Duds

SOME wise guys in China think they know the reason for the failure of the North Korean missile launch on Friday after seeing a Chinese news agency photo of the North’s control room. Here’s the photo, which shows a computer monitor at the top, and an enlargement below of what they suspect is the logo visible at the bottom left hand corner of the monitor.

The first four characters are 家電下郷. That’s the name of a Chinese stimulus program for providing subsidies to people living in agricultural villages to purchase consumer electronics equipment. The phrase on the enlarged sticker identifies the location as a designated shop selling that equipment.

Some on the Chinese Internet wondered whether it was aggressive salesmanship on their part or aggressive purchasing on the Koreans’ part. As you might expect, the comment sections became Comedy Central:

* “So, North Korea is a Chinese agricultural village?”

* “North Korea is China’s largest agricultural village.”

* “North Korea is part of a Chinese agricultural village that can’t be subdivided.”

* “Ah, so it was Chinese-made. Now we know why the launch failed.”

* One person replaced the character for village or township (郷) in the logo 家電下郷 with the characters for North Korea: 家電下北朝鮮

* “The rocked was launched with Chinese tax money.”

Some people in Japan also saw the humorous aspects of the situation. The political cartoonist in my local newspaper replaced the North Korean missile with a caricature of Kim Jong-eun and showed him veering off course after being launched.

Most Japanese, however, were angry rather than amused. The following timeline explains the reason.

7:38:55: The missile was launched.

7:40: The missile exploded and fell into the sea. This was confirmed by an American early warning satellite. The American confirmation of the launch was communicated to the South Koreans and the Japanese before the missile failure.

7:42: The failure was immediately relayed to the crisis center in the Kantei (Japan’s White House), and to Prime Minister Noda and Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu in the prime minister’s office.

7:50: South Korean television reported the launch and its failure.

8:03: The Japanese crisis center issued its first report, which was sent to local governments using the Em-Net system: “We are unable to confirm the launch of the missile”.

Yonemura Toshiro, deputy chief cabinet secretary for crisis management, was assigned responsibility for making all official government announcements. It was his decision to send that message with that content. For some reason, he thought there was confusion between the information received internationally and that received domestically, so he decided to be cautious. He didn’t tell Mr. Fujimura what he did.

8:10: The South Korean government announced the failed launch.

8:16: The Defense Ministry reported the launch to the crisis management center.

8:23: Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki suddenly appeared before the media and read a short statement announcing the failed launch of a “flying object”. He left without taking questions.

Had the missile not failed, it would have taken about 10 minutes to enter Japanese airspace. Mr. Fujimura later explained they were “double-checking”. That’s what they had decided to do in advance before making any statements.

The crisis management center personnel complained of delays in receiving radar information from the Self-Defense Forces. Noted the Yomiuri Shimbun:

“The process was designed so that the center would be notified only when all necessary pieces of information became available. As a result, the government missed the opportunity to use the J-Alert system, which instantly transmits emergency warnings across the country, as the system cannot be activated until the information is received by the center.

“Though the J-Alert was considered an important tool for the government to quickly warn the public, the utilization of the system was hampered.”

Shortly after 10:00: Mr. Noda was angry, and he has a reputation for keeping his temper. He told aides, “We need to be more clear,” especially because they received the proper information promptly.

But the government was prepared for any eventuality. Here’s a photograph taken in Tokyo at 10:56, about three hours later:

The excuses started not long thereafter. Tarutoko Shinji, acting DPJ secretary general, said,

“It probably fell before it came into view of Japanese radar. This happened before it could have had an effect on Japan, so our initial response was not delayed.”

Said Mr. Fujimura:

“We had to verify it, including what content we should release and whether it should have been released.”

He added that they were being cautious because the government relayed info on Em-Net after North Korea’s previous missile launch in 2009, though the information hadn’t officially reached them yet. Finally, he explained that:

“The principle is to provide information when there’s danger of damage to Japan.”

No one was relieved.

Mr. Tanaka spoke to the media on evening of 13th:

“The defense ministry and the SDF performed its mission to protect the lives and property of the people against the launch.”

The Defense Minister didn’t show up for work on the 14th, as he had no official duties. It was left to Deputy Defense Minister Watanabe Shu to submit to interviews by six television programs. The most likely reason Mr. Watanabe was sent to make the rounds is that Mr. Tanaka is already viewed as buffoon by the opposition politicians and the media alike. (He was chosen for the post because his wife Makiko is an ally of Ozawa Ichiro, and Mr. Noda thought preventing a split in the party was more important than competence.) After a series of misstatements that revealed his ignorance of security matters, he’s been refusing invitations to deliver speeches.

Mr. Watanabe explained they weren’t able to eliminate all the possibilities right away, including the firing of a different, short range missile. He also said there were concerns that the North might fire off more missiles, and that a crisis could result if South Korea tried to recover the missile parts and the North tried to block them.

Despite those concerns, the government ordered the withdrawal of the recently assigned Land Self-Defense Forces from Okinawa with a swiftness that surprised the military men on the ground.

The reaction at the Seetell website summed up the national sentiment:

“The Japanese government spent the better part of 3 weeks preparing for the launch of a North Korean rocket, cancelling an annual cherry blossom party this weekend, ringing Tokyo with anti-missile batteries and positioning Self-Defense Forces on land and sea, all the while telling the public to remain calm. It even created one of its infamous but, apparently, ineffective expert panels for the event. Yet, despite this advanced preparation and hype, and in an inept replay of its failure to use the SPEEDI system to warn the public about the spread of radiation from Fukushima just one year ago, the government botched it.”

It’s even worse than that: Those were Aegis-equipped ships and Patriot anti-missile systems deployed in Tokyo and Okinawa to prepare for the launch. But:

“While the government was “double-check(ing)” the event was already over. While the government was “double-check(ing)” the rocket was fulfilling its destiny. It is only fortunate for this inept, elitist, consensus-driven, and always politically opportunistic government that the rocket disintegrated minutes after liftoff, falling harmlessly into the sea.

“The end result is that all this preparation was for nothing. All the hype was for nothing. All of the wasted money was for nothing. The government wanted to be seen as organized, commanding, and ready to defend the nation while sending a strong message to neighboring nations that Japan could not be bullied. Instead, the Japanese government got about the same result as the North Korean government, a failed attempt at political chest thumping.”

LDP Diet Affairs Chairman Kishida Fumio wants to conduct an investigation in the Diet to determine what happened. He discussed that with his counterpart Jojima Koriki of the ruling DPJ. Mr. Jojima told him:

“No parts from the missile fell into Japanese waters, so there’s no need for a Diet review.”

Others slammed the government’s continuing preference for keeping secrets about serious matters from the people, as they did during the Senkakus incident with China and the nuclear accident at Fukushima.

Here’s Seetell again:

“The evidence shows that this government, from politicians to bureaucrats, is not capable, either because of lack of intelligence or lack of ability or lack of a moral compass or simple unwillingness, to protect the Japanese people. The truth is that the greatest danger facing the Japanese people is not the Chinese red menace or the isolated North Koreans, but the Japanese government itself.”

Indeed, one could make a case that the DPJ government might think the greatest danger is the Japanese people. The National Police Agency on the morning of the 13th instructed all of its headquarters nationwide to be on the lookout for any “right-wing activity”. They were given three instructions:

1. Gather information related to right-wing activities and Chongryon (the North Korean-affiliated organization for Korean citizens living in Japan.

2. Reinforce the surveillance and defense of government offices, particularly the Kantei and the foreign and defense ministries, and

3. Promptly report public disturbances.

The cops had a slow day that day.

Matsubara Jin, the chairman of the National Public Safety Commission and perhaps the DPJ’s most prominent right-winger himself, tried to cover for the government by saying the prime minister issued three instructions:

1. Be on the alert and gather information.

2. Strive to provide information to the people, and

3. Strengthen communication with the countries involved.

He added that the police agency made every effort to respond to the prime minister’s instructions.

The overall response also contained elements of the surreal. Social Democratic Party Secretary General Shigeno Yasumasa weighed in with his party’s views. He began by expressing the party’s opposition to the North Korean missile launch, but continued:

“Using the North Korean threat as an excuse to installing and reinforcing the missile defense system and using the defense of the southwestern islands (Senkakus, et al.) as an excuse to build up the Self-Defense forces in Okinawa can only amplify the tension in Northeast Asia.”

It helps to know that the party called themselves Socialists during the Berlin Wall days and sponsored annual peace cruises to Pyeongyang. They also favor unarmed neutrality, and use Costa Rica as an example to be emulated.

Malcolm Muggeridge sussed it all out decades ago. It’s the great liberal death wish (though the term liberal is of course a euphemism).

Both the LDP and Your Party say they want to censure Tanaka Naoki for committing buffoonery in the conduct of his duties. But it was obvious that serving as a Cabinet Minister was beyond his capabilities before his appointment, and they should really consider censuring Mr. Noda for selecting him for such a critical post to begin with. Defense ministry officials have let it be known to the media off the record that the sooner the better would be fine with them. Thus, it shouldn’t be long now before he returns to the status quo ante of anonymous irrelevance.

The first thing a visitor to the DPJ’s English-language website sees is their slogan:

Putting people’s lives first.

If it weren’t a laughing matter, that would be the biggest joke of all.

*****
Drunken Sailor Watch

From an AFP report:

Japan is considering lending about $60 billion to the International Monetary Fund to help strengthen a global firewall against contagion from the European sovereign debt crisis, Kyodo news agency said on Sunday…If realised, Japan’s contribution could be one of the biggest by a member nation, Kyodo quoted an unnamed government official as saying.

*****
How low has the DPJ government sunk in the estimation of the people? So low they’ve got the Bottom Blues.

Hashimoto Toru (3): Other policies, other views

**This is the third of a multi-part series on Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru and the phenomenon he represents. The first is here, and the second is here.**

Japan is now in a crisis state, so we have to put it all on the line to make a real change in the form of the country.
- Hashimoto Toru, 24 March

WHILE the centerpiece of Hashimoto Toru’s proposals for Japan is the radical devolution of authority to local government and to cut big national government down to size, his policy menu would be a wonk banquet if he were the sort of mobile mannequin-pol that appeals to most policy wonks. He insists that most of his proposals are starting points for discussion, and that politicians should enter at the end of the process, rather than the beginning. Finally — unlike 99.44% of the world’s politicians — he serves his banquet straight up, with neither the meat nor the words minced.

Earlier this year, Mr. Hashimoto drafted a statement of general principles and guidelines for his One Osaka movement that he titled Ishin Hassaku, or eight policies of renewal. It was a deliberate modification of the title of a similar document called Senchu Hassaku written by Sakamoto Ryoma, a samurai/activist in the final days of the Edo period. His “eight shipboard policies” became the basis for the later Meiji-period reforms. All Japanese of secondary school age and older understand the reference immediately.

He explained the reason for the document:

“Our work is to determine the course of Japan. We will develop a concrete philosophy for policy, politics, and government administration. The ones who don’t have that are the current political parties. Both the DPJ and the LDP are in a stupor.”

That last sentence is also immediately understood by all Japanese of secondary school age and older.

The mayor sometimes refers to it as the Great Reset. Now here’s his explanation of the basic principle:

“The argument of the Isshin Hassaku is simple. One Osaka will achieve, as the image of the nation for which we strive, a nation of individuals who behave independently, regions that behave independently, and a nation that behaves independently. To achieve that, it is indispensable to establish a democracy and a government mechanism capable of making decisions and accepting responsibility, and to promote the vitalization of the generation active today.”

The mention of decisiveness and responsibility refers to everyone in the legislative and executive branches of the national government in general, and the Democratic Party administration in particular.

The document’s eight sections cover such topics as the restructuring of governing institutions and reforming education. They include the direct election of the prime minister, the institution of the state/province system, the abolition of regional tax distribution, the abolition of education committees (i.e., boards of education), and the integration of pension, welfare, and unemployment programs.

To explain further, the Constitution requires that the prime minister be a sitting member of the Diet elected by the Diet members. That requirement has been abused by decades of passing the washtub, in the Japanese phrase, of the prime minister’s position among the members of the ruling party without voter input. The LDP started it, but the DPJ liked it just fine after they got a taste of their own. Putting it to a popular vote would require a Constitutional amendment, and the public might be up for that. All Japanese of secondary school age and older understand that the status quo is untenable.

In fact, his One Osaka ally, Osaka Prefecture Gov. Matsuo Ichiro, said earlier this week he thought anyone should be able to run for prime minister as long as they had 20 sitting MPs back their candidacy. That immediately generated speculation the intended beneficiary would be Mayor Hashimoto himself (though the process to enable his candidacy would take some time), but the idea has enough merit on its own to warrant serious discussion. What they’ve got now isn’t good enough, and the DPJ has shown everyone that it isn’t going to get better.

The young lawyer makes a television appearance.

The abolition of the regional tax distribution from the national government would mean giving greater authority to the sub-national governments to raise their own revenue. (Where I live the prefectural government now sells advertising on the autos for public sector use.) The abolition of the education committees refers to his effort to make local government executives the final authority for education, rather than professional educators. That issue will be presented in more detail in a later installment of this series.

When Mr. Hashimoto unveiled the Ishin Hassaku, he explained that it contained “guidelines for political thought” for the next lower house election, but that it wasn’t an election manifesto/party platform. “If we submit something like the DPJ manifesto,” he asserted, “it would be a failure.” The document intentionally contains no numerical targets, because it is supposed to be a rough guide for changing the system.

Such is the political discourse in our age that the media and his political opponents immediately called it a manifesto and criticized it for not being more specific in the way manifestoes are supposed to be. Among the newspapers, the Sankei has since dialed back on their language and now call it a “de facto manifesto”.

Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio observed that Mr. Hashimoto had learned a lesson from the failure of the DPJ’s 2009 manifesto. Of course, we’d be here all week if we were to mention all the lessons everyone learned from the failures of the DPJ since 2009. The first would be not to take anything Hatoyama Yukio says seriously.

Mr. Hatoyama forgets that he wasn’t so anxious to call a manifesto a manifesto either in 2009. Just before the election that year, as party president, he rolled out the DPJ manifesto to great fanfare, with banners over the stage heralding the arrival of The Manifesto, a word that was printed in big red letters on the front cover. Then the governor of Osaka prefecture, Hashimoto Toru objected the document was not specific enough about the devolution of authority. Mr. Hashimoto was massively popular even then, so the DPJ rewrote it and resubmitted it a few days later. When the media quite rightly questioned the process, Mr. Hatoyama insisted that the first one wasn’t really a manifesto but a “collection of government policies” instead. (The story is here. I’d congratulate myself for my prescience about what a DPJ government would be like if it hadn’t been so bloody obvious.)

Other policies

We’ve seen before that he’s proposed a two-year national discussion on Article 9 of the Constitution, the inaptly named Peace Clause, followed by a referendum. He thinks it’s time for Article 9 to be history, and recently restated his position:

“Ceaseless efforts are required if you would maintain a tranquil life. The people themselves must do the work. The text (of the Constitution) has caused us to forget that completely.”

Wealth redistribution

In one of his famous daily Tweet-a-thons, the governor wrote:

“There’s the idea of the negative income tax. This is one item for consideration as a way to further develop Basic Income.”

University professor and commentator Ikeda Nobuo, who tends to hold the governor at arm’s length, was impressed. He wrote, “It is unprecedented for this (idea) to emerge in Japanese policy discussions.” Look closer and you’ll see that he’s discussing two social welfare schemes, one from the Right in Milton Friedman’s negative income tax idea, and one from the Left with the Basic Income idea, which Prof. Ikeda attributes to Andre Gorz and others. It’s also important to note that the governor says it is “an item for consideration”, if only because his critics charge him with dictatorial tendencies. Dictators are not usually guys who willingly say, “Let’s talk about it.”

Prof. Ikeda then offers a simple comparison of the basics.

The concept of negative income tax involves the positive taxation of income that exceeds the minimum taxable amount, and negative taxation, or providing some of the funds obtained to people with incomes below the minimum taxable amount.

If the minimum taxable income is set at JPY four million, for example, and the tax rate is 20%, the amount of income exceeding that benchmark would taxed at 20%. People with incomes below that amount would receive 20% of the difference between their actual income and the minimum taxable income. A person whose income is JPY two million would receive a benefit of JPY 400,000 as 20% of the JPY two million difference, giving him a total income of JPY 2.4 million. Based on the same calculation, people who earned nothing would receive JPY 800,000.

Prof. Ikeda goes on to say there are different approaches to Basic Income, and uses one of those approaches as an example. Assuming JPY 800,000 would be distributed to those with no income as the basic income, a person who earned JPY 2 million would have that amount taxed at 20%, resulting in JPY 1.6 million. To that amount would be added the Basic Income of JPY 800,000 to get JPY 2.4 million, or the same amount that person would receive under the negative income concept.

Regardless, he says, the idea is to eliminate conventional social welfare, which is one of Mr. Hashimoto’s key proposals. Prof. Ikeda holds that the current system is unfair because it distributes funds from young people of relatively modest means to older people who are financially better off. Since the issue is income rather than age, the idea is to eliminate public pensions, welfare payments, unemployment insurance, and long-term care insurance (nursing for the old and infirm) and integrate those schemes into either a Basic Income or negative income tax system. He also notes that it would eliminate the vast expenditures for the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.

Prof. Ikeda admits it would be difficult politically to eliminate the existing substantial benefits under the current system. He also says it would generate concerns of an infringement of property rights, because Japanese pensions are two-tiered and include both corporate payments and personal payments.

Maintaining the status quo, however, means that the current pension system will go bankrupt in 20 years, and enormous taxation would be required to offset a JPY 800 trillion yen shortfall.

That’s the reason the proposed increase of the consumption tax is such a contentious issue in Japan. The Finance Ministry estimates that expenditures for pension, healthcare, long-term care, and “demographic problems” will exceed JPY 40 trillion in 2015. The current 5% consumption tax produces about JPY 13 trillion in revenue, or about or 30% of the amount required for those expenditures. Raising it to 10% would result in JPY 27 trillion of revenue — says the Finance Ministry. Some people are even calling for an increase in the tax to 30% to make up the difference.

That explanation is what makes opponents so livid. The Finance Ministry ignores that a tax increase of that size will depress consumption, which will depress the economy, resulting in lower-than-projected revenues. That’s exactly what happened when the tax was raised from 3% to 5% during the Hashimoto Ryutaro administration. (To be accurate, the tax revenues that fell were those from the income tax and corporate taxes. Consumption tax revenue rose.) Current deflationary conditions would make the impact worse today.

The assumption that the status quo of the system should be maintained regardless of the impact on the finances of both the nation and the individual households also angers people. (This is what people mean when they say we’re witnessing the collapse of social democracy.)

So — Mr. Hashimoto jumps on the third rail of politics everywhere and insists that changes have to be made because the current system is untenable and the government/bureaucracy’s solution is unworkable. He then offers in a public forum possible solutions for the problem, one from the left and one from the right, neither of which is well known in Japan, and suggests that everyone mull them over.

Combine that with his communication skills and ability to win big in elections, and now you know why he scares the vested interests of the national political and bureaucratic class, as well everyone on the Left.

North Korea

Mr. Hashimoto spoke to a group of family members of North Korean abductees in early February. He told them:

“The national government must express its thinking more clearly. I have no idea what they want to do….Osaka Prefecture and the city of Osaka will not permit the abduction problem (to continue). I want to clearly express the view that we will have no relations whatsoever with the outlaw state of North Korea until they become a normal country.”

He also said he would tighten the government’s requirements on providing public (financial) assistance to schools in Japan operated by Chongryeon, the North Korean citizens’ association:

“All the local governments throughout the country can do that if they want. Why is it that the national government cannot issue this sort of directive?”

Energy

He serves the chair of a Kansai area federation of local government heads. At their last meeting, he suggested that the mayors of Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe should use their cities’ stock holdings in Kansai Electric Power to create a new, non-nuclear energy strategy, though he didn’t offer specifics. The governor of Nara is generally opposed to Mr. Hashimoto’s schemes, so he does not participate in the group. That might explain why the group decided to back a proposed route through Kyoto instead of one through Nara for a maglev train line.

Governmental systems

One Osaka wants to create a system that allows the prime minister to leave when required to attend to business overseas. This week, the debate over the budget started in the Diet just as the leaders of the U.S., China, and South Korea were meeting to discuss ways to handle North Korea. Asks Mr. Hashimoto:

“What about Japan? As usual, the prime minister is chained to the Diet.”

While recognizing that Diet debate is one means of democracy, he suggests it is not an absolute that requires the prime minister’s constant presence. Just as a company president doesn’t have to do everything himself, he wrote, there are questions the prime minister doesn’t need to answer in person, and these should be delegated to his representatives. He tips his hat to Ozawa Ichiro by repeating the latter’s charge that out-of-control bureaucrats in the past appeared in the Diet and gave whatever answers they liked, but says it is the job of the leading “politicians’ group” (he didn’t call it a party) to control the bureaucrats’ answers.

As for what being chained in the Diet meant in practical terms on this occasion, here’s a report from Kyodo:

“With Pyongyang’s planned rocket launch looming over East Asia, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had the perfect opportunity at this week’s global nuclear summit in Seoul to raise Japan’s presence in dealing with North Korea.

“But Noda missed out on the chance as he arrived in Seoul only on Monday evening, skipping a working dinner that officially kicked off the two-day Nuclear Security Summit, and barely engaged in substantive bilateral talks….

“The prime minister was instead preoccupied with his key domestic task — pushing the consumption tax hike on which he has said he is “staking my political career.”

“Prior to his trip to South Korea, Noda had been tied up with Diet deliberations on the tax hike, with his Cabinet aiming to approve the key bill Friday.”

Kyodo doesn’t tell us that Mr. Noda is preoccupied about a lot more than the tax increase. There is also the possibility that the issue will splinter his party and force either an immediate election or an alliance of the tax hikers in the DPJ with those in the opposition LDP.

Outside observers, in brief

The 5 February edition of the weekly Sunday Mainichi offered some observations of Hashimoto the politician from others in the same business who’ve seen him in action. Here’s one from a member of the Osaka City Council, who chose to remain anonymous.

“One thing he’s got going for him is that he didn’t make the blunder of dashing into national politics right away as soon as he achieved a little popularity. He’ll probably select candidates (for the lower house election) based on the circumstances of each election district and after probing the response of those around him. He’s a very solid strategist.”

A man identified only as a veteran LDP politician said he had exceptional skill at enhancing his presence:

“From the voters’ viewpoint he looks hot-blooded or emotional, but in fact he’s the opposite. He’s cool, settled, very objective, and makes shrewd calculations. He’s very shrewd at sizing up a situation and advancing or withdrawing accordingly…with all the attention on him now, he’s showing interest in national politics, and observing the course of events. Because he always views circumstances with a certain detachment, he can maintain his popularity and increase the level of opinion in his favor. He’s a politician that’s very much his own man, and that can’t be imitated.

“(Former Prime Minister) Koizumi had Iijima Isao to orchestrate his appearances and make sure he wasn’t overexposed, but Mr. Hashimoto seems to have been born with that knack. He might even be better at it than Koizumi.”

The author of the Sunday Mainichi article suggested that his strategy is to hold off on running himself in the next lower house election — he’s 42, so he has plenty of time — but instead place some of his people in the Diet to establish a foothold and form alliances with like-minded people, such as those in Your Party or any other new regional party members that might get elected.

When asked about the possibility of an alliance between One Osaka and the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru quite logically observed:

“Mr. Hashimoto is winning acclaim because he’s anti-existing political parties. It would be a difficult decision for them to ally with the LDP, an existing political party.”

Incidentally, Mr. Ishihara supported the creation of an Osaka Metro District during the November election in Osaka.

To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction

That someone as outspoken, specific, and fearless as Mr. Hashimoto will attract critics and enemies is as immutable a principle as Newton’s Third Law. Here’s a brief look at a few:

Sengoku Yoshito, former Chief Cabinet Secretary in Kan Naoto’s first Cabinet, speaking of the Osaka Metro concept:

“The core body of self-government is the basic government of municipalities. The prefecture should leave things up to the city. I wonder how well (his idea) would work.”

Works in Tokyo, doesn’t it? Mr. Sengoku is presenting the DPJ’s vision of decentralization — doing away with prefectures and organizing everything around 300 fiefdom/cities. It makes more sense when you know that Mr. Sengoku (like Kan Naoto) doesn’t believe in nation-states, but rather a worldwide network of communities in a New World Order guided by such bureaucratic globutrons as the UN and the EU.

Anyone could have guessed that Social Democratic Party head Fukushima Mizuho, the vile body of Japanese politics who’s always up to some black mischief, wouldn’t like Mr. Hashimoto:

“A policy of bringing the principle of competition into education and discarding (teachers) is very dangerous…As for the Osaka Metro concept, I have no idea what they’re talking about with many of the points. I’m going to watch this carefully.”

She knows exactly what he’s talking about. She has to monitor Mr. Hashimoto because he’s orbiting on the other side of the galaxy from social democrats.

Ms. Fukushima used the same I-don’t-know-what-he’s-talking-about line for Abe Shinzo’s vision of a Beautiful Japan, even though he wrote a book about it. She knew what that was all about too. She just finds distasteful the idea that her native country in particular, or any nation-state in general, is beautiful.

Indeed, most commentators pro and con agreed that during the Osaka election, the arguments made for the Osaka Metro plan and those of its opponents were clearly stated and easy to understand.

But here’s my favorite — you can almost see the spit fly. It’s from Ichida Tadayoshi of the Communist Party. A reporter pointed out to Mr. Ichida that some of the One Osaka policies, such as those for nuclear energy, the tax system (i.e., consumption tax) and social welfare were similar to those of Japan’s Reds. He didn’t like that:

“There is absolutely no match at all. Even though in some places it looks like some of the letters in the words are the same, there is no value in critiquing the policies of a person who would trample on the freedom of thought and conscience guaranteed in the Constitution.”

Isn’t it entertaining to watch a Marxian fulminate over freedom of thought?

Meanwhile, over in Japan’s English-language press, the boys and girls who play newspaper at the Japan Times made a bad Kyodo article worse by trying to convince readers that Kansai political leaders don’t like the Hashimoto plan to reorganize the prefecture/city. Here’s the first paragraph.

“Osaka Mayor-elect Toru Hashimoto’s administrative reform plan has only limited support so far among prominent local leaders, with just six openly backing his proposed bureaucratic shakeup, a survey has found.”

That story falls apart as soon as they fill in the details.

“The survey polled the mayors of Japan’s 18 officially designated major cities, and the governors of the 13 prefectures that host them, excluding Osaka Prefecture and the city of Osaka.”

Here are the results:

In favor: Four governors (Niigata, Aichi, Kyoto, and Hyogo) and two mayors (Niigata and Nagoya). There’s a similar reorganization proposal being discussed in Niigata, by the way.

Opposed: One governor and three mayors, all unidentified, perhaps to protect them from constituents.

Neutral: 21

So the total is 6-4 in favor and 21 sitting on the fence with their fingers in the wind. Now here’s the headline the Japan Times ran:

Few leaders back Hashimoto’s plan

And you just know the kids are congratulating themselves on their cleverness.

Finally, try the Japanese Wikipedia page on Mr. Hashimoto for the portrait photo. Thousands of photographs have been taken of Mr. Hashimoto since he was elected governor of Osaka five years ago, but this is the one someone thought was representative. Now we know that Wikipediatric immaturity is an international phenomenon.

Coming next: There isn’t room here to describe the policy positions that most upset his enemies, so that will come later in the series. The next installment will present his use of Twitter as a weapon. In the process, the reason he generates such strong opinions will get a lot clearer.

Afterwords:

I make it a matter of principle to forget about links to the Japan Times in the same way it’s a matter of principle not to pay to see an Oliver Stone movie (much less watch one). I made an exception for the Kyodo article about Prime Minister Noda because it is so delicious when the denizens of La Tour D’Ivoire unwittingly reveal their overeducated vacuity. Here’s the end of the article:

“As things stand, political observers already see Japan as having little influence over North Korea, unlike China and the United States.

“Japan is a peripheral player with no significant leverage over Pyongyang” despite its strong interests in changing North Korea’s hostile policy, said Denny Roy, senior fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu.

“According to Roy, who focuses on Asia-Pacific security issues, “Japan is trapped into a noninfluential role unless it gives up its tough position on the abductee issue.”

“Yoshihide Soeya, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Keio University, said Japan’s North Korean policies are being held “hostage” by domestic sentiment over the abductions, which has compelled the government to take a hardline stance.”

It isn’t often we see such a short, concentrated burst of willful ignorance from oblivious, self-important people. And then there’s the stupid — there is no other word — attempt of Mr. Soeya to be clever by describing Japanese policy as held hostage because the Japanese public is outraged their citizens were (and might still be) held hostage by an outlaw state.

North Korean agents conducted black ops in Japan by kidnapping innocent civilians — including a mother and her young adult daughter, two young lovers on a moonlit stroll, and a 13-year-old girl on her way home from school — removing them to the Prison Nation, and forcing them to teach the Japanese language and culture to their agents whose assignment was destabilizing Japan.

How unfortunate for Japan that “domestic sentiment” (i.e., they’re so angry they could spit) is tying the hands of the Japanese politicos, when they could be do-goodering for the international community, such as sending food to feed the North Korean army, or money to feed the lifestyles of Pyeongyang’s rich and nefarious.

Denny Roy might ask some of the people on the street outside his Honolulu office what they would think had Cubans done the same to Americans, and never fully ‘fessed up — and even offered fraudulent birth certificates for premature deaths.

Has he read this article, or would he care if he did?

“His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man to a wooden pole.

“Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered “redemption” through hard labour, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government.

“Guards stuffed pebbles into the prisoner’s mouth, covered his head with a hood and shot him. In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them.

“The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea’s labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.

People are meeting in South Korea because everyone is concerned of an imminent North Korean missile launch. But just last month:

“A U.S. delegation has just returned from Beijing following a third exploratory round of U.S.-DPRK bilateral talks. To improve the atmosphere for dialogue and demonstrate its commitment to denuclearization, the DPRK has agreed to implement a moratorium on long-range missile launches.”

Denny Roy says Japan is “a peripheral player with no significant leverage”.

So, as a missile is being gassed up a month after a deal not to launch one, might we ask just who does have significant leverage? (The Chinese probably do, but they’d rather be part of the problem than be part of the solution.)

And why be a player in a pointless game?

Read it in the news

STILL dealing with an influx of work, but in the meantime here are some links providing an update on the state of the industrial media in the U.S.

One Free Korea examines the working relationship between the Associated Press and the North Korean government. No one else will.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is now on the payroll of the Chinese government.

As Harry Truman once said, I feel sorry for the man who reads the newspaper at the breakfast table and thereby thinks he has an understanding of what is happening in the world.

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Peace-loving peoples

We, the Japanese people, desire peace for all time and are deeply conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationships and we have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world.
- From the Preamble to the Japanese Constitution

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
- Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution

The United States has some 70 bases — in Japan. This (state of affairs) is not that of an independent country. I want to eliminate this abnormal state of affairs, and have Japan capable of defending Japan. Absent that concept, how can we conduct discussions with other countries?
- Yamada Hiroshi, former chief municipal officer of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward

(A)n editorial cartoon published during the war years in London’s Daily Mail…shows a neat little man in a bowler hat unhappily shaking hands with a dishevelled colossus. The caption reads: “Ah, Mr. Policy, young Side Effect here has been anxious to meet you …”
- George Jonas

ONE use to which the late author, student of psychology, and man of the world Idries Shah put his many books was to convey certain perspectives on form, function, and how they are frequently misapprehended. Shah held that forms have limitations, and that among those limitations are time, place, culture, and language. If they are neither changed nor discarded, they become fossilized, becoming both museums and exhibits. Some choose to become attached to a form rather than its content. They are unable to make the distinction between the container and its function, and assume the fossil still functions as it did in the past.

The creation of the Japanese Constitution as a way to bend the nation’s behavior is an excellent illustration of the perspectives on form and function Shah wished to convey.

Consider the language of the preamble shown above, which some Japanese find more objectionable than Article 9, the “peace clause”. The nation is supposed to rely on the “justice and faith” of the “peace-loving peoples of the world” for its security and existence. Pluralizing the word people, assuming that peoples are peace-loving, and proclaiming that national survival can be entrusted to their goodwill identifies the sort of people who wrote it, their worldview, and the general time period in which it was written. It belongs in a vitrine in a corner of the museum near the quill pens and dialed telephones, rather than as the first statement of principle atop a document that would express the national consensus for the survival of the state.

In retrospect, it’s curious that people expected a Constitutional requirement in that form to function at all. The authors knew well that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact also prohibited the use of war as an “instrument of national policy”, so only an ideologue would have thought the Japanese Constitution in isolation would succeed. By 1945, technology had enabled the Europeans to realize the objective inherent in centuries of behavior and turn the continent into a smoldering ruin of a charnel house. Justice and faith in the love of peace were not the motivation for the Western world’s colonization of East Asia. Nor were they the motivation that impelled them to eliminate the East Asian nation that would usurp their position. Such were the high ideals controlling the human relations of the age.

Further, there is no real consensus on what Article 9 even means. Some people claim it was to make Japan a pacifist nation, but that’s difficult to see when the commonly accepted meaning of pacifism is applied. Here’s a brief description of how the Constitution was put together:

Although an American directive allowed him to order reforms “only as a last resort,” with the first postwar general election just two months away and with an 11-nation commission due to take over the issue of a constitution, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, intervened.

He ordered his own 24-member Government Section staff to draft a constitution, and on Feb. 4, his aide, Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney, convened a meeting and declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a historic occasion. I now proclaim you a constitutional assembly.”

Lieut. Col. Charles Kades, who had been in Japan since a week before Japan’s formal surrender the previous summer after taking part in the invasion of France in 1944 and serving on the War Department’s General Staff, was put in charge of the steering committee and told to produce a constitution by Feb. 12.

But Kades denied that it was strictly pacifist in intent when Japanese journalist Komori Yoshihisa visited him at his Wall Street office in New York in April 1981 and spoke with him for three hours:

“I myself wrote Article 9, including the section about the renunciation of war. I was given a page from a yellow legal pad by Whitney with instructions on three or four main points. I think they were notes he took from a conversation with MacArthur. But every nation has the right to its own self-defense. That’s why I thought (the part prohibiting self-defense) was illogical, and I took the liberty to remove it.”

The references to military forces, war potential and the “right of belligerency” were as written on the paper he was given. Kades admitted, however, that he didn’t understand the meaning of the “right of belligerency”. He said that if Japan had objected to that phrase, he intended to remove it.

“The intent of this Constitution was at first to keep Japan disarmed forever, but that had the effect of tying America’s hands in bilateral relations with Japan, and for the United States, that created a situation that was ill advised.”

Now there’s the unanswerable question: how is a nation disarmed forever supposed to defend itself? By some interpretations, Japan is ranked ninth worldwide in military strength, yet to take the language of the Constitution at face value would mean that it has the world’s largest and most potent police force.

The Constitution also enables the United States to use Japanese territory for its own ends. Here it is from the horse’s mouth. In this case, the pony is Kevin Maher, the former director of the Office of Japan Affairs at the US State Department:

“I don’t think Article Nine of the Japanese constitution should change. If the Japanese constitution was changed the United States would not be able to use Japanese land to advance US interests. The high host nation support the Japanese government currently pays is beneficial to the US. We’ve got a very good deal in Japan.”

Regardless of what one thinks of the Japanese left, their caricature of their own country as an American aircraft carrier has some justification.

Another function of the Constitution has been to contribute to the neutering of the Japanese political class. With domestic policy largely in the hands of the bureaucracy and foreign policy outsourced to the Americans, the Japanese political class has devolved into a group of parasites engaged primarily in emitting gusts of hot air, concocting Byzantine power struggles, and consuming the nation’s time and money.

Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki

Typifying the problem is that the Noda Cabinet has already had two Defense Ministers since its inception five months ago. The criterion for their selection was to balance intraparty factions rather than their ability to oversee the national defense. The first, Ichikawa Yasuo, was known to be aligned with the Agriculture Ministry and had little expertise about defense matters. Mr. Ichikawa insisted this inexperience was the ideal demonstration of civilian control of the military. He was replaced four months and a half-dozen verbal pratfalls later, though he blamed it on bureaucratic backstabbing.

His successor is Tanaka Naoki, another AgMin zokugiin. He is distinguished only as the husband of former Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko, who knew as much about diplomacy as her husband knows about national defense. Mr. Tanaka stepped in it even more quickly than Mr. Ichikawa. During a live interview on NHK the first weekend after his selection, he confused a question about relaxing the standards for the use of weapons by self-defense forces overseas with the reexamination of weapons export prohibitions. Asked specifically about the first by the NHK moderator, he talked about leaving behind construction equipment after participating in peacekeeping operations overseas. Struggling to rescue Mr. Tanaka, the interviewer asked him whether he had a positive attitude about the use of weapons by self-defense forces. The Defense Minister answered that it was neither positive nor negative.

The one function the Japanese Constitution has not performed, however, is the one it was created for: to prevent the “peace-loving peoples” in the neighborhood from piecemeal attacks on the country to seize or attempt to seize Japanese territory outright. Meanwhile, the Americans either declare it isn’t their business and look the other way, or have been actively complicit in that seizure.

Who indeed are the peace-loving peoples in Northeast Asia?

* The peace-loving people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Persons of sound mind can stipulate that the North Korean government neither qualifies as a member of the region’s peace-loving peoples nor can be trusted to behave as if they were. Persons of sound mind also know there are some who will disagree with that characterization, but taking them seriously isn’t worth the time or trouble.

While North Korea has no apparent designs on Japanese territory, they have, for reasons that make sense only to them, threatened to turn the country into a sea of fire. They also occasionally fire missiles in a direction where only Japan exists. (To be sure, Pyeongyang actually attacks only South Korea, but in an erratic manner that gives the Americans an excuse to bug out on their promise to defend South Korea as well.)

* The peace-loving people of the People’s Republic of China

It would be possible to agree with the Chinese assertion they are peace-loving people if we overlook their post-WWII invasions of the Korean Peninsula, India, and Vietnam, and their current buccaneering from southern Japan to the South China Sea.

The Chinese boosted their defense budget by 12.7% in FY 2011 to roughly 601.1 billion yuan. That was a resumption of 22 consecutive years of double-digit defense budget increases, a string that ended briefly in 2010, when defense expenditures were limited to a single-digit rise. In contrast, the Japanese Finance Ministry wants to cut the 155,000 members of the Land Self-Defense Force to 141,000. Japan is the only major country whose defense budget has continually declined since reaching a peak in 2002.

The Chinese cited as their reason increases in equipment and military training, personnel training/education, and salaries and benefits for the military.

When asked by reporters whether the increase was to apply pressure to neighboring countries, a government spokesman replied it was still less than 2% of GDP and lower than that of many countries. He also said that China was pursuing defensive policies and would not threaten any country.

Shortly thereafter, the Chinese had their first trial flight of a new stealth fighter. Here’s a look at some more of their new defensive infrastructure.

They didn’t behave as a peace-loving people in the fall of 2010, when they were the belligerents in the Senkaku islets , which they and the Taiwanese recognized as Japanese territory until seabed resources were discovered circa 1970.

This behavior should not have been unexpected. Noted Shimizu Yoshikazu in the monthly Chuokoron:

President Hu Jintao said at the Communist Party Conference in March 2009 that the country will staunchly defend its sovereignty, security, and territory. He also said the country would be more assertive in defending its maritime interests. Mr. Hu modified the dictum of Deng Hsiao Ping, who said, “Hide our abilities, build our strength, and move forward little by little.” The new policy is “Maintain hiding our abilities and building our strength, but be more aggressive diplomatically.”

Mr. Shimizu said that few people noticed because the full text of his address was not published. A senior official in the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it meant the country would perform a more aggressive role in international affairs.

Here’s what the Chinese mean by their “maritime interests”:

“Japanese government officials are weighing China’s intent after the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Party, called the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea part of Beijing’s “core interests.”

“…The People’s Daily article said Japan’s plan to name uninhabited islands near the Senkakus, known in China as the Diaoyu Islands, “is a blatant move to damage China’s core interests.””

The Chinese also refer to Tibet and Taiwan as part of their core interests.

Chinese newspaper editorials reflect a similar peace-loving attitude. For example, Hu Feiyue was one of four “experts” who presented views in a one-page special on the Senkakus dispute in the China Daily:

“Since Japan has been continually strengthening its control over the Diaoyu Islands (Senkakus), it is not enough for China to only send patrol boats to the islands. Instead, China should continue to modernize its navy. Considering Japan’s actions and the effect of China’s countermeasures, Beijing should think of employing another strategy,”

He also referred to the Japanese arrest of the Chinese fishing boat captain after ramming two Japanese Coast Guard vessels as “Tokyo’s affront”.

More specific was this from the Dongfang Ribao (Oriental Daily) in Hong Kong on 5 April last year:

There will not be peace between China and Japan unless China shows the resolve to use nuclear weapons. Japan is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear (weapons) in the past century twice. The first was when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb, and the second was during the Fukushima nuclear accident. The Japanese are extremely sensitive to nuclear issues, and China is not without the means to employ this means…For most Japanese, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a nightmare that can not be forgotten, and it has wounded their spirit. The uneasiness and dread due to the nuclear accident has paralyzed Japanese officials and the public, and politicians continually spout nonsense.

Japan can say no to China, but it cannot say no to nuclear weapons. For China to gain Japan’s respect it must refer to these weapons and present an attitude of not renouncing their use…Japan is a country with a high degree of self-regard, and it bows only to those who defeat it. Even though it lost to the U.S. in World War II, it does not think it lost to China, and pressures China with this strong approach….Now it challenges China through its textbooks on the Senkakus issue. Why should China promise a country such as this that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons?

China is thought to have deployed 300 nuclear warheads, by the way.

This rhetoric has been backed by the Chinese military harassment of Japan, which began in the Senkakus long before the 2010 incident.

In September 2005, the Chinese sent five naval vessels, including a guided missile destroyer, to the vicinity of the Chunxiao gas field. That’s four kilometers into the Chinese EEZ, but the Chinese have been using it as a platform to siphon off gas from the Japanese side. One of the ships aimed a gun at a Japanese P3-C surveillance aircraft.

A day before the resumption of Japanese-Sino talks on the status of the gas fields, China revealed it had established a “reserve vessel squadron” in the East China Sea capable of “fighting during wars” and equipped to “eliminate obstacles at sea.”

They’ve been engaging in similar activities near or in Japanese air space, particularly in the past five years. From April to December 2010 alone, Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces scrambled 48 times against Chinese aircraft. That was the highest total of the past five fiscal years (starting in April), and did not include the January to March figures. More recent incidents have involved a refusal to provide identification after entering the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). The Chinese military aircraft used to stay outside the ADIZ, but that changed in October 2010.

Last March, a Chinese State Oceanic Administration helicopter flew to within 70 meters of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) destroyer Samidare. Then-Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi said, “It was an extremely dangerous act.” That was countered by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, who replied that China’s right to claim the islands was “indisputable” and that its actions were in accord with international law.

On 30 December 2010, the Asahi Shimbun reported on People’s Liberation Army planning to land on and seize the outlying islands of other countries. The envisioned operations would include the use of bombers and amphibious vehicles.

On 2 January 2011, a commenter in the Communist Party-run Global Times claimed that the Japanese were just trying to worsen relations and suggested the Asahi ran the article at the government’s request.

*****
More troubling still is the Chinese interest in Okinawa. Some in China are now calling for the establishment of a Ryukyus Autonomous District. In other words, they think it’s Chinese manifest destiny to swipe the islands from Japan. Here is a public announcement of an apparently well-funded group to work toward that objective:

Former National Police Agency investigator Bando Tadanobu translated into Japanese an essay that appeared in the Chinese media calling for such a scheme as part of the PRC’s launch of a national strategy — the so-called Ryukyus Millennium.

“The Ryukyu islands must be recovered and a Ryukyu Autonomous District of the People’s Republic of China established for the millennium development of China. The law guarantees China sovereignty of the Ryukyus under the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Declaration. It must be turned into a forward base facing the Pacific Ocean….China will build the Ryukyus, the Japanese and American military shall depart from the East Sea (i.e., what everyone else calls the East China Sea) and the Ryukyus will be a breakwater for Chinese security.”

The essay also asserts that the time to seize Okinawa is now, and the Ryukyu Islanders, who are part of the Chinese people, also seek this. Mr. Bando reminds his Japanese readers that the Chinese government insists the Senkakus are Chinese territory and that senior PLA members openly discuss planning for an invasion of Japan.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The same argument has also appeared in other Chinese media sources, including three times in the Apple Daily and once on the Boxun News website.

Tang Chungfeng, a specialist in Japan research at the Chinese Ministry of Commerce who also served in the Chinese embassy in Japan, has championed the cause in the aforementioned Global Times, as well as the Ifeng.com news site (for Phoenix TV). Mr. Tang claims that the real Japanese objective is not to maintain control of Daioyutai (Senkakus), but to legalize its “illegal control” of the Ryukyus.

He lists four reasons for this.

1. The Ryukyus become the starting point for Japanese territorial waters.
2. It is a strategic move to obtain maritime resources and to keep northern Taiwan in check.
3. It draws their territorial line in the East China Sea.
4. It wipes away the shame of having been defeated in World War 2 by an “inferior race”, the Chinese. The Japanese still say they were beaten by the Americans and the Russians, not us.

Mr. Tang says this is the signal flare for the resurgence of Japanese militarism, in which Japanese bushido will again rule the world. It is a psychological demand of the Japanese right wing, which is more important than natural resources.

With two university professors, Mr. Tang wrote a similar article for the Global Times of 10 November 2010. In the same newspaper two days before that, he urged China to support the Okinawan “independence movement”.

Demonstrations were held in Chengdu in October 2010 after the Senkakus Incident of 7 September. Student leaders said they had been organized a month before with the help of the government. Some of the demonstrators carried signs saying, Recover the Ryukyus, Free Okinawa.

Occasionally the well-meaning superficialissimos of the Western mass media and thinktankeria get nosey and parade their wonderfulness by advising the countries involved it would be so much better if everyone got along and shared the wealth of the sea near the Senkakus instead of fighting about it. The Japanese have always been amenable to that. Now to get the Chinese to match their behavior with their words:

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura told reporters Wednesday that Japan protested to China after a flare was seen Tuesday at a Chinese structure at an undersea gas deposit. Japan has made similar complaints several times in the past.

“We have detected a flare, a sign that it is highly likely that there is a gas development going on,” Fujimura said. “Any unilateral exploration is unacceptable.”

The deposit, known as Kashi in Japan and Tianwaitian in China, sits near a median line of the two countries’ overlapping exclusive economic zones.

Japan and China agreed in 2008 to suspend unilateral digging in that field while continuing talks, but talks have stalled since 2010, following a diplomatic spat stemming from a maritime collision near disputed southern islands claimed by both countries, as well as Taiwan.

Two (back-translated) comments allow us to draw conclusions from all this. The first is from Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. (The emphasis is mine.)

China has of course warned that Japan is positioned as part of the American alliance, but we must recognize that is not the only point. I interviewed a general with the People’s Liberation Army, who said, “We might be able to achieve accommodation and cooperation with the U.S., but that will not happen with Japan. For China, Japan will likely remain a military threat”. There is a special historical animus towards Japan.

Meanwhile, Dan Blumenthal, current commissioner and former vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said:

In China, there is a memory and anger at Japan based on history, and an intense awareness of revisionism. That awareness is strengthened and inflamed by Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Now, the Chinese think this should be rectified, even with military force, by becoming superior to Japan, and having the ability to threaten Japan.

* The peace-loving people of Russia

Japan and Russia signed the Treaty of Commerce, Navigation and Delimitation on 7 February 1855. The treaty both established official relations between the countries as well as their borders. The Russians confirmed that the islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, and Shikotan, and the Habomai Islets (just seven kilometers from Hokkaido), were Japanese territory, distinct from the Kurile Islands.

Article 2 of the treaty states:

“Henceforth the boundary between the two nations shall lie between the islands of Etorofu and Uruppu. The whole of Etorofu shall belong to Japan; and the Kurile Islands, lying to the north of and including Uruppu, shall belong to Russia.”

Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai Islets are to the south of Etorofu. They were not mentioned in the treaty because they were understood to be part of Japan.

They stayed part of Japan until after World War II ended. The Soviet Union renounced its neutrality treaty with Japan and declared war on 9 August 1945, three days after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally on 15 August, and on 18 August the Soviets started occupying what Japan calls the Northern Territories. That process lasted until 5 September, three days after the surrender documents were signed.

For reasons impossible to explain, the English-language mass media finds it impossible to simply state these facts. Though the Soviet occupation of the islands occurred after the Japanese surrender, Reuters uses the expression “near the end of the war”. Even though the Japanese position is that the islands are not part of the Kuriles, based in part on the 1855 treaty language, the New York Times accepts the Russian formulation and calls them the South Kuriles. (Then again, the Times thought it was copacetic for the Americans to write the Japanese Constitution, as the text at the above link about Charles Kades shows.)

The Soviets occupied the islands because American President Harry Truman allowed them to. Stalin wanted the entire island of Hokkaido to create a Communist North Japan, as he did with North Korea and East Germany. Truman made a deal to prevent that by tossing Stalin the four smaller fish. This has been confirmed by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (an American citizen) from diplomatic cables and detailed in his book Anto. (That can be translated as Secret Strife or Hidden Battle).

Thus, the Soviets chose to exact their revenge for losing the 1905 war by kicking Japan when it was down. In the 1956 agreement between the two countries that ended the state of war between them and restored diplomatic ties, the Russians agreed to give two of the islands back as part of a future peace treaty. They show no signs of fulfilling their promise.

The Russians saw that the Democratic Party-led government of Japan flinched badly in its confrontation with China in the fall of 2010. Should it be surprising that one thug state would imitate another? Their own military testing of Japan’s territory and defensive posture began almost immediately thereafter and continues to the present.

The Russian navy sent 24 ships through La Pérouse Strait, which separates the southern part of Sakhalin from the northern part of Hokkaidō and connects the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. This was the largest group of Russian ships to make this passage in 10 years, and included cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, tank carriers, and hospital ships.

In September 2011, the Russians conducted their largest military exercise off Kamchatka after the end of the Cold War — with 50 ships and 50 aircraft — to maintain the defense of their continental shelf area. One never knows when the Japanese or the Canadians are going to attack. It is curious that Russian exercises of this sort pass with little or no comment overseas, but the Japanese dispatch of an airplane to observe Chinese provocations is the signal for Western academics to write papers calling for the joint peaceful development of resources.

In early December 2010, Russian maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft flew directly above a joint U.S.-Japanese military drill. The main sea drill continued, but the air drill was halted to prevent the exposure of any tactics.

Though it is natural to observe military drills of neighboring countries, the Russians chose to be obnoxious in their observation and their justification afterwards. Said fleet spokesman Roman Markov:

“The area is our zone of responsibility. The airplanes carried out a planned flight in an area of the Russian Pacific Fleet’s regular activity.”

That was a month after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made the first visit of a Russian/Soviet head of state to the islands since they became Russian territory. Previous leaders had refrained from doing so to avoid antagonizing the Japanese, but discretion in bilateral relations is no longer a priority. A more recent visitor was Nikolai Patrushev, former director of the FSB (the new KGB) and secretary of the Security Council of Russia. This visit, also seen as out of the ordinary, was ostensibly to check on border security and economic development. These two men were followed by the first deputy premier, the regional development minister, and the defense minister.

One reason cited for Mr. Medvedev’s visit was to boost his image of strength before elections. That is standard operating procedure for the countries of East Asia — if the national government’s popularity needs a tonic, bash the Japanese. That’s been the drink of choice of Chinese and South Koreans for more than 60 years.

The timing was also right. Japanese defense policy at the time called for a shift in focus from defense of the north and a reduction of equipment and personnel in Hokkaido to upgrade security around the Nansei Islands of Okinawa and in the East China Sea.

What was then-Prime Minister Kan to do? He and his government had already been flayed for their mishandling of the Senkakus incident, and now the Russians were capitalizing on his demonstrated weakness. But Mr. Kan had to trust “in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world”. He lacked options for dealing with people who are ambivalent about peace and act with injustice and in bad faith. Having only a single dimension as a politician, he reached into his bag of trick and reverted to his origins as a street-corner loudmouth by criticizing Mr. Medvedev’s visit as “an unforgivable outrage”. (He got away with that sort of language in Nagata-cho for years because no one took his New Left grandstanding seriously.) He also said it was “an act of violence”.

The Russians, knowing all about shouting shoe-pounders in diplomatic venues, easily swatted that one away. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded that the Japanese prime minister was being “undiplomatic”. Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko noted:

“The Russian president independently selects routes of his domestic trips. Any recommendations from abroad are inappropriate and unacceptable.”

The time for using the phrase “unforgivable outrage” came that summer after Mr. Medvedev signed a law passed by the Duma making 2 September an annual holiday to celebrate the Soviet victory over Japan. In other words, it took the Russians 65 years to commemorate their week-long struggle in 1945, their postwar seizure of the Northern Territories, and their postwar use of 600-700,000 Japanese servicemen as slave labor from 1946 until 1956 (though most were released by 1949). An estimated 10% of those Japanese died in Soviet captivity.

Why now? Don’t look to Reuters or the New York Times for an explanation.

Mr. Kan might also have chosen to take a stern view when the Russians conducted Vostok 2010, their operational/strategic military exercises, from 29 June to 8 July in the Kuriles over Japanese objections. Or when the Russians established three new artillery and missile testing areas near the Kuriles and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

But it’s too late for that — especially now that there are signs of an anti-Japanese alliance among the peace-loving peoples of the region.

On 8 September 2011, Air Self-Defense Force jets scrambled to meet Russian *and* Chinese military aircraft approaching Japan. Two Russian TU-95 bombers flew around Japan accompanied by refueling aircraft. They started flirting with Japanese airspace from the Tsushima Strait off Nagasaki prefecture, passed south of Okinawa, and then swung up along the Pacific Ocean coast northward to an area near the Northern Territories. It was the first confirmed circumnavigation of Japan by Russian military aircraft, and it was obviously intentional. They passed Fukushima Prefecture in the Pacific at precisely the time Prime Minister Noda was there to view the damaged nuclear plant. The entire flight, including refueling, took 14 hours.

While the Russians were still airborne, a Chinese Y8 intelligence-gathering airplane flew across the dividing line between China and Japan in the East China Sea and came within 100 – 150 kilometers of The Senkakus.

(The Russia must have enjoyed their aerial tour of Japanese territory, as military aircraft made another circuit just outside Japanese airspace last month. Foreign Minister Gemba Koichiro called his Russian counterpart to ask for self-restraint and more information; three days later it was reported that his call hadn’t been returned.)

One year before, on 27 September (shortly after the Senkakus Incident), Mr. Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao met in Beijing to sign a joint statement calling for “mutual support for each other’s core interests, including national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.”

It also contained these passages:

“During the war (World War II), people in China and Russia sustained major aggressions from the fascists and militarists, and they endured the cruelest ordeals and suffered the heaviest casualties…The fascists and militarists schemed to conquer and enslave us two nations, other countries, and the whole continent. China and Russia will never forget the feat of those who checked those two forces…

Most telling of all was this sentence. It’s worth reading twice:

The glorious history, imprinted with the friendship the people of the two countries forged in the war and their mutual help, has laid a sound foundation for today’s strategic partnership of coordination between China and Russia.

The Russians have even teamed up with the North Koreans. When the late Kim II visited Russia in August 2011, they finalized an agreement for joint military exercises, an unusual step for Pyeongyang. Kim suggested full-scale military maneuvers, including offensive exercises, but that was too much even for the Russians. They also did not respond to requests for aircraft and parts. Meanwhile, the North Koreans kept interaction with Russian forces at a minimum for lower-ranking soldiers. That limited the initial exercises to pilot rescue operations.

It is not clear what peace-loving purpose the Russians — whose navy obtained access to a Sea of Japan port through a 2010 agreement with the North Koreans — think this serves. Only allies conduct joint military operations, after all.

* The peace-loving people of South Korea

Birds of a feather, they say, flock together, so one might assume that South Korea, the only other nominal free market democracy in Northeast Asia, would think its best interests lie in an alliance of some sort with the Japanese. That assumption would be mistaken.

The Japanese suspect that when Chinese pushing comes to shoving, the Koreans will accommodate themselves to the Chinese, regardless of the specifics of the situation. An example is the language in an editorial from the Joongan Ilbo of South Korea. They’ve noticed that today’s Chinese are acting like the Imperial Japanese a century ago. They’re also aware that Chinese behavior could cause nearby countries to behave as Finland traditionally has toward its Soviet Union/Russian neighbor. But that was fine with them:

“(We) must act judiciously. China’s existence is a threat to our security, but essential for us economically. Therefore, for several decades at least, we must ride the wave of an economically prosperous China. That will require South Korea to stay neutral in the struggle between Japan and China.”

They seem to have overlooked that the struggle in East Asia is not between Japan and China, but between China and everyone else in the region with territory the Chinese claim.

Not that the South Koreans are immune from junior grade militarism of their own. They’ve already chosen to stick their saber in the face of the one country that won’t fight back. As detailed by two posts on the masthead here, South Korea seized the Takeshima islets by force after they failed to convince the United States to include it in the San Francisco Peace Treaty specifying what would and would not be Japanese territory. So, despite having ignored the rocks for centuries, they took the islets while the taking was good — knowing the Japanese were relying on the justice and faith of peace-loving peoples.

As this post describes, some South Koreans have their eyes on Tsushima too, and senior members of their military use the invisible Japanese military threat to Takeshima to urge the expansion of their military capabilities. Meanwhile, the North Koreans are the ones who are actually sinking their naval ships, shelling their territory, and murdering their tourists.

But Seoul is buckled up and ready to do battle with the Japanese. On 5 July 2006, their Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs sent a ship to survey ocean currents in Japan’s EEZ near Takeshima. Japan responded by sending a Coast Guard patrol boat to monitor the ship, contact it by radio, and ask them to stop. The Koreans ignored the Japanese request and dispatched their own Coast Guard vessel, which sailed between two ships. Nothing untoward happened, but the Japanese prime minister at the time, Abe Shinzo, said at a symposium in the fall of 2010 that the Japanese government was told the Korean captain had been given permission by South Korean President Roh Mu-hyon to fire on the Japanese ship. The expression used was “attack with the intent to harm”.

Mr. Abe consulted with the Foreign Ministry and the Coast Guard and decided not to stop the Korean ship by abordage. He later explained:

“With China, we would understand what they’re going to do because diplomacy to them is completely a game. One side can predict what the other will do if one does certain things…Roh, however, was strange and even other Korean officials and military men found him somewhat confusing. We didn’t know what he would do, because there seemed to be no logical thought or calculation of profit and loss, and the situation could have escalated beyond imagining.”

Of course, that’s not how the South Koreans remember it. (The emphasis is mine.):

Roh Moo-hyun instructed the military to destroy unauthorized Japanese ships heading for Dokdo while in office, a close aide to the late President said Friday.

This indicates that President Lee Myung-bak’s predecessor braced for the worst possible diplomatic relations with Japan to thwart the neighboring country’s territorial ambitions of Korea’s easternmost islets.

The revelation came amid escalating criticism of the government’s stance of dealing with the issue in a low key manner.

Kim Byung-joon, a former senior presidential secretary for policy planning, said in an article posted on the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation’s website, “In April 2006, when Seoul-Tokyo relations were chilled by Japan’s territorial claim of Dokdo, President Roh instructed his secretaries to consider destroying Japanese ships crossing into our territorial waters without permission.”

Among considered measures for destruction was using a Korean military ship to ram the targeted vessel from Japan, Kim recounted.

What to do?

Many Japanese have always known what this situation requires. When the Liberal-Democratic Party was formed in 1955, its new charter called for Japan to rewrite the Constitution. The members eventually found it easier to indulge in the more profitable political activity of pork distribution, and turned into the Japanese version of RINOs in the bargain. The LDP could have served as the role model for the American GOP to become stealth social democrats.

Somura Yasunobu, then a professor of international politics at the Tokyo University of Science, wrote an op-ed for the January edition of Keizai Orai in January 1991. It was rendered in English by the Translation Service Center Asia Foundation and run in the 23 April edition of the Japan Times that year. (That predates the Internet as we know it today, so it is not online.).

Prof. Somura said then all that needs to be said. Note how one passage echoes the statement of Charles Kades.

During the Persian Gulf War, Americans accused Japan of hiding behind the postwar Constitution to avoid involvement, while liberals here claimed the administration of Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki was ripping it up in an attempt to send troops overseas. The Americans were right and our poor, pacifist Constitution was both more controversial and ridiculous than ever.

The document was foisted upon Japan when it was still under the thumb of the US occupation (1945-1952). Common sense tells us that the policies pursued by even the most benevolent of conquerors are not designed entirely for the benefit of the conquered. By the same token, a national charter adopted when Gen. Douglas MacArthur ruled Tokyo is irrelevant today.

When Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, all legislation imposed by the Occupation should have become null and void. Anyone who still wants to preserve this Constitution in effect favors perpetuation of American rule….

…Until recently, many people have justified retaining this made-in-USA instrument as expedient, and in terms of realpolitik, Japan’s most advantageous option. I admit that I have not been among those clamoring for revision. Patchwork reform of a document so fatally flawed makes no sense…

…The heart of the Constitutional issue is the famous war-renouncing Article 9, which says in part, “the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” From the standpoint of international law, this makes no sense.

…In the old days, the concept of a belligerent party was used, for example, regarding rebel separatists. It provided the basis for subsequent recognition of a group as a legitimate government or the territory under its control as an independent nation. The 1947 Constitution did not even accord this minimum standing to Japan.

When Japan regained its pro forma independence in 1952, we entered into a mutual security treaty with Washington that left national defense and internal security in the hands of the U.S. military. The pact was later revised, and the Japanese government assumed the latter responsibility.

Nevertheless, the treaty made Japan, for all intents and purposes, a U.S. protectorate. Any Japanese eager to maintain this relationship after all this time is like a middle-aged man who still wants to be breast-fed by his mother.

Of course, the notion of a right to wage war has been rendered absurd by weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and conventional. The only just wars are those of self-defense; the right of belligerency simply means that a nation can protect itself.

It is contradictory to argue that Japan has the right of self-defense but not the right to wage war….This anachronistic document belongs in the national archives, not on the books as the supreme law of the land.

What to do? The Japanese should rip up the American neo-imperialist document dashed off in less than a fortnight and become a nation again.

After all, based on actions rather than words, they’re the only peace-loving peoples in Northeast Asia.

Afterwords

* It is easy to identify the peace-loving peoples of the world even at international sporting events.

Japan has hosted the Olympics in exemplary fashion three times. It is beyond the realm of imagination that the incidents in Seoul and Hangzou could have happened anywhere in Japan. It is inconceivable that a Japanese crowd would boo another country’s national anthem, boo a national team throughout a sporting event, throw garbage on players and fans, and behave so badly the army is required to keep them in line. International sporting events in Japan have never been cancelled due to public health concerns. And no Japanese officials have ever thrashed a judge from another country because they were unhappy with the decision.

* Here’s a report of how American soldiers in Japan keep in training.

* The drive-by academic, Walter Russell Mead, drove by again:

“Japan, Russia Build Ties As Asian Balance Shifts”

Note that he calls the islands the Kuriles and says nothing about how they were occupied. Does he know? His wishful thinking is based on a few quotes in one Kyodo report that could have been recycled by every Japanese and Russian foreign minister for the past half-century.

He missed this in the rearview mirror as he drove away:

Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba said on Saturday that a heated, decades-long territorial dispute with Russia was far from solved even as they agreed to boost security and economic cooperation.

Gemba said the territorial issue must be solved before Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, invests further in the islands and Russia’s underdeveloped Far East region.

“We would consider joint business activities if it helps solve the sovereignty issue,” Gemba said.

“But we must not violate Japan’s legal stance…In that sense, the positions (between Japan and Russia) remain far apart.”

*****
The day the other countries in the region can produce an indie band like Kiwi and the Papaya Mangoes is the day they reach the level of Japanese internationalism.

On their previous album, KPM did a Brazilian forro tune with Indian percussion and a flute. The Korean writing seen briefly in this video spells out the name of the Japanese national anthem.

Norks nix Noda

YESTERDAY the Korean Central News Agency of North Korea mentioned Japan in an editorial for the first time since Kim Jong-il’s death. They weren’t happy, either. Then again, Pyeongyang’s default position toward diplomacy is that it’s not happy unless it’s not happy.

This time, they were upset at the Japanese government for failing to express official condolences for Kim Jong-il’s funeral (though it did immediately after Kim’s death). The two countries do not have diplomatic relations.

They were also cheesed because Japan refused to allow some senior members of Chongryon (the General Association of North Korean residents in Japan) to attend Kim’s funeral.

Translating from the Japanese report:

Even if a neighboring country does not share in the sadness of a great state funeral, the Japanese authorities are responsible for the vile act of obstructing the condolences of the Korean people…Morally speaking, they are immature infants…They are unaware of even elementary human ethics, morality, or courtesy.

But the English from the KCNA site is not only better, it is downright entertaining:

The whole world was in bitter grief at the end of the last year over the demise of leader Kim Jong Il, peerlessly great man produced by mankind and great leader recognized by the world.

But!

The Japanese authorities…officially revealed their hostile stand, saying “the government has no intention to express condolences”. Worse still, they let loose such balderdash as uttering it was their hope that the great loss the Korean nation suffered would not adversely affect the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

And:

The Japanese authorities’ evil actions found a more striking manifestation in the fact that they desperately blocked the visit to the homeland by the chief vice-chairman of the Central Standing Committee of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) to express condolences before the bier of Kim Jong Il.

They’re just getting warmed up:

The Japanese reactionaries have put the DPRK-Japan relations at the lowest ebb, talking for years about the abduction issue which no longer exists and poses no problem. Yet, they are using it as a pretext for hurting the supreme leadership of the DPRK even today when the Korean nation is grieving the great loss. This is unpardonable in any respect.

The phrase “poses no problem” in the Japanese version was literally “doesn’t even have an odor”. It is probably closer to the original Korean.

The winds are gusting up to gale strength:

This is nothing but a mean and ridiculous behavior of the morally stupid guys who stoop to any infamy to gratify their political greed.

It is as clear as daylight what miserable end they will meet.

That’s quite some alliteration in the first sentence. Unconscious genius?

They come close to sticking the knife in, though the thrust misses at the end:

Japan has topped the world list of replacement of prime ministers, becoming the laughing stock of the world and not a day passes without unstable domestic politics. Hence, Japan will never understand the social system in the DPRK, most stable in the world.

Some literary scholars say that the American novelist Thomas Wolfe (You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward Angel) wrote with his hand in his pants (literally). The scribes at KCNA seem to have the same habit.

The complaint about the “chief vice chairman” of Chongryon is telling. They’re referring to Ho Jong-man, the group’s de facto leader. Japanese reports note that the authorization refused was for Mr. Ho to go to Pyeongyang and come back.

Ho Jong-man was born on the Korean Peninsula and is a delegate to the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea, though he lives in Japan. Here’s another excerpt from the KCNA editorial:

That was why many officials and lawmakers of Japan urged the prime minister and the chief Cabinet secretary to allow the visit of the chief vice-chairman.

The photo here shows the Chongryon memorial held in Tokyo for Kim two weeks ago. The group’s leader, a resident of Japan, is a member of what passes for the North Korean legislature. The policy of the Democratic Party of Japan, the country’s current ruling party, is to pass legislation permitting citizens of foreign countries with permanent residence permits to vote in local elections — including Korean citizens who are members of the North Korean legislature — though that would seem to be in violation of Article 15 of the Constitution. Providing that suffrage would surely be the foot in the door toward permitting their vote in national elections, or even holding public office. (That is the implication of the Japanese expression used for this policy). And some “lawmakers”, presumably Diet members, thought the government should have let the Chongryon officials attend the funeral.

See what I mean about a fifth column in Japan?

One Japanese politician did stop by the Tokyo service and express his condolences, however: former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro. Of course Mr. Koizumi is not a North Korean sympathizer, but he did convince Kim Jong-il to let some of the Japanese abductees in that country return home. His gesture is understandable.

It took a couple of decades, but at least they could go home again.

*****
On the Christmas post, I mentioned that Yamashita Tatsuro can sound like a combination of uptown soul music and the Beach Boys. Here’s what he sounds like when he emphasizes the former mode. Happy greetings!

Number one son

JAPANESE commentators have more pressing reasons to pay close attention to movements and events in North Korea than their Western counterparts. The nation’s ties to the peninsula are ancient and complicated, they are within range of North Korean missiles under the control of very unfriendly folks who also have nuclear weapons, and there is a group of people in Japan who are potential (and actual) fifth-columnists. That group extends to the political class.

One focus of Japanese interest that seems to have been largely ignored by those in the West is the potential behavior of Kim Jong-il’s eldest son Kim Jong-nam, now leading a life of exile in Macao. The 11/18 January issue of the biweekly Sapio provides a brief and excellent explanation of the circumstances. Here it is in English:

*****
Because he is being protected by Kim Jong-il’s aged subordinates, Kim Jong-eun is only running on rails laid down by his father before he died. Even if Jong-eun were to place advisors from his generation around him and take charge of the military to strengthen his personal authority, an even bloodier battle awaits to stabilize that structure: internecine warfare.

Since ancient times, throughout the world, some rulers have stabilized their authority by liquidating relatives who were potential threats. Unless these “side branches” are removed, they can’t be sure when their antagonists will focus on and support another member of the same family who could become a threat to themselves.

Jong-il established his own authority by passing through similar struggles. One of then was with his half-brother, Kim Pyeong-il, the son of Kim Il-sung and second wife (and former secretary) Kim Song-ae. His brother was seen as a powerful candidate to succeed his father; he was held in such esteem that Kim-Il sung is said to have declared that control of the party would be passed to Jong-il and the military to Pyeong-il. That engendered strong feelings of jealousy in Jong-il, who sent his younger brother into exile. After Jong-il prevailed in the power struggle, Pyeong-il was relegated to service as the ambassador to Hungary in 1988. For the past 23 years, he has served as the ambassador to several European countries, thus keeping him at a distance from the corridors of power. (He is now the ambassador to Poland.) There are even rumors that he was castrated to prevent him from having more children. (N.B.: He has a daughter and a son.)

In the same circumstances is Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, who lives in Macao. When Jong-eun established his position as his father’s successor in September 2010, he twice planned assassinations of his older brother, but sources say those were blocked by China. Some think that if Jong-nam returned to North Korea for the state funeral of his father, he would be taken into custody and not allowed to leave again.

In accordance with Confucian tradition, the one person who could arise to destabilize Kim Jong-eun regime is Jong-nam, the eldest son. In fact, attention focused on him as the successor to his father around 2000, and some senior leaders tried to place him in that position. Nishioka Tsutomu, a North Korean analyst and chairman of a group to bring the Japanese abductees home from North Korea, points out that Jong-nam is at the eye of the hurricane:

Senior members of the North’s leadership are filled with doubts that Jong-eun will really work out, and suspect that the Chinese actually support Jong-nam. In September 2010, Jong-nam made a point of appearing before the Japanese media to declare that his father was opposed to the transfer of authority to Jong-eun. His attitude was that of a man protected by the Chinese Communist Party. Word of his appearance and statement was conveyed to the North.

Some in North Korean leadership are of the view that the Kim Jong-eun regime will not last long. There are even reports they’ve been telling each other to come up with $US 300,000 to prepare for the collapse.

North Korea would not exist without the support of China. If the young Kim Jong-eun were to cause relations with China to sour due to his concerns and envy of his half-brother’s Chinese ties, it could further weaken his regime. If that were to happen, it is not out of the question that the military could grow out of control, bare its teeth, and launch a coup or civil war.

*****
Here’s a link from the Daily NK with more details of the family history and photographs of Kim Pyeong-il with his son and daughter. Photographs can be deceiving, but they actually seem to be normal and well-adjusted people, unlike their relatives.

*****
The North Koreans operate a propaganda website for South Koreans. On 1 January, a video of a song said to be in praise of Kim Jong-eun was uploaded to the site. The publication is viewed as part of the regime’s effort to stabilize Jong-eun in power. The song is called Balgorum or Footsteps; i.e., the military’s footsteps are in synch with those of Jong-eun.

That website has a YouTube account, and Balgorum was also uploaded there on 1 January. It starts off with a minute’s pep talk in the distinctive North Korean style. I once asked a young South Korean woman what she thought of that manner of speaking, and she said it gave her the creeps. (She visibly shuddered.)

The song is accompanied by printed lyrics. As far as I can tell, they mention only “General Kim”, but there are scenes of Jong-eun accompanying his father.

It’s worth watching from beginning to end. Not only is it educational, the video production and the musical performance are also well done.

Kan Naoto’s northern exposure

The DPJ has an inseparable relationship with the extreme left.
- Isozaki Yosuke, LDP member of the upper house

Prime Minister Kan was originally a citizen-activist, so in some ways he is likely sympathetic to North Korea.
- Suganuma Mitsuhiro, former member of the Public Security Intelligence Agency

RECENT events in North Korea reminded me of a post I had planned to write earlier but didn’t find the time for. Then again, it’s about former Prime Minister Kan Naoto, whom most people in Japan would prefer to never be reminded of again. But the information it contains demands the stiffening of the upper lip and the blocking of the nostrils to finish the job. It involves the reason he decided to quit jerking the nation around after spending the summer doubling down on his jerkdom after escaping a no-confidence motion in the lower house.

Recall that Mr. Kan insisted he never gave his predecessor as prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio, a firm promise that he would resign in their early June meeting Mr. Hatoyama requested for just that purpose. He stayed vague and hazy about his plans throughout the summer, when he wasn’t hinting he would continue indefinitely in office as the National Torturer in Chief. He even indulged his inner Koizumi by examining the possibility of dissolving the Diet, calling a snap election, and running on the single issue of nuclear power. He finally threw in the spoon on 26 August, though earlier that week an interview with him appeared in one of the Asahi publications in which he again suggested he was in it for the long haul.

What made him change his mind? Here’s a possibility: The exposure of his murky ties with North Korea and other radical leftists was about to get him in trouble beyond his capabilities to ignore.

It isn’t unusual for politicians of the left in Western democracies to have questionable ties with unpleasant elements. For example, it’s well-known in the United States that Edward “Lion of the Senate” Kennedy thought Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov was more approachable and had more peaceful intentions than then-President Ronald Reagan.

The same mindset among Japanese politicians of the left has often become manifest in attitudes ranging from deference to cordiality or even stout defense of North Korea, particularly when Kim Il-sung was in charge. The delusion also infects people not ostensibly of the left; we’ve seen before the suspicions surrounding then-Foreign Minister Maehara Seiji of the DPJ, who quit while the quitting was good, and even Kato Koichi of the LDP, who nearly became prime minister.

The dirty Kan laundry was put through the wash in July, and it stained the water a muddy red. Most of the Japanese news media pretended it didn’t exist at first, but the story grew too big to ignore, and finally some Americans started sniffing around.

But Mr. Kan showed his colors long before that.

Shin Gwang-su

In 1980, North Korean agent Shin Gwang-su organized the abduction of Osaka cook Hara Tadaaki, in part to use Hara’s passport to enter Japan while working as a North Korean agent. He was a foot soldier in a six-year Pyeongyang program of clandestine warfare in which at least 17 Japanese were abducted, though the real total could have been as high as 70 or 80 people. Shin, a zainichi and native of Shizuoka, was also identified by Chimura Yasushi and Hasuike Kaoru as one of the two men who abducted them. The two Japanese and their families were repatriated in 2002.

Shin Gwang-su

North Korea denied the abductions for years, and the useful idiots and politicians of the left in Japan claimed it was all a conspiracy theory cooked up by whacked-out right wingers. Japan’s Socialist Party got along quite well with the North Koreans in friendly solidarity and sponsored a Peace Boat cruise to the country every summer. JSP leader Doi Takako visited Pyeongyang in 1987 for Kim Il-sung’s birthday party and said:

We JSP members respect the glorious success of DPRK under the great leader Kim Il Sung.

She was also shown on television telling the families of the abductees to “get over it”.

Shin was finally apprehended by South Korean authorities when in that country on another secret mission in 1985, and sentenced to death. Their interrogation revealed information about the abductions, his use of Hara’s passport, and his statement that he was instructed to conduct the operations by Kim Jong-il in person.

The plight of political prisoners in South Korea under the military dictatorship became a cause célèbre among the Japanese. (Westerners are familiar with the phenomenon with such cases as that of Mumia Abu-Jamal in the United States.) A petition circulated for their release was signed by 129 Japanese Diet members. In addition to members of the Socialist Party and Komeito, the forerunner of today’s New Komeito (many zainichi are members of the affiliated Soka Gakkai), two MPs from the small Democratic Socialist Federation also signed: Kan Naoto and Eda Satsuki. Mr. Eda would later become the second Justice Minister in the Kan Cabinet, replacing Chiba Keiko, who lost her upper house seat in the 2010 election. A Socialist Party member in those pre-DPJ days, she also signed the petition.

The South Koreans later commuted Shin’s sentence to life imprisonment. Then-President Kim Dae-jung sent him back to North Korea in 2000 as part of the Sunshine Policy, where he was hailed as a hero of the state. The Japanese police have an outstanding warrant for his arrest, but that would require the North Koreans to pinch their hero first and hand him over.

Kan and Eda claimed they had no idea that Shin had been involved in the abduction of Japanese nationals. Mr. Kan said he signed it only because someone asked him to, and he hadn’t paid much attention to the content of the document. The flippancy of that answer is typical of the profound disrespect he has displayed toward his countrymen and the political process throughout his career.

Chiba Keiko was grilled in the Diet on the same question in 2009 (by the Japanese Communist Party). She admitted that she had investigated Shin’s background at the time and discovered that he “probably” was involved in the abductions, but that problem was superseded by the greater human rights issue, which she did not specify. She allowed that signing the petition was a careless thing to do, which is more than Kan Naoto has ever done.

Just for you!

For me?

In late July, a previously unknown photo came to light that showed Kan Naoto during his visit to North Korea in March 1995 as part of a Japanese delegation that included Watanabe Michio and Aso Taro of the Liberal Democratic Party. (Watanabe had been foreign minister two years before and was to die that September.) Mr. Kan was in the Cabinet at that time as a member of the New Frontier Party, and fellow party member Hatoyama Yukio was also along for the trip.

The photo, seen here, was taken by a Japanese freelancer and shows Mr. Kan receiving a present from Kim Yong-sun, then head of the international division of the Workers’ Party of North Korea. In that role, Kim was responsible for directing North Korean spying and other undercover operations abroad.

It’s fascinating how often information potentially damaging to Japanese politicians seems to surface at certain times, even though the physical evidence had been around for a while. The freelancer’s other photographs taken at the time have also been made public. The only other person to have been photographed receiving a gift from Kim during the visit was Mr. Hatoyama.

It is also worthy of note that the New York Times considered Kim Yong-sun important enough to rate a brief obituary when he died following an automobile accident. Alas, they lacked the space to mention his work in the international division.

Campaign Cash

After Mr. Kan deflected the no-confidence motion in early June, the nation was livid at both his weaselly maneuvering and his refusal to specify a date for stepping down. That and the effect it would have on the Tohoku recovery occupied the public’s attention for the rest of the month.

The Kan-Sakai handshake

When it appeared that that the prime minister was digging in, some new information just happened to come to light in the first week of July. It was revealed that Mr. Kan’s political fund management committee donated JPY 62.5 million yen (more than $US 800,000) from 2007-2009 to a small political group linked to suspects in the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens. Further, JPY 50 million of that amount was donated to the group in 2008. That is the maximum allowable amount, and it accounted for 60% of the group’s funding for the year.

The group benefiting from the Kan largesse was the Citizens’ Council for a Change of Government (shortened to Mezasu-kai in Japanese). It originated in and was created by the Shimin no To (Citizens’ Party).

CP head Sakai Takeru, who also travels under the name of Saito Masashi, has known Kan Naoto for 30 years. (photo). In fact, Mr. Sakai worked in the first Kan campaign for a Diet seat. He is a self-identified Leninist who has expressed solidarity with and support for the Red Army Faction of the Communist League, which hijacked a JAL flight to North Korea in 1970. In 2004, he wrote in the quarterly Risen (short for the Japanese “Theoretical Battle Line”):

I am (involved with) elections for the sake of revolution…my objective is revolution, so we must eventually change the central authority. But it is important to create a central territory where the revolutionaries are strong.

The Citizens’ Party walks the walk as well as talks the talk. Two members, Inoue Sakura and Yonahara Hiroko, managed to get themselves elected to the municipal assembly of Yokohama. On 29 May, 2002, they tried to pull down the Japanese flag displayed in the assembly’s main conference hall, and duked it out with the assembly staff before they were subdued. One week later, on 5 June, they took control of the seats of the assembly chairman and the secretary-general and blocked the session by refusing to move for six hours. The city of Yokohama finally expelled them as delegates.

The CP publishes a newspaper that openly supports North Korea and promoted the views of the Red Army Faction. It has also given space to Kan Naoto to promote his own views. He wrote for the paper:

I most definitely want to seek the ideal approach for a movement that combines both the labor movement and the citizens’ movement.

Under the direction of Mr. Sakai, the group created the Mezasu-kai in 2006 to back the then-opposition Democratic Party’s effort to win control of the government. One member of the new group was Mori Taishi, the son of the late leader of the Japanese Red Army, Tamiya Takamaro, and his wife, Mori Junko. Father was the leader of the JAL airliner hijacking group. Mother is on Interpol’s wanted list for abducting Ishioka Toru and Matsuki Kaoru from Europe to North Korea in 1980.

Their son Taishi was born in Pyeongyang and first came to Japan in 2004.

Said LDP Diet member Kawai Katsuyuki:

(He) was in North Korea until the age of 20. It is easy to imagine what sort of education he received.

It isn’t necessary to imagine his education at all, because the facts have been reported. He grew up in the “Japan Revolution Village” created on a site about an hour from Pyeongyang for eight Japanese families, including those of the hijackers. Mori received what has been described as a “revolutionary education” to convert Japan to Kim Il-sung-ism. In addition to textbooks, the village also had rifle ranges and boxing rings, and the training was conducted as a family. Every morning the village turned out to sing “The 10 Pledges”, which included promises to conduct the unconditional and thorough implementation of the Two Kims’ teachings, to protect the organization’s secrets with their lives, and to create revolution in Japan. The families had 20 children altogether, and all of them came to Japan.

Citizens’ Party head Sakai Takeru, Kan’s pal of 30 years, visited them in North Korea 10 years ago and met the villagers.

In April, Mori Taishi ran for the municipal assembly of Mitaka, a municipality in the Tokyo Metro District, but lost. He was officially endorsed by the Citizens’ Party.

As you might imagine, the opposition parties thought Mr. Kan had some explaining to do. Kan Naoto was his usual charming self:

I made the donation to provide solidarity and support to a local party to fulfill my job as an officer (acting president) of the party (DPJ) at the time…It was my decision to make the donation, so I have no intention of asking them to return it.

And:

The flow of my political funds has been properly submitted in its entirety.

Well, that wasn’t the issue, was it? He continued:

I thought it would be a positive to become allied with them.

He added that he saw no reason to apologize to the abductees’ families, and that he didn’t know of the Mezasu-kai membership links to the abductions. Incidentally, as prime minister, he was the head of the special government group for dealing with the abduction issue.

His lack of knowledge about the group didn’t stop him from personally funneling the maximum donation to them in 2008. People wondered why he spent that much money on a group he knew so little about — unless his knowledge was limited to their affiliation with the political party of his Leninist friend. In any event, no one believed him any more this time than they did when he cavalierly dismissed his signature on the petition to free Shin Gwang-su.

For another perspective, here’s Prof. Iwai Tomoaki of Nihon University:

It is commonplace for politicians in Japan to make donations within the framework of one political family – usually through the parent organization to several sub-organizations as a means of helping them financially. I have seldom seen a case like Mr. Kan’s, in which political funds have been channeled into an outside political organization that seemingly is not directly linked with his body. In view of the prevailing accepted practices in Japanese politics, it certainly is a puzzling flow of funds.

It gets more puzzling: Tokyo prosecutors agreed to a request to investigate the donation for possible criminal prosecution. They checked the books of the Kan political fund committee and found a negative balance of funds on the date one of the donations was made. That meant it should have been impossible to give them any money. There is also no evidence of a loan. How can a donation be made with invisible funds?

Mr. Kan finally apologized in the Diet on 21 August, though he made sure to attach qualifiers to it first. He was unable to look his questioner in the eye.

In addition to their election activities, Mezasu-kai was also discovered to have spent money lavishly in Ginza nightclubs, Tokyo-area restaurants, and a Naha, Okinawa steakhouse. Lavish in this case is the equivalent of thousands of dollars at a time.

There’s more. Isn’t there always?

The political fund group of former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio also donated JPY 10 million yen to Mezasu-kai, and groups affiliated with six DPJ MPs gave money to the Citizens’ Party. But turnabout is fair play: Mezasu-kai donated JPY 16.9 million to groups affiliated with three Democratic Party members.

The group received JPY 249.6 million yen in all from several DPJ Diet members. One of them was Washio Eiichiro, who served on a special lower house committee for the abduction issue. You guessed it: he claimed his group didn’t know the Mezasu-kai back story, either. Mr. Washio was seen as a “conservative” (whatever that means in the DPJ universe), but Citizens’ Party head Sakai served as his aide for four years. Mr. Washio explained that he was a friend of his father, was introduced to him as a reliable person, and helped with his election campaigns. He said that he felt somewhat betrayed.

What an incurious lot, these Japanese politicians.

It was then revealed in August that the Citizens’ Party had dispatched six people to work as aides for four DPJ diet members to help in election campaigns. They were paid with public funds, which were divvied up into equal shares and distributed to all the party members. Spreading the wealth!

Finally, the Citizens’ Party is registered as a political group that is affiliated with Diet members, in this case four DPJ members.

South Korean money

Kan Naoto was also discovered to have received substantial donations twice from a South Korean national — quite against the law — once in 2006 and once in 2009. These donations came to light on 11 March, the same day as the Tohoku earthquake, so the news was lost to the public consciousness. But prosecutors in Tokyo were sufficiently curious to begin an investigation in May. Mr. Kan later returned the money, but the opposition boycotted an upper house Budget Committee session when he refused to hand over documents on the illegal donations.

The Kan government and North Korea

How did the prime minister’s feelings of solidarity for socialism Korean style translate into actual policy? The record is mixed. In April, still spending most of its time dealing with the Tohoku disaster, the Kan government extended the existing Japanese sanctions on North Korea. Those include the prohibition of imports, luxury exports, and Japanese port calls by North Korean ships. Mr. Kan instructed officials to study the possibility of tougher sanctions if Pyeongyang continued to stonewall the proposal for talks to discuss Japan’s doubts that all the abductees have been returned.

This does not necessarily mean he favored additional penalties or even the ones already in place. He may not know much about the recipients of his political donations, but he knows as well as any other politician the emotional resonance of the issue in Japan.

More in accord with his inner compass was his government’s granting of visas to five members of the North Korean Olympic Committee for meetings of the Olympic Council of Asia in Tokyo in mid-July. It was the first time in five years anyone with a North Korean passport had been allowed to enter Japan. The government explained that the constitution of the OCA, the governing body for sports in the region, calls for the separation of sports and politics.

Apparently the Olympic authorities do not consider North Korean concentration camps to be as reprehensible as the behavior of apartheid-era South Africa, which was prevented from participating in the 1964 Summer Olympics and was expelled from the IOC in 1970.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said they hoped this would lead to improved relations with Japan.

But if any act of the Kan government encapsulates the Kan approach to politics, it was the prime minister’s request of the education ministry to resume its consideration of permitting free schooling for the Chongryon-operated high schools in the country — on the morning of the day the DPJ was to caucus to select his successor. (Chongryon is the General Association of North Korean Residents in Japan.) In other words, one of Kan Naoto’s last acts in office was a political middle finger. One plank of the DPJ election platform was to make high school attendance free for all students. (The Japanese once took seriously the concept of compulsory education ending at age 15 and required tuition for high school.)

This would seem to be in violation of Article 89 of the Japanese constitution that prohibits public expenditures for any educational enterprise not under the control of public authority. The Chongryon schools have their own curriculum, teach the juche philosophy/religion, and have pictures of Kim I and II on the walls. It has not been reported whether they sing the Ten Pledges to start the day, as Mori Taishi did in the Japan Revolutionary Village.

The DPJ was working to implement this part of their manifesto when the North Koreans conducted a rocket attack on a South Korean island in November 2010, so public opinion would not allow them to move further. Mr. Kan said the resumption of the effort was justified because conditions on the peninsula had reverted to those prevailing before the attack. He also said it would be possible to provide the students with money retroactively to April, when the school year starts.

Waking up

Most of the information on the donation to the Mezasu-kai and the connections of the principals was reported by the Sankei Shimbun starting in July. The rest of the print and broadcast media looked the other way in public, even though the revelations caused some sharp questioning in the Diet. That ended on 28 July, when the Yomiuri Shimbun published its first report on the matter.

One day later, a project team was formed in the Diet with members from several parties to investigate the donations. Attending the first meeting was Azuma Shozo — a DPJ Cabinet member who was the deputy minister for handling the abduction issue. Talk began of an intra-party DPJ coup organized by four senior members of the party.

More ominous was that the controversy had started to attract attention in the U.S. and generated concerns about Kan Naoto’s trustworthiness. Better late than never, eh? The American ambassador John Roos even traveled to Niigata at this time to visit the site where the 13-year-old Yokota Megumi was kidnapped by North Korean agents in 1977.

These revelations and the reaction to them seem to have finally budged the intractable Kan. Everyone knows he announced his resignation on 26 August, but few know the exposure of his political associations is the factor that seems to have pushed him into it.

People will be singing Auld Lang Syne at midnight on New Year’s Eve throughout the English-speaking world. The song begins: Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Ask that question in Japan about Kan Naoto, and the answer will be yes. Many people will be taking a cup of kindness, but no one will be toasting him.

Afterwords:

* The Cabinet of Noda Yoshihiko, Mr. Kan’s successor, declined to strengthen economic sanctions against North Korea. For some reason, they think there are prospects for new talks about denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

After taking office, Mr. Noda said he would carefully examine the Kan order to re-examine the benefits for Chongyron schools. That means he isn’t going to quash it and is buying time until emotions subside.

He also appointed Hiraoka Hideo as justice minister. Mr. Hiraoka is a pacifist who attended the 50th anniversary party for Chongyron schools. He supports diplomatic recognition for North Korea, opposed the dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces to deal with the Somalian pirates, and thinks the law is too strict on political donations from foreign countries.

One criticism of Noda Yoshihiko’s behavior as prime minister is that he gives precedence to the party over the national interest. His personal attitude toward the countries on the Korean Peninsula would be at home in the LDP, but his party is populated with so many people who share the ideas of Kan Naoto, Eda Satsuki, Chiba Keiko, and Hiraoka Hideo that he has to take them into account. The perpetual eggshell walk of DPJ leaders to prevent party dissolution is one of the many reasons they are not fit to govern.

* Some of the conversation between Kim Jong-il and the late South Korean President Ro Mu-hyeon at their Pyeongyang summit on 3 October 2007 was revealed by South Korean government sources on the 30th. Ro pressed Kim to take a forward-looking approach to returning South Korean abductees — the North Koreans have plenty of them, too — but Kim rebuffed him. He said:

Even though we went so far as to apologize, Japan attacked us.

In other words, Kim viewed his return of the Japanese abductees as a diplomatic failure, and he wasn’t about to let that happen again. He also alluded to criticism he received from the military when he added:

There are people around me who are known as hardliners.

So the abductions have blown up in everyone’s face, including that of Kim, thought to be the man responsible for them. That alone might say more about the state of governance in North Korea than the opinions of all the pundits put together.

*****
British rocker Peter Frampton saw a documentary on Yokota Megumi and the abductions and was moved to dedicate two songs to her.

Holy mother

MOTHERHOOD is an integral part of the narrative that religions present, whether the mother is the Aztec earth goddess, Mary in the Roman Catholic tradition, or Kim Jong-suk in the religion of Juche. For you unbelievers, Kim Jong-suk was Kim Il-sung’s wife and Kim Jong-il’s sainted mother. Her portrait is placed on walls in the home and worshipped in the same way as those of her husband and son.

Sheela na Gig --- The Maternal

Jong-suk died at the age of 31 while giving birth to a stillborn daughter. She is officially known as “The Heroine of the Anti-Japanese Revolution”, and was given the posthumous title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on 21 September 1972. Even though Jong-suk died while quite young, she is also cited as the founder of the Workers’ Party of Korea auxiliary organizations, the Korean Children’s Union, and the Korean Democratic Women’s Union. Verily, she must have been possessed by the divine spirit.

It’s natural, therefore, for theologians to turn their attention to the mother of Kim Jong-eun, the latest blessed event in that country’s continuing stream of miracles. Her name was Ko Yong-hui, and she died in 2004 after having brought forth Second Son Kim Jong-cheul (AKA The Girly Man) and Kim Jong-eun, who was known in his younger days as the “Morning Star General”. Perhaps his manger was strategically placed as part of Providence’s plan to guide the Wise Men to Pyeongyang.

Ko was one of Kim Jong-il’s mistresses rather than his wife. He had another concubine when they met, but she quickly became his favorite. Shortly before her death, the propagandists got to work and proclaimed her “The Respected Mother who is the Most Faithful and Loyal Subject to the Dear Leader Comrade Supreme Commander”. (It’s good to be king, eh?) They seem to have started the process of elevating her to the Pantheon too, but that project has now ended.

In fact, she’s lately become something of a non-person, despite being a literal non-person for seven years. The North Korean People Urgent Action Network (RENK) a Japan-based NPO, reported on the 23rd that Ko’s name has not appeared in any of the local media reports about her son following the death of The Son earlier this month. The Respected Mother, etc., no longer seems to be worthy of veneration.

That’s probably because she was born in Osaka.

RENK also reports that the mention of her birthplace and place of residence for the first 11 years of her life has been classified top secret, the mere mention of which will result in severe punishment. (RENK thinks that means concentration camps.) Thus, North Korean heretics face the real risk of Hell on Earth, even if the heresy is said to be an open secret in the country.

Juche Tower --- The Paternal

Ko was a member of a zainichi family; i.e., Japanese-born ethnic Koreans who choose to retain Korean citizenship. Her family repatriated when she was 11 under a program that was conducted from 1950 to 1984. She later became a member of a dance troupe that entertained His Holiness, who saw the light after seeing her righteous moves on the dance floor.

RENK speculates this situation might cause problems with Chongryun, the association of North Korean citizens in Japan (some members of which have seats in the North Korean national assembly). Chongryun knows all the facts too, so from the regime’s perspective, they know too much. Will that cause Pyeongyang to place some distance between themselves, despite the financial assistance the group provides? A controversy such as this could cause the Mother of all Schisms.

Here’s the problem: Though her family was ethnically Korean, Ko was born in an unclean place rather than the Pure Land, and the North Koreans are nothing if not purists. Worse, one of the principle tenets of the Church of Juche is that everyone in Japan has cloven hooves and forked tongues. Finally, it doesn’t help that her Korean ancestors were from Jeju Island, which is now part of South Korea. (The location of the family seat is a big deal in Korean culture.)

All of this brings to mind another question: When Kim Jong-eun and his brother Jong-chul visited Japan in 1991, did they swing by Osaka to see their mother’s hometown?

Kim Jong-nam at the Gates of Hell (Kitamura Toshifumi/AFP/Getty Images)

That’s right: Officials in both Japan and South Korea have confirmed that the two brothers entered the country on 12 May 1991 and stayed for 11 days. Kim Jong-eun, then eight years old, was carrying a Brazilian passport in the name of Joseph Park, and he obtained a Japanese visa in Vienna. The Japanese were tipped off that he was in the country illegally and investigated, but he had already left.

They traced a credit card used by an adult member of the traveling party and discovered that one of the places they visited was Tokyo Disneyland. That’s a favorite destination of the Kim brothers — Number One Son Kim Jong-nam was caught with his wife and kids in Tokyo on 1 May 2001 traveling on a Dominican passport. Before their deporation, he told authorities that he was taking the family to see Disneyland. It was later revealed that Jong-nam had been a frequent visitor to Tokyo. Rumor has it that he stayed in the same Shinbashi hotel and that he especially liked the public baths.

Really, Japan and the Disney Corporation should be proud of themselves. Christians make pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Lourdes, Moslems try to visit Mecca at least once in their lifetimes, and the Kim Brothers bowed at the Tokyo shrine of Mickey and Minnie.

And that brings to mind the final question: Did Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-eun feel a special kinship with the Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride when they swung by Fantasyland?

*****
Update: There’s a report now in Japan from two sources, one of whom is a Chongryun official, that a crisis could erupt in North Korea as soon as February. The party and the military are trying to establish Jong-eun’s position, but any unhappiness over the division of spoils could touch off an old-fashioned Joseon dynastic struggle, they say. Battles of this sort between two sons of the king with different mothers are an old story in other parts of the world as well.

These sources suggest that Number One Son Jong-nam (who has gotten fatter since the above picture was taken) is still a factor to be accounted for. The Chongryun source says he is very personable and has maintained ties with people in the party and the military his own age. He goes so far as to say he is even quite popular among this group. The source also notes that he was the heir apparent before he got caught with his proverbial pants down in Japan.

Finally, Jong-nam himself says he urged his father to open the country and adopt reforms, and got exiled for his opinion. There is, say the sources, a reform wing of sorts in North Korea, and it is not out of the question the reformers would unite behind him.

*****
The Sheela na Gig photo was taken by John Harding
*****
The Kims are consecrated boys, every last one of them.

Ichigen koji (85)

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

The North has several problems, but the most serious is the absence of a fixed retirement age for the military. That makes reform of the military impossible.

- Kim Jong-nam, eldest son of Kim Jong-il, from his Macao home. The son seems not to have known of his father’s death until the official announcement. He is said to attribute this to military interference. His name does not appear on the list of the 232 members of the state funeral committee.

If true, this might throw some light on the real nature of the country’s leadership.

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Which way to the helm room?

For (schools) at train stations for studying abroad, it’s Nova. For speeches at train stations, it’s Noda.
- A common political joke about the Japanese prime minister that Mr. Noda uses to promote himself

APPALING crisis management ability has been one of the most frequent charges against Japan’s Democratic Party government since they took office in 2009. The Kan Cabinet’s pharisaic foozling of both the Senkakus Incident and the Tohoku/Fukushima triple disaster in particular are object lessons for the political class that will almost certainly go unheeded.

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko doesn’t seem to have been paying attention.

An outdoor space heater generates hot air at a Japanese train station

At 10:00 a.m. on Monday the 19th, the Korean Central Broadcasting Station in Pyeongyang gave notice there would be a “special broadcast” on both television and radio at noon that day. The same notice was repeated at 10:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., though KCBS did not specify the content of the broadcast.

That caused the Japanese news media to sit up and take notice. NHK issued a report after 11:00 a.m. announcing that a special broadcast from North Korea was forthcoming. (Tokyo and Pyeongyang are in the same time zone.) While not speculating on the content, NHK also noted that advance notice of two hours was given in 1994 on the death of Kim Il-sung, and one-hour notice was provided in 2000 of the broadcast announcing the summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state.

Just before midnight Sunday night, the North Koreans conducted a test-firing of two short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan. Something was most definitely up.

NHK was ready. By chance, I turned on the television at about 12:03 p.m. that day (I looked at the clock first), and NHK was already rebroadcasting the video of the North Korean television announcement. It was obvious from the Korean announcer’s black clothes what had happened.

Despite the warning, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko was not quite ready to deal with the situation. He was in a car on his way to give a speech at the JR Shinbashi train station in Tokyo.

Even though it was clear that something important had happened in North Korea, Mr. Noda got in his official vehicle just before the broadcast began for a sidewalk speech he had scheduled for 12:15 p.m.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu said the prime minister gave instructions before he left to inform him of the broadcast content. An aide contacted him at 12:03 p.m. while he was en route to the station. Even then, Mr. Fujimura had to call again at 12:05 p.m. to ask him to return. He got back at 12:09 p.m. and convened a meeting of the Japanese version of the National Security Council at 1:00 p.m.

Absent from the meeting was Yamaoka Kenji, the upper house-censured chairman of the National Public Safety Commission and the minister responsible for handling the North Korean abductee issue. He was out of town on “business related to the Diet”, and didn’t make it back in time. This is becoming something of a habit for the DPJ NPSC chairs. One of his predecessors in the Kan Cabinet, Okazaki Tomiko, lasted just four months on the job because she didn’t bother to show up for work after the North Koreans shelled a South Korean island last year. (Ms. Okazaki is best known for having participated in an anti-Japanese demonstration in Seoul as a Diet member.)

Said LDP Vice President Oshima Tadamori:

That (the prime minister) left to give a speech while knowing there would be an important announcement is a truly regrettable (act) for a leader. Mr. Yamaoka’s (absence) is also a grave matter.

Added New Komeito head Yamaguchi Natsuo:

I doubt they were prepared for any change in the situation.

For its part, the DPJ was full of its usual fatuous self-congratulation. Boasted Acting Secretary-General Tarutoko Shinji:

We responded faster than any other nation.

Mr. Noda himself seemed to sense that he had blundered, and ignored questions from the news media about the criticism. An unidentified government official told Kyodo:

It is a fact that they did not gather information on the premise that something serious could have happened.

And what about the content of the sidewalk speech that Mr. Noda thought took precedence over important breaking news from North Korea about 12 hours after two missile tests? He was going to explain in public the necessity for a consumption tax increase and tying it to social welfare programs. After the end of the extraordinary Diet session, he had told aides, “I want to create situations in which I can directly promote the policies to the people.”

At least we now know where the prime minister’s priorities lie.

Mr. Noda’s singular claim to public recognition before becoming a Cabinet member was his practice of giving speeches at the Funabashi, Chiba, train station in his district every morning for 24 years. He ended the speeches when he became “finance minister” last year. Perhaps he was looking forward to this one: it was to be his first outdoor speech since becoming prime minister.

It was unsurprising that neither the lighter-than-air Hatoyama Yukio nor the less-than-sober Kan Naoto were capable of handling their duties without walking face first into a wall. Noda Yoshihiko, however, is the son of a member of the Ground Self-Defense Forces No. 1 Airborne Brigade, consisting of elite paratroopers. If any politico should understand the importance of being at one’s duty station in a potential emergency — especially when there is advance notice — it is Mr. Noda.

When Hillary Rodham Clinton ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary, she claimed she would be the more reliable choice if the president received an emergency 3:00 a.m. phone call. Meanwhile, the DPJ prime minister can’t be bothered to watch a noon television broadcast when he knows it’s coming.

Some Western observers give a pass to the DPJ because they are novices at this head-of-government business. While that assessment is nominally true, it is also fundamentally incorrect.

This is what they are.

*****
Afterwords:

* Nova was the largest private English school company in Japan until it went broke in 2007.

* Somebody needs to tell the crew in Tokyo that Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman.

Altered states

The divertissement du jour among Westerners who follow the news is their fascination with the public grief demonstrated by the North Koreans on the news of the death of Kim II.

There are several reasons for their interest, and perhaps the most immediate is the surprise at suffering people shedding tears for the monster responsible for their suffering.

Another is that most Westerners are unaware the Koreans tend to be more demonstrative in certain situations than other people. For example, here are some excerpts from a scholarly paper on the Korean concept of han. The first is a quote from another work translated by the author of that work into English, so make some allowances:

The Koreans are a people strong emotional side. They are especially apt in expressing the emotion of sadness. Koreans cry not only when they are sad, but when they are ill or shocked by something impossible to put down in words.

The author continues:

Koreans interpret frequent crying as a positive sign of being ‘compassionate’. Many people are seen wailing in funerals and even birthdays and weddings, where professional wailing-woman or a female shaman is called to cry during the ceremony.

Also:

The social taboo on crying is less emphasized in Korea than is in other cultures. Despite being a nation strongly affected by Confucian beliefs, which emphasizes that a man should not cry, Korea does not regard men crying itself as a shameful activity. Rather, it emphasizes that men should only cry for sacred subjects such as their elders or their motherland, and that in such cases, the crying is an act of honour and fidelity, not an act of weakness. Putting restrictions on the emotional expression of males has in turn affected that of females in Korean culture. Being an emotive, tearful nation and putting limits on men crying at the same time has made the act of women crying a mandatory procedure in certain situations (20). Ethnological analysis has shown that during funerals and annual sacrificial rites (a Korean tradition that honours the dead of the family), the cries of the men are short and formal, while the women wail louder, longer and without any reservations. Males have to shed reserved tears, especially when they are not closely related or unrelated to the deceased. However, women are not bound by such limits and can cry openly for distant relatives or even strangers. Such acts are even appreciated by the families of the deceased, who believe that having women cry with them assists the funeral procedure. (21)

In folk culture and traditions of shamanism, the role of wailing women are crucial in many rites and ceremonies. The wailing ritual, called goot in Korean, is a performance consisting of crying and wailing that serves diverse purposes from driving away evil spirits, honouring the dead, and providing entertainment to the public…The main characteristic of goot has been its portrayal of the emotion of Han artistically. It holds significance in that in a goot, the act of crying transcends that of a personal feeling of grief but a publicly shared emotion initiated by the wailing women. The act of crying and the essence of Han has thus become a cultural symbol as well as holding individual significance.

Finally, taking all the responses as a whole, there is the unmistakable whiff of an attitude of cultural superiority as they watch others make a spectacle out of themselves. Civilized people are more seemly in their grief. There’s quite a lot of that sort of thing on the Web these days, by the way — couched in intellectualism and scientific detachment, of course.

Some are even debating the sincerity of the tears. Based on his experience and knowledge of China, John Derbyshire asserts:

More often than not, those North Korean tears are real.

Other people aren’t so sure. We’ve already seen that Joshua Stanton at One Free Korea thinks Kim was generally despised by his people. Another doubter is Oshima Shinzo, the editor of the monthly Seiron magazine. Here’s a post from his blog on Tuesday.

*****
The strongest impression I get from the news reports of Kim Jong-il’s sudden death on television and the newspapers is the unexpected calmness of the North Korean public.

When I opened the morning papers, I saw the headlines in the Asahi (“The Citizens Weep”), and the Nikkei (“Sobbing on the News of the Death”). The Sankei captioned a photo taken in Pyeongyang, “Citizens Break Down in Tears”.

But, for example, only a few people were weeping in the Reuters photograph the Asahi ran of workers in the Pyeongyang electric wire factory — even though the caption said they were all crying at the news.

On television, I saw the camera pursue people who were crying as they walked. One could almost feel a sense of something like desperation on the part of the cameraman, due to the scarcity of the scenes he was looking for.

None of the media conveyed the coldness of the North Korean people’s emotions, however. The media person will make the stereotypical assumption that the northerners would weep and sob at a time such as this.

Kim Il-sung died suddenly at 2:00 a.m. on 8 July 1994. When his death was announced at noon on the ninth, the entire country was engulfed by true weeping and sobbing. Of course a few were faking it, but for most of them, those were real tears.

Lee Dong-il, the editor/translator of North Korean History Textbooks, wrote: “When we come in contact with news so sad it is as if heaven will collapse, we shed tears of blood, weep and wail in a loud voice, and thrash about.” Even if the part about tears of blood is an exaggeration, scenes very similar to this were in fact seen throughout the country (at the elder Kim’s death).

I’m sure many people still remember the reports from print and broadcast media throughout the world of the scenes of people crying and shouting at the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansudae in the center of Pyeongyang.

Perhaps the North Korean media will make a point of showing scenes of weeping and sobbing people now, but I suspect they will be dramatizations.

We should recognize that the feelings of the North Korean people toward Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are as different as heaven and earth.

(End translation)

Afterwords:

* Another matter of interest is that some of the same people who are sharp to spot the mass media’s tendency to wildly exaggerate the size, extent, and enthusiasm of certain events, such as demonstrations (particularly the broadcast media), are so accepting and unsuspicious at other times.

* From the paper on han:

Even today, crying at funerals is a taboo for the Japanese. (16)

There’s been crying at every one of the several Japanese funerals I’ve attended. It was subdued for the most part, but quite intense at one or two of them.

Just because it’s footnoted in an academic paper doesn’t make it a fact.

*****
From one altered state to another

The Pyeongyang Amen Corner should be able to get off on Prince Jazzbo’s first line:

“It shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and who do have no teeth the gums will feel it.”

Ichigen koji (82)

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

No one can see what is actually going on in North Korea and the whole world is watching it.

- Kawakami Takashi, Takushoku University professor specializing in security issues, American politics, and the Japan-U.S. relationship

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Instructive

IT’s instructive to compare the Chinese print media’s response to the deaths of both Kim Jong-il and Vaclav Havel.

Poster Marc at the site One Free Korea provides the links to the China Daily’s obituaries of Kim and of Havel.

I also recommend reading Joshua Stanton’s post on Kim’s death at One Free Korea. The views of someone who pays close attention are more instructive than the generic drive-bys in the Western media.

For all the wailing in public, Mr. Stanton thinks that North Koreans generally despised him, and hold his son in even less regard. He writes:

Kim Jong Il had spent the decades before his father’s death cultivating relationships with his father’s generals. Now look at Jong-Eun’s eyes. There is cruelty and arrogance in them, but it’s the fear I see. That’s the sort of face a suburban sex offender wears to the exercise yard at Pelican Bay. No matter how many icons of him are placed in living rooms, classrooms, or lapel pins, he will spend the rest of his life stepping warily within a nest of vipers. The real power will stay with Kim Jong Il’s old comrades and relatives: Kim Young Il; Jang Song-Thaek, whose portfolio includes North Korea’s political prison camps; General Ri Yong-Ho; General O Kuk-Ryol, whose family controls the counterfeiting rackets; and Kim Jong Il’s sister (and Jang’s wife) Kim Kyong-Hui, who is said to have pushed hard for North Korea’s disastrous currency redenomination and confiscation last year. As a partial consequence of that, refugees report finding the night’s toll of the dead lying around the train stations each morning. That is why any hopes that this transition is a harbinger of reforms are probably false. The state isn’t interested in reform, and Kim Jong-Eun’s coronation won’t change that, because it is a sham. But that doesn’t mean that the regime can stop change forever.

Also:

Psychologically, so much has changed in North Korea. The regime was not really ready for this day. Its deification of Kim Jong-Eun has been uncharacteristically halting, even timid. The regime understands how volatile a moment this is. The Daily NK reports that it has closed its border with China, closed all markets, imposed a near-curfew, and filled the streets of at least one city with armed soldiers. This is not the reaction of a state that expects its subjects to erupt in spontaneous grief.

More videos on the public reaction from this North Korean site; you’ll still be able to figure it out if you can’t read Korean.

Observes Mr. Stanton: “Faking or not? In such a place as North Korea, it can’t be hard to find reasons to cry real tears.”

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Vale of tears

I saw a lot of those people over there…they were thin, and riding on bicycles instead of driving in cars, but I didn’t see any brutality.
- Ted Turner

WHETHER or not you believe that life where you live it is a vale of tears, an expression that originated in the Catholic hymn Salve Regina, that’s exactly what it is in North Korea.

The actress who reads the scripted news for North Korean television choked back her tears as she informed the nation at noon today that the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, had died on Saturday. Reports from foreigners in Pyeongyang say the staff of the Hotel Koryo was weeping. According to this story, people are not allowed to go outside — the entire nation under preventive detention? — and the sounds of lamentation can be heard on the street. The Chinese government extended its deep condolences to the nation.

Some people were brought to their knees.

Why?

In 2005, Shin successfully escaped the prison camp where he was born, raised and repeatedly tortured…Children were beaten to death in front of others for stealing five grains of wheat out of hunger. Girls were raped and protesting mothers disappeared. He witnessed his own mother offering sex to guards. Teenagers were buried under cement while being forced to build power plants. Shin’s middle-finger knuckle was cut off as punishment for dropping a sewing machine. And he watched the public executions of his mother and brother after their failed escape.

But for Shin, that was the way it was. “I didn’t think the world I lived in was wrong. I was born to it,” he said.

Meanwhile, at #117, the North Korean GDP is lower than that of Lebanon or Burma, and the countries below it on the table are mostly small island nations. (Exceptions are Cuba and the Dominican Republic, which rank higher.) In contrast, South Korea ranks 12th. That contrast is even more pronounced when one knows that the Japanese concentrated heavy industry in the north and agriculture in the south during the early part of the 20th century, giving the North an economic advantage it maintained for quite some time after the Korean War.

In fact:

North Korea’s per capita income is less than 5% of the South’s. Each year the dollar value of South Korea’s GDP expansion equals the entire North Korean economy.

This probably doesn’t incorporate the earnings from their nuclear weapons technology and trade with Pakistan and Iran, however.

The man most responsible for turning his country into a vale of tears has left it. Let’s hope that turns out to be a Christmas miracle.

*****
Some people seem to have been allowed outside. The young man in what might be a school uniform at the 17-second mark says aboji, which means father.

That’s some serious cult-like behavior. Or else…

The source said people were afraid in case they did not show enough zealotry in their mourning, recalling punishments meted out to some after Kim Il-Sung’s death 17 years ago.

A cult of oligarchy, at any rate.

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Kidz Я the Cabinet

IGNORANCE of the law is no excuse, say the authorities, in their perpetual search for new handholds by which to seize us by the scruff of the neck and keep us docile and lowing.

If the authorities have it right, there’s no excuse for the presence in the Cabinet of Azumi Jun, the Boy Finance Minister who’s extended to three the DPJ string of finance ministers that know squat about finance and even less of the law. Then again, Kan Naoto and Noda Yoshihiko, numbers one and two in the sequence, used the position as a steppingstone to the premiership despite their comradeship in the blind mice brotherhood. There might be hope for Master Azumi yet. After all, his only job experience before becoming a national legislator was as an NHK newscaster, and he’s never held a major Cabinet post until now. Thus, his one marketable skill is the ability to read without stumbling over someone else’s script on camera or in public. What other qualification is there for serving as a politician these days?

It was Mr. Azumi’s turn to flunk the test during Question Time in the upper house of the Diet on the 15th. Kawakami Yoshihiro, a fellow traveler in the Democratic Party, was ragging on the Bank of Japan and their monetary policy due to the presence in that chamber of the bank’s Deputy Gov. Yamaguchi Hirohide. Pressing Mr. Yamaguchi on what he considered to be an insufficient money supply, Mr. Kawakami fumed, “The Bank of Japan is hindering the Democratic Party.”

Azumi the Lad quickly stepped up to their defense and explained:

Under the Bank of Japan Law, we cannot disregard (the objectives) of price stabilization and increasing the value of the currency. It is an important requirement to conduct monetary easing to the extent possible in that context.

It would seem that he is under the impression monetary easing is something central bankers are supposed to be in the habit of. He’s also confused about the provisions of the law regarding the Bank of Japan’s activities.

Article 1.1: The objectives of the Bank of Japan…are to issue banknotes and carry out currency and monetary adjustments.

Article 1.2: In addition to the provisions of the foregoing item, the Bank of Japan shall contribute to the maintenance of trust and order.

Article 2: When conducting currency and monetary adjustments, the Bank of Japan shall contribute to the sound development of the national currency through price stability.

There’s no mention anywhere in the law of “increasing the currency’s value”, so his answer raises the question of where he came up with that idea.

There’s only one possibility. His knowledge of fiscal and monetary matters before Mr. Noda thought he was just the man to be finance minister was no greater than the average convenience store clerk, and that means he requires tutoring by Finance Ministry bureaucrats. They’re only too glad to help. That allows them another handhold to seize fiscal policy by the scruff of the neck. Besides, how could he convincingly read his script without special instruction? (Kan Naoto made a point of getting up earlier than usual to make his 8:00 a.m. briefings.)

Thus, Mr. Azumi’s only source of information is his ministry minders. QED, they have convinced him a strong yen is a Good Thing. Japan’s major exporting companies are groaning from their yoga contortions to deal with the havoc the high yen has caused, but the Finance Ministry seems to think it’s copacetic. The limited monetary easing during the Koizumi administration was a factor in helping the economy recover, according to some observers, and the average rate then was 116 to the dollar. Yes, so much better for the nation at the mid-70 level, isn’t it?

But more to the point is that the two elements of the Azumi Definition of the BOJ role —- price stabilization and increasing the value of the yen — are incompatible. Under the purchasing power parity theory, if there is price stability in all the advanced industrialized countries with, for example, a 2% annual rate of increase, the currency would also stabilize and could not increase in value relative to the others.

While we’re on the topic of what Mr. Azumi doesn’t know, it was apparent from his response to an Eda Kenji question in the lower house on the 9th that his education hadn’t progressed to an explanation of credit default swaps yet.

That would be ever so helpful for a finance minister to understand. If any of the European sovereign debt falls, the American financial institutions that issued swaps against the debt —- you know, like Goldman Sachs — will be liable for gadzillions of dollars they don’t have, even after Mr. Obama bailed out his campaign financiers. That would put the U.S. financial system at risk of default.

The swaps are also important in Europe, too. Or at least they used to be.

But perhaps the biggest sin of the lot was effectively to render all credit default swaps (a form of insurance against default) on sovereign debt essentially worthless, or void, by making the Greek default “voluntary”.

This has made it impossible to hedge against eurozone sovereign debt purchases, and thereby destroyed the market. Worse, it’s made investors believe that the euro cannot be trusted, that it’ll repeatedly find ways of reneging on contract. That’s the point of no return. This is no longer a serious currency.

So, we’ve got the combination of people openly talking about the extinction of the Euro as a currency, other people openly talking about a global economic crisis worse than that of 2008, still others who think the collapse of the massive Chinese real estate bubble is underway, and Japan’s finances under the nominal stewardship of Azumi Jun.

Isn’t that just ducky?

*****
An interesting theory was floated recently about all the pratfalls Japan’s “finance ministers” take on the Diet floor during Question Time. When Kan Naoto appeared before the Diet after his appointment as finance minister, it was obvious that knowledge of the multiplier effect was not part of his résumé. (Meanwhile, it was just at this time the English language media of the West was touting him as a “fiscal hawk”.)

Mr. Kan too was given daily instruction by the Finance Ministry bureaucrats. The story goes that he had trouble grasping the concept of the multiplier effect during his briefings. (That’s understandable; a lot of concepts can be slippery that early in morning if you’re nursing a hangover.) The LDP Diet member who asked the question that tripped Mr. Kan up is said to have close ties with ministry bureaucrats. Some people suspect that the ministry deliberately tipped off the questioner about the lacuna in Mr. Kan’s knowledge to make him look bad.

But why would they so blatantly humiliate a politician with whom they were working? The answer is that it was an object lesson to Kan Naoto in particular and all politicians in general. He had to have known the ministry deliberately handed a weapon to the political opposition to knife him in public. Unless he was forever after their humble and obedient servant, the ministry would find other ways to make life even more unpleasant for him…

Recall that the ministry has jurisdiction over the National Tax Agency. Was it coincidental that the tax problems of Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichiro came to light just two or three months after the DPJ formed a government in 2009 which promised to keep the bureaucrats from meddling in national governance? (Let’s assume for the moment they were serious about that promise, dodgy though the assumption may be.) Mr. Hatoyama had to pay the equivalent of $US six million in back taxes and penalties. The case against Ozawa the Real Estate Tycoon, who pulled the equivalent of roughly $US four million out of his safe at home in cash to give an aide so his political funds committee could buy some property, is still to be resolved.

*****
And we can’t end without a mention of Kawakami Yoshihiro, yet another rare bird in the DPJ aviary. Did you notice from his question that he thinks the Bank of Japan is supposed to conduct itself as an arm of the Democratic Party government?

His background makes for entertaining reading. Originally an LDP lower house member, he was one of the MPs that Koizumi Jun’ichiro tossed from the party for opposing the Japan Post privatization. He later joined the opposition DPJ and won election to the upper house in 2007, two years later.

One of his pet causes is the integration of the residents of Chinese and Korean nationality into Japanese society. In fact, according to a 2010 interview with China’s Global Times newspaper, he favors the common administration (共同統治) of Japan with the Chinese and Korean permanent residents, who should be given full political rights. He also advocates closer ties to North Korea and thinks Mr. Koizumi’s two visits while prime minister should have resolved all the problems with that country. He’s been quoted as saying that it’s strange Japan doesn’t support (支援) North Korea.

Strange is in the eye of the beholder, it would seem. That a man with his background and incongruous combination of beliefs actually sits in the Diet, sponsored by the ruling party, is strange in itself.

****
Ben and Jun got them Young Boy Blues.