By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:02:40 +0000

This guy should read Asou Tarou’s book titled ‘Totetsu mo nai Nippon’ as far as living in Japan.

By: ampontan

ampontan — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:07:08 +0000

MAT: It’s now Comment #3 in the comment section instead of a separate page.

By: Mat

Mat — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:52:39 +0000

The answer from Mr Alford doesn’t appear in my browser. I just get:
Error 404 – Not Found

(using Firefox last English version)

By: Princess Leia

Princess Leia — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 02:32:59 +0000

The correct scholarly way to refer to the political views of Mr Aso, Mr Nakagawa, Ms. Sakurai and others is “conservative nationalist.” I suggest our editor to read some of the literature. I am actually quite impressed that Mr Alford knew that term.

By: Keizo

Keizo — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:08:28 +0000

As an actual Japanese person, I find Anpontan’s commentary extremely insightful. He really does have a good grasp of what’s happening here…in a way that 99% of foreigners here don’t (no offense, I continually find that my 10+ years in the US still cannot truly allow me to understand American politics as well as he understands Japanese politics).

Good stuff, keep it up!

By: TokyoVP

TokyoVP — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:54:13 +0000

If you would like rate Aso along the political spectrum, then explore his Nihon-Kaigi resume. He was the head of the Nihon-Kaigi Diet group, right? Eleven of eighteen members of Aso’s Cabinet are nespots…how many are members of Nihon-Kaigi? This political litmus test was used for the Abe administration by several Japanese, reported in Wikipedia.

By: Peter Alford

Peter Alford — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:48:55 +0000

ALFORD: I hope you will allow this lengthy response; I think it addresses points made by you and others.
AMPONTAN: PETER ALFORD, the Tokyo correspondent for The Australian, sent in a comment today regarding an article that appeared here earlier this week. He said:
I suppose I’m being very unwise in not just copping this, but could you or Get a Job Son! provide sufficient examples of the frequent perpetrations of sensationalist tripe about Japan?
I am by the way an interested reader.
Here is my reply:
Thanks for your note and for stopping by to read. (Seriously.)
But to start with, the expression I used was “blatant nonsense” and not “sensationalist tripe”.
ALFORD: You don’t use the phrase sensationalist tripe but Get A Job Son! whom I also invite to respond, does.
AMPONTAN: I really don’t have time to dig through the search engine at your site, but let’s take a look an article in today’s edition of The Australian about Aso Taro becoming prime minister.
ALFORD: You don’t have the time to check but it’s ok for you to casually impugn my newspaper’s Japan coverage for which, over the past four years, I have been mainly responsible.
Don’t use the search engine at our site, unless it’s got better recently it’s not very comprehensive.
I am willing to make available to you (once the current excitement slows and I have time to do so) either a complete set of my raw copy, say for the last year, or key words for you to search a large enough representative selection, on the net.
Your obligation would be to give a considered judgement on whether or not it is blatant nonsense, and I would hope you would have the good grace to measure it as general newspaper coverage for a general interest foreign readership, rather than the specialisation that happens on Ampontan and other Japan political/social affairs websites.
As to Get A Job Son! Get a real name, mate! What are you scared of?
AMPONTAN: The article describes Mr. Aso as a “conservative nationalist”.
It is not possible to do justice to this discussion on a website, but I’ve long held the use of the word “nationalist” should not be used merely to denote politicians who unapologetically give preference to working on behalf of what they consider the national interest. I don’t follow domestic Australian politics, but in the US there are some politicians on the left who think it is wrong to work on behalf of the national interest.
“Nationalist” is a loaded expression that does not really describe Mr. Aso, as I see him today. I suspect some journalists use it as a code word. It edges very close to some rather unsavory political characters of both the past and present. It is also usually used in a disparaging way, based on the assumption that it is backwards and regressive compared to “internationalism”. If the UN and the EU are examples of the latter, spare us please.
ALFORD: I believe conservative nationalist is a reasonable shorthand description of Mr Aso for a non-specialist readership in Australia. I understand the loaded nature of the word to many readers, but I cannot avoid it simply because of that. The more I become familiar with the intrinsic strong nationalisms in the countries of this region, I try to use the term neutrally. In the feature piece you refer to below, you will note I use Mr Aso’s own description of himself and I believe this and other recent rhetoric would fairly be described as nationalist. Many people would say Mr Aso’s brand of nationalism is benign and preferable to the watery, over-compromising “internationalism” still to be seen in parts of the LDP. I don’t actually disagree with that. I just wasn’t having that argument.
AMPONTAN I discussed this at greater length last year by comparing Abe Shinzo’s political approach and a Jacques Chirac speech here.
“…succeeding Yasuo Fukuda, who after barely 11 months in office gave up on his attempts to govern against the DPJ-controlled Upper House blockade of his programs.”
Mr. Fukuda’s term (which ended today) lasted 365 days, according to an article I saw in the Japanese press.
ALFORD: This is nit-picking. Both Mr Abe and Mr Fukuda announced their intentions to resign after barely 11 months. That is the point where they gave up. How can you sensibly assert otherwise?
AMPONTAN: Did he give up? Perhaps. There has been rampant speculation in the Japanese press since early spring that the party was unhappy with him and would try to find a graceful exit for him after the summit, however. He announced his resignation a month later. I would not make that statement with such certainty.
ALFORD: Did Mr Fukuda give up? Like you I don’t know for sure but I think it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption. In his statements yesterday he gave as his reason for going his inability to make the Diet work for the government’s programmes. He announced his intention to resign a bare four days after unveiling his economic stimulus package. There was no news media speculation about this happening, as far as I know, until an hour before he made the actual resignation announcement. His graceful exit was supposed to be after the July G8 summit; however the summit was followed by a widespread assumption in the Japanese media and political circles that he had in fact decided to press on. I concede there was considerable nervousness in the LDP about having him at their head in an election campaign, but I didn’t say otherwise.
AMPONTAN: It also should be remembered that the DPJ passed a non-binding censure of Mr. Fukuda during the last Diet session, merely for exercising his Constitutional authority. They would continue to use that as an excuse to stonewall his government in the future.
ALFORD: The DPJ was stonewalling legislation in the Upper House long before the non-binding censure motion in June. The censure motion, despite its unique nature, may have had little effect on Mr Fukuda’s state of mind; it certainly became less significant to his LDP colleagues. That is why the DPJ looked at using it late last year and again early this year, but decided not to. Yet last October such as Taku Yamazaki were predicting a censure motion would oblige Mr Fukuda to resign immediately and dissolve the House of Reps for an election. Clearly the DPJ (which has been seeking just that result for most of the past 18 months) came to believe a censure would not cause that to happen. So apparently did Mr Fukuda’s colleagues; if there was any panic in the ranks when the motion went through in June I didn’t read or hear about it.
AMPONTAN: “Mr Fukuda, 72, and his cabinet resigned this morning to clear the way for Mr Aso’s team, although the new PM is unlikely to make major changes to the ministry.”
Mr. Aso retained five ministers and appointed 12 new ones. These included a new foreign minister, finance minister, justice minister, defense minister, and chief cabinet minister.
ALFORD: Inaccurately conveyed, granted, though I was aware of the changes you cite. What I meant to convey was that the cabinet changes themselves would have little effect on public perception of the government. If you like, when things are a little quiet, I can go through the cabinet reshuffles of the past four years and demonstrate that in fact the turnover was not unusually high.
AMPONTAN: In the piece you wrote, linked to that article, you say:
“Each of Aso’s two immediate predecessors lasted barely 11 months, though they faced no serious threat within the Liberal Democratic Party”
See the above for the length of Mr. Fukuda’s term.
Mr. Abe’s was one day longer.
ALFORD: See above for my rebuttal. Note also that several months before Mr Fukuda’s resignation, the Oriental Economist quoted the PM saying he intended to stay around at least longer than “that awful Mr Abe”. He didn’t even manage that.
AMPONTAN: See the above also for a reference to the LDP spending most of the year trying to find a way to get rid of him.
ALFORD: You think some in the LDP might have been trying to find a way of getting rid of him, rather than just wandering around miserably hoping for a resolution to descend from the blue. True, we read reports of the subterranean activities of Mr Koizumi and Ms Koike, which seemed to me to be aimed at a psot-election scenario, and Mr Yosano’s manouvering. Where’s your evidence of any organised attempt to dislodge Mr Fukuda, or even seriously to persuade him to leave immediately?
I suspected, and I referred to this at the time, that when he chose Mr Aso for LDP secretary-general in August, Mr Fukuda was starting to organise his way out. Like you, I fully expected him to go; I just didn’t expect it to happen within weeks of a reshuffle and days of an important economic package. The patent surprise of his colleagues when the night of the resignation announcement does not suggest he fell to an organised push.
AMPONTAN: I’ve written here before about the considerable opposition within the LDP to Mr. Fukuda, starting from Takenaka Heizo’s article in the Bungei Shunju. The opposition was a reaction to Mr. Fukuda’s return to a reliance on the bureaucracy (specifically the Finance Ministry) rather than pursuing reform. There is even talk among the reformers of forming a new “urban-based” party. This wing is estimated to number about 100 Diet members, though of course the days are numbered for some of them.
ALFORD: You wrote it and I read it. I still didn’t see any organised push within the parliamentary LDP. Before the reshuffle, people were calling for Mr Aso to be brought back to the front ranks. In the weeks before the resignation announcement, that political bed-hopper Mr Mori began to talk about Mr Aso as a leader. The day before so did Mr Amari. Maybe they had an effect on timing, who can tell? Many things recommended by Mr Mori to the LDP backfire. Mr Koizumi, at least publicly, was urging Mr Fukuda to hang on. Do you have evidence there was anything more than talk?
AMPONTAN “Even now, as another mild recession laps at their doorsteps, the Japanese are a point of stability in a world financial system gone wild.”
Public debt in Japan is a very serious problem, both at the national and prefectural level. Some prefectures are worried about insolvency in 2-3 years. The public debt was 176.2% of GDP in 2006, according to the CIA factbook. This is still, I think, the world’s largest governmental fiscal deficit (at least among developed nations). Consider that Mr. Yosano wanted until recently to raise the consumption tax to hack away at this.
ALFORD: What is it with you, that you can parse one phrase in a paragraph and ignore the rest. I believe any fair-minded reader would understand this as a reference to the events of the past week. Do really deny that the actions of Japanese financial houses in that time have not provided stability in, as I repeat, a world financial system gone wild? If you are trying to imply I am not aware of the nature of Japanese public debt and its consequences, I can deluge you with references.
AMPONTAN: “Ichiro Ozawa, the Opposition Democratic Party of Japan’s bullish leader, who has been correct in most calls for the past 18 months…”
Please name three of those calls.
ALFORD: 1.Mr Ozawa’s strategy of using an Upper House election success to force the Government to an early general election (which he laid out at the Foreign Correspondents Club before the election, and other forums as well, I guess).
2. Mr Ozawa’s Upper House election campaign strategy, which helped achieve that success, particularly in rural single-member prefectures.
3. Mr Ozawa’s judgement that refusing even minimal cooperation by the new Upper House, despite the Lower House over-ride, would wear down the Government to such a point it would have to seek a general election: witness the third PM since then is now expected to call an early election.
So maybe not right about everything thus far. Just right about the important things, except for one (see below).
AMPONTAN: “…might even give enough government MPs the nerve to try to break the DPJ’s deathly grip on the upper house, at least to the extent of driving through the Diet Fukuda’s emergency economic package.”
I don’t understand this. The DPJ grip on the upper house lasts until the next election, at least, which is three years away.
ALFORD: What don’t you understand? First, straightforwardly, that LDP MPs will get the nerve to spend the extra time necessary to get the economic package into law and have some higher credibility in an election campaign; not just sitting dead on the Upper House table when the Lower House is prorogued.
Secondly, though the LDP’s strategy is difficult to accomplish, it’s simple enough to comprehend. If the LDP comes through the next election able to form another government, particularly if it’s a convincing win, Mr Ozawa will be the one under pressure in his own party. If, somehow, LDP-Komeito managed to retain two-thirds majority, you would see Mr Ozawa’s resignation on election night. It’s not the DPJ’s objective to squat in the Upper House for three more years; the objective is to win government soon, and if they fail to at least restrict an LDP coalition to a narrow majority, I think Mr Ozawa will go. Even if DPJ agreed to join a post-election LDP coalition I suspect the price would be Mr Ozawa’s removal, which the likes of Mr Maehara would happily endorse.
AMPONTAN: “Along the way there was only one misstep, but it was Ozawa’s and it showed why some senior DPJ members make no effort to disguise their loathing and suspicion. Late last year he was cleverly inveigled by Fukuda into private discussions about a grand coalition between their parties.”
I would maintain there have been quite a few Ozawa missteps, starting with the idea of challenging the government over the Indian Ocean refueling mission. And really, he wasn’t “inveigled” into talks about a grand coalition. He thought it was a great idea and the best way to implement some DPJ measures. There are also rumors that those talks continue on the QT, by the way, which I’ve mentioned here once before.
ALFORD: We can argue about the effect of blocking continuation of the Indian Ocean deployment when everyone including Mr Ozawa knew the DPJ would eventually be overridden. In the meantime, the tanker and escort were pulled from the area between November and January, the government was embarrassed in front of its international friends, Mr Ozawa was given a platform to explain in detail his attitude to overseas SDF deployments. DPJ unity was once again strained but it did not break. Meanwhile, again, if we are to believe the Japanese media and good commentators (eg Takao Toshikawa), a sick Mr Abe literally couldn’t stomach the prospect of fighting the Indian Ocean bill all the way through the Upper House and back again. That was one reason he quit. An early scalp for Mr Ozawa. Are you sure this was such a misstep.
That Mr Ozawa was inveigled into talking about a grand coalition doesn’t mean he didn’t think it was a great idea. That’s one way to inveigle people. That he clearly misunderstood the talks wouldn’t leak early or his party wouldn’t react badly to a complete reversal of DPJ strategy shows how well he was inveigled. The still not-fully-explained role of Yomiuri Shimbun’s Mr Watanabe suggests also an element of entrapment.
AMPONTAN: “But in a political society where blue blood is almost obligatory for leadership contention, Ozawa’s father was a mere businessman, a backbencher from Iwate.”
Blueblood to me means descended from royalty or nobility. While Mr. Fukuda’s father was a prime minister, and Mr. Abe’s father a foreign minister and grandfather a prime minister, the political antecedents of their predecessors were not that big a deal. Off the top of my head, the last Japanese prime minister to have been a blueblood was Hosokawa Morihiro. And Mr. Ozawa was born and educated in Tokyo, though he succeeded his father in representing an Iwate district, so he is no stranger to privilege.
ALFORD: Oh come on, why do you resort to this? If, when you read the term blueblood in relation to Japanese politics, you do not share the understanding it means political pedigree, then you are in a very small and pedantic minority. I’m not going to bore your readers with names and facts about generational LDP politics. They know them, they’re familiar with the term blueblood in this context. Even the outsider Mr Koizumi’s father and his adoptive grandfather were significant conservative ministers.
AMPONTAM: “He wants to make manga and anime (animated video) and favours other otaku (geek) activities that are at the forefront of Japan’s cultural diplomacy.”
What other geek activities would those be?
ALFORD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku Read the section In Japan.
AMPONTAM: “Words such as these won’t hurt Aso’s popularity. In the next weeks, expect to see his personal ratings rise high above those of Ozawa.”
The last poll I saw had his personal approval ratings at roughly double those of Mr. Ozawa’s in percentage-point terms already. But yes, they might go even higher, as Mr. Abe seems to enjoy retail politicking much more than Mr. Ozawa.
ALFORD: They will go higher, but now Mr Aso is being compared with Mr Ozawa as Prime Minister, not as a would-be PM. That’s my point; that’s the LDP’s best hope.
AMPONTAM: Blatant nonsense? Perhaps an overstatement in this particular instance, but clearly these articles could have been much better.
ALFORD: So not blatant nonsense, after all? Maybe you’ll also acknowledge I do pay some attention to what’s going on? Originally you could have just posted a comment like “for once, he’s written something I generally agree with” and I would have copped it. But of course when you take a wide swing like you did, you attract in ignoramuses who don’t have an argument to make, just a cheap, anonymous snipe at my newspaper.
You leave hanging the implication that most of what I write about Japan is nonsense, or at least lacking thought and study. I’ve offered you the opportunity to justify that. My reporting contains errors and misjudgements but it’s not the work of a fool or a lazy, unperceptive man.
And it would be helpful when you compare general media stories and commentary to the higher analytic plane, where you claim to operate, at least to acknowledge the constraints imposed by a 650-word news story or a 1700 word feature for a general, foreign, non-resident audience For instance, I have to use up to 15 per cent of space available for a story about a major Japanese political development to background my readers on what has gone before. My space is strictly limited, yours is restricted only by where you think the readers’ interest thresholds are. Of necessity, I have to compress…you on the other hand can take for granted your readers are familiar with the background and anyway you can link back or link out.
AMPONTAN: Still, I am not being facetious when I say this is superior to the efforts of many other newspapers. For example, the headline above the West Australian article is “Blueblood Nerd-In-Chief”.
Nor am I being facetious when I say thanks again, and please feel free to comment any time.
ALFORD: Nor am I being facetious when I say I will continue to read Ampontan. Like other good, provocative Japan-focused political and social affairs websites, I find it invaluable. But I feel the general standard of web commentary in the world today is woeful (and, of course, much of it wouldn’t exist without newspaper reportage to sneer at). However, I don’t publicly or privately slag-off any particular website or posting just to show my low regard for them generally.

Fair enough?

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:56:07 +0000

What is the definition of ‘nationalist’ by the Aust-russian or Aust-korean?

By: Tornadoes28

Tornadoes28 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:39:11 +0000

Interesting facts that you have presented.

Comments on: Reply to Mr. Alford

By: Ken

By: ampontan

By: Mat

By: Princess Leia

By: Keizo

By: TokyoVP

By: Peter Alford

By: Ken

By: Tornadoes28