Ozawa Ichiro - The Final Act

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, In a few hours from now, Ozawa Ichiro, after a third and final meeting Koshi'ishi Azuma, his erstwhile friend in the Democratic Party of Japan leadership, will announce what he, Ozawa, will do with his party membership credentials.

Chances are he will tear them up.

Unlike in the case of his attempt to out prime minister Kan Naoto, where Ozawa watched the no-confidence vote on a television screen from his office, Ozawa turned up in person to hand the token takers the little blue-green tablet indicating that he was voting "no" agains the pending legislation.

For Ozawa, who is usually either at his home in Setagaya-ku or on the road when the Diet is in session, and who has a history of not showing up at crucial showdowns, to actually show up and vote on legislation in defiance of the party leadership is a strong indicator that he has made up his mind to go down with his ship, one way or the other.

One can imagine the frustration of Koshi'ishi, appealing to Ozawa's considerable sense of self-protection, describing to Ozawa what his future will be should he bolt from the DPJ:

"Without the party to protect you, you will be spending the rest of your living days giving testimony to Diet committees investigating everything you have done in your entire career. Are you ready to face such a future? Are your followers? Or do you actually believe that the LDP, having joined hands with you once, leading to the circumstances contributing to the death of Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo and, out of desperation, nearly joining hands with you again until you backed out after your private deal with Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo and Watanabe Tsuneo led to your DPJ allies turning on you -- that the LDP will now join hands with you to turf out Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko and form a conservative-liberal alliance of convenience with you? Do you not understand there is no there there? Does it not enter your imagination that the LDP and the New Komeito, whom you have both jilted (in the LDP's case four times) will not take this opportunity to join hands with your new enemy the DPJ and redistrict you and all who follow you out of existence? That your newest friends like Yamada Masahiko are nihilists, with nothing to lose?"

It is tempting to believe that Ozawa, having plunged so many times deep into a pool of resolution, only to climb out at the last moment, leaving his followers wet, cold and bedraggled, might be willing try this ploy one last time -- whether or not it salvages a single line of the DPJ manifesto of 2009. It is tempting to believe that his peculiar insertion of the phrase kyoko ni ("forcibly") in his criticisms of the Noda Administration's approach toward the passing the consumption tax legislation indicates he has some flexibility toward the legislation -- that if the passage were somehow accomplished without force, that he might entertain the notion of staying in the party.

However, the indicators are not in favor of this interpretation. Ozawa showed up for a vote in the Diet: that alone is "we interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement" level news. Kyoko ni is probably just rhetoric, an appeal to swing voters who are confused about whether the imposition of the rise in the consumption tax is a good thing or a bad thing, telling these voters, "Good or bad, it was the way that Noda approached the problem that was wrong."

Clouds wreath the capital. Rain has fallen and more is threatened.

The murky beginnings of what one presumes will be a long and memorable day.

Catching Up On The News - Unconstitutional Elections

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Something huge happened yesterday.

In a footnote to my post of yesterday, I noted that NHK announcer Okoshi Kensuke last Thursday confronted Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko with the bald fact that the current map of the House of Representatives districts is unconstitutional, rendering an election impossible on technical grounds. While the Prime Minister had no alternative but to concede that the current map is unconstitutional, he dodged the thrust of Okoshi's question, saying that the Diet had too many important and difficult issues before it for anyone to be discussing a dissolution and an election at this time.

Noda had been, until the live NHK interview, careful to not get cornered on the question of the constitutionality of holding an election. He had left it up to Koshi'ishi Azuma, the Democratic Party of Japan's secretary-general, to tell the seemingly bone-headed members of the political press over and over again that since the issue of the disproportionality of a single vote (ippyo no kakusa) had not been resolved in accordance with the standards set down by the Supreme Court judgment of March 2011, no House of Representatives elections could take place.

While any position aside from the one Koshi'ishi has taken is ludicrous -- unconstitutional meaning “contrary to the basic law of the land, the law upon which all other laws are based” -- Noda has been careful to preserve the notion that the holding of an election is a matter of opinion -- his opinion -- rather than a matter of law.

The reason Noda has needed to maintain this fallacy is simple: his power to call an election is the whip he needs to keep the followers of former DPJ party leader Ozawa Ichiro in line. Nothing terrifies the Ozawa-vetted first termers like the possibility being plunged into an election. With the disdain the public has at present for the DPJ and perhaps permanently for Ozawa, each and every one of these Ozawa acolytes would be wiped out.

Perversely, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito have aided Noda in the maintenance of this illusion. The leaders of both the LDP and the New Komeito know just as well as anyone else that elections are impossible if the districts are unconstitutional. Nevertheless they have been calling for elections for two years straight. And why not? It is the biggest free lunch in history. The public opininon polls on the level of public support for the LDP and the New Komeito could find that both have 0% support and it would not matter: the two parties would still call for elections.

Noda, for his part, tacitly used opposition demands for elections as a means of bolstering the illusion he has wished to preserve. If the opposition is demanding elections, it stands to reason that the opposition at least believes elections can be held.

Hence the sound of breaking glass yesterday when LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru asked Prime Minister Noda, in special Diet Committee session, whether in fact the failure to correct the disproportionality of votes in the electoral districts put a shackle on the right to dissolve the Diet. Noda replied that no, failure to act did not shackle the right and that elections would be held when they he thought they were needed. (J)

Technically, both men are correct. Following through on Ishihara's thought, a dissolution of the Diet would trigger the implementation of Article 54 of the Constitution, which states that following a dissolution of the Diet, an election must be held within 40 days. Since the current electoral districts have been ruled unconstitutional, and the Diet would no longer be in existence to fix them, the election would a priori be void.

As for Noda's insistence that the right to dissolve the Diet is not compromised, his position is true only via the most painstaking of hairsplitting. The right to dissolve the Diet, held by the Emperor but exercised upon the advice of the Prime Minister, is not compromised until the moment the right is exercised, at which point the country would be blasted out into extraconstitutional space.

While the constitutional implications of this conundrum are fascinating*, what was of immense political importance in Ishihara's question was that unless the LDP tries to pull off the same trick that the DPJ has been pulling -- i.e., having the party secretary-general insisting that holding a House of Representatives election is impossible while the party president maintains that it is not -- the delicate minuet Noda and the opposition have been dancing together has come to a sudden stop. If a gaggle of reporters corner LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu and press him on whether or not Ishihara's question means the LDP now believes holding elections is unconstitutional, chances are the not terribly swift-thinking Tanigaki will not have an intelligible response.

If and when Tanigaki flubs his moment in the spotlight, the political game board will become completely scrambled, just when Ozawa Ichiro, the master of Go (Part 1 and Part 2) is set to meet with the prime minister. (J)

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* The current emperor, being the conscientious, cautious but independent-thinking man that he is, would likely, on the most perfect of legal grounds, toss post-1945 precedent into the dustbin by refusing the prime minister's request for a dissolution.

The Article 51 Exemption

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, During the Friday's House of Councillors Budget Committee session, the first Liberal Democratic Party questioner was the painfully little-known Ishizaki Yosuke (OK, try; try to name whom he represents. See? Neither could I. I had to look it up).

Ishizaki Y. (there were, unbelievably, two LDP questioners in Friday's budget session with the surname Ishizaki) began his questions with the following speech, none of which had anything to do with the business of the day:

Last year on March 29, in a session of the Budget Committee with the purpose of reviewing what had happened, I was seated at this seat.

This was the first session of the Budget Committee after the Great Easter Japan Disaster. Prime Minister Kan and the members of the Cabinet were all in emergency disaster relief uniforms. I asked, "Was it not strange for the supreme commander of the disaster relief effort to board a helicopter for the nuclear power station? For the prime minister to go before Tokyo Electric Power Company, going about yelling at them, "What are you going to do?" I asked, "Was not the venting [of the reactor vessels] and the provision of seawater to the reactors slowed down by this?"

What I got in return was, "At at time of national crisis, to question whether or not government the government was harassing [TEPCO and its workers] -- give us a break (keshikaran)"

Yet now, a year later, if you look at the news reports of today, we have come to learn that almost everything I insisted at the time was true. [Isolated shouts]"

Uh, no. In either retractions of previous stories, reports from the news outlets contradicting their own previous assertions and from reports on the investigations of outside organizations, nearly every one of the things you asserted on that day, Senator Ishizaki, turned out to be false.

How do the members of the Diet get away with continuing to hold to positions that are demonstrably untrue? How do they get to repeat them, so that they are once again entered into the historical record?

First, no one is watching. Well, I was watching -- but what good does that do? Actually that is not true either. My old Mizuho Bank branch used to have the Diet sessions on for the edification/entertainment/sedation of their customers waiting their turns. Many municipal office waiting areas have the broadcasts on for similar reasons. So I was not exactly the only witness to Ishizaki's attempt to rerewrite history.

Second, there is the little business of Article 51 of the Constitution. What Senator Ishizaki was insisting was true was a slander of former Prime Minister Kan Naoto. Even though it was not in his initial slanderous remarks, Ishizaki went on later to implicate and by doing so slander the then Chief Cabinet Minister, now Minister of Economics, Trade and Industry Edano Yukio, seated not four meters away.

What could Edano or Kan do to stop Ishizaki from perpetuating lies and damaging their reputations? Absolutely nothing. It was his Diet time, in which he can say any damn thing about any damn citizen he chooses, because, under Article 51:

Members of both Houses shall not be held liable outside the House for speeches, debates or votes cast inside the House.

Unless his own colleagues censure or expel him, a costly process in terms of political capital and time, he is going to have a lectern at which he can spew outrageous (keshikaran) calumnies forever.

Ishizaki Y. is truly blessed. Contrary to the adage, he can have not only his own opinions but his own facts.

For the video of the session, click here, and do a little digging.