The wolf is at the door

IT was almost the Aesop’s Fable in reverse: Officials have for so long been so little forthcoming with real information about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, some people wouldn’t believe them even if they were to tell the truth that the shepherd boy is warning about a fictitious wolf.

Other people, for reasons that are not clear, seem determined to create a situation which will manifest that wolf and bring him to the doorstep.

Most of the 30 (or 40, or 50, depending on the account) people who showed up for a good, old-time sit-in on Tuesday in the city of Kitakyushu were expressing honest concerns. They came to block six trucks hauling 80 tons of debris created by last year’s disaster from Ishinomaki, Miyagi, for a trial incineration at the Hiagari facility. The demonstrators plopped down in front of the gates to prevent the trucks from entering, which they successfully did for more than eight hours. One even crawled under a truck. The police finally dispersed them, arresting two in the process. That cleared the way for another 21 trucks to arrive later that evening.

Officials said the first burning of the debris over three days at two locations in the city went ahead as scheduled. It was packed in 140 plastic bags each measuring two meters in diameter. The announced radiation count was less than 100 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram. The health ministry’s lowest acceptable limit for radioactive cesium is 200 becquerels per kilogram of drinking water and 500 for vegetables.

The debris was mixed in a one-to-nine ratio with ordinary municipal refuse and incinerated in a method the city claims will remove more than 99.9% of the toxic material, even that contaminated by radioactive cesium. The city will then measure the radioactivity of the trucks and the equipment after the work is completed, and decide by mid-June whether to allow full-scale incineration to continue. If they agree, they will be the first municipality in western Japan to do so.

The small number of demonstrators is significant for two reasons. First, Kitakyushu was once a heavily industrialized city with serious pollution problems, but has won international recognition for converting itself into an “environmental city”. As a result, most residents do indeed trust them in matters of this sort. One 34-year-old woman griped about the demonstrators: “These people have a narrow viewpoint and think only of their immediate surroundings.” The city admitted, however, that they were negligent in promptly explaining the procedure to citizens’ groups and focusing on agriculture and fishery groups instead.

The low number is also significant because the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, AKA Chukakuha, wasn’t able to round up any more than that for the demo. Chukakuha is a revolutionary/terrorist outfit that arose in the late 60s/early 70s, when that sort of thing was in vogue. More than a hundred of its members have been arrested for murder (sometimes of themselves), assault, and homemade bomb production. They’re still around, though less active and with less coverage than before. One member fired a mortar at the guest house for heads of state at the 1986 Tokyo summit, and others set fire to the homes of public sector employees in Chiba in 2002/3. Here’s the JRCL English-language website, which gives you an insight into their avocation. Japanese-language ability is required to read one member’s report boasting of how they held up the incineration, however.

It’s said to be an “open secret” that Chukakuha were behind last year’s Energy Shift Study Conference, attended by then-Prime Minister Kan Naoto. Mr. Kan is no dupe, by the way; he’s hung out with people of this sort since his own days as a student demonstrator, and has spoken more than once of his sympathy for Zenkyoto’s “cultural revolution”.  Another fellow traveler is one of Japan’s leading punitive leftists, the head of the Social Democratic Party of Japan, Fukushima Mizuho. She and her unofficial husband have given legal advice to Chukakuha members, spoken at conferences organized by their members, supported some of their activities, and were (jointly) named as one of the most 100 influential people of the world last year by Time magazine for their anti-nuclear energy crusade. What, you hadn’t heard?

The news readers in this clip don’t offer any more information than you already know, but it’s worth watching to see how things went down. Where else in the world do policemen dressed in freshly pressed white shirts and neckties drag off demonstrators to the pig box?

Whistling for the wolf

While a certain amount of public hysteria about a nuclear power plant accident is to be expected, professor/author/alphablogger Ikeda Nobuo charges that the mass media in general and the Asahi group in particular are deliberately provoking it and making it worse. The Asahi group operates both a newspaper and a television network, and their political/social views are roughly similar to those of the New York Times in the U.S. and The Guardian in Britain.

Prof. Ikeda is scathing in his criticism of the Asahi, not for their general philosophy, but for their readiness to reverse their positions to enflame public opinion and benefit in the form of higher circulation/ratings. Once a strong editorial supporter of nuclear energy in the 1970s, the newspaper has shifted its stance over time and became a nuclear-free advocate after the Fukushima accident. He asserts that the newspaper’s approach is typical of behavior stretching back decades, and is reminiscent of their editorials and articles written to whip up martial spirit during the war. He quotes from an Asahi editorial written on 14 August 1945.

“There is no question that the atomic bomb has considerable power. Nonetheless, while all new weapons have power in the beginning, historical fact bears out that their power suddenly wanes when measures are eventually established against them….the opportunity for revenge on the enemy’s atrocities will arrive when first, the belief of the people burning within their breasts becomes a ball of fire that quietly hardens and bursts at once into flame.”

Note that the editorial was published after the two atomic bombings and Japan had already agreed to surrender unconditionally, but the newspaper was still talking about “revenge on the enemy’s atrocities”.

After Japan’s surrender the following day, the Asahi wrote an editorial saying that the country must establish “a nation of peace”. Since then, they have trumpeted the necessity to “defend the Peace Constitution”.

Prof. Ikeda then presents for comparison an editorial written by the newspaper’s Ono Hirohito calling for a nuclear power-free society that reverses their pro-nuclear stance:

“Isn’t declaring that we should examine whether or not to give up nuclear energy the same as saying the accident of 11 March didn’t occur? We should first make up our minds whether or not we should give up nuclear energy, and then confront the subsequent challenge of whether or not we are able to give it up. The Fukushima accident compels us to change our thinking in that way.”

Says the professor:

“It is eerie how closely this resembles the editorial of 14 August 1945. What they have in common is the approach of proclaiming a hardline policy based on an ideal without considering whether or not it is possible. During the war, they pandered to Imperial Headquarters, and after the defeat they reversed themselves and pandered to the GHQ. During the period of rapid growth, they pandered to the power companies and supported nuclear energy, and after the accident they reversed themselves and support a nuclear-free Japan. For the Asahi Shimbun, the Fukushima accident was the second defeat in the war.”

He deals with the behavior of the television network in a separate blog post:

“It is a simple matter to cast off a sense of shame, pander to fools, and boost ratings, as Asahi TV has done. It is the same as the Asahi Shimbun boosting its circulation during the war by writing of the “explosion of the ball of fire that is the people” to enflame public opinion.

“This is the fateful dilemma of mass society. Democracy is based on the premise that the people are wise, but in fact the people are emotional and short-sighted. In a national referendum, they would likely vote to give up nuclear energy and reduce taxes to zero. The people who believe that is true democracy have the intellectual facilities of a junior high school student.

“A consensus can be created by emotion, but results cannot be changed by emotion. The losses incurred by stopping nuclear power generation have exceeded JPY six trillion, which is already more than the damage from the accident at Fukushima reactor #1. Any large power blackouts that occur will likely cause immense human damage far greater than that of Fukushima. When that happens, one wonders if Asahi TV will align itself with the victims and strike the anti-establishment pose.”

The Asahi isn’t the only Japanese newspaper responsible for spreading paranoia. The EXSKF site (which enjoys a bit of paranoia itself) demonstrates how the Yomiuri Shimbun’s mishandling of technical information — beyond the comprehension of the average journo — has created the false impression that the Fukushima nuclear contamination is four times worse than that at Chernobyl. It isn’t, and the poster at the site provides and explains the correct calculations:

Cesium-137 released from Fukushima: 400,000 terabecquerels

Cesium-137 released from Chernobyl: 3,400,000 terabecquerels

Kansai Electric’s Oi nuclear reactors

Media wolf whistling is bad enough, but downright despicable is the use of nuclear energy as an issue by politicians and their associates who already enjoy broad public support. It is difficult to see how they can benefit from pandering. Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru has galvanized attention as the symbol of serious, bottom-up government reform in Japan, and his rise has ignited a renaissance of dynamic criticism and debate, particularly among those under the age of 50. Yet he has chosen over the past few months to detour into a call for a nuclear-free Japan with emotional appeals characterized by the absence of proposals for replacing the lost energy source. In particular, he is speaking out against resuming operations at the Oi nuclear power plant in his neck of the woods. Here’s an example of his rhetoric:

“If you say you’re putting peoples’ lives first (the slogan of the ruling Democratic Party), putting the peoples’ lives in danger by restarting the nuclear plants would not be possible.”

Kansai Electric Power, facing the worst potential power shortfalls of the country’s utilities if the plants are not restarted, has warned that it will have to raise rates otherwise. Osaka Prefecture Gov. Matsui Ichiro, Mr. Hashimoto’s primary political ally, retorted by threatening wolf-like behavior to oppose a rate hike:

“Mayor Hashimoto Toru and I can only resort to holding a sit-in in front of their offices in opposition.”

Kansai Electric says their thermal power fuel costs (oil, coal) were JPY 500 billion higher than last year (to compensate for the shutdown of the nuclear plants), and will amount to another JPY 400 billion this year. Their total fuel costs are double those of 2010, and they are warning of insolvency.

The City of Osaka is the largest single stockholder of Kansai Electric. Thus, the man who represents that ownership stake is behaving as if he would bankrupt the company. Ah, but one of his advisors has a solution. That would be “energy scientist” Iida Tetsunari, a member of various institutes, recipient of various government appointments, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, and a promoter of the idea that Japan can go 100% renewable energy by 2050:

“At this rate, Kansai Electric will go bankrupt next year. The government should offset the fuel expenditures. That way they won’t have to raise rates.”

Save the facepalm — It gets worse. Former Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry high-flyer Koga Shigeaki, a University of Tokyo graduate, former principal administrator for OECD, radical reformer of the bureaucracy, and another key Hashimoto advisor has started dancing with the wolves.

Not so long ago, he knew better. Last year, he said that the biggest problem with nuclear energy was how to dispose of the fuel. Now he too wants to shut all the reactors down.

He attended a recent meeting of the Municipal Energy Strategy Council in Osaka and started an argument with a representative of the national Agency for Natural Resources, who was there to advocate restarting the nuclear plants.

Koga: “Just what is the reason you are thinking of restarting the reactors?

NRA rep: “At the minimum, we have confirmed their safety is such the reactor core would not be damaged to the extent of that which occurred during the Fukushima accident.”

Koga: “Don’t you understand any situations other than Fukushima?

And:

Koga: “METI’s ties with the power company are too close, so they are lenient. Your whole argument is based on the assumption that they will be restarted.”

NRA rep: “It’s harassment when you talk about close ties.”

Then they got emotional.

Still not time for a facepalm — That’s not the half of it. Here’s what Mr. Koga told the viewers of the Morning Bird TV program on the Asahi network on 17 May:

“I can only think that (Kansai Electric) will create a state of “power outage terrorism”. They’ll intentionally cause an accident at the thermal power plant, or stop operating it if an accident does occur, to create a panic due to a large power shortage. They’ll say their only choice is to restart the nuclear power plants.”

Over-the-top rhetoric in Osaka must be contagious. Another Hashimoto aide, former Finance Ministry official Takahashi Yoichi, also plays with fire in this excerpt from a column in Gendai Business Online:

“It has gotten difficult for the DPJ government after Mayor Hashimoto’s declaration that he and One Osaka will bring them down. The best chance for cutting him down to size, regional devolution, is already beyond their capability. In the end, the concern would be, though it is difficult to imagine, Kansai Electric suicide terrorism by creating an insufficient power supply during the peak period of summer use. What crosses the mind is the response of the Social Insurance Agency during the Abe administration when the subject of their privatization was broached. The agency released a stream of information that was fatal to the Abe administration (loss of pension records that occurred a decade before). The falsehoods of the “suicide bombing” of the Social Insurance Agency circulated at the time.

“Kansai Electric is a private sector company, and the company would collapse if they really did something like that. I don’t think it’s possible, but it is a fact they can control the supply of power, and there is a touch of uncertainty that rolling blackouts are not out of the question. That subject already has arisen. If the situation continues in which they have no measures for dealing with peak load (they probably can’t), then it is perhaps possible they might consider a little shock therapy, though I really don’t want to think about it.”

What some people really don’t want to think about is that these people are creating a wolf from a figment of their imaginations. Try this from Bloomberg:

“The highest reading reported on the health ministry’s website so far has come from a sample of spinach collected on March 18 from Hitachi city, 97 kilometers (60 miles) south of the plant. The spinach, which didn’t enter the food chain, contained 27 times the safe limit of radiation for I-131, according to the health ministry.

“The spinach contained 54,100 Bq/kg of I-131 and 1,931 Bq/kg of cesium. That means consuming 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of fresh spinach would yield a radiation exposure of 1.2 millisieverts, or half the average annual natural exposure from soil and cosmic rays, based on Bloomberg calculations using a formula posted on the website of Japan’s Food Safety Commission.”

Some of the wolf whistlers would probably accuse them of hiding something. Maybe a UN scientific committee is hiding something too. From Nature magazine:

“Few people will develop cancer as a consequence of being exposed to the radioactive material that spewed from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year — and those who do will never know for sure what caused their disease. These conclusions are based on two comprehensive, independent assessments of the radiation doses received by Japanese citizens, as well as by the thousands of workers who battled to bring the shattered nuclear reactors under control.

“The first report, seen exclusively by Nature, was produced by a subcommittee of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) in Vienna, and covers a wide swathe of issues related to all aspects of the accident. The second, a draft of which has been seen by Nature, comes from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, and estimates doses received by the general public in the first year after the accident. Both reports will be discussed at UNSCEAR’s annual meeting in Vienna this week.

“The UNSCEAR committee’s analyses show that 167 workers at the plant received radiation doses that slightly raise their risk of developing cancer. The general public was largely protected by being promptly evacuated, although the WHO report does find that some civilians’ exposure exceeded the government’s guidelines. “If there’s a health risk, it’s with the highly exposed workers,” says Wolfgang Weiss, the chair of UNSCEAR. Even for these workers, future cancers may never be directly tied to the accident, owing to the small number of people involved and the high background rates of cancer in developed countries such as Japan.”

Or even MIT:

“A new study from MIT scientists suggests that the guidelines governments use to determine when to evacuate people following a nuclear accident may be too conservative.

“The study, led by Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times greater than background levels for five weeks, no DNA damage could be detected.

““Clearly these studies had to be done in animals rather than people, but many studies show that mice and humans share similar responses to radiation. This work therefore provides a framework for additional research and careful evaluation of our current guidelines,” Engelward says.

“It is interesting that, despite the evacuation of roughly 100,000 residents, the Japanese government was criticized for not imposing evacuations for even more people. From our studies, we would predict that the population that was left behind would not show excess DNA damage — this is something we can test using technologies recently developed in our laboratory,” she adds.”

Power shortages this summer would not only cause inconvenience and discomfort, they could also lead to the creation of an economic wasteland resembling the remains of the Fukushima nuclear power plants — all due to the popular delusion of crowds encouraged by the self-aggrandizing behavior of wolverine media outlets and politicians disguised in Granny’s clothes .

It will take six weeks to get the Oi nuclear power plants running again in the Kansai area, where the shortage will be the most critical. That means it’s very close to being too late. Rather than find a secret air-conditioned room to hole up in, the editorialists and the politicians will more likely put on a show of making a virtue out of hardship. They did that in 1945, too.

*****

Got to watch out for those wolves. They sure can be sneaky.

Ichigen koji (105)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

Politics until now has been a world in which policy has been neglected in favor of “I like that guy, so I’ll ally with him,” and “I can’t stand that guy, so I’ll drive him out.” Policies and beliefs are nonchalantly changed one after the other for the sake of political crises.  Unless we deliver ourselves from that sort of politics, Japan will never improve.

- Matsuda Koji, upper house member from Your Party

Just deserts

Upon a pillory – that al the world may see / A just desert for such impiety.

- Warning Faire Women (1599)

IF it were possible to bestow a person with a medal for services rendered to society, pin the medal to his chest, cover his eyes with a blindfold, stick a final cigarette in his mouth, and stand him against a wall to be executed by firing squad, Public Enemy/Hero #1 would be Julian “Wikileaks” Assange. While his behavior is undoubtedly execrable by any standard, we are also undoubtedly better off for knowing some of the information he was responsible for revealing. Much that information demonstrates the contempt the international political oligarchy has for the people they rule. Some of that information involves the Japan-U.S. security alliance.

Recall that in the summer of 2009, Hatoyama Yukio and the Democratic Party of Japan made the specific promise during their lower house election campaign to tear up the agreement with the Americans and move the Marine air base at Futenma in Okinawa outside of the prefecture “at a minimum”, and ideally outside the country altogether. Negotiations for dealing with the base began after Marines raped a schoolgirl near there in 1995.

To briefly recapitulate: The United States governed Okinawa from 1945 to 1972, even though the Allied occupation ended in 1952. It took 20 more years for the Americans to give Okinawa back.

Cross my heart and hope to die!

It would be entertaining to hear someone deny the argument that they still occupy it. The Ryukyus account for 0.6% of Japan’s land area, but host 75% of American military facilities in the country. Those bases occupy 18% of Okinawa’s land area. Roughly 70% of the people on the country’s four main islands support the military alliance with the United States, compared to only 10% of the Okinawans. (A higher percentage is willing to put up with it for the economic benefits.) More than 50% of Okinawans think the unwillingness of the rest of the country to either reduce their burden or accept American military facilities themselves is a form of discrimination. That makes it the ultimate manifestation in Japan of the Not In My Back Yard phenomenon.

The American military is stationed in the country for Japan’s “defense”, but Futenma is a Marine air base. Marines attack; they don’t defend.

When negotiations began with the Clinton Administration, there was an American promise to return Futenma to Japan (who built the first air base there during the war) in five to seven years. That somehow morphed into a project to build a new airbase in northern Okinawa.

There are four directly elected lower house seats in Okinawa Prefecture. Before the election, two seats were held by the then-ruling LDP, one by the Social Democrats, and one by the People’s New Party. Buoyed by the anti-LDP sentiment nationwide, the Aso government’s use of the Koizumian two-thirds lower house majority to push through the Guam Transfer Agreement, and the DPJ promise to move Futenma, the DPJ snatched those two LDP seats in the 2009 election. They didn’t run any candidates in the other two districts; the incumbents were members of parties that were part of their alliance and which joined the ruling coalition.

Several things became apparent within days after Mr. Hatoyama took office. Among them were that he had no idea what he was doing, neither he nor his party could be trusted to keep any of their campaign promises, and he had no business holding any executive position whatsoever, much less the prime minister of Japan at a turning point in the country’s political and governmental history.

To telescope a long story, two months after he opened the fall session of the Diet with a speech at the end of October 2009, he couldn’t keep his own story straight about his government’s plans for the Futenma base or their negotiations with the Americans. Statements made in the morning became inoperative before the end of the day. He would decide before the end of the year and then he put it off until May. He famously asked Barack Obama to trust him, and people wondered what it was he could be trusted to do. By early January, the Japanese media already assumed that his days as prime minister were numbered. His support numbers were in free fall after he had squandered both his honeymoon period and one of the most golden of opportunities ever available to a new government and its leader.

By May 2010, Mr. Hatoyama confirmed what had been obvious since the beginning of the year when he announced that Futenma would stay in Okinawa as originally planned. He traveled to Okinawa himself to apologize to the governor:

“I tried to do different things, but I came face to face with the difficulty of the actual problem of (moving) everything outside the prefecture.”

Mr. Hatoyama resigned at the end of the month after one of the shortest terms and with one of the lowest support ratings in postwar Japanese history.

The Beans are Spilled

One year ago this month, Wikileaks released American governmental cables sent from Japan to the U.S. about the Futenma discussions. They didn’t generate much comment, even in the English-language media, because the focus of Japan-related news was still the Tohoku disaster of two months before.

That information made Mr. Hatoyama and his government look even worse, as difficult as it is to imagine. Try this account from the Economist:

LESS than a month after a new government took office in Japan in September 2009, American officials talked their Japanese counterparts through a longstanding frustration: stalled plans to build a new airbase for American marines on the southern island of Okinawa. According to confidential minutes of the meeting sent to Washington, DC by the American embassy in Tokyo, leaked by WikiLeaks, Kurt Campbell, an assistant secretary of state, said a new airstrip was necessary because of China’s growing military strength. But that could not be discussed publicly, “for obvious reasons”.

A few months later Mr Campbell went further, according to another cable. Because of potential threats from North Korea, China and elsewhere, America and Japan faced “the most challenging security environment” in 50 years. However, he said the messages to the public often glossed over that reality. Presumably that too was to avoid offending China, even though it would have helped Okinawans to understand why the new facility is deemed so important.

And:

The WikiLeaks cables show that the number of marines and their dependents slated for removal to Guam has been inflated in order to soften opposition. (The 2009) agreement mentions the removal of about 8,000 marines and 9,000 dependents. But an American embassy cable in 2009 says that when the plan was formulated in 2006, “both the 8,000 and 9,000 numbers were deliberately maximised to optimise political value in Japan.” Okinawa officials suspect that the number of Guam-bound marines may be as few as 3,000—if they go at all.

When it came to power in 2009, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, which had opposed the relocation plan in opposition, came under intense pressure from Washington to push ahead with it. American officials urged the new government not to discuss alternatives in public, warning of a strong American reaction if it did, according to WikiLeaks.

The Eurasia Review Newsletter provided more details in an article by Rajaram Panda. ERN deserves a milder form of the treatment appropriate for Assange: They should be commended for presenting additional information and then kicked in their backsides for entrusting the article to Mr. Panda, who combines a tendency to exaggerate with an ignorance of Japanese politics remarkable even for non-Japanese who write about the country.

The article begins:

In a startling revelation, the US cables posted on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks said that, in 2009, the US had warned the then Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio about Japan’s wavering policies on bilateral ties.

It doesn’t take them long to screw it up:

When Hatoyama took office in September 2009, Japanese people believed that he was a sincere but helpless politician who was unable to fight the influence of the US.

Not one word after the comma in that sentence is true. No one knew how he would deal with American influence, and he gave every indication beforehand that he intended to create some distance in bilateral relations. While it is true that some view him as sincere, it is also true that they view as childishly naive the few policies he’s sincere about.

The revealed documents now show that Hatoyama and the DPJ had lied to the Japanese people during the 2009 election campaign. The DPJ and the Japanese government officials were never committed to relocating the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma outside of Okinawa Prefecture, as the revealed documents indicate.

That’s true, but only in an interpretative sense. The American arm twisting of the DPJ does not seem to have begun until after the election.

Between 2009 and early 2010, Hatoyama and his officials conveyed to their US counterparts that Japan would seek alternatives to the 2006 Agreement to relocate Futenma to the Henoko district of Nago in Okinawa Prefecture. However, in a secret pact, they said that Japan will honour the 2006 Agreement if the US rejected the proposed alternative.

The Obama administration knew early on that the Hatoyama administration would go along with the 2006 Agreement as long as the US continued to reject any alternative. Hatoyama had secretly said this to the US six months before he decided to break his promise to the people to relocate the base outside Okinawa.

Six months before he announced that he broke his promise was in December 2009, post-election and post-arm twisting.

The US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific affairs, Kurt Campbell, complained in October 2009 that Hatoyama told his Chinese and South Korean counterparts in Beijing that Japan depended on the US too much. Campbell told Japanese Parliamentary Defence Secretary Akihisa Nagashima that such remarks “would create a crisis in US-Japan relations… Imagine the Japanese response if the US government were to say publicly that it wished to devote more attention to China than Japan.”

We don’t have to imagine the Japanese response, because we know what it is — official sycophancy. The U.S. government has been devoting more attention to China than Japan without saying it publicly for the past two decades.

Now they don’t bother to hide it. This week the U.S. government allowed China the exclusive privilege of purchasing U.S. debt directly from the Treasury, without having to buy the bonds through Wall Street brokers and pay their commissions. The Chinese are now the leading American debt underwriters. Japan formerly starred in the role of Number One Sponge and still buys nearly the same amount as China, but they’ve never gotten the star treatment.

As Mark Steyn frequently points out, the Americans will be paying enough interest on the debt held by China to finance the annual outlays for the People’s Liberation Army by 2016. Meanwhile, Japan pays far and away the highest vigorish of any overseas country to support American troops stationed on its territory. This is justified in part by the need to defend Japan from China.

Finally, a contemporary use of the word “bizarre” that isn’t hyperbole.

But that’s unless the Chinese are actually unloading on the secondary market what they buy from the Treasury to satisfy their desire to get out of US debt and into gold while satisfying US demands to buy more of its debt. (There’s another interesting Wikileak in there, too.)

The Japanese people now feel that Hatoyama’s US policy was fraught with duplicity and backroom deals. Being the Land Minister, Maehara was dabbling with foreign affairs and was playing a crucial role in handling Japan’s US policy.

He’s speaking here of Maehara Seiji, who was involved with the discussions. Mr. Panda thinks that Mr. Maehara’s participation was due to his connections with the American government, and were improper because he was the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. He is not aware that Maehara Seiji held another Cabinet portfolio at the time — Minister of State for Okinawa and the Northern Territories. It was his business to be involved.

In other words, Mr. Panda doesn’t know the A of the ABCs of Japanese politics/government.

The Obama administration was aware that there was a section of politicians in Japan who sought distance from Washington. Even many Japanese people started to view Japan’s policies as being dictated by the US and described their own country as “America’s baby”. In particular, right-wing nationalists vouched for reducing reliance on the US and argued that Japan must not be afraid to take a confrontational position in foreign policy.

“Started to view”? That view started among many Japanese people on 16 August 1945. And if there is a certified demonstration of lazy thinking/no thinking/no real experience among people writing about Japan, it is their wishful thinking about the effect on modern politics of “right-wing nationalists”, whatever either of those debased terms mean nowadays. The psychopundits either overlook or never saw that the same arguments attributed to those unenlightened and unintelligent dregs of society have been made even more stridently by the left-wing internationalists in Japan. The leading figures of the Democratic Party government are among the country’s most well-known left-wing internationalists.

The Obama administration is believed to be instrumental in Hatoyama’s ouster from office because of the latter’s inept handling of the Futenma base relocation issue.

Not in the US and Japan of Planet Earth. Last rites were already being prepared for Hatoyama Yukio a few months after he took office, for a galaxy of reasons. Futenma was the coup de grace. People are not without their suspicions about American string-pulling in the Japanese government, but the Democratic Party did not want to go into the July 2010 upper house elections led by a man whose support ratings were maxing out at 19% in the polls.

The inept handling of the Futenma base relocation issue? Mr. Hatoyama broke his pre-election promises — which of course the U.S. knew about — to do what the United States wanted to do. This doesn’t make much sense.

Besides, Campbell complained in October 2009 about Hatoyama’s policy towards China and South Korea. At the Nuclear Summit in April 2010 held at Washington, Obama snubbed Hatoyama and weeks later Hatoyama resigned and was replaced by the more US acceptable Kan Naoto. Kan immediately confirmed that the Futenma base issue would proceed according to the US desire. No wonder, when the leaks surfaced, he declined to comment and said that the announcement of information was “not legitimate”.

Kan Naoto is one of the leading left-wing internationalists of the DPJ, though he is also known as a trimmer most interested in power. Japanese arms were almost certainly twisted to cause the DPJ to cry uncle, but the crying had already happened before Mr. Kan’s turn arrived. As deputy prime minister, he had a ringside seat.

It is too soon to assess how the public will digest the dishonesty of the DPJ and how the Japanese government succumbed to the US pressure to follow its line of thinking. The opposition is likely to mount a campaign again calling for Kan’s resignation. Maehara was seen as an agent of the US and the Japanese people are unlikely to forgive him.

It will always be too soon for Mr. Panda to offer analysis about Japan. None of this happened. The opposition mounted a campaign calling for Kan’s resignation, but none of the many compelling reasons had anything to do with the United States. Mr. Maehara has been relegated to the sidelines, not because he was seen as an “agent of the US”, but because he’s viewed as an opportunistic lightweight with an unexplained affinity for North Korea.

Japan-US ties are too complex and its real value cannot be evaluated from this single incident.

Nor can they be evaluated by a drive-by observer lacking field-specific knowledge. The only solution for dealing with people such as Mr. Panda is to persecute them to the fullest extent of the Internet Law of the Jungle.

Finally, here’s how the Ryukyu Shimpo, an Okinawan newspaper, handled with the revelations:

According to U.S. official telegrams disclosed by WikiLeaks, while the DPJ administration was seeking the relocation outside of Okinawa Prefecture of the U.S. Marine Corps now based at Futenma, a staff member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan suggested to United States government officials that they should not compromise on the Futenma relocation plan. The cable indicates that both governments inflated the numbers involved in U.S. Marine Forces Transfer Plan from Okinawa to Guam. The Roadmap for Realignment Implementation agreed to by both governments in the spring of 2006 states that 8000 Marine Corps personnel and 9000 dependents would move to Guam, but leaked telegrams indicate that these numbers were inflated to optimize their political value.

And:

The cables also include an example of a Japanese career bureaucrat recommending to United States officials that they stay on course with the Roadmap for Futenma relocation after the regime change to the Democratic Party of Japan. At an unofficial lunch meeting October 12, 2009, Director General of Bureau of Defense Policy Shigenobu Takamizawa is reported as warning the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt M. Campbell “against premature demonstration of flexibility in adjusting the realignment package.” The cables also reported that a counselor in charge of political affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan made the basically the same remark to his counterpart of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. The cables therefore indicate that career bureaucrats moved to prevent the Hatoyama administration from seeking the relocation of the facilities at Futenma outside of Okinawa.

This is more evidence, by the way, that the Japanese bureaucracy considers itself to be the permanent ruling class of Japan. That exonerates neither Mr. Hatoyama nor the DPJ, however. Another of their campaign promises was to bring the bureaucracy under control, and they have the authority to do so if they choose to use it. But enjoying the perquisites of political status is more attractive than exercising that authority and touching off a de facto civil war that few of them have the ability to contest.

Diplomatic cables from this period show that despite the DPJ’s formal efforts to find a new candidate site for Futenma, the United States from an early stage thought the Hatoyama administration would go along with the 2006 agreement as long as the United States continued to reject any alternatives.

On Dec. 10, the U.S. Embassy inTokyo dispatched a cable that was classified “secret” and for American eyes only.

The cable said, “Five DPJ Cabinet members (Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa and Maehara) met on the evening of December 8 and agreed that they could not accept moving forward with the Futenma Relocation Facility (FRF) because of opposition from the DPJ’s coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party.”

According to the document, Maehara explained to Roos that Japan would seek a number of alternatives that might be acceptable to both the United States and the Okinawa people.

But the cable shows that Maehara also said, “If the U.S. does not agree to any alternative to the existing FRF plan, the DPJ would be prepared to go ahead with the current relocation plan and let the coalition break up if necessary after Golden Week (April 29 to May 5 in 2010).”

Thank you, Julian Assange.

But there’s more:

On Dec. 21, 2009, then Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka had a lunch meeting with (US Ambassador) Roos. Their discussion was included in a cable classified as “secret.”

Yabunaka referred to the Dec. 17 meeting in Copenhagen between Hatoyama and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The cable has Yabunaka saying, “Prime Minister Hatoyama confirmed to the secretary in Copenhagen that if the (Japan) review of the FRF alternatives to Henoko did not yield viable proposals, (Japan) would return to the 2006 FRF agreement.”

Immediately after his meeting with Clinton, Hatoyama told reporters accompanying him: “It would be very dangerous to force through (the 2006 agreement). We have begun efforts to think about new alternatives.”

However, the cable has Yabunaka referring to those media reports as “inaccurate.”

And:

On Jan. 26, then Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yorihisa Matsuno met with embassy officials. A cable classified as “confidential” and titled, “Hatoyama confidante on Futenma, Nago election,” described Matsuno as “Hinting at current Kantei (Prime Minister’s Office) thinking.”

Matsuno is further quoted as saying, “Hatoyama and the Okinawa Working Group will have to consider ‘for form’s sake’ Futenma options outside of Okinawa, but the only realistic options are to move Futenma to Camp Schwab or another ‘existing facility.’”

The cable also has Matsuno saying, “The Camp Schwab landfill option was ‘dead.’”

Turning over a New Loop

A flood of media features timed for the 40th anniversary of the reversion of Okinawa to Japan and the related events washed over news media consumers last week. Hatoyama Yukio went back to Okinawa for the first time since he dined on crow with the Okinawa governor in May 2010, and delivered a speech at a Ginowan hotel.

Here’s how he started the speech:

“I love all Okinawans.”

You’re such a lovely audience!

He continued by whining:

“I wanted to let some air into the (base) issue. I wanted to make some progress during my time in office, somehow.”

Before he appalled the nation:

“I have not been able now to satisfy the emotion of “outside the prefecture, at a minimum”. I can clearly state that one who has not satisfied that emotion does not fully understand the emotions of everyone in Okinawa. I intend to have that belief always.”

Everyone in Japan knew what he meant despite the vacuum-packed circumlocution and euphemism. All the headlines in the print media trumpeted the Hatoyama claim that he still supported moving the base outside the prefecture.

There was remarkably little anger, incidentally. People long ago realized he’s an eternal adolescent (most closely resembling a junior high school girl) with too little sense and too much money who had no business becoming prime minister. They intend to have that belief always.

One of his excuses was that he wasn’t able to do devote all his attention to the issue because he was too busy putting together a budget, despite having thousands of subordinates at his disposal. Nobody believed that, either, coming as it did from a man who preferred to attend galas with his trophy wife, the royalty of showbiz, and the Imperial household rather than attend to the business of government.

There was also the usual externalization of the internal fog:

“My thinking got too far ahead of itself, and I wasn’t able to fully convince many people.

“When I think about it, I wonder if it was an unreasonable course. When I think about it now, that’s what I think.”

Nonaka Hiromu, the chief cabinet secretary under LDP Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo in 2000, attended the same event as Mr. Hatoyama. When it was his turn to speak, he looked directly at the former prime minister and said:

“Men are supposed to have a sense of shame. Did you come so casually to Okinawa to dishonor (literally, hurl mud at) the Okinawans?”

Later interviewed by the Ryukyu Shimpo, he added:

“A person who stands on the dais and dishonors the Okinawans makes my blood boil (literally, steams my guts).”

Mr. Hatoyama was his oblivious self when he too was interviewed by the Ryukyu Shimpo the next day:

“It was natural to raise the issue of moving the base outside the prefecture.”

By this time he had found a new excuse:

“The Defense and Foreign Ministry bureaucracy struggled to decide how to return the base to Henoko (in line with the pre-existing agreement). They introduced the logic through the Americans that it would be inappropriate to take the base outside the prefecture, and only Henoko was acceptable.”

He’s confirming the Wikileaks revelations about Messrs. Takamizawa and Yabunaka above, and indirectly contradicting Mr. Kan’s denial. All he had to do to end the malarkey was put his foot down, but there wasn’t enough time to put him through a series of testosterone injections.

*****

After His Majesty’s Firing Squad in the Kingdom of Just Deserts dispatches Assange, it will be the turn of Hatoyama Yukio to stand blindfolded against the wall for his high political crimes and misdemeanors. Pinned to his lapel will be a medal for the service he rendered his country by using his mother’s money to buy the party that ended single-party rule in Japan.

*****

Meanwhile:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe the United States should remove all its troops from Western Europe and let the Europeans defend themselves. Only 29% disagree, but another 20% are undecided.

That number will probably continue to grow and extend to Asia, if it already doesn’t.

*****

Mr. Hatoyama isn’t the only one who wanted to go back to Okinawa. I’ll bet the other guys had more fun, though.

Last laugh

DURING the global financial crisis of 2008, then-Prime Minister Aso Taro was one of many leaders around the world who chose to further damage their economies by urging budget-busting stimulus expenditures.

Current Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko was a relatively unknown backbencher in those days. Straining to be clever, he referred to Mr. Aso on his website in December that year as Baramaki Obaka, in reference to the government’s contributions to the IMF. Roughly translated, baramaki is pork-barrel spending, and obaka is big dummy. The similiarity in the pronunciation to the name of Barack Obama, who had been elected president the month before, was intentional, though it was not a reference to Mr. Obama personally.

In the Diet today, Mr. Noda said, “That was not an appropriate expression. I must apologize.”

The prime minister was answering a question put by LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru. Mr. Ishihara noted the substantial contributions the Noda administration has made to the EU bailout, and asked, “How are you any different from the Aso administration?”

Ordinarily, that would have been the last laugh, but the amount of money of the mind Japan has firehosed other countries with during both administrations isn’t a laughing matter — particularly for Japanese taxpayers.

The Noda administration wants to raise the consumption tax AND the income tax AND the inheritance tax AND the gasoline tax AND the capital gains tax AND eliminate business tax breaks, while being extraordinarily generous with foreign aid of various kinds, from forgiving Myanmar debt to bailing out European banks.

Fiduciary responsibility? It is to laugh.

Further, Mr. Ishihara is threatening to introduce a no-confidence motion in the lower house unless the government submits its consumption tax increase legislation. That seems strange, until one remembers that Mr. Noda is talking about delaying the bill so he can patch up the differences with Ozawa Ichiro and the anti-tax faction within his own party AND the loud rumors of discussions between the DPJ and the LDP to create a grand coalition for a tax increase. That would give them enough time to screw the public before they both get neutered in the upper and lower house elections that must be held by next summer, resulting in their electile dysfunction.

No one will be laughing at that pratfall.

Ichigen koji (103)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

I still clearly remember the words of (then) Democratic Party President Ozawa Ichiro when he proposed a grand coaltion to the Fukuda Yasuo administration (in November 2007). I was LDP secretary-general at the time. “The Democratic Party,” he said, “lacks both the ability and the qualities to lead a government. You must allow them into the Cabinet to study.” The idea of a grand coalition foundered due to Democratic Party internal opposition, but looking at them now as the ruling party, it is just as Mr. Ozawa said.

- Ibuki Bunmei

Hashimoto Toru (7): Exasperation

OSAKA Mayor Hashimoto Toru might be Japan’s Most Exasperating Person, if such a title existed. As often as he says or does something that makes the advocates of small and sensible government feel like firing confetti from cannons, he just as often says or does something that gets people thinking about dressing him in tar and feathers. Here are two examples of each.

Culture

One of the many candidates for Exhibit A in the trial against public sector profligacy is the redistribution of other people’s money to buy art. Some people seem to believe cultural activity would cease to exist, or not exist at all, unless The State writes the checks.

When serving as Osaka Prefecture governor, Mr. Hashimoto ended the annual JPY 450 million handout to the Osaka Century Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was established in 1989 and operated by a foundation with a 2005 budget of JPY 700 million. Solvency was a problem despite the largesse, and people began discussing the possibility of merging the four Osaka area orchestras to save money. The governor started paring in 2008 and eliminated the subsidy last year.

Despite the savings, the response from some quarters was that the philistine Hashimoto was hindering the promotion of culture.

Frédéric Bastiat had an answer for that — and many other things besides — in an 1850 pamphlet titled The Law. It has never been bettered:

“Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

Some people make the excuse that the civilized Europeans, those pillars of fiscal sanity, have state-supported culture, and that we too will become just as civilized if we allow government to pay for it all.

Roger Kimball, the editor of the New Criterion, a magazine of culture/arts/politics criticism, had an answer for that — and many other things besides:

“Have you taken a look a Europe and its state-supported culture recently? Really, this objection is almost too embarrassing to answer. What makes you think that state involvement of culture leads to anything other than the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in? Take your time.”

Mr. Hashimoto was less elegant in his rebuttal, but no less accurate. During the debate conducted over orchestra funding in 2009 at a business planning meeting for the prefecture, one conscientious objector said that the government should recognize its responsibility. Rebutting logic of that sort doesn’t require elegance, so Mr. Hashimoto said:

“If you want to keep the orchestra, your employees should join a fan club.”

The orchestra survived, though there were no reports on whether a fan club was formed. It’s now called the Japan Century City Orchestra. The Kinki Sangyo Credit Union in Osaka announced they’ll pick up JPY 200 million of their tab.

Now Mr. Hashimoto has to do it again as Mayor of Osaka. The Osaka Philharmonic receives a JPY 110 million subsidy from the city government, and the city’s project team looking into government expenditures is recommending a 25% cut. They’re also thinking of eliminating entirely the subsidy to The Osaka Municipal Symphonic Band, which operates an outdoor concert venue near Osaka Castle. The municipal band, formed in 1923, is the oldest orchestra in Japan and the only one affiliated with a local government.

The welfare queens started moaning en chorale. The choirmaster is composer/songwriter Miyagawa Akira, who organized a concert to support the band with 40 other musicians. Said Mr. Miyagawa:

“It would be reckless if the city decides to simply end the subsidy with no concern for its image.”

But even he understands that carte blanche no longer applies. He allowed that the municipal band needed to change “partially” to get public support.

As Mr. Hashimoto tweeted after the philharmonic found a sponsor, ”Culture will also have to do its share.”

They’ve already started. The municipal band holds four Friday evening concerts every July, which attract 20,000 people during the month. They’re now soliciting money in exchange for naming rights.

Japan’s Communist Party charges that Mr. Hashimoto is opposed to cultural funding because it doesn’t turn a profit. But we should consider the source, which never considers the possibility that anything should exist outside of the public sector. They also never consider the possibility that profitability is an excellent indicator of popular support.

At the end of April, I attended a concert presented by the symphony orchestra of the local university, which was augmented by area amateurs. The program included Beethoven’s 7th and a piece by Saint-Saëns. The hall was 75-80% full on a fine Sunday afternoon, and we were treated to an excellent performance. Culture worthy of the name is strong enough to survive on its own. Confiscating the assets of private citizens in support of a dubious proposition leads to “the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in”.

Human rights

Mayor Hashimoto is not calling into question the public funding of the Osaka Human Rights Museum, AKA Liberty Osaka, but rather the nature of its activities. That is unfortunate; the name alone suggests that the museum’s objective is to violate the human rights of the majority by promoting privileges for selected minorities.

While still governor, he told the foundation that some changes would have to be made. He has a voice in the institution’s management because both Osaka Prefecture and the city subsidize the foundation.

Said the mayor:

“When I was governor, I instructed the museum to change some of its exhibits because they were terrible. I spent quite a lot of time discussing the concept of the changes with the museum authorities. I wanted an educational institution that thought about what had to be done to enable children to think about their own future and to make their dreams and wishes come true.”

Some museum visitors were unhappy about the changes the museum made and complained about it. He returned with Osaka Gov. Matsuo Ichiro for another look, and they weren’t happy about the changes either. Mr. Hashimoto described it as “the usual parade of discrimination and human rights” themes.

As the mayor described the “dreams of the future” section, there was something hanging on the museum wall…Do you want to be a carpenter? Apply to the want ads from building contractors. Do you want to become a baseball player? Be selected in the draft. Do you want to become a teacher? Pass the certification test for teachers and get appointed by the Board of Education. He tweeted:

“What part of this is an educational facility that thinks about the future? This is grotesque.”

A cybertrip to the museum’s Japanese language website (no English) reveals the grotesqueries right away. The museum says its mission is to raise consciousness about those people suffering from discrimination, such as the burakumin, Koreans resident in Japan, Uchinaanchu, the Ainu, the disabled, women, lepers, people with HIV/AIDS, sexual minorities, the homeless, and “others”.

To break that down:

Burakumin: It has been widely reported that Mr. Hashimoto’s father and his family were burakumin, a social (not ethnic) minority that has been subject to discrimination. He and his mother deny it, his uncle affirms it, and almost no one in Japan cares. Attendant to legitimate anti-discrimination activities, burakumin rights advocates run hustles of the sort people in the States have long been familiar with. (Books have been written about it.) A publicly funded museum in Osaka promoting burakumin rights is roughly equivalent to insisting that the U.S. needs to maintain affirmative action programs with Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office.

Korean residents in Japan: There are about 610,000 Japan-born and –bred ethnic Koreans who voluntarily choose Korean citizenship, some of whom have never set foot on the Korean Peninsula. Some people think their choice of national loyalties should not prevent them from having voting rights in Japan, as championed in the fine print of the ruling Democrati Party’s manifesto. Those with South Korean citizenship can vote in South Korea. Those with North Korean citizenship are represented by Chongryun, whose chairman and five other officials are members of the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyeongyang.

Chongryun also operates schools for ethnic Koreans, with pictures of Kim I, II, and (presumably) III on the walls, and implements a curriculum that promotes the juche philosophy. Some people think it is discriminatory that these schools do not receive the same Japanese government financial assistance as Japanese schools.

Uchinaanchu: That’s what some Okinawans call themselves in the Okinawan dialect/language. Everyone else in Japan calls them “Okinawans” when a distinction is necessary. The museum’s choice of that term suggests they might support a separatist movement. Most Okinawans don’t. In fact, the younger they are, the less likely they are to be separatists. The museum’s choice of the term also suggests an eagerness to be me-too multiculturalists. Can’t miss that progressive bus!

I watch Okinawan Japanese interacting with non-Okinawan Japanese all the time. I have never seen or heard non-Okinawan Japanese discriminating against Okinawan Japanese. Or even make jokes about them. Doesn’t happen.

The Ainu: Perhaps some of this ethnic minority are still discriminated against, if anyone could find any of them. There aren’t that many left, their numbers are dwindling, and the government is already paying people to be Ainu for a living.

Women: With his new Cabinet evenly split 50-50 between men and women, French President François Hollande has shown he thinks gender is a more important qualification for high-level personnel appointments than competence. Some Japanese think it is discrimination to not behave as M. Hollande. That opinion even extends to the personnel choices of  private sector companies, which are nobody’s business but the companies.

Then again, if the Cabinet ministers in France are anything like those in Japan, competence is not one of the criteria for their selection to begin with.

Sexual minorities: Some Japanese men have become fabulously well-to-do by queening it up on national television for decades. (I can think of six off the top of my head, and I almost never watch television.) This week, Tokyo Disney Resort — yes, Tokyo Disneyland — said two lesbians can have a wedding ceremony at a hotel on the site.

As the AFP news agency puts it:

“Homosexuality in Japan is widely accepted but not openly discussed.”

What’s to discuss? You either do it or you don’t. If you don’t believe the AFP, by the way, hit the link to the Beautiful Way of the Samurai on the right sidebar.

John McKeller, the leader of HOPE (Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, has an answer for that — and many other things besides:

“(E)ven as a young, radical college student, I had no time for the clubby, leftist lemmings who comprised the early gay activists. They were dull, they were depressing, they always looked and acted as if they were born to be offended and victimized, they could never discourse for more than 5 minutes without hitting some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology…

…In 1967, Pierre Trudeau supposedly liberated us when he said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”. Subsequently, matters of privacy and discrimination were laudably and necessarily dealt with in the early 1970′s. But today, the bedrooms of the nation are in everybody’s faces. Today, it’s all about benefits, privileges, social engineering, nihilism and redefining normalcy. Today, it’s all about blurring every distinction between personal and political issues and vigorously stifling any attempts at discussion or debate.”

Ignore the false front of idealism and look at the reality: the objective of the museum and the similar activities of NGOs and GOs the world over is not “equality”, but power. Fertilize it with public money and it will reward the behavior of such grifters as Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. Or even this guy.

The inspiration is not positive, but punitive. Among the fellow travelers on the same road are those whose taste in intellectual fashion favors the jackboot. Here’s an impressive display of semi-literacy and word manipulation from a woman in Britain, who concludes that it’s all very sweet. Read it all the way through and see if you don’t feel like throwing a satsuma at her.

Some elements of the ruling DPJ are at the forefront of the Japanese vanguard of rights hucksterism. They slipped into the election manifesto of 2009 the establishment of a “human rights committee” as a wing of the Justice Ministry. Prime Minister Noda (further to the left than is generally recognized) thought it was so important, he wanted to submit a bill creating that committee to the Diet this year. He didn’t explain why it was important, but explanations are not his forte. Justice Minister Ogawa Toshio also thinks “it is essential to establish a human rights committee that can respond appropriately to human rights violations.”

It was stymied not by the opposition parties, but by opposition within the ruling party. Enough people in the DPJ thought the whole business was a violation of free speech and Article 21 of the Constitution. Finally the bureaucrats stepped in and said “it was too early” because there has been no debate among the people. If a debate eventually does occur, it would be helpful to translate Mark Steyn into Japanese:

“I regard (human rights commissions) as an abomination. All the key protections of common law, the presumption of innocence, truth as a defence, the right to due process, the right to confront your accuser in open court, all these things go by the board under a human rights commission system, which is essentially a hierarchy of fashionable victim groups…essentially if someone feels offended by you, you are guilty…because we have elevated the human right not to be offended into a bedrock human right. I think particularly in multicultural societies that governments are very comfortable with this because they regard themselves as the sole legitimate arbiter of acceptable public discourse between different social groups.”

Alas, Mr. Hashimoto drops the ball in the end. He wants to have museums of modern history that present both sides of historical arguments. Just call the whole thing off. Historical arguments are as hardy as cultural activities, and have no trouble surviving on their own.

Money

Amamiya Masayoshi, the Bank of Japan’s Executive Director of Monetary Affairs and Financial Markets, was recently appointed the head of the bank’s Osaka branch. The Osaka office serves as the primary cash backup for the Tokyo office. (It took three hours to transfer stewardship of the funds when Mr. Amamiya assumed his duties.). The appointment caught even some inside the BOJ by surprise. Most speculation has it that the bank wanted someone in Osaka capable of explaining the economic facts of life to Mr. Hashimoto.

One of the Osaka mayor’s primary advisors is former Finance Ministry official Takahashi Yoichi, so it does seem odd that he would need additional tutoring. Then again, Mr. Hashimoto has some odd ideas that he got from somewhere. For example, he wants to amend the Bank of Japan law to permit the government to establish price targets.

Godfrey Daniel!

Prices are established by all of us acting alone together in our best legal interests. It’s called the Invisible Hand. The Visible Ham-Hand of the public sector is incapable of establishing prices that are legitimate. If it were, the Soviet bloc would still exist.

But that’s not all. The mayor also thinks the BOJ is too independent and the government should also set monetary policy targets.

Mother of Pearl!

If that happens, we should get the government to provide everyone with free yoga lessons. All the better to kiss our backsides goodbye. Society’s weak will need a Head Start on the physical training.

If anything is sure to screw things even further up than the financial bureaucracy has already screwed things up, it would be to allow the human airbag ventilating system in Nagata-cho/Washington/Brussels/Anywhere Else to determine prices and monetary policy.

Spit on a stick!

The man whispering these sour nothings into the Osaka mayor’s ear is likely the aforementioned Takahashi Yoichi, who also advises Your Party. One thing all these people have in common is an admirable understanding of the problems and an execrable understanding of the solutions. It is all the more puzzling because Mr. Takahashi was closely involved with the Japan Post privatization of Koizumi Jun’ichiro.

The first thing Mr. Amamiya of the BOJ should whisper in Mr. Hashimoto’s ear when they meet is that the government is no more capable of handling the market for money than it is for cars, cabbages, or medical care.

Most people thought Frederich Hayek was whacked when he called for the denationalization of money. But read what he wrote:

“Since the function of government in issuing money is no longer one of merely certifying the weight and fineness of a certain piece of metal, but involves a deliberate determination of the quantity of money to be issued, governments have become wholly inadequate for the task and, it can be said without qualifications, have incessantly and everywhere abused their trust to defraud the people.”

And:

“The government monopoly of the issue of money was bad enough so long as metallic money predominated. But it became an unrelieved calamity since paper money (or other token money), which can provide the best and the worst money, came under political control. A money deliberately controlled in supply by an agency whose self-interest forced it to satisfy the wishes of the users might be the best. A money regulated to satisfy the demands of group interests is bound to be the worst possible.”

Now those are ideas whose time has come. While few people expect a legitimate free market in money to emerge any time soon (underground markets are a different story), it should be now clear to most people that a government which regulates money or monetary policy will always do so to satisfy the demands of group interests. (That includes businesses too big to fail.) It should be especially clear to the people who operate human rights museums. They’re working the same street corner, after all.

Darkness

Mr. Hashimoto can be fairly charged with populism for his anti-nuclear power stance justified solely by emotional harangues, without offering an alternative of any sort. But that’s not the worst part. Here’s the mayor as quoted by the 14 May Yomiuri Shimbun on the question of restarting the Oi nuclear power plant in the Kansai area:

“There will never be a situation such as this again. The next generation must fully experience what it will be like to live under government decree to restrict energy usage.”

Jesus Menstruating Goldfishes! What tar pit of the soul did that bubble up from?

Emotional distortions projected in public have nothing to do with logic, but since this is a policy question, let’s apply it as logic — ”The next generation must fully experience what it will be like to live under government decree to restrict bandage and antiseptic usage and apply buffalo dung poultices instead.”

Even in the event that he one day becomes prime minister, his own supporters wouldn’t let him get away with that. In fact, his closest political ally, Osaka Gov. Matsui Ichiro, already has objected:

“Last year’s rolling blackouts had a major impact on the economy. There’s no reason to so facilely accept restricted energy usage.”

And if you use too much energy? Mr. Hashimoto didn’t come up with a solution for that, but the Energy Strategy Conference of the city and prefecture of Osaka did. According to the 15 May Osaka edition of the Mainichi Shimbun, they suggest creating an Energy Conservation Notification Center to which citizens could report offices and shops that they think are too bright.

Sorry. All out of colorful oaths.

The standards these neighborhood informants would use to determine whether the illumination of the establishments was too bright were not specified. Human nature being what it is, however, one of the standards will surely become, “That guy/company/shop clerk is a creep.”

They also suggest shutting down government offices during the hotter hours of the day in summer, which is not a bad idea in theory. I’m self-employed and work at home, and I often take a siesta or read at those times. But I can work at night, on weekends, and whenever I feel like it, deadlines permitting. What would employees do with two or three hours of free time at a job site far from their home? (Stop that snickering!) Returning home is not possible for most people. Will they be made to stay late at night to catch up?

Rather than the idea of government restriction of energy usage, they should be focusing on deregulation that permits increased energy supply and distribution. A system will go into effect this July in which the existing utilities will be forced to pay roughly twice the cost of nuclear-generated power to enterprises generating energy from alternative sources. Of course the people really paying for it will be the consumers.

See what happens when the government sets price targets?

But since the government. or a government monopoly, is as incapable of dealing with the power market as it is with anything else, the plan should be to borrow the idea of that crazy guy Hayek and denationalize/deregulate supply as well as production (and prices), create smart grids, and throw the market open to everyone.

That brings us to the most puzzling and exasperating aspect of all. Those people who, like Hashimoto Toru, talk about privatizing the public sector and operating the government on businesslike principles, are usually the same people who immediately understand the problems with culture subsidies and human rights scams. They are seldom the people who think government control of prices and money is a good idea. They are almost never the people who talk about the need to experience life with government restrictions on power. (That’s what these people do.)

I would have thought it impossible for these ideas to coexist. Hashimoto The Exasperating has achieved the impossible.

Afterwords:

These are serious questions about the role of government in society, but the story in the English-language media about Hashimoto Toru this week was his prohibition of tattoos for Osaka city employees. Such is the media’s four-panel comic strip approach to the world. While they noted that most public establishments, including public baths, and several large private companies have the same prohibitions due to the association with yakuza, they missed one of the key parts of the story. More than half of the 110 or so city employees with tattoos are employed at the Environmental Division, which is a euphemism for garbage collectors. There are unlikely to be many gangsters on the garbage trucks. In Osaka, those trucks are much more likely to be manned by burakumin.

*****

In a demonstration of non-government funded cultural diversity, Kevin Kmetz plays a Bach prelude on the shamisen in Tokyo.

 

Ichigen koji (102)

一言居士

- A person who has something to say about everything

Unless the Noda Democratic Party swallows whole the tax increase proposal of  the Tanigaki Liberal Democrats and dissolves the lower house (for a general election), it will only create a synergistic effect of unpopularity for both the Tanigaki LDP and the Noda DPJ. The lower house will have to be dissolved next year anyway (when its term ends). Will that dissolution occur when the synergistic effect is at its maximum? That might be even more invigorating for everyone. It would give (Hashimoto Toru’s) One Osaka enough time to get ready.

- Hasegawa Yukihiro, author and member of the Tokyo Shimbun editorial board.

DPJ Secretary-General Koshi’ishi Azuma and other party members are now coming out in favor of holding a double election next year,  when the current lower house term expires and an upper house election will be held as scheduled by law.

Others, however, such as LDP upper house member Yamamoto Ichita, one of the last of the party’s Koizumians, notes that Prime Minister Noda, Deputy Prime Minister Okada, and Finance Minister Azumi are suggesting they are open to modifying the DPJ tax hike plan. Mr. Yamamoto is appalled, because he thinks this is a sign that (a) they will swallow the LDP plan whole, and (b) that will lead to a grand coalition without a Diet dissolution.

And that will lead to even more support for One Osaka.

Ichigen koji 101

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

The important thing about the verdict (of not guilty for Ozawa Ichiro) is that the public now knows the fact that political funds are transferred in units of hundreds of millions of yen, and the fact that statements of income and expeditures for political funds can be made off the books to suit the politicians’ convenience. These facts are indisputable.

Because there was no direct evidence, I did not think it would be possible to prove there was collusion in the false bookkeeping entries. Therefore, the verdict is completely understandable and appropriate. But we can also assume that a report between former DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro and his aide about the off-the-books transaction was acknowledged, so it cannot be said that (Mr. Ozawa) was completely innocent…The people will absolutely not view this as having been legal and proper.

- Takamura Kaoru, author and novelist, on last week’s Ozawa Ichiro verdict

Afterwords:

Please excuse my absence for the past week; the PC was on the verge of giving up the ghost, so that meant buying a new one, getting it set up, figuring out where they decided to hide the old familiar functions on the new model, and transferring a lot of files.

Collision course

THE political and social forces in Japan are now arrayed and moving on a course that makes a noisy electoral collision inevitable. How the forces sort out post-collision isn’t possible to determine, but one thing is certain — the collision will be just one of the major engagements in an ongoing war.

Nagoya Mayor Kawamura Takashi in Tokyo

That much is clear now that we’ve seen the evisceration of the work of Koizumi Jun’ichiro after he steered Japan to the course of reform. The reactionary Politburocrats included the old guard of his own party, the bureaucratic establishment at Kasumigaseki seeking to reclaim sovereignty over policy, and the chancers of the Democratic Party snouting around for any excuse to rise to the level of Politburocrat Nouveau. They accomplished their work in less time than the five years Mr. Koizumi spent in office.

Last week, the Men of System demonstrated again how they operate. The ruling Democratic Party lacks an upper house majority, so it was unable to prevent the opposition from censuring two Cabinet ministers: Maeda Takeshi of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (for political misbehavior) and Tanaka Naoki of Defense (for being a doofus on the job).

Upper house censures are non-binding, so the two men can technically stay, but the opposition parties are refusing to participate in negotiations until they’re removed. Said LDP head Tanigaki Sadakazu:

“As long as those two stay in office, there will be no progress on the bill to combine social security and the tax system.”

Added New Komeito chief Yamaguchi Natsuo:

“We cannot respond to any parliamentary proceedings in which they have jurisdiction.”

Everyone understands that it’s a chabangeki farce staged to gain political advantage. Mr. Tanigaki and most of his party already back a consumption tax increase, and the ruling Democratic Party intends to use only 20% of the revenue from the increase for social security. A larger amount will be allocated for public works projects. Just like the old LDP.

The DPJ understands the farce better than anyone because upper house censure was a weapon they created to gain political leverage after they and their allies took control of that chamber in 2007. They censured then-Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo in 2008 for reasons that were trivial then and which no one can remember now.

But when the plastic sword was used to smack them around, Prime Minister Noda and DPJ Secretary-General Koshi’ishi Azuma decided they didn’t like the idea after all. Both men are protecting the censured miscreants, and Mr. Noda won’t remove them from office. Said Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu last Friday:

“The prime minister’s policy is clear. He wants them to fulfill the responsibilities of their job.”

Both men of course realize that’s beyond the capabilities of Mr. Tanaka, but they have appearances to maintain and the Ozawa wing of the party to mollify.

Their display of plastic backbone has caused some consternation in Japan’s real ruling class, however. That spurred one of their agents in the DPJ to give the prime minister his marching orders.

That would be Fujii Hirohisa, the former head the Finance Ministry’s Budget Bureau — Dirigiste Central — also the former secretary-general in Ozawa Ichiro’s old Liberal Party, the first finance minister in the DPJ government (for all of three months), the head of the Tax Commission in the Cabinet Office, one of the DPJ’s Supreme Advisors, and (if the rumors are to be believed) a daytime drinker.

Mr. Fujii and his comrades worry this will delay their objective of raising the consumption tax to European social democrat levels. Therefore, Mr. Fujii called on the prime minister to “remove the thorns”, because:

“The two of them have definitely done something wrong.”

But he quickly added the real reason:

“Whenever the prime minister makes a decision on what to do, the basis for everything is to pass the consumption tax increase by any means necessary.”

Now what is Mr. Noda to decide to do? He wants to project himself as a man of vision with the unwavering resolve to gouge the public and maintain the system do what is best for Japan. He also reportedly hates being called a Finance Ministry puppet.

On the other hand, Mr. Fujii has been molding Mr. Noda since the DPJ formed its first government, when the latter was the deputy finance minister in both the Hatoyama and Kan administrations. The prime minister is also aware that the Finance Ministry is capable of using the various means it has developed for staging de facto internal coups d’etat.

In other words, look for Messrs. Maeda and Tanaka to start cleaning out their desk drawers, soon rather than late.

Weapons

Kasumigaseki in general and the Finance Ministry in particular have developed a substantial armory over the years to maintain their citadel. For example, all the national dailies have now published several editorials supporting a consumption tax increase. Most of them used nearly identical phrases, probably because they all received the nearly identical Finance Ministry briefing. The most enthusiastic member of the print media has been the Asahi Shimbun. They ran an editorial on 31 March titled “A consumption tax increase is necessary,” which included this content:

“With the rapid aging of society, we must provide even a small amount of stability to the social security system and rebuild the finances that are the worst among the developed countries. The first step requires that we increase the consumption tax. That is what we think.”

And the next day:

“It is important to come to a prompt decision without evading a tax increase.”

Another column appeared on 6 April with the title: “Politics and the consumption tax increase – stop the excuses”. It contained this passage:

“While you’re saying “first”—such as first reduce government waste, or first let’s end deflation, or first dissolve the lower house for an election — Japan will become insolvent.”

The Asahi insists the voters can have their say after the tax increase has been safely passed. That’s the same strategy foreseen months ago by ex-ministry official and current reformer Takahashi Yoichi.

As a newspaper of the left, the Asahi might be expected to favor higher taxes and stronger central government, but perhaps they have a more compelling reason. That would be explained by another news report that the Asahi tried to hide in an overlooked part of the paper, but which the rival Yomiuri Shimbun gave more prominent coverage on 30 March.

It seems that a tax audit revealed the Asahi failed to report JPY 251 million in corporate income over a five-year period that ended 31 March 2011. They were required to pay substantial penalties.

Golly, what a coincidence!

On the other hand, the bureaucrats are not picking on just the Asahi. All the newspapers and their reporters are being audited, which is a process that can take from several weeks to several months. The reporters treat their sources, anonymous or otherwise, to food and drink, and we all know that expense accounts are there to be padded. Tax officials are even said to be visiting the eating and drinking places listed on the returns for confirmation. Both the Asahi and the Yomiuri already had to refile their taxes in 2009.

The Asahi insists their editorials are unrelated to the audits, and they might have a point. There are about 20 people on the paper’s editorial committee, and all of them support a tax increase. Most of them once covered the Finance Ministry as members of the ministry’s kisha club, a system that combines short leashes with exclusive access. And many of them are also graduates of the University of Tokyo, which is the institution of choice for the Finance Ministry’s recruitment.

It’s natural to assume that the members of the old boys’ club would think alike, but a tax audit certainly helps to focus their thinking.

Not a rhetorical question

Fortunately, irresistible forces are headed straight for these immovable objects. Nagoya Mayor Kawamura Takashi, one of the squad leaders in those forces, launched his political juku in Tokyo on Saturday. He told his 200 students:

“I want to change the mechanism of this country, in which taxes are not reduced by even one yen.”

Mr. Kawamura is screening and preparing candidates for the next lower house election by using the same juku mechanism employed by Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru and Aichi Gov. Omura Hideaki. There will likely be an alliance of some sort between those local parties and Your Party at the national level. Their message is the largely the same.

Delivering that message on Saturday as the first lecturer was former METI official turned bureaucratic reformer Koga Shigeaki. Mr. Koga rebuffed requests to run for governor of two prefectures to serve as Mr. Hashimoto’s senior advisor, and he also has connections with Your Party. He told the juku students something that everyone in Japan apart from the Politburocratchiks understand: The current system of governance is dead, and the creation of a new system starts with civil service reform.

Part of the problem

The experience of Koga Shigeaki illustrates one of the many reasons that Japan’s Democratic Party has become part of the problem instead of the solution. He was selected as an aide to then-Reform Minister Sengoku Yoshito in the Hatoyama Cabinet, but that appointment lasted only a few days. Kasumigaseki wouldn’t stand for it, and Mr. Sengoku is not one to stand on principle when his place in the power structure is at stake. Indeed, the former lawyer confronted Mr. Koga with a semi-gangsterish threat (likely picked up from his former clients) during the latter’s Diet testimony on reform at the request of Your Party.

Try this for a thought experiment: Imagine that the cities of Chicago and Los Angeles, and their respective states of Illinois and California, are governed by local parties calling for radical governmental reform. One of the primary planks of that reform is putting a leash on the public sector. Three of those four chief executives were once members of the two major parties. The deputy mayor of New York is a colleague, and the mayor is a sympathizer.

Need I mention that this would be topics #1, #2, and #3 in the American mass media 24/7, and that the Journolist-coordinated efforts to slime them all would be rank even by their standards?

(Of course, this is only a thought experiment. California is actually heading 180° in the other direction.)

Japan has the oldest and most dynamic of the modern anti-elitist reform movements of the world’s major democracies. It’s the one with the greatest chance of success, and it’s also possible to make the case that it is the most positive in outlook. (The French just gave 18% of the vote to Marine LePen, though in their defense the Eurabia concept was idiotic even by Eurocrat standards.)

Predictions are usually a waste of time, but here’s one you can hold me to: The English-language media in general, and the FCCJ lackwits in particular, won’t bother to notice what’s happening in Japan until they find themselves ankle-deep in the muck after the bloodletting of the next general election, and some well-coiffed and -dyed heads will be adorning the tops of pointed stakes. The media will then be “surprised”.

And then they’ll launch a slimeball fusillade. Take it to the bank.

Kasumigaura

Yes, this is a national phenomenon. It’s happening again, this time in the city of Kasumigaura, a largely agricultural town of 43,600 in Ibaraki Prefecture.

After the city was created in 2005 through the merger of two smaller municipalities, the residents expected to benefit from the economies of scale. They really should have known better. Instead of one unified municipal office, the new city officials created two, one in each of the constituent entities. One of them required the construction of a new building. They also separately maintained their former methods of collusion for deal-cutting: one controlled by the civil service, the other organized by private sector industry.

It got worse after the new city’s second mayor took office in 2007, when he was unopposed in the election. Opposition quickly materialized after the city council voted themselves a 40% pay raise. A citizens’ group was organized, and they ran Miyajima Mitsuaki for mayor in the next election. He upset the incumbent by a 276 vote margin.

The problem, however, was that there was little turnover in city council members. Four are reformers, 11 are in the flybait class, and one is a fence-sitter. In one year and eight months, City Council has rejected 32 of the mayor’s initiatives, including the rollback of the salary increase, other salary cuts, and a bill to provide free medical care for children through the third year of junior high school. (That last is an idea common to many of the reformers in local government. There are several possible explanations for this mixture of welfare statism into what is primarily a small government philosophy, but it does suggest they are not ideologues.)

The mayor therefore announced last week that he and the citizens’ group will start a petition drive to recall City Council. They’ll have a month to come up with 15,000 signatures. It won’t be easy, but Mr. Kawamura overcame the same hurdle in Nagoya, and his hurdle was much higher because of that city’s larger population. I wouldn’t bet against them.

*****
It bears repeating that the next lower house election will not be the last battle of the war, regardless of the result. The reformers at the regional level have found their voice and their allies are not going to go away. Meanwhile, the Politburocrats are stocking the moat with as many alligators as they can breed.

The current system of governance requires that the bureaucracy oversee the process as the Cabinet formulates a bill and the ruling party examines it before it’s submitted to the Diet. Defying the wishes of Kasumigaseki requires a thorough knowledge of policy and some serious spine, neither of which is a hallmark of the political class anywhere. The civil servants devote a lot of time to anticipating objections to their favored policies and formulating arguments against those objections to feed to the politicians.

One advantage of the reformers is that people such Your Party’s Watanabe Yoshimi and Eda Kenji, Hashimoto advisors Koga, Sakaiya Taiichi, and Hara Eiji, as well as advisor to both Takahashi Yoichi, have extensive knowledge of policy and Politburocrat tactics, and took a clear public stand long ago.

Another man who combines both is Takenaka Heizo, a Cabinet member throughout Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s entire term of office, and the man responsible for producing the Japan Post privatization package. Mr. Takenaka has said that victory will require 10 years of continuous guerilla warfare.

In short: Japan is in the midst of the most civil Civil War a modern democracy has ever seen.

Drunken sailor watch

The Prime Minister’s Office unveiled its new website earlier this month, which they created as a portal site to provide comprehensive information on policy. That’s a fine idea, but the Jiji news agency reported the redesign of the old site required an expenditure of JPY 45.5 million (almost $US 560,000 on the nose).

What? You didn’t hear the detonation on the Internet?

A lot of people thought it could have been done for 10% of that amount, and some said they would have been happy to take the job at that price. They also said they wouldn’t have created a site with text that was unreadable for those using Apple’s Safari browser and without the kanji errors on the page for children.

Prodigy

Piano prodigy Okuda Gen appeared on television again Sunday night. Now ten years old, Gen has been playing piano since the age of four and giving concerts since the age of seven. He’s composed 50 pieces of his own. He likes all sorts of styles and plays classical music well, but is a particular fan of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. On Sunday, he performed as an equal with an adult drummer and bassist.

The boy is remarkably self-assured for his age, even without his musical ability. It seems unlikely at this point that he’ll acquire the problems that usually attend children such as these when they enter The Jungle of Puberty.

But the most astonishing part of Gen’s story is that he started playing because he thought he would like it. Neither parent is involved with music, and they say he’s never taken a music lesson.

Here he is at age eight. Pull your socks up.

More on Hatoyama the hapless, part two

BEFORE we return to our regularly scheduled programming, let’s have two quick posts to provide more details on the approach of Hatoyama Yukio to politics and governance. They should help explain the reasons he was Phase One of the triple disaster that the DPJ government has been for Japan. Besides, some people just can’t turn their heads when they pass a wreck on the highway.

—–
The national government is indicating a willingness to allow Kansai Electric Power to restart the reactors at the Oi nuclear power plant. Some local governments in the area think they’re moving much too fast. One of them is the city of Osaka, which is the largest shareholder in Kansai Electric.

Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru, as we’ve seen before in the (soon to resume) series about him, has pitched his tent among the group that opposes nuclear power in Japan. Mr. Hashimoto’s critics charge him with populism, and this is one area in which the charge legitimately sticks. All the reasons he gives for his opposition are emotional rather than rational, and he’s offered no serious proposals for alternative energy sources.

When it became apparent that the government was interested in getting the Oi plant back on line as soon as possible, Mr. Hashimoto declared war and said it was now the mission of One Osaka to bring them down:

“I am angry just at the fact that the government thinks it can fool the people with the provisional safety standards. If that’s how they’re going to do it, this will get serious, and we will have to make them pay for it. Kasumigaseki (the national bureaucratic dirigistes) is making light of the people.”

This upset the number two man in the DPJ, Secretary-General Koshi’ishi Azuma. During a speech in Kyoto, he said the government would formulate and present a plan for nuclear energy to counteract the One Osaka offensive. As for an election, his attitude is Let’s Rumble:

“One Osaka has stated that they will bring down the government because the DPJ government will ruin Japan. We accept their challenge.”

Accepting the challenge is exactly what the DPJ lower house MPs want to avoid. Many of them already know they’ll be looking for work in the private sector after the next election, so they’re looking now for anything that resembles a tourniquet. A promise to take on One Osaka over this issue in a general election is the equivalent of cutting open the veins in the rest of their limbs.

Mr. Koshi’ishi is clearly ignoring public opinion. The most recent Shinhodo 2001 survey conducted by Fuji TV, for example, found that in the part of the election for proportional representation by party, 10.2% of the voters favored the DPJ and 21.8% favored the LDP. In other words, they’re sitting at less than half of the total for the primary opposition party.

Further, 44.4% of the respondents said they were still undecided. At this stage of the political process, undecided means they think the DPJ and the LDP aren’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. Therefore, most of them will probably vote for someone affiliated with Mr. Hashimoto’s One Osaka group, or perhaps their national party ally, Your Party. In last November’s election for Osaka mayor, the Asahi Shimbun exit polls had most of the independent vote going to Mr. Hashimoto. The Shinhodo 2001 survey covers only the Tokyo area, but politicians consider it a bellwether of the national mood.

The DPJ Diet members at risk complain that Mr. Koshi’ishi is free to talk so tough because he’s a member of the upper house, where the terms are fixed and not subject to dissolution. He’s also 75 years old and likely to retire when his term ends anyway. Here’s what the MPs are saying amongst themselves: Mr. Koshi’ishi was an official of the Japan Teachers’ Union when they were comfortable with having out-of-the-closet Stalinistas as members, and he’s considered to be the guardian angel of the JTU old guard in the party. They think he’s upset Mr. Hashimoto is taking the teachers’ unions and public employees’ unions head on in Osaka, and is winning the battle.

Reporters asked Hatoyama Yukio what he thought of all this. He is a former prime minister, after all. Mr. Hatoyama said:

“Well, the (Osaka) mayor has his own ideas, and I suspect that the surrounding prefectures have concerns about the restart of the Oi plant that haven’t been alleviated. So, if the approach of too quickly restarting the plant has elicited the mayor’s opposition, wouldn’t it be necessary for both parties to seek a calmer response? But if we are going to contest an election, we must by all means put up a stiff fight.”

No, no one in Japan can reconcile his last sentence with the rest of his statement either. But people gave up on that long ago.

Other notes:

Here’s more data on the prospects for what might become an election that drops a bunker buster into the world of Japanese politics.

In preparation for the next election, local parties that would influence national politics are creating political juku, or ad hoc institutes to organize and educate potential candidates. Hashimoto Toru’s One Osaka group is in the process of selecting the most promising 2,000 students to continue their orientation before a further reduction to 400.

Aichi Gov. Omura Hideaki started his own political juku in the region and gave the first lecture himself on the 12th in Nagoya. There were 678 people listening. Most were from Aichi, but some also came from Tokyo, Gifu, and Mie.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the Osaka branch of the LDP decided to organize a juku of its own. They’re calling it the Naniwa juku and began recruiting a month ago. They were hoping to attract 30 participants. A month into the process, they still haven’t found 30 people willing to join up and associate with the LDP brand, so they’ve extended the application period.

———————–
One member of the Democratic Party of Japan has left the party over the Noda government’s march toward a tax increase, and 29 more have resigned secondary positions of responsibility in the party and government in protest. A journalist spoke to one of them (whom he did not identify), and asked if he resigned because he saw no future in the DPJ. Here’s the answer:

“Rather than that, being a member of the party itself is just embarrassing.”

The DPJ government in Japan has become one of the epic political failures in the advanced democracies of the postwar period. As the party president and their first prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio has much to answer for. The public is so fed up, however, they can’t be bothered to ask.

*****
The biggest fool that ever hit the big time, and all he had to do was act naturally.

Now this is serendipity. That song is followed by Honky Tonk Man. So was Hatoyama Yukio.

Ichigen koji (98)

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

Whether it is the result of confrontation or discussion between the DPJ and LDP, a Diet dissolution and general election in June is probably unavoidable. What will the issue in that election be? It will undoubtedly be Prime Minister Noda’s consumption tax increase, but what is LDP President Tanigaki doing? During the campaign for the 2010 upper house election, Mr. Tanigaki said, “As a responsible opposition party, we must resign ourselves to a consumption tax at the 10% level.” Yet now he is complaining about a consumption tax increase and demanding the Diet be dissolved. His opposition to a consumption tax increase is nothing more than a procedural argument: the DPJ said they would not raise the consumption tax during their (four year) term. The once-dominant party is now driven only by political crisis. How they have fallen.

The DPJ is calling for reform that integrates social welfare with the consumption tax, but they will introduce a bill only to raise the tax, divorced from a pension scheme. If the bill passes, no means have been created for accepting the increase in revenue. At first, it will most likely be used to offset the fiscal shortfall. If that happens, it would be just as the Finance Ministry planned it.

- Yayama Taro

Earlier this week, the LDP said that one part of their next election manifesto would be a call to raise the consumption tax to 10% “for now”.

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Hashimoto Toru (6): Hanging out in bad company

THERE’S been a slight change of plans: The next phase in the series on Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru was to move on to the controversies that have erupted over his behavior and theories of government administration in Osaka. After last week’s episodes in the daily Hashimoto docu-drama, however, there’ll be a quick detour before getting to the red meat.

Episode #1 featured Mohammad in the form of Tokyo Metro District governor and national curmudgeon-in-chief Ishihara Shintaro traveling to Osaka to visit Mt. Hashimoto for a private discussion that lasted about 90 minutes. Both men were mum on the details of the confab’s contents. That the Tokyo governor, 38 years older, in his fourth term, and a celebrity for more than half a century, would be the one to travel is noteworthy in itself.

Most of the news media is still in the breathless schoolgirl diary phase with Mr. Hashimoto, so speculation over a possible political alliance spun their little hamster wheels even more furiously. Mr. Ishihara, who has been complimentary of the Osaka mayor, is in the process of forming a new political party with his curmudgeons-in-arms.

Mr. Hashimoto has demonstrated sound political instincts to this point, and he certainly knows the polls show the public takes a dim view of the new old guys’ party by a two-to-one margin. That’s the reverse of the two-to-one margin that looks forward to the contribution of regional parties such as the one he leads. Other than budgets, most politicos are clever at basic arithmetic, so if there are any positives to an alliance outweighing the negatives, they’re not easy to see.

One the other hand, Your Party head Watanabe Yoshimi took a more relaxed view, suggesting that the two men were just getting a sense for each other.

There were some minor revelations: Mr. Ishihara told Mr. Hashimoto that national politics is a different game altogether from local politics. (He was elected to the upper house of the Diet in 1968, and after four years there spent 23 years in the lower house.) Thus, one possible benefit of a meeting would be for the older man to explain the birds and the bees of Nagata-cho and national celebrity politics.

Episode #2 was much smaller in scale, but much larger in impact. In brief, here’s what happened: The Asahi Shimbun wrote an editorial criticizing Ozawa Ichiro for playing house wrecker again and balking at the DPJ leadership’s insistence on a tax increase. That’s unremarkable in itself; it’s what newspapers do. The Asahi, however, had to get all Asahi-ish about it and criticize Mr. Ozawa for being undemocratic. One of their employees actually wrote the line, “Democracy weeps”.

That pudding’s a bit rich even for left-of-center newspaper platitudinizing — the DPJ leadership forwarded the proposal to the Diet after squelching internal debate on their tax proposal without a vote. Several terms come to mind for describing that behavior, but “democratic” isn’t one of them. (Some party members, such as first-termer Miyazaki Takeshi, claim a majority of the DPJ MPs are opposed to a tax increase.)

In one of his Tweet-a-Ramas, the Osaka mayor stuck up for Mr. Ozawa while sticking it to the Asahi, which also runs editorials calling on Mr. Hashimoto to reconsider his positions. The mayor pointed out that the DPJ leadership’s decision to back a tax increase had nothing to do with democracy, yet his own clearly stated positions won a large electoral mandate in November. He wondered if the Asahi had any idea what they were talking about.

The defense of Mr. Ozawa prompted university professor, author, and blogger Ikeda Nobuo to sound off. Here’s what he said in English.

*****
During the next general election, everyone’s eyes will be in the movements of One Osaka rather than those of the Democratic Party or the Liberal Democrats. Ozawa Ichiro has praised Hashimoto Toru as a “comrade in the reform of the governing structure.” Mr. Hashimoto also thinks the consumption tax should be converted to a local tax. In exchange, the regions would eliminate the tax fund allocations from the national government. The insufficient funding sources for local government would be offset by local governments raising the consumption tax on their own responsibility. In addition, project-specific tax revenues, such as those for roads, would be transferred to the regions in addition with the work. He praises “Ozawa Sensei” for supporting these changes in the governing structure.

One can sense Mr. Hashimoto’s intent in using sensei, a term of respect, for Mr. Ozawa, which he uses for no other politician. This is a misapprehension of reality, however. During the election for DPJ party president in 2010, Mr. Ozawa called for incorporating all the subsidies to local government in a lump sum. He said nothing about eliminating the tax grants to local governments and replacing it with the consumption tax.

If the consumption tax were to be converted to a local tax and each prefecture had different tax rates and category exemptions, there would be great confusion. What consumption tax would be levied for companies with branches throughout the nation? Some of the American states have a consumption tax, and there are different VAT rates for each European country, which creates the problem of tax avoidance. If this plan to have different areas in small Japan levy different taxes is not a joke, I can only think it is ignorant.

Mr. Hashimoto has said, “I am not completely opposed to a consumption tax increase, but I am opposed now to a tax increase for the purpose of social welfare expenditures.” Is he unaware that during the Hosokawa administration, Mr. Ozawa proposed raising the consumption tax to 7% and converting it to a national social welfare tax?

This incoherence results from making the decision to defend “Ozawa Sensei” first and then looking for a reason to oppose the consumption tax which conforms to that decision. As might be expected, even Mr. Hashimoto recognizes that he cannot “completely oppose a tax increase” in Japan’s current fiscal state, but says he is opposed to this tax increase proposal. But if he’s opposed to this proposal, he offers no substitute that spells out when and under which circumstances he would increase taxes. He has no plan specifying how he would rebuild the nation’s finances.

Mr. Ozawa was once in the forefront of a move to increase the consumption tax. The reason he opposes that now is clear: He wants to bring down the current anti-Ozawa leadership of the DPJ. That’s what politics is like, and it’s pointless to look for a logical consistency in his assertions. Mr. Hashimoto, who defends this fuzzy logic, has thus become a fomenter of political crises himself.

But I do not think this political crisis-focused intuition is bad. If Mr. Ozawa leaves the DPJ and combines his fund raising and organizational skills with Mr. Hashimoto’s popularity, they could become the strongest party in the next general election. If some of the LDP members join, it could result in a Prime Minister Hashimoto and a party Secretary-General Ozawa, a pattern similar to that of the Hosokawa administration.

The problem, however, is what they would do. Mr. Hashimoto’s policies are off-the-cuff populism, such as his labor union bashing and opposition to nuclear energy. If that is to be his approach to national politics, the Kasumigaseki bureaucrats would make short work of him. Mr. Ozawa’s power has also waned, so there would be serious concerns that this government would be as short-lived as the Hosokawa administration. The only thing to do is look forward to the election after next.

(end translation)

The part pointing out the contradictions is right on, but the rest of it is rather off. Before we get to that, however, here’s what author and commentator Asakawa Hirotada had to say about these episodes:

“It’s a form of lip service, or perhaps camouflage. Based on what I’ve heard from those involved with One Osaka, the people of that organization, which Mr. Hashimoto leads, think it would be a negative for them to work with the old-style politicians such as Mr Ozawa and now former People’s New Party head Kamei Shizuka (N.B., a potential Ishihara ally). One Osaka seems to have decided that those are not people they will align with. That one of the elder political statesmen, Mr. Ishihara, took the trouble to go to Osaka to talk with Mr. Hashimoto is very significant. Mr. Ishihara has two sons in the LDP (N.B., one the secretary-general), so he has move with extreme caution in regard to the formation of a new party. He cannot afford a misstep. He almost certainly had Mr. Hashimoto maintain a careful silence. That’s probably the background behind the Hashimoto Tweet.”

First, the obvious: If they handed out trophies for being the most unpopular politician in Japan, Ozawa Ichiro would be awarded enough palms to retire to a coconut plantation. His negatives surpass even those of the DPJ itself. If Hashimoto Toru is foolish enough to form an alliance with Mr. Ozawa, the bloom would go off the rose so fast you’d need time-lapse photography to see it. He would almost certainly be written off by Your Party and many of the people who have come to Osaka from elsewhere to work with him. (If they didn’t, they themselves would be written off by the public.) It would also legitimize the charges that he’s a power-mad despot who would adopt any policy to seize that power.

It’s never possible to rule out anything with politicians, tending as they do toward venal stupidity (or stupid venality), but a Hashimoto – Ozawa alliance does seem unlikely. For one thing, as Prof. Ikeda notes, Mr. Ozawa’s influence has waned. Regardless of the circumstances, the next election for his acolytes in the Diet will be the equivalent of the Light Brigade charging into the Valley of Death at Balaclava, giving One Osaka fewer allies to work with.

Now for the less than superb:

* Saying that Mr. Hashimoto’s anti-nuclear power stance reeks of populism is a legitimate charge, even considering that Prof. Ikeda is staunchly pro-nuke. The Osaka mayor hasn’t come up with anything remotely resembling an alternative energy plan, and his anti-nuclear appeals are based entirely on emotion.

But denigrating Mr. Hashimoto’s union-bashing (if that’s what it is) as populism is ill-considered word-slinging. We’re talking here about public sector union members, not trade unions. As prefectural and municipal employees whose salaries are paid by the citizens, their behavior and on-the-job conduct is Mr. Hashimoto’s responsibility as the chief executive officer of government. Those salaries have been pegged at 40% greater than those of their private sector counterparts, and the only people anywhere who pretend to think they work as hard or harder are the politicians receiving their support.

Having once been a municipal employee, I know that no one employed in the public sector actually thinks that. The opportunity for a paid semi-vacation while showing up at a warm office is the reason many of them got into it to begin with. Co-workers got angry whenever I put forth more than a minimum amount of effort: “What are you trying to do, kill this job?”

One of Mr. Hashimoto’s consistent themes is the necessity for public employees to work as hard as private-sector employees with the same sense of urgency.

And that doesn’t begin to examine the problems with the dark antimatter of Japan’s teachers’ unions in public schools. But we’ll leave all of that for another day.

* Prof. Ikeda thinks small Japan won’t be able to handle different tax rates, but Japan isn’t as small as some Japanese like to think — it’s larger than any European country, unless you count Russia. Mr. Hashimoto also favors a sub-national reorganization of the 47 prefectures into states or provinces, and most of those plans call for nine to 12 entities. Thus, there would be fewer tax differences than the professor suggests.

There’s no confusion over applicable tax rates for companies operating in different areas of the United States, and if the Americans can handle it, the Japanese can. The goal is decentralization and the devolution of authority to local governments. Skillful people in the regional areas can use tax policy to their advantage by enticing companies to relocate. For years, some Japanese have lamented the differences in the economic strength of the regions, and local tax policy is one way to change the balance. Successfully attracting companies would result in higher and better employment, and that would result in lower social welfare expenditures.

True, inept government management could create situations such as that which exists in California, where usurious taxation, over-regulation, and public sector emoluments are driving legitimate businesses and serious people out of the state. Japanese local government is not immune to that disease. For example, Rokkasho-mura in Aomori used tax subsidies from the national government to build an international school for the children of the employees at a local power plant. The construction costs were JPY 400 million, and annual operating costs are roughly JPY 100 million. That’s a splendid edifice for seven foreign children.

But that’s what happens in a free society when people take responsibility for their own affairs — some of them screw up, and they must be held accountable. The paternalist/nanny state alternatives have shown us their inhuman face, and it’s too ugly to contemplate.

* The United States has a sales tax, not a consumption tax. There are differences. Parents who send their children to a juku in Japan have to pay consumption tax, for example. American sales taxes don’t apply in those situations.

* Finally, Prof. Ikeda seems to have it backwards. Mr. Hashimoto opposed the consumption tax increase before he started looking around for reasons to defend Ozawa Ichiro. Criticize the man if he’s got his numbers wrong — and some say he does — but not for having the idea to begin with.

It might be that Mr. Hashimoto is the type of politician who brings out the worst in the prestige commentariat. They prefer to hash things out in salons or seminars, and few have an appreciation for the difficulty of retail politics, much less its necessity. The Osaka mayor is the type of guy who causes their sphincters to clench. Some politicians, such as Barack Obama, have a knack for the reverse. David Brooks, the token non-leftist writing op-eds for the New York Times, met Mr. Obama and gushed: “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

Maybe Hashimoto Toru needs to get his trousers pressed.

Mr. Hashimoto read Prof. Ikeda’s post and countered with a bit of real populism:

“People who haven’t been involved in the actual operation of government shouldn’t make such facile criticisms.”

That’s an excellent rule of thumb, but it’s not applicable this time.

Another contributor to Blogos, the large blog aggregator Prof. Ikeda organized, suggests they cool it. He thinks there’s little difference between the positions of the two men apart from nuclear energy policy, and adds that a Hashimoto-Ozawa alliance is unlikely. What’s more likely are alliances such as this: The first election in Osaka Prefecture since last November’s One Osaka victory was held on Sunday for the mayor of Ibaraki. The winner was Kimoto Yasuhiro, backed by both One Osaka — their first endorsement — and Your Party.

Perhaps the most pertinent aspect is Prof. Ikeda’s concluding statement that an alliance would force people to wait for the election after next to get what they want. It bears repeating: The public anger is real, it’s been there for years, it’s growing, and Hashimoto Toru is only the most visible personification of it.

In the comments, reader Tony wonders if the Osaka mayor is flying too close to the sun. I don’t think that’s happened yet, but if the wax in his wings does melt, others will take his place.

As for waiting on an election, we might have a while to go. People are warning that a tax-raising, Ozawa-less DPJ-LDP coalition is not out of the question.

Drunken Sailor Watch

Here’s a sentence from a news item that appeared over the weekend:

“The Japanese government intends to extend support worth about 1 billion yen for ethnic minorities in Myanmar in the form of food aid and contributions to the U.N. refugee office.”

This is what the consumption tax is being raised for? The folks at the Seetell website have it right — perhaps the people of Tohoku should apply to international aid agencies if they want relief. Their own government would rather play rich uncle and spend the money somewhere else.

*****
Here’s another guy who flew too close to the sun

Obituaries

THE only living people for whom obituaries are written are politicians and their parties. So many are now being written for the Democratic Party of Japan that you can almost smell the lilies through the computer screen. The author of this one is freelance journalist Itagaki Eiken, who once covered the prime minister’s office for the Mainichi Shimbun.

*****
“The Democratic Party was formed in hasty confusion as a lifeboat to save those politicians in the existing parties whose prospects were threatened by the first election after introduction of the single-seat district, proportional representational system (21 October 1996). In that sense, it started as a hodgepodge that included people from the left to the right. They came together without any common beliefs, political ideals or philosophy, vision, or policy, and that state has continued to the present. This is clearly shown by their inability to formulate a statement of party principles. (N.B.: They tried several years ago, with such people as Okada Katsuya and Eda Satsuki on the drafting committee, but they gave it up as hopeless.)

“In short, the reality of the situation for the DPJ is that they are a motley crew of individual politicians of rigid self-interest who are satisfied if they win their own election campaigns. That’s why they casually break their promises to the people, and why the only tenacity shown by former Prime Minister Kan Naoto was a blithe attachment to extending the life of his government…

“…In December 1885, the Meiji government abolished the Daijo-kan (Grand Council of State) governing structure and instituted the Cabinet system. In the 127 years since the establishment of this centralized authority, there has been bureaucratic governance of the state under the control of the former and current finance ministries. Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru would extinguish this from the root. Obstructing that path now are Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, the Finance Ministry bureaucracy, starting with the prime minister’s Deputy Finance Secretary Katsu Eijiro, other bureaucratic groups in the central government, and the mass media that clings to its vested interests. These are literally the opposition forces. In that sense too, the Democratic Party of Japan under the leadership of Prime Minister Noda, the betrayers of the people, cannot escape their collapse. Prime Minister Noda has sold his soul to the finance ministry bureaucracy and betrayed the people. Hence, his fate is to become the chairman of the funeral committee for the Democratic Party of Japan.”

*****
I’m not going to go either. Living men have work to do.

Sunrise in the land of the rising sun

NOTHING is stronger than an idea whose time has come. Sakaiya Taiichi, the senior advisor to Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru, spoke to the Your Party convention in February. The speaker and his audience share a common purpose, and both know that the time for their ideas has come. This is what he said in English.

*****
Your Party is different from the other parties. It was not born in the Diet, but was born from a citizens’ movement — the first one in the postwar era. There might have been some in the Meiji period, but it’s a rare thing. Most parties are created when several MPs get together in the Diet. Most of those parties fall apart.

Your Party began when Watanabe Yoshimi advanced his own policies and started a citizens’ movement by himself. Mr. Eda (Kenji, party secretary-general) was in synch with that. It is a party of democracy that you should be proud of.

It happened again at the end of last year. Diet members scrambled together to form groups and receive the public subsidies given to political parties. They have no political views, ideology, ideas, or concept of what the state should be. Both the Liberal Democrats and Democrats are parties for creating political crises, trifling with the people and causing them misfortune. They leave policy to the bureaucrats, and never think about Japan the nation.

Postwar Japan had many splendid conceptions. One concept was in foreign affairs, in which it would stand with the Western powers, and become a small country in military affairs and an economic giant. The option to become a military power did not exist during the American occupation, so that is what happened. The second concept was economic: The (political) system of (19)55 (when the LDP was formed), bureaucracy-directed policy, the cooperation of the business world, and large scale mass production.

They thought that even if no one had any political views, all they had to do was defend these concepts. That continued until the 80s. After that, however, the times changed: The Cold War ended, and large scale mass production reached its limits. Despite that, however, no one still had any political views or a concept of the state. All they did was create political crises.

Then Watanabe Yoshimi became a minister in the Abe Cabinet, and continued to serve in the Fukuda Cabinet. He lasted longer than usual (laughter). He began to talk about something different — civil service reform. That earned him the enmity of the bureaucracy, but the amendment to the National Civil Service Law passed. I created the draft of that amendment in the advisory council.

But even though that amendment was passed, nothing changed. The bureaucrats are unyielding. The president of the National Personnel Authority did not appear in the Diet. In the end, the (Civil Service System Reform) headquarters revolted, and Deputy Chairman Koga was fired. Even though the law was passed, nothing happens. The reality is horrendous.

Watanabe Yoshimi is a rare politician. He thinks about the concept of the state. Those politicians have been extinct for a long time. Even if there are some drawbacks, the policies are truly great. This year — This is It! This is the year of decision. The one I uncovered was Mr. Hashimoto (Toru). The circle of reform is growing. This year is the year of decision.

Why will this be the decisive year? It will be an extremely difficult year for both the Japanese economy and the global economy. Thus, there are four parts to the agenda. One is a state/province system with regional authority. There are three forms of government administration: the nation, the prefectures, and the basic self-governing bodies. The Osaka Metro District concept would convert that into two levels. We must not mistake the state/province system as a model for merging prefectures. We must change the nation.

(After creating that system) the regions must not say anything about the affairs the national government will handle — specifically, foreign affairs, defense, and the currency. Meanwhile, the national government will not say anything about the affairs the regional governments will handle. That is how it should be.

Second is civil servant reform. Civil service is not a job, it is a form of status. Until the 80s, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare was a small government office. Both the health ministry and the labor ministry accepted only seven people each with a humanities background for the elite job track. At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry were large ministries and accepted 26 people each. But now the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare is a large ministry with oversight for 25% of the national income. The agriculture ministry has jurisdiction of no more than 1.8% of GDP.

Anyone can be a bureau chief in the health ministry. The agriculture ministry has no work. If you ask, what about transferring the career agriculture ministry bureaucrats to the health ministry, that would be absurd. It would be like entrusting the old Kishu domain (present-day Wakayama and part of Mie) to the people of the Satsuma domain (present-day Kagoshima). It isn’t a job, it’s a form of status.

Organizations and personnel must be based on the principle of functionalism, and selection must be based on ability and incentive. The organization of any body that defends its status will inevitably crumble.

Third is a growth agenda. Japan today is facing its third defeat. Defeat is not losing a war. Even if it loses a war, a nation will not collapse. True defeat is the collapse of an ethical view and the system.

The first defeat was the Bakumatsu period (at the end of the Edo period). The values of the Edo government were stability and equality. They purposely did not build a bridge over the River Oi (in Shizuoka). They sought stability and equality by preventing people from crossing the flow, and making the movement of people difficult. That’s when progress became important with the arrival of the Black Ships (Commodore Perry).

It goes without saying that the second defeat was in the war. Now Japan is in third period of defeat. The sense of ethics is in turmoil.

Now it is seen as a good thing to receive social welfare benefits. In Osaka, even if the primary school teachers scold their students by saying, “If you don’t study, you’ll have a hard time later,” the students retort, “I’ll get welfare payments, so I’ll be all right.” They say 10% of the junior high school students can’t do multiplication.

Mr. Hashimoto’s proposal is to conduct a relative evaluation of the teachers. Five percent of the teachers will be given the lowest grade of a D. Teachers who get Ds two years running will have to be re-trained. If they do not improve after re-training, they will be asked to leave. How many teachers receive the lowest grade under the absolute evaluation system now? It’s only 0.15%. That’s one-and-a-half people in 1,000. There’s maybe one in a school.

In Osaka, where the teacher evaluations are strict, the teachers’ union says the teachers there have three times the neuroses of teachers anywhere else. It’s a scam. The same statistics cite the cause of the neuroses. The primary cause is trouble with other teachers in the teachers’ lounge.

The fourth is creating an open Japan. That’s true also of the TPP. What did we do during the Meiji Restoration? The policy known as “The return of the lands and the people from the feudal lords to the Emperor.” In short, civil servant reform, giving up the status of samurai. That was the second year of Meiji (1870). Next, they cheerfully opened the country. (N.B.: The term Mr. Sakaiya invented for this idea, which he frequently uses in speeches, is suki suki kaikoku.) The Tokugawas grudgingly opened the country. In the brocade pictures (nishiki-e) of the times, foreigners are depicted as devils or tengu (monster-spirits). That changed.

The next thing they did in the Meiji Restoration was economic reform. In the new currency law of the fourth year of Meiji, the monetary units were unified as yen and sen. They started using paper money, and it became possible to create credit. In the Bakumatsu period, according to the calculations of Oguri Kozukenosuke, annual tribute accounted for only 40% of expenditures. Now, of the (government’s) JPY 104 trillion in expenditures, including quarterly adjustments, tax revenues account for JPY 42 trillion. Exactly 40%.

Annual tribute was only 40% of expenditures. Oguri Kozukenosuke worried that annual tribute would have to be tripled. That vanished in an instant with the start of the Meiji period and the new paper money under the new currency law. A deflationary economy has to be converted to an inflationary economy. In a deflationary economy, the past governs the future. There has to be nominal growth of about 3%.

The next thing they did in the Meiji period was eliminate the domains and create the prefectures. In other words, the state system. After that followed education reform. In Japan at that time, 40% of the boys and 25% of the girls learned reading, writing, and arithmetic at the terakoya, the Buddhist temple schools. It was the leading country in the world for education. Even in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, only one in four boys went to school. There was only one educational institution in all of Europe that admitted girls.

They eliminated all the terakoya and created schools. That’s because the objectives of education changed, from stability to progress. Educating people suitable for large-scale mass production was required. That idea still remains today. That’s why they taught that individuality and originality was a bad thing. They called all individuality a “defect” and originality was chastised as garyu (not following conventional methods).

Of course basic education is important. Ten percent of first-year junior high school students can’t multiply. That is the responsibility of the teachers, and they should be fired. Attending Board of Education meetings is a part-time job for teachers once a month. A view of education as a whole is not possible. The people who think that’s fine are the education ministry bureaucrats supported by the status system.

Teaching is also a form of status. There are many English teachers incapable of English. On the other hand, they have teachers who’ve come back from living in the United States teaching social studies. That’s all they have a license for. Next to the teachers fluent in English are the English teachers who can’t speak English at all, and the teachers back from the United States teach about the Japanese Diet, of which they know nothing.

We must change this absurdity with systemic reform. The drawback of reformers is their tendency to splinter without limit. That’s causing a lot of trouble right now in Osaka (laughter). The conservatives are surprisingly united. This reform is good, that reform is bad, only about 20% can agree on each issue. As a result, the unfortunate situation will continue.

That’s why, even if there are problems to a certain extent, we must agree that it (reform) is better than what we have now. Persons of good character are not capable of reform. Have you ever heard anyone say that Oda Nobunaga was a person of good character? (laughter) The requirement for reform depends entirely on the ability to achieve breakthroughs. Watanabe Yoshimi has that ability.

This is it. This is the year of decision. Let’s put aside our small differences and unite behind the big things we agree on. This year, please work so that we can increase our number to 300 (in the lower house of the Diet).

(end translation)

*****
Meanwhile, here is one of the most astonishing newspaper articles I’ve ever read anywhere, and that it appeared in the Asahi Shimbun is more astonishing still. The Asahi is the newspaper of the left in Japan, and the DPJ is the major party to the left of center (with quite a few members quite left of center). Here’s the headline. Note the past tense:

DPJ’S GOVERNING FIASCO: Party never challenged Finance Ministry

It’s a condensed version of everything I’ve been reporting on for the last three years. They’re writing off the DPJ.

It’s difficult to find a passage to quote because every sentence is a dagger thrust. Let’s stick to this:

Successive DPJ administrations have failed to make meaningful spending cuts. Despite rounds of budget screening, the three budgets compiled by the party effectively ballooned to record levels on an initial basis.

You know what they say: Read the whole thing. Also note the background of former Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa and his opinion about the respective role of bureaucrats and politicians.

That’s the same Fujii Hirohisa who was the secretary-general of Ozawa Ichiro’s Liberal Party before it merged with the DPJ, and who doesn’t know what happened to the party’s public subsidies that it was supposed to return to the Treasury when it folded. (Some in the print media suspect it wound up in Ozawa Ichiro’s safe before being spent to buy real estate for his political funds committee.) That’s the same Fujii Hirohisa who appeared on a Sunday political talk show one day before Hatoyama Yukio made his first speech to the Diet as prime minister in 2009 and admitted the party had no intention of keeping all the promises in the manifesto. They would just keep enough of them to keep the people so happy they would return them to office four years later. They didn’t, they didn’t, and they won’t.

Remember all those so-called journalists who wrote about the “fiscal hawks” of the DPJ?

ROTFLMAO.

*****
The lead story in the 12 April edition of the weekly Shukan Bunshun is titled, Farewell, DPJ. They report the results of their polling that asks voters the question, “If a lower house election were held today…” (It’s becoming a cottage industry.) While they have the LDP doing better than in other surveys, they think the DPJ would lose close to two-thirds of its seats. They also think all three DPJ prime ministers — Hatoyama, Kan, and Noda — stand a good chance of losing their seats. (Hatoyama’s been on thin ice in polling for a while.)

*****
Get ready, people — the train is coming.
Oh, yes it is.

Hashimoto Toru (5): Onishi Hiroshi speaks!

ONISHI Hiroshi is the head of a marketing and management consulting company who also blogs about politics and business. His thoughts in a recent post about One Osaka and contemporary Japanese political conditions were quite sensible. Here it is in English.

*****
The One Osaka political juku received applications from 3,326 people, and after examining the applicants’ essays in the first screening, they selected more than 2,204 candidates from 46 prefectures for the start of lectures. There will be five sessions until June, when they plan to reduce that number to 400-1,000. Immediately, one ran across criticisms and concerns expressed in the mass media and blogs.

It’s my sense that most of them are wide of the mark. Because expectations are high, the criticisms and concerns were hurled in the way that fans of the Hanshin Tigers (baseball team) hurl harsh language at the players. The people who assembled at the One Osaka juku, went the criticisms, were after all just a group of amateurs. These people can’t be expected to shoulder the burden of national government.

But if we are to learn from the business world, innovation comes from the frontier and not the center. It teaches the lesson that many of the people who break through the limits of the industry experts and the mature business mechanisms are those who come from the outlying areas of the industry.

Speaking of political experts, that describes the Liberal Democratic Party, with their many years of experience of heading governments. But LDP politics have come to a dead end. There is no question that the current problems of a declining population, fiscal deficits, pensions, and nuclear energy are the bill left by the LDP government. Just because people are experts does not mean they are capable of good politics. Experts have their limits too.

There is also the criticism that the people who have come to the juku are the shades of the Koizumi Children and the Ozawa Children (younger Diet members elected on the coattails/influence of those two politicians in 2005/2009). It is nothing more than a rerun of people climbing on board a temporary trend, they say.

But the Koizumi Children and the Ozawa Children were a temporary grouping of people resulting from elections based on whether one supported or opposed the Japan Post privatization, or whether the LDP/New Komeito coalition should remain in government or be replaced by the Democratic Party.

The decisive difference is whether or not One Osaka can generate an impact on national government now, and whether they can become a force that spurs the reorganization of the political parties. They are not at the stage where they can suddenly take control of government. Even with the lecture courses and the further screening of the 2,000 students in June, they can not be treated in the same way. At this point, criticisms and concerns of that sort are not fair.

Certainly, there are different ways to go about it. Possible methods include selecting people after repeated workshops, or discovering the talented among them during dialogues. Perhaps they could somehow use social media. But that’s something for political parties other than One Osaka to think about. It’s not possible to arbitrarily determine that something absolutely won’t work at a stage when no results are visible.

Another frequent criticism is that they are being led astray by a superficial fantasy of reform. This feeling of doubting reform is understandable with the sense of disappointment that the Koizumi reforms didn’t continue, or that the DPJ was unable to proceed with the reforms the people expected.

It’s my feeling that the subject of the criticism is incorrect. One thing that prevents innovation is found in the saying, “The road to failure is paved with good intentions.” It seems to be something close to that. The classic comeback to crush new ideas in the business world is, “We did that before. We’d just be doing the same thing again.” That seems to be a superficial rejoinder along the lines of not wanting to be fooled. But that’s a poor position which results in protecting the politics of today and eliciting a condition from which there is no exit.

It doesn’t need to be said that Japan is in need of many reforms. It is self-evident that we must break free from the developing country model of bureaucratic leadership and the systemic fatigue and detrimental effects of a national structure with centralized authority. We must create the foundation in which more diverse industries can be created. We must change the national mechanisms for thinking about such issues as the government’s efficiency in responding to the problems of an aging society, or rebuilding the regional communities.

Both the DPJ and the LDP proclaimed they would move from the center to the regions, and raised the issue of dealing with the bureaucracy at Kasumigaseki. But there are limits to how both parties put their own interests first, and their concrete efforts lagged or faltered. Rather than regional sovereignty, the state/province system as proposed by Kasumigaseki was a shabby thing that, from the center’s perspective, would place daimyo throughout the country to maintain authority and complete control over the regions.

In reality, the concrete measures and efforts toward regional sovereignty have originated in the regions, as symbolized by One Osaka. At present, the existing parties are looking for a way to join in that effort.

The reform of the phrase “from the center to the regions” is not at all the superficial issue of changing procedures or the legal system. Rather, it means shifting the center of gravity for authority. In other words, there will be tremendous discord created over the question of authority, both on the surface and behind the scenes, as authority is seized from the existing political parties and the bureaucracy and shifted to the regions. If this were a period in which democracy had not been established, that sort of problem would result in hostilities or warfare.

In light of history, it is unnatural to think problems of that magnitude could be resolved by the Koizumi reforms or the change of government to the DPJ. To brush that aside by saying reform is nothing more than a fantasy is the same as defending the status quo. It is only that the elements who will address the issues of reform have not yet appeared, or have not yet matured.

True reform will be cultivated with the active and continuous participation of the people. Achieving that will require the creation of momentum and growth into a larger movement. Rather than abruptly take control of the government, the thinking and political methodology of One Osaka is likely that of increasing their influence on national politics and growing into a force while joining hands with the existing political parties.

Also, one becomes aware that the criticism and concern arises because of the ill will toward the “one phrase politics” in which One Osaka, and Mayor Hashimoto in particular, creates an enemy and uses that as an opening for repeated attacks. It is perhaps a good idea for commentators to talk of many subjects, or for politicians having it out in Diet skirmishes to talk of many subjects, but (one phrase politics) is a method that should be recognized for delivering a message to the people of the city and the country, and creating a sense of sympathy.

How you approach someone depends on whom you’re approaching. If you’re approaching mass media commentators, it’s a good idea to have the long messages those people prefer. But approaching the people of the city or the country requires something easily understood. Had One Osaka stopped there, however, I think they would not have been able to achieve their current high level of support, nor would they have been able to influence the existing political parties. Indeed, American presidential elections use the political methods of former Prime Minister Koizumi and Mayor Hashimoto; perhaps they employ them even more. Further, the criticism of One Osaka as unrealistic, or full of desktop theories, or that they champion the difficult-to-understand Osaka Metro District concept, cannot be ignored.

Just what is it that the people with the criticism and concerns are afraid of? Why are they so concerned over the One Osaka whirlwind that is now spreading. Wouldn’t that rather serve to heighten interest?

My sense of the current competition for authority between the DPJ and the LDP is that the differences within each party are greater than the sense of values and policy differences between each party. Further, the points at dispute have increasingly narrowed, and their debate centers on competing proclamations of their ability. Situations are often seen in the business world in which companies expand their battle for market share over minor differences.

In most of those cases, they have gradually become detached from the main issue of offering the higher value the market demands. New market entrants arise by creating an opening between the two. This sort of competition for share that creates no innovation has little meaning now in this great age of transformation from industrialization to digitization, and to globalization.

It is the same with politics. They have become detached from the needs of the people, and their struggle for authority is based on their self-interest. Politics have come to a dead end. Further, even if the LDP were to win a large victory in the next election, it will have been nothing more than an own goal brought about by their enemy’s blunders. They have not gained the support of the people, so their second collapse is clearly visible.

The reason for the very parties’ existence will be threatened unless they begin to address the people more directly, and make greater efforts to gain the sympathy and support of the people. These circumstances do not call for criticizing other parties, and enhancing one’s presence by repeatedly criticizing other parties is too short-sighted.

Nor are these the circumstances for existing political parties to play the game of political warfare within the party or the Diet, detached from the people. Speaking realistically, the existing political parties still have the forces to assume control of the government in national politics. I have a strong sense that if they have the spare time to criticize One Osaka, then we should more strongly present our requests to the existing parties.

(end translation)
*****
Some minor points:

1. Mr. Onishi specifically mentioned the problem of the “declining population” as one item on the bill left by the LDP. No political measures anywhere exist to halt or reverse a declining population. In fact, they’re usually counterproductive.

European style child allowances were one of the major policy initiatives of the Democratic Party government when it took power in 2009. Prime Minister Hatoyama justified it by citing the example of France, where subsidies are attributed to boosting the birth rate from 1.8 to about 1.9 (the last I looked). The French, however, offer many more benefits than the DPJ’s now rescinded straight cash payments, have higher income tax rates than Japan, and a VAT north of 19%.

The French also do not break down census information by religious affiliation, but some estimate that Muslims account for 40% of the population aged 20 or younger. Prof. Julien Damon of Sciences Po in Paris reports that approximately 20% of French births are accounted for by migrant families or those with one foreign-born parent. Foreign-born Muslims are likely to have more children than the ethnic French. Government benefits are irrelevant (unless it is a factor for Muslims with large families overseas moving to France to receive them.)

Pavel Kohout writes, in an article now behind a paywall:

“In 1927, Italian duce Benito Mussolini launched a program called Battle for Births. Mussolini believed that Italy had fewer people than it needed in order to play the part of a major world power. By the beginning of the 1920s, Italy had 37 million citizens. Il Duce set the number of 60 million by the year 1950 as national target. To achieve this target, Mussolini introduced generous benefits, especially for families with multiple children. Fathers of six or more paid no taxes at all. Of course, tax penalties for the unmarried were introduced, too. Abortions were outlawed, and contraception was hard to obtain. Later, career obstacles for unmarried men were officially introduced, mainly in government administration.

“The fascist government in Italy lasted long enough in peacetime that we may know its results. Exactly as economic theory would predict, the birthrate fell from 1927 to 1934. So did the number of marriages. Not surprisingly, the average age of marrying couples increased.”

And because this was a DPJ initiative, they couldn’t help tripping over their own diapers. In the first two months of the program, they paid about JPY one billion in public funds to foreign residents for 7,746 children living outside Japan. (It is an interesting bit of trivia that when New Komeito first proposed such payments in the Tokyo Metro District, the harshest opponents were the DPJ.)

All of this money was spent to boost a birth rate that fell below the 2.1 replacement level in 1957.

Of course the real problem lies elsewhere. Said Lord Sachs, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth:

“Parenthood involves massive sacrifice of money, attention, time and emotional energy…where today in European culture with its consumerism and instant gratification – because you’re worth it – where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born?”

Then there’s the attitude of Barack Obama, who used his daughters as an example of his reason for supporting abortion:

“If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

The more likely explanation is the extension of the concept of survival of the fittest. Natural selection is weeding out the offspring of those people incapable of dealing with the modern world, in which today’s predators are psychological rather than saber-toothed tigers. How else to explain the phenomenon of the anti-lifers who think children are a “luxury good”, or who want to levy a carbon tax on people who have children? It’s natural contraception without the pill.

But I digress.

2. The Japanese deficit is not attributable to all of the LDP, as Mr. Onishi suggests. It was slightly over JPY 20 trillion when Mr. Koizumi took office. It hovered around that level for two or three years while his government dealt with the post-bubble problem of banks saddled with non-performing debt. It started to drop three years into his term, and fell to JPY seven trillion three years after that in the year of Abe-Fukuda. The deficit began to climb again under the anti-reformers Fukuda and Aso, especially after the global economic crisis of 2008, when Mr. Aso and the mudboaters saw an excuse to dish out the pork labeled as economic stimulus. Since 2009, the DPJ governments have set three new records with a debt explosion that is positively Obamanian. The Koizumi policies slashed it to less than one-third in six years. The rejection of those policies has resulted in annual deficit about twice what it was during his first year in the Kantei, or more than JPY 40 trillion.

UPDATE: The budget for FY 2012 was passed a few hours after I wrote the foregoing. The lower house approved it, and the upper house (where the ruling DPJ does not have a majority) rejected it, so it was enacted anyway in accordance with the Constitution. It came in at just a skoche more than JPY 90 trillion, which is the first DPJ budget to be lower than that of the previous year. It is also the lowest budget they have ever submitted, IIRC. However, that is only for the general account. The special accounts for the Tohoku recovery and pensions, which are also the responsibility of the national government, bring the total above JPY 96 trillion, the highest ever. This fact has been noted in all the news reports, so the Noda Cabinet will not get credit for “budget reduction”.

3. Mr. Onishi seems to offer a slight internal contradiction. He says that in another age, the required solutions for today’s problems would have resulted in warfare. If that’s the case, it’s difficult to see how joining hands with the people who created the problems will solve them.

4. He also thinks the Osaka Metro District concept is difficult to understand, but that seems to be a minority view. Most thought the arguments during last November’s election, pro and con, were easy to understand.

*****
I haven’t read the article yet, but the latest issue of the weekly Shukan Gendai (14 April, out yesterday) reports the results of their voter preference survey in the Kinki region. They say Hashimoto Toru’s One Osaka would sweep all the single-seat districts in a lower house election. It would be a historical rout for both the DPJ and the LDP. They also say both DPJ bigwig Maehara Seiji and LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu would lose their elections (both are from Kyoto). That would not necessarily throw the bums out, however; with the odious proportional representation system, their parties would probably put them at the top of their respective PR lists.

Meanwhile, Yayama Taro has an article in the April issue of Voice about the phenomenon. The headline reads: The Hashimoto Whirlwind Will Not End as a “Diverson” (asobi, literally, play or pastime).

Here’s the first paragraph:

“One Osaka, led by Mayor Hashimoto Toru, has engulfed the political world in a whirlwind. Looking at the Tokyo editions of the major newspapers, it seems they treat the Hashimoto whirlwind as a local Osaka phenomenon. Pure and simple, this must be viewed as a major development that will lead to the reorganization of the central government. Having sensed that, I subscribed to the Osaka edition of the Sankei Shimbun.”

There’s a whole lotta shaking goin’ on.

He won’t have to read the Osaka editions if any bad news emerges. The Asahi Shimbun will be sure to cover that.

In any event, Mr. Hashimoto is also getting plenty of television coverage.

*****
The next posts in the Hashimoto series will examine his largest controversies/battles as governor and mayor in Osaka.

*****
What we need is some local funky diversity, and that’s what Cicala Mvta (pronounced “muta” in Japanese) offers. Any ethnic/folk/pop style of music that calls for a clarinet, leader Okuma Wataru plays.