The Nakatsugawa Mystery Solved, Or Ozawaism Without Ozawa

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Well, that was fast.

In my post of yesterday, I was puzzled what Nakatsugawa Hirosato, a Tokyo Bloc proportional seat representative of the Democratic Party of Japan could be doing quitting the party to serve as an independent.

It turns out the answer depended on what one believes "independent" means.

If by independent one thinks "serving in the Diet without attachment to any party" then Nakatsugawa's resignation yesterday made no sense.

If, however, by independent one means "a label to paste upon oneself until the party one hopes to join organizes itself" then a proportional seat member throwing himself off the DPJ party list before the party got around to throwing him off itself makes complete sense.

As it turns out, Nakatsugawa seems to be the missing piece in the plans of Kiuchi Takatane, the first man out the door in the buildup to the passage of the consumption tax bill. Kiuchi, the Tokyo District #9 seatholder and a former Merrill Lynch partner, is The Big Money behind a new parliamentary caucus in the House of Representatives, just as Tanioka Kuniko is The Big Money behind the new Green Wind (Midori no kaze) caucus in the House of Councillors.

Kiuchi, it turns out, is further along in the process of building a party around himself than Tanioka. Nakatsugawa, if and when his resignation from the DPJ is accepted, would become the fifth member of the Kiuchi's new caucus, currently slated to be called "the Association of Reform Independents" (Kaikaku mushozokukai) (J). With five members the caucus could be converted into a formal party, eligible for public campaign funding and other goodies.

The caucus, which is to be launched today without Nakatsugawa's participation, is composed of Kiuchi, a North Kanto proportional seat holder, a South Kanto proportional seat holder (Nakatsugawa, if and when he joins, would complete a Kanto Plain trifecta) and Sato Yuko, a Nagoya District seat holder and former political secretary to current Nagoya City mayor and major loon Kawamura Takashi.

So on successive days the DPJ has seen defections tied to monied former members, both of whom were recruited by Ozawa Ichiro, each establishing proto-parties linked to neither the DPJ, the LDP nor Ozawa Ichiro's Livelihood Party.

It is impossible to tell how far either Kiuchi's or Tanioka's caucuses can go. Neither Tanioka's liberal (don't tax but spend) or Kiuchi's neo-liberal (don't tax and don't spend, indeed, cut) ideologies electrify the electorate. Tanioka is an irrepressible talker, so will have no problem in promoting Green Wind and keeping it in the public eye. Kiuchi's communication skills are so far unknown. Kiuchi's focus so far on the Kanto Plain area, where Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party has its base (and indeed, featuring a political philosophy which is nearly indistinguishable from Watanabe's), and Tanioka's only having women in her caucus are hurdles both incipient leaders will have to overcome before either caucus can become a significant new forces in politics, both which in their essences seem to be competing flavors of Ozawaism-without-Ozawa.

--------------------------------------------------
* In my post yesterday about the Green Wind, I did not acknowledge the association of Green Wind with Die Grünen and other Green parties in Europe. While the association is there, particularly in Green Wind's anti-nuclear stance, the connection of green with wind in a caucus of the House of Councillors is the stronger precedent. The House of Councillors has had the Furyokukai ("Wind-Green-Association") and then the Shinfuryokukai ("New-Wind-Green-Association"). The latter association formed a joint caucus with the DPJ only to be absorbed into it, leaving only the name of the caucus -- The Democratic Party Of Japan and New Wind Green Association Caucus -- as a reminder of the Shinfuryokai's existence.

Laboring To Retrieve Some Semblance of Relevance

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, When Yamaoka Kenji dropped off the 40 resignation letters from Democratic Party of Japan members of the House of Representatives at the DPJ secretary-general's office on Monday, the curiously round number of 40 raised some eyebrows. Suspicions were reinforced by the odd coincidence that 40 was precisely the number of likely defectors being batted around in press reporting immediately prior to the delivery of the letters.

No matter how good their reporters are, no paper or television station ever gets the numbers spot on. Close, sure. But on the money? A damn rare occurrence.

It was not outside the realm of conjecture that former DPJ leader Ozawa Ichiro and Yamaoka had asked some of those who wanted to quit the DPJ to remain behind, to become sleepers, poised to resign from the DPJ in dramatic style when the new Ozawa-led breakaway party came into being.

However, so botched was the Monday breakout, with 3 of the 40 asking to have their resignations rescinded and a fourth becoming an independent, that a drastic change the narrative was in order. The story was becoming one of laughable oafishness and presumption rather than menace.

So it seems that Ozawa chose to burn one of his presumed sleepers.

Kato Gaku (Nagano District #5, freshman) was one of the 17 DPJ members of the House who had voted against the bill raising the consumption tax to 10% by 2015 but who elected to stay on the in the party. On Tuesday the DPJ executive tagged Kato with a two-month suspension of his party privileges.

Somehow Kato found this punishment, which would see him reinstated with full rights in time for the DPJ's leadership election in September, too onerous to bear. Exile and potential electoral oblivion seems to have been preferable.

Kato's attempts to create the impression that he had come to his decision on his own were almost sad. After meeting with Acting President Tarutoko Shinji, Kato explained his resignation as being a result of the likelihood there will be a House of Representatives election within the next two months and he wanted to prevent the increase in the consumption tax (J) -- two thoughts that whether considered together or in isolation, make not a bit of sense.

After Kato's meeting with DPJ secretary-general Koshi'ishi Azuma, he told waiting reporters, "I have come to this decision by myself." Such a claim is, of course, ludicrous. Whenever an adult male Homo sapiens tells you he came to a decision by himself, it is precisely because he did not.

Meanwhile the other 18 members of the DPJ under suspension -- the 17 others who had earned two month suspension plus Hatoyama Yukio, whose "no" vote on the consumption tax legislation was deemed so heinous, coming as it did from a founder of the party, that he was slapped with a six month suspension -- met with 3 of the House of Councillors members who had had their resignation tendered to the secretary-general on Monday in a study group meeting on of the passage of the consumption tax bill through the House of Councillors. Hatoyama, the parrot that he is, borrowed Ozawa Ichiro's catchphrase of "putting the livelihood of the people first" (kokumin no seikatsu ga daichi - a phrase Ozawa allies today registered as the names of the new caucuses for the DPJ rebels in the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors) as the reason he will continue to struggle with the DPJ leadership, even after receiving the party's most severe form of punishment short of expulsion. Hatoyama also parroted the blunt warning of Ozawa Sakihito (no relation (to Ozawa Ichiro) that if the all the members of the opposition, Party Kizuna, the yet-to-be-formed Ozawa party and the DPJ members under suspension were to vote together, a no-confidence motion again the Cabinet would pass. (J)

Theoretically, true. Practically, impossible.

The LDP and the New Komeito crave power; the Your Party hates the Noda government's contractionary economic policies and the deference it pays to the bureaucracy; and the Socialists hate the tax rise and the government's policies on the restarts of Japan's idled nuclear reactors.

But to think that all the members of these parties, plus the Sunrise Party, the other microparties, the independents plus the Communists will all join hands with Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio to topple the Noda government is wishful thinking at its most wishful.

As for Hatoyama's and Ozawa Sakihito thuggish, numerically implausible threats, they have flushed down the toilet any chance of the mainstream DPJ leadership ever allowing either man any responsibility greater than crossing guard or perhaps garbage collector.

How many Kato Gakus still sleep among the ranks of the DPJ? My guess is four, perhaps five more. It is possible, however, that my confidence in Noda Yoshihiko's mastery of the numbers blinds me to the likelihood of a much larger and damaging number of potential defectors remaining.

As for Ozawa Sakihito, he clearly seems to have missed the elementary school lesson that when someone treats you with leniency, you show remorse and, for a decent interval, remain silent.


Later - This text has been edited for clarity.

The U.S. Establishment Wishes It Had A Vote Here

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Democratic Party of Japan senior advisor Watanabe Kozo is one of the grand old men of Japanese politics. He is one of the three surviving members of the famous Seven Magistrates (shichinin no bugyo) of the Liberal Democratic Party, the seven middle-ranking members of the Takeshita Faction identified as likely future prime ministers (the other two surviving members of the group are Ozawa Ichiro and Hata Tsutomu. An oddity: only those who left the LDP are alive today).

However, the weight of years (79 of them) and ill health are forcing Watanabe K. to consider retirement at the end of the current Diet's term.

Herein lies a problem. The support group (koenkai) of Watanabe K. wants his first born son, Watanabe Tsuneo (no, obviously not that Watanabe Tsuneo) to succeed his father. DPJ rules, as laid down by the party manifesto of 2009, forbid the handing down of seats to family members. It is a rather ridiculous rule, as it was laid down by Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio, both of whom are hereditary seat holders (ah, the sweet scent of the double standard).

[Ed. Re: Hatoyama, see comment #5 below]

So Watanabe T. cannot receive the support of the local DPJ chapter should he wish to run. Of course, if the DPJ local chapter chooses someone else to run for Watanabe's seat, that person is unlikely to defeat an LDP opponent without the full support of the Watanabe K. koenkai.

Yesterday Watanabe K. suggested a novel solution (Watanabe K. is notorious for mumbling out contrarian and cranky suggestions, making him every journalist's best friend). If DPJ rules prevent his son from inheriting his seat and his koenkai remains adamant that it will support no one else, then Watanabe the Younger can run as a candidate on the Your Party ticket. (J)

Cue sound of DPJ senior cadres rolling their eyes and biting their lips.

Of course, Watanabe the Younger may not even want the job. A political scientist who spent a decade at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, he has what seems to be a comfortable position as the Director of Policy Research at The Tokyo Foundation. The thought of the soft-spoken Watanabe T. atop some sound truck giving campaign speeches to knots of elderly strangers or empty parking lots simply boggles the imagination.

Of course, one influential group would be thrilled to tears if Watanabe T. were to run for and win a Diet seat: the U.S. Japan policy establishment. "Nabe," as he is commonly known in Washington circles, would be considered a trustworthy DPJ shepherd of the Japan-U.S. alliance, a role that has been monopolized until now by Special Advisor to the Prime Minister Nagashima Akihisa or "Aki," as he is commonly known.*

The Washington policy establishment has no say in this intra-party kerfuffle **, of course. However, wise persons in the U.S. Japan policy community might want to email Watanabe the Younger and ask him, "Nabe, do you really want to run for a Diet seat?"

------------------------------------------
* It seems that anything more than two syllables taxes the Washington imagination.

** Watanabe Kozo is not the only problematic party elder. Fellow senior advisor and former Magistrate Hata wants his son to inherit his House of Representatives seat.

The Revolutionary Council Overreaches

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, It was strange watching the video of Osaka City Mayor Hashimoto Toru presiding over the meeting of an Ishin no kai steering committee as the delegates ratified list of ultimate goals for the quasi-party, if and when it participates in national elections.

The list of the Ishin no kai goals includes:

- abolition of the House of Councillors

- direct elections of the Prime Minister

- abolition of the prefectures in favor of larger regional units resembling the German lander (the various plans known collectively as the doshusei).

- abolition of the grants from the national government tax revenues to local areas (chihokofuzei) in favor of direct taxation carried out by the local areas themselves

[By the way, where are the sources of the chihokofuzei grant monies?

32% of income taxes
32% of taxes on alcohol
34% of corporate income taxes
29.5% of the consumption tax
25% of tobacco taxes (Source)

Not a bad cut of national revenues...]

- elimination of national pension payments to the wealthiest taxpayers after their retirement (nenkin hokenryo no kakesute - J)

What was so strange about the video clip was how disengaged Hashimoto looked (especially since that last idea is his). Whether it was out of boredom, madness or a desperate attempt to anesthetize himself to the berzerk radicalism of his minions, Hashimoto was simply not there, emotionally or intellectually.

The list of campaign promises, which the Ishin no kai, in complete agreement with its ersatz Meiji Restoration revivalist ethos has called its "Eight Policies from the Ship" (senchu hassaku) in imitation of Sakamoto Ryoma's famous missive, has already drawn guffaws from the established political parties. The leaders and spokesmen of the parties had a field day yesterday, pointing out that item after item would require not just a revision of numerous laws but even amendment of the Constitution, a document which has not seen the alteration of even a single punctuation mark since its promulgation on November 3, 1946. (J). That any and every amendment would require not only its passage through the Diet with a two-thirds vote in both Houses but approval from the voters in a national referendum (the governing rules of which came into effect less that a year ago - J) casts the Ishin no kai wish list into the realm of fantasy.

Applause did come from some quarters yesterday. Predictably, the terrible twins of the Chubu Region Aichi Governor Omura Hideaki and Nagoya Mayor Kawamura Takashi had nice things to say about the quasi-party platform (J). Omura echoes every decentralization plan coming out of Osaka and Kawamura, well, he is just nuts (but in a damnably warm and clever way. His tour de force has been providing the depleted Tohoku with wave after wave of Nagoya civil servants to replace persons lost in the triple disaster or for the training of their replacements -J).

The surprise was the positive reaction of the Your Party to the Ishin no kai proposals. Your Party leader Watanabe Yoshimi praised the list, saying that in terms of bringing the national bureaucracy under control, decentralizing of authority and making Japan a nation of prosperity, the goals of the Ishin no kai and the Your Party are completely in sync (J).

Maybe he just scanned the text.

Major media outlets have panned the proposals. The Asahi Shimbun suggests that the ideas expressed needed a little more intra-party discussion before being released (J). The Sankei Shimbun wonders what happens to the Emperor as head of state, if the prime minister is popularly elected (J).

Up until now the Ishin no kai has been on a roll. It had, possibly because the reality of what it represented had not been spelled out, been gaining popularity in the public imagination.

It remains to be seen whether the release of this wild wish list slams the brakes on the what had been until a hurtling "Go Go Hashimoto" freight train.

Parsing Out Hashimoto's Goals

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Over at σ1, Corey Wallace present a long exposition on the position of Hashimoto Toru in terms of links he might or might not make with national or other regional politicians. (Link)

To his views, a few comments of my own.

- A link-up between Hashimoto's proposed party and Your Party could be quite profitable in a geographical sense. The Your Party is mostly a Kanto Plain area party. If Hashimoto and Watanabe Yoshimi can work out an entente, the result would be an East Japan/ West Japan split of responsibilities, which would be much easier for both parties to handle.

- A major potential stumbling block to any sort of alliance between any of the national parties and a potential Hashimoto national party is Hashimoto's ego. Mr. Wallace sees him as a pragmatist. I see him as a revolutionary -- and revolutionaries are known to have (usually with disastrous consequences) amazing self-confidence.

Anyway, it is all aboard the regionalism train. In the wake of Hashimoto's announcing of the establishment of a training school for prospective national politicians -- to be opened, according to the latest accounts, in March (J) -- Aichi Governor Omura Hideaki has announced the establishment of his own training school for prospective politicians (J). Furthermore, the governors of the prefectures on Shikoku (Ehime, Kagawa, Kochi and Tokushima) have announced they will be forming a regional organization to better coordinate their relations with the central government and collaborate with regionalists in the Kansai. (J)

Interesting times.

Storm Clouds Gathering, But To What End?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Today the Diet opens its 180th regular session. It promises to be a murderous one, with absolutely no quarter being given by or cooperation coming from the opposition Liberal Democratic, New Komeito and Your parties.

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko has emanated an aura of preternatural calm in advance of his policy speech today but it masks an intense amount of pressure upon him and his Cabinet. To every single piece of legislation or proposed legislation there is heated, almost hysterical opposition, not only between the ruling coalition and the opposition, but between the coalition partners and even between large segments of the Diet membership of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. Even the budget, which would normally be guaranteed passage by the DPJ's huge majority in the House of Representatives, is threatened by its contents, most particularly the plan to restart construction of the Yamba Dam -- a plan that is anathema to what seems a clear majority of DPJ Diet members (just why the Noda government caved in to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism pressure on this issue late last year never made the pages or the programs of the mainstream media).

The Fall 2011 extraordinary session saw a miserable 34% passage rate among bills presented to the Diet, the worst rate of bill passage seen since the Heisei Era began. The upcoming regular session, with its series of extremely controversial and radical bills, may end up deadlocked at an even lower level of success.

The question on everyone's lips is whether or not a state of crisis in this upcoming session of the Diet will trigger a House of Representatives election.

Three scenarios predominate:

1) The House of Representatives refuses to consider or rejects the debt ceiling and law modification legislation necessary to implement the Fiscal 2012 budget, triggering a deadlock so tight the prime minister must call an election (a dream of the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party).

2) The Noda government negotiates a settlement with the LDP and the New Komeito whereby they will band together to pass the budget enabling legislation and the raising of the consumption tax in return for a dissolution of the Diet and an election (a dream of political journalists).

3) Internal dissension within the DPJ over the consumption tax rise grows so fevered that Prime Minister Noda, in a fit of pique, calls an election to rid the party of its of its anti-tax faction (the dream of those who believe Ozawa Ichiro is the black hand behind all of the DPJ's internal problems).

Arithmetic, Ozawa's ongoing trial and recent polling results would argue for deals being struck, possible leading to or made after the toppling of Tanigaki Sadakazu from his perch atop the LDP.

If an election were held prior to the predicted end of the regular session of the Diet and/or with no important legislation passed, the DPJ would lose a huge number of seats, particularly in the rural districts. It was a once-in-a-half-century change of heart on the part of voters that enabled the DPJ to capture these bastions of LDP power in 2009. The party would be loath to part with them.

As for the internal divisions of the DPJ, they are very much as "all bark and no bite" affair. The most loudly barking groups in the party are those most vulnerable to losing their seats in the next election (hence the volume of their barking). They know quite well that if they gum up the works on consumption tax legislation or Japan's entering into negotiations on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership so much so that Prime Minister Noda feels compelled to hold an election, they are electoral toast. The direct followers of or those ready to bend an ear to Ozawa Ichiro, who love to look around the room and admire their numbers whenever Ozawa deigns to bless them with his words of political wisdom, are also numbly aware that any breakaway party with Ozawa at its head or under his thrall will get thrashed in an election.

Furthermore, neither the DPJ nor the LDP want to go before the voters right now. In a stunning recent poll by the Mainichi Shimbun only 17% of the voters supported the DPJ and 16% supported the LDP (E). The two major parties are terrified of non-mainstream parties, either the Your Party or the proto-national party being formed by Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru (J). Even the normally lock-step the-LDP-is-my-party-right-or-wrong Yomiuri Shimbun is terrified of the prospects of a populist revolution and is counseling the LDP to get off its duff and cooperate with the DPJ-led government (E).

So much thunder and lightning will be evident today and through the next two weeks, as the governing and opposition parties get their turns at the rostrum.

Whether the typhoon will bear down upon the land, however, remains surprisingly uncertain.