Of The Financial Times And Japan

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, I love the Japan team of the Financial Times. Mure Dickie, Jonathan Soble and Michiyo Nakamoto (and former Tokyo bureau chief David Pilling, when he takes a flyer at writing about his former home base) deserve nothing but the most effusive of praise for presenting the country as it is, without only-in-Japan dross or a misguided/lazy rephrasing of what appears in the less-than-reflective, scandal-fluffing domestic news media.

I just wish they would stop one-on-one interviews with Japanese figures. It causes their interview subjects nothing but trouble.

The latest victim of the curse of the FT interview is ambassador to China Niwa Uichiro (J). In an interview with the FT, he was asked about Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor and agent provocateur emeritus Ishihara Shintaro's plan to have the TMD purchase three of the Senkaku Islands from their private owner (if you are Chinese, Taiwanese or from Hong Kong, p-r-iv-a-t-e o-w-n-e-r is of course pronounced "färs-kl ˈkleɪmənt").

According to the FT, Niwa responded:

“If Mr Ishihara's plans are acted upon, then it will result in an extremely grave crisis in relations between Japan and China.”

(Link)

True, or at least possibly true. It depends on how the Chinese view Ishihara's making Kurihara Kunioki (E) a very rich man in the one-hop transfer, thanks to the quick thinking of Vice and Actual TMD Governor Inose Naoki, of private donations to Mr. Kunioka's account (E). If the Chinese government, which has been very circumspect and withdrawn of late, shrugs the sale off as bunch of self-described patriots throwing their money away, all will be well.

Trigger the deluge of condemnation, nevertheless, from the usual suspects: Ishihara (no surprise here), the anti-government press (E) and the Noda government, obsessed as it is with the concept that nothing -- NOTHING -- can get in the way of the passage of the bills raising the consumption tax.

As for the Financial Times, it landed a two-for-one deal out of the interview, publishing the interview, then publishing the government's response to the interview. (E)

It has been six years since I dashed off my ever-more-seriously-in-need-of-an-update-and-revision Rules of Japanese News. Despite the list's intemperate origins, Rule #2 still seems to have some juice left in it:

"If an exclusive interview produces a scoop for the Financial Times, the interviewee probably did not understand the question."

Later - Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko was waded in the Niwa controversy. In testimony to the House of Representatives, the PM stated he will not be asking for Niwa's resignation, saying that Foreign Minister Gemba Ko'ichiro delivered a warning to Niwa, and that Niwa had reflected deeply upon his actions. (J)

Of course, this was the same vote of confidence that Noda expressed in Minister of Defense Tanaka Naoki and Minister of Infrastructure, Land, Transport and Tourism Maeda Takeshi...and we all know how well that turned out for those two men.

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.

Yoshihiko, Takeshi, Naoki, Azuma, Sadakazu, Natsuo, Yoshimi, Yo'ichi, Hirohisa, Jun'ichiro and Ichiro

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

It's been a bad day (Please don't take my picture!)
It's been a bad day (Pleeeaaze!)

- REM "Bad Day"(2003)

As scheduled, the House of Councillors censured Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki and Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Maeda Takeshi. Their business done, members of the House from the Liberal Democratic Party promptly stood up and strode out of the chamber, making a spectacle of their party leaders' threats to boycott all Diet business until Tanaka and Maeda are either fired or resign.

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko has sworn he will not force the ministers to resign -- which we can assume is code begging the two to resign. DPJ Secretary-General Koshi'ishi Azuma, who is looking older and older these days, as if that were physically possible, continues to hold to an improbable line that there are no reasons for the two ministers in question to resign.

Technically, Koshi'ishi is correct: the censure motion is a symbolic measure with no legal consequences. However, with the LDP and the New Komeito refusing to consider any legislation pending in the House of Councillors, indeed boycotting committee meetings, the ostensibly sanction-free measure has teeth. Fujii Hirohisa, the equally venerable but not so sepuchral-looking as Koshi'ishi head of the DPJ's tax committee (whose resignation from the Hatoyama Cabinet for health reasons looks more and more suspect every day) has asked the prime minister to bow to the inevitable and fire Tanaka and Maeda if he wants to save the consumption tax rise legislation, the supposed cornerstone of his political program (J).

To make the survival of Maeda and Tanaka even less likely, the Tokyo Prosecutors Office Special Investigations Branch (cue Star Wars Imperial March music) on Friday accepted documents accusing Maeda and others with violations of the public elections law. Maeda's use of his office's stature and materials in order to influence the Gero City mayoral election is indisputable. The prosecutors' failing to transform the charges into an indictment would shock the conscience. (J)

So Maeda must go, and with the undertow he generates, Tanaka must be swept out with him. Having pledged in his victory speech in last fall's DPJ leader election to be a "no-sides" party leader, meaning that he will choose his cabinet and fellow party leaders based not upon ability but on fair representation of all the different groups within the party, Noda harvests the rotten fruit of his ill-considered magnanimity.

Former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro, wherever he is hanging out right now, must be thinking, "Noda-san, when I was prime minister, were you not taking notes? Even Ozawa Ichiro, who accepts no one as his equal, saw that my way of tossing into the trash the candidate lists from the faction leaders, appointing the competent and firing even the popular when they caused trouble was the only way to run this blessed land."

Image: Maeda Takeshi (L) and Tanaka Naoki (R) leaving the Cabinet meeting room on April 17, 2012.

Image courtesy: Mainichi Shimbun

Given 'Em The Axe, The Axe, The Axe

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

"Give 'em the axe, where?
Right in the neck, the neck, the neck!"

- The Stanford University Axe chant

Aside from the Prime Minister and Chief Cabinet Minister Fujimura Osamu, Tanaka Naoki and Maeda Takeshi have been my favorite members of the current Cabinet. Given how much the latter two ministers have done to damage, sully or otherwise trash the reputation of the Noda Government and the Democratic Party of Japan, it is has only been natural to write about them (click on the labels below for earlier posts). I could have written so much more, too...

However, it seems these halcyon days are drawing to a close. Rather than play with Tanaka and Maeda as a cat would with mortally-injured-but-still-living mice, the opposition trio of the Liberal Democratic Party, the Your Party and the New Renaissance Party yesterday submitted motions of censure against both men to the president of the House of Councillors. The censure votes will come on Friday, with passage a seeming mathematical certainty. (E)

I heartily support the censure motions. If any pair of ministers has deserved the axe, this pair has.

I have two reservations tempering my glee, however.

First, Noda Yoshihiko should have fired both of these morons himself the moment each first cast doubts upon the ethical or intellectual standards of the Cabinet, rather than giving them time to add to their pewter reputations and besmirch his and the DPJ's rule.

Second, the LDP has debased the censure motion. It will be hard for the public and possibly historians to see a difference between the censures Tanaka and Maeda and those of Ichikawa Tatsuo and Yamaoka Kenji. These latter motions were passed on the last day of the last year's extraordinary session of the Diet in what looked like a fit of pique. Ichikawa started out as a defense idiot but grew into his job over the course of the Diet session. Yamaoka was censured not anything he had done as minister but for not renouncing his support from direct-marketers. Censuring Ichikawa and Yamaoka was done not for actions by the ministers but with the goal of sowing confusion within the DPJ, as both Ichikawa and Yamaoka were Ozawa Ichiro supporters, through and through.

Defenders of the LDP will point out that the DPJ, in its time in opposition, filed a blizzard of censure motions. While true, the claim elides over the crucial point that prior to the takeover of the government by the DPJ, only one cabinet minister had ever been forced to resign after being censured: Nukaga Fukushiro in 1998. Since the LDP-led opposition seized control of the House of Councillors in July 2010, however, it has used the censure motion to force the resignation of four cabinet ministers and is set to hack down two more.

Use of the censure motion when the opposition has the power to halt the progress of non-budget legislation carries with it the danger of censure becoming nothing more that a blunt instrument of political mischief-making, rather than a weapon of righteous anger or for shaking when political circumstances render the opposition impotent.


Later - The morning's NHK plain white rice news show Ohayo Nippon had person-on-the-street interviews regarding yesterday's submissions. Voters -- men and women, young and old -- all thought the opposition was abusing the power to censure.

Later still - The Asahi Shimbun offers its two yen's worth, not significantly different from my own. (E)

Why Is This Man Still A Minister?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Do you know me?

Chances are, you don't.

I am the minister who has made an utmost effort to kneecap my own party, signing off on the dream budgets of bureaucrats under me with such craven disregard for the Democratic Party of Japan's welfare I have split the party's core leadership over my shenanigans, when it already has enough trouble dealing with the looming shadow of Ozawa Ichiro.

Now I have gone and done something so stupid, so incredibly wrong that I finally may get the ax I have so richly deserved. Imagine me, the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, taking time out of my day to write a letter to construction companies of Gero, a city of 38,000 persons in Gifu Prefecture, asking for the support of these companies for a former DPJ legislator now running for mayor of that city.

I wrote the letters, signed them, then sent them to the construction companies in Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism envelopes!

My excuse for this egregious abuse of my office for political purposes? None. But believe me, I am vewy, vewy sowwy I did this.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu has said that he will investigate my actions. What is there to investigate? I did it. I have confessed to the press that I did it.

DPJ Secretary-General Koshi'ishi Azuma says I did not break the law on public officials interfering in politics (J). If I somehow did not manage to break the law, then that law is not worth a damn.

The Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito are demanding my resignation. Considering what I have done for and to my own party, it is a miracle DPJ legislators have already not bound me up, gagged me and dumped in the trunk of a government car.

My name? Maeda Takeshi. I was a page 2 story two days ago. Thanks to the DPRK's expensive fireworks display today, I will be a page 2 story tomorrow.

Damned Damn Dams Damn Damn Japan

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Let me see if I get this straight. After restoring, under the sponsorship of the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), funding for the completion of the egregious Yamba Dam – an immense political liability for an administration for whom the Yamba dam cancellation was seemingly the only campaign promise it had not repudiated or altered beyond all recognition and a tumor that lurks within the budget passed by the House of Representatives last Thursday (J) – the Cabinet has just approved a further bill, again authored by the MLIT minister, providing funding for offsets and new economic revitalization plans for local communites that have been disrupted by the cancellation of dams. (J)

Who the hell is thinking up these bills? OK, the MLIT bureaucrats, given. But who in his or her right mind thinks that these bills will do anything but hurt the standing of the Democratic Party of Japan among non-aligned voters, who at 48.7% of the electorate are the prizes up for grabs in the next House of Representatives election? (J - with background in E)

These communities have already been pigs at the trough in the development phase of these cancelled projects. Now we are going to be giving them seconds?

Who the heck is in charge of this mess?


Later - Many thanks to reader PM for pointing out the broken links.