Japan's Politics Stomps On The Accelerator

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens entitles one of the chapters "TOO FULL OF ADVENTURE TO BE BRIEFLY DESCRIBED."*

I feel the same way about events in politics these past few days.

-- Liberal Democratic Party president Tanigaki Sadakazu faced reality yesterday, giving up on even running for reelection (E). That he waited so long, forcing his second-in-command Ishihara Nobuteru to forego advance preparation for his own bid for the presidency, either represents faith triumphing over observable fact, or payback for Ishihara's only half-hearted expressions of support for Tanigaki's running for a second term.

Though Ishihara appears to be on course for a victory in the presidential race, and, after the next House of Representatives election, the premiership, it bears noticing that historically his presidential bid is an aberration. Only two secretary-generals have taken over as president since the peaceful, negotiated transition from Nakasone Yasuhiro to Takeshita Noboru in November 1987.

The first was the closed-door, five person negotiated agreement for Secretary-General Mori Yoshiro to take over the premiership from the brain dead but still on life support Obuchi Keizo, three days after Obuchi suffered his fatal stroke.

The other instance of a secretary-general succeeding a party president was Aso Taro taking over for Fukuda Yasuo when Fukuda suddenly resigned on September 1, 2008. Aso had only been in office a month, having been named secretary-general in a leadership shakeup on August 1.

The Aso case points out the main reason why most secretary-generals cannot usually make the direct transition from the party #2 position to the presidency. Under normal circumstances, the secratary-general has been the right-hand man to the president, as much responsible for the daily decisions, right or wrong, as the man in the #1 spot. The secretary-general has also always been seen as bearing ultimate responsibility for the LDP's performance in elections. Many a leadership transition was triggered by the party having a poor showing in an election, mandating that the secretary-general resign and serve a brief stint in limbo.

However, in this instance, the abrasiveness and shallow party roots of Ishihara's main challenger, foreign and security policy specialist Ishiba Shigeru, seem to be showing a green light for Ishihara's election, possibly even in the first round vote of the LDP local chapters.

The other challengers in the LDP race -- former prime minister Abe Shinzo, Machimura Nobutaka and Hayashi Yoshimasa -- seem to be in the race for tactical or public relations reasons.

Hayashi is the Washington think tank candidate -- fluent in English and a familiar face in Washington. He is, however, a member of the House of Councillors -- whose members are seen as not having a personal investment in the party's performance in the House of Representatives.  Hayashi is seen as being only technically available to step into the position of prime minister.

Machimura is the faction head candidate, participating so that the list of candidates has at least one faction head in it. Machimura's candidacy presents another hurdle for Machimura faction member Ishihara, as he would normally count on the votes of his faction as the core of his support in the Diet members' round of voting.

Abe is entering the race for purely tactical reasons. He used to be both the ultra-conservative and Washington think tank candidate. His breakdown while in office, unsurprisingly cooled most Washington and national interest. He does remain, however, the most recognizable of the unapologetic, fantastic history-believing nationalists. He is thus probably running in order to play the part of kingmaker in between Ishiba and Ishihara, extracting a promise of accelerated militarization and anti-Chinese and anti-South Korean stances in return for the votes of his supporters.

-- The window for declaring oneself a DPJ leadership candidate closed yesterday. With Hosono Goshi having been talked out of running on Friday last, a field of four candidates-- deridable as "Noda Yoshihiko and the Three Dwarfs" -- now are set for a whirlwind campaign ending on September 21. (E)

As Okumura Jun has noted, the explosion of interest in a Hosono candidacy last week was prima facie evidence that the three remaining Noda challengers -- Haraguchi Kazuhiko, Akamatsu Hirotaka and Kano Michihiko -- do not inspire. In speeches yesterday, each of the candidates, whilst criticizing the prime minister and his policy of accommodation with the LDP-New Komeito alliance, revealed his particular weakness. Haraguchi fulminated about the public's loss of faith in the party due to the abandonment of the promises in the 2009 manifesto. Haraguchi seems unaware that 1) manifesto author Ozawa Ichiro and his most of his acolytes decamped a few months ago, leaving a very small audience, at least among Diet members, for the "we have forgotten our roots" message.

Akamatsu's and Kano's candidacies seem more tactical, given their comparatively advanced ages (Akamatsu is 63; Kano 70). Akamatsu represents the potential votes of the party's under-appreciated socialists, while Kano can offer the votes of his own group and the votes of the members with a visceral hatred/fear of a DPJ commitment to participate in the Trans Pacific Partnership. Kano already has a history of vote trading, his support having been a crucial component of Noda Yoshihiko's victory over the Ozawa-supported Kaieda Banri in the 2011 leadership election.

Both Akamatsu and Kano railed against the three-party agreement that made the passage of the social welfare and pension reform bills possible. Noda defended it, and defended the extension of the three party agreement into the fall extraordinary session. Both sides are just blowing smoke, however. The three party agreement has falls into abeyance with Tanigaki's withdrawal from the LDP presidential race and the automatic evaporation on Spetember 8 of the bond issuance bill and electoral reform bill.

-- Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru on Sunday hosted a symposium (E) introducing the ideas that will vault his regional movement into a national political party, the Nihon (or Nippon) Ishin no Kai (the Japan Renewal Party or Japan Restoration Party. By the way, forget about running a search on 日本維新の会 -- what you get is the Facebook page of a Haraguchi Kazuhiko study group of the same name). At the seemingly interminable meeting (five hours in real time) Hashimoto introduced the seven members of the Diet who will today (Tuesday) tender their resignations from their current parties in time for the the JRA's coming out reception on Wednesday. That three of the seven are House of Councillors proportional seat members of the Your Party indicates the prescience of Michael Penn's private circulation article, of August 27, "Yoshimi Watanabe's Your Party in Terminal Crisis."

Of the remaining four defectors, three come from the DPJ and one from the LDP. Matsunami Kenta of the LDP is a proportional seat member of the House of Representatives, and from the Kinki bloc where Osaka is located. That the majority of the JRA's Diet members are proportional seat members indicates the cautious attitude district seat holders are taking with towards to Hashimoto's leap into national politics. That the majority of the defectors are also from the House of Councillors, rather than the more volatile and politically significant House of Representatives, indicates a further lack of certainty among those dissatisfied with the status quo that Hashimoto has coattails.

Also attending and speaking at the meeting were the usual suspects of devolution of power to local governments: former comedian and Miyazaki governor Higashikokubaru Hideo and two of The Three Hiroshis: former Kanagawa Yokohama pretty boy governor mayor Nakata Hiroshi and former revisionist textbook inceptor and Suginami City mayor Yamada Hiroshi, whose Spirit of Japan Party (Nihon soshinto) went nowhere. (J)

That Hashimoto featured these pre-August 2009 election retreads at his talk fest, and indeed wants them to run as Nihon Ishin no Kai candidates, indicates that for all the media interest and public opinion poll enthusiasm for the new party, there is little meat yet on the bones.

-- The deployment of MV-22 Osprey aircraft to the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa received what was ostensibly a significant blow on Sunday from a mass protest (E). Organizers claimed 101,000 persons participated in the rally. Aerial images on television seemed to indicate the size of the crowd was closer to 20,000, though it is possible thousands were, like crowd at the July 16 nuclear protest, hiding under the trees from the blazing sun.

Given that signing off on Osprey operations is electoral poison, it is likely that the final OK will be given by a lame duck Cabinet after after the results of a House of Representatives elections are in. That the U.S. Marine Corps generally gets what it wants means that the effectiveness of the protest is about as doubtful as its crowd numbers.

-- The purported suicide of Financial Services and Postal Reform Minister Matsushita is still the top of the news -- as a such a rare occurrence should be.

I loathe conspiracy theories and theorists but the official narratives so far regarding this case do not hold together. We are supposed to believe that a man found toppled over had hanged himself, or strangled himself with cords of some kind. We are being asked to believe that his security detail did not have a key to his condominium, having to use Minister Matsushita's wife's key to open the condominium front door. We are being asked to believe that he left goodbye messages to his wife, Prime Minister Noda and the Cabinet. We are being asked to believe that the imminent publication of a Shukan Shincho expose of a purported mistress may have pushed Matsushita to take his own life. (J)

As to the last claim, when you are seventy-three, recovering from prostrate prostate cancer and are revealed to have engaged in extra-marital shenanigans, you are well past the "this will ruin my career" stage.

Next up should be revelations of the content of the purported three goodbye notes.

Do I expect to be seeing the actual texts, ever?

No.

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

* Demonstrating that British comic writing has been in the dead-pan, self-referential subversion of the narrative voice business for a very long time.

Tanigaki's Reelection: Deader Than Elvis

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Elvis Presley, of course.

Liberal Democratic Party president Tanigaki Sadakazu drifted further down in his Kurztian course yesterday.

In what should have been a mere formality, he called upon Koga Makoto, leader of the Kochikai (Koga Faction). A formality because Tanigaki is himself a member of the Kochikai, having merged his own faction, also called the Kochikai, with Koga's in May of 2008, first in order to order to reunite the sundered original Kochikai, which split into two competing groups in 2001 and second and more importantly, to gain leverage through numbers in intra-LDP fights for position and spoils.

Now as the champion of the rebuilt Koseikai, albeit arising out of the far smaller of the two shards of the original faction, Tanigaki should, out of the bonds of loyalty that bind LDP members to one another even when their bonding makes zero sense in terms of ideology or general election strategy, have received Koga's support.

Tanigaki did not get it. (E)

Koga has been a known opponent of the Tanigaki doctrine of taking a confrontational stance toward the Democratic Party of Japan's every proposal in a bid to force a House of Representatives election. He encouraged cooperation, being a major back room facilitator of the DPJ-LDP-New Komeito agreement to pass the bills reforming the social welfare and pension systems, including the raising of the consumption tax.

The LDP's voting on August 29 in support of the seven party censure motion, which condemned the three party agreement, infuriated Koga. He could not, would not support Tanigaki's continued reign as party president. (J)

Without the support of his faction behind him in the party election, Tanigaki has essentially zero chance of rounding up the even the 20 signatures necessary for applying to be a candidate. No one wants to be associated with a politician who has been cast off by his faction leader.

Unwilling as ever to comprehend that some things are just impossible, Tanigaki has yet to call it a day.

By the way, unlike Tanigaki's reelection chances, the other Elvis is quite alive...and laughing at himself.

Tanigaki Sadakazu In The Heart Of His Darkness

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

- Apocalypse Now (1979)

There are number of ways one can betray oneself. One can violate one's stated principles. One can behave in a manner that defies simple logic. One can act in a way that leads one's friends to abandon you.

In general, it is best to avoid all of the above.

However, there are times that we flawed creatures really, really, really want something so badly we are willing to betray ourselves. In these cases is still best to limit oneself to one of the above forms of self-injury on any given day.

Yesterday, the Liberal Democratic Party and their leader Tanigaki Sadakazu threw that concept into the fire.

Immediately after the Democratic Party of Japan's ramming of the bond issuance bill and the electoral reform bill through a just short of half-empty House of Representatives, the LDP and the New Komeito submitted to the House of Councillors a childish and nearly parodic motion of censure to that House's president.

The two parties wanted to have a vote on their motion the next day.

Unfortunately for the two parties, they had not conferred with the other opposition parties in the House of Councillors, whose votes they needed for the LDP-New Komeito motion to pass. When negotiators from the two parties went to meet their peers in the other opposition parties, they were aghast to find out that the other parties wanted the LDP and the New Komeito to vote for their censure motion, which had been sitting on ice in the House of Councillors since August 7.

Since the August 7 bill of censure contained a condemnation of the DPJ-LDP-New Komeito Three Party Agreement on the passage of the social welfare and pension bills -- and singled out for condemnation the consumption tax bill, which the LDP and New Komeito had both voted for, the tax rise indeed being a campaign promise of the LDP -- voting for such a censure motion would seem out of the question.

However, to everyone's surprise but those who know how deep the rot inside the LDP extends, the LDP leadership said:

"OK, if you are adamant about this, we are cool with voting for your motion."

Which immediately led to the New Komeito asking for time for "an adjustment" (chosei) of the atttack on the prime minister.

I would have loved to have been at that strategy meeting...

New Komeito Member (slowly, as if in distress): "OK, let me see if I have this straight.

You want us to vote in favor of a censure motion condemning the Three Party Agreement, an agreement to which we were two of the three Parties...and which also condemns the legislation agreed upon in that agreement, that we, together with a wounded DPJ, dutifully voted in favor of in the House of Councillors...legislation which, may I remind you, was not in the DPJ's manifesto, but in the LDP's manifesto.

Please tell me that this is not the plan."

LDP Member (grinning): "That's the plan!"

At which point the New Komeito delegation probaly told -- or should have told -- their peers in their longtime alliance partner:

"We twisted the arms of our local party organizations to forge this alliance. We took a huge blow to our reputation as the party of peace by voting with you on the dispatch of Maritime Self Defense Forces ships to the Indian Ocean. We hung with you when you tried to turn back the clock to the pre-war era under Abe Shinzo. We got wiped out in the 2009 House of Representatives election because of our association with you. Our district vote switching in that election saved your party from utter annihilation.

We have been through hell and high water with you.

But this, this insane.

Sorry, but you're on your own now."

I have said it before -- when the religious party in a secular-religious party coalition is the voice of logic, moderation, patience and the dirtying ones' hands in the service of a greater good -- then you are suffering from a serious breakdown in the natural order.

Undeterred by their friends having abandoned them, the LDP yesterday linked arms with the remaining opposition parties in the House of Councillors, including the People's First Party headed by the LDP's arch-foe and designated punching bag Ozawa Ichiro, to pass the August 7 motion of censure, the New Komeito's members walking out of the chamber before the vote.

The motion passed, 129 votes to 91.

Ostensibly, the passage of the motion of censure means the current Diet session is over. The House of Representatives can continue to carry out its business. The House of Councillors, according to tradition if not law or rule, goes on immediate hiatus. The tradition of ceasing all business after a motion of censure is a reason why under normal conditions, the House of Councillors has indulged in this non-binding nonsense on what had been previously determined to be the last day of the Diet session.

We live, however, in abnormal times. The inability of one man, Tanigaki Sadakazu, to accept that he has never had what it takes to be LDP president, much less Prime Minister of Japan -- and the inability of the LDP presidential hopefuls in the top leadership, with their vested interest in maintaining the status of the office of the president even as it was being dragged down by an incompetent -- have left the LDP sans sense, sans morality, sans anything.

Phi Slamma Jamma

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, I obviously did not think they had it in them.

However, faced with a Liberal Democratic Party threat to submit a censure motion against Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko tomorrow, the members of the Democratic Party of Japan ignored the bad optics of the LDP opposition parties boycotting the Diet plenary session to cram not just the bond issuance bill but the electoral reform bill, which the Special Committee on Political Ethics and Election Law sent to the floor of the House of Representatives only yesterday, down opposition's throats. (J)

Now that the bills have passed the House of Representatives, they go to committee in the House of Councillors, where the opposition, led by the LDP-New Komeito alliance will have to justify on camera why they are pushing the government to the edge of fiscal crisis and what is wrong with the DPJ's electoral system reform bill.

And wouldn't ya knowit, even though the DPJ, the LDP and the New Komeito divvy up the chairmanships of the House of Councillors committees thusly:

Full Committees
DPJ 12
LDP 10
New Komeito 3

Independent Sub-committees
DPJ 1
LDP 1

Investigative Commissions
DPJ 3
LDP 2

the chairs of the Finance Committee and the Special Committee on Political Ethics and Election Law are both members of the DPJ.

Did I say something about electoral reform being the crown jewel of the 2009 election, the prize worth the fighting for?

With DPJ members as the masters of ceremonies, the LDP and the New Komeito will have to talk or walk. They must either explain themselves or boycott the proceedings.

It's a lose-lose proposition.

The DPJ does not have the votes in the House of Councillors to pass the bond issuance legislation -- the bill it really needs to pass in the these last few remaining days of the regular Diet session. However, it has set up the conditions for the LDP take the rap should the government shut down because it cannot pay its bills.

The DPJ may not be ready for prime time. It still lacks, for example, a serpent- tongued guy or gal to make exquisity verbal hamburger of every LDP hypocrisy or revision of the historical record.

However, in terms of in-your-face slamming down of legislation, the DPJ's got game.

Do Japan's Progressives Have To Lose Their Minds?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

Something has gone wrong
Sighing, sighing
Faces have turned long
Crying, cryin'
Hear them sob and whine
Tearful, tearful
That's a real good sign that they're feelin' glum
Sad sad times have come...

- REM and CTW, "Furry Happy Monsters" (1998) *

In the same edition of the Tokyo Shimbun as the cartoon featured in yesterday's post (thank you again Jordan) the powers that be there printed an editorial that simply boggles the imagination.

Read it, please.

But wait! Before you do, get down in a prone position! I was luckily already on the tatami when I read this piece. Otherwise I would have hit the floor at a possibly injurious velocity. (Link)

For those with neither the time, inclination or capacity to read the original, here is the deal.

The Tokyo Shimbun, while it is only a prefectural newspaper and the offspring of the Nagoya-based Chunichi Shimbun, is fairly well established as the broadsheet of progressivism. Some might ask whether or not The Asahi Shimbun is not the standard bearer here. Sadly, the Asahi is not progressive, merely confused.

Anyway, the Tokyo Shimbun is the reliable voice of the non-Marxist left.

Which is why the editorial so shocking: it echoes the rhetoric of the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito regarding the need for a Diet dissolution and elections.

Since a direct translation will take too long, here is a synopsis:

1) The "politics of being able to come to a decision" (kimerareru seiji) was just a cover story for the passage of a bill raising the consumption tax.

2) Now that there are only 10 working days left before the official end of the Diet session, what could the DPJ-LDP-New Komeito working arrangement hope to "decide"?

3) The first thing that needs to be decided is the matter of the disproportionately represented districts. The DPJ submitted to committee its version of a reform bill (I have argued previously that this bill is a red herring, meant to fail or never be voted upon - MTC). Opposition parties boycotted the session, leaving the DPJ representatives voting to send the bill to the floor of the House of Representatives in a show of force (kyoko).

4) This was no way to handle a matter as fundamental as the means by which Diet members are to be chosen.

5) Since the opposition parties control the House of Councillors, the sending of the DPJ bill to the floor without the consent of the LDP and the New Komeito is pointless, especially as the current bill is a patchwork of ideas without a guiding principle.

6) Did they DPJ not send to the floor this ragbag bill without a hope of passage only to delay the House of Representatives election where they are predicted to go down to ignominious defeat?

7) In order to put the questions of the necessity of raising of the consumption tax to the voters, hurry up and pass the minimal +0/-5 revision, then dissolve the Diet.

8) As for fundamental reforms such as cuts in the number of Diet members, what is realistic is to leave the problem to be solved in the interval between the upcoming election and the election after, through the setting up of a commission of experts to debate the problem.

9) Before attacking the proportional seat numbers, which reflect the people's will, try the more painful cuts of the number of districts; of the amount of public campaign finance extended; of the salaries of seat holder salaries and stipends for PR and research purposes.

10) The DPJ decided to send to the floor the bill on the issuance of new bonds without the LDP present at the committee meeting. This was impermissibly impolite conduct of Diet business.

11) The LDP intends on submitting a censure bill to the House of Councillors on the 29th. If it passes, the Diet will thereafter be just spinning its wheels. The disproportionality issue will be left in abeyance and the bond issuance bill will be put off for later.

12) It is difficult to accept a "politics of being able to come to a decision" when its result is the increasing of the burdens shouldered by the populace. It is time to put an end the politics of that fails to decide what should be decided, leaving only each side blaming the other.

This is the product of a diseased mind. Point #8 is beyond bizarre: no one could possibly believe that anything approaching fair and unbiased redistricting would be possible were the LDP to regain power, as the LDP would should the +0/-5 solution be adopted. The LDP had 54 years in power during which it could have installed a mechanism for assuring the proper representation of all the citizens. For its own profit it did nothing. Only under after its brush with life in the opposition in 1993-94 did it consent to the first serious reforms of the districts. To belive that a panel of experts would achieve diddly squat under an LDP regime is flat out nuts.

As for the lack of politesse in voting of bills out of committees when the opposition is boycotting, when did the LDP ever restrain itself on this issue during its years in power? Besides, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, if the other side does not want to show up, you cannot stop them.

Some folks are angry that the DPJ has not been able to fulfill the promises of its manifesto. Many are furious that Noda Yoshihiko staked his and his party's political life on rasing the consumption tax, an LDP manifesto promise.

However, that the editorial division of a major newspaper should forget history and despise political reality (where the LDP-New Komeito's control of the House of Councillors gives them a perverse control of the government's agenda) to the point where it is screaming "Oh, just tear it all down!" indicates we are on the precipice of a descent into nihilism.

C'mon boys and girls (and furry monsters too): things are not so bad. So the Augean Stables are taking a bit longer than a weekend to clean up. What do you expect after a fifty-four year-long elective dictatorship?


* The original version of this song has an East Asian history angle. The first line of the chorus, "Shining Happy People Holding Hands," was the title of a PRC poster lead vocalist and lyricist Michael Stipe saw in 1991. The poster had been issued as a part of the propaganda campaign encouraging national unity in the aftermath of the Tien An Men protests and subsequent crackdown. The song was meant to be sickly ironic. However, as was the case with the band's song "The One I Love," the story of an abusive relationship, the public absorbed the meaning of the song in a manner exactly opposite the way the artists had intended. The band had to just go with the flow. As a result the above linked video is a subversion of a subversion of a subversion of a suppression of a subversion.

Why Noda Chose The Consumption Tax Or How Rick And The SSJ Meet Dracula's Daughter

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, There are two major list-serves on contemporary Japan, the NBR Japan Forum and the SSJ-Forum. Many of the same individuals contribute to both, with the NBR Japan Forum being heavier on economics and security and the SSJ-Forum, unsurprisingly, being more often on society, culture and politics. Of the two, the SSJ-Forum is generally the more useful, as a large number of the posts are events schedules, calls for papers or book release announcements. Also the SSJ-Forum does not tend to get clogged up with long-winded debates over issues relevant to the participants but irrelevant to contemporary Japan (Rod Armstrong and Mike Smitka, I am not talking about you. Keep up the good fight!).

However...

On August 4, Richard Katz of the Oriental Economist newsletter posted a question to the SSJ-Forum:

I'm curious to know how rational choice theorists would explain PM Noda's single-minded devotion to pushing the unpopular consumption tax hike.

My understanding of rational choice theory is that it borrows its methodology from economics in which actors try maximize their utility in the narrow sphere of the
marketplace, and utility is defined by some fairly well-specified objective function, e.g. firms try to maximize profits, consumers try to maximize materal (sic) living standards and so will buy a $300 TV rather than a $400 one if the two are perceived to be identical. In the case of rational choice theory about politicians, as I understand it, the objective function is usually said to be to gain power by getting elected and re-elected, rising in the ranks of their party and office, and being part of a ruling party. Ideology, principles, beliefs are all laid by the wayside.

How can any of this explain Noda's actions? As a result of the tax hike and his mishandling of the nuclear restart issue, the Democratic Party of Japan is headed for a calamitous defeat. Most surveys (as well as my own personal conversations with DPJ and LDP Diet members) suggests the DPJ would win about 100 seats if the election were held now whereas the LDP would win 200. One first-term DPJ Diet member from western Japan, a genuine reformer, bitterly told me he may need to switch to Hashimoto's party if he wants to survive the next election. Needless to day, Noda will no longer be head of the DPJ in the aftermath of such an electoral disaster (assuming he remains PM in the run-up to it). Whether these numbers turn out to be right or not, depends on the Hashimoto party and other factors, but I don't know of anyone who believes the DPJ will win.

[snip]

So, how does rational choice explain Noda's willingness to sacrifice his own career and his party's fortunes in order to "do the right thing" as he saw it?

If one says that "doing the right thing" is now part of the objective function, then rational choice theory is basically left with saying: "he did it because he wanted to do it." That, to me, hardly seems like a contribution to either explanation or prediction.

BTW, this is not a rhetorical question on my part. I have little doubt that rational choice theorists do have an explanation for Noda's actions; I just can't
figure out what it would be. I'm hoping that its advocates on the list can help me out.

The question has prompted a number of luminaries in the field -- Aurelia George Mulgan, Thomas Berger, Ellis Kraus, Okumura Jun -- to post partial answers to Katz's question. These having been popping into my mail box at the rate of about one every 18 hours.

All of which makes me feel like Dracula's daughter -- at least as she is portrayed by Lily Tomlin in her one-person sketch, "Lud and Marie Meet Dracula's Daughter" of, oh, way too long ago.

Have a listen.

OK, now that you are back -- here is problem with the question -- which is the problem with the discussion.

When asking about how a given theory explains how a certain choice is made, it is helpful if the choice actually existed. To whit, asking, "I'm curious to know how rational choice theorists would explain why men prefer apples with blue and white Kusama Yayoi-style polka dots on them?" would be worthwhile if there were apples with blue and white Kusama Yayoi-style polka dots on them.

[An aside, but it always fascinates me that 99% of the articles promoting one of Kusama's exhibitions or analyzing her work manage to avoid mentioning that she is clinically insane. She lives, voluntarily, in an assisted living community as she is well aware that she is bonkers.

Her insanity informs her art, I think. Keeping her mental condition under wraps is a real disservice.]

Now in the case of Noda's choice, Katz has, in his written work for the Oriental Economist and his two public presentations in Japan, one at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan and the other at Temple University Japan, taken at face value Prime Minister Noda's claim or insinuation that he had three major projects to undertake in the near future to bolster Japan's economic health:

1) begin formal, unequivocal discussion on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership

2) restarting Japan's nuclear power plants as soon as possible

3) raising the consumption tax in order to stabilize the funding of the nation's welfare and pension systems

For a Japan optimist like Katz, who sees Japan's output gap and suppressed domestic spending as criminal and reversible, the prime minister's decision to pursue option #3 at the expense of options #1 and #2 is perverse. The Japanese government's current borrowing costs are among the lowest on earth. The currency is one of the world's strongest. There is no crisis in confidence in Japan's ability to finance its debts. Furthermore the previous raising of the consumption tax in 1997 contributed to a crushing of domestic GDP growth, helping trigger the financial meltdown of 1998 and in the end reducing overall tax receipts (I think the little matter of the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997 had a little more to do with the 1998 crisis than the consumption tax rise -- but my memory is perhaps faulty).

Why pursue an end that will likely damage rather than strengthen the economy?

As Katz's question indicates, he also cannot see the political value of pursuing a rise in the consumption tax. Every single past instance of the tax either being imposed, raised or even talked about (2010) has led to the ruling party getting hammered in the next election.

However, if you look carefully at the three major policy programs listed above, it is clear that only the third, the consumption tax, was real. The first and second options, however economically sound, were political red herrings or lead balloons (choose your metaphor).

Any analysis of the "choice" a DPJ prime minister makes or may make must consider paramount the control the Liberal Democratic Party has over the passage of legislation through the House of Councillors. If the LDP does not like a policy, it has no chance of being implemented.

Looking at the TPP, one can immediately see that no matter what the government or the Nihon Keizai Shimbun may be saying, it is dead on arrival. The liberalization of the agricultural sector makes the TPP anathema in the rural districts, which are as ever overrepresented in the current Diet. Voting for the TPP would kill the reelection prospects of a DPJ representative in a rural seat. As for the LDP, which wants to regain the rural seats it lost to the DPJ in 2009, the TPP is also poison, though the LDP leadership, in pandering to the business lobby that also abandoned the LDP in 2009, keeps the TPP among its verbal bag of tricks.

So pursuing the TPP was a hopeless endeavor, especially after it turned out that the gatekeeper to Japan's joining the discussion was the U.S. Congress, particularly the U.S. Representatives and Senators from the state of Michigan and other U.S. auto producing states. There is only one thing negotiators of this blessed land want to show the legislators from the states dependent on America's bailed-out auto industry, and that is their naked backsides.

Restarting the nuclear power plants was also political poison. The country is in the grips of a deep and irrational fear of nuclear power and the nuclear power industry. Any politician speaking up for the restarting of nuclear power would be suspected of being in the pocket of the nuclear village.

Noda rational expectation was that Japan's industrial and commercial interests understood that this was their fight, not his. It was up to Japan's economic actors to make the case to the public that dangerous and unpredictable as it may be, the nuclear power plants had to be restarted, lest the country suffer economic damage or even catastrophic blackouts.

This industry pointedly failed to do. Perhaps it was unaccustomed to doing heavy political lifting by itself, having always relied on the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry to do their dirty work for them. Perhaps the elites in both the bureaucracy and industry, unaware that the political ground had shifted underneath their feet, thought that they could cow the populace into silence with just the hint that an interruption in the reactors restarts could hurt output and thus employment and remuneration.

Whatever the reason, industry failed to convince anyone that the country was on the brink of disaster. It took a personal intervention by the prime minister, at the last minute, and a chancy game of chicken with political maverick Hashimoto Toru, to persevere in a struggle to just get the Oi #3 and #4 reactors back on line before this summer, which has turned out to be a scorcher.

That prime minister Noda paid deeply for this intervention was made clear yesterday when he had to invite into the Prime Minister's Residence representatives of the crowds of anti-nuclear protesters who have been making his Friday evenings deafening affairs. In pointed contrast, representatives of the Japan Chamber of Commerce also paid a visit to the Residence yesterday to limply present the prime minister with a unwelcome written request that the government do more for the security of power supply.

As for the consumption tax, here was a policy program that had a chance in hell of succeeding, specifically because it was not a DPJ program but an LDP one. On the face of it, the LDP could not vote down one of its own campaign promises, when given the chance.

It is indicative of the intellectual and ethical rot in the LDP that the party nearly succeeded in convincing itself to negate the implementation of its own campaign program, even after the DPJ blew itself into to pieces in an act of self-sacrifice in order to accommodate the LDP.

So the answer to the question initially proposed is simple: Noda chose the consumption tax option because it was real. Governments have to do something, even seemingly stupid stuff, lest they be accused, and rightly so, of doing nothing.

"Rationality" had nothing to do with it.

Now, I will go listen to Ms. Tomlin one more time. I need the laughs.

A Brief Rumination On Ozawa Ichiro, With A Long Detour Through A Condemnation Of The LDP

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, I have been accused for being unfairly negative toward Ozawa Ichiro, both here and in private communications.

I have always found these accusations rather peculiar. I have consistently argued that Ozawa was the victim of a baseless persecution in the public sphere.I have argued repeatedly that the charges filed against him and his aides were bogus; that his shady reputation was just that, a reputation, not a fact; that he was a bugbear of The Establishment and had suffered for it.

Often the accusations come from a misreading of my characterization of Ozawa's responsibility for a particular political situation. In my post of the other day, I seemed to be intimating that the Liberal Democratic Party learned from Ozawa its knee-jerk and unpatriotic automatic naysaying to any proposal of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, its constant calling for new elections and its criticism of every act of the governments of Kan Naoto and Noda Yoshihiko.

If this were the takeaway from my assertion, the result would be a gross misrepresentation of history. Ozawa did repeatedly call for elections during his tenure as party leader of the DPJ. He also used his party's majority in the House of Councillors to stymie government initiatives, particularly the renewal of the dispatch of Maritime Self Defense Forces ships to the Indian Ocean as a part of Operation Enduring Freedom and the renewal of the temporary tax on gasoline.

These positions were based not on an unthinking saying of "no" to every government act or policy but on fundamental principles.

After the Koizumi years, the LDP was a spent force. Execrable notions -- such as Japan could be revived as an economic and political power through the reimposition of pre-1945 respect for authority and enforced patriotism -- were not laughed out of the room but the foundation of national policies. The party's last three pre-August presidents were either the sons or grandsons of prime ministers.

After Koizumi, the LDP had no business being in power.

As for the Indian Ocean dispatch and the gasoline tax, the first challenged the constitutional limits of MSDF actions. The dispatch may have been indispensible for the maintenance of the Japan-U.S. alliance -- but it should have been explained as such, not painted over with a cavalcade of nonsense. The gasoline tax had been imposed at the height of the 1973 Oil Crisis. It had been renewed without explanation or justification for over thirty years.

In all three instances, the crucial issue was government accountability. The DPJ was demanding it because the LDP was not providing it.

However, in the basic running of the government, the DPJ, despite being the opposition party, worked with the LDP, or at least did not impede the government's delivery of basic government services. In part, this cooperation was due to the DPJ's having only limited powers, the LDP and the New Komeito together having a supermajority in the House of Representatives which could override any action or inaction of the House of Councillors, where the DPJ had the upper hand. However, the DPJ also understood that at loyal opposition had to be loyal, not just an opposition.

Once and only once did the DPJ use its legal powers to oppose the government. This was on the selection of the successor to Fukui Toshihiko as governor of the Bank of Japan. The DPJ told the LDP from the outset it would not accept as candidate an alumnus of the Finance Ministry. Out of purest contempt, the LDP sent not just one, but two alumni of the Finance Ministry as its candidates. These candidates the House of Councillors rejected. Finally, out of exasperation, the LDP proposed the academic and incumbent governor Shirakawa Masaaki, who was quickly confirmed.

What the LDP learned from these episodes were the most childish of lessons: a centrist political party had had the temerity to oppose the LDP. If the LDP is ever were in the opposition, it will oppose everything that that centrist party would propose.

Which is why we are where we are where we are today. The number of bills the government can push through during a Diet session is risible. A DPJ prime minister, in order to secure the support of three major bills (the limit it seems the LDP is willing to accept), one of which is the bill on bond issuance necessary for the government to pay its bills, must offer to resign. It happened to Kan; it is happening to Noda.

In a sense, it would be to the country's benefit for the DPJ to lose its majority in the next election. The DPJ at least has some sense of how to behave as an opposition party with some semblance of a conscience.

Of course, the LDP is even more spent as a force than when it was when it was tossed from power in 2009. It has nothing to offer to anyone, even its traditional constituencies in protected industries, big business and the rural areas.

That we are in the predicament we are in is in no small part due to Ozawa Ichiro's personal failings. His sense of entitlement, his obsessive need to be in charge, his inability to nurture talent, his incapacity to accept others as equals all contributed to his betrayal of the revolution he worked so hard to bring about. Whatever the political scientists may say about inevitable things happening inevitably, personality and individual decisions matter. Had Ozawa, when Hatoyama Yukio offered him the position of secretary-general of the DPJ in the giddy days after the August 2009 wipe out of the LDP, turned Hatoyama down with a "It's time for someone else, someone with less political baggage, to secure the gains we have made," our political today discourse would be richer and more meaningful.


Later - For a report on what looks like another episode of Ozawa's spiteful pettiness getting the best of him, please read Okumura Jun's latest, "Assassin for Kikawada? Is Ozawa Crazy? But Will the DPJ Miss a Golden Opportunity? over at GlobalTalk 21.

The Senkaku Invasion, Considered

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Over at the The Atlantic, CFR Fellow Sheila Smith has had published a revised version (E) of her August 15 Asia Unbound post on the bang-your-head on the desk pig-headeness displayed on the anniversary of the worst wars.

I would only quibble with her characterization in the revised article of the Taiwaness attitude toward Japanese territories. Despite one of the activists making it to shore carrying a Republic of China flag, the Taiwanese attitude seems to be "Leave us out of this!" Not only did Taiwan authorities not allow the Hong Kong ship make port at Taichung to take on fresh water but it convinced Taiwan activists preparing to join the crew of the Hong Kong vessel that it was really in their best interests to stay home.

Furthermore, in a little noticed near incident on July 26, a Taiwanese squadron of three naval vessels sailed close to the 12 nautical mile limit surrounding the island of Yonaguni. In respone to sailing so close to Japanese territorial waters, the Taiwanese Navy went bonkers, relieving the commanding officer of his command and affixeing a demerit to his service record. Since then the committee in charge of the defending the rights of naval personnel has seen to it that the demerit will be revoked. (E)

The Taiwanese Navy's immediate and near hysterical response to even appearing to desire to violate Japan's territorial waters seems to demonstrate that government of Taiwan has a sent word on down that the basic rule is restrict territorial grandstanding to talk, not action.

Over at Global Talk 21, Okumura Jun has been dashing out a series of invaluable posts on the Senkakus landing incident. Okumura-san hammers away at the takeaway from the landing: that by carrying out maneuvers that resulted in significant damage to Japan Coast Guard vessels, but making no attempts to board the vessel -- even after the activists tossed cement blocks at the JCG ships -- and by having the arrests carried out on land as gently as possible by local -- i.e. Okinawa Prefecture -- police specially transported to the Senkakus for the occasion, Japanese claims of sovereignty of the islands have been enhanced. This was absolutely the worst possible outcome for the People's Republic of China, no matter how much it has thrilled some in Hong Kong. (E)

One ongoing domestic dispute perplexes Okumura, however:

"...there seems to be significant criticism in Japan over the fact that the authorities let the Hong Kong activists land on the Islands. I don’t understand this; are the critics suggesting that the authorities should have exercised deadly force if need be rather than let the activists land, then arrest them for illegal entry? After all, they were posing no known physical threat to any persons or assets under Japanese jurisdiction. If this had been a helicopter and not a boat, would these critics have insisted that the Coast Guard shoot it down?"

Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. You know, the old "If it was good enough for the Soviet Union (E) it is good enough for us" line of reasoning.

I am stunned. Members of the opposition, playing politics with the government's conduct of Japan's security policy, in direct contradiction to positions they have previously taken.

Where oh where could they have ever learned that little trick?

This is not to say that Ozawa Ichiro would be acting as the LDP is in this instance. Indeed, he would not. However, the LDP, with its "Learn nothing; forget nothing" ethos, is only doing what it thinks an opposition party should do: play "tit-for-tat" -- do unto others as they have done unto you -- no matter that that what they are advocating is intensely and unpatriotically stupid.

Now such stupendous nitwittery has its uses, of course. It certainly makes it easier for the Noda government to lay it on the line with with the Chinese, telling them:

"Look, keep a lid on this, OK? Do not let your self-appointed, presumably sexually frustrated middle-aged male hyper-patriots make us look bad. Because if the DPJ gets wiped out in the next election as a result of its supposed weak stance on national security, you will be dealing with this cabal of nitwits."

Rushing Forward With No Confidence

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, On Sunday, I put forth the proposition that Koizumi Shinjiro's visit to Liberal Democratic Party headquarters accelerated LDP moves toward submitting either a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet or a censure motion against prime minister Noda Yoshihiko. Koizumi, walking very much in his father's footsteps and also reflecting his long stint in Washington, has become the face of the free market/low tax wing of the LDP, especially since The Big Man, Nakagawa Hidenao, has been put on ice.

In pushing a plant to threaten the PM with a no-confidence motion or censure, Koizumi was also the representative of the members of the LDP who had resigned themselves to the June 15 three-way LDP, the New Komeito and Democratic Party of Japan agreement to vote for consumption tax bill in both Houses of the Diet. Not a few in the LDP were sure the consumption tax issue would lead to the breakup of the DPJ.

The controversy over the raising of the consumption tax did indeed lead to a breakup, with Ozawa Ichiro leading his followers out of the DPJ. However, to the disappointment of those who thought the breakup would result in the DPJ-led coalition losing its majority in the House of Representatives, Ozawa led out of the DPJ only about half of the legislators purportedly under his influence -- well short of the number of rebels needed to transform the DPJ-led coalition into a minority government.

When Koizumi and his six youthful fellow LDP members bullrushed the office of the LDP party president, however, they were pushing on an open door. LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu has known that in order for him to win reelection in the party presidential election in September, he had to have something to show for his first term.

He had to foment a crisis, and in this month.

The dispute over the date of the House of Councillors vote on the consumption tax was too small potatoes for this purpose, at first glance. The LDP proposed to have the vote on the 10th; the DPJ and Prime Minister, wanting delay action in the Diet so that they might cut deals on legislation with Tanigaki's successor, proposed a vote on the 20th.

The DPJ offer was only an initial bargaining position, though. The party's negotiators, in talks with LDP and New Komeito representatives, indicated the August 10th date was acceptable. (J)

Taken aback, the LDP violated all normal negotiating procedures and proposed a vote on the 8th -- a counter proposal to which the DPJ, while indulging in the requisite amount of whining at the LDP's duplicity, agreed to yesterday. (J)

Of course, in the meantime, in the face of the DPJ's violent accommodation to every one of the LDP's wishes, the LDP presented a further demand -- that Prime Minister Noda make a public commitment (kakuyaku) to dissolve the Diet after the House of Councillors vote on the consumption tax legislation. Otherwise the LDP would submit either a no-confidence motion or a censure motion or both.

The Prime Minister, who if anything is calm and controlled in his responses, told the LDP yesterday that the dissolution of the Diet was his problem, the timing of which was up to him and nobody else (J). A seemingly now hysterical LDP leadership responded by vowing to go through with its threatened submission of a no-confidence motion or a censure motion today, and to renege on the June 15 agreement. (J)

It is a rare thing when the representatives of a small religious party have to pay a visit to the headquarters of a large secular party in order to tell the secular party "Calm down or else." Nevertheless, that is what leaders of the LDP's longtime ally the New Komeito, their faces grim, had to do last night (J). Presumably they explained to their LDP counterparts that if an election were held, the LDP-New Komeito alliance would lack a majority in either House of the Diet -- and that no third party would cut any deals on passage of legislation with an LDP that has a history of backing out of major, signed agreements.

So all by indications, Tanigaki has triggered the political crisis he needed. Unfortunately, it seems to be leading to his own private Waterloo, rather than the overthrow of the Noda government he has desired.


Later - This post has been edited for clarity.

The Show Must Go On

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, A grinning Ozawa Ichiro, leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan's splinter party "The People's Livelihood Must Come First" Party (a.k.a. - the "Livelihood Party") paying a courtesy call on the offices of the leading opposition Liberal Democratic Party, shaking the hand of a grinning LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu.

O - "I am Ozawa, leader of the new Livelihood Party. Please look upon us kindly."

T - "Tanigaki of the LDP. You are the Anti-Christ."

O - "Thank you, thank you. You are the worst president the LDP has ever had."

T - "Your policy platform is pure pandering, without a hope of ever being implemented."

O - "Your party has no policies at all. You are mere hand puppets of the bureaucracy."

T - "When the election comes, your party will be annihilated."

O - "When the election comes, your party will be superseded by whatever that pipsqueak Hashimoto Toru cooks up."

T - "You call Hashimoto a pipsqueak now, but I know that once this meeting is over you will be on the phone, begging him to repudiate his praise of Prime Minister Noda."

O - "I am actually not here to see you. I came here to shake hands with Nobuteru and Tadamori, whom I know have an actual future in your party's leadership."

T - "I see you brought your nodding dashboard ornament Shozo with you. If he is such a committed policy wonk, where does he find the time to work on his suntan?"

O - "Don't diss him. He's got 5 elections to the Diet."

T - "I know. Second in your party to you in terms of Diet experience. Pathetic. You really have no friends, do you?"

O - "Permit me to shake hands with your colleagues."

T - "Be my guest, panda-hugger."

O- "Not the best of times to be using that epithet (E). Anyway, you're the one who refers to his own collected thoughts as "The Analects" (J) and whose grandfather was reassigned from his command in China because he was being too nice to the Chinese (J)."

T - "I look forward to our working together."

O - "Me too."


Ooooh, aaaahhhh...

Photo courtesy: The Yomiuri Online

Ishihara Nobuteru's Interesting Gambits

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Ishihara Shintaro, the elected, if not actual, governor of the Tokyo Metropolitan District, sure has made himself scarce since the death of the Ueno Zoo's panda cub yesterday morning.

It was Ishihara who hilariously, in his own mind, at least, suggested that the new cub be named Sen-sen, with a later sibling to be called Kaku-kaku, in order to form the duo Sen-kaku, to needle, oh so very cleverly, the owners of the pandas the TMD, the proprietor of Ueno Zoo, is paying somewhere aroung 1 million USD a year to display, and highlighting Ishihara's suddenly favorite uninhabited islets -- the TMD seemingly not having enough far-flung uninhabited islands to keep him occupied. (J)

I cannot decide whether it is Ishihara's unwisecrack or the significance of panda exchanges to Sino-Japanese relations that had Google News Japan listing the death of the cub among the "Politics" stories all morning long.

Ishishara's attempted purchase of the Senkakus pushed the central government to muscle in on the sale this week, spoiling Foreign Minister Gemba Ko'ichiro's meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Phnom Penh (E). The announcement of the government's plan to pip Ishihara and the TMD no doubt led to yesterday's riposte of Chinese fishery agency ships entering the 12 nautical mile exclusion zone about the Senkakus.(E)

While Ishihara Senior has been creating headaches for the Noda Cabinet, #1 son Ishihara Nobuteru, the Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, has been a positive boon for Noda Yoshihiko and his Democratic Party of Japan.

Yesterday, it was Nobuteru who delivered the most devastating of the many put-downs of Ozawa Ichiro's new Putting the People's Livelihood First Party:

"Cannot raise the consumption tax; eliminate the nuclear power plants... Can you protect the people's livelihood this way? Waving the Manifesto the DPJ could not carry out, will they not just go on down the same road the DPJ has come down?"

(Link - J)

Politician that he is (and long has he enjoyed my appreciation of his dedication to his craft), Ishihara did not rule out working with the Livelihood Party on a no-confidence motion against the Noda government.  However, he did say he would do so only following "an exhaustive examination of the situation."

On the same day, Ishihara hosted a coming out press conference for former Olympic speed skater Horii Manabu. Horii, a bronze medal winner at the Lillehammer Olympics, has been assigned the role of "assassin" (shikaku) of former prime minister Hatoyama Yukio, challenging him for the Hokkaido #9 seat in the House of Representatives. With Hatoyama the biggest, most pustulent boil on the face of the DPJ, the LDP's selection of a strong candidate to unseat him is like a Christmas gift in July to the prime minister and his party.

On paper, upending Hatoyama is a daunting task. He humiliated his 2009 LDP opponent, a former toy company employee (the beauty of the politics of this blessed land...I never have to make anything up), winning 66% of the vote to the LDP candidate's 26%.

However, Hatoyama was carried upon the wings of the public's rage against the LDP and Hatoyama's presumptive election as prime minister should the DPJ win and win big.

Since August 2009, Hatoyama has only stumbled, embarrassing his constituents. The manner by which he was forced to relinquish his premiership was epic in its combination of hubris, mendacity and blind stupidity. On one visit to his home prefecture, he mused about retiring from politics to take up farming, only to rescind that plan a week later.

Hatoyama's constituents would also not be out of place asking the Tokyo transplant: "Excuse us, but what have you done for us lately?" In Horii, the voters would have a chance to vote for someone who actually achieved something in his life, without his wealthy mother having bankrolled it.

The helpful Ishihara has also recently positioned himself as the next likely leader of the LDP. He did so by, paradoxically, declaring on July 6 that if current LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu presented himself as a candidate for the party presidency in September, he, Ishihara, would support him. In the deliciously contrarian world of LDP internal politics, this was a knife in Tanigaki's back.

The primary qualifications of a candidate for the LDP presidency are loyalty and a studied disinterest in becoming president. By expressing his desire to be loyal to Tanigaki, Ishihara has put pressure on Tanigaki to reciprocate by not seeking reelection. Ishihara punctuated his camouflaged request with a whomping non-sequitur:

"If there is no dissolution of the Diet, there will be all kinds of folks coming out as candidates. I too may have to think about it."

(Link - J)

Try thinking that statement through. Think of the counterfactual: the Diet is dissolved, and an election is held. Tanigaki, as the president of the party, leads his forces into electoral battle. If the LDP triumphs, Tanigaki, as the president of the LDP, becomes the presumptive prime minister while Ishihara is rewarded with a reappointment to the position to the post of secretary-general. If the LDP fails to make significant gains, or is indeed wiped out, Tanigaki, if he still has a seat in the Diet, immediately resigns, setting up a leadership election. Ishihara, as the point man on elections, at least according to LDP tradition, follows Tanigaki into disgrace and becomes ineligible for the presidency.

So while sounding as though it says something, the statement actually says nothing -- except, of course, silently, "Tanigaki-san, if you cannot push the Noda Cabinet to the wall before the end of the Diet session on September 8, you had better get the heck out of my way."

Wonderful, wonderful stuff...

Giving The LDP Some Credit, Sort Of

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, I have an incurable habit of dumping on the Liberal Democratic Party,

My latest bad joke at the LDP's expense?

"You know, there's an old saying:

Fool me once, shame on you

Fool me twice...I'm LDP!"

even as it has fallen out of grace and into the unbearable position of an opposition party.

I cannot, however, fault the LDP for lax discipline. While the Democratic Party of Japan gave DPJ members of the House of Representatives who voted against consumption tax bill two month suspensions of party privileges -- save for former party leader Hatoyama Yukio, who earned a six month suspension -- and a stiff warning to the DPJ representatives who absented themselves from the crucial vote, the LDP leadership dropped an anvil on former party secretary-general Nakagawa Hidenao for absenting himself from the consumption tax vote: a six month suspension of party privileges. (J)

For Nakagawa, who has tried to keep the flame of Koizumiism alive inside the LDP, abstaining from the vote was a matter of principle. Indeed, in an ideologically reordered political world, Nakagawa would be with his intellectual comrades in the Your Party, rather than waging a quixotic battle against the LDP's mishmash of laissez faire capitalism, paternalism, state capitalism and socialism.

Such is the logic of party discipline, however, that free thinkers face punishment for not following orders.

Very Kind Of Them #12

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The good folks at the East Asia Forum have taken a long-winded, meandering stem-winder of an essay, distilled it to its essentials, and posted the result on their website:

Ozawa’s departure, the revival of the DPJ and the future of Japan

They have also very kindly provided a link to all my EAF contributions:

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/author/michael-cucec/

as well as an RSS feed:

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/author/michael-cucec/rss

For a completely different take on the resignations, please read Aurelia George Mulgan's EAF essay of July 3:

Can Ichiro Ozawa repeat history in Japan?

especially the final paragraphs, where Dr. Mulgan identifies the crucial difference between this Ozawa-led breakup of a party and all his previous ones: this time, he is not the one walking away with the cash.

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.

And Ozawa Ichiro As Moe Greene

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Former Democratic Party of Japan leader Ozawa Ichiro has met three times over the last two days with his erstwhile friend in the DPJ leadership Koshi'ishi Azuma, this over Ozawa leading his followers and allies in an open rebellion against the leadership's sponsorship of legislation raising the consumption tax from 5% to 10% by April 2015.

After the first two rounds of talks on Thursday, Ozawa said that if the talks end in failure, he will have to make a grave decision. After the third meeting on Friday afternoon, Ozawa promised he would make the decision one way or the other (presumably he was referring to leaving the DPJ or staying) on Monday.

In terms of the content of the Ozawa-Koshi'ishi discussions, one can say with some degree of confidence that it does not require three meetings and a weekend to deliver an ultimatum.

For that, one meeting would have been more than sufficient.

It does take three meetings and a weekend for a talking-things-over with one's minions for a very arrogant man who thought he was in an impregnable position to come to the realization that he has been made an offer he cannot refuse.

In all the discussions of Ozawa's magic numbers -- whether it is the 54 DPJ members he would have to drag along with him out of the party (lest any of his followers have second thoughts about the jump, Ozawa made sure to extort letters of resignation from his supporters, which he keeps stashed in his pocket) to reduce the DPJ to minority status in the House of Representatives; or the 43 42 he would need to lead out of the party in order to form a parliamentary caucus of 51 representatives, the minimum necessary to propose a no-confidence motion; however many billions of yen it is his followers would need to run credible campaigns in their districts, should elections be held; the percentage of the public apprecia Ozawa's departing the DPJ with his followers in tow to form a new party [15%, according to The Asahi Shimbun, 16% according to the Yomiuri Shimbun)] -- two little problems have been overlooked:

1) the Noda government has established a working, if not exactly cordial, relationship with the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito, and

2) whilst the LDP/New Komeito alliance wants to replace the DPJ/rump PNP as the ruling coalition, it absolutely craves the chance to crush Ozawa once and for all.

Talented amateur player of Go that he is, Ozawa may be a little taken aback to find himself in an impossible position, neither able to cut a deal nor walk away from the table undiminished.

Everything hinges now on pride, whether Ozawa overcomes his, or sends the political world reeling again based upon his confidence in the rightness of his own vision.


Later - The original text of this post contained a number of links, all of which were lost in a software crash at midnight, Tokyo time.

Even later - I confess a certain sympathy with the view expressed by Okumura Jun over in his June 26 post over at GLOBALTALK 21: that Ozawa has lost control of his followers, leading to their redefining on their own what fanatical devotion to him should be.

What Is The Opposite Of "No News Is Good News"?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, - Police catch up with Takahashi Katsuya in a Kamata manga coffee house. (Link - E)

Now come the questions:

Since Takahashi and Kikuchi Naoko successfully reintegrated themselves into society, with Kikuchi serving as a professional eldercare attendant, will a national conversation begin on the possibility of personal redemption, even after one commits heinous crimes?

Will doubt seep in regarding the guilt of the eleven followers of the Aum Shinrikyo sect now sitting on death row, that perhaps their mental competence, when inside the cult, was compromised, preventing them from having the ability to make rational decisions about right and wrong?

Will a discussion arise about the propriety of the death penalty, the issuance of which makes Japan an outlier among OECD countries with similar political and social systems?

- The Ozawa-hostile Shukan Bunshun drops a bomb on top of Ozawa Ichiro. (Link - E)

Ay caramba! Unless the purportedly former Mrs. Ozawa comes forth soon to either authenticate or repudiate the published letter and its contents, we are in for a very tense next few days.

- Oh, and that combined pension and tax systems thing, supposedly on the cliff's edge? The mainstream media is now reporting that an agreement on the sheaf of bills is just awaiting the relevant party officers' signatures -- with the kicker that the New Komeito may part ways with the LDP over the agreement. (Link - J)


Later - As regards the first story and the series of questions I ask, I am not holding my breath. "Hang'em high," has a powerful grip upon the national psyche.

The End Game

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The Democratic Party of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito, the only three parties that matter -- a state of affairs so grating to the other parties in the Diet that the three leftist microparties and the one libertarian miniparty are joining hands to protest the "price fixing going on behind closed doors" (J) -- are putting the final touches on a final agreement on the shakai hosho zei ittai kaikaku an, the bills enabling the combined reforms of social security and tax systems. (J)

There are some hurdles standing in the way of the three parties coming to an agreement by the Prime Minister's deadline of June 15. The LDP wants the Noda government to repudiate the DPJ's 2009 manifesto pledge to rewrite pension law so as to guarantee that all pensioners receive a minimun 70,000 yen per month from the national pension plan. The LDP and the New Komeito together want Noda to repudiate the DPJ manifesto pledge to repeal the special eldercare system for persons over 75 years of age, a terribly unpopular and initially confusing program of mandatory healthcare prepayment the two parties sweated blood to pass when they held the reins of government. The three parties are also at loggerheads over what, if anything, they should do to lessen the impact of the imposition of the consumption tax on those person living at or below the poverty line.

Now according to the news noise machine, Prime Minister Noda is desperate and willing to sacrifice the DPJ's identity (E) or prepared to discard policies intrinsic to the DPJ's unity (E) all for the sake of winning the LDP's and the New Komeito's votes in favor of the passage of the bills raising the consumption tax.

Maybe. It depends on what one believes DPJ policies are.

If one takes the simplistic route, that DPJ policies are all the policies listed in the 2009 and 2010 manifestos, then the above assertions are true.

If, however, one takes the position that the policies listed in the 2009 manifesto were the ones Ozawa Ichiro tossed together trying to buy the support of every special interest the LDP, in its internal shift to becoming a modern, urban-based party, had left lying in the dust, without any concern as to whether the resulting program was internally consistent or affordable -- i.e., LIES -- then:

a) the DPJ is a party of lies and liars, and thus their promises are worthless rhetoric, not policies, or

b) the promises made in the 2009 manifesto, which Kan Naoto tried desperately to render more concrete and believable in the 2010 manifesto, were never the policies of the DPJ, just electoral dandruff clinging to Ozawa Ichiro's jacket.

When Ozawa loyalist and true believer Kawauchi Hiroshi wails about the impending deal on the sheaf of bills reforming the pension and tax systems...

"The LDP's proposal is unacceptable. If we were to agree, the DPJ would become the LDP."

...he is not only showing that he is more a courtier than a politician but also a poor student of history. Fiscal consolidation, realistic pension funding schemes and a willingness to sacrifice growth for stability are core policy positions of the original DPJ. These were the principles undergirding the August 2005 party platform, under then party leader, now Deputy Prime Minister Okada Katsuya.

That DPJ co-founder Hatoyama Yukio forgets what he used to believe and defends the 2009 manifesto as holy writ (J) is neither implausible nor particularly significant. Like the White Queen, Hatoyama can believe a half a dozen impossible things before breakfast.

What the representatives of the DPJ, the LDP and the New Komeito are going to be banging heads over today are the remnants of the fight. The DPJ has a rather weaker position due to the PM's having set a deadline. This prevents the DPJ from exercising its ultimate weapon of extending the Diet session, forcing everyone to just sit on their tailbones until the LDP and the New Komeito fall into bickering in between themselves over just who is preventing the passage of their favorite bits of legislation. It should surprise no one that the DPJ has chosen this moment to float a trial balloon for a radical restructuring of both the LDP's and the DPJ's plans to reform the House of Representatives which hews close to what the New Komeito has been proposing and which would mess up the proportional seat voting for the LDP (E) -- just at the moment the LDP is showing strength in that half of the ballot.

All could go haywire at the last moment. Someone could say something untoward about someone else's sister, leading to a termination of negotiations.

All indications are, however, is that what we are seeing is the end game, one where the LDP and the New Komeito will wander away from the table having agreed to have their members vote with the government on a raft of bills, with neither the promise for elections nor the Noda repudiation of Ozawa Ichiro which the two parties had been demanding.

The Illusion of Choice

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

"What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?

- Reg, Life of Brian (1979)

NHK (J - Time Sensitive) and Fuji TV (J - Time Sensitive) released the results of their latest random dial public opinion polls last night.

The pollsters found that:

- The popularity of the Cabinet remains mired in the zone of mediocrity, indicating the Prime Minister received no bounce for ridding his Cabinet of its most troublesome members.

Do your support or not support the Noda Cabinet?

NHK
Support 27%
Do not support 51%

Fuji TV
Support 28%
Do not support 61%

- That anti-nuclear power feelings in the country are not visceral, at least not on the national level, and do not extend to a continued moratorium on the restart of Kansai Electric Power's Oi reactors.

NHK
Do you agree with the prime minister's statement on Friday that the restart of the Oi nuclear reactors is necessary to protect the livelihood and security of Japan?

Agree 31%
Disagree 27%
Neither 37%

Fuji TV
Are you in favor of a restart of the Oi reactors?

In favor 49%
Opposed 43%

- That the country is once again favoring an early election, after backing off earlier this year.

When should the next House of Representatives election be held?

NHK

As soon as possible 20%
Before the September leadership elections of the DPJ and the LDP 15%
Before the year's end 21%
At the end of the current Diet's tenure 36%

Fuji TV

Summer this year 27%
Before the year's end 26%
At the end of the current Diet's tenure 34%


As to who would prevail in an early elections, one has to consult other survey results. The Kyodo poll of June 4-5, which found support for the Noda Cabinet at 32%, makes for grim reading for the ruling Democratic Party of Japan.

Which party would you vote for in the proportional seat selection of the next House of Representatives election?

DPJ 16%
LDP 30%
Your Party 7%
New Komeito 4%
Communist 4%
Socialist 2%
Other 5%
Do not know/no response 33%

Given party support numbers like these, the probability that Prime Minister Noda will call a snap election is zero. He will not lead his party into oblivion.

Nevertheless, the news media dutifully reports that in his Diet testimony yesterday Noda signaled that should the bills raising the consumption not pass during this Diet session, he might ask the Emperor to dissolve the Diet, triggering elections. The prime minister was purportedly cracking the whip at the anti-tax forces in his own party, most of whom are allied with former party leader Ozawa Ichiro and many of whom would lose their seats should an election be called tomorrow. (J)

Except of course, that the Diet cannot be dissolved tomorrow. Technically the emperor could dissolve the present House of Representatives but the result would be the implosion of the 1946 Constitution.

My bet is that the Heisei emperor will not honor a request to dissolve the Diet -- a refusal that itself would trigger a constitutional crisis.

Indeed blessed land's continuing constitutional constipation and the ruling party's abysmal poll numbers combine to form a blockage rendering public opinion largely moot. The public may dislike or hate certain decisions the government is making. However, that displeasure has no outlet. Unless an alliance is forged in between Ozawa's followers and the LDP -- a pact that the LDP, having once concluded with Ozawa, is determined to never conclude again -- nothing can budge the Noda government from its perch.

So while the poll takers continue to take the pulse of the people, the opinions expressed have no impact on the government's actions.

It is the illusion of choice.

For Which I Pray

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

"When God is trying to punish you
He answers your prayers."

-- various attributions

Today Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko will shake up his Cabinet for the second time since its inauguration nine months ago. A cursory, dismissive review of the reshuffle would attribute the need for a second housecleaning in a short span of time in office as a sign of Noda's political weakness, a move forced upon him by the demands of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito after he failed, in two rounds of talks with Ozawa Ichiro, to win Ozawa's support for the government's primary goal of passing the legislation necessary to raise consumption tax to 10%.

A cursory review would, as is its wont, be oversimplifying matters.

The meetings with Ozawa last Wednesday and yesterday were never as the news media wanted them to be: for Ozawa to either fall on bended knees before Noda or for Ozawa to come roaring out, announcing that he and his followers were leaving the Democratic Party of Japan. Instead, both men walked out of the meetings with their dignities and the party intact. The most anti-DPJ media outlets called the meetings failures (E) while those with cooler heads merely noted that the two men argued past one another as if on parallel tracks (heikosen).

Both men, especially Ozawa, were very careful in their presentation of what went on at the meetings. Ozawa indeed did the unthinkable last Wednesday, appearing in a mainstream media interview, live, on set during what is the most important, if not most watched newscast: NHK's 9 pm news. Neither on that show nor yesterday did he ever say he would vote against the legislation, if and when it came up for a vote -- only that he was opposed to it. What he and his closest followers would do when push comes to shove has been left hanging up in the air.

With the talks ending inconclusively, Noda has moved on to answer the demands of the opposition, the first of which is the replacement of the Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki and Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Maeda Takeshi, both of whom the House of Councillors censured on April 20. However, according to media reports, Noda is going to go well beyond what the opposition has demanded in the reshuffle, sweeping out of his Cabinet three problematic officials: Minister of Justice Ogawa Toshio, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Kano Michihiko and MAFF Senior Vice Minister Tsutsui Nobutaka.

Ogawa probably did not draw a target on his back for checking up on horse racing reports during Question Time (E). If anything Ogawa's weakness for the horses made him seem more human and approachable.

Ogawa is being shown the door for pulling a Yanagida Minoru (E). In a speech on May 11 at his alma mater Rikkyo University, Ogawa joked that when he was running for office, he had listed on his campaign posters that he had been a judge. "However," he explained, "The three years I spent working as a judge were pretty boring for me, so even though it was not to my advantage, I asked my staff to strip the title from my posters." (J)

It is just amazing what Ministers of Justice will say about their jobs to accommodating audiences whom they feel they need to amuse.

As for Kano and Tsutsui, they are the dead, red meat that has to be thrown to the opposition to prevent questions about the Li Chunguang Affair (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) from devouring the remainder of the regular Diet session, which has an already hopelessly behind schedule due to the LDP's boycott of House of Councillors' sessions, leaving the Diet only two weeks (in theory) to blow through 60 heretofore unexamined bills. (E)

The upshot is that with the delivery of the heads of Tanaka and Maeda and the dismissal of Kano -- who was going to be a pain the posterior about the Trans Pacific Partnership, another major goal of the Noda government -- and Tsutsui, and with Ozawa's failure to support the consumption tax rise, the onus is now on the LDP, whose campaign manifesto contains a pledge to raise the consumption tax to 10%, to either support the bills or betray themselves.

Of the two, I would prefer the prime minister's position.

The Noda-Ozawa Meeting

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Tomorrow at this time, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko will be meeting with former party leader Ozawa Ichiro. Noda's stated goal going into the meeting is to convince Ozawa to support the government's bills raising the consumption tax from 5% to 10%. Ozawa has publicly stated that he is not inclined to support the tax. (E).

So is the meeting a preamble to a breakup of the Democratic Party of Japan over a point of principle? Or it red meat thrown to sate the voracious news media monster? A song-and-dance show put on by the two men in order to confuse the opposition Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito?

That I should ask these rhetorical questions telegraphs my feelings that this is a charade.

Why feel that this is a meeting with a predetermined outcome, one of Ozawa tossing the decision to vote for or against the bill to his followers to decide on their own?

- Ozawa is meeting Noda at DPJ headquarters. As a general rule, Ozawa meets with no one -- though the weeklies have Ozawa "going to Hachioji" with some regularity -- unless there are votes as the door prize (remember his pilgrimage to Koya-san?).

Ostensibly, DPJ headquarters is a neutral venue for the meeting. After all both men are DPJ members. However, as Noda is the DPJ's leader, party headquarters is his house: he is the master of it. For Ozawa to show up at headquarters makes it clear who is calling upon whom.

- Noda has stated there will be only one meeting, or as he colorfully put it, "I will explain that my intent is for this to be a single meeting on this one issue, a single last throw of the dice for everything (kenkon itteki)." (J)

Such brinkmanship is not Noda's style. The PM is something of an anaconda. He wraps his coils around you, waiting patiently, tightening his grip each time you inhale, until you asphyxiate.

If he is saying, "This is it. My way or the highway," in advance of a conference with the kingmaker who supposedly enjoys the loyalty of 1/4 of the DPJ's Diet delegation, then the likelihood that the two are going to have a serious debate with an outcome still in doubt is pretty close to zero.

- The DPJ has already had its internal debate on the bills raising the consumption tax. Ozawa's side lost that debate.

Noda will not throw a defeated man a lifeline.

- Cultivating the image of the DPJ as hopelessly divided has its uses. In addition to keeping journalists busy chasing after wild geese, it confuses the heck out of the opposition.

It would be unwise to head into a general election with the party's image being that of a house divided. However, due to the effective current constitutional ban on elections, the leadership of the DPJ has the freedom to play this purported deep split for at least a little while longer.

- Ozawa is in the Hotel California of Japanese jurisprudence ("You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave"). On May 9, the private lawyers prosecuting Ozawa on violation of the political funds act appealed his April 26 acquittal. The appeals process is normally relatively speedy, with the higher court judge having a strong incentive to affirm the judgment of the lower court. However, in the Ozawa case, the presiding judge's presentation cast doubt upon the veracity of Ozawa's testimony -- and by extension his determination of Ozawa's innocence. This opens the door for the appeals judges to reverse the verdict.

In any case, Ozawa will be stuck in an indicted state for a goodly while -- which makes it highly unlikely he and his flock will leave the DPJ. With their champion hobbled, the Ozawa loyalists have almost zero chance of surviving as an independent political force.

So though his loyalists and hangers-on attend Ozawa's seminars and he their fundraising parties, he is not going anywhere, party-wise.

The question for the political commentariat after tomorrow should not be "Whither Ozawa?" but how many of Ozawa's followers will abstain from the votes on the consumption tax bills, considering the light punishments the party meted out to the first-termers who absented themselves from vote on the no confidence measure against Kan Naoto's Cabinet.