Beyond The Morita Minoru Rule

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Morita Minoru is a critic of and commentator on Japanese politics. He was once treated as a something of a sage by the foreign press. He even has or had (I have not checked in a while) a blog, the link to which is on the left.

Morita is less quoted and consulted now, mostly because of the Morita Minoru Rule, one of MTC's "Rules of Japanese News" (promulgated in 2006 and in desperate need of an update, especially Rule #1):

4) A political issue almost never works itself out the way Morita Minoru says it will.

For a long while Morita's pronouncements had value, in a negative way. You would see him on TV pontificating or read his prophecies and immediately be able to say, "Well, we now know for sure that that will not happen."

Recently the domestic and Japanese press seem to have abandoned Morita, possibly because what he has been spouting is, to borrow Wolfgang Pauli's wicked putdown, not even wrong.

It was good, nevertheless, to see Morita being quoted the other day, in an article where he was paired off against Nakano Ko'ichi of Sophia University (Jochi daigaku) someone who actually thinks about the political scene, rather than just talks about it. I urge you to follow the link and read the whole article, despite the grating initial paragraph, because if you do not the rest of what I am going to say in this post will be uninteligible:

ANALYSIS: Passage hinges on Ozawa, opposition
The Japan Times
By NATSUKO FUKUE
Staff writer

Saturday, March 31, 2012 - Despite the Cabinet's approval Friday of a sales tax hike bill that sparked months of dissent and resistance from the ruling party's ranks, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda may find that in the deadlocked Diet, the more things change, the more they stay the same...(Link)

Okay, so now you are back. Did you notice anything? Did you notice an a slight queasiness? Did you feel that after reading the analyses from Morita, Nakano and the author herself, you came away with absolutely no sense of where anything was headed?

Welcome to the political space of Beyond The Morita Minoru Rule, a place of ultimate uncertainty -- where idiocy and brilliance, the preposterous and the inevitable cannot be distinguished from one another. Here the Morita Minoru Rule fails because even the people who are supposed to know something know nothing.

Is it important or not that 4 sub-cabinet level officeholders resigned their posts on Friday, especially as the Deputy Prime Minister tells the press on Saturday that the Noda government is not accepting their resignations? (J)

Who knows?

Will the Liberal Democratic Party under Tanigaki Sadakazu vote against the government bill raising the consumption tax to 10% in a de facto joining of hands with Ozawa Ichiro and those members of the Democratic Party of Japan loyal to him? When the LDP's manifesto calls for a raising of the consumption tax to 10%?

Who knows?

As the analysis article's unintentionally hilarious four-word paragraph...

"Then again, maybe not."

...indicates, arguments in either direction, with up and down thrown in to boot, all seem equally valid.

We are in a space which recalls former U.S. President Harry Truman's wish for a one-handed economist, as all his economic advisers, after stating their initial opinions, would then say, "On the other hand..."

Very Kind Of Them #6

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The East Asian Forum has published an essay of mine on the reshuffle of the Cabinet (Link).

A few of my snarkier observations were wisely excised by the wonderful editors of the EAF. Unwisely, I will post them here.

Re: The consumption tax

Once the proposed hike in the consumption tax is complete, the tax rate will still be below European value added taxes and in line with Australia's and New Zealand's goods and services taxes. It will be unpopular because it is regressive and reaches out to tap the many elements of society who, though one subterfuge or another, manage to avoid or evade income taxes.

Re: Okada Katsuya

Known by his critics as "The Taliban" for his unswerving views, Okada reportedly refused the position of chief cabinet secretary when Noda formed his first cabinet on September 2 of last year. Okada purportedly preferred to stay out of the limelight in preparation for a challenge for the post of party leader at the next party leadership election, scheduled for September this year. Okada's unpopularity with middle-ranking members of the DPJ, who remember how he led the party to ignominious defeat in the 2005 House of Representatives election, also played a part in his decision to sit back and cool his heels for a while.

Re: Matsubara Jin

The appointment of Jin Matsubara, one of the rare foreign policy and security hawks in the DPJ, should probably be seen a sop to the families of those abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s. The families of the abductees and their supporters have felt that the DPJ has given them short shrift, as the during the 2 1/2 years the DPJ has been in power the abductees portfolio has changed hands seven times.

The appointment of hardliner Matsubara to the main homeland security and the abductees positions makes it unlikely that Japan will make a meaningful contribution to discussions among regional actors of new strategies of dealing with the DPRK in the aftermath of the passing of Kim Jong-il and his replacement by his son Jong-un. Instead, Japanese insistence on a "final resolution" of the abductees issue will continue to be throwing sand into the gears of any proposed shift in policies.

Re: Hirano Hirofumi

As for the appointment of Hirofumi Hirano, it is bald attempt on the part of prime minister Noda to curry favor with the group of DPJ parliamentarians loyal to former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama. Hirano put in a disgraceful performance as chief cabinet secretary during the Hatoyama Cabinet and was ineffective as a negotiator with his opposition counterparts during his recent stint as parliamentary affairs chairman.

Re: Ozawa Ichiro and the Kizuna Party

The two ministers who had to be replaced after being censured, Yasuo Ichikawa and Kenji Yamaoka, are close associates of Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's problematic former leader and major power broker. Ozawa, who is both under party disciplinary sanction and criminal indictment, still managed to attract 109 Diet members, most of them members of the DPJ, to an anti-consumption tax study group session he led immediately after the main DPJ party convention on January 16.

Rumors that Ozawa loyalists might turn against prime minister Noda in a no-confidence vote this spring or even form a new party in the near future gained considerably more credibility in the last days of December when nine members of the DPJ with strong bonds to Ozawa left the party and founded Kizuna, a new, anti-consumption tax, anti-Trans Pacific Partnership party.