For the record

THIS PREVIOUS POST on the Japan’s ruling coalition contains a purported exchange between Fukushima Mizuho, the head of the junior partner Social Democrats, and Tahara Soichiro, host of the television program Asa Made (Until Morning). During the exchange, Ms. Fukushima insisted that police should let dangerous criminals escape rather than take any action that would cause injury when trying to apprehend them.

This excerpt is so easy to find on the Japanese-language turf of the Internet that some have described it as “famous”. Just this weekend, however, I discovered that the dialogue might be bogus, which would make it a Japanese urban legend. One blogger/author has been trying to find the original record of the program and cannot do so. Neither can the Asahi TV network, on which the program appeared.

It is perhaps Ms. Fukushima’s radical background, combined with a tendency to fire off comments that are intemperate, loopy, or both, that make it easy to believe she might have said something that dangerous and silly. But too many people are already involved in the nonsense of tarring others with fabricated quotes, so we don’t need to contribute to it here.

On the other hand, her exchange with then-Foreign Minister Nakasone and then-Defense Minister Hamada in the Diet about intercepting a North Korean missile cited in that same post is on the legit. She’s also been known to compare missile defense to hitting a bullet fired from a pistol with a bullet fired from another pistol.

Ms. Fukushima, the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, Social Affairs, and Gender Equality, has also left a record in print about matters now under her jurisdiction. Specifically, she is responsible for government efforts to deal with Japan’s low birthrate, yet she is also opposed to the “family system”. For example, in her book Kekkon ha Bakuchi De Aru (Marriage is a Gamble), she writes:

“When a child turns 18, I think we should hold a ‘Family Liberation Ceremony’”.

In Fukushima Mizuho no Rakudai Kosodate Noto (Fukushima Mizuho’s Notes from Her Child-Rearing Failure), she adds:

“When children turn 18, I want to tell them, ‘Do as you please’. Start from scratch and think about how to live your own life without interference from anyone else 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. I want to do the same thing myself. In my case, I want to be liberated from having to make them meals and trying to come up with something for them to do on their days off. Banzai!”

In other words, the DPJ-led Government has put in charge of promoting the creation of families a person who dislikes parenthood and thinks children should be given the boot from the family circle as soon as it’s legally possible to do so.

Wait, it gets better.

On her Japanese language blog, she wrote the following on 3 April this year:

“Today’s social structure compels an environment that is heartless toward young people. They are thrown into a society in which the different safety nets have become withered, including government, the family, the community, and the company. Young people are being made to bear the burden when there is no (political) vision for what do after the economic crisis.”

So out of one side of her mouth she shouts a lusty Banzai for kicking the kids out the door at age 18, while out of the other she laments that the family has become weakened as a social safety net.

There’s nothing very mystifying or complicated about all this. Ms. Fukushima comes from the anti-life segment of the Left whose objective is to establish state control over all aspects of the citizens’ behavior, and to be one of those whose hands are on the levers of control. It doesn’t make any difference whether the issue is national defense, a low birthrate, or lichee import quotas. Politicians of a similar breed can be found throughout the West, and have even gained a temporary ascendancy in the United States. She, and they, will say or do anything as a temporary expedient to achieve that objective.

People are making up false quotes and attributing them to her? It’s unfair, but that’s been known to happen to people in the political arena who take stands that many dislike.

In the long run, however, it won’t make much difference. She has an extensive record of bona fide statements that are enough to legitimately brand her as a fringe thinker representing the negative fringe element.

The real problem is that Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio doesn’t see it that way.

You decide!

No one from the private sector will accept the position as president of Japan Post (if President Nishikawa is forced out). After President Nishikawa steps down, it is very likely that his replacement will be either someone who was a career bureaucrat, or someone from the private sector who will compromise with the bureaucracy
- Takenaka Heizo, in the September issue of Voice

THERE WERE SEVERAL REASONS why it was important to privatize Japan Post. First, there is no need for the government of an advanced, developed nation to operate a banking system, an insurance system, and a postal system, much less in competition with that nation’s private sector.

In addition, the funds in the banking and insurance system were controlled by Japan’s Finance Ministry, the bureaucratic entity most likely to arrogate a political role for itself. By law, these funds can only be invested in government bonds. Those investments were the lifeblood of the Iron Triangle of big business, bureaucracy, and government (i.e., the Diet) that ran Japan Inc. That was the source of funds for all the corruption and the Bridges to Nowhere.

The privatization of Japan Post was the most important such step since the Japan National Railway was broken up into regional private sector companies during the Nakasone Administration. Former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro dissolved the lower house of the Diet and held a special election specifically to take this issue to the people in 2005. The result was the second-largest majority for the governing party in postwar history. In fact, it was a supermajority that allowed the Government to override any defeats in the upper house. Mr. Koizumi’s support when he left office stood at 70%.

The terminally clueless mudboat wing of his party squandered this advantage, however, and in the following election, in August this year, the opposition DPJ nearly reversed those numbers in the lower house. It was clear that the electorate rejected the LDP because it had turned its back on reforms and minimizing the political influence of the bureaucracy. They wanted the DPJ to continue those reforms.

After little more than a month in office, we can now take it as given that the DPJ is, from several perspectives, a party of charlatans. While some members are just as earnest in their desire for reform as the Koizumians, the party itself is controlled by people for whom power is the real objective. Policy is just something that can be replastered to suit the times, in the words of their political puppeteer Ozawa Ichiro.

The intent of the DPJ has been obvious ever since they formed an alliance with the People’s New Party, which consists solely of reactionaries whose only objective was to reverse Japan Post’s privatization.

Any remaining credibility the DPJ had as serious reformers ended yesterday when Saito Jiro was appointed the new head of Japan Post. As Mr. Takenaka predicted, his background is in the bureaucracy. But not just any ministry—it was the Finance Ministry itself, the Big Swinging Dick of Kasumigaseki. And he was not just any bureaucrat. The Asahi referred to him as “the Don of the bureaucratic alumni”. Mr. Saito once held the position of administrative vice-minister of the Finance Ministry.

That was the same position once held by Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio’s father, Iichiro.

Mr. Saito comes with the added advantage of having had close ties to Ozawa Ichiro since the latter last pulled the strings of the Hosokawa Administration 15 years ago. He was selected by PNP head Kamei Shizuka, who, like all men of low cunning, seems to have been too clever by half.

If nothing else, the selection will give the new government an early lesson in damage control—if it survives the damage. Japanese author, university professor, commentator, and blogger Ikeda Nobuo thinks it’s possible the Cabinet might fall before the Diet is convened, but of course that remains to be seen. A Google news search in Japanese shows there are already more than 500 articles on Mr. Saito’s selection. Every major Japanese newspaper has slammed the pick.

Prime Minister Hatoyama thought it was wonderful, however. He said:

“It’s a very good (selection). A very interesting personnel (choice).”

He seems not to have been intentionally ironical.

Mr. Hatoyama also defended the choice by saying that Mr. Saito had left the bureaucracy 14 years ago. He did not, however, refer to his party’s opposition to Muto Toshiro as the head of the Bank of Japan because of his ties to the Finance Ministry. Mr. Muto had left the bureaucracy only eight years before that.

Referring to that apparent contradiction, Chief Cabinet Minister Hirano Hirofumi said:

“I think any comparison between the two is a little different.”

When pressed by reporters to explain why, he answered,

“I think it’s different. That’s my awareness.”

Fukushima Mizuho, the head of the Social Democratic Party of Japan, a coalition partner, said:

“It was a compromise choice. Rather than whether he was a former bureaucrat, I think they emphasized policy”.

Everyone listening to this statement knew that Ms. Fukushima would have wet her pants in public had the LDP made the same selection.

As usual, the most penetrating observation came from Takenaka Heizo, the man who was more responsible than any for launching Japan Post on the road to full privatization:

(The Hatoyama Cabinet) says it wants to eradicate amakudari (cushy post-retirement jobs in government for retired senior civil servants), but in truth, this is just watari (the repeated hiring of former bureaucrats) under the leadership of the politicians…The idea that they are disassociating themselves from a reliance on the bureaucracy is a falsehood…It is the de facto renationalization of Japan Post”

You get the idea.

I could go on, but as it turns out, I’m going to be away for the weekend and won’t be back until Monday.

Until then, you can take part in the first Ampontan poll, which is shown below. Don’t hesitate to get clicky and make your voice heard. Every vote counts!

See you next week!

Perverting the popular will

THE CONTINUING TURMOIL within the Cabinet of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party over the funding sources for their campaign pledge to provide annual subsidies to families with children threatens to confirm the electorate’s worst pre-election fears about the party. Those fears included:

1. A lack of competence in governance
2. The absence of party unity
3. An inability to keep their word
4. Giving priority to political crises over policy
5. Their true intentions

The DPJ translated their platform into English and placed it on their website, which is linked on the right sidebar. Here’s what it says about the child allowance:

“We will pay a child allowance of JPY 312,000 per annum (about $US 3,450) for all children until they finish junior high school.”

According to their platform, this will require an outlay of JPY 5.5 trillion annually. Critics both outside and in the party have insisted for more than a year they wouldn’t be able to fund the plank in the manner they propose. (Some said they could only come up with half of it that way, and only for the first year.) Now the new Government is admitting what everyone else had known all along.

L-R: Hatoyama, Kumagai, Hirano

Bedlam erupted when some in the Cabinet suggested that local governments and private-sector businesses be made to foot part of the bill. Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro objected that this contradicted their platform promises and would require holding a new election to gain public support.

Those who would make local governments and businesses pay tried to justify their proposal by claiming that the party platform did not specifically state that the national government would be liable for all expenses.

One of them, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi, said this at a press conference on the 19th:

“The choice of cooperation from local government is possible.”

Note the use of the word cooperation as a euphemism for coercion. Note also that the stratagem itself is the essence of duplicity.

Responded Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio during a speech on the 20th in Yokohama:

“’Local government liability’ is not what I have in mind…Of course the national government will bear the full liability. The nation’s finances are very tight, so the Finance Ministry had the idea of having local government be partially liable. That’s too cold-hearted. I will definitely build a consensus in this direction (i.e., national government) as the prime minister.”

Note that Mr. Hatoyama tries to shift the blame on the Finance Ministry, the most powerful of the bureaucracies and the primary offender among those in Kasumigaseki that would usurp political authority.

But if the Finance Ministry hasn’t changed its ways, why has the new government outsourced the compilation of the new budget to them, as this otherwise fawning editorial from the Mainichi suggests? The DPJ also promised in their platform to make sure politicians handled these matters in the future.

At a press conference that same evening, Mr. Hirano retorted:

“The (prime minister’s) statement carries weight, but we must decide on a specific proposal that includes the prime minister’s opinion.”

Just who’s in charge around here? Are we to believe the prime minister does not set the policy for his own Government? That he has to spend the time to create a consensus for an issue that no one thought existed two weeks ago? Why is the Chief Cabinet Secretary contradicting the prime minister–his boss–within a matter of hours?

For another example of the inscrutability of Japanese politics, Mr. Hirano was selected because he was considered a Hatoyama ally and confidante.

This brought an immediate response from Mr. Haraguchi:

“Once the national government makes a decision, the automatic assumption that local governments should also bear financial liability calls into question our qualifications to promote devolution and reform.”

Mr. Haraguchi is taking an admirable stand on principle, and he’s right to tie the financing issue to the platform promises of greater regional autonomy.

Unless they’re going to try to weasel out of that promise, too.

As inevitable as death, taxes, and duplicitous politicos was the explosive response from Osaka Prefecture Gov. Hashimoto Toru. The wildly popular Mr. Hashimoto was the most prominent of the nation’s governors who spent the spring and summer preaching the gospel of the decentralization of the national government, the devolution of authority, and the end to unfunded mandates. He’s already declared that his prefecture would no longer pay the personnel expenditures for those national civil servants working in Osaka.

The DPJ had to have known he would be livid. Several members of the party’s leadership visited Osaka during the summer specifically to win his endorsement. The party even humiliated itself by retracting and amending its platform after a highly publicized presentation because the governor thought it wasn’t tough enough on the issue of devolution.

Here’s what Mr. Hashimoto said:

“It’s dictatorial politics for the DPJ to arbitrarily decide something and then tell the regions to put up the money. It’s a Communist state. (The use of the expression) ‘Local authority’ (in their platform) was a disguise.”

After the party’s landslide victory at the end of August, some members now apparently assume they can dispense with Mr. Hashimoto and other local reformers and do as they please. Then again, it’s not as if the DPJ was fond of the governor to begin with. The photo above shows Mr. Hatoyama and Mr. Hirano with Kumagai Sadatoshi, the candidate they endorsed in the Osaka election that Mr. Hashimoto won.

A sign of what’s to come?

Will the party continue to come up with excuses to do as it likes regardless of the popular will? There already have been some troubling signs.

Here’s Health, Labor, and Welfare Minister Nagatsuma Akira speaking to ministry employees on 17 September:

“The party platform (contains) our orders from the people.”

And Education Minister Kawabata Tatsuo speaking to his employees the same day:

“The party platform is not a promise. It is something that has weight, instructions that the people said we must carry out. The people have mandated that I implement it as quickly as possible.”

This is, of course, arrant nonsense. The DPJ is in power because they are not the LDP, and for no other reason. Most voters didn’t bother to read their platform, and few could even say what’s in it other than the two or three planks most commonly discussed on television.

Then again, the party didn’t make all of it easy to read either, as a look at the printed version makes clear. They put all the grass for the goats in large print and color up front. Then, starting on page 16, in print small enough for an insurance policy, they advance a different agenda. For example:

“Establish an institution for the relief of the infringement of human rights, and ratify the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”

That protocol gives individuals the right to complain to a UN body after they’ve exhausted legal procedures in their home country;. i.e., they can’t win their case. It is designed to address individual violations of human rights in the more benighted parts of the world of which Japan is not a part. To cite one example, South Africa in the apartheid era made all its civil servants speak to citizens in Afrikaans only. An appeal based on the use of that protocol ended that policy.

It should go without saying that Japan has no problems of the sort. Unless, of course, one thinks that private sector public baths banning foreigners in some Hokkaido towns after drunken Russian sailors urinated in the shared tubs constitutes an infringement of human rights requiring UN attention. The objective of the leftist elements in the DPJ is to enable the creation of a cottage industry of rights hustlers similar to the shakedown operations run by Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and others in the U.S.

Other countries that have not signed the Optional Protocol include the United States, Great Britain, India, and China.

Also lurking in the fine print is a proposal to provide public support to non-profit organizations. Gee, do we have to ask who the beneficiaries of that one will be?

Does anyone really think it is the people’s mandate for these parts of the platform to be implemented as quickly as possible? A better question would be whether as many as 1% of the electorate has even heard of those planks.

Bait and switch, deceit, and a manifesto that contains stealth provisions and disposable policies–those weren’t part of the people’s mandate either.

Bait and switch

NOW THAT the Japanese electorate has unwittingly jumped from the frying pan into the fire by selecting the country’s Democratic Party to lead a government, people are starting to get scorched. Everyone knew before the election that the DPJ’s principal talents were obstructionism and harangues more suited for postgraduate seminars and smoky union halls than a legislature, but people held their noses and voted for them anyway. Entropy had finally had its way with the Liberal Democratic Party, and that party’s mudboat wing stepped up to the challenge by committing the de facto equivalent of hara-kiri.

By trying to implement a platform whose individual provisions never polled all that well and won’t work well at all, the new government is making manifest its shallowness, petit authoritarianism, and disregard of anything outside its self-interest.

From the Mainichi Shimbun

The vernacular edition of the newspaper carried a story that described a chilly conversation last week between Sengoku Yoshito, the Minister of State for Administrative Reform, and Nagatsuma Akira, the Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare.

Mr. Sengoku initiated the conversation about the JPY 12.4 billion-program for one-time payments of JPY 36,000 to parents of children aged 3-5. That program was started by the Aso Administration at the behest of its New Komeito coalition partners. The payments were supposed to have been made by the end of the year.

The Mainichi quoted Mr. Sengoku as telling Mr. Nagatsuma:

“The special child support allowance was begun by New Komeito, so it has to be cut”.

He also said this was a “Cabinet decision”, though why Mr. Nagatsuma—a Cabinet member—was not present when the decision was made was not explained.

The program was a likely candidate for the axe anyway, because it was adopted to please the former government’s junior coalition partner and to deflect attention from the DPJ’s more extensive child subsidy proposal before the election. That alone doesn’t explain the antagonism, however.

What does? Despite sharing a similar political outlook, the DPJ has shown no interest in bringing New Komeito into their ruling coalition. Indeed, they’ve gone out of their way to harass them in the Diet. They’d rather try to reconcile the irreconcilable paleo-old guard of the PNP and the viperous left of the Social Democrats and govern as if they were in a four-legged race.

That’s because the DPJ’s Shadow Shogun, Ozawa Ichiro, has detested New Komeito for years. If the Mainichi report that this was a Cabinet decision is true, now we know who’s making decisions for the Cabinet.

For an insight into the inscrutability of Japanese politics, by the way, Mr. Sengoku is considered to be an Ozawa opponent within the party.

In the end, the Government canceled the program and held a press conference to “apologize to the people and local governments.”

No one was mollified.

From the Asahi Shimbun

The Aichi Prefecture Mayors’ Conference was held last week in Nagoya, their first meeting since the new government took office. All but one of the prefecture’s 35 mayors attended. The mayors passed a resolution asking the Government to assume full financial liability for the DPJ’s own child allowance proposal, as per their political platform, instead of sticking local governments and the private sector with part of the bill. Some participants complained that the DPJ’s ineptitude is causing turmoil in local government.

Said Inuyama Mayor Tanaka Yukinori (affiliated with the opposition LDP):

“The ministers just jump the gun with these statements, without specifying what is wasteful and what was wrong about the previous expenditures.”

Here’s Toyota Mayor Suzuki Kohei on the work his his city already performed for the Aso Administration policy:

“Our efforts wound up being a waste of time and money. (Some municipalities had to hire temporary employees.) When (the Government) says, ‘We’re a new administration,’ some local governments think that’s an insufficient reason or explanation.”

The sentiments were echoed by Aichi Gov. Kanda Masaaki, a guest at the meeting:

“There is uneasiness and turmoil in the communities. I’m going to do everything I can to hold local conferences to convey our concerns to the government.”

From the Nihonkai Shimbun

Tottori Gov. Hirai Shinji was even more scathing. At a press conference on the 15th, he said:

“The people ordered kabayaki (grilled eel), but they were served up something already eaten alive by a viper.”

In reference to the new Government’s inability to deal with the Finance Ministry bureaucrats, Mr. Hirai noted:

“Whenever the Finance Ministry says anything, they just swallow it whole and keep putting it on the tab of local government. Nothing at all has changed. In fact, it’s gotten worse.”

It might be that local governments could be a more effective check than the nominal opposition party, the LDP, which seems to be missing in action at the national level.

Then again, the Hatoyama Administration isn’t in the mood to listen, regardless of the number of conferences Aichi Gov. Kanda holds.

On television

On the 18th, Deputy Finance Minister Noda Yoshihiko reiterated that the Government is still considering having local governments and businesses cough up some of the money for their child allowance scheme.

Bait-and-switch, inflexibility, and policies that smack of Mussolini-style corporative fascism are no way to run a government, son.

Let’s reduce reliance on the bureaucracy by expanding it!

Back to Sengoku Yoshito, the Minister for Administrative Reform, who also appeared on TV on the 18th touting his latest reform idea. He wants to reorganize Mr. Nagatsuma’s MHLW:

“Its jurisdiction is so broad in scope that the problems arising there every day come up nowhere else.”

The Aso Administration was also interested in reorganizing the ministry last May, but, as with the Aso Administration itself, nothing came of it.

His proposal would seem to be hypocritical for a party that co-opted local reformers by promising to disassociate from the bureaucracy, and then changed its tune to disassociating from a reliance on the bureaucracy once they took office.

Instead, he suggests creating three new Cabinet ministries, each with a name that only the left could dream up:

• The Ministry of Children and Families
• The Ministry of Education and Employment
• The Ministry of Social Insurance

The LDP had the capital idea of privatizing the Social Insurance Agency, but the agency itself torpedoed that plan by leaking the news of the colossal, decade-long foul-up of pension records. (All the more reason to privatize, is it not?) Then-DPJ-head Ozawa Ichiro said it should be merged with the National Tax Agency.

But now the DPJ is the party in power. Now they want to make it into a ministry of its own.

The idea behind coupling education with employment was that the Education Ministry, which also includes culture, sports, science, technology, and God knows what-all, was another candidate for reorganization. Mr. Sengoku did not explain why there was a need to end one Rube Goldberg bureaucracy just to create another. Nor was any justification provided for the existence of full-fledged Cabinet ministries focusing on labor, children, or families; it was as if no justification were needed.

In other words, Mr. Sengoku’s idea of governmental reform is to create three useless ministries where one existed and none are needed. Yes, let’s not rely on bureaucrats any more. As if that weren’t enough, he also said he was going to think of other ways to efficiently reorganize the central government.

Well, what sort of administrative reform can one expect from a former labor lawyer who was first elected to the Diet as a member of the Socialist Party? Did anyone really think he was going to consider central government downsizing?

Here’s another one on the inscrutability of Japanese politics: Mr. Sengoku is affiliated with the DPJ’s Maehara-Edano group/faction, which is considered to be on the Right within the party.

Meanwhile…

People outside of Japan are starting to draw conclusions about the new government, particularly those in financial circles.

Phill Tomlinson thinks stagflation will continue:

Many Keynesian economists are still baffled by Japan. Over the years, policy after policy has been proposed by their school of thought, all of which involve some form of government action, but time and time again they all seem to fail. The classic Keynesian rebuttal whenever these policies fail is “Well, the authorities didn’t do enough”. Just like they apparently didn’t do enough during the Great Depression.

And:

The reason why they never recovered to their previous highs was exactly what the Government did, they took over and tried the command economy approach. Roads to nowhere, propping up banks that were insolvent, not allowing private enterprise to take over the means of production. Rather than money going into the private sector, Japanese savings that were accrued during their economic miracle were funneled into Government bonds, wasteful Government consumption. It was quite simply a classic stagflation that is still ongoing.

That was published on the same day it was reported the Government would try to prop up debt-ridden Japan Airlines by putting its ownership in the hands of a quasi-public corporation without having it go through bankruptcy.

Meet the new boss.

Even worse than the old boss.

From the frying pan into the fire

Politicians are interested in signaling goodness, but not interested in doing good.
- Roger Koppl

SOME WESTERN ACADEMICS and commentators have recently wondered in print why Japan doesn’t “punch above its weight” in international affairs, and then did their readers a favor by answering their own question. While the conclusions resonate nicely inside the Ivory Tower, the inaccurate assumptions or pre-existing biases on which most are based render them useless. They should try a close shave with Occam’s razor instead.

The Japanese political class is incapable of punching above its weight in international—or domestic—affairs, because its members are ignorant of the realities of the world outside Nagata-cho and the world outside Japan, are self-satisfied in that ignorance, and are loathe to learn or do anything that would jeopardize their status.

That description could be worn by the slobbering, snorting, overfed cattle that constitute the political class everywhere, but it fits the average Japanese pol like a bespoke suit from a Ginza haberdasher.

Some have been gushing on the web about how the Japanese election was a mandate for change in the same way Americans voted for change and Barack Obama last November. While it is true that the Japanese voted for change, it wasn’t because they were enthralled by the teleprompter-dependent speechery of a man now shown to be dressed in the Emperor’s new clothes. Rather, their choice was determined by the wish to avoid the black hole of the Liberal Democratic Party’s anti-charisma combined with a national sense of faute de mieux.

Where has that leap of faith landed them? From the frying pan into the fire.

Exhibit A

From the Asahi:

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said he will compile a new supplementary budget centered on economic stimulus and employment measures to prevent the economy from faltering again.

“We have to do everything possible to bolster employment,” Hatoyama told reporters during a trip to Beijing. “We also have to allocate money to improve the safety net and stimulate the economy. We’ll need economic measures that double as job measures.”

Mr. Hatoyama has thus declared to the world that he is a receptacle of received misunderstanding—of the nature of economies, governmental stimulus, and the failure of those policies overseas.

The government is expected to finalize the list of programs to be canceled out of the 14 trillion yen first fiscal 2009 extra budget, compiled by the Aso administration, by the end of this week.

All the better to redistribute the pork in ways that fits the cut of the new administration’s jib. To wit:

On Sunday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano said the government plans to begin handing out a child allowance in June.

Where will that money come from?

Well, Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Maehara Seiji is cancelling more than just dam projects. In Kyushu alone, he nixed the plan to widen to four lanes the Nagasaki Expressway from Nagasaki to Tarami, eliminated the funds for surveying obstacles at the Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Oita, and Kagoshima airports, stopped the earthquake proofing of buildings at the Civil Aviation College in Miyazaki City, and cut from JPY 10 billion yen to JPY 4.9 billion the expenditures for land preparation to extend the runway at the Kitakyushu Airport.

There doesn’t seem to be any Bridges to Nowhere on that list. Absent expert testimony, some of those projects seem reasonable.

In addition to the Nagasaki expressway, the Government plans to axe all the projects to widen highways in the supplementary budget. There was no word on how the Government plans to deal with the anticipated extra traffic if they ever deliver on their promise to eliminate highway tolls.

The Government also expects recover about JPY 300 billion by cancelling a fund to promote the integration of farmland, but that won’t reduce outlays. They’re just going to shuffle the money from one pile to another by giving it to inefficient individual farmers instead.

The impact of the recession is such that tax revenue for the current fiscal year is forecast to be far below initial expectations.

So don’t spend money you don’t have!

How much don’t they have? The Government expects about JPY 40 trillion in tax revenue, but admits that it might be even less. Meanwhile, the preliminary budget of the party that was going to cut the waste out of government spending comes in at more than JPY 93 trillion–the highest in Japanese history. And a different Asahi report states that the actual amount will rise to as much as JPY 97 trillion due to “unspecified itemized requests” from each ministry.

Who knew double-talk could be so expensive?

Another way they could pry loose some funds is to live up to their platform plank of reducing civil service expenditures by 20%, and do so in a way that doesn’t force local governments to hire the personnel dumped from the national bureaucracy.

But since local government workers’ unions constitute a large part of the party’s campaign foot soldiers, that’s another promise they’re unlikely to keep.

Were the Government’s priority a sound Japanese economy instead of legal vote-buying schemes, it wouldn’t be shifting the money of the mind dreamt up for the previous administration’s stimulus from its left hand to its right, printing it up at the Treasury, or creating it through government debt instruments.

Moreover, the government faces a daunting challenge in its bid to prop up the economy without adding significantly to the country’s huge debt levels.

Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said Friday the amount of new government bonds to be issued this fiscal year will be kept at 44 trillion yen–the sum envisioned by the previous government–or lower. But a large second extra budget would make that pledge difficult to honor.

That pledge lasted as long as the fireflies in summer. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi admitted that deficit-financing bonds were a possibility for the 2010 budget if there were revenue shortfalls. He was seconded by the prime minister:

Pre-election Hatoyama

“If we increase (the issue of those bonds) we will not be able to maintain the state.”

Post-election Hatoyama

“I don’t think we should issue (those bonds) to begin with, but it is necessary to determine whether or not an unavoidable situation will emerge, while considering a situation in which tax revenues plunge.”

He was right the first time.

These were the same people who thought it would be easy to shake JPY 20 trillion loose from wasteful government spending. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lotta shaking goin’ on, does there?

Incidentally, until Japan Post is fully privatized, all the money in their savings accounts and insurance policies—20% of the nation’s personal financial assets—can only be invested in government bonds, rather than the other instruments private sector banks can invest in.

Is the opposition to Japan Post privatization by the DPJ and the People’s New Party starting to make sense now?

For all their talk about putting the lives of the people first, the DPJ—as well as the LDP mudboat wing—doesn’t seem to care about economic policies that would enrich the lives of the people over the long term. They would rather signal goodness than do good.

Well, then what?

Those who insist that government spending is as good as private sector spending for sustained economic growth and long-term employment increases fail to understand efficient resource allocation. The government is incapable of determining the best way to use capital goods and other resources. Only the market, consisting of millions of independent actors, works that out, over time.

Rather, it spends to salvage inefficient sectors and prevent politically painful economic adjustments. If the sectors receiving the stimulus funds were producing what the consumers want at prices they were willing to pay, a stimulus wouldn’t be necessary.

A government stimulus will not generate the tax revenue needed to pay down the national debt either, if only because the stimulus is just a money reshuffle. No new wealth will be created. To be blunt, it’s just another form of central economic planning, but some people would rather believe their fantasies than their lying eyes.

What to do instead? That question was answered long ago.

• During the first two years of his term, U.S. President Warren Harding nearly halved federal spending and cut taxes by one-third. Those policies continued under Calvin Coolidge and unemployment fell to 1.6% by 1926. The resulting economic growth from 1920-1929 was phenomenal.
• Despite the laissez-faire label, Herbert Hoover was a believer in strong federal intervention. During his four-year term, real per capita federal spending rose 82%, falling to 74% during the Roosevelt administration from 1933 to 1940. Unemployment rose sharply after the 1929 stock market crash, but six months later was nearly back to pre-crash levels. It skyrocketed after Hoover’s interventions, and Roosevelt’s policies kept it at that level, including during the double-dip depression of 1937.
• U.S. President Ronald Reagan cut taxes, spending, and unnecessary regulation and intervention without reshuffling the money, and created a quarter-century of stout economic growth.

It is as if the DPJ believes that national wealth is created by parthenogenesis.

That would be understandable in the case of Hatoyama Yukio, once you’ve seen the family mansion.

But neither he nor his party as a group have given the slightest indication that they’ve spent any time thinking about the creation of national wealth.

Exhibit B

The hard-bitten ex-cop and current Financial Services Minister Kamei Shizuka came of age when no one much cared about the Japanese economy other than the Japanese, and the Japanese only cared about achieving First World levels of prosperity even if it took collusion between big business, government, and the bureaucracy to get there.

Life imitates art

Mr. Kamei has now bitten hard into a philosophy of debt moratorium that calls for a debt repayment holiday for SMEs and injecting public funds into any financial institutions that would suffer as a result. The minister might have had his arm twisted to come up with that last proviso. He’s already said that any banks requiring financial assistance during a debt repayment moratorium are too weak to survive.

Some speculate this grim nonsense stems from a desire for revenge for the bankruptcies of some of his corporate financial backers after last year’s financial crash. Others think he’s doing it just to raise the profile of his splinter party among small businesses.

When he defends these policies, he comes across as a 3-D version of the cartoon character Yosemite Sam plugging away at a room full of varmints:

“There are few people in the LDP now who sing the praises of market fundamentalism…(if) their thinking doesn’t change, it’s possible that one mega-party will be formed in the future.”

He added that this “might take some time”, perhaps after next summer’s upper house election.

While today’s LDP may now know as little as the DPJ about how to lay the tarmac for future prosperity, that’s not the most interesting part of his statement.

In October 1940, the Japanese government sponsored the creation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Many of the organizers intended that it become—well, a mega-party—and some political organizations voluntarily disbanded to join. The objective was to create a “new political structure”. It included the bureaucracy and the military in addition to political parties. The prime minister was automatically the head of the association, which had a nationwide branch network. From June 1942, it assumed control of local governmental units from the national bureaucracy. Weakened by a lack of autonomy, the association was dissolved in June 1945.

In other words, Mr. Kamei looks forward to a political realignment resembling the configuration in place in Imperial Japan during the height of the Second World War.

The minister is also rather spry for a man in his 70s, which is perhaps due to his sixth-dan ranking in aikido. Watch him stoop to sixth-rate demagoguery in this recent conversation with Keidanren head Mitarai Fujio:

“The increase in murders among family members is because (big business) does not treat people as people.”

He also complained that the heads of big businesses no longer share their earnings with small businesses during good economic times, but retain those funds as internal reserves. When Mr. Mitarai asked if he thought that was their responsibility, the minister replied, “You must feel responsible,” in the same language a primary school teacher would use to scold children for a cafeteria food fight.

For his part, Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio was nonchalant about his Cabinet minister shooting from the lip. He observed, “That sounds like something Mr. Kamei might say…perhaps he was extreme in has language, and was impolite.”

That also sounds like something a prime minister might say when he realizes he stepped in it by choosing that man as a coalition partner and it’s now stuck to his shoe. Then again, Mr. Kamei has been seated prominently at Mr. Hatoyama’s right hand during Cabinet meeting photo ops.

The rebuttal

People here used to say that the most effective political opposition in Japan was the United States government. Now it seems as if the only people willing to put Mr. Kamei in his place are in the overseas media. For a taste of that, plus a devastating critique of Japan’s political class, try this article in the Wall Street Journal:

(A) proposed loan repayment moratorium for small- and medium-sized businesses…is the brainchild of Shizuka Kamei, the new banking and postal-services minister. Mr. Kamei thinks SMEs, the engine of employment for developed economies, need help in the downturn, but not the tough love of competition or—perish the thought—bankruptcy. So he commissioned Kohei Otsuka, a senior vice minister at the Financial Services Agency, to study how the government might force lenders to forgive SME debts. Financial-sector stocks promptly tanked.

And:

Japan may not have a state-owned financial system like China, but it is still state-directed. Japan runs an essentially circular financial system where savers deposit money at domestic banks, the banks buy ever-more worthless government debt, and then the Diet shovels that money back out to favored political constituencies and export industries. The current Democratic Party of Japan-led government, headed by Yukio Hatoyama, plans to tweak this model, but not fundamentally change it: rather than redistribute the public’s money to business, the DPJ wants to give it to families.

The minister’s political ideas may date from the 1940s, but his economic ideas are more up-to-date: Japan from the mid-1950s

Mr. Kamei said late last month “financial inspections should aim at turning around struggling corporate borrowers instead of leading them to go bankrupt.” That’s a recipe to paper over a problem, not fix it.

Without a financial system that efficiently channels money from lenders who have it to borrowers who need it, Japan will have a hard time growing its moribund economy…The last time Japan tried to paper over a growing pile of bad loans, bail out failing lenders and businesses and pay off political constituencies, the world’s second-largest economy sunk into a lost decade of growth. Then again, maybe it never really escaped.

Except for skipping over the successes of former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro and his financial jack-of-all-trades Takenaka Heizo—which the rest of the country’s political class and media are trying to paper over—this brief piece contains more honesty and common sense than anything I’ve run across in the Japanese print media.

Other than Takenaka Heizo’s magazine articles.

Who’s in charge here? (1)

There are enough loose cannons in Fort Kamei to frag an entire platoon of junior officers. The Hatoyama Administration is barely a month old, and already he’s angrily told off the Finance Minister, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, and the Internal Affairs Minister for daring to express opinions about policies he considers to be in his bailiwick. Yet he’s not shy about butting into matters that aren’t part of his portfolios. At a press conference earlier this week, he wondered aloud if all the American military forces in Japan were absolutely necessary. He cited as an example the Yokota air base near Tokyo.

At the same press conference, he sounded off about Justice Minister Chiba Keiko’s proposal to allow Japanese women to keep their maiden names after marriage. Said Mr. Kamei:

“I don’t understand the psychology behind the idea that family names must be different. The husband, wife, and children will have different names. That would turn the home into something like an apartment house. Would it be a good idea for all the nameplates (on the front of the house) to be different?”

That was during the afternoon. At another press conference in the same place on the same morning, Fukushima Mizuho, the Minister in Charge of Womanhood, Motherhood, Shop Till You Drop, and Tossing Her Mini-Party a Lollipop—who kept her own maiden name after marriage—supported the same proposal.

Exhibit C

They are the people who believe all conflict stems from avoidable misunderstanding. Who think that the world’s evils spring from technologies, systems, complexes…and everything else except from the hearts of men, where love abides. Who mistake wishes for possibilities. Who put a higher premium on their own moral intentions than on the efficacy of their actions. Who champion education as the solution, whatever the problem. Above all, the Goodists are the people who like to be seen to be good.
- Bret Stephens

Many Japanese metaphorically slapped their heads when they realized that Prime Minister Hatoyama was serious about his goofy vision of yuai (fraternity), more suitable as a topic for a middle school public speaking contest than the pragmatic business of international statecraft.

But he’s not alone. Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya—like his boss, a boyish-looking bon-bon from a fabulously well-to-do family rich enough to let its scions play at politics—paid a surprise visit to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in Kabul.

They politely avoided talking about Japan’s looming suspension of its refueling mission for NATO forces in the Indian Ocean. What they discussed instead was the Japanese offer to provide job training for the Taliban—you in the back row, stop that snickering!—as well as their living expenses during the training. Mr. Karzai said it would be difficult but possible. Now why would the president blow his chance at free money from overseas by laughing out loud?

Injecting some adulthood into the discussion was Foreign Minister Rangin Spanta, who asked that Japan continue funding Afghani police salaries because maintaining public safety was also important.

It’s a good thing he didn’t ask for help from the Japanese police. Some in the ruling coalition would have thrown a fit because the policemen would have to behave like policemen and carry weapons.

One wonders, however, what job training—I know, it is hard to keep a straight face—Mr. Okada is talking about. For example, when they were in power, the Taliban banned:

…pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, cinematography, equipment that produces music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, VCRs, television, anything that propagates sex, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, Christmas cards, employment, education and sports for women, movies, music, dancing, hanging pictures in homes, clapping during sports events, kite flying, and beard trimming.

Well, that pretty much leaves out any employment that involves electricity. Unless it’s used to wire the dynamite for blowing up the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan.

It doesn’t seem to have occured to either the prime minister or the foreign minister that the Taliban really aren’t interested in the modern world. From the horse’s mouth:

“(E)lections are incompatible with Sharia and therefore we reject them…We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1400 years ago and jihad is our right. We want to recreate the time of the Prophet.”

But then a Goodist isn’t going to let practical considerations get in the way of demonstrating his Goodism.

Mr. Okada has also said in regard to Afghanistan:

“I don’t think that support means just sending the military.”

Leaving aside the question of what he would know about military support, he’s right, of course.

The other support becomes effective, however, only when the military goals have mostly been achieved. But understanding that requires an understanding of the objectives and the application of military force.

It also requires the knowledge that the Taliban have become a real danger to the government again. Vocational school is unlikely to solve that problem.

Who’s in charge here? (2)

Mr. Okada later chose to expound on the East Asian rhapsody that Mr. Hatoyama is so enthralled with. He said the entity might include Japan, China, South Korea, the ASEAN nations, India, Australia, and New Zealand.

People noticed that the United States was left off the list. True, it isn’t part of East Asia, but then neither is India. But any move away from the U.S., real or imagined, is exaggerated after the brouhaha that erupted following the appearance in the New York Times of Mr. Hatoyama’s translated magazine article.

When asked his opinion, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirano Hirofumi did some paperhanging of his own:

“I haven’t heard yet from the foreign minister whether the U.S. would be included or excluded.”

Mr. Hirano also added that the bilateral relationship is the basis of Japanese foreign policy.

The Japanese media took this to be backtracking from the foreign minister’s comment, and a statement that the government hasn’t made a decision yet. Considering the range of opinions inside the party and the absence of any pressing need to pursue the issue, that decision might get made on the 12th of Never.

Is it too much to ask of this lot to synchronize their policies?

Exhibit D

Who needs an opposition party when anyone in the Cabinet is happy to serve in that role, depending on the issue, the time of day, and the phase of the moon.

One of the main planks of the DPJ election campaign was the payment of a cash allowance to families with children in lieu of a tax deduction. Their platform called for the national government to make all the payments.

After a month in office, it finally dawned on the Government that what everyone—including their supporters—had been saying for the past two years was right on the money: Namely, they didn’t have the money to do it. (It will require JPY 5.3 trillion every year when fully implemented.)

That’s when Health, Labor, and Welfare Minister Nagatsuma Akira, who is starting to look as if he’s in over his head on any issue that doesn’t involve national pensions, floated the idea of local governments and private-sector companies kicking in some money too.

It seems as if we’ve got another 21st century supporter of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association here.

Local governments in Japan, already pushed to the point of insolvency, are so inflamed over unfunded mandates and the financial liabilities forced on them by the national government that Mr. Nagatsuma’s idea will be enough to cause serious problems with chief executives and assembly delegates in prefectural capitals around the nation.

And requiring companies to pay? That socialism isn’t creeping—it’s galloping. Then again, some Japanese are already suggesting the DPJ is just a socialist party in everything but name.

Mr. Nagatsuma also wanted to save money by freezing the provisions of the Aso Administration’s supplemental budget that would provide financial support to children aged 3-5.

It didn’t take long for the Cabinet to round the wagons into a circle and start firing on themselves instead of the Indians.

Who’s in charge here? (3)

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro was opposed to ditching the Aso plan because the money was already in the pipeline and local governments had made the preparations to spend it.

“This government must not have desktop (i.e., impractical) debates that ignore conditions on the ground.”

But Mr. Nagatsuma ended the measure anyway. They need the money for their other programs.

The Internal Affairs Minister was even blunter when addressing the funding for the family subsidies:

“If we’re going to change the political platform, which says the national government will pay for everything, then we should call another election and ask the people what they think.”

That comment would be praiseworthy under any circumstances, but it’s a doubleplusgood display of spine coming from Mr. Haraguchi, who is viewed by some as having the principles of a weathervane that ends up pointing in whatever direction the Ozawa breeze is blowing.

Exhibit D

Policy for Ozawa is just like candy (for the people).
- Kamei Shizuka

Some are trying to paper over the growing concerns about the coalition government pulling in several directions at once by reassuring everyone that things will change once the DPJ wins an outright majority in the upper house and no longer needs the excess baggage of the SDPJ and the PNP.

But party Secretary-General and Shadow Shogun Ozawa Ichiro has just punched a hole in their paper. Speaking about the next upper house election at a press conference, he said, “Of course the goal of every party is a majority.”

And added:

“The SDPJ and the PNP worked with us during the lower house election and it turned out well, so I want to maintain that cooperative relationship in the future.”

At a meeting before the press conference, he said:

“The DPJ does not have a majority in the upper house. That does not mean we will reject a coalition with the SDPJ and the PNP. They are our compatriots with whom we worked together, so we will continue to work together in the future.”

It looks like we might be stuck with the marginal Mr. Kamei and Ms. Fukushima in government for longer than we hoped.

It’s also time for an encore from the start of this post:

“The Japanese political class is incapable of punching above its weight in international—or domestic—affairs, because its members are ignorant of the realities of the world outside Nagata-cho and the world outside Japan, are self-satisfied in that ignorance, and are loathe to learn or do anything to jeopardize their status.”

That’s not going to change anytime soon. Mr. Ozawa has given instructions to the party’s first-term MPs that their primary job is to get reelected instead of worrying their heads about the workings of government.

I’ve said it before: this has the potential to get really ugly.

We’re starting to get there.

Hatoyama Yukio, AKA Klaatu

I think of my husband as a man from outer space.
- Hatoyama Miyuki, the wife of Japan’s prime minister

GOING BY the shorthand version in the English-language media, Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio was given his nickname “The Man from Outer Space” because Japanese think the shape of his eyes make him look like an alien.

Those looking for a more satisfactory explanation than the ones found in the English-language media might refer to the recently published Hatoyama Yukio no Uchujin Goroku (Roughly, The Collected Sayings of Hatoyama Yukio the Spaceman) for more background.

Yukio-chan

The book explains that the moniker started to gain traction back in 2001 when Mr. Hatoyama’s party, the Democratic Party of Japan, was desperate to create an identity for itself among the electorate after Koizumi Jun’ichiro of the Liberal Democratic Party became prime minister. Mr. Koizumi’s support in the polls transcended the stratospheric and touched the lower levels of outer space itself. The LDP tried to capitalize on the phenomenon by selling key chains, cell phone straps, and other merchandise that featured likenesses of the PM, whose unique hair style made him a natural for caricature.

Meanwhile, support for the DPJ was teetering at the bottom end of the seesaw. The party wanted to raise the visibility of Mr. Hatoyama, who was then serving as party head and came off a poor second in comparison to his LDP counterpart.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the party decided to create a cartoon character of Mr. Hatoyama that they called Yukio-chan. The caricature exaggerated the shape of his eyes and placed them somewhere below cheekbone level. It does make Mr. Hatoyama look non-human and otherworldly, and it’s easy to see how people made the spaceman connection. In fact, the shape of the eyes and the jawline somewhat resemble those of the alien drawn for the cover of the 1985 Whitley Strieber book Communion, whose subject is alien abductions. (Whoa, now…I’m not going there!)

The DPJ was so pleased with its creation that they put it up on the home page of their website, used it to sell their own character goods, and hung a life-size poster of the caricature at party headquarters in Tokyo.

One wonders what the office ladies thought the first time they saw it.

As often happens, the law of unintended consequences came into effect. Instead of raising the profile of either the party or Mr. Hatoyama—neither of which happened for several years—the caricature cemented in the public mind the image of the DPJ boss as a bug-eyed visitor from another galaxy.

To be sure, this was all done with Mr. Hatoyama’s approval. In fact, he seems to rather like the spaceman idea. He’s on record as having said:

“I want to transcend (being) an earthling.”

Isn’t that as good an explanation as any for the basis of his political philosophy and policies?

Streiber's alien

The caricature was a natural target for the LDP. One of the first to spot the potential was then-Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko, who always led with her dokuzetsu, or poison tongue. The book quotes a political journalist who says that she and Mr. Hatoyama often became embroiled in what he referred to as “strange disputes” in those days. Whenever a reporter would bring up the subject of Hatoyama Yukio, she’d dismiss it with the reply, “Ah, that spaceman!”

(Ms. Tanaka had quite the knack for nicknames, by the way. The late Hashimoto Ryutaro, who served as prime minister in the 90s, had a full head of slicked-down hair that he combed straight back. She referred to him as Uncle Pomade, or Pomado Oji-san.)

For an interesting twist, and example 35,472 of how politics makes strange bedfellows, Ms. Tanaka and her husband are now officially Space Cadets as members of the Hatoyama-led DPJ.

So, if the Japanese public thinks Mr. Hatoyama looks like a spaceman, perhaps that’s because they were encouraged to do so by both the man and his party.

And if you think the DPJ has unusual ideas for the visual promotion of its candidates, wait’ll you see how Deputy Prime Minister Kan Naoto sold himself once upon a time.

Situation vacant

ONE FINE DAY, Japan will have a real government at last. Despite a few positive moves in that direction by the recently installed Hatoyama Administration, however, it’s starting to look as if that day isn’t going to dawn anytime soon.

Driving in reverse

People are asking questions about members of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan’s policy study group attending the briefings of various ministry bureaus. The problem is that the party members are not bound to uphold the confidentiality of what they hear.

New Health, Labor, and Welfare Minister Nagatsuma Akira discussed the issue with reporters after a Cabinet meeting on the 25th. He said:

“We’re thinking of a method in which we would appoint them as a sort of project team under Cabinet authority and have them work as part-time civil servants, for whom the confidentiality requirement applies.”

The reason the electorate voted in such massive numbers for a change in government was because they thought it was an urgent priority to disconnect the government from bureaucratic control.

How they manage to disconnect themselves from the bureaucracy by becoming part of it remains to be seen.

Legislation?…Oh yeah, that!

Here’s Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio on convening a Diet session in October:

“No decision has been made. We haven’t made a decision yet on what bills we’ll propose. Now we’ll start thinking about whether an extraordinary Diet session is necessary. There are two elections coming up (on 25 October to fill vacant upper house seats in Kanagawa and Shizuoka) and we have to see what happens.”

In other words, the people who’ve been telling us they’re ready to handle the reins of government for the past two years still haven’t got a program ready, though it’s been apparent for most of the year that they’d win the election.

Apparently, by-election campaigns take precedence over the Diet’s business.

The Nikkei points out that Mr. Hatoyama has a full diplomatic schedule next month, including summits with the leaders of China and South Korea. Why summits should be a priority isn’t clear, however. Both countries will be right there where they’ve always been for the foreseeable future, and there are no bilateral problems that either could be or need to be solved right away. That means there’s no real reason for Mr. Hatoyama to give them all his milk and cookies just yet.

As a small-government guy, I think it’s a capital idea for legislatures to meet as infrequently as possible—they only wind up getting into mischief and causing trouble for normal people—but would it have been too much to ask of the DPJ to have settled on what they want to do in Nagata-cho before they got there?

Aren’t they supposed to be the policy wanks, the ones who brought party platforms into Japanese politics?

Then again, if the DPJ wins both of those upper house seats, they might be able to disconnect themselves from one of their useless coalition partners and get to work.

And speaking of useless coalition partners…

More Cowbell from Kamei

It was almost a tradition in Japanese politics for one of the members of a new Liberal-Democratic Party Cabinet to shoot his mouth off within a week of being sworn in and wind up shooting himself and the party in the foot.

Well, the new Financial Services Minister Kamei Shizuka is an ex-LDP stalwart, so maybe he’s trying to keep the tradition of loose cannon fusillades alive.

Recall that Mr. Kamei recently said he favored a three-year moratorium on bank loan repayments for small businesses and homeowners—including some interest payments—and using public funds to prop up any banks that might have trouble making ends meet by forgoing all that income.

Mr. Kamei fired off several salvos on a TV broadcast yesterday as a counterattack to the legions of those who were appalled at the idea, including members of his coalition.

“Banks that are so weak that their stock would fall because of what I said aren’t qualified to function as banks.”

The Asahi dryly wondered whether a statement that employs “vague standards” to discuss the qualifications of banks is appropriate for a Cabinet minister with such broad oversight over those institutions.

“(If this measure) causes investors and citizens to lose their faith (in the banks) to such an extent, the financial institutions themselves should reflect on the reasons for their problems.”

Oh. It’s all their fault.

Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa has said neither he nor the Bank of Japan thinks the measure is necessary. You may fire when ready, Kamei:

“We agreed to introduce that as a policy measure (during the negotiations to form a coalition). I don’t know what he’s talking about after all this time, but he’s just talking to himself.”

Meanwhile, overseas institutional investors started looking for the nearest exit.

In other news, he’s converted to the Hatoyama philosophy of high school student government:

“People can’t live under this radical philosophy of market supremacy, in which the strong eat the weak. I’m only trying to implement yuai (fraternal) politics.”

Mr. Kamei is also the Minister in Charge of Bloviating About Japan Post Privatization. Haraguchi Kazuhiro, the new Internal Affairs and Communications minister, has offered a suggestion for Japan Post’s reorganization. Said the Man in Charge Around Here:

“I’m the Minister in charge of Japan Post. It’s not that person’s (Haraguchi’s) position to make characterizations (literally, draw pictures) about matters that are my responsibility.”

I’ve remarked several times on Ozawa Ichiro’s propensity for creating inherently unstable coalitions, but this must be a record. The new Government’s only two weeks old and already one of the Cabinet ministers is telling two of his colleagues where to get off.

Despite the criticism from within the ruling party and business and financial circles, Mr. Kamei thinks he’s sitting in the catbird seat:

“If they’re so (opposed), they might hope that the Prime Minister will replace me. But that’s not possible.”

Here’s the problem–Mr. Kamei is right. During the campaign Candidate Hatoyama also came out in favor of a debt repayment moratorium while stumping for DPJ lower house MP Kawauchi Hiroshi, a member of the Hatoyama group/faction. Mr. Hatoyama said the moratorium was Mr. Kawauchi’s idea, but he also supported it. Though it went unremarked at the time, that part of the speech was filmed and is up on YouTube.

This has the potential to get really ugly.

On second thought, maybe it’s a good idea to put off a new Diet session until the by-elections after all.

UPDATE:

Oh, my. According to the Asahi, at a press conference on the 28th, Mr. Hatoyama now said:

“It’s not the case that (the three coalition partners) agreed to go so far as a moratorium.” (モラトリアムということまで)

You know how they say charity begins at home? Maybe yuai does too–starting with the coalition government. If Mr. Hatoyama can’t sell it there, how can he expect to sell it anywhere else?

Japan’s political kaleidoscope (4): Too many cooks, too many crooks, and too many kooks

The devil’s greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist.
- Baudelaire

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity–but don’t rule out malice.
- attributed to Albert Einstein

The essence of the Democratic Party of Japan now is a three-tiered structure of the Finance Ministry, Party Secretary-General Ozawa’s troops, and public sector labor unions. It will be impossible to maintain this structure without tax increases.
- Nakagawa Hidenao

THE NEW JAPANESE COALITION GOVERNMENT led by the Democratic Party of Japan—with the People’s New Party and the Socialists Democratic Party of Japan invited to hop in the jalopy to buy their upper house votes and relieve the DPJ of the chore of conducting serious negotiations with more responsible legislators—faces a minefield of potential problems as they embark on their magnificent adventure.

Their most serious obstacle is a lack of internal unity. Many in Japan are calling this a “mosaic government” in reference to the incongruent philosophies of the DPJ’s constituent groups, and that doesn’t begin to account for the polar opposite philosophies of their coalition partners. The glue that held the DPJ together this long was the dream of taking control of the government. Now that they’ve reached their version of the promised land, they’re behaving like the crew that tore down the house but still has to figure out how the plumbing and electricity works. And rather than hit the ground running, they’ve hit the ground after running into each other.

The government was in power for just two days before squabbles broke out among Cabinet ministers, and the junior coalition partners began complaining that the DPJ is blowing them off.

Referring to their disagreements with the DPJ, SDPJ Secretary-General Shigeno Yasumasa told a group of reporters gathered in the Diet building, “We’re not on the same page.” PNP head and Cabinet member Kamei Shizuka complained directly to DPJ bigwig Kan Naoto on an NHK TV broadcast yesterday that the minor parties were being shut out of policy decisions.

Meanwhile, the Government must also overcome the skepticism of both the public and the news media that they are competent enough to be trusted with the nation’s car keys, and that they are committed enough to do what they’ve promised to do. That promise is to take the first steps on what the public thinks as their most important mission—wresting control of policy from the nation’s bureaucracy and strengthening local government.

That the public is skeptical is not in doubt. Skepticism might seem odd considering the party’s lopsided lower house majority and their receipt of about 56% of the popular vote nationwide. But an Asahi Shimbun survey published on 2 September shows otherwise. When asked whether they thought the DPJ victory was the result of voter support for their policies, here’s how the respondents answered:

No: 52%
Yes: 38%

Moving on to specific policies….

Wait! Enough! Screw that for a lark. I refuse to go along with the conspiracy of silence from those who primly cop a responsible commentator pose while ignoring that the launch of the new government has combined the slapstick of third-rate provincial vaudeville, leftover LDP hackery refried to hide the odor and slapped with a different label, and enough hypocrisy to choke a televangelist.

Yes, the Liberal Democratic Party had it coming, but it’s not what the Japanese people had coming. I wrote recently that based on past performance, a DPJ-led government had the potential to have more rings than the Ringling Bros., but no one could have predicted that Nagata-cho would turn into the world’s biggest Big Top.

Here’s the short version: Japan’s new government has too many cooks, too many crooks, and too many kooks—and some of them are the same people!

The Cooks…

The Chef de Cuisine

Sometimes called the executive chef, the chef de cuisine is the man whose name is on the menu. But he’s just as likely to spend his time visiting other restaurants or writing cookbooks.

Japan’s new executive chef is Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, who says he intends to reorient the government to make it Cabinet-directed, and who doesn’t say he is continuing a process begun by Koizumi Jun’ichiro and interrupted by his successors.

His position alone makes him a center of power both in the government and his party. One of the DPJ’s founding members and the head of his own faction/group, he used his substantial family fortune to keep the party afloat for several years. What could be more natural than assuming that he is the primary actor in the Government?

Well, there’s this: During the party’s six-day election campaign in the spring to select a new leader when Ozawa Ichiro resigned after his chief aide was arrested for accepting illegal contributions, one Japanese weekly reported that a secret document was circulated to the party’s MPs, who had the exclusive right to vote in the election. The document was said to have been a full frontal attack on Mr. Hatoyama’s opponent, Okada Katsuya, for his weakness during his previous tenure and his responsibility for the party’s rout in the 2005 lower house elections. The debacle, it asserted, was partly due to Mr. Okada’s lack of a spine. It claimed that the party would be much stronger with the “soft” Mr. Hatoyama as the front man and the “hard” Mr. Ozawa wielding a billy club behind the scenes.

So who’s the boss?

The Sous Chef

Nominally the second in command to the Chef de Cuisine, the sous chef often runs the kitchen and creates and cooks the food to be served, and you already know who I’m talking about before I type his name. So does the rest of Japan. Typical of recent reporting was this headline in the Shukan Post:

Ozawa Ichiro Controls the New Government—and Japan!

The new DPJ secretary-general (i.e., party head) will be the Shadow Shogun himself, Ozawa Ichiro, the man for whom an apt comparison would be the kuroko of joruri puppet theater. The kuroko manipulate the puppets in full view of the audience, but are dressed in black and masked to create the collective fiction of invisibility.

Mr. Ozawa is the kuroko who taught the DPJ how to win elections—mostly using all the Tammany techniques and political jiu-jitsu picked up from his mentor Tanaka Kakuei during his days in the LDP. He was also the kuroko of the short-lived Hosokawa and Hata administrations, the only other non-LDP governments since 1955 and another unwieldy amalgamation of incompatible elements.

After leaving center stage, Mr. Ozawa embarked a task more suited to his abilities–non-stop nationwide campaigning and canvassing in local election districts. As a result, an estimated 130-150 of the 308 DPJ members in the lower house and nearly one-third of the full membership now owe their seats to him. In practical terms, that means he has more command over their loyalty than does the party.

Everyone knows he is capable of picking up his ball and taking his team to start a new game elsewhere, as he threatened to do so nearly two years ago when the rest of the DPJ top brass blew their collective top over his proposed coalition with the LDP under Fukuda Yasuo. The Faustian bargain between Mr. Ozawa and the veterans who predate him in the party has allowed him to create a second center of power on which the nominal head, Hatoyama Yukio, must depend. During the DPJ election campaign, it was stressed that a vote for Hatoyama was a vote for party unity. Many saw in that slogan an implied threat that a vote for Okada as party leader meant that Mr. Ozawa would walk.

Money talks, and we all know what walks

The Shukan Bunshun reported that Prime Minister Hatoyama wanted to keep Mr. Ozawa in his position as acting president and Okada Katsuya as party secretary-general.

When word reached the puppet master, he exploded: “Hatoyama and the people around him are clueless.” Another acting party president, Koshi’ishi Azuma, said to have developed close ties with Mr. Ozawa, had to intervene on his behalf with Mr. Hatoyama.

Why the insistence on the position of party secretary-general? Because money talks. In that position, he has control of JPY 17.3 billion (about $U.S. 190 million) in 2010 in government subsidies for the party, a substantial rise from this year’s total of JPY 11.8 billion. He’s just following the literally golden rule of Tanaka Kakuei: Politics is numbers, numbers are power, and power is money.

The new prime minister has no illusions about whom he’s dealing with. Here’s Mr. Hatoyama quoted in the 25 February 1999 Yukan Fuji:

“Mr. Ozawa fled the LDP five years ago only because he lost in a power struggle in his faction and in the party. He’s raised the banner of governmental reform to prevent the people from realizing that.”

And we all know what they say about politics making for strange bedfellows.

Chief Kan Opener

Long-time DPJ stalwart and former party president Kan Naoto is in the Cabinet as both Deputy Prime Minister and the head of a new group called the National Strategy Bureau. What the national strategy will be, and what the bureau will do exactly, we don’t know—and neither does he—but he’s going to be in charge of it. It’s Standard Operating Procedure for the DPJ to come up with a policy or an idea and then figure out what to do with it only when it’s time to do the work.

Kamei Shizuka of the People’s New Party made a phone call to Mr. Kan to find out more about the bureau. Here’s how one newspaper reported it:

Kamei: What will you do at this National Strategy Bureau?
Kan: I don’t really know. There are several things I’d like to do, but for now, I can only grope my way forward.

The DPJ party platform says: “The National Strategy Bureau will create a national vision for the new era, and formulate the budget framework under political direction.” It’s supposed to consist of about 20 people. As is par for the DPJ course, there’s no mention of what its specific authority will be, whether “the national vision” will have anything to do with foreign policy, and how it will be involved with budget formulation. For all we know, it might turn out to be a political salon allowing the rookies and the rank and file to do some coffeehousing while the heavyweights take care of business somewhere else.

It is nearly axiomatic that everything the DPJ says is subject to change at any time, and sure enough, Mr. Hatoyama explained this week that the NSB will handle the framework of the budget while the Ministry of Finance will handle the details.

The foundation document for the party’s platform is their Index of Policies 2009, last modified in July. It’s on the party website, but only in Japanese. Here’s what it says about the budget:

民主党政権では、国民を代表する政治家が自ら予算を編成します…官邸に各省の大臣などを集め、予算編成の基本方針を決定し、省庁ごとに政治家が主導で予算を編成します。
Under a DPJ administration, politicians representing the people will formulate budgets. The Cabinet ministers will meet in the Prime Minister’s office, determine the basic policies for the budget, and then politicians will direct the budget formulation for each ministry.

But, you protest, key to civil service reform is to keep the MOF at arm’s length from that process. The MOF is notorious for being the bureaucracy’s worst offender at policy meddling. Takenaka Heizo, the man who directed fiscal policy and reform in the Koizumi Administration, fought a five-year running battle with the ministry and warned in December 2007 that the zombies had returned under Yasuda Fukuo. The DPJ promised to put an end to that for good by putting the civil servants in their place.

And just like Brutus, the DPJ are honorable men and women all.

Some think that Mr. Kan has ambitions of his own. If he decides that he would make a jolly good successor to Prime Minister Hatoyama, the National Strategy Bureau would make a jolly good launching pad. Meanwhile, moves are already underway in Okayama, Fukui, and Mie to establish local strategy bureaus in the party at the prefectural and municipal level. No one knows what their strategies will be either, but roughing out the framework for the central government’s budget won’t be one of them. Their efforts, which are partly designed to create stronger local party organizations, will likely be coordinated on some level with the Cabinet-level body.

And mark Mr. Kan down as being a bit miffed at Hatoyama Yukio. It’s reported that when he found out decisions for Cabinet posts had been made without his input, he quickly called the prime minister, incredulous that he wasn’t asked for advice.

Short-Order Cooks

Need flapjacks, a Philly cheese steak, or legislation made to order? Last weekend, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that the DPJ had decided to create yet another new organization, tentatively called the Party Leaders’ Council, referring to DPJ senior executives. The council will consist of five members, including Messrs. Hatoyama and Ozawa, and will determine party strategy for the Diet. While decisions about Diet business have to be made somewhere in the Government, there was no explanation why that requires another new organization, and whether it will limit its purview to the Diet. One has to wonder at this point if the party leadership is dominated by the type of people who would rather draw up attractive menus than do any actual cooking behind a stove.

Chefs de Partie

These cooks, also called line chefs, are responsible for organizing and managing a small team of workers to ensure the restaurant’s work area is under control. Who better to keep the workers in line than the many DPJ members who started out in life by organizing workers, particularly those in the Japanese Teachers’ Union and the All-Japan Prefectural and Municipal Workers Union? They provide the foot soldiers and the muscle for the party’s election campaigns.

That’s no surprise for a party with more than a few ex-Socialists, both in the Diet and in executive positions at party HQ. In fact, says Tsujimoto Kiyomi of the Socialists Democratic Party of Japan, the DPJ is now more dependent on labor unions than was the Socialist Party itself. (The SDPJ added the second word in their name after the Berlin Wall fell for protective coloration.) Before the recent election, the number of DPJ Diet members with ties to the old Socialists was estimated to be just under 30, and they also brought many aides and staffers with them when they left the party in 1996.

The DPJ claims it’s committed to the devolution of governmental authority to local governments and reducing the number of civil servants. We’ll see how long that commitment lasts now that the public sector employees’ union helped put them in power.

How close is the party leadership to the unions? The first order of business for both Mr. Hatoyama and Mr. Ozawa the day after the general election was to visit union rallies in Tokyo to thank them for their help.

The Journeyman C(r)ook and the Apprentice Chef

The inherently unstable DPJ—more of a coalition itself than a party—organized a ruling coalition with two mini-parties from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, the PNP and the SPJ, supposedly because they need their votes to get bills passed in the upper house.

A Study in Body Language, or, Why a picture is worth a thousand words

The three parties finally agreed on the terms for a coalition government last week. Here, the word “agree” means that the DPJ generally acceded to the demands of the two smaller parties after negotiations, though it’s a mystery why they wouldn’t have known what those demands would have been months ago and worked them out in advance.

What did the two microparties demand? The creation of yet another power center. The DPJ caved in to their insistence for forming—you guessed it—a new council consisting of the three party heads to function as a separate group within the Cabinet, even though both PNP head Kamei Shizuka and SDP head Fukushima Mizuho were awarded Cabinet posts.

Mr. Kamei’s accusation on NHK that the DPJ was cutting them out of the policy loop is a reference to the ruling party making policy decisions outside this council.

The Journeyman C(r)ook

The PNP is a splinter group of ex-LDP oldtimers who want to halt postal privatization, the most important governmental reform of the past 20 years. One of the reform’s objectives was to prevent the bureaucrats from diverting the funds in the postal savings and life insurance accounts to build all those bridges and roads to nowhere.

You know—putting the bureaucracy in its place.

The DPJ has always known exactly what the PNP wants to do, yet their platform clearly states that Japan Post will not return to being a state-operated enterprise. Their initial proposal in the coalition talks was to “consider” freezing the sale of government-held stock and reorganizing the enterprise. The PNP, however, demanded—and got—a firmer commitment to freeze the process without specifying what they intend the future form of it to be.

Party boss Kamei Shizuka has already served time in the Cabinet during his LDP career, most notably as Construction Minister in the days when there was enough pork on the hoof to start a new Commodities Exchange.

Mr. Kamei wanted to head the Defense Ministry, but settled for the Financial Services portfolio and Minister in Charge of Bloviating about Japan Post. The DPJ may already be regretting that decision, however. It turns out his party’s knowledge of economics seems stuck in the era when there was actually a need for postmen to hand deliver all the mail. Like most everyone else in the country, the DPJ probably didn’t read their website.

Here are some of their proposed solutions:

Solution 1: Shut down the Osaka Nikkei 225 Futures Market
Problem with Solution 1:
This Osaka market accounts for 59% of the country’s stock price index futures trading and nearly 100% of the options trading. Stock futures trading often performs its function of price discovery more rapidly than the stock market itself. Though the October 1987 stock market crash in U.S. was blamed on the fall of stock index futures, it was actually an early warning of the crash rather than the cause.

Solution 2: Eliminating mark-to-market accounting
Problem with Solution 2:
Bankers and their advocates hate this accounting method, while accountants, investor advocates, and banking analysts love it. It forces financial institutions to value their assets at true market prices, which could make them swallow huge losses during a market downturn. In other words, eliminating the practice enables them to hide those losses. The banking industry would rather value the assets based on future cash flow, and no, they have no idea what that will be either. Beth Brooke, global vice chair at Ernst & Young LLP, has said, “Suspending mark-to-market accounting, in essence, suspends reality.”

The idea was floated by some in the LDP in 2003, but Takenaka Heizo and the Koizumi Administration successfully resisted the suggestion. The man who proposed it was Aso Taro.

Solution 3: Eliminating capital adequacy requirements for banks
Problem with Solution 3:
These requirements determine how much money a bank can lend, but some think they can cause a credit crunch because banks will cut down on their loans to meet the requirements. The danger of elimination is obvious—a lending institution has to have something to back up its loans. But even Mr. Takenaka thought it was important for the requirements to be flexible.

This solution is being proposed as the discussion in the rest of the world is moving in the direction of raising capital adequacy requirements.

Solution 4: Issuing JPY 200 trillion in non-interest bearing government bonds (About $US 2.2 billion)
Problem with Solution 4:
Bonds of this type are sold at a discount to par value rather than with coupons, and the intention here is to fund the deficit. The problems involve the greater provision of central bank money, the potential for raising the fiscal premium, and damaging the credibility of the currency.

Solution 5: From Mr. Kamei himself—a three-year moratorium on debt repayments by small businesses, and the injection of public funds into banks that become financially strapped by the lack of income due to the moratorium.

Isn’t it fascinating that a man whose party’s website inveigles against the “strong eating the weak” is ready to have taxpayers bail out banks as one leg of his Rube Goldberg economics? Mr. Kamei says the SDPJ is for it too, and he wants to get it done by the end of the year.

I thought I told all you whippersnappers to sit down and shut up!

The Mainichi Shimbun editorializes that these loans, combined with home mortgages, total JPY 300 trillion nationwide and account for 70% all bank loan portfolios. They worry the moratorium could cause bank failures among regional banks in particular. Mr. Kamei’s suggestion has already started a sell-off of bank stocks.

Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa says nothing has been decided, and told reporters, “If the economy was really that bad, it would be one possibility to consider, but the Bank of Japan has not said that’s the situation we’re in.”

But Mr. Kamei insists it’s settled. He also said that he’d listen to Mr. Fujii’s opinions, but, “It won’t be discussed. It isn’t a matter that we’ll decide after discussion.”

The Finance Minister backed down.

Are Cabinet ministers in this administration to act as feudal lords, with the ministries as their personal fiefdoms? Where’s Prime Minister Hatoyama when you really need him? Where are all those newly created government policy bodies when you really need them? When it comes to that, where are all those Finance Ministry bureaucrats when you really need them?

Then again, Bloomberg quoted Prime Minister Hatoyama as saying that “he’ll avoid more bond sales, so new spending will depend on his success in shrinking the bureaucracy and public works programs”.

Richard Daughty, the COO of a financial advisory services company in the U.S., writes financial commentary under the name of The Mogambo Guru. He referred to Mr. Hatoyama’s claim as “Standard Political Crapola (SPC)”.

Though Mr. Kamei’s been in office less than a week, it was enough time for him to also cross swords with Haraguchi Kazuhiro, the new Internal Affairs and Communications minister. Mr. Haraguchi floated a plan for the reorganization of Japan Post into three independent companies rather than four companies under the aegis of a holding company. Said Mr. Kamei:

“I’m responsible for Japan Post, and I’ll take the responsibility and decide.”

The chastened Mr. Haraguchi explained, “It was just an illustrative example”.

The Apprentice Chef

Meanwhile, the other coalition partner, the SDPJ, has an agenda of its own. One of their goals is to eliminate the American military presence in Japan. Rather than support a greater Japanese defensive capability in its place, however, they also believe that people shouldn’t use weapons to defend themselves. (We’ll get to more of that later.) This is just what Mr. Hatoyama doesn’t need with the Americans wondering about his intentions after the translation of his goofy article from Voice magazine appeared in the New York Times, but hey, these are the people his party wants in government.

During the negotiations to create the coalition, the SDPJ declared:

“The proposal of amendments to the Japan-U.S. Status-of-Forces Agreement should be made from the perspective of minimizing the burden on the people of Okinawa, and the approach to the reorganization of American forces (in Japan) and their bases should be reconsidered.”

The DPJ balked, and the negotiations grew unpleasant. At one point DPJ representative and now Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya got so fed up with SDPJ head Fukushima Mizuho that he stormed out of the room. He charged that the DPJ wasn’t offering concrete proposals but delivering political lectures instead. Once a Socialist, always a Socialist.

Ms. Fukushima merely responded by going over his head and calling Hatoyama Yukio. And then going over his head by calling Ozawa Ichiro.

The DPJ finally compromised by changing the language to, “move in the direction of” reevaluating the agreements. They suggested the language be softened to create good relations with the Obama Administration in the U.S. Ms. Fukushima was delighted, and was shown crowing about it on TV to the other 11 members of her party with Diet seats.

Ms. Fukushima was angling for the Environmental Ministry portfolio, because, as she noted, they have a larger staff. Instead she settled for the new Consumer Affairs Ministry, which makes one suspect someone in the DPJ has a sense of humor. That’s just the sort of pretend-important Cabinet post the LDP once awarded to their female politicians as apprentice chefs to give them some experience in the political kitchen while using them as tokens to convince female voters they take them seriously. It’s surprising that Ms. Fukushima, who began her professional career as a radical feminist attorney, fell for it. But then a seat at the table of power is enough to trump principle for most leftists.

Who’s in charge here?

Before the recent election, the DPJ had 114 members in the lower house. They now have 308, for a net gain of 194 seats. The PNP had five; they now have three. The SDPJ stayed even at seven, but now have three directly elected MPs instead of only one. The reason for that increase was not due to greater popular support, but the DPJ’s choice to abstain from fielding a candidate in those districts.

The DPJ has far more than the 241 votes it needs for a lower house majority. Yet, in the upcoming administration, the handful of MPs from the formal coalition partners, and particularly their two party heads, will have a greater influence and say on the direction of the government than the 194 new DPJ members, who represent the popular will today.

That the DPJ created a coalition which includes the PNP and the SDP makes it difficult to avoid the accusation that their Government is a distortion of the democratic process and inimical to the expression of the popular will.

…The Crooks…

The reason I referred to Kamei Shizuka as a journeyman c(r)ook was recently explained in this Japanese-language blog post by Ikeda Nobuo. Mr. Kamei seems to have a knack for making money from shady deals with shady companies with a yakuza presence lurking in the background. One incident mentioned is described in a 1989 Yomiuri Shimbun article, which reports he made profits of JPY 400 million (about $US 4.18 million) in excess of market valuation in a 1987 stock sale that an official termed “an unnatural transaction.”

Perhaps that explains why he doesn’t like mark-to-market accounting.

It’s bad enough that a single-issue splinter party has an influence on policy far out of proportion with its numerical strength. It’s even worse that a man who might be mobbed-up is now in the Cabinet and punching far above his weight. But the DPJ put him there.

Suzuki Muneo

Meet former LDP lower house rep from Hokkaido Suzuki Muneo, the postwar record holder for jail time for a national legislator: 437 days, for bribery. Two of his top aides were also nailed. Mr. Suzuki had carved out a minor suzerainty in the Foreign Ministry. Though he had no official position, he had enormous influence over senior bureaucrats on policy and overseas aid projects.

After his release from prison, he became an advocate for decentralizing government, albeit under centralized control and direction, and an economic demagogue in the style of Kamei Shizuka. He was reelected to the Diet as head of a vanity party.

He was also sentenced to another two-year term for bribery in 2004 and has lost every subsequent appeal. The case is now before the Japanese Supreme Court. The next loss means another jail term and a five-year ban on public office.

But Mr. Suzuki is a pal of Ozawa Ichiro, and has influence among the voters in Hokkaido, where the carnage for the LDP was particularly gruesome this past election.

So the DPJ appointed the ex-con whose name is synonymous with lying and being on the take to chair the lower house Foreign Affairs Committee.

…And The Kooks

More troubling than the number of cooks and crooks in the governmental kitchen is that many of the people involved are not part of the reality-based community. The problem is best described by British novelist, journalist, and commentator James Delingpole, who recently published a book titled, Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work. He says:

“In it, I warned the U.S. of the ‘smorgasbord of scuzzballs, incompetents, time servers, Communists, class warriors, eco-loons, single-issue rabble-rousers, malcontents and losers who always rise to the surface during a left-liberal administration….it becomes a problem – as you’re about to discover, if you haven’t already – when your ruling administration consists of nothing but these people. No longer do they qualify as light relief. They become your daily nightmare…. Making these predictions was a no-brainer because it’s exactly the same process as we’ve witnessed in Britain these last twelve years under New Labour.’”

He might just as well have been talking about Japan. We’ve already seen that the PNP is the Government’s version of a “single-issue rabble-rouser”, but there are even worse. Much worse.

Japan Teachers’ Union

No group is more committed to putting ideological blather and self-interest before the public good.
- Jonah Goldberg, on teachers’ unions

The goals of the Japan Teachers’ Union include improving the Japanese educational system so that it more closely resembles the systems in the United States and Great Britain. The California public school teachers appreciate those improvements so much that 25% of them now send their children to private schools.

They share the same disdain for individual achievement as their overseas cousins, as they want to do away with competitive examinations. Political indoctrination of the students starts early and focuses on the supposed sins of Japan rather than its achievements and opportunities. Former Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura Nobutaka once said that the LDP would have been open to more detailed discussions of Japanese wartime responsibility in schools had there not been so many Marxists among the faculty.

The JTU recently cleaned up its website, most likely in anticipation of a successful election result. Once upon a time, it featured amateurishly drawn cartoons that revealed both their politics and the arrested development of their sense of humor. But tools are available to retrieve erased pages. Here’s an example of one of their eliminated cartoons featuring a likeness of what apparently is supposed to represent former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.

For another taste of their junior hi humor combined with their “resistance”, try this article in Great Britain’s Guardian from three years ago describing the antics of school teachers who dislike Kimi ga Yo, Japan’s national anthem, and the imperial system:

Japanese who object to being forced to sing their country’s national anthem have a secret weapon: the English language. Kiss Me, an English parody of the Kimigayo, has spread through the internet and was sung by teachers and pupils at recent school entrance and graduation ceremonies, local media reported yesterday.

“Teachers and pupils”? See what I mean about indoctrination beginning early? The 11-year-old wise guys are indoctrinating the teachers in pre-adolescent spitballery.

Leftwing teachers unions regard Kimigayo, which is based on an ancient poem wishing the emperor a “thousand years of happy reign”, as a symbol of Japan’s militarist past.

When they say ancient, they mean more than a millennium. Though Kimi ga Yo was not officially adopted until about 10 years ago, it has been the de facto anthem for much longer.

Here are the complete lyrics:

May your reign
Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations,
Until the pebbles
Grow into boulders
Lush with moss

Grab yer firin’ iron! Them’s fightin’ words!

Did some Japanese manipulate national symbols for their own ends during an ugly period of the nation’s history? Yes, as has every other nation in the world. But one reason children are sent to school is to learn the national narrative. The agenda of “leftwing teachers”, other than those in Soviet bloc-type countries, is to denigrate the national narrative by poisoning the minds of the students. The full Japanese national narrative is not defined by one gruesome chapter, nor is it an unending tale of imperialism! capitalism! racism! sexism! war-mongering! These people so dislike their country one is forced to wonder if the real object of their dislike is themselves.

Then again, perhaps they’re not used to tradition in matters such as these. Sergei Mikhalkov wound up writing three sets of lyrics to the Soviet/Russian anthem from 1943 to 2000. The first version was in praise of Stalin, the second version was Stalin Who?, and the third version is in praise of the Fatherland. Keeping the same tradition for more than 1,000 years? How conservative and L7 can you get!

The Japanese in this camp loudly proclaim that they are defenders of the Constitution, i.e., Article 9, the peace clause. Very few fall for it, however, because if they were true defenders of the Constitution, they wouldn’t hold in such contempt the first sentence of Article 1:

The Emperor shall be the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people…

Those who watched the Japanese election returns on TV saw JTU alumnus and Acting DPJ President Koshi’ishi Azuma preening on stage with the other party leaders after their big victory. He’s already said more than once this year that education without a political element is not possible (despite being against Japanese law). Everyone knows what political element he has in mind. Mr. Koshi’ishi’s pre-election position in the party was equivalent to that of Ozawa Ichiro and Kan Naoto, and he retains that influence. But even the DPJ wasn’t dumb enough to put him in the Cabinet and make him a sitting duck. He’ll just roll up his sleeves and go to work out of the public view.

DPJ

Here are some excerpts from the DPJ website in English:

We do not seek a panacea either in the free market or in the welfare state. Rather, we shall build a new road of the democratic center toward a society in which self-reliant individuals can mutually coexist and the government’s role is limited to building the necessary systems.

Does that not fairly scream of Third Way nonsense without writing the actual words? Saying that one is a believer in the Third Way is similar to some of those who call themselves bisexuals. The former is just a leftist who knows better than to parade on May Day carrying a red flag, while the latter have sesquicentennial encounters with the opposite sex to avoid coming all the way out of the closet and admit being gay.

And note the false equivalence between the free market and the welfare state. Pavarotti and Johnny Rotten were both singers, but that didn’t make them equals.

We shall restructure the centralized government from the perspective of devolution toward citizens, markets, and local governments.

They plan to do that by making direct government payments to parents for child rearing in lieu of tax deductions, by making direct government payments to families for high school tuition, and by making direct government payments to individual farmers.

The real DPJ political platform is the Index of Policies, on which the so-called Manifesto is based and then cleaned up for public consumption.

Unlike the Manifesto, the Index—which was last revised in July—is not in English. It’s also recently been tucked away on the party website under the Manifesto section, whereas before it was in full view. Some Japanese have said they find the language in the Index “peculiar”, and they have a point. I haven’t been through all of it—it’s long and packed with boilerplate and platitudes—but it does have some peculiar ideas for a party that claims to be devoted to citizens, markets, and local government.

Such as:

“We will proceed with consideration of an International Solidarity Tax that taxes specified economic activities across national borders, and which will be used as the funding source for international organizations to conquer poverty and support developing countries.”

What we have here is a policy with a retro-Bolshie name to levy an unjustifiable and ill-defined tax to fund an enterprise that anyone who goes through life awake knows will fail. Looks like all the highway signs on the DPJ Third Way read Merge Left.

According to the Index, they also want to maintain the inheritance tax to “Return part of (a person’s) wealth to society”. And here I thought that a person’s wealth was already a part of social wealth. Japan’s inheritance tax was 70% in 2005, which means that a lot of people spent a lot of time and trouble finding ways to get around it.

The party wants to establish a Permanent Peace Study Bureau in the Diet Library. One has to admit that does have potential as a job creation scheme. They’ll need a full janitorial staff to deal with all those cobwebs.

They also want to prevent suicide by spending a lot of money on analysis and studies for suicide prevention. They intend to make it an obligation of publishers to produce textbooks that children with weak eyesight can read. They want to levy stiffer taxes on stiffer drinks to promote health, which is sure to please those taxpayers who have one or two stiff drinks a month and are in excellent health, but will pay the same rate as the lushes.

Perhaps the most peculiar of word choices is found in the section that discusses the party’s stance against North Korea. Their approach comes across as somewhat hardline. But the section is titled, “The core development of diplomatic relations with North Korea”, or in Japanese, 北朝鮮外交の主体的展開.

This part – 主体的 – which corresponds to “core”, is seldom used in Japanese, and it has no bearing on the explanation that follows. But the word is used quite frequently in North Korea. There it’s pronounced juche, and it’s the ruling philosophy of the North Korean government.

The arrested development of their sense of humor is a more widespread malady than I thought.

The Socialists Democratic Party of Japan

In most Western countries, the socialists and the social democrats are the girly men of the left, unable to bring themselves to the truly whacked position of the remaining Communist poseurs. Perhaps that’s because they realize they would lose their opportunities for making money in the stock market and real estate investments under a true Red regime.

In Japan, those relative positions are reversed. The SDPJ are the vicious, vaporous, anti-life, and anti-reality bunch, while the JCP is better behaved and actually has some integrity.

Consider: The North Koreans attempted to assassinate then-South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan during a 1983 visit to Rangoon by detonating three bombs by remote control. The president was not killed, but 21 people were, including three South Korean Cabinet ministers and four Burmese.

The Chinese government criticized the North Korean government in the state media and broke off official contact with Pyeongyang for several months. Japan’s Communist Party also condemned it, saying that terrorism had no part in their movement. Japan’s Socialists?

North Korea was unconnected with the incident in any way because it was not beneficial to them.

For years they claimed that it was impossible for the North Korean government to have abducted Japanese citizens. When Kim Jong-il finally fessed up, their successors in the SDPJ excused the abductions by saying it didn’t compare in any way to Japanese behavior on the Korean Peninsula during the war.

The party’s website is not in English, but it does proudly proclaim that boss Fukushima Mizuho attended the Socialist International conference this year. It’s adorned with a few of the global-standard Socialist illustrations of a rose held aloft in a fist. Their environmental policies—cap’n’trade, anti-nuclear power, anti global “warming”—are the usual blast of hot air one expects from watermelons, so-called because they are green on the outside and red on the inside. Then again, the SPDJ has never bothered to hide its crimson exterior.

The DPJ voluntarily chose the SDPJ as their coalition partners and gave the party head a seat in the Cabinet. They helped boost the party’s chances in the recent election by refraining from running a candidate in districts with prominent SDPJ members. That’s how they picked up two directly elected seats in the lower house.

Fukushima Mizuho

The SDPJ boss hasn’t always been so chummy with the DPJ. She once said, “The LDP and the DPJ are only as different as curry rice and rice curry.” Now that she’s part of the government headed by the latter, it would seem that she has developed a more discriminating palate.

She and husband Kaido Yuichi are both attorneys. Ms. Fukushima has focused on radical feminist causes, and she’s written three books on sexual harassment and domestic violence. She’s also written another called Konna Otoko to ha Zettai Kekkon Suru na! (Under No Circumstances Marry a Man of This Type!). She and her husband have frequently associated with people linked to the Chukaku-ha, or Japan Revolutionary Communist League, and defended them in court trials.

They must have had plenty of work. From the late 60s to the early 90s, Chukaku-ha led or was involved in numerous open battles with police, sabotaged the railroad in 33 Tokyo and Osaka locations when it being privatized, attacked LDP headquarters with a flamethrower mounted on a truck, conducted fatal arson and bombing attacks, and fought bloody battles with two other groups on the ultra-left, resulting in an estimated 100 fatalities. Their slogan is “Workers of the world unite under the banner of anti-imperialism and anti-Stalinism!” That presumably means they were down with K. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao.

In May 1991, Chukaku-ha changed course and decided to focus its efforts within trade unions and mainstream left-wing movements. One of those efforts was a petition drive to prevent Japan’s use of military force in the event of a foreign invasion. Ms. Fukushima signed it.

Registered as an attorney in 1987, Ms. Fukushima first won election to the Diet in 1998, though it is only a proportional representation seat in the upper house. She is one of the few party leaders in Japanese postwar history who have been unable to win a Diet seat in a direct election, or unwilling to try.

Let’s have Madame Chairman speak for herself. Here’s a brief transcript from her 2005 appearance on the TV show Asa Made (Until Morning), being interviewed by Tahara Soichiro.

Fukushima: I am absolutely opposed to the use of sidearms by police officers. For one thing, even perpetrators of crimes have their rights. The police must not be allowed to injure criminals at all. Even if it is a brutal criminal with a lethal weapon, the police should approach the arrest unarmed.
Tahara: And what happens if a police officer does that and is killed?
Fukushima: Well, that’s the job of police officers…(Shocked sound from the people in the studio. Showing irritation at the response, she continues)…Besides, if a criminal puts up that much resistance, there’s no need to go to all that trouble to arrest him. There’s no problem with letting him escape.
Tahara: But what if the criminal who runs away kills someone else at a different location?
Fukushima: That’s a separate problem…

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Diet debate about the possible interception of an incoming North Korean missile.

Fukushima: If the intercepting missile hits the target, debris will fall. If it misses, it will fly outside the country. Can you say there won’t be any harm caused to the citizens either in Japan or in other countries?
(Then) Foreign Minister Nakasone Hirofumi: If it presents a danger of damage to the lives and property of our people, that missile should be intercepted as a matter of course.
(Then) Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu: But there would be more damage if the missile would be allowed to fall. If it’s intercepted in space, most of the debris would burn up and not fall to earth. It’s important to destroy the missile first and minimize (its potential for harm).
Fukushima: If we miss, it will harm the national interest, and if we hit it, what happens if it turns out to have been just a satellite?

There was laughter at this remark from opposition benches for some reason, but then we’ve already found out about the sense of humor of the Japanese left.

The DPJ thought she would make a dandy Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, Social Affairs, and Gender Equality in the new coalition government, and so appointed her to that position.

Tsujimoto Kiyomi

Currently the SDPJ’s head of Diet strategy, Tsujimoto Kiyomi came up with the idea for taking cruises on a Peace Boat to the countries that Japan invaded during the war when she was a Waseda undergraduate in 1983. It’s not easy for a spunky coed to organize a project on that scale, regardless of her commitment or idealism, so she needed some help.

She received that help from Kitakawa Akira, who later became what is described as her common-law husband, and Oda Makoto.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and intelligence service archives became available, it was discovered that Mr. Oda had been a KGB agent. Mr. Kitakawa was a member of the Japanese Red Army, a revolutionary terrorist group formed in 1971 that was responsible for bombings, airplane hijackings, and armed attacks throughout the world. One member was caught with explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike in the 1980s and spent time in an American jail. Several members were granted asylum in North Korea, and the Japanese government is trying to extradite them. It remains an obstacle to the normalization of relations.

Though vicious, the group’s membership was always small, and they immediately had problems finding the money to survive. It was provided by Palestinians starting in 1972.

Join me in solidarity to smash the country and make the world safe for large purple vibrators

The Peace Boat, meanwhile, expanded the range of its voyages and visited the Middle East. Cruise members met several times with Yasser Arafat, perhaps to thank him for his money and ask for more. It was eventually awarded Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. That is an honor they share with Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice (he speaks in tongues on television), the Brazilian Federation of LGBT Groups (Associação Brasileira de Gays, Lésbicas e Transgêneros, ABGLT), the Advisory Commission of the Evangelical Church in Germany, The American Civil Liberties Union, The Association for the Advancement of Psychological Understanding of Human Nature, The Centre for Women the Earth the Divine, The Italian Confederation of Labour, Conscience and Peace Tax International, Fraternite Notre Dame, Inc., and the International Academy of Architecture. That would suggest the designation is as easy to obtain as a package of free tissues outside any large train station in Japan.

Mr. Kitakawa was responsible for JRA activities in Europe, and he was eventually deported from Sweden. Back in Japan, he founded the Daisansha publishing company, which has released six of Ms. Tsujimoto’s books.

She was recruited by former Socialist Party leader Doi Takako to run for the Diet, and she won her first election in 1996. A few years later, Shigenobu Fusako, the founder of the Japanese Red Army was arrested in Takatsuki, Osaka, Ms. Tsujimoto’s home district. She was in the company of Yoshida Mamoru, a member of Tsujimoto’s staff in Takatsuki.

As an MP, she started receiving national exposure in the early years of the Koizumi Administration with her semi-hysterical challenges of the prime minister during question time. She does have spunk, however, and it was great television, so a star was quickly born.

It just as quickly faded after her success went to her head and she accused the aforementioned Suzuki Muneo during his questioning in the Diet of being a “trading house for suspicion”. Mr. Suzuki, semi-hysterical himself, blew up in a memorable rant.

Those of you who enjoy interesting coincidences will be delighted to know that not long afterwards, investigators just happened to discover that she had been raking off funds from the money that was supposed to be paid to her political aides. It was suspected that she gave some of the money to Mr. Kitakawa. She was sentenced to two years in jail with a five-year stay of execution.

Ms. Tsujimoto resigned her Diet seat, but Japanese voters can be a forgiving lot, and she’s back, though keeping a much lower profile.

Again, let’s let the lady speak for herself. Here’s one:

“It’s not possible that the peace-loving North Koreans would abduct anyone.”

Golly, where have we heard that before?

She has a strange conception of loyalty for a Diet member:

“I don’t want to be a Japanese. I want to be an international person.”

Perhaps I should have spelled that “internationale”.

Indeed, she has been so internationale in general, and pro-North Korean in particular, that some Japanese have wondered if she is a naturalized Korean with family roots in the northern part of the peninsula.

Here’s how she views her duties as a national legislator. She was speaking informally to a person she didn’t realize was a reporter:

“They say a Diet member should protect the lives and property of the citizens, but that is not my intention. My role is as a ‘national destroyer’ MP who will try somehow to destroy the framework of the state.”

There’s a bit lost in the translation, as Ms. Tsujimoto is making a pun. The word for Diet member is 国会議員 (kokkai gi-in). She replaced the first two characters with the homonym 国壊 (kokkai), which means “national destruction”.

She also has a unique sense of fun. During a feminist conference sponsored by the owner of a shop for sex toys, the amusingly named Love Piece Club, she autographed a large purple vibrator for an auction.

Now nobody objects to the ways people choose to get their kicks, but one would expect a Diet member to show some discretion at a public event.

Sidebar

The Love Piece Club has a website. One of the pages is here, which displays the nude snapshots a photographer took of the “Buy Vibe Girls” at the Yasukuni Shinto shrine bright and early one morning. Ordinarily, it’s standard Internet practice to warn of photos that aren’t work safe, but any work supervisor who caught you looking at these is more likely to feel sorry for you than angry at you.

The title of the page, by the way, is Nobody Knows I’m Lesbian. Come on, Mina, who are you trying to kid? All anyone has to do is look at your picture.

Now, former combatants and ex-cons Tsujimoto Kiyomi and Suzuki Muneo are part of the ruling coalition, proving beyond doubt that politics makes for the strangest of bedfellows.

One wonders which one brought the large purple vibrator.

Ms. Tsujimoto, a politician convicted of skimming public funds, who pals around with terrorists, who would rather be known as the national destroyer than a Japanese, and who has vowed to wreck the framework of the state, was appointed by the ruling DPJ to serve as Vice-Minister for the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. That ministry is responsible for the national infrastructure and dealing with disasters.

Here’s the best part: No one in her party likes the idea at all. Ms. Tsujimoto’s own initial reaction was:

やだ、やだ、やだ、やだ！

That’s what a four-year old throwing a tantrum might say when told to take some unpleasant medicine—No, no, no, no!

She gave in after being told that party head Fukushima Mizuho signed off on it. But then Ms. Fukushima claimed she didn’t sign off on it. But then she admitted that she did.

With Ms. Fukushima occupied by her make-work duties in the Cabinet, Ms. Tsujimoto was being counted on by the party to be the face of their campaign in next year’s upper house election. Those with a Machiavellian turn of mind might wonder if the DPJ purposely wanted to give her some make-work duties of her own in the bureaucracy. That would prevent her from being the poster girl of the SDPJ campaign, making it easier for the DPJ to take them out in the election and form a government without their help.

It’s a wrap!

I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for those Japanese who were so fed up with LDP rule that they felt compelled to vote for the DPJ and its coalition of too many cooks, too many crooks, and too many kooks in the hope they would receive clean government, real reform, and responsible political behavior.

If we’re lucky, perhaps they’ll manage to achieve some of their promised reforms during their administration, particularly shutting off the entry of bureaucrats into public sector jobs. They might yet reinsert the jackhammer into the foundation of the structure of interests that holds the country back. Maybe their conduct will spur the rejuvenation of a sharp opposition party, regardless of label, whose members will be decisive enough to ditch the mudboaters before refloating their political ship.

Credit where credit is due

Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya

Mr. Okada has opened attendance at his press conferences to all members of the Japanese news media, ending the kisha club monopoly in which only certain outlets get direct access to the politicians. Now the weekly magazines, Internet publications, and sports newspapers (some of their political reporting is better than you think) can attend. This development was not reported by the Asahi Shimbun, the Yomiuri Shimbun, or the Nikkei Shimbun, which constitute Japan’s press monopoly. Perhaps they’ve taken lessons from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and most of the American TV networks.

I’ve said before that the DPJ always carries banana peels in its back pocket for pratfall practice, and this time Prime Minister Hatoyama showed off his best Buster Keaton form. Before the election, he promised that he would open up his press conferences too. The reporters asked if he would put that in the party platform. He said no, it wasn’t necessary to go that far.

The only reporters allowed at Mr. Hatoyama’s first press conference were those in the kisha club.

Maehara Seiji

The new Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, Mr. Maehara is often criticized by the party’s left wing and DPJ hacks because he (a) is not left-wing, (b) believes in a strong national defense, (c) intensely dislikes Ozawa Ichiro and his presence in the party, and (d) is capable of apostasy by working with the Koizumian reformers of the LDP, including rebel Watanabe Yoshimi. If there’s anything the left hates more than common sense, it’s a traitor.

One of his first announcements as MLIT chief was the suspension of the Yamba Dam project in Gunma. This was immediately hailed by all those anxious to end the ties between construction industry pork and the government once and for all.

But they couldn’t even get this one right. The governments of the six prefectures that will be affected by the decision were not at all pleased. Tokyo in particular is concerned about the water supply for the exploding population in some areas of its jurisdiction. Mr. Maehara is going to visit Gunma later this week and talk to local officials. Some are so upset they say they won’t attend if the decision is not changed.

Also opposed to the decision is the Gunma governor–who is affiliated with the DPJ. The governor was miffed that the prefectural government wasn’t consulted before the MLIT announced the decision.

In other words, the party that promised to decentralize government and devolve authority to local governments made an arbitrary central government decision without any input from local government and a governor on their own team.

Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa said no final decision had been made, but the MLIT is behaving as if they’re going to shut it down. Mr. Fujii deferred to Mr. Maehara.

Except Mr. Maehara spun around again and deferred to the locals. He’s now said the legal procedures to halt the project won’t begin until the “understanding” of the six prefectures is obtained.

Now you know why some charge the DPJ wasn’t ready to assume control of the government. All of this, including discussions with the local governments, should have been worked out long ago. Mr. Maehara says he is merely executing one of the planks in the DPJ platform. That was the same platform the party kept revising after its initial release just last month.

Kawabata Tatsuo

Mr. Kawabata was named Education Minister, much to the relief of those who were apprehensive about Koshi’ishi Azuma winding up with that job. The JTU wants to roll back the education reforms of the Abe administration, particularly the new teacher certification requirements. But at his initial press conference, Mr. Kawabata said that would be only one of several options examined over the next four years. Those experienced at reading bureaucratic tea leaves think that means the JTU might not be getting carte blanche in the new Government after all, though they warn that Mr. Koshi’ishi has yet to be heard from.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kawabata talked up a proposal for extending teacher training to six years—the same amount of classroom time as a Japanese medical doctor. But then classroom instruction is hardly brain surgery. Every extra minute seated in a classroom staring out the window while some teacher drones on about classroom teaching is a minute wasted. If the objective is to improve classroom instruction, that time would be better spent being actively involved with life as it’s actually lived.

Afterwords:

Sorry for not keeping my promise. The last post said the next one would be “tomorrow”, but that turned into two weeks. I had some work to do, and wading through the sheer deluge of information related to today’s topic took some time.

A correction–but the point still stands

AFTER SUNDAY’S ELECTION, I wrote in the Afterwords section that Yosano Kaoru wasn’t selected as a proportional representative candidate, even though he had more votes than two other LDP candidates and one DPJ candidate.

As someone pointed out in the Comments section, Mr. Yosano was in fact selected. It turns out that the edition of the newspaper I used to write the Afterwords section did not have the absolutely positively final results. I’m sorry for any confusion that might have caused.

However!

I’m now looking at the edition of the newspaper with the final results. In Tokyo’s proportional representation bloc, the DPJ’s Hayakawa Kumiko was selected upon receiving 106,892 votes, though she lost the direct election in her district. She was listed at the top of the DPJ table. Former Cabinet minister Koike Yuriko of the LDP was also selected after receiving 96,739 votes, though she also lost the direct election in her district.

Meanwhile, another direct election loser, Sato Yukari of the LDP, eighth on the list of LDP PR candidates, received 121,244 votes, yet was not selected for the Diet (only five LDP members in the Tokyo bloc cleared the hurdle). In fact, she received more than Kamoshita Ichiro, who was listed first in the LDP table. He got 111,590 people to vote for him.

My original point stands: Any system that allows this to happen, regardless of the identity of the candidates or their party, and regardless of the reason, is profoundly undemocratic.

Here’s the first cat out of the bag

THAT DIDN’T take long. Just two days ago, I wrote that the Democratic Party of Japan, the government’s new ruling party, had the potential to create a circus with more rings than Ringling Brothers. No one could have expected the show under the big tent would start so soon, however.

Mabuchi (I'm not a Diet member, I just play one on TV) Sumio

One of the pigmeat provisions inserted for the general public in the party platform was the elimination of expressway tolls, despite polling that shows people are against it by at least a two-to-one margin.

Included in the English language version of their platform, which you can see on their website, is a promise to “revitalize local economies by eliminating highway tolls”, and to “progressively eliminate all highway tolls”. This is mentioned in at least three places in the platform, though one of those includes the weasel words, “in principle”.

Well, the weasel didn’t even wait for the Hatoyama government to be sworn in before it stuck its head out of the burrow.

On Wednesday, DPJ lower house member Mabuchi Sumio (Hatoyama group) from Yokohama appeared on the current affairs program Hodo Suteeshon broadcast on the TV Asahi network. The show is hosted by Furutachi Ichiro, and former Aera editor Isshiki Kiyoshi also appears as a commentator.

I didn’t see the program, but according to several Japanese sources, the following exchange took place.

Isshiki: If you eliminate expressway tolls, the traffic jams…

Mabuchi: We’ll have the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport conduct simulations in those places where it seems traffic jams are likely to occur, and charge tolls there.

Furutachi: What! But everyone thinks that all the expressways will be free except for the Metropolitan Expressway (in the Tokyo area) and the Hanshin Expressway (in the Osaka area).

Mabuchi: If it seems there will be traffic jams, there’ll be tolls.

Furutachi: We pretty much know where there are likely to be traffic jams. Will the Tomei Expressway have tolls? (The Tomei is 350 kilometers long and runs from Tokyo to Aichi.)

Mabuchi: I can’t say which routes are likely to be crowded.

Furutachi: Well, they’re already crowded now, so we know, don’t we?

Mabuchi: If we mentioned the names of specific routes that would retain the tolls…considering the emotions of the people in the area, it would have been difficult for us to say before the election.

“Don’t read my lips,” eh? I understand completely. If the expiration date of your campaign promises is the day after the election, it’s best to win the election first before you level with the voters. It’s right there in black and white in the poli sci textbooks used at all the finer universities, not to mention the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management.

Also during the program, Mr. Mabuchi said that some in the party thought they should spell out before the election which roads would still have tolls and those that wouldn’t.

Ah, but that would be telling!

Is there anyone in the DPJ who isn’t the political equivalent of a rubber duck in a straw hat floating in the bathtub?

Other than Ozawa Ichiro, and he probably doesn’t float.

Update: The Nihon Keizai Shimbun published a poll on 2 September revealing that roughly 60% of those surveyed said they would not use expressways more frequently even if tolls were eliminated. (58% said there would be no change, and 1% said they would use the expressways less frequently.) This was most pronounced for those aged 40 or older, with the percentage of people set in their ways rising to 67%. Even 51% of those in their 30s said it would have no effect on their driving choices.

Some of the reasons cited by respondents were:

* No increase in automobile use otherwise: 58%
* More crowded roads: 55%
* Higher expenditures on gasoline: 36%

Not often cited in this debate is Tokyo Vice-Governor Inose Naoki’s claim that only 10% of Japan’s registered vehicles are ever driven on expressways. That is perhaps a factor contributing to the first reason listed above.