Beauty Girls: Koizumi Jun'ichiro

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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 Worst Of Days

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Today should be the best of days. A day of celebration of the end of the worst of all wars. The end of the rule of this blessed land by an oligarchy of military officers. A celebration of the end of the needless sacrifice of millions soldiers and tens of millions of civilians to a false god, a faith that security is bought through the elimination of potential threats on one's horizon, pursued and acquired with blood and treasure, only for horizon to move ahead, non erit finis. It should be a celebration of the end of the long subjugation of the Korean peoples and the attempt to extirpate their culture. The end of the 80 year struggle between China and Japan for mastery of East Asia, a conflict that left both devastated and impoverished.

It should be a day of remembrance, yes for the soldiers who died in the conflict, but more importantly the civilians, who had no part in the conflict between the military men, other than to be crushed and blown to pieces by the machine of war.

A day to raise a glass and say, "It ended on this day."

But it will likely not be the best of days. It will likely be one of the worst.

State Minister for the Abduction Issue and Chairman of the National Security Commission Matsubara Jin and Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Hata Yuichiro promised to visit Yasukuni today. Matsubara earlier this morning made good on this promise. If and when Hata makes good on his promise, these will be the first visits to Yasukuni by Cabinet ministers since the Democratic Party of Japan took power three years ago. It will be the first visit by more than one Cabinet member since the Koizumi years.

Matsubara has always been a paid-in, Grade Triple-A, choice member of the right-wing bag of nuts. His right-wing bona fides were why prime minister Noda Yoshihiko handed him for the Abductee portfolio, which the DPJ had been passing around like a hot potato. Matsubara was always a candidate for the DPJ-member most likely to visit the shrine on August 15. He has simply made good on the threat that he posed.

Hata has never featured prominently in right wing newsmaking . He has been a regular attendee of August 15 legislators' visits to Yasukuni. A member of the House of Councillors, he is not up for reelection next year; this is no bald electoral stunt. His father Tutsomu, however, seems too ill to run for his House of Representatives seat. So Hata Junior is possibly positioning himself for a run for his father's seat.

Nagano Prefecture is not seen as a part of the conservative heartland. Hata the Younger is a real legacy politician, however, with few or no personal achievements or capacities. With the DPJ a damaged electoral brand, it seems that he feels insufficiently confident he has the gravitas to both forego going to Yasukuni today and still win the Nagano #3 seat his father has occupied since 1969.

On the 10th of this month, Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu asked members of the Cabinet to show self-control as regards official visits to Yasukuni. Matsubara reportedly has and Hata is promising to adhere to the letter, if not the spirit, of Fujimura's request by paying "personal" or "private" visits. (J)

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko might have asked Matsubara and Hata to suspend their visits or resign as ministers if they really wished to pay their respects. However, any interest Noda may have had in the Japanese Cabinet's demonstrating restraint in the interest of regional peace flew out the window with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's visit to Dokdo/Takeshima on the same day Fujimura made his appeal. After Lee's provocation, no prime minister could survive asking his subordinates to not visit Yasukuni.

In delicious irony, the excuse that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade made for Lees's visit to Dokdo is exactly the same one Koizumi Jun'ichiro used to give for his visits to Yasukuni: of what business is it of other nations when a leader of a country visits a location inside his own land? (E)

Noda is prickly about matters of Japanese honor. As the son of a Ground Self Defense Forces officer he sometimes takes a swerve toward the crazy as regards the actions of the Imperial Forces. His hair-splitting on the status of the 14 Class A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni or the procurement of the sex slaves known as the comfort women makes Japan's neighbors nervous. In the case of the comfort women issue, Noda's government out of principle had no strategy to deal with the new situation arising from the South Korean Supreme Court's ordering the country's executive branch to publicize the issue. It was Noda's ignoring Lee's importuning him to make some visible effort as regards reconsideration of the comfort women issue that pushed Lee to make his final determination to visit Dokdo. (J)

Meanwhile, somewhere north of the the Taiwan Straits, a shipload of Hong Kong activists is on course for a collision with Japanese Coast vessels just inside the 12 nautical mile perimeter around the Senkaku Islands. According NHK, the activists will arrive in the area about the Senkakus at around noon today, Japan Standard Time (J). As these confrontations have ended fatally in the past (E) it is inexplicable that Hong Kong authorities did not hinder the vessel's departure.

In South Korea, today is Independence Day. Considering how they have viewed the performances of South Korea's athletes at the London Olympics as an expression of national power and the victory in the South Korea-Japan men's soccer match as an expression of spiritual power (E - Fiction is dead: there is no longer any reason to make stuff up) one shudders to think how today's end of Japanese rule over Korea will be celebrated.

So today will be not a celebration of a region liberated from a hypertrophied, paranoid, expansionist nationalism but indeed the opposite, a series of vignettes reminding the rest of the planet on how much this ideological dead end holds the region in its thrall.

Taking Up Sides Against The Family

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Both the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan suffered breakdowns in party discipline in last night's no confidence vote.

As I noted in my live blogging of last night's vote, seven members of the LDP remained in the chamber and voted for the no confidence motion:

Nakagawa Hidenao
Shiozaki Yasuhisa
Suga Yoshihide
Koizumi Shinjiro
Kawai Katsuyuki
Shibamasa Masahiko
Matsunami Kenta

Disciplining the first four will be difficult. Nakagawa is already serving a six-month suspension of party privileges for having absented himself from the consumption tax bill vote in June. What to do now -- extend his suspension to a year?

Shiozaki presents an equally difficult conundrum. As a card-carrying member of the "Friends of Shinzo" -- the coterie of fanatabulist radicals who seized control of the government after their leader, Abe Shinzo, was elected prime minister -- he represents the vanguard of what has been a heretofore largely silent segment of the LDP's support base: the haters of postwar Japan as it is. Punishing Shiozaki severely threatens the unity of the Machimura Faction, which while ruled by a dove is filled with hawkish opponents of the current leadership group, its policies and its tactics.

As for Koizumi Shinjiro, he is a superstar, with the looks and the hooks to bring the house down. He has been among the LDPs most effective critics of the DPJ, from the very first weeks of the DPJ's turn as the party in power. He is a fourth-generation lawmaker, who won his father's district without his father lifting a finger to help him, a brilliant impromptu speaker and a winner in a year when the LDP first-termers had nearly zero chance of election.

He does not need the LDP: the LDP needs him.

On the DPJ side, there were two members who voted for the resolution: Kobayashi Koki, whom I disparaged yesterday, and Koizumi Toshiaki, who spent seven years cooling his heels after two terms as a DPJ district Representative. He was revived in the landslide election of 2009 as the Representative for Ibaraki District #3.

In addition to these two turncoats, who submitted their resignations from the party prior to last night's vote, five members of the DPJ's House of Representatives delegation called in sick.

Former Prime Minister Hata Tsutomu's illness was real: he has been hospitalized since February with an undisclosed illness.

Four other members, however, came down with illnesses of convenience:

Hatoyama Yukio
Kawauchi Hiroshi
Nakagawa Osamu
Tsuji Megumu

Kawauchi (Kagoshima District #1, 5th term) has been the human quote machine for a news media complex eager to find members of the DPJ willing to talk trash about the leadership. He has been a DINO (Democrat In Name Only) for as long as anyone can remember. His personal website (Link) has as its top line Kokumin seikatsu ga dai'ichi, the Ozawa Ichiro-dreamed up 2009 electoral slogan and the name of Ozawa's new party.

Kawauchi can and should be joining one of Ozawa's parties. However, he is far more useful to Ozawa as a DPJ irritant. The party should expel him. However, to expel Kawauchi and not expel Hatoyama will be difficult to explain.

Nakagawa is in his second term, having served from 2003-05 as a proportional seat member from the Kinki bloc. His career was revived by the 2009 landslide, where he became the district seat holder for Osaka District #18.

Tsuji Megumu has had a nearly carbon copy career, serving in a Kinki bloc proportional seat in 2003-2005. He lost his seat in the 2005 LDP landslide, then failed as the DPJ's candidate for mayor of Osaka City that same year. His career was also revived by the 2009 landslide, where he won the district seat for Osaka District #17.

The latter two mid-career veterans, with only a single district victory under their belts, have to be looking at the popularity of Hashimoto Toru's Osaka Ishin no kai and figuring that they have no chance at reelection as Democrats. Unfortunately for the pair, they have no chance of reelection as independents. If they had remained faithful to the leadership of the Democratic Party, then they might have at least had the chance to return to the Diet from the proportional list.

That is all water under the bridge now. The DPJ's local party organization will not support them as district candidates for the next election, ending their political careers.

As for Hatoyama, he is a special case. He is the co-founder of the DPJ. He and his mother bankrolled the party in its early years, when corporations would turn their backs on the party. He will be disciplined but in an insufficiently severe way, making it impossible to put a lid on the loquacious Kawauchi.

However, Hatoyama has gone too far. He has been both treacherous and useless. His tenure as prime minister was a disaster for the party, laying the groundwork for the party's losing control of the House of Councillors and thus the ability to set the political agenda. Since his downfall, an unrepentant Hatoyama has never ceased engaging in limp but still corrosive efforts to undermine his successors. He also encouraged Ozawa Ichiro, a man who has never understood the concept of party loyalty, to cause mischief.

Hatoyama should probably be considered the Fredo Corleone of the DPJ. He's family, so whadda ya gonna do? He is safe "as long as Mama is still alive" -- i.e., until such time as the current Diet is dissolved. The mainline leadership of the party will have to keep him at arm's length, but no further. After the Diet is dissolved, however, the present leadership will very probably take him fishing.

Goodbye, Detritus

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, In decidedly minor political news, Kobayashi Koki, one of the total wastes of human skin Ozawa Ichiro brought into the Democratic Party of Japan for possibly no reason other than to make himself look better by comparison, has declared he will vote for the pending no confidence motion and leave the DPJ. He has found intolerable the party's having submitted a bill raising the consumption tax. (J)

Koba-chan, your train left the station over a month ago.

So long you Tokyo University Faculty of Law graduate, former Ministry of International Trade and Industry bureaucrat, former Liberal Democratic Party district seat holder, expelled from the LDP by Koizumi Jun'ichiro for opposing postal reform and stripped of your seat by Koike Yuriko, only to be returned to the House of Representatives as a proportional list seat winner for the DPJ -- you will most certainly not be missed.

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.

Ozawa Ichiro As Potential Troublemaker

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, [Flash - the three lawyers who failed to win a conviction of Ozawa Ichiro with violations of the Political Funds Control Act have decided to appeal the not guilty verdict (J).

It is not too surprising a decision. The trio have an incentive to prove that they were not the fools losing the case made them out to be. They surely received an extra jolt of energy from the trial judge's statements casting doubts on parts of Ozawa's testimony. While the judge's asides did not find Ozawa, as Ishihara Nobuteru put it yesterday, "99% jet black" (J) they did not allow Ozawa to proclaim hiself pure as the driven snow either.

Later - Guessing as to whether or not the prosecuting lawyers have sought to humiliate the Democratic Party of Japan by announcing their decision to retry Ozawa after the DPJ executive voted to reinstate his party privileges is something the reader should not take two seconds to ponder over. Of course, they did. Such abusive behavior is in line with the conduct of this trial and the trials against Ozawa's secretaries, which from the outset have been politics by the most thuggish of means.]

Now, where was I?

I am on the record as believing Ozawa Ichiro faces constraints on his behavior preventing him from becoming the ogre the mainstream and scandal press predict he will be, now that his shackles are being loosed. (E)

However, my assertions have been predicated on Ozawa's understanding that the Democratic Party of Japan is different from the Liberal Democratic Party. Underpinning such a vision is a belief that after winning the control of the Diet through emulating the pork-barrel promises that made the LDP such an unshakable part of the post-Occupation reality, the DPJ would then shift gears and return the decentralized authority, anti-subsidy, anti-protectionist, anti-pork barrel program that made the pary the darlings of the urban white collar consumer vote.

Intrinsic to such vision was a completely overhaul the disenfranchising House of Representatives single-member districts system. At present, 91 of the single-member districts have population greater than twice the population of the smallest district, Kochi #3. The disparity shook even the somnolent Supreme Court to rule last year that the current system is unconstitutional, violating the right of all citizens to equal protection of the law.

However, when Ozawa effectively came to power through the puppet regime of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, revising the electoral system was not the first item on his agenda -- which it should have been if the DPJ were to have any chance at retaining power in the next House of Representatives election. Instead, what Ozawa did, to the horror of many in the media, was to order all of the first-termers, many of whom had specialist knowledge and had entered politics in order to affect and implement policy, out of the government positions to which Prime Minister Hatoyama had appointed (nakedly and brazenly showing who was calling the shots inside the DPJ). Instead, he ordered those stripped of their government positions and all other first-termers to forget policy and concentrate instead on politicking inside their home districts -- which, when you think about it, only makes sense if the borders of the districts were not set to change.

It is true that at the time Ozawa was not under the gun of the Supreme Court, which was not to deliver its ruling for another year, long after Ozawa had been toppled from power over the Futenma climb-down and the revolt of the middle-ranking lifers of the DPJ. However, numerous lower-ranking decisions had found the existing House of Representatives districts unconstitutional. Also, while the DPJ had won control of the House of Representatives with a mixture of disgust for the LDP and borrowing some of the LDP's vote-buying strategies (an Ozawa innovation that transformed the DPJ from a losing urban-surburban party to a winning national party) -- it was clear that the DPJ could not pull those same two rabbits out the hat twice.

For the DPJ, the choice was either reform the system or die.

So as Ozawa is given his freedom, the question is whether during his time in suspension, did he learn what it means to be a member of the DPJ? Or has he remained adamant in his thinking that the way to run Japan is to accept the country as it is and work around the margins, even though that approach has brought him grief time and time again, whether it was in the LDP, the New Frontier Party, the Liberal Party and his time as the power behind Hatoyama's throne?

In terms of policy, the signs are not encouraging. His opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, given the disparate interests of its negotiating members, may just as well end up crashing of its own accord, reveals an unfortunate attachment to the rural vote as it is currently super-empowered.

Ozawa's unwillingness to play ball with the current party leadership over the imposition of a rise in the consumption tax, which is represents a tough, and yes, contractionary solution to a debt mountain not of the DPJ's making, paints a picture of him as a factional bully, throwing around the weight of the 100 or so members of the DPJ beholden to him, rather than as a party man.

Ozawa's defenders insist that whatever the methods employed, Ozawa's primary interest has been the seizing of policy from the bureaucracy and making it answerable to the voters. To be sure, on the surface, the government of Noda Yoshihiko seems to have relinquished whatever gains not only his party made but much of what the LDP's Koizumi Jun'ichiro wrenched from out of the hands of the bureaucrats. For this reason, an unleashed Ozawa immediately challenging the legitimacy of the current leadership group is not only inevitable but salutatory.

It would be a grave mistake, however, for Ozawa to take on the leadership of DPJ. He must meet with Noda, one-to-one, and see what Noda's real goals and strategies are.

I do not refer to Noda as The Impenetrable One out of laziness. Noda is almost perversely parsimonious with his actual thinking on any given issue, no matter how beautifully he may talk about every issue. You can read Noda's words in the newspaper or on the Web, or hearing speaking him out loud on television or in person. However, as to what he thinks, one draws a blank. He may have a silver tongue but he does not appear to be speaking his mind.

Does Ozawa have the humility to go to the Kantei for a meeting of minds? The outlook is admittedly not promising.

Note - this post has been edited for greater clarity and precision.

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

Hashimoto's Women And Some Wishful Thinking

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Over at σ1, Corey Wallace has a new post up about the Saturday opening of Hashimoto Toru's juku. In his post Wallace argues that the Ishin no kai movement has an Achille's heel: it seems to have only a limited attraction to women. Women candidates have had powerful symbolic force in the last two House of Representatives elections, yet fewer than 10% of the 3326 applicants for the Hashimoto juku have been women.

I am not sure I buy the argument. First, 10% of 3326 is 330, which 30 more than the total number of candidates the Ishin no kai is expected to run in the next House of Representatives election.

Second, Hashimoto, who will have final say as to the candidates, is no dummy. Where a woman candidate will have a better chance to win than man, he will select a woman to run.

Third, and this is significant, the current ruling Democratic Party of Japan is a disaster when it comes to empowering women. A glance at the current Cabinet and the sub-cabinet level political posts makes this abundently clear. It is true that former party leader Ozawa Ichiro recruited high-profile women candidates to run and win against male Liberal Democratic Party candidates. However, the association with Ozawa currently disempowers these women in intra-party politics and prevents them from receiving significant posts.

The Liberal Democratic Party, despite its reputation, did promote women -- not only to more significant posts but in greater numbers. The cabinets of Koizumi Jun'ichiro were very woman-friendly: a surprising outcome from a divorced politician with a reputation of one with an eye for, but not a commitment to, the ladies. Tanigaki Sadakazu had Koike Yuriko as his chair of the General Council; no DPJ woman has ever been anywhere near a top party post.

So if any party needs to fear its relationship with women, it is the DPJ. Contrary to misconceptions, the DPJ has historically had a greater popularity with men than with women. Given the current DPJ leadership's retrenchment on issues of special importance to women like the child-rearing allowance (E), a supposition that the DPJ will do as well among women as it did in 2009 is shaky.

As for the DPJ's views of the opening of the Hashimoto juku, the member of the party executive who states...

"Ishin no Kai's use-by date will expire in a year. If the dissolution of the lower house is moved back further, Ishin no Kai will lose its momentum."

(Link)

...is living on Fantasy Island.

The Ishin no kai will not just fade away into irrelevance like the LDP reform revolts headed by Kato Ko'ichi, Watanabe Yoshimi and Masuzoe Yo'ichi. The Ishin no kai is a popular movement with a base in the Kansai. It is not a just wooden horse from the Nagata-cho merry-go-round that has suddenly reared up and bolted away.

Stopping Hashimoto from reaching greater heights and amassing more power will require hard, hard work, with the news media ~~colluding~~ cooperating with the mainstream parties to hold him down. Just sitting around in the tatami room, drinking mugi-cha and swatting at mosquitoes, waiting for the Ishin no kai to fall à la Blood, Sweat and Tears, will just not suffice.

Tanigaki Sadakazu And Godwin's Law

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, It had to happen eventually, and as almost as eventually, Liberal Democratic Party President Tanigaki Sadakazu was going to be the man at the center of the action.

Hashimoto Toru's blustery manner, tyrannical treatment of civil servants and pursuit of enforced patriotism has emboldened some of his followers to monitor at school graduations ceremonies not only whether teachers and school administrators were standing for the national anthem but whether their mouths were moving (J has led to elites, mostly based in the capital, to deride his Hashimoto's manner and his political quasi-party the Ishin no kai as representing "Hashism."

It was up to Tanigaki to violate Godwin's Law -- which means to confirm it, of course.

On Sunday, in a speech in Kyoto, Tanigaki stamped up and down on subtlety and seemingly stepped in kemo sabe.**

"In saying that party politics is no good, it is like like the emergence of the military faction in the teens of the Showa Era. It seems to be in the same atmosphere that Hitler and Mussolini emerged." (J)

OK, wow, he has gone and done it, called Hashimoto a neo-proto-Hitler.

Somebody had to do it.

One cannot not deride Tanigaki's musings as a full expression of Godwin's Law, where given time and an ever enlarging number of comments the chances of a debate devolving into comparisons with Hitler comes to equal 1. Kamei Shizuka called former prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro a "Hitler" in 2003 for having the temerity to use his powers a president of the LDP to force members to toe the line he set for the party (E). Boy, I am sure Kamei was surprised when Koizumi forced him out of the LDP two years later!

Tanigaki's comparison of Hashimoto Toru's rise that of Hitler comes prefaced by negative remarks about the rise of the military faction in the Japanese government during the 1930s.

Such talk would seem odd from the grandson of one of the generals who commanded the forces invading and occupying China. However, Kakesa Sadaaki was not your ordinary 1930s general. Indeed, he was transferred out of China and plopped on the island of Rabaul on the direct order of Prime Minister Togo Hideki for having being too solicitous and respectful of the Chinese.

One of Tanigaki's main political peculiarities, one which is not so peculiar given the example set by his grandfather, is his comfort with things Chinese as compared the rest of the LDP, which tends to be extremely suspicious if not paranoid about China. While his affection toward China is focused more on its classical tradition, thinking positively of China would, in a happier world, serve as a bridge between himself and Ozawa Ichiro, who has cultivated close relations with the leaders of China, despite the political unpopularity of such behavior.

Should sinophilia be seen a litmus test in Japanese politics against fascism? In Ozawa's case it is clearly does instill distaste of strong man rule, when the policies merit it. Just who might be the judge of the merit of said policies is the question. Ozawa clearly took Democratic Party of Japan's 2009 House of Representatives victory as a justification of the implementation of the party's 2009 manifesto. That the DPJ victory might possibly have been as much the result of disgust with the LDP as a stamp of approval for the manifesto did not serve as a bridle on Ozawa, who saw to it that the promises were carried out, even at the cost of party unity, party popularity and the term in office of his puppet Hatoyama Yukio.

But back to what happened on Sunday. Despite Tanigaki's tendency to misunderstand situations and concepts, his sincerity he feels in comparing "Hashism" to its namesakes is not as easy to dismiss as it would be had the above quote issued from other lips.

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* This last news item has already been mentioned by another blogger. However I do not remember who it was. My apologies to him or her for not being able to extend a tip of the hat.

** This is a joke regarding an upcoming Johnny Depp movie. Don't worry about it.

Later - This post has been edited for greater clarity - MTC.

Perhaps They Will Never Know

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Today is a day of remembrance, a day when a goodly part of the nation will actually take a break from its usual frenetic Sundays to stand at attention for a minute of silence at 2:46 p.m. The emperor, bless his 78 year-old soul, will take part in memorial activities, despite having had a heart bypass operation 3 weeks ago. He at least believes this a day like no other. We should all think as he does.

In the spirit of the day, I shall restrain myself from my usual fury or glee at the latest shenanigans of the nation's political classes. My mind is consumed at present with a typhoon of contempt for all but a few of the elected and the meritocratic and nepotistic elites. However, I will hold the storm's fury back for this one day.

One point, however. Many publications and broadcasts (and one famous organization, inexplicably still headed by a defrocked imperial prince) have been carping about the lack of progress in the reconstruction of the ravaged and broken areas of the Tohoku (we should not forget that the earthquake and its aftershocks wreaked havoc far from the reach of the tsunami). The failure to begin rebuilding the lost communities, whether once again in the tsunami zones or on the shaved-off tops of nearby mountains, is ascribed to the current divided Diet or, in certain quarters, the inexperienced hands of the Democratic Party of Japan-led government.

No and no and No and NO!

The elites who are charged with guiding us, or at least using our tax money wisely, are not at a loss with what to do with the Tohoku. They are at a loss with what to do with Japan -- and have been so for 20 years now. Oh some of them have a plan, the Abe Shinzo-Shimomura Kokubun-Hiranuma Takeos and their ilk, to turn the populace into authority-fearing, emperor-loving, nation-building automatons...but sorry, been there, done that and no, it does not turn out very nicely, thank you very much (note to government of the PRC: imprison your colonels now, while you still can). The Liberal Democratic Party and the followers of Ozawa Ichiro made it their common cause in the midst of the disaster's rescue and stabilization phase to drive Prime Minister Kan Naoto from office. Now they are trying to do the same to Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko during what is still the recovery phase. If either of these opposition camps were to seize the wheel of the ship of state, however, neither would have the foggiest notion in what direction to sail the Nihon Maru.

The ship has been adrift for two decades. Every so often a steady hand has taken hold of the tiller -- Hashimoto Ryutaro, Koizumi Jun'ichiro -- but it was always to right wrongs ten years too late, when it hardly mattered anymore. The victory by the DPJ was the same -- its program of putting people's livelihoods first was not revolutionary -- it was archaic, practically an anachronism. By the time the LDP had power stripped from out of its cold, near-dead claws, the treasury was empty; the countryside depleted, dependent and despondent; the cities ugly, unkempt and angry.

So today, as the cameras sweep over the barren lots and skeletons of structures for this anniversary, before running off to cover some other epiphenomenon or catastrophe, tune out the blather about the present day political mess. The images are of Japan as it is, as it has been under the veneer of efficiency and equality and beyond Tokyo's glitz and youth and energy. The stillness and lethargy are not aberrant: they are symptomatic of a ruling class without time in their schedules for the people they are supposed to be leading.

The Rehabilitation Of Kan

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, With the one year anniversary of 3/11 fast approaching, the reviews and reassessments of the crazed first few hours, days and weeks after the triple disaster have been coming in over the transom at a predictable yet indigestible rate. So much material is being released, so many seminars and commemorative events are being held that the mind can absorb only a fraction of the information bombarding it.

Nevertheless, from amidst the cacophony, one muffled truth of the catastrophe is at last being heard clearly: Prime Minister Kan Naoto performed his job up to what were the limits of what was humanly possible and kept focused on the important, whilst almost everyone around him lost his or her heads.

As of last week, the domestic news media was still failing to appreciate how it was taken in by its sources in the power industry and the national bureaucracy in campaigning against Kan's leadership during the crisis. As if reading from the same script, the papers and the broadcast media all claimed on Monday last week that a 400 page report (an English précis by the group's leader Funabashi Yoichi can be found here) by the Rebuild Japan Initiative (Nihon saiken inishiateibu) would offer incontrovertible proof that Kan's micromanagement and intrusion into so many aspects of the crisis, particularly the attempts to control the mushrooming disaster at the Fukushima Dai'ichi plant, contributed to confusion and bad decision making.

However, in the release of the report and in the press conference by the co-authors, the exact opposite was shown to be true. Kan's intense involvement and refusal, after the power company representatives and the bureaucracy failed him, to take anything being told to him at face value, turned out to be at worst unimportant and at best crucial for mitigating the catastrophe. What complaints there were about Kan's intensity came from bureaucrats who were dumbfounded that this damned politician was doing their jobs and appointing civilian advisers to aid him. That he had to do their jobs or appoint others to do them because they themselves were not doing them did not, according to the media's quotes from the report, ever cross the bureaucrats' minds.

The rehabilitation of Kan's reputation is being led, as was the investigation in the Olympus scandal, by outsiders, both domestic and foreign. The mainstream is still caught up in its own master narrative, that the Kan Cabinet's disaster response was a failure and Kan a self-deluded meddler. Some organizations are beginning to grasp how thoroughly they were led astray by their sources (J). Others are doubling down (J), committed to their narrative and their prejudices.

Since I myself have a reputation to protect -- of being one prone to extreme statements -- put me down as nominating Kan Naoto as Japan's greatest prime minister since Yoshida Shigeru. With little public support for his cabinet, the upper echelons of the national bureaucracy inert to the point of malfeasance, an opposition that only three weeks after the disaster was accusing him in Diet committee of having caused the explosions at Fukushima Dai'ichi and a pair of quislings in his party who came within centimeters of leading their followers into joining hands with the opposition in a no-confidence motion against his cabinet, he oversaw the largest ever mobilization of the Self Defense Forces, the most massive disaster rescue and relief operation in the country's history, the greatest evacuation, housing and resettlement operation of the postwar era and the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl -- and when he had no political allies or capital left, leveraged his resignation into a means of extorting from his many enemies the passage of three last vital pieces of legislation. (E)

Nakasone Yasuhiro and Koizumi Jun'ichiro retired from the scene with golden halos. Kan had to spin straw into gold -- and having done it, received not a thimbleful of credit for it.

Tanigaki's Ticking Clock

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, President of the Liberal Democratic Party Tanigaki Sadakazu must be feeling pretty blue these days, despite the relatively mild weather in Tokyo (mild as compared to the Japan Sea side of the nation, which has been absolutely flattened with snow this season). He has led the LDP from a nadir of around 17% popularity in the aftermath the Democratic Party of Japan victory in August 2009 to its current 17% after two-and a half years of DPJ fumbling and bumbling. He has never cultivated a particularly memorable personality: whether of that of an intellectual, of a super-nice guy or of a calming influence upon the fractious factionalism of the LDP barons -- all of which were reasons given for his appropriateness as party leader in September 2009.

In the meantime, the DPJ, whilst originally setting itself apart from recent (post-Mori Yoshiro) LDP practices in terms of foreign affairs and fiscal policies, is now plundering the LDP party manifesto for ideas, which the LDP, even though it is the main opposition party, obviously cannot oppose. When the DPJ cannot stomach the LDP's proposal, it turns to the LDP's ally the New Komeito for draft legislation, whether it is for the reduction of the remuneration of national bureaucrats or the counter-reformation at the post office (J). The DPJ's acceptation of the latter draft bill is especially ominous for the LDP and its leader, as the original reform of the post office was an LDP government crusade, admittedly under the iconoclast prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro. Walking back a reform that split the LDP asunder in 2005 is very difficult for the LDP to contemplate. That not backing the New Komeito bill would create a rift in between the LDP and the New Komeito makes the eventual decision on what to do all the more fraught.

Now to Tanigaki's woes are added the rise of regional parties, the most prominent of which is Hashimoto Toru's Kansai-based Ishin no kai. The emergence of these regional parties means that the LDP cannot rely on the stance of being the default anti-DPJ alternative, even in the districts, the contestible ones of which the LDP was hoping to recapture in the next House of Representatives election. The emergence of these regional parties and the low poll ratings of the LDP have undermined Tanigaki's core policy of demanding a dissolution of the Diet and elections. At worst, the LDP may not come out of an election in less dire straits than it is in now; at best it and its ally the New Komeito will not have an outright majority, requiring cohabitation either with the DPJ or the volatile regional parties.

There has even been a blowup over the LDP's latest campaign poster. The choice of a side-lit image, with most of Tanigaki's face in shadow, is unusual, to say the least (J). Major party figures, including past prime ministers, have called the image dark and depressing; many in the party have demanded the poster's withdrawal and destruction.

Tanigaki's term ends in September. He can run for reelection. However, he faces rivals already maneuvering to oppose him. Acting policy research council chairman Hayashi Yoshimasa has already established a study group, the equivalent of a candidacy exploratory committee (J). Hayashi has a handicap in that he is a member of the House of Councillors, a body from which no LDP leader has ever been elected. As the first speaker to his study group Hayashi invited a stronger candidate, the former policy research chief and agriculture minister Ishiba Shigeru (J). Ishiba has a voice that takes some getting used to, but once one has inured oneself, one clearly recognizes a formidable intellect and drive. He has had not restrained himself in criticizing both the leadership of Tanigaki and the LDP's current drift into the party of simply saying "No."

Still quiet but very much in the race to replace Tanigaki is party secretary-general Ishihara Nobuteru. Being Tanigaki's right hand man until September will make it hard for Ishihara to do anything but sotto voce campaigning for the top spot. When visiting Washington (hard on Ishiba's heals, it should be noted) Ishihara did tell audiences there, "If Tanigaki does not run again, I am am thinking of running." (J)

Tanigaki is staring at leaving a historical record of mediocrity. It will be interesting to see whether this psychological burden pushes him to greater recalcitrance or a resigned cooperative stance over these probable last few months of his presidency. Prior to his election as party president, Tanigaki had alway been portrayed as a moderate -- and he probably is one -- which would explain his ineffectiveness as a party bulldog. He may not want to act the poodle or the lapdog. However, with the DPJ insinuating itself in between the LDP and the New Komeito, he may feel he has no choice during but to do so.