Japan's Politics Stomps On The Accelerator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

Okumura Jun's View Of The Diet Post-Election, And My Own

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, As is his habit and capacity, Okumura Jun has published a magisterial outlook, laying out the political situation in the Diet, post-House of Representatives election.

Okumura-san and I have been in agreement for a very long time that the Tanigaki Line -- block all significant Diet business in a bid to force the Democratic Party of Japan-led government into holding new elections -- was idiotic, as any post-election administration would have to be a coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party and the DPJ. Aggressively toppling the DPJ government through its effective control of the House of Councillors, only to have to reach out to the DPJ post-election because the LDP-New Komeito alliance lacked a 50% majority in the House of Representatives, seemed at best pointless, at worst a recipe for likely catastrophic intra-party strife.

Now that Osaka City Mayor Hashimoto Toru has unleashed his beast, the Nihon Ishin no Kai (or Nippon Ishin no Kai - E), translated as the Japan Renewal Party -- whose initials are, as Okumura-san has noted, the same as Japan's national horseracing organization, an acronym that is as much a brand name as NEC -- I must part ways with Okumura-san.

The political calculus has changed.

The LDP, the DPJ and the JRA will finish first, second and third in the number of House of Representatives seats. However, in the popularity contest, the proportional seat voting, the DPJ will likely finish behind the other two parties, in third place.

As Okumura has suggested, the JRA's policy platform presents problems for any party wishing to form a post-election ruling coalition with the JRA as a partner. In particular, the JRA's Eight Policies (hassaku) include a host of promises requiring changes to the Constitution, a document that has not seen a single comma altered in it since its promulgation 55 years ago.

The sheer number of improbable promises being made guarantees that negotiations with the JRA on a common policy platform will be onerous.

However, the LDP will have little choice but to approach the JRA, the DPJ having an incentive and a cover story for sitting on the sidelines.

The DPJ's reasoning will be impeccable:

"The voters have spoken and rejected our rule. How can we double-guess the voters' judgment and team up with either of the parties whom the voters have chosen as our replacements?"

The LDP and the JRA will come up with something, probably involving a lot of study groups examining such hopeless causes as direct elections of the prime minister, revision of Article 9 and abolition of the House of Councillors. They will agree on policies to assign an identity number to everyone, to further diminish the independence of teachers, to eliminate the ability of local bureaucrats to engage in political campaigns (a delicious bit of hypocrisy, considering the number of local bureaucrats currently enrolled as students at Hashimoto Toru's juku) and to promote greater love of the government country.

Left behind, despite being ideas that both parties share, will be commitments to unifying of the prefectures into lander (doshusei) and ensuring the country's accession to the Trans Pacific Partnership. These policy changes will go nowhere precisely because of loud commitments the parties will make to them. Mandating unification and the TPP require "Nixon goes to China" decisions: only those who have never been supporters have the credibility to make the leap, in light of the country's changing situation.

After the formation of the coalition and the election of a new prime minister, probably Ishihara Nobuteru, the fun will really begin.

It will likely not be over policy, either.

I have criticized Ozawa Ichiro bitterly on many occasions. However, in one area of political endeavor, his efforts have proven spectacular: in the recruitment of talent. He himself has been dogged by unproven and unprovable accusations of corruption. His recruits to the DPJ, however, have been spectacular in their capacity to stay out of trouble, a stirring contrast to the lurid spectacle of that was and is the LDP. The vetting and courting process of potential candidates would often stretch out over years, with Ozawa involved every step of the way. Indeed, the bringing in of candidates into a party is perhaps the only part of politics Ozawa really enjoys.

The JRA's candidates will be recruited primarily out of the enthusiasts and acolytes who shelled out the cash to attend the Hashimoto juku. As such, it will be a collection of a hundred ticking time bombs of scandal. Messy divorces, delinquent taxes, yakuza friendships, love children for whom no child support was paid, buried stints in hospitals for depression -- you name it, they will have it, just like any neighborhood in this country, where the veneer of civility hides a thousand secrets.

The afternoon broadsheets and the weekly scandal magazines have no incentive to protect any of these fresh-minted politicians or bolster the upstart Hashimoto. Even the much beleaguered Ozawa had at least one evening newspaper in his corner: the JRA boys and girls will have nothing.

It will be as sharks at a feeding frenzy, like Abe Shinzo's Year of Living Luridly (remember the four different Ministers of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries? The attempted coverup of the loss of 50 million pension accounts? Matsuoka Toshikatsu's water purification devices and his suicide a few months later?), only many times worse.

At this the DPJ Diet members will just sit and watch, a frieze of Dr. Gachets, stirring themselves only to ask the occasional pertinent and embarrassing question.

An overwrought vision? Possibly. But a damn sight more likely than the LDP and DPJ cohabiting. Unlike the LDP, the DPJ was born an opposition party. Losing power is unpleasant for the party but does not pose an existential threat. The DPJ will not succumb to a frenzied search for anything -- ANYTHING (a Socialist as Prime Minister? We can do that.) to seize control of the Cabinet.

As was the case in 2009, it would indeed be best for the DPJ to just wait and let the golden apple drop into its lap, again.


Later - My apologies for not fixing the typos earlier. Something has been blocking my access to Blogger.

From Out Of The Mailbag

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

"Rather than writing a hatchet job based largely on snark about grammar, why don't you spend a little more time laying out what you think is wrong with the argument? Surely that would be more illuminating?"

Thus was I challenged the other day by an anonymous commentator as regards my dismissal of Dr. Jeffrey Hornung's essay for The Diplomat, "South Korea’s Irresponsible Diplomacy With Japan."

The commenter is absolutely right. I had indulged my aggravation with the misuse of language (a sin from which Seth Garrett has pointed out, I am not immune), metronomic recitation of facts and strained metaphors. Under this veneer of faults lay a more fundamental flaw: the thesis that those in power in Japan have made brave and insufficiently appreciated efforts at reconciliation and reflection in regards to the country's expansionist imperial period. That these efforts have been insufficiently appreciated because they have been insufficiently brave does require illuminating, especially since Dr. Hornung's essay is part of what seems a concerted push by elements of CSIS and the CSIS Pacific Forum across the spectrum of online media:

"South Korea’s Irresponsible Diplomacy With Japan"
Dr. Jeffrey Hornung
Associate Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and an Adjunct Fellow with the Office of the Japan Chair at CSIS.

"War memories and territorial disputes in Northeast Asia"
Preeti Nalwa
Non-Resident Kelly Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow and PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi.

"Korea-Japan: enough is enough!"
Ralph Cossa
President of the Pacific Forum CSIS of Honolulu, an affiliate of CSIS in Washington.

Cossa's essay contains certain annoying items that do not exist, such as Japan's king and its National Assembly (it is Japan's Emperor and the Diet, respectively). However, I can hardly giggle and point, as in a recent post I claimed that the Heisei emperor had visited South Korea -- an assertion for which thoughtful correspondent A. R. has asked me to provide supporting evidence.

Ooops.

I was also recently chided in comments by reader Philippe for writing a puff piece on the final nail being driven in the coffin of Tanigaki Sadakazu's campaign for a second term as Liberal Democratic Party president. The post could be read as trying to beat some life into what had long been an exceedingly dead horse.

To an accusation that the post was a puff piece I plead guilty. I needed for myself, if not for the readership, to balance with the light with the dark, having written the previous day of my uncomprehending horror at the touted candidacy of Abe Shinzo for LDP president. Also, having only recently stumbled across Elvis Costello's "A Monster Went And Ate My Red 2" I was looking for an opportunity to share it.

However, on the broader issue of Tanigaki Sadakazu even thinking about running for a second term, and news media's treatment of the subject as anything more than a joke, that should be a subject of wide and deep discussion.

Tanigaki Sadakazu has been something of a guide star in my writing on the LDP and its problems. In July 2006 I went so far as to call him "the man who put the 'idiot' in idiot-savant." I have probably written more posts about him than on any other politician who was not a prime minister.

Tanigaki is the modern politician who should not have been. He has the social graces of a teenage boy, took eight years to finish his Bachelor's, failed the lawyer's exam six times before finally passing on his seventh try and has never had a real job. Nevertheless he managed to be annointed decades ago the dauphin of the Miyazawa Faction -- the faction led by the flat out smartest man in the Diet. That his rise through the ranks in the faction and the party could be explained by a compliant press -- who could not hide his cringeworthy attempts at ingratiating himself -- as being due to his being a policy wonk (seisaku tsu) should befuddle, perplex and finally anger anyone believing in the role of the Fourth Estate in a free society. Any intelligent person's review of his public statements makes plain he has not the slightest understanding of not just policy, but of common everyday occurrences (failing, for example, to understand that the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve is the price).

That the political classes and the news media should collude in labeling Tanigaki what he clearly was not, even as they provided evidence that he was not what they were saying he was, has been a source of constant wonder to me. That he should rise to the post where he could have stepped into the role of leader of this blessed land should give everyone pause.

I felt it proper to mark the occasion when the Tanigaki farce seemed finally, irretrievably over.

Tanigaki's Reelection: Deader Than Elvis

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

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

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

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

Tanigaki did not get it. (E)

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

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

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

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

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

Tanigaki Sadakazu In The Heart Of His Darkness

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

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

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

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

- Apocalypse Now (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please tell me that this is not the plan."

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

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

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

We have been through hell and high water with you.

But this, this insane.

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

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

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

The motion passed, 129 votes to 91.

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

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

Six New Fredos

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

Fredo, you're nothing to me now. You're not a brother, you're not a friend. I don't want to know you or what you do.

- Michael Corleone, The Godfather, Part II (1974)

On Friday, six Democratic Party of Japan members of the House of Councillors voted against the ittai kaikaku reform bills, including the bill raising the consumption tax. These six defectors are new, not a part of the 12 DPJ members who left the party to join Ozawa Ichiro's People's Life First Party (33 days since its founding and still no party website) or the 3 who left to form the Green Wind caucus.

The six are:

Tokunaga Eri (Hokkaido district seat, elected in 2010)
Mito Masashi (Kanagawa district seat, elected in 2007)
Uematsu Emiko (Kagawa district seat, elected 2007)
Okubo Yukishige (Nagasaki district seat, elected 2007)
Arita Yoshibu (proportional list seat, elected 2010)
Tashiro Kaoru (proportional list seat, elected 2010)

Mito, Uematsu and Okubo face reelection next year,. The other members are in for the long haul. Like House of Representatives member Kawauchi Hiroshi, all six really belong inside the LF. However, they are far more useful to Ozawa as fifth columnists inside the DPJ. Through them he can still influence DPJ policies, even though he himself is no longer inside the DPJ.

The six cannot be expelled or even severely reprimanded. After the defections to the LF and the Green Wind in July, the DPJ is left with 85 members in its House caucus, only one member more than the Liberal Democratic Party. Were the six traitors of Friday to leave the DPJ, the party would fall to the #2 rank in the House, losing the majority of committee chairmanships and most likely the position of President of the House.

Ozawa knows the DPJ's loss of control of the House's chairmanships would eliminate his ability to influence politics. It should surprise no one that he has his acolytes remain inside the DPJ House of Councillors caucus.

Speaking of disobedience, the LDP has decided upon the punishments to be meted out to the seven of its members of its House of Representatives delegation who defied orders to abstain from voting on the no confidence motion against the Noda Cabinet. The seven will receive reprimands, the second strongest of the eight levels of punishment the party can mete out to its members. (J)

This slap on the wrist is surprising, as one of the sinners, Nakagawa Hidenao, was served with a six-month suspension of all party privileges for having abstained from the June House of Representatives vote on the consumption tax.

The leadership had solid reasons to be lenient. The participation of Shiozaki Yasuhisa in the mini-mutiny was a transparent threat of a greater hard-right rebellion against Machimura faction leader Machimura Nobutaka for his milquetoast leadership and his support of LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu. A severe punishment could also push Koizumi Shinjiro to run in the next election as an independent, an outcome the LDP is desperate to avoid. Koizumi the Younger (Koizumi IV) is, as Okumura Jun has put it, the LDP’s Chosen One, the prophesied future leader of the party.

It would furthermore be the height of hypocrisy for the LDP to punish the seven for voting for a no confidence motion only a day after Tanigaki and the LDP leadership abandoned plans to submit their own no confidence motion.

So the six DPJ House of Councillors and the seven LDP House of Representatives members, traitors to the party line each and every one, are virtually untouchable.

The weak responses by both the party leaderships presages further breakdowns in party discipline. An inability to get a straight answer from the LDP will endanger Prime Minister Noda’s plan to squeeze the LDP into voting for the bill authorizing the issuance of new bonds. The LDP leadership is eager for a quick deal on a redistricting bill – a necessity as the dissolution of the House and the calling for new elections would plunge the country into an irrevocable extra-constitutional state. However, if the LDP cannot guarantee party unity on the bond bill, it is of little use to the DPJ as a negotiating partner.

Of course, what can be said of the LDP applies equally, if not more so, to the DPJ. True to the nature of its former leader Ozawa, who recruited the majority of the DPJ’s serving Diet members, party members seem to have only the weakest of understandings of the fundamental importance of loyalty to the party. Disagreements over policy have thus led to a splintering of the party, not along the ideological lines the pundits predicted three years ago, but on the degree of loyalty to Ozawa the person.

Later - This post has been edited for clarity.

Signs Of The Apocalypse #3

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The Yomiuri Shimbun sees the world the way I do...and tells the Liberal Democratic Party, "You're wrong in this: chapter, line and verse."

Of course, no one cares about this right now. The Nadeshiko are down 1-2 to the United States with five minutes left to play.

The Ignobility Of Failure

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

Soon oh soon the light
Pass within and soothe this endless night
And wait here for you
Our reason to be here...

Yes, "The Gates of Delirium" (1974)

Soon.

Soon (chikai uchi ni).

The Diet will be dissolved...soon.

That is the promise Liberal Democratic Party president Tanigaki Sadakazu was able to wring out of Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko last night, after threatening to submit a no confidence motion in the House of Representatives and a censure motion in the House of Councillors if the PM did not commit to a dissolution before September 9.

After the leadership of the LDP spent the afternoon mocking the prime minister's offer of a dissolution "in the near future" (chikai shorai ni), asking what the heck it meant and demanding a precise date. "'In the near future?' It is ridiculous to think we would ever agree to that," declared LDP Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Kishida Fumio. (J)

For all the energy expended and all the threats, what the LDP has won is the status quo ante. Actually, it came out with less than when it embarked on this campaign of confrontation: its members cannot vote for the no confidence motion six mini- and micro-parties submitted to the House of Representatives and the censure motion seven caucuses submitted to the House of Councillors. (J)

Noda did not cover himself with glory either, at least not on the surface. He agreed to wield the "treasured sword passed down through the generations" (denka no hoto) -- the fancy-pants term for a dissolution of the Diet -- at the request of the LDP.

However, Noda stayed true to the promise he made to his fellow party members yesterday afternoon: that he would not give the LDP a precise date for a dissolution of the Diet. (J)

Furthermore Noda knows -- and one hopes by now the rest of the DPJ knows -- that the meaning of "soon" depends upon how deeply the LDP is willing to injure itself. A House of Representatives election cannot be held until the matter of the unconstitutionality of the districts is settled. If the LDP wants an election "soon" it will have to acquiesce to a DPJ redistricting bill, the details of which are going to make the LDP gag.

As for Tanigaki, this is his Waterloo. He needed to break the Noda government in order to have a chance at reelection in September.

As at Waterloo, the outcome was "a damn nice thing." Noda's fate was not fully secure until the sudden and timely intercession of the six-party and seven-caucus coalitions. Their submissions of motions of no confidence and censure on the 7th scrambled Tanigaki's and the LDP's schedule of attack.

Ever wonder if Ozawa Ichiro's breakaway from the DPJ was an act of political theater meant to confuse the LDP? Sometimes I do.

As for the LDP as a whole, it is in grave peril. Party discipline, which has always been a thing of wonder, will be tested on the no confidence and censure votes. There will be a whirl of activity today, as the leadership tries to keep members of the party from voting for the motions.


Later - Veteran newsman Tahara So'ichiro, writing for Nikkei BP Net, offers a theory: that LDP faction heads, together with Oshima Tadamori, the Talleyrand of LDP politics, cooked up a Tanigaki attempt to renegotiate done deal as a means of guaranteeing Tanigaki's not being reelected party leader in September. (J)

Rushing Forward With No Confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Later - This post has been edited for clarity.

Summer's Here! Let's All Topple The Noda Government!

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, According to the Sankei Shimbun, the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party is planning to submit a no-confidence motion in the House of Representatives and a censure motion in the House of Councillors on August 7, one day before the LDP and its ally the New Komeito hopes to have their members in the House of Councillors to vote in favor of bills submitted by said Noda government. The leadership of the LDP is willing to stay its hand on the two disciplinary actions, however, if the Prime Minister Noda promises to ask for a Diet dissolution before the end of this current Diet session runs out, which as of now will be on September 9. (J)

I know none of that scans.

Let us see if it makes sense in gangster-speak:

"We look forward to conducting business with you, as we have agreed, on Wednesday. However, on Tuesday, we are going to shoot you...unless, of course, you agree by Tuesday to shoot yourself sometime within the next 40 days...and we expect you to stand by that promise to shoot yourself, because if you don't, we'll shoot you."

Nonsense, of course -- but even more so because, as we know, Noda does not have a gun and the LDP, if it wants to shoot Noda, will have to borrow ammunition from the Democratic Party of Japan.

What the heck is going on here?

It seems the little visit Koizumu Shinjiro paid to LDP headquarters on August 1 with six of his fellow Young Turks has paid some dividends, as the leadership seems to be singing from Koizumi's hymnal. The seven striplings met with party president Tanigaki Sadakazu and told him had he to repudiate the June 15 agreement made with the DPJ on passing the government's reform bills, including the bill raising the consumption tax. Barring a repudiation of the agreement, the LDP had to wave a no-confidence motion or a House of Councillors censure motion in Noda's face. (J)

That the LDP senior leaders would roll over and offer up their throats to Koizumi -- who, one must remember, is in his first term -- is ludicrous. However, so is the position the LDP finds itself. It holds veto power over any non-budget legislation, due to the DPJ-People's New Party ruling coalition's holding only 88 seats in the 242-seat House of Councillors. In response, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko is sending to House only bills the LDP cannot refuse to support -- as they are drawn up based on promises the LDP made in its campaign manifesto. So while the LDP, which wants to act like an opposition party in the basest, most brain-dead way, by opposing the government at every turn, finds it has to accept what the government has been proposing.

The LDP leaders were not just pushed by Koizumi and the younger generation; the other opposition parties have presented their own threat to box in the LDP and the New Komeito. The seven opposition parties not party to the June 15 agreement met on August 3 and decided to submit their own no-confidence motion by June 8, in symbolic protest against the likely House of Councillors vote on that date raising the consumption tax. (J)

Pressed from both inside and outside, the LDP leadership is reduced to issuing absurd threats. Absurd not in the no-confidence motion's being dead upon delivery -- there is still a chance that some number of DPJ members greater than 15 will vote for the motion. Absurd in that the current government is following the LDP's policy script; a no-confidence motion cannot trigger a dissolution of the Diet; and the LDP leadership, to demonstrate it is still viable, must follow the lead of its most junior members and its pipsqueak political enemies.

Getting The Numbers Right On The No Confidence Motion

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, In my post of yesterday, I asserted that for a Liberal Democratic Party-sponsored no confidence motion to pass, LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu would have to round up every member of every one of the opposition parties, all of the independents and then 17 members of the Democratic Party of Japan.

Alert reader RK asked in an email: "Are you sure 17 is the correct number?"

Interestingly, the news media in recent days have not posted any hard numbers on exactly the number of ruling coalition defectors the passage of a no-confidence motion would require.

The number, however, is certainly not 17, save under a special case of a specific number of Representatives abstaining.

There are 480 seats in the House of Representatives. At present one of these seats is empty, meaning their are 479 representatives. Furthermore, the Speaker of the House, former DPJ member Yokomichi Takahiro, does not vote, except in the case of a tie.

So the number of voting members will be 478. Half of that number is 239. For the motion to pass with all members voting, those in favor must number 240 (50%+1).

The ruling coalition is composed of 250 member of the DPJ and 4 members of the People's New Party. With 254 in the ruling coalition, Tanigaki would have to lure 16 of the ruling coalition (254-16 = 238) into voting for the no-confidence motion.

However, the chance that everyone will be present and voting is unlikely. The Communists (9 votes) will likely abstain, as they are wont to do (Then why are they even in the Diet at all? Heck, I do not know). This would raise the bar to 20 defectors (469/2 = 234.5, 50%+1 = 235, 254-20 = 234).

Of course, members of the ruling coalition could abstain, lowering the number of defectors needed. Indeed if all 17 of the DPJ Representatives currently under suspension for having voted against the legislation raising the consumption tax abstained, and all the members of the opposition voted for the no-confidence measures, supporters would only have to lure 6 members of the DPJ to switch sides, (478-17 = 461, 461/2 = 230.5, 50%+1 = 231, # in the opposition + independents = 225).

As the math indicates, however, a significant slice of DPJ legislators would have to be sending clear signals on their giving up on the party and the LDP would have to be exercising strict discipline over membership of the rest of the House before Tanigaki could entertain a hope that a no-confidence motion could pass.

The LDP, a cautious, even timid organization, does not move on hope alone.

So the while the idealized minimal number of defectors is 16, the actual minimum is fluid, and the ability to round up the correct combination of defectors and abstainers ostensibly beyond the capacity of the current opposition.

Tanigaki's Appeal To The International Finance Community

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, As noted earlier this morning, Liberal Democratic Party President Tanigaki Sadakazu was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal Asia (E). He was also interviewed by Bloomberg (E), leaving Reuters no doubt wondering, "What are we, chopped liver? Not raw, of course." (E)

In both articles, Tanigaki makes essentially the same points:

- If Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, in an attempt to prevent further defections from the Democratic Party of Japan's House of Representatives or House of Councillors delegations, proposes modifications of the bill doubling the consumption tax in FY 2015, then the deal in between the DPJ and the LDP-New Komeito alliance is off.

- Tanigaki is ready to submit a no-confidence motion against the government in August.

What could be compelling the president of the LDP to talk to foreign financial information wire services? Was he just going the rounds, talking to anyone who could schedule an interview with him?

Seemingly not. A cursory look at the domestic press shows him offering no interviews to a domestic news entity, just a press availability open to everyone on the 20th.

So what is the deal here?

The first point Tanigaki raises is trivial: a deal's a deal. The PM is not stupid -- he knows that if he tries to renegotiate the package on the passage of the pension and social welfare bills through the House of Councillors, the LDP and the New Komeito will cry betrayal, and order their senators to vote against the bills, killing the reforms.

The second point raised is non-trivial -- and gives an indication why Tanigaki chose to spend his time with Bloomberg and ASW-A rather than any major domestic news outlet.

Tanigaki faces a huge battle to retain his position, should he choose to present himself as a candidate in the LDP's presidential election in late September. He has taken the party absolutely nowhere in three years in office. The party's public support numbers are below those the party had after its trouncing at the polls in August 2009 -- though, to be fair, the LDP does rather better when the question asked is: "What party will you be voting for in the proportional seat vote for the House of Representatives?"

Ambitious colleagues in the party know that Tanigaki's election to the presidency was not due to any outstanding qualities he possessed, but merely because out of the princes of the factions, it was Tanigaki's turn on the throne (I am indebted to Okumura Jun for this insight).

The domestic news media is aware of the tenuous hold Tanigaki has upon the party rank-and-file. They know that if he cannot engineer a political crisis before the end of the current Diet session on September 8, he will go down in history as only the second LDP president to not become Prime Minister.

What the domestic news media also knows is that Tanigaki has virtually no ability to precipitate a political crisis of the magnitude capable of toppling the Noda Cabinet. He cannot bring down the government in this session over the bond issuance bill: the government has enough money to last until October, or beyond, with a little fiddling. As for a successful no-confidence motion, Tanigaki would have to round up everyone not in the governing coaltion -- every member of every party and every independent -- plus 17 of the DPJ's own members, to vote with the LDP (the numbers work out differently, of course, if there are abstentions). This means the Communists voting with the LDP, something that might happen, oh, immediately prior to a giant meteor hitting earth, extinguishing all life on the planet. It means the LDP joining hands with Ozawa Ichiro's People's Life First Party (LF).

The LDP has a strong wish to return to the position of the party of government and strict internal discipline. But grab Ozawa's hand, after all the many times he has scalded the LDP? The very thought sets the brain to boiling.

So it would make sense to talk, not to the national media, which would ask all sorts of embarrassing questions like:

- "How are you going to get the Communists into bed with you?"

and

- "What if you entice the requisite number of number of traitors to vote with you and your allies against the government? Then what do you do? The electoral districts are still unconstitutional, so a Diet dissolution and elections are illegal. What kind of coalition are you going to put together to solve that problem, after you have blown the DPJ apart?"

Better to talk to the international financial press, to sow confusion in the international markets and foreign institutions, first in the hopes of sparking questions about the stability of the Noda government, and second, through the Japanese media's peculiar obsession with the way Japan is portrayed in the non-Japanese media, a rebound of the story in the domestic press.

Because after a serious bout of political deafness over the U.S. Marines' introduction of the despised MV-22 Osprey aircraft into this blessed land (J), one which made it look as if the intransigence of the U.S. Marines was going to drive a second DPJ prime minister out of office, the PM has righted himself and is demanding safety assurances and interim flight paths guaranteed to drive the U.S. Marines nuts. This is perhaps not the "Return to Sender" message the public wants the PM to send to the United States. However, it represents a significant step in the government at least appearing to reclaim sovereignty over the nation's airspace, which Noda for a moment seemed to be giving away.

Tanigaki needs Noda to misread another issue, or have a member of the Cabinet get caught in a compromising position, to evade the axe in September.

Without Noda's or the Cabinet's help, Tanigaki is doomed. He will talk up a storm but he has no wind at his back.

It Had To Happen Sometime

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, It was a typo just begging to happen.

So it happened.

Congratulations Wall Street Journal Asia, you win the coveted LGM (Little Green Men) Award.

Japan Opposition Leader Says Tax Deal Not Set
July 23, 2012

By ALEXANDER MARTIN And TOKO SEKIGUCHI - TOKYO

Barely a month after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda negotiated an agreement with the main opposition parties to pass a controversial sales tax increase, the head of the opposition said he is preparing to push Mr. Yoda out of power and may ditch the tax deal...

(Link)

I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah
Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda
S-O-D-A, soda

I saw the little runt sitting there on a log
I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said "Yoda"
Y-O-D-A, Yoda
Yo-yo-yo-yo Yoda...

- Weird Al Yankovic, "Yoda" (1985)

Later - The folks at the WSJ-A have since scrubbed the typo. Ah, but I have the screen capture:

Japan's Depleted Politics

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, This Sunday's morning talk show lineup provided a stark demonstration of the depleted state of this blessed land's politics. Following a week of significant action -- the defection of four more members of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and the consequent formation of two new parliamentary caucuses in the Diet and even more more in the local assemblies (J - Yamanashi and J - Tochigi); the public humiliation of Ambassador to China Niwa Uichiro, the first non-bureaucrat to hold the post, over his matter-of fact assessment that a purchase of three of the Senkaku Islands by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government would likely lead to great frictions in between Japan and China (E - When will the Government of Japan get around to issuing the "It's OK talk to anyone -- ANYONE -- just not the Financial Times" directive?); the first serious hiccup in the seemingly unstoppable march of Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru (for those keeping score: July 21 = 0 tweets) -- the best that Nichiyo Toron, the national broadcaster NHK's flagship political debate program could come up with was a debate in between Jojima Koriki and Kishida Fumio, the Diet Affairs chairmen of the DPJ and the Liberal Democratic Party, respectively. For 22 minutes, rather than the customary hour. And with Kishida not even in the Tokyo studio but piped in from outside.

This is nearly unprecedented. Nichiyo Toron almost always has at least the policy chiefs of all the major and mini-parties of the Diet on display, if not the party secretary-generals. True, the result looks ludicrous, with the representative of the ruling DPJ and the representative of its coalition appendage the People New Party on one side facing off against six (now, with Ozawa Ichiro's new Livelihood Party, it would be seven) representatives of the main opposition parties on the other, requiring the moderator to carry out a delicate dance of traffic control in between the criticisms of the opposition and the assertions of the ruling coalition and in between the positions of the significant parties and the sad bleatings of the insignificant.

The abbreviated face-off covered only a tiny range of issues. Both men offered their party's positions on:

1) the progress of the main reform social welfare and pension bills (ittai kaikaku hoan), including the bill raising consumption tax to 10%, through the House of Councillors

2) the schedule for the holding of House of Representative elections, once the ittai kaikaku bills pass the House of Councillors, as the written agreement in between the DPJ, LDP and the New Komeito requires

3) the likelihood of the LDP cooperating with the DPJ in passing the all-important bond issuance bill necessary to implement the DPJ-drafted budget, before the money runs out of money in October (E)

4) the competing bills of the DPJ and LDP on reforming the districts and size of House of Representatives, in order that an election might be constitutional

5) the stability and legitimacy of the DPJ-led government, in light of the recent waves of defections from the DPJ

These five subjects are all linked together as in a chain: the solving of one leads to and depends upon the solving of others. As the sparse attendance at Nichiyo Toron debate indicates, these are issues the DPJ and the LDP have to work out between themselves, as no combination of either party with any of the other parties in the Diet can approve any of the necessary legislation.

The greatest hurdle is an agreement on the reform of the House of Representatives. At present, 97 districts have populations greater than 2 times the population of the smallest district, meaning that over half the votes in those 97 districts are essentially thrown away. Despite a history of deference to the executive and legislative branches, the Supreme Court has thrown down a challenge, declaring any disparity greater than 1.99 to 1 unconstitutional, putting some meat on Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees citizens equality under the law.

The LDP bill, known as the +0/-5 Solution, is a clever response to the Supreme Court's challenge. Rather than giving the voters in the 97 grossly underrepresented districts a greater say in the running of their government, the bill would simply abolish the five smallest districts. The disparity of between the 97 largest districts and the smallest district would then fall below the 1.99 limit.

The attraction of this bill for the LDP is obvious. It preserves almost intact the inequalities that perpetuated LDP rule for 50 years. The urban and suburban, revenue-producing districts are denigrated, while the largely rural districts, with their government contract- and regulation-protected economies, are elevated.

The competing DPJ bill has as its core the +0/-5 Solution, which is contrary to the interests of the DPJ's natural constituency, the abused urban and suburban electorate. Tacked on to the +0/-5 core, however, are a pair of amendments that at once entice and repel the New Komeito, the LDP's alliance partner.

The DPJ bill is thus not a bill at all. It is a red herring, a lie told in order to keep the LDP and the New Komeito engaged, under the illusion that a weakened DPJ is ready to cut a deal on redistricting. In return the LDP and the New Komeito, out of their present eagerness to hold an election, are expected to offer concessions on pending bills, such as the all-important bond issuance bill.

However, all the gamesmanship cannot disguise a basic reality: the DPJ and the LDP no longer have the luxury of playing ruling party versus opposition. With the recent defections of 16 House of Councillors members, the DPJ no longer has the option of teaming up with the New Komeito to pass bills through both Houses of the Diet. Only a DPJ-LDP consensus can guarantee a bill's passage.

Furthermore, as Okumura Jun has noted, barring the intrusion of a Hashimoto Toru-led national political party -- which, due to this week's revelations and Hashimoto's sudden loss of his voice, suddenly has become far less of a threat to the status quo -- there is no plausible set of election results altering the necessity of DPJ-LDP cohabitation. An election, if held today, would not prove or solve anything.

Furthermore, the LDP membership does not really want to have an election, not now. Party president Tanigaki Sadakazu has proven a disappointment, unable, since his election in 2009, to improve his party's standing with the electorate, despite the DPJ's many stumbles and bumbles. Tanigaki's term ends in September; several of his more aggressive and thoughtful colleagues are poised to replace him. Eager to force an election before his term runs out, Tanigaki advocates implacable confrontation with the DPJ. His intra-party rivals, unwilling to undermine the authority of the party presidency that they themselves covet, echo his intransigence, though with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Hence the current poverty of Japanese politics. While a multitude of decisions await, the direction of the country is hostage to the passage of a handful of bills. Furthermore, a faith that party identity is honed through conflict with the other side, a legacy of the LDP's long reign in power, holds the two major parties back from inescapable collaboration.

The Show Must Go On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O - "Me too."


Ooooh, aaaahhhh...

Photo courtesy: The Yomiuri Online

Ishihara Nobuteru's Interesting Gambits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Link - J)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Link - J)

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

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

Wonderful, wonderful stuff...

What Knowledgeable Friends Are For

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

It seems I have won my bet with Okumura Jun on the size of the July 6 protest in front of the Prime Minister's Residence. According to Tokyo Metropolitan Police estimates 17,000 demonstrators showed up on June 29, the day after the restart of the #3 reactor of the Oi nuclear power plant. According to the same source, 21,000 demonstrators showed up on Friday night (Protest organizers have of course said that far more protesters showed up on both nights than the police claim. Given the incentives, I am sure the correct number is somewhere in between).

Now Okumura-san can claim that the 24% increase in estimated crowd size, rather than the greater than 25% decrease he predicted, was due to the free-for-all that happened at the Foreign Correspondent's Club earlier in the day, when the non-Japanese press bludgeoned Kurokawa Kiyoshi, chairman of the National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Commission for the discrepancies between the English language précis and the Japanese text, including the foul attribution of the failure to "Japanese culture" found only in the English version ((F and E). Perhaps it was the obvious the desire of the folks on Friday to be out protesting in the rain, rather than under clear skies as was the case the week before.

Whatever.

All joking aside, what was stunning and important was that the mainstream news media on Friday stopped pretending the protests were not happening. TV news broadcasts had helicopters circling the Prime Minister's Residence (try that one in Washington DC, Beijing or Moscow) broadcasting live images of the crowd. The newspapers stepped up their coverage, including even the Yomiuri Shimbun, which refused to report on the June 29 protest. (J)

So over lunch at Aux Bacchanales (Okumura-san spent part of his formative years in a majority French-speaking city and I went to a bilingual school where one of the languages was French -- so our having lunch in a Tokyo bistro appropriate, thank you very much), I will have the chance to discuss why he and I have such different views of the timing of the next House of Representatives election.

As far as I can see, there is only one human being of consequence who wants a snap election after the passage of the consumption tax bill through the House of Councillors: Liberal Democratic Party President Tanigaki Sadakazu. Tanigaki knows that if the Diet is not dissolved before the end of its session on September 8, he will have to face an LDP presidential election. Due to his lackluster performance as LDP leader -- the party failing under his leadership to capitalize on numerous bumbles and fumbles of the Democratic Party of Japan -- he will go down as only the second LDP president, after Kono Yohei, to never become prime minister.

Sadly, and all too typically, Tanigaki is alone in believing that the stage is set for elections. The news media complex, after reporting at length in February that the current electoral map is unconstitutional, then repeating the process in May following the Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's on-air admission that the districts are unconstitutional, are humming that elections will be held in the next two months -- proving once again that for the domestic media, facts will never be allowed to get in the way of a good story*.

For his party and party-to-be, Ozawa Ichiro has been declaiming that elections are imminent (J - check out the invaluable pyramid of the number of elections of the House of Representatives members of Ozawa's proto-party). However, Ozawa is merely using the threat of elections in order to 1) keep his fellow rebels close to him, 2) encourage to other members of the DPJ to defect (this in order that they might avoid going into elections tarred with the brush of raising taxes) and 3) perpetuate the illusion that he knows more than he actually knows**.

As for Tanigaki's fellow LDP's members, they are worried that entering a campaign with Tanigaki at the head of the party will lead to disaster. Better to wait until September, replace Tanigaki with someone more dynamic like Ishiba Shigeru, Ishihara Nobuteru or Hayashi Yoshimasa***, then push the Noda government to the wall in the fall extraordinary Diet session.

As always, there is the unresolved matter of rendering the holding of elections constitutional. The current situation would make a great trivia game "gotcha" question: "Name the countries in Northeast Asia where the holding of national elections is illegal." In a recent GlobalTalk 21 post, Okumura-san argues that a snap election is possible, either via the legislative fiddle devised by the LDP -- eliminate the five smallest electoral districts and their 5 seats in the Diet, lowering the discrepancy between the smallest remaining district and the largest to 1.78, well below the Supreme Court's threshold of 1.99 -- or simply bullrush the Emperor and the Supreme Court, in succession, over the unconstitutionality of the districts.

As for the latter solution, forget it. There is no way under the sun (intentional allusion) that Prime Minister Noda will convince the present emperor to send this blessed land spinning into an extra-constitutional void. He is a people's emperor, willing to junk tradition when tradition is contrary to fact or contemporary practice. Moreover, he is the son of Hirohito: he will never, ever, ever allow an extra-constitutional assertion of power by any branch of the government.

As for the first solution, not even the LDP, which dreamed it up, believes the DPJ will ever accept it. Redistricting is the key to the kingdom of heaven: he or she who holds in his or her hand determines who shall rule this nation for the next decade. It is the prize that the DPJ fought for -- to reward the DPJ's core urban/suburban constituencies with the representation they had so long been denied under LDP rule...and lest it be forgotten, the sad-sack district, the one whose voters are the least represented in the House of Representatives, whose votes are worth only 40% of the votes in the least populous Kochi #3 district -- that is Chiba District #4 -- Prime Minister Noda's district.

As if the DPJ needed any more reason to delay the next election, the popularity numbers for Hashimoto Toru's Ishin no kai have not yet plateaued. Until such time as it is clear just how far Hashimoto's political movement can roll, the incentive is to sit tight.

So a snap election? In the evening newspapers' dreams perhaps.

---------------------
* The "Ozawa Ichiro is corrupt" presumption is another example.

** This is a classic smart prophet's double game. If the prophesied comes about, then the prophet was right. If the prophesied does not come about, the prophet claims it was precisely because of his/her prophecy that those in control altered conditions so as to render the prophesied impossible.

*** Hayashi has already founded his own study group, a precursor to a major candidate's run for the office of the presidency. He is the default Washington candidate (E). He is, however, a member of the House of Councillors, a huge demerit in LDP internal politics. Party members want to a leader from the House of Representatives, where he/she will share in the fates of those thrown into an election by a Diet dissolution.

Of Course I Do

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Of course I want to write a contrarian post about the present situation inside the Democratic Party of Japan and the Diet following the House of Representatives vote on the three bills paving the way for a raising of the consumption tax, insulting along the way a whole raft of persons, including:

- Hatoyama Yukio

- Ozawa Ichiro

- Tanigaki Sadakazu

- Yamaoka Kenji

- Watanabe Yoshimi

However, such was the jet lag from my trip that when I sat down at my computer, I could see five objects on the screen when I knew there were only three -- meaning I was in no shape to try to tackle the grand opera performance we folks in the cheap seats are not expected to even think about, much less understand.

Suffice it to say that not all the 57 members of the DPJ who voted against the bills or the 16 members who sat out the vote are necessarily ready to commit political suicide out their love for Ozawa Ichiro. A certain fraction are true believers, with enough brains to figure out what their interests are but incapable of seeing that their dear leader is only using them, alternating between bullying and flattering them, terrifying them into craving his approval. A goodly number, the most senior members of the cabal, have made the journey with Ozawa from party to party -- meaning they are just flunkeys, with scarcely a brain wave disturnbing their cerebellums. There are also idiot-savants like Hatoyama who have such a blind faith in the Doctrine of the Mean that they forget the Texas Rule of Politics: "The only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos."

It should also be remembered that the larger-than-expected number of nay-voters and abstainers may not represent a victory for Ozawa but indeed a failure of the imagination of the prognosticators. Think about it: you are a fence sitter in the DPJ, not tight with Ozawa but not tight with the mainstream leadership either. You have a tough election fight ahead of you. The New Komeito and the Liberal Democratic Party are all in on the vote, meaning it will pass by a huge margin. Why not be on record as an opponent of tax rises?

As for the threat to the cohesion of the DPJ, one cannot threaten that which has never existed. Every voter in 2009 had read what was on the DPJ label -- "Contents do not represent an organized political party, just an organized movement against the LDP. Westministerian-like levels of party discipline will be freakish and brief." (E)

The electorate also knew, because the newspapers, magazines and news programs went over the numbers in excrutiating detail, that the 2009 manifesto was a Potemkin Village, an improbable passel of promises to every possible constituency -- and that electorate was still was willing to grant the DPJ a huge majority in the House of Representatives.

As for Ozawa, he is on trial again. Ostensibly, he should have been stripped of his party privileges upon the refiling of charges against him. That he has not means that the party central leadership can choose to strip him of his privileges, making it impossible for him to run or even vote in the September DPJ leadership election. All those who followed his lead in voting against the legislation could suffer similar, if lesser, trimmings of their wings. If those are not punishments eliminating Ozawa's influence on party affairs, then what are? Recall that Ozawa already ordered an auto-purge of his followers from their government and party positions in April. Without party privileges, the rebels are dead to the party.

So whatever it is that Koshi'ishi Azuma and Ozawa Ichiro will be discussing this afternoon, it is likely not the end of Noda Yoshihiko's world.

Catching Up On The News - Unconstitutional Elections

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Something huge happened yesterday.

In a footnote to my post of yesterday, I noted that NHK announcer Okoshi Kensuke last Thursday confronted Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko with the bald fact that the current map of the House of Representatives districts is unconstitutional, rendering an election impossible on technical grounds. While the Prime Minister had no alternative but to concede that the current map is unconstitutional, he dodged the thrust of Okoshi's question, saying that the Diet had too many important and difficult issues before it for anyone to be discussing a dissolution and an election at this time.

Noda had been, until the live NHK interview, careful to not get cornered on the question of the constitutionality of holding an election. He had left it up to Koshi'ishi Azuma, the Democratic Party of Japan's secretary-general, to tell the seemingly bone-headed members of the political press over and over again that since the issue of the disproportionality of a single vote (ippyo no kakusa) had not been resolved in accordance with the standards set down by the Supreme Court judgment of March 2011, no House of Representatives elections could take place.

While any position aside from the one Koshi'ishi has taken is ludicrous -- unconstitutional meaning “contrary to the basic law of the land, the law upon which all other laws are based” -- Noda has been careful to preserve the notion that the holding of an election is a matter of opinion -- his opinion -- rather than a matter of law.

The reason Noda has needed to maintain this fallacy is simple: his power to call an election is the whip he needs to keep the followers of former DPJ party leader Ozawa Ichiro in line. Nothing terrifies the Ozawa-vetted first termers like the possibility being plunged into an election. With the disdain the public has at present for the DPJ and perhaps permanently for Ozawa, each and every one of these Ozawa acolytes would be wiped out.

Perversely, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito have aided Noda in the maintenance of this illusion. The leaders of both the LDP and the New Komeito know just as well as anyone else that elections are impossible if the districts are unconstitutional. Nevertheless they have been calling for elections for two years straight. And why not? It is the biggest free lunch in history. The public opininon polls on the level of public support for the LDP and the New Komeito could find that both have 0% support and it would not matter: the two parties would still call for elections.

Noda, for his part, tacitly used opposition demands for elections as a means of bolstering the illusion he has wished to preserve. If the opposition is demanding elections, it stands to reason that the opposition at least believes elections can be held.

Hence the sound of breaking glass yesterday when LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru asked Prime Minister Noda, in special Diet Committee session, whether in fact the failure to correct the disproportionality of votes in the electoral districts put a shackle on the right to dissolve the Diet. Noda replied that no, failure to act did not shackle the right and that elections would be held when they he thought they were needed. (J)

Technically, both men are correct. Following through on Ishihara's thought, a dissolution of the Diet would trigger the implementation of Article 54 of the Constitution, which states that following a dissolution of the Diet, an election must be held within 40 days. Since the current electoral districts have been ruled unconstitutional, and the Diet would no longer be in existence to fix them, the election would a priori be void.

As for Noda's insistence that the right to dissolve the Diet is not compromised, his position is true only via the most painstaking of hairsplitting. The right to dissolve the Diet, held by the Emperor but exercised upon the advice of the Prime Minister, is not compromised until the moment the right is exercised, at which point the country would be blasted out into extraconstitutional space.

While the constitutional implications of this conundrum are fascinating*, what was of immense political importance in Ishihara's question was that unless the LDP tries to pull off the same trick that the DPJ has been pulling -- i.e., having the party secretary-general insisting that holding a House of Representatives election is impossible while the party president maintains that it is not -- the delicate minuet Noda and the opposition have been dancing together has come to a sudden stop. If a gaggle of reporters corner LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu and press him on whether or not Ishihara's question means the LDP now believes holding elections is unconstitutional, chances are the not terribly swift-thinking Tanigaki will not have an intelligible response.

If and when Tanigaki flubs his moment in the spotlight, the political game board will become completely scrambled, just when Ozawa Ichiro, the master of Go (Part 1 and Part 2) is set to meet with the prime minister. (J)

-----------------------------
* The current emperor, being the conscientious, cautious but independent-thinking man that he is, would likely, on the most perfect of legal grounds, toss post-1945 precedent into the dustbin by refusing the prime minister's request for a dissolution.