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

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

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

- REM "Bad Day"(2003)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy: Mainichi Shimbun

On Sunday, We Enter A State Of Transcendance and Transgression

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, On Saturday, February 25, the clock runs out on the Diet's efforts to come up with an electoral map for the next House of Representatives election. In March of last year, the Supreme Court declared the 2009 electoral map unconstitutional due to excessive disproportionality in between the populations of the smallest electoral districts and the largest. It suggested that the maps be redrawn so that the disproportionality of population between the smallest and largest districts does not exceed 1.99. Otherwise, the Supreme Court might for the first time in its history invalidate an election.

It is only on Sunday, however, that this blessed land enters of state of transcending the Constitution and transgressing against the Supreme Court's orders.

The Diet was given a reprieve by the judicial branch. It had up to one year after the announcement of the results of the 2010 population census to make the necessary adjustments to the electoral map to bring the disproportionality in districts below the 1.99 threshold.

It was one year ago on Saturday that the results of the 2010 decennial census were announced.

Due to the split control of the Houses of the Diet, both the ruling parties and the opposition parties had to come together to devise an electoral map that fell within the guidelines set by the Supreme Court's ruling.

This the parties have failed to do.

The parochial interests of the parties are in opposition. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan, in particular, has wanted to make good on its 2009 Manifesto promise to cut the number of proportional seats in the House of Representatives to 100 from its current 180. This guaranteed a showdown with the mini- and micro-parties, which remain viable solely because of the large number of proportional seats available. Since the major opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party, desperately needs the votes of the mini-party New Komeito to elect its candidates in the district elections, it (the LDP) could not support the DPJ's proposed cuts.

The winners and losers are easy to distinguish. The ruling DPJ, which is languishing in the popularity polls, has no wish for an election at this time. For the DPJ, it is no elections, no problems. The New Komeito and the micro-parties are also winners, as the logjam has prevented the DPJ and the LDP from colluding in chopping down the number of proportional seats, which is in both DPJ's and the LDP's interests as the only two parties currently capable of running credible campaigns for the district seats.

One sure loser is the LDP. According to recent poll results, a head-to-head contest against the DPJ would lead to a reversal of the losses the LDP suffered in 2009. The LDP has a strong desire to force an election while this iron is still hot. The LDP is also desperate to contest andelection before the regionalist parties, the most important of which is Hashimoto Toru Ishin no kai, get themselves organized for running candidates for House of Representatives seats. Once the regionalist parties nominate candidates, the voters will have two large anti-DPJ parties on the ballot. Given the still strong public aversion to the LDP brand and a natural wish to not admit a mistake (for having dumped the LDP from power in 2009) the default anti-DPJ vote will like fall into the hands of the regionalists.

The major news outlets are enraged at the political parties for allowing the country to fall into a state of constitutional disgrace (Here is The Asahi Shimbun's editorial. Here is the Nihon Keizai Shimbun's -- better hurry up and copy this latter one).

News dudes and dudettes, the time to get enraged was last year, not days before the deadline.

Does the end of the grace period mean that the prime minister cannot dissolve the Diet, since a valid election cannot be held? Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu would want everyone to believe that the prime minister could still call an election (J) -- this in order to scare the living daylights out of the first-termers and Ozawa Ichiro supporters in the House of Representatives, as they would likely be utterly wiped out were an election to be called today.

Unfortunately, that the Chief Cabinet Secretary says something is so does not make it so. In this case, Fujimura is clearly wrong/being economical with the truth (take your pick).

Rest assured that Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko and current DPJ leadership will use this suspension of normal constitutional processes to drive the LDP leadership nuts -- and to hold out electoral reform carrots to the New Komeito in repeated efforts to entice the mini-party into betraying the LDP, its longtime ally.