That ain’t right

The debate over taxes will be decided in a different dimension than that of the citizens’ opinions or wishes. The citizens already feel a sense of powerlessness and wonder what elections are for.
- Doctor Z in Gendai Business

IF one country puts the lie to the aphorism that people get the government they deserve, it is Japan. What more is an electorate supposed to do? Japanese voters have tried everything short of hanging the politicians from lampposts to make their wishes very clear: More reform, less central government, lower taxes. They’ve punished at the polls, often brutally, politicians of every party for ignoring them. Though it was not the first expression of voter intent, Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s landslide victory in the 2005 lower house election marked a turning point in voter awareness. What was their reward? His successor, Abe Shinzo, allowed back into the party the foxes Mr. Koizumi threw out of the henhouses. His two successors turned their back on the Koizumian reforms that the voters favored.

That set up the Democratic Party of Japan’s own landslide victory at the next lower house election four years later. But in one of the most successful bait-and-switch scams ever, the DPJ accomplished in just two years what it took the Liberal-Democratic Party 40 to do: They’ve sloughed off their glitter to dip themselves in dreck. As a result, they lost ground in the upper house election last year instead of the outright majority they wanted, and have been pummeled in local elections since.

The one certainty in addition to death and taxes in Japan is that the politicos will ignore the lead story on the front page of the newspaper this morning, which presents a summary of the latest Kyodo polling results.

The findings that the support rate for the Noda Cabinet slid 2.5 points from the month before, to 44.6%, and the non-support rate rose six points to 40.3%, were not the reason for the prominent placement. Here are the results that were:

* Do you think the lower house of the Diet should be dissolved and an election held before a bill is submitted to increase the consumption tax?
Yes: 50.7%

* Do you favor the (Finance Ministry-inspired) Noda plan to pass the tax increase bill first and then hold an election?
Yes: 25.4%

The people also have an idea about where to start looking for solutions. They were asked if there should be a realignment of political party membership. (The unstated premise, which everyone knows, is to achieve ideological consistency.)

Yes: 71.5%
Not necessary: 17.8%

Another important element of the popular will is revealed by their continued selection of radical reformers as the chief executives of local government. Some of the candidates they choose may not be the ideal vessel for those reforms, but they’re the ones listening to the consistent message from throughout the country: We want decentralization and downsizing.

That was demonstrated yet again by Hashimoto Toru’s decisive victory in the election for Osaka mayor a week ago. It was a ratification of his plan to administratively reorganize the Osaka area to resemble the governmental infrastructure in Tokyo, though he’s also a champion of decentralization. That means the mayors of Japan’s second- and third-largest cities, Osaka and Nagoya, are now reformers. The administration of the Tokyo Metro District, particularly with Inose Naoki as Deputy Governor, also has that cast.

Thus, these numbers from the Kyodo poll will not be a surprise:

The combination of those who have hopes for regional parties or who lean that way: 72.4%
The combination of those who do not: 24.6%

Upper house member Yamamoto Ichita of the LDP stated the obvious:

People criticize Mr. Hashimoto and call him a dictator, but he also placed Osaka Prefecture’s finances on a sound footing. Unless the existing political parties take this result very seriously, they’ll find themselves in big trouble in the next election.

The existing political parties know it as well as Mr. Yamamoto. That’s why the DPJ will delay the next lower house election as long as they can, and the DPJ/LDP/New Komeito troika will try to rig the system in the meantime to their advantage.

The national imbalance in the number of people represented in each Diet district has been declared unconstitutional, so a redistricting scheme is required before the next election, which must be held by the summer of 2013. The DPJ promised in 2009 to reduce the number of national legislators, but no one expects them to keep their promises anymore. The mudboat wing of the LDP wants a return to the multiple-seat district system that was eliminated in the 1990s. Their allies in New Komeito and the smaller parties want to keep the proportional representation system instead shifting to a winner-take-all system, because that’s the only way they can keep their seats. LDP head Tanigaki Sadakazu said that an “all-or-nothing” system wasn’t suited to Japan.

Regardless of whether it is suited to Japan, it definitely isn’t suited to the old factional style of LDP politics.

Because the three parties haven’t figured out a way to divvy up the political spoils yet, the DPJ announced they will not submit an electoral reorganization plan in the current Diet session. That will thwart the popular will once again, as they will submit a scheme for a tax increase before whatever farce they come up with for electoral reform. Apparently, the ruling party thinks that tossing out the plank of an election manifesto that promises no new tax increases by raising taxes without taking it to the people first is perfectly suited to Japan.

In short, the politicians in Japan are actively moving in reverse and beavering away to achieve the opposite of everything the people have been telling them to do. It’s scant consolation that politicians in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, among other countries, are behaving the same way.

Indeed, they’re lucky the Japanese prefer public order to public unrest. If this country resembled Libya, there’d be more than 700 bloody backsides on corpses in Nagata-cho instead of just one in the Sahara.

*****
Politicians ain’t the only ones who take all the gold. You know that ain’t right.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Winter beauty

THIS POST was timed to go up at 10:00 p.m. on a Sunday night in Japan. For 22 years, from 1978 to 2000, that was the starting time for the broadcast of the 30-minute musical program, Enka no Hanamichi. Enka is a style of music popular in Northeast Asia, and in Japanese the word is usually written with the two characters that mean “to perform” and “to sing”. An excellent description is found at Barbara’s Enka Site:

A friend of mine once remarked that these were “Japanese torch singers” and that’s a fairly good description. Enka songs are 1 to 6 minutes long, and are performed standing, usually wearing formal attire. For men this can be either Japanese or Western attire, for women it is generally a kimono. (Korean and Chinese women seem to usually sing Enka in glittering gowns.) The song lyrics are tragic yet philosophical, and sometimes even amusing. Drinking songs are common, usually to help “drown my sorrows”. Songs of love, separation, death and suicide abound. The subject matter of the typical lyrics involves tragic love and sweet resignation to the comfort of cherished memories of better times. Arrangements use a unique mixture of Western and Japanese instruments, from the koto to the electric guitar. Violins are common, but surprisingly, pianos are not.

We Western music lovers might imagine it this way… Team up a songwriter who writes old-fashioned Gypsy music with a romantic lyricist of an American blues or country music background. Then translate the lyrics into poetic but old-fashioned Japanese and arrange the music for a band made of half Japanese musicians and half European classical musicians, plus a harmonica and electric guitar. Then find a Japanese woman to sing the song in full kimono, but choreograph her performance as if it were an operatic aria. That would give you something close to Enka music…

Enka no Hanamichi was an elegantly done program — the production quality was so good, the singers would use their filmed appearances as promotional videos. Japanese television makes extensive use of the stereo sound function to present movies and television programs in their original language versions, as well as the dubbed Japanese version. This program used the same function to offer just the background music, which allowed the viewers at home to use it for karaoke. (Song lyrics are commonly printed on the screen for all types of music programs here.) The elegance, exquisite sadness, and sheer amount of talent involved meant the program was a fine way to spend a half hour on a chilly autumn or winter evening, after a bath and with a glass of shochu mixed with hot water.

I was reminded of the program after reading short article from a Wakayama newspaper announcing the selection of enka singer Sakamoto Fuyumi, a native of Kamitonda-cho, to receive a local award for her contribution to culture. (The characters used to write Fuyumi are “winter” and “beauty”. It’s also her real name; names of that sort for women are not uncommon in Japan.)

Her big break came when she appeared on an NHK program for amateurs. Songwriter Inomata Kosho, one of the judges, was so impressed with her performance he took her in as a pupil. (In fact, she became his live-in housekeeper.) Her first hit came at the age of 20 in 1987 and sold more than 800,000 copies. According to a Yomiuri Shimbun article too old to be on line, that was a record at the time for first releases, though I suspect they’re referring specifically to this genre. Since then, she’s released more than 30 albums and appeared on NHK’s famed New Year’s Eve Music Program, Kohaku Uta Gassen, more than 20 times.

Part of her appeal is her combination of sweet femininity with a certain gutsiness and unfeigned naturalness. Another part is that she really is a winter beauty: She won an award in 2006 for looking good in a kimono.

Ms. Sakamoto has maintained close ties to Wakayama, and when informed of the award, said:

I will continue to devote myself to the path of song with the hope that I can please everyone in Wakayama. Thank you very much for this honor.

You can hear and see all that for yourself in this YouTube video, which is another fine way to spend a chilly Sunday evening. Note how the instrumentation is a combination of Western classicism, rock and roll, and traditional Japanese music, as Barbara the Enka Lady explained.

And for yet another example of Japanese ecumenicism, as well as Sakamoto flexibility, here she is with Hosono Haruomi of Yellow Magic Orchestra in a group called H.I.S. performing Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze with Japanese lyrics.

Stick around to the end and you’ll see her in a brief interview. She looks good in jeans, too.

Ichigen koji (77)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

From tonight’s Shoten television program

Utamaru (the moderator of the panel of rakugo comedians, explaining the premise for the weekly joke contest): You’ve been out drinking with people from work and had too much, and now you want to go home early. I’ll play the part of a supervisor you don’t like. You say to me, “I’ve got to be going now because XXX”. I’ll try to dissuade you and say, “No, let’s go to one more place!” You continue the conversation from there.

Enraku (one of the comedians on the panel): Prime Minister, I can’t drink any more. I just can’t drink any more, so let’s call it a night.

Utamaru: No, let’s go to one more place!

Enraku: But we’ve done nothing but drink (i.e., swallow) all the American demands so far!

When one of the comedians comes up with a joke or routine that is particularly funny or clever, the moderator awards the comedian with a zabuton, or cushion for seating on the floor.

Enraku was awarded a zabuton for this joke.

Utamaru is in the pale green kimono at the far left, and Enraku is in the lavender kimono third from the right.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Streetcar century

STREETCARS still wend their way through 19 Japanese cities, with the system in Hiroshima being the most extensive. Even Tokyo, better known for its urban rail network, has two or three lines. Osaka, Japan’s second city, has only one, the Hankai Tramway between southern Osaka and Sakai, and local residents celebrated its centenary on Thursday.

On one of my rare forays outside Kyushu, I rode the rails of the Hankai line on a trip to Osaka with my wife 11 years ago. It was great fun and as funky as the dickens — and if the car was 100 years old, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. We took the tram from the Tsutenkaku tower, an Osaka landmark, to the Sumiyoshi Taisha, which will mark its 18th centenary in 2013.

Just as worthwhile as the visits to the tower and the shrine was the ride between the two. The tram passes through the back roads and back yards of southern Osaka, so there’s no quicker or better way to get a feel for the daily life of Taro and Hanako in the ‘hood away from the shopping districts and tourist destinations.

One of the sports dailies did us a favor by filming the small anniversary celebration and putting excerpts on YouTube. Excellent stuff! Reading the video captions, it turns out that the company’s oldest streetcar still in service dates from 1928. They’ve gussied it up quite a bit, however. It’s a lot prettier than the one I rode on, and that didn’t have a pink roof, either!

The station shown is the one at Ebisucho, a three-minute walk from Tsutenkaku. When I was there, the bulletin boards had small posters advertising a dodgy-looking punk rock/death metal nightclub nearby. That’s a model of Tsutenkaku behind and to the left of the first woman speaker. And danged if that violinist doesn’t sound as if she’s about to break into a version of The Orange Blossom Special.

If so, it speaks to her diversity. It’s Asai Sakino, a member of Japan’s Colegium Musicum Telemann.

Factbox

MAN bites dog: Reuters decided to make itself useful for a change by providing a summary of free trade agreements and related negotiations in East Asia. They offer the information on a page called Factbox.

Here’s what it says about Japan:

Japan already has free trade pacts with ASEAN, Brunei, Chile, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand and Vietnam.

It has reached a free trade deal with Peru, but the agreement has yet to be ratified.

Japan has also been in negotiation with Australia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, while its free trade talks with South Korea have been shelved. It has been in talks with the European Union to start free trade negotiations.

It might be useful to keep these boxfacts in mind whenever you encounter the inevitable articles premised on the preconceived notion that Japanese minds and markets are closed. A more useful preconceived notion would be that the author of any industrial mass media article about Japan knows little about the country, and is distorting what little he does know.

Speaking of free trade, Japan stepped up those negotiations with Australia two weeks ago. And let’s debunk another preconceived and distorted notion while we’re at it: though the national governments are indeed dragging their feet, Japanese and South Korean businesses, universities, and local governments based in Kyushu and the southern part of the Korean Peninsula (particularly Busan) long ago took matters into their own hands to start building and strengthening ties in every sector with the stated objective of forming a regional free trade zone. You can read about some of those efforts in the Japan-Korea Amity category on the left sidebar. Living in Kyushu, I read stories about it in the newspaper nearly every day.

Now, here are some Factbox facts about the United States:

Washington is working on a proposed Transpacific Partnership (TPP), which it sees as a key element of its plan to double U.S. exports over the next five years.

A key element of its plan to double U.S. exports, eh? And still some Japanese can’t work out why their currency has appreciated by more than 30% against the dollar over the past few years. Americans, ever the insular continentals, aren’t particularly interested in international arithmetic.

Japanese Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko keeps telling people that TPP would be a “win-win” for both countries, but as previous articles around here have shown, the economic benefits of TPP would not be significant for the Japanese. Economically, the agreement would be closer to a “wash-WIN” than a “win-win”.

Even if Japanese participation in the TPP were to become a reality, American rice farmers might not find a hospitable market in Japan, regardless of their prices. The Yomiuri Shimbun conducted a nationwide survey of households last month that found 89% of the respondents saying they would buy domestic rice even if it is more expensive, while only 7% said they’d consider overseas rice at a cheaper price.

Those numbers would become less extreme over time, but there should be no doubt that the rate of growth of American rice sales, and the time required to achieve that growth, would displease the Western bien pensants, enamored as they are of the idea of Japanese insularity. We’ve heard and read it all before.

Meanwhile, here are some more facts to put in the box. I took a trip to the mall earlier today to browse in the bookstore. There were several newly published paperbacks on the shelves arguing both the pros and cons of Japanese participation in the TPP.

I bought a couple of books (on other subjects) and headed for the parking lot. On the way out, I passed a Baskin-Robbins, Mister Donut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Tully’s. There were lines of people waiting to be served at each one. I stopped off at a small import shop and bought whole wheat pasta made in Italy and a package of dark chocolate-covered pomegranate made in Quebec.

And then I came home and typed this post on a Dell (Japan) computer.

But I’ll be eating Japanese rice for dinner. It’s more expensive, but it tastes better.

*****
What’s there to say about preconceived notions? “If it hadn’t been for conditioning…”

Finis for the fins?

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and remain silent.
- Epictetus

SOCIAL critic Miyazaki Masahiro offered some observations on recent trends in Chinese cuisine earlier this week. Here they are in English.

*****
With everything else being destroyed in China, is the core of their food culture also at risk? Shark fin soup, the sine qua non of sophisticated Chinese cuisine, has become a target of attack. This has surprised both the Chinese and the Japanese, who export shark fins to China. Activists have converged on Shanghai to strip the Chinese of their dietary culture by demanding that people stop eating shark fin on some pretext or other — environmental protection, ecological protection, anything will do.

Japan has been deprived of the whale. In China too, bear paws and dog meat are now de facto illegal. (Manchuria is an exception. There, dog meat restaurants still flourish.) Stewed bear paw has, for all intents and purposes, been banned for about two years. The primary reason cited was hygiene, and now there is mock bear. But bear paws are considered an indispensable part of elegant dining, though it took a month of stewing in a pot to soften them and remove the toxicity.

Whole grilled squab is popular in Guangdong, but the shops serving civet have disappeared from the main streets. A campaign promoting a trial tasting of dog meat had been scheduled, but was canceled.

Most people in Beijing no longer eat dog meat. Even in Guangdong, owl eyes, which had been a favorite of young women (because they were said to improve eyesight), are not as popular as they once were, and there are signs that grilled squab (doves) will be the next target. (Why it is that Japanese women’s groups don’t criticize the Chinese for eating the symbol of peace, I don’t understand.)

And then there is shark fin.

It’s said that 30% of the world’s shark species are threatened with extinction, and most of those have disappeared into Chinese stomachs. China imports most of its shark fin from Japan. It became so scarce after the Tohoku earthquake that local fishermen began receiving premium prices.

WildAid was held on 22 September 2011 in Shanghai, and many Chinese were surprised to see basketball star and national hero Yao Ming in attendance. Most Chinese love shark fin soup (N.B.: It’s traditionally served at wedding banquets), and a controversy erupted when Yao Ming and Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, held a news conference to declare that eating shark fin was barbaric and should be banned.

I wonder — is this the first time Chinese food culture has come under simultaneous attack from inside and outside the country?

(end translation)

*****
The World Park Junkies have survived all these years, so maybe shark fin soup will too.

Ichigen koji (76)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

The discussion of the (Imperial) system should be left to debate in the Diet…(but) when discussing the ideal form of the Imperial Household in the future, I would very much appreciate it if they asked for my opinion, or that of His Majesty the Crown Prince.

- Prince Akishino, second in line to the Imperial throne, during a news conference held on his 46th birthday

Most of the coverage in the media both in Japan and overseas focused on his comment that there should be discussion of the possibility of establishing a retirement age for the Emperor. The current Tenno is 77, has had health problems in the past, and recently spent time in the hospital for pneumonia. The overseas media is aware that the position is almost entirely ceremonial, but unaware of the amount of time required to serve.

This statement was not widely reported overseas, however. Those in Japan who play close attention thought the statement was rather frank for a member of the Imperial family. They suspect it might be an expression of frustration within the family that the political class makes the decisions on important matters related to the family without consulting them at all. The family is of course aware that some Diet members, including former Prime Minister Kan Naoto, are closet republicans who would abolish the system if given a chance.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Interpretations

TANAKA Satoshi, the head of the Okinawa Defense Bureau, went out drinking with some members of the media on Monday night, and it cost him his job.

While they were in the process of getting lubricated, one of the media lads present asked Mr. Tanaka why the government has so far not set a schedule for submitting to Okinawa Prefecture an environmental assessment report on the relocation of the US Marine air base at Futenma. This report would expedite the implementation of the plan.

Here’s how Kyodo translated his reply:

Do you declare that you are going to commit an act before you do so?

The media members present said he used the word okasu for “commit an act”. Since spreading gossip is their primary job, they promptly got to work and blabbed about it as soon as they got next to a computer. Kyodo’s amusing explanation was that this word is “often interpreted as implying an act of sexual violence against women”. Japanese dictionaries don’t present that word as an implication, however — they list “rape” as one of the definitions. It’s primarily used to mean “to violate, to contravene the law, or to commit an improper act”, so it’s easy to see how the meaning expanded. I found that out first hand years ago early in my life in Japan when I stumbled over the word myself. I said okasu instead of okosu when I was talking about waking someone up, and I had to revisit the dictionary later after everyone in the room gave me a funny look.

Defense Minister Ichikawa Yasuo summoned Mr. Tanaka to Tokyo to explain himself. He said he doesn’t remember saying it, but Mr. Ichikawa fired him anyway. Kyodo explained:

Ichikawa said it would be difficult for Tanaka to continue in the post while the ministry is in a crucial stage regarding various issues involving Okinawa.

We don’t need Kyodo or a dictionary to interpret that. It means that government officials aren’t allowed to tell the truth about policies detested by the people who will be the most affected.

Most amusing of all is the media-driven teapot tempest. Kyodo’s dizziness in their effort to avoid the word “rape” resembles the 19th century women of the Victorian age who chose to substitute “limb” for the vulgar “leg”, and covered up the limbs of large tables so as to prevent impressionable eyes from gazing on that curvaceous naked wood.

The comment was held to offend Okinawans, and some Okinawans did their Pavlovian postmodern duty and became offended. You’d think they’d be glad someone in the government finally told the truth. It seems they’d much rather pretend the DPJ government intends to do something it is incapable of doing — getting the base moved.

The comment was also held to offend women, presumably the feeble-minded among them overcome by the vapors at the combination of a figure of speech, the facts of life, and common sense. Japan awaits the social epidemiologist who can identify the local strain of the political correctness virus that has infected so many Western lackwits handicapped by a congenitally weak intellectual immune system.

Left unsaid by the media was the most salient fact, perhaps because it was so obvious: the government’s prediliction for rape won’t come as news to the rest of us.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Central bonkers

A half-century experiment in draping steam­ship anchors around the necks of the productive class and expecting them to run a four-minute mile has ended in failure. The confiscation of rights and property, the moral impoverishment of generations caused by the state’s usurpation of parental obligations, the elevation of a credentialed elite that believes academia’s fashions are a worthy substitute for knowledge of history and human nature, and above all the faith in a weightless cipher whose oratorical panache now consists of looking from one teleprompter screen to the other with the enthusiasm of a man watching someone else’s kids play tennis–it’s over, whether you believe in it or not. It cannot be sustained without reducing everyone to penurious equality…

To which some progressives respond: You say that like it’s a bad thing.
- James Lileks

WERE dunking stools still an accepted means of punishment, most of the world’s lawyers, politicians, and journalists would never spend a dry day in their lives, such is the level of contempt in which they are held by the public. (Higher level academics skate, if only because they have so little impact on anything outside of campus life.)

A recent addition to the members of these unhelping professions are those in positions of authority at financial institutions and central banks. The negative interest of the public is being compounded daily now that the politicos and banksters have joined forces in a tag-team match to apply a choke hold on the people who are supposed to be on the same side. As in professional wrestling, their acting is every bit as bad as that of the hams in the ring, and the fix is just as much on.

Europe and the EU are being run as if it were a Goldman-Sachs subsidiary. The financiers did such a boffo job of disguising Greek and Italian debt in 2002 to enable it to join the monetary union, the EU returned the favor by placing a G-S alumnus in charge of the Italian government. They didn’t need no steenkin’ elections, either.

Notes the Independent:

It is not just Mr Monti. The European Central Bank, another crucial player in the sovereign debt drama, is under ex-Goldman management, and the investment bank’s alumni hold sway in the corridors of power in almost every European nation, as they have done in the US throughout the financial crisis. Until Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund’s European division was also run by a Goldman man, Antonio Borges, who just resigned for personal reasons.

In the United States, a Government Accounting Office audit revealed this year how the Federal Reserve behaves when no one is paying attention. Said the Socialist Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders:

As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world…No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president.

The interest rate on those loans was 0%.

Incidentally, that last sentence demonstrates how little even Mr. Sanders has been paying attention. The Fed isn’t a government agency — it is a banking system whose stock is owned entirely by the member banks. The confusion is understandable, however: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, for example, is the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He worked with former Goldman-Sachs exec Henry Paulson to implement the American economic stimulus that’s worked so wonderfully.

That audit also showed that Goldman-Sachs received $814 billion in interest-free loans from the Fed, by the way.

Meanwhile, Japanese politicians are getting mightily cheesed off by the Bank of Japan and its governor, Shirakawa Masa’aki. Some Diet members from several parties have formed a group to amend the Bank of Japan Law. They conducted a symposium on 24 November and held a news conference afterwards. What they’re worried about is the BOJ’s response to deflation, but what we should be worried about is that they think inflation is the answer.

That noted fiscal and monetary policy expert, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, spoke at the news conference and said one of the changes he wants is for “inflation targets” to be introduced. He thinks the BOJ should be required to achieve a certain rate of increase for specified prices.

As the European debt crisis starts to descend on the U.S. and Asia, it is extremely likely this will accelerate the appreciation of the yen and deflation.

Mr. Hatoyama reported that when he was prime minister, he personally asked the BOJ governor to introduce inflation targets, but Mr. Shirakawa ignored him. He added:

I don’t think we can eliminate deflation at this rate.

Another former prime minister, Abe Shinzo of the LDP, said after the symposium that “maximizing employment” should be included in the BOJ mission in addition to price stabilization. Your Party head Watanabe Yoshimi said the Cabinet and the Finance Minister should be given authority, subject to Diet approval, to remove BOJ top executives.

Watching the political/financial face off creates a sigh of regret similar to that involuntarily generated after one tunes in to a Yankees’ – Red Sox baseball game: If only there were a way to ensure that both teams would lose.

Hatoyama Yukio still blathers on about an East Asian version of the EU to the few people who stumble on his wavelength, but he’ll never figure out that what he thinks is the solution is the problem he’s warning about. The structural differences in East Asian economies and polities ensure that the failure of an East Asian entity would be worse than the failure in Europe.

And why would people think that forcing the central bank to create inflation is a good idea? It’s understandable that Mr. Hatoyama would want to smudge over the memory of his one and only budget as being the highest and most debt-reliant in Japanese history, but locking inflation targets into law locks in a de facto increase in taxes and a de facto decrease in the value of money. Events of the past three years alone should have been enough for anyone to recognize the impotence of central banks, and that no financial or government institution is capable of acting with precision. Evidently, shuffling between sitting atop a mountain of money as large as the Hatoyama family fortune and sitting in the bowels of the Diet deprives a body of its eyesight and common sense.

Mr. Abe wants the bank to boost employment? Here’s how to boost employment: create a climate that encourages the private sector to boost capital investment. If there’s anything Japan’s politicians should have learned over the past 20 years, it’s that central bank actions won’t contribute to improving employment, or whatever polite U-digit fictions that governments use nowadays for employment statistics.

Mr. Watanabe’s proposal seems to be yet another demonstration that Your Party rates highly on their problem-identification ability, but struggles to receive a passing grade with their problem-solving ability. A political mechanism for removing BOJ officers is a good idea in theory, but putting that in the hands of the Finance Ministry puppets or veterans who serve as Japan’s finance ministers, or the Diet MPs, whose negligible knowledge of economics and finance is supplemented by teams of Finance Ministry bureaucrats operating as Kasumigaseki lobbyists, is a bad idea in fact.

But these are not normal circumstances. There’s an excellent reason Mr. Watanabe and the rest of the politicians are out for the Shirakawa scalp — if the Bank of Japan governor hasn’t been lying, he’s incompetent.

Addressing charges that the BOJ’s quantitative easing has been insufficient to create the inflation the politicos are looking for, Mr. Shirakawa stated in a September news conference that the effect of quantitative easing to stimulate the economy can’t be appropriately measured, and added:

The ratio of the Bank of Japan’s monetary base to GDP is 24.6%, exceeding the 17.4% for the Federal Reserve and 11.5% for the ECB….Japan exceeded the 17.4% ratio in 2002, (showing that) we began monetary easing earlier than the FRB.

Takahashi Yoichi quickly whipped out this graph comparing the ratio of the monetary base to GDP between the United States and Japan as proof that the Bank of Japan governor is wrong. It shows that Japan is falling behind in the race to create more money of the mind.

1 January 2000 is the date used to set the value of 100 as the index for the graph. One possible reason for Japan’s higher level throughout most of the decade is that people here more frequently use cash for transactions and settlements than in the U.S. and Europe, though that’s always been the case.

The graph also shows, however, that the U.S redline in money supply starts to skyrocket with the financial crisis of 2008. Why anyone thinks Japan should try to keep up with that misery maker is beyond comprehension.

Another blogger used official statistics to create this chart of the monetary base alone. Japan is blue, the U.S. is red, and Europe is green.

But Mr. Shirakawa is sticking with his story:

Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa said Tuesday the comprehensive credit easing policy introduced by the central bank in October 2010 has not yet sufficiently fed through to the real economy due to low growth expectations among firms and households. “The powerful credit easing has generated extremely easy financial conditions for firms and households,” but the policy’s effect on the real economy is “not enough,” Shirakawa said at a parliamentary session.

That’s because companies and households are not investing and spending money amid low growth expectations, Shirakawa said.

And that’s because companies and households are not going to invest and spend money until the government and central banks get out of the way.

As the Seenow website points out:

Of course, the failure of modern-day Keynesian policies, the basis for Shirakawa’s asset purchase program, is the assumption that increasing the supply of something will lead to an increase in demand. That might be true for iPads if the increase in supply was accompanied by a decrease in price, but it doesn’t hold for credit, especially when excess credit is a primary cause of economic malaise.

Unlike governments and central banks, households and businesses – which are required by law and the fundamentals of sound stewardship to live within their relative means or suffer the consequences – understand the need to deleverage, to reduce their exposure to debt. More debt is simply not the solution for too much debt and it should not take a degree in economics from the University of Chicago to understand that.

Once upon a time — almost a century ago, now — the wiser heads did understand that. They realized the best solution was usually to just stand there instead of doing something. Human nature means that booms and busts will always be with us, but a policy of non-interference allows the poison to work itself out of the system, soon rather than late.

But even the wiser heads have gotten dumb and dumberer over the years. The elites of finance and politics will continue to make themselves part of the problem instead of the solution, and they will find a way to make themselves comfortable in the rubble after the inevitable collapse. The rest of us won’t have time for schadenfreude. We’ll be too busy fending for ourselves.

*****
It’s more entertaining to watch this Taiwanese dawg give away bank notes instead of the credentialed elites. True, that part of the video lasts only a few seconds, but the background scenery before and after more than makes up for the brevity.

Those homiez who don’t care for rappers can turn the sound down, because that’s not the point. Unless of course, you understand Chinese — rumor has it that the lyrics are rather trashy.