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.

We Can Have Elections!

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Well of one kind. And only with regrets. And they are not the elections everyone is talking about.

Quietly, and without very much fuss, it seems that Ishikawa Yasuo, the disgraced former minister of defense (Mister "I am an amateur in defense issues and that is the epitome of civilian control" to you and me), now secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Japan's House of Councillors delegation, has crafted a simple plan to rectify the disparities in that House that the courts have ruled unconstitutional. The plan has the agreement of the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito and the disappointed acquiescence of the rest of the opposition parties. In contrast with the reform of the House of Representatives districts, which has the various parties talking past one another, the Ishikawa Plan has an excellent chance of being converted into law by the end of this extended regular session of the Diet.

The plan is a minimal, hair-splitting solution to the Supreme Court-mandated reform of the disparities in the House of Councillors. Kanagawa Prefecture, which currently suffers from the fewest Senators per capita, will be bounced from six senators to eight. Osaka Prefecture, which is the next in line in terms of underrepresentation, will be similarly bounced from six to eight.

To supply these four new Senate seats, someone will have to give up seats. Those someones will be Fukushima Prefecture (great timing!) and Gifu Prefecture, both of which will drop from four senators to just two.

This is a quick and dirty solution. The highest level of disparity in the country, currently 5.11 to 1 in between the voters in Kanagawa Prefecture and those in Tottori Prefecture, will drop to 4.75 to 1 in between those in Hyogo Prefecture and those in Tottori. This slips below the court-mandated maximum of 4.99 to 1, allowing for a legal election to take place on schedule in July next year. (J)

While the Ishikawa Plan seems unremarkable for what it contains, what it does not contain makes it interesting. Gone, for example, is any hint of the DPJ's manifesto promise to cut 40 seats from the House of Councillors. This is a huge concession on the part of Ishikawa, a reputed Ozawa Ichiro toady. Also absent from the plan is any hint of an attempt to accommodate the New Komeito Party's and the Democratic Socialist Party's desires to replace the d'Hondt proportional seat distribution system with the Additional Member System. The minor parties have been asked to wait to have their desires answered prior to the 2016 electoral cycle, ostensibly in order give everyone time to think about the proposal.

In the absence honoring the promises of massive seat cuts made in the DPJ's 2009 manifesto, reform of the House of Councillors was always relatively simple. This is due in part to the greater level of disparity allowed -- 4.99 to 1 as opposed to 1.99 to 1, the standard set by the Supreme Court for the House of Representatives districts.

Another contributing factor is, perversely, the knowledge that the House of Councillors had all the constitutional sense wrung out of it decades ago. Designed to be friendly to independents, and thus a brake on party mob rule, it became partisan battleground through the 1982 introduction of the awarding of proportional seats from party lists. The takeover of the House by parties failed to upend the relationship between the two Houses thanks to the persistence of the 1955 System, whereby the LDP retained dominance in the House of Representatives and the country and the Socialist Party played the part of an opposition while being the dominant party's tacit accommodators. However, in the 1990s the concorde collapsed, half after the breakup of the LDP in 1993 and half in the Socialists' committing ideological suicide from 1994 onward.

The person who really cracked the nut, however, was, unsurprisingly, Ozawa Ichiro. First through the New Frontier Party and then later through the DPJ, Ozawa capitalized on the perversion of the the House of Councillors' original purpose and status to make it, and not the House of Representatives, the fulcrum point in politics.

That the minority parliament in the Diet can now, through control of the House of Councillors, hold the rest of the apparatus of government hostage, was never the intent of the writers of the Constitution. The Ishikawa Plan's meagre reforms will make no dent in this anomalous situation.

The resolution of the unconstitutionality of the districts in the House of Councillors sets up a huge battle over the reform of the districts of the House of Representatives. It will not be resolved, as the LDP desires, with a simple abolition of the five smallest electoral districts. The DPJ rank-and-file will demand an Armageddon over House of Representatives redistricting.

Expect them to get one.

Of Bets and Debts Blogged

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of sharing at lunch at Aux Bacchanales with Okumura Jun, my reward for winning a gentlemanly bet with him" over the relative sizes of the anti-nuclear demonstrations on June 29 and July 6.

However, I did not dine with a clear conscience. I had a longstanding pledge that I had never made good upon. Back in September of 2007, I pledged to eat my hat if the United Nations Security Council had actually included in one of its resolutions praise for the soon-to-be-expiring Maritime Self Defense Forces refueling mission to the Indian Ocean, a clause included at the insistence of Japanese diplomats in order to undermine the Ozawa Ichiro-led Democratic Party of Japan's refusal to approve an extension of the mission.

Incredibly, the story happened to be true.

Of course, as we know this sacrifice of Japan's prestige came to naught, as the DPJ-led House of Councillors did not pass the extension legislation by the November 1 expiration date of the previous extension, requiring the LDP to use its supermajority in the House of Representatives to renew the Indian Ocean dispatch in the next year.

Anyway, I had never consumed my hat, as I had pledged to do.

Until yesterday.

The below concoction is known as a Texas Straw Hat. It comprised of ground meat, tomato products, onions, cheese, spices, lettuce and unsalted, plain corn chips.

It was consumable.

My debt is paid up, my conscience is now clear.

Many, many thanks to Okumura-san for the recipe.

The Best Of Times

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, This is going to be a fun week.

On the 26th, the decision in Ozawa Ichiro's political funds mishandling case comes down.  Expect the otherwise circumspect Ozawa to wax loquacious to the mainstream press on how the investigation and trial were political charades from beginning to end, intiated with the goal of undermining the principle of elected officials governing the country.

On the 29th, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko travels to Washington with next to nada in his travel bag (see my short review of the outlook for the visit here). Of greatest interest to the U.S. officials in the know will be whether the Diet is functioning again and what Noda intends to do about Ozawa and his followers. As for the officials not in the know, they will wonder what the heck Noda is even doing in Washington.

So The Budget Passes. Now What?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Since Sunday the government of this blessed land has been operating without a budget, an embarrassing state of affairs which happens from time to time (the last time was 14 years ago). For reasons that escape me for the moment, the Democratic Party of Japan's floor leaders managed to demonstrate an alarming inability to count backwards 30 days from April 1, alarming in that it is both simple to do and also reminiscent of the inability of the floor leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan to count backwards 60 days during that party's final years in power.

With the budget bill set to become law today thanks to the 30 day rule written into Article 60 of the Constitution (seemingly the only article of the Constitution that is worth a damn), the opposition-dominated House of Councillors, ever ready to prove itself more than just a place to take a good nap, roused itself yesterday to vote the budget down. This triggered the rigmarole of the formation of a joint committee of both Houses which, amazingly, after long minutes of hard bargaining, found itself in an irreconcilable deadlock on the bill, meaning that the budget bill automatically became law.

On the surface, the 2012 budget is smaller than the 2011 budget, the first year-on-year nominal drop in six years. Add on all the special accounting for the recovery and reconstruction efforts resulting from the triple disaster of 3/11, however, and the budget is the largest ever. (J)

Just getting the budget passed is not much to write home about. The hurdle is the budget enabling legislation (yosan kanren hoan), primarily the approval of the issuance of bonds to pay for the items in the budget. With all the attention that has been focused on the bill raising the consumption tax, which is the sexier story due to the internecine battle it has spawned inside the DPJ, the Diet fight over the enabling legislation has been ignored.

However, passage of the enabling legislation is the real make-or-break fight for the Noda government. Last year Prime Minister Kan Naoto, in a fantastic bit of legerdemain, forced the LDP and the New Komeito to vote for the enabling legislation by threatening that if they did not, he would not resign as prime minister*. Prime Minister Noda, who has no intention of resigning, will have to find his own lever for prying a "Yes" vote from out of the hands of the LDP and the New Komeito.

One of the strategies proposed is keeping the Diet in extended session until the opposition parties just give up. I am not sure how the incentives are supposed to work here, unless the plan is to freak out Tanigaki Sadakazu over his trying to win reelection as LDP President whilst leading his party in a do nothing strike in the Diet, obstreperous behavior that will earn the LDP a serious lashing by the mainstream press (all except by the Nippon Terebi network, which has proven to be even more pro-LDP than its owner the Yomiuri Shimbun). The Diet session is going to be extended anyway due to the number of controversial bills the government has submitted for Diet approval (J). In terms of atmospherics, it will be difficult to disentangle which part of the extension is being carried out in order to complete Diet business and which is meant to drive the opposition parties nuts.

Working out a quid pro quo between the ruling coalition** and the opposition parties would be an option, if this blessed land's political classes could consider Houses of the Diet being controlled by different parties a natural state of affairs. However, the political classes are united in considering such a division unnatural, calling it a "twisted Diet" (nejire kokkai). The quid that the opposition parties want the ruling coalition to pro quo is a dissolution of the Diet in return for a yes vote on the enabling legislation and the bill raising the consumption tax. Since the DPJ is neither suicidal (assuming recent poll numbers are correct, the party would be demolished were elections held this summer) nor unaware that the current Diet district seat apportionment system is unconstitutional, the LDP and the New Komeito are making offers that the DPJ can do nothing but refuse.

So the stage is set for a lengthy stalemate.

Whatever the supercomputers of the Japan Meteorological Agency may be predicting, it is going to be a hot, hot summer.

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* The essay is "Kan Won" in Reconstructing 3/11: Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown - how Japan's future depends on its understanding of the 2011 triple disaster available from Amazon.com. (Link)

** Yesterday, Shimoji Mikio, the erstwhile secretary-general of the possibly still extant People's New Party ostensibly fired his superior, Kamei Shizuka, replacing him with Financial Services Minister Jimi Shozaburo (J). Kamei, as one can imagine, does not accept his being fired by his subordinate. At present we seem to have two PNPs: one composed of Kamei and his distant relative, the other of the six MPs who say that the PNP has not withdrawn from the ruling coalition.


Later - Critical minds think in parallel: today's Tokyo Shimbun has a lead editorial on the above subject. (J)

The Tokyo Shimbun's editors seem to be of the opinion that it is worthwhile to remind the legislators that ultimately it is the citizens who will be deciding their political futures. Somehow this reality, of which the legislators have heretofore been seemingly been ignorant, will entice them into turning away from their petty, immediate obsessions and instead stir them to provide leadership for the country.

While the editors are at it, they might as well wish for ponies for everyone as well.

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.