The Emperor After The Fall

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Today is The Big Day -- when the judge in the Ozawa Ichiro trial on violations of the Public Funds Control Law Political Funds Control Act hands down his verdict and if Ozawa is found guilty, his sentence. The news is full of analysis of the meaning of the Ozawa verdict, including these two pieces by Toko Sekiguchi (E) and Aurelia George Mulgan (E).

I hate to be the grump in any instance -- but the verdict today is largely irrelevant. As Sekiguchi points out in her piece, Ozawa will appeal if he is found guilty. If he is found not guilty, the Association of Those Seeking the Truth (Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai) will have failed in its quest to milk the arrest of Okubo Takanori for some evidence to put Ozawa away. Given that the members of this group, whoever they are, all seem to be in retirement and thus with plenty of time on their hands to cause mischief (the Devil makes work for idle hands, after all), it is likely the Association will just find another blind alley to send prosecutors running down.

(An aside: the slavering anti-Ozawa weekly Shukan Bunshun decided that yesterday, the eve of the verdict, was the perfect day to release an exclusive story about a heretofore unknown child Ozawa fathered out of wedlock. Classy rag, that Shukan Bunshun.)

Whatever the purported goals of the cases against Ozawa and his aides, the political purpose has been served. The arrest of Okubo forced Ozawa to resign as head of the Democratic Party of Japan on the eve of the election that was to push the Liberal Democratic Party off its perch and install a DPJ-led coalition government. The resignation as party leader prevented Ozawa becoming prime minister. While Ozawa was able to engineer the election of his ally-puppet Hatoyama Yukio as his replacement, with Ozawa taking the role of effective party leader through the post of DPJ Secretary-General, Ozawa was denied the prize which he had long desired and had long labored to seize. As for the arrests of former aides Ishikawa Tomohiro and Ikeda Mitsutomo, on the basis of evidence of violations of the Public Funds Control Law found by the prosecutors after a proctological search through the documents seized in relation to Okubo's arrest, these weakened Ozawa's position in the party, making it possible for middle-level legislators to challenge his stranglehold on party policy making.

Ozawa's indictment on January 31, 2011 (E) gave the anti-Ozawa members of the DPJ, including prime minister Kan Naoto, the leverage needed to force party secretary-general Koshi'ishi Azuma, an Ozawa ally, to suspend Ozawa's party privileges.

Stripped of all formal party positions and even access to party funds for his own reelection. Ozawa had to exercise influence indirectly through the first-term and second-term legislators in Houses of Representatives and the House of Councillors whom he had hand-picked as candidates, and through the largely second- and third-grade legislators who had followed him through party after party. These nominal disciples number about 150 legislators, a third of the DPJ's membership in the Diet.

However, without his hands on the money spigots of the party, particularly the public financing provided to finance elections, Ozawa has had to rely on the bonds of affection, loyalty and his own funding apparatus to keep his allies faithful. This bond has weakened, however, as Ozawa's time in internal exile has dragged on. On issues of policy, such as opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the rise in the consumption tax, he has had to ally himself with other disaffected elements of the party, such as Mr. No To Everything Yamada Masahiko. He also found himself, in June 2011, on the verge joining hands with the LDP, the party he had worked so hard to unseat and dismantle, in a vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Kan. Only a last-minute and ultimately empty face-saving compromise worked out by the feckless Hatoyama prevented Ozawa from fulfilling the media's negative portrayal of  him as a selfish destroyer of parties and governments.

Even this indirect influence over party policy making has evaporated, however. In a show of principle and utter political naïveté, Ozawa's allies in the DPJ dragged out the party debate over the legislation raising the consumption tax from a projected 3 days to 3 weeks. Exasperated, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko cut off debate, giving the final decision on the legislation to Policy Research Chairman Maeda Maehara Seiji -- an outcome that effectively negated the entire three weeks of debate. In response, four of Ozawa's acolytes in government positions and 30 in party positions resigned their posts. Eager to preserve party unity, the party leadership refused to accept the resignations, giving the legislators and Ozawa a chance to reconsider their actions. After six days of waiting, the government accepted the resignations of the government appointees on April 5 (E). It still left the door open, though, for those who had resigned party posts.

The party, however, very quietly shut that final door on Monday (J,) accepting resignations of the Ozawa allies who had resigned their party posts.

So as the political commentariat and twitterati await the verdict with bated breath, the political impact of the outcome is less significant than political observers will admit. Ozawa is now more shadow than shadow shogun. The current leadership group, knowing his tendencies, will not permit his appointment to any position of power. He will not be allowed near the party's pot of political funds. His followers have abandoned the positions they could have used to influence or if necessary gum up policy making.

Ozawa has been the most influential, hated and fascinating politician of the last 30 years. However, whatever happens today will not shake the political world to its roots. Its branches may shiver a bit -- but that is all.

 Later - My apologies for the HTML failures that led to half the original text being swallowed up into the ether.

Still later - Many thanks to alert readers O.J. and M.P. for catching the errors.

The Age Of Innocence

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, With the Democratic Party of Japan under the leadership of Noda Yoshihiko rolling back many of the changes the party promised in the 2009 manifesto...

1) the elimination of the child allowance (kodomo teate) and the reinstitution of the child support payment system (jido teate)

2) the proposed restart of construction of the Yamba Dam

3) the raising of the consumption tax without calling an election

4) permitting bureaucrats, in particular the head of the Cabinet Legislative Office, to testify in Diet committee session

...one could come away with the impression that there is not a yen's worth of difference in between living under the rule of the DPJ and living under the rule of the Liberal Democratic Party.

However, there is one major difference in the way the machinery of government functions now and the way it did under the previous regime -- and it is of such vital importance that persons of conscience must pray that some way, somehow, the DPJ wins back the support of the voters in the months ahead:

Under the DPJ, the organs of the law have not been used to capriciously imprison those who buck the system.

Under the LDP, the prosecutors office sent former Livedoor president Horie Takafumi to prison on charges that, if they had been applied to Japan's banking community, would have sent hundreds, if not thousands, of bank executives to prison. The confessions that were the sole pieces of evidence of Horie's complicity in misstating the value of Livedoor assets were extracted from his subordinates by placing them in solitary confinement in unheated cells during one of the coldest winters in the last half-century and threatening them with lengthy prison sentences should they not identify their employer as a co-conspirator.

The prosecutors office sent activist investor Murakami Yoshiaki to prison based solely on a confession police tricked a naive Murakami into making. Livedoor executives, who testified against each other in their own trials, were united in stating that Murakami was innocent.

Just when it seemed predestined that Ozawa Ichiro was going to be prime minister of Japan after the next House of Representatives election, the prosecutors moved in on Ozawa Ichiro political secretary Okubo Takanori for campaign funding violations, ostensibly for knowingly accepting donations from a private organization founded and funded by a mid-sized construction company for the purpose of evading campaign finance rules. The Okubo arrest meant Ozawa had to resign as DPJ leader, robbing him of his rightful chance to become PM. He was able to engineer the election of his ally/puppet Hatoyama Yukio as his successor but this was a poor substitute for actually winning the top prize.

Prosecutors used the Okubo arrest as a pretext for seizing the records of Ozawa and his funding organization, the Rikuzankai. They then proceeded to go on a fishing expedition, trolling through the records for something, anything to send Ozawa to prison.

What they found was a mis-recording in the 2004, 2005 and 2007 (but strangely, not the 2006) Rikuzankai accounts of a personal loan Ozawa extended to the organization. The loaned sum was used as collateral (tampo) for a bank loan (in Japan, unless you borrow from the consumer finance companies, you can only borrow money if you can prove you can pay the full amount of the loan back, immediately). The recording mistakes were such that if that were they found in the accounts of any other politician, they would have earned the perpetrators a stern verbal warning. Instead member of the House of Representatives and former Ozawa secretary Ishikawa Tomohiro and Ozawa secretary Ikeda Mitsutomo were arrested and convicted of campaign finance violations.

With Ozawa as the party with fiduciary responsibility in the case, his name and seal appearing on the first page of the account books, the prosecutors could certainly have gone after him next. However, somehow in the interim, something has dulled the heretofore zealous prosecutors office. It certainly had the right target: the most unpopular, least-trusted politician in the country; a man who behaves like a complete jerk toward even his ostensible allies; a person disappears from public view, only to reappear wearing a surgical mask, whenever things heat up; and a man with a seemingly inexhaustible, to borrow an image from Okumura Jun, ATM located in his home.

Nevertheless, the prosecutors refused to indict Ozawa on anything. It was left up to the never-say-die mugwumps of the "The Association of Those Seeking the Truth" (Shinjitsu o motomeru kai) to force the courts into appointing a trio of lawyers from the Tokyo #2 Bar Association (and boy, did it take a long time to find three lawyers willing to sacrifice their time, potential income and reputations on the case) to file an indictment of Ozawa not on the provable charge of fiduciary negligence but on unprovable charges of conspiracy to file falsified campaign documents -- unprovable because the sole piece of evidence was a confession forced from Ishikawa that he had told Ozawa about the misleading records, evidence that the judge in Ishikawa's trial threw out as a product of prosecutorial misconduct.

That the judge in the Ozawa case would also throw out the confession was nearly guaranteed (judges in Japanese courts looooovvvve precedent). He did indeed throw it out, pretty much ending the chances of a guilty verdict (the judge's verdict will be delivered on April 26).

Anyway, since the election of a DPJ-led government, we have seen nothing of the "the nail that sticks up will be hammered down" miscarriages of justice of the kind that sent Horie and Murakami and may still send Okubo, Ishikawa and Ikeda to prison. With the DPJ in power it is the nose-thumbers, the outcasts and the misfits (and the occasional mostly harmless loony) who have control of the asylum.

That is the way it should have been years ago. For this blessed land's sake, that is the way it should remain.

Ozawa Ichiro Clears A Major Hurdle

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, In his trial for purportedly overseeing the filing of false political funding organization accounts, Ozawa Ichiro today received a huge gift from the Tokyo District Court. The court threw out as evidence the confession investigators forced from Diet member Ishikawa Tomohiro, Ozawa's former political secretary. (J)

Ishikawa's confession was the one damning piece of evidence the prosecuting attorneys had against Ozawa. It had been thrown out of court in Ishikawa's own trial due to evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. Ishikawa was still convicted along with two other former or present Ozawa secretaries of filing false funding accounts based on other evidence.

Commentators agree with Ozawa's lawyers' contention that without the acceptance of Ishikawa's confession into evidence, the case against Ozawa falls apart (J). Only in Ishikawa's confession was there any statement that Ozawa unambiguously assented to the falsification of the recording of a personal loan Ozawa made to his political funding organization, the Rikuzankai.

Ozawa's full exoneration will not come until April, when the court renders its verdict. However, with an acquittal now a near certainty, Ozawa will have greater leeway to inject himself in the political fights within the DPJ, particularly the battle over the raising of the consumption tax (E). He can also be expected to cause headaches for Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko over whether or not he will lead his followers and allies within the party to join with the opposition in passing a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet, as he nearly last June did against the Kan Cabinet.

From all appearances, the big dog has slipped his leash.

The JNN Poll of February 4-5 - A Quick Review

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, This is a "catch it while you can" post.


TBS has put up the results of its telephone public opinion poll taken February 4-5 (J).

The key takeaways from the post are:

Support for the cabinet has declined to 32.2%, while the percentage of those not supporting the Cabinet has risen to 66.6%. The decline in the Noda Cabinet's support numbers have been uninterrupted since the cabinet's inauguration, with no bounce at all from the cabinet reshuffle of January 13.

This news would be terrible news for Noda if it were not for the conveniently provided numbers for the Kan Cabinet, which stood at 28.3% at the time of the opening of last year's regular session of the Diet. Of course at the time the Kan Cabinet was reeling from the horrible mishandling of the Chinese fishing boat collision and subsequent leak of the video of that collision (a pair of extraordinary blunders that Sengoku Yoshito walked away from with a censure from the House of Councillors. That Sengoku is now in charge of drafting the DPJ's new electoral manifesto shows that some folks and organizations never learn).　Kan received a bump due to his efforts post-3/11 but never regained the popularity Noda enjoys now.

As for the reasons why voters do not support the Noda Cabinet, the tired old "Because we have no hopes for his policies" occupies the top spot with 42% of all those not supporting the Cabinet. The reason why this is tired and old is that "no hopes for his policies" is always in the top spot, that or "no hopes for improving the economy" -- something a prime minister nowadays has almost no control over. As for not implementing policies, in a previous post I have indicated that there is, quite on the contrary, a great deal of movement toward the implementation of policies, if not quite the policies of the DPJ per se.

- As for the fraught legislation raising the consumption tax from 5% to 10% by fiscal year 2015, a majority of those polled, 56% are in favor, with 46% opposed. This is good news for the Noda government, for which the passage of the consumption tax legislation is the highest hurdle in its agenda for the current Diet session.

- Demonstrating that "by the year 2075" has not yet stuck in the voters heads as the height of absurdity, the further 7.1% rise in the consumption tax projected to be need by that date in order to pay for the 2009 manifesto promise of a floor of 70,000 yen per month in national pension payments is unpopular with 72% of the voters. These voters want the DPJ to reconsider its 2009 pledge -- no matter that only a small fraction of those offering this opinion will still be alive in 2075.

- Demonstrating that the sudden burst of activity in regionalist politics is having an effect on voters, 75% of those polled believe it desirable that regional parties participate in national politics. Unsurprisingly, the top vote getter among politicians that the voters find themselves drawn to is Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru, the poster child of the regionalist movement. Number two on the voters' mind is Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor Ishihara Shintaro, who has allied himself in name with Hashimoto's proposed administrative reforms in Osaka Prefecture. Coming in in third place is current Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko.

Though it does not appear in the above linked report, the JNN poll found the support numbers for the main national parties still on a downward slide, with the popularity of both the DPJ and the Liberal Democratic Party below 20% and falling from last month's reading. The continuing decline in DPJ and LDP numbers is good for the country as it reduces to nil the enthusiasm of either party to face the voters in a snap election. These figures and the sudden irruption of interest in the regional parties going national are strong incentives for the two main national parties, along with the LDP's alliance partner the New Komeito, to produce a solid record of achievement in the current Diet session.

Whether the DPJ and the LDP follow these incentives, or find themselves getting sidetracked yet again by new developments in the ever-shifting saga of Ozawa Ichiro and his convicted lieutenants (one of whom, Ishikawa Tomohiro just got married to a former television presenter -- demonstrating that even future jailbirds still got wings to fly), remains the big question.

Image courtesy: TBS

Later - Here it is the next day and the link to the TBS report has already been removed from the Web.

As I said, catch as catch can.