or do we need reassurance that he will not collapse this time?

Finally, what are the voters supposed to make of this "We will take Japan back. The LDP" business? The slogan made perfect sense in December, when the government was in the hands of the opposition. But the LDP, in coalition with the New Komeito, now controls the government. If we are to take the non-snigger inducing interpretation of Abe and Company's promise to "take Japan back" (Nippon o, torimodosu), the only folks they can take Japan back from is themselves.

Which indicates that Nippon o, torimodosu means...

The extensive use of the back of the PM's head and the relatively limited set of locations indicates that no one took the making of this commercial too seriously. The scenes with hidden and potential double meanings are too many to be coincidental. The walk down in the hallway of the Old Prime Minister's Residence, for example, takes on the ghost story -- but only, of course, for those who know what the interior of the old Residence looks like.

The whole "walking through Japan" theme has to be a riff on Democratic Party of Japan leader Kaieda Banri's much derided "Walking" poster released in the run up for this election (Link - J). Abe and Co. seem be feeling so comfortable (and why should they not be, given the results in the public opinion polls?) that they are taking chances, throwing the base some red meat, poking the crippled DPJ and its lame leader.

At least that is the way it looks from where I am, which is behind.

--

Later - Despite the close relationship in between the current administration and the Yomuri Shimbun, photos of Abe Shinzo and Watanabe Tsuneo together are rather hard to find. The only significant one in Google Images is this one. Of course, it is a doozy of the mutual back scratching genre, with Abe in between his two People's Honor Award honorees, both of whom were superstars for the Yomiuri Giants, with Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide and Watanabe sitting together right behind Matsui Hideki.


Later still - Pravda-by-the-Palace argues that the LDP and the New Komeito remain wary of slacking off or appearing to be overconfident. (Link)

Sorry...but this election is in the bag. The LDP will win almost every single-seat district. It will win at least one seat in all of the two seat districts and two in where it is running two candidates in the three-, four- and five-seat districts. The New Komeito will pick up at least a seat everywhere it is running a candidate.

The few remaining seats will the subject of bitter struggles in between the DPJ, the Japan Communist Party, the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party. Based on a poll of 30,000 voters (now there's a sample!) the Mainichi Shimbun is predicting the LDP will win around 70 seats outright (Link - J) -- i.e. the party will be in the position to reel in a handful of independent or conservative opposition lawmakers and be able to say, "Hasta la vista, baby" to the New Komeito. The LDP will not actually sever relations with the New Komeito because the party faces a significant breakaway this fall of lawmakers opposing Japan's participation in Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations. However, having at least the theoretical potential to dump the more reticent and passive New Komeito will significantly alter the balance of power in between the LDP and its ruling coalition partner.