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

Words Are Not Enough

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Hmmmm...

Japan's AIJ chief admits loss cover-up, apologizes
Reuters

The president of Tokyo-based money manager AIJ Investment Advisors admitted to Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday to covering up losses of $1.3 billion in clients' pension money, but said he had no intention of cheating his clients.

In his first public comment since the scandal broke in February, Kazuhiko Asakawa apologized to clients and the financial industry for the cover-up and said he had been confident that the losses could be recovered.

AIJ lost the funds through bad bets on equity and bond derivatives, wiping out the bulk of the $2.4 billion in client assets it was managing, Japan's financial regulator, the Financial Services Agency (FSA), said last week.

More than 90 corporate pension funds, mostly smaller ones, were invested with the money manager, which was handling pensions for about 880,000 people.

"I want to use this opportunity to apologize to all beneficiaries who believed in our funds and purchased them," Asakawa told a financial committee of parliament...

[Link]

I was watching snippets from the hearing yesterday on NHK -- and I would not characterize the attitude of Mr. Asakawa as apologetic. Oh, he may have mouthed phrases that when translated by a machine would scroll out as apologies. His attitude, however, said, "Yeah, I lost your money. But then you were stupid enough to give it to me. Who is the jackass here?"

As for the other executives called to testify, including Old Boy advisor from the old Social Insurance Agency, when they claimed that if they had to choose between calling themselves victims (higaisha) and perpetrators (kagaisha), they would call themselves victims -- that was rich.

Prior to yesterday's performance, I was thinking, "For their sakes, Asakawa and his cronies had better hope beyond hope that none of the small- and medium-sized companies they bilked has ties to organized crime." After last night's performances, I found myself thinking, "For their sakes, they had better hope beyond hope that none of the 880,000 investors whose savings they destroyed watches television."

AIJ Is Not A Lousy Investment Company...

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, ...it is a truly excellent Ponzi scheme. (E)

The Bernard Madoff scandal barely made the news here in Japan. So it is not surprising that an investment company reporting steady returns for over a decade, even as the globe was rocked by the greatest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, was not flagged by regulators or corporate pension fund managers as suspect. Now, according to The Asahi Shimbun, many of the 120 corporate pension funds that invested in AIJ are on line to writing off half of their asset base, meaning they will not be paying out their corporate retirement benefits (kigyo nenkin) or even the full amount of their employees pension (kosei nenkin). (J)

Greed makes simpletons of us all. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. A fool and his money are soon parted.

Yes, the clichéd admonitions could just go on and on.