A textbook from the South Korean New Right

RECENT ACTIVITY in the Comments section has prompted me to present a summary of a longer article sent to me some months ago by Prof. Shimojo. It is not part of his recent series of short essays, but it is worth reading for the information it presents. Here is my very quick translation.

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A Textbook from the South Korean New Right

In March last year, the Textbook Forum of South Korea, consisting primarily of economists, published the Proposed Textbook of South Korean Recent and Modern History. This textbook has attracted attention both inside the country and overseas because its view of recent South Korean history is not based on the theory of Japan’s colonization of Korea as an illegal seizure of territory. Rather, it offers (to a certain extent) a positive evaluation of Japan’s role in the modernization of the country. For that reason, it is viewed in some quarters as a Korean version of the New History Textbook published in Japan. That is why it was subjected to a concentrated attack by the Left.

At just that time, a new conservative government took power in South Korea that emphasized a practical relationship with Japan rather than the issues of the past. The publication of this textbook portends the advent of a new period for the historical problems of Japanese-Korean relations. Therefore, let us consider how best to deal with those historical problems as we refer to this textbook of the New Right.

The creation of the Textbook Forum

The preface of the proposed textbook states that the Textbook Forum was created in 2005. On 16 March that year, Shimane Prefecture passed an ordinance establishing Takeshima Day, which inflamed nationalist passions in South Korea. It was also a period in which historical issues were brought to the forefront. Then-President Roh Moo-hyon made historical problems a matter of national policy and established the Presidential Commission on True History for Peace in Northeast Asia. That resulted in the emergence of a narrow-minded nationalism in South Korea, and the forces of the Left gained strength. This trend was accelerated by a special law passed by the Roh Administration in 2004 that enabled the investigation of collaborators with the Japanese during the colonization period. Thus began a period of research into the past.

At the same time, Shimane Prefecture passed an ordinance declaring Takeshima Day and commemorated the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the islets into the prefecture. Opposition to these moves erupted in South Korea. The backdrop to this opposition was the South Korean historical view, formed in the 1950s, that Takeshima represented the first territory sacrificed in Japan’s invasion of the Korean Peninsula. However, then Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon (now UN Secretary-General) took the stance that the Takeshima issue was of greater importance than the bilateral Japanese-Korean relationship itself. President Roh also declared that the claim of sovereignty over Dokdo (Takeshima) constituted a “second invasion”. Thus, historical issues became a matter of South Korean foreign policy.

This further inflamed nationalist sentiment in South Korea, for which Prof. Emeritus Han Sung-joo of Korea University paid with his reputation. At that time, Prof. Han had written an article for the April 2005 issue of Seiron titled, “The Stupidity of the Condemnation of the Japan-Friendly Faction, Stemming from Communist and Left-Wing Thought”. In the article, he argued for a reexamination of the merger between Japan and Korea. The university stripped him of his title, and his vilification as a pro-Japanese professor spread to campuses throughout the nation. The previous year, in 2004, Prof. Lee Yeong-hun, a central figure in the Textbook Forum, published The Latter Joseon Period Reexamined from the Perspective of Quantitative Economic History. That prompted a reevaluation of Japan’s colonization and merger. The Textbook Forum was founded in this environment.

A different approach

In South Korea, the new proposed text was viewed as a Korean version of the New History Textbook. Since the textbook problems of 1982, however, Japan’s Neighboring Nation Clause has permitted interference from China and South Korea. In regard to the Tsukuru-kai’s New History Textbook, the self-restraint in the writing of textbooks has limited efforts to championing the cause of the liberal view of history.

The dispute over textbooks in South Korea, however, originated in the South Korean nationalist view of history that arose during the negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which began in 1952. This is rooted in the intellectual conflict between Left and Right. It was in this context that the Roh Administration employed the issue of historical views as a card in diplomatic relations. In February 2008, the Roh Administration in its final days distributed educational videos both in South Korea and overseas that focused on seven separate issues: the Yasukuni shrine, comfort women, history textbooks, Takeshima, the East Sea, Chinese historical research into its northeastern region, the former Mongolia (which caused an uproar in South Korea), and the border dispute between China and North Korea involving Mt. Changbai. The objective was the Takeshima dispute, however. The aim was to isolate Japan by mobilizing all the historical issues and insisting that the colonization was a Japanese invasion. In 2007, legislatures in the United States, Canada, The Netherlands, and the EU also took up the comfort woman issue after being urged to do so by South Koreans.

Japan, however, views the comfort woman issue as a single issue, and so was unable to respond from a broader perspective. When the problem with history textbooks arose, the Neighboring Nation Clause was adopted. When the issue with comfort women arose, the simplistic response was the Kono Statement. The South Koreans thus extracted commitments from Japan. Both the Koizumi and Abe administrations encouraged the joint study of Japanese-Korean history, but the result could be seen in advance as long as there was a problem with historical views in South Korea.

In this regard, the Textbook Forum’s publication of the Proposed Textbook of South Korean Recent and Modern History represented a different approach—one that did not follow the South Korean historical perspective that viewed history as an invasion by the Japanese.

The Textbook Forum

The Textbook Forum has criticized conventional education in history for its nationalistic view based on a single perspective. The basis for its position is statistics and other data. Prof. Emeritus Park Son-su of the Academy of Korean Studies stated, “The description in the textbook showed that Japan contributed to the improvement and modernization of the Korean colony’s economy, society, and culture.” He was also critical, however, saying “The Japanese colonial government was the worst government, with none other like it in the world.” This is just historical viewpoint speaking, however, and is not historical fact.

In the 1970s, President Park Chug Hee’s Semaul Movement put South Korean agriculture on an independent footing and promoted economic development. President Park used the Japanese colonial administration as his point of reference for this movement. Past textbooks denied those successes, however, because the Park Administration was a military dictatorship, and he was considered friendly toward Japan.

That Park Geun Hye, a presidential candidate of the Grand National Party, is his oldest daughter was another factor in the political use of history. South Korea’s historical disputes are extremely political.

Park Geun Hye praised the Proposed Textbook of South Korean Recent and Modern History, saying, “It highlights the problems with current textbooks.” The South Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry has presented to the Ministry of Education a proposal to revise the current textbooks. Thus, through the recognition of diverse values, the waves of democratization are beginning to break over South Korean history textbooks.

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Afterwords: Long-time readers know I am loathe to use the expression Right Wing or any of its permutations because its meaning became degraded beyond any practical use years ago. I asked Prof. Shimojo about the use of the term New Right, and he answered that the term is used in South Korea itself. Therefore, I used it here.

Hope-y days are here again

There is a paucity of evidence—peer-reviewed scientific evidence—that forecasters know how to deliver the goods: reliably accurate political, economic and technological predictions. In fact, when I have staged competitions, many forecasters fail to outperform the proverbial dart-throwing chimpanzee—and most cannot outperform extrapolation algorithms that simply predict “more of the same.”

- Philip Tetlock

PREDICTION IS VERY HARD, observed that noted sage of American baseball Yogi Berra, especially about the future. You can double down on those sentiments when peering into the crystal ball of Japanese politics, perhaps the most opaque piece of glass in the cabinet. But now that Japan’s voters finally got their hands on the lever and flushed the Liberal Democratic Party out of office, the cyberteeth of the chattering classes have turned into dental castanets as they try to predict the behavior of the Democratic Party of Japan in government, as well as that of Hatoyama Yukio, who will become the world’s first prime minister nicknamed The Man From Outer Space.

Forecasting political behavior during a term in office, or even how long that term of office will last in a parliamentary system, is an exercise akin to a sports journalist writing a column at the start of a new season predicting how the final standings will shake out several months later. Anyone who bothers to read it forgets it about five minutes after turning the page. It’s space filler and nothing more.

But the real reason no one is able to predict with any accuracy the behavior of a DPJ government is that the DPJ itself doesn’t have the faintest idea what it’s going to do next. Don’t forget, this is the group that revised their party platform so often over the past few weeks that one began to expect TV personality Mino Monta to pop up and ask in English, “Final answer?” (That’s a direct imitation of host Chris Tarrant on the British TV quiz show, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, but I digress.)

Still, it is worthwhile to examine a few questions. But since there’s no one else here in my office at home, I had to make them up myself!

Is this victory a mandate for the DPJ’s policies?

No, this victory is not a mandate for the DPJ’s policies, but they’ll behave as if it were anyway. But why believe me when you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth? Here’s a quick look at what the Japanese think.

A national poll published by the left-leaning Asahi Shimbun on 18 August asked respondents how they viewed the DPJ’s plans to find the money to pay for its campaign promises. This was an important question because most Japanese, even those sympathetic to the DPJ, think their funding schemes are as realistic as Chinese fortune cookies and required about the same amount of thought to put together.

A total of 83% said they felt “uneasy” about those plans.

That’s a natural response to DPJ claims they’re going to pull JPY 16.8 trillion (about $US 180.7 billion) worth of rabbits out of a hat during the next four years, apart from the other expenses of government.

The same Asahi poll asked about one of the crown jewels in the DPJ platform: the elimination of the income tax deduction for children and its replacement with a cash subsidy from the government.

• Approve: 33%
• Disapprove: 55%

Another question asked whether they agreed that expressway tolls should be eliminated.

• Good idea: 23%
• Bad idea: 67%

The numbers for that last question didn’t look much better when the Sankei Shimbun and FNN conducted a joint poll on the 25th from the opposite political perspective. Their poll showed that 65.4% of those surveyed thought free expressways was a bad idea, while only 30.1% approved.

The DPJ also made a big issue this time round of the so-called legacy candidates, the sons and daughters of national legislators who decide to go into the family business after their parents retire or die. It was a heaping helping of hypocrisy—Mr. Hatoyama has a Diet pedigree stretching four generations back to the 19th century—but they focused their fire on Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s son Shinjiro, all of 28, who had served as an aide to his father and was tapped to replace the old man in his Kanagawa district.

This was no doubt an effort to discredit the most successful LDP politician of his generation, a man who still outpolls individual DPJ candidates in popularity surveys and who earned a reputation as a reformer that the new government can only dream about. Nevertheless, the DPJ chose an odd strategy by running a 27-year-old attorney against Shinjiro.

Koizumi the Younger won handily.

To sum up, none of the platform planks other than those devoted to government reform, i.e., those inserted as non-targeted pork rather than for specific interests, such as farmers or large medical institutions, found resonance with the public.

Some English-language journalism attributed the victory to the DPJ’s “bold stand” of vowing to fix the economy and reorient U.S.-Japan relations. Others claimed the voters deserted the LDP because of the party’s “pro-business” policies that resulted in a growing “income gap”. Still others mentioned Aso Taro’s verbal “gaffes”.

That’s lunchmeat.

The reason the DPJ did so well—and there is only one reason—is that their name is not the Liberal Democratic Party. It was a textbook case of throwing the bums out. The electoral decimation that felled even some of the more responsible and serious members of the LDP demonstrated that nothing would satisfy the public except new faces.

Come on, can’t you be more serious?

Well, if you fancy some op-ed/faculty lounge perspective, here’s a taste. Despite the LDP’s effort to distance itself from its only recent success in Koizumi Jun’ichiro and its glaring lack of coherency, it still led the DPJ in polling until January this year. Former DPJ head Ozawa Ichiro’s willingness to form a grand coalition in November 2007 was based on polling that showed his party would still lose a lower house election, despite their landslide win in the upper house election just a few months before.

It wasn’t until the global economic crisis hit, followed by an Aso/LDP stimulus package the public didn’t want, that the tide finally turned. That tide quickly reversed course when Mr. Ozawa refused to step down after it became apparent his Iwate political machine was up to its neck in old-style LDP money politics. The polls didn’t swing back until Mr. Hatoyama replaced him. The ill-advised LDP promise to raise the consumption tax made sure they stayed that way.

As the people have made abundantly clear for the better part of two decades, they’re fed up with the old LDP approach to governing. That approach was a great success in bringing Japan back from a bombed-out wasteland to a state of domestic prosperity and tranquility, but those days are long gone. The electorate rewarded the LDP when it seemed as if it had turned over a new leaf during the Koizumi administration, but punished them severely when it became apparent the party had allowed the jungle to grow back over the new trail chopped through the wilderness.

The LDP really had become a mudboat, and it dissolved all on its own.

A random observation: One of Abe Shinzo’s objectives as prime minister was to break free of the postwar framework. It is an irony that his goals might well be accomplished by the DPJ victory.

Are the DPJ competent enough to head a government?

Had the DPJ ever demonstrated for two consecutive weeks a minimal amount of preparation, professional research, and a clear and focused presentation of their policies, the answer would be yes, but this is a party that carries banana peels in its back pocket just to keep in pratfall practice. This circus has the potential to contain more rings than the Ringling Brothers.

The DPJ stutters every time it tries to talk the talk. Why should they be expected to walk the walk?

But what about the DPJ’s policies? Don’t they have a reputation as policy wanks?

Policies? What policies would those be? Who needs principled policies when there are so many interest groups to pander to? Besides, as Mr. Ozawa once put it in a Japanese-language pun, campaign promises are convenient because they can be so easily replastered. Or as their LDP opponents put it, policies for the DPJ are like condiments on a pizza.

The only consistent thread running through DPJ activities for the past two years has been to foment political crises to gain power. Policies are created on an ad hoc basis as necessary.

Will they reform Japanese politics and government?

They’d better try, or they’ll find the traditional striped pants and cutaway photo op of inauguration day to be the high water mark of their administration. People throughout the world lose patience with politicians very quickly nowadays. For proof look no further than the U.S., where Mr. Obama’s poll numbers have now cratered to less than 50% among likely voters from a 70% mark on 20 January.

As a party, the DPJ’s primary objective has always been to gain power, and their primary objective will now be to keep it. That makes it less likely they’ll expend any political capital on a serious fight over ideals. Watch them go for the low-hanging fruit, particularly those most visible to the public, and avoid anything else.

The party has promised to make highways toll free, which will require a new bureaucracy to manage road repair and construction—a retreat from the Koizumi administration measures that began to wrest this sector from the clutches of vested interests political, bureaucratic, and industrial.

The DPJ has formed an alliance with the small People’s New Party, whose paleo-politics are those of an unreconstructed, pre-Koizumi, non-reform LDP. Their condition for the alliance is halting postal privatization, to which the DPJ agreed. The government’s postal savings deposits and life insurance accounts financed the pork for the construction industry in the bad old days. That’s what they want to bring back.

The DPJ’s platform calls for sharp cuts in proportional representation in the Diet. But they’ve also formed an alliance with the Social Democrats, who will not compromise over their demand to keep the proportional representation system. They were able to win only three seats outright in this election, after all. The SDP also gets very wormy about protecting Japanese shipping from the Somalian pirates, as if the country is apt to fall off the wagon and march on the Asian continent again. A rather substantial number of DPJ Diet members support that mission, and one wonders how long they’ll be able to tolerate the SDP tail wagging the DPJ dog.

The DPJ is this very minute negotiating with both of those parties to form a coalition government, and neither is likely to budge from their positions.

Yet the DPJ has already said they will not work with Watanabe Yoshimi’s Your Party, whose very existence is based on deep systemic reform, and whose five seats outnumber those of the PNP in the lower house. Mr. Watanabe even conducted a dialog in the July issue of Voice with pundit Yayama Taro, a supporter of the reform wing of the LDP, filled with fulsome praise for Mr. Hatoyama and the DPJ. He was probably angling for a second tour of duty as the minister of governmental reform in the new cabinet.

Why is the DPJ shunning Your Party? The latter group ran candidates against the DPJ in a handful of election districts, that’s why.

It’s difficult to be sanguine about the prospects for real reform when the new government is playing footsie with reactionary non-reformers and flipping off the true believers.

The DPJ's political big tent concept

That does not begin to mention the incompatible range of political philosophies within the DPJ that would make it impossible for any party to stay in power while keeping everyone satisfied. Those philosophies range from Nanjing Massacre deniers to straight up Socialists.

And while the calls for devolution and bureaucratic downsizing remain strong nationwide, serious efforts in that direction seem unlikely for a party who relies on the muscle, including campaign foot soldiers, of the All-Japan Prefectural and Municipal Workers Union.

In short, the DPJ’s big tent concept more closely resembles a Christo sculpture than a viable political unit.

Will Hatoyama Yukio be a capable leader?

Godfrey Daniel! It’s a wonder the man’s wife doesn’t tie ballast to his foot every morning to prevent him floating off into the ether.

Try his recent op-ed translated from the September issue of Voice. With the possible exception of his suggestion that a substitute needs to be found for the dollar as the key international currency, and the observation that the Chinese wish to establish international dominance, every word of it is factually incorrect, infantile, or a hallucination.

And that includes every instance of “a”, “and”, and “the”.

I’m not even going to try to fisk that—life is much too short. Suffice it to say that the first person who came to mind after reading that piece was Henry Wallace (odd how even their hair styles are similar). Indeed, just because he can afford an excellent tailor and says he believes in fraternity and goo goo goo joob does not prevent him from being delirious.

When even the New York Times examines a left of center politician and suggests that he needs to be more serious about deregulation and market reform, you know we’re in the Twilight Zone.

What about his foreign policy?

Read that op-ed again and tell me it doesn’t sound more like a text written by a high school girl for a speech contest than a serious foreign policy vision.

Both China and South Korea are ready to believe relations with Japan will improve. That’s not surprising, considering that Mr. Hatoyama seems ready to bend over for them.

As for distancing the country from the United States, that’s inevitable considering the callous American disregard of both Japanese interests and basic fairness in a bilateral partnership over the years, but we’ll see what creation emerges from the DPJ pizzeria.

Does the DJP victory mean the Japanese political system has matured?

Not quite yet. That point will be reached after whatever becomes of the LDP develops a unified philosophy more suited to contemporary situations, hones its voice in opposition, and retakes power after the electorate bounces the DPJ for its inevitable failures…and then whatever becomes of the DPJ develops an identity of its own, rather than “We’re not the LDP!”, and forms its second government.

That’s when the system will have matured.

Only a gutless pundit would refuse to make predictions!

Well, if you insist. It simply is not possible for a man such as Hatoyama Yukio, who combines a cosseted upbringing in a fabulously wealthy family with a political vision based on a fata morgana, to be a successful prime minister for very long. Considering the numerical superiority the DPJ now enjoys, we might be treated to an encore performance of the LDP leadership charade of the past three years, in which the party passed the premiership from one empty suit to the next without calling for a new general election.

And here’s an extra: Japan will never again see one party stay in control of government for the better part of 60 years.

Afterwords:

Yosano Kaoru, Mr. Aso’s Finance Minister, lost the election in his Tokyo district, and he was also deprived of a proportional representation seat because the LDP picked up only two in that region and he was seeded third on the list.

But a close examination of the results shows that he received more actual votes than both of the two LDP PR candidates ahead of him on the list, and the DPJ candidate who was at the top of that party’s regional list.

The identity of the candidates or their party affiliation makes no difference. For those two LDP candidates and the DPJ candidate to win Diet seats while another candidate with more votes than any of them goes home a loser means that the system is profoundly undemocratic.

Update: It turns out that the edition of the newspaper I used to write the Afterwords section did not have the absolutely positively final results, and Mr. Yosano did make it in the Diet as a PR candidate. Sorry for the confusion.

But my original point still stands–as this will quickly show.

Open letter to Yosano Kaoru

To: Yosano Kaoru, Minister of Finance, Liberal Democratic Party headquarters
From: Ampontan, c/o This Website
In re: Your criticism of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan’s new platform

Mr. Yosano:

The Asahi Shimbun account of your recent speech in Unnan, Shimane, in which you slammed the DPJ platform, contained some most interesting quotes.

For example:

“It’s mostly a world of pipe dreams and trompe l’oeil.”

And:

“It makes me think even the Communist Party is more serious.”

I agree completely. It is a world of pipe dreams and optical illusions, and considering how they hold fast to their core beliefs, the Communist Party of Japan is more serious (despite offering even stronger opiates and more distorted optical illusions). Then again, at least they have party-wide core beliefs to hold fast to.

In fact, I suspect that most of the Japanese electorate would agree with you too. The DPJ’s policies are a weird blend of the childish and the cynical, are they not? No one in Japan believes their numbers—least of all themselves—and the internal contradictions of the platform show a disrespect for both the electorate and the political process. In some ways, it does border on the criminal, as a Kyodo report quoted you as saying.

And bringing up the Communists is apropos, because the DPJ platform is a bit Bolshie in places, isn’t it?

For example, the Asahi report said you specifically mentioned the DPJ policy of giving income supplements to individual farm families, after which you commented:

“You cannot trust a party that appeals to the people with assertions that are mistaken in their most basic aspect.”

There’s an even better example you could have chosen: Their plank calling for the elimination of the income tax deduction for children and replacing it with a direct monthly government stipend through junior high school. Of course they’ll want to extend that through high school, eventually, once they put the hook in.

But you couldn’t very well mention that one, could you? After all, that idea originated with your New Komeito coalition partners in the Tokyo Metro District.

Still, all these complaints are beside the point, and we both know why. Absent a change in the status quo, they’re going to beat you like a drum in the lower house election.

And just about everyone in the country understands the reasons for it but you.

Here’s the most important one: You didn’t learn the Koizumian lesson. Mr. Maverick came into office with public support rates above 80% and left five and a half years later with those same rates at 70%, after delivering the second-largest lower house electoral victory in postwar history. That might well be unprecedented for a modern democracy, particularly one of the larger ones like Japan.

Did he achieve all the reforms that he promised? No, but politics is the art of the possible, and he had to lay his political life on the line to get as much as he did.

But let’s be honest–It’s not as if you understood any of that to begin with. It took the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass after the porcine ineptitude of Mori Yoshiro and a revolt from the local rank and file to force you to select him at all.

Yet within months after he stepped down, you readmitted the people he threw out of the party for opposing postal privatization, which immediately sliced 20 percentage points off those public support numbers. You must have suspected that would happen, but you did it anyway, didn’t you?

According to Nakagawa Hidenao, 70% of the lower house members are (were) reform supporters, but you allowed the party machinery and the bureaucracy to slowly grind them down.

The drubbing the electorate administered to your party in the upper house election of 2007 should have been enough to grab the attention of the most slack-jawed of dullards, but you didn’t learn even after that brick wall fell on you.

You might have been relieved by the rebound of the Cabinet support rate to almost 60% after you installed Fukuda Yasuo as prime minister, but that was a pipe dream of your own. It fell back into the 20s as soon as everyone understood that Mr. Fukuda’s forte was that he had no forte, as a DPJ wag put it. But that’s one you should have understood to begin with.

It could not have been clearer what the Japanese people have thought for nearly 20 years about the wicked way your party has gone about its business, and how they will reward anyone who makes the effort to do something—anything–else.

So you’re finally worried about losing to the party that behaves like a primary school student with a loaded pistol, as Mr. Ibuki so accurately described them?

You’ve got no one to blame but yourselves for that, I’m afraid.

And now you’re stuck between several rocks and the proverbial hard place. You can have Mr. Aso lead the party into the election on a platform of raising taxes and defending the bureaucracy, and stand on the deck of the Mudboat-maru as it crumbles and dissolves.

Or, you could replace him with some semi-plausible reform alternative and prepare for the election. But no one will blame the DPJ for screaming bloody murder over that one. And your coalition partners say they’ll withhold support from any LDP Diet member who calls for Mr. Aso to step down.

Goodness only knows what backroom deal you cut with them behind the scenes—a promise to delay the election until October so they can play their shell game with Japan’s 90-day residency requirement for voters after the local Tokyo balloting? Whatever it was, you’re stuck with it.

On the other hand, replacing Mr. Aso with a serious reformer holds the risk that the bureaucrats will find a way to bring him (or her) down too. We’ve seen how the Social Insurance Agency nailed shut Mr. Abe’s coffin when you were ready to privatize them. That’s one lesson you did seem to learn. More than a few people think sources in Kasumigaseki provided the prosecutors with information on the fund-raising practices of Ozawa Ichiro. Isn’t it funny how no one could find any dirt despite sniffing around Mr. Ozawa’s finances for years—until it looked like his party might win?

And now the same thing’s happening to Mr. Hatoyama. What a coincidence!

Mr. Koizumi might have caught them off guard, but you can be sure that won’t happen again. They’ll be ready for your next reformer.

So it’s a bit late in the game for you and the rest of the LDP sleepwalkers to start worrying about a party that offers only pipe dreams, isn’t it?

You might be familiar with an old English expression–You made your bed, now you’ll have to lie in it.

Don’t forget to turn out the light.

Sincerely,

Amp

Japan’s political kaleidoscope (2): Aso edition

THE YEASTY FERMENT brewing in the world of Japanese politics is a heady blend with ingredients ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Anyone who thinks politics in this country is moribund either isn’t paying attention or their beverage of choice is Kool-Aid. Today’s draft is drawn primarily from the Aso Taro keg.

Politicians say the darndest things

Logorrhea is an occupational hazard for politicians, and all sorts of things come out of their mouths when they’ve switched on cruise control. This is from a recent speech by Prime Minister Aso Taro:

“(The current Japanese national soccer team) doesn’t have a superstar like Nakata Hidetoshi. Eleven people working together—that’s Japanese soccer. If Japan had a superstar, it would be His Majesty the Emperor.”

Do you ever wonder how Mrs. Aso would answer if someone asked her whether her husband talks like this when they’re relaxing together at home?

Then again, if the idea of Jesus Christ Superstar can sell millions of albums, launch productions on Broadway and the West End of London, generate two films with a third planned, and still be performed on stage 35 years later, it should be harmless for some Japanese to consider the tenno to be the local superstar.

Why people dislike journalists #4,937

Journalists defend themselves from the charge of pointlessly repeating the same question by saying it’s their job. Well, yes, for some people, working for a living does involve creating make-work projects designed to convince the boss you’ve got the situation well in hand. All they usually accomplish, however, is to waste the time of people with more productive things to do. Try this dialogue from a recent Aso Taro press conference:

Reporter: First, about the personnel for senior party positions and the Cabinet…

(Mr. Aso leans back and smiles)

Reporter: Last Saturday you had a discussion with Mr. Kuroda (LDP secretary general), and at that time you took a negative approach to making major personnel changes. You said, “I’ve never talked about it; it’s just outsiders making things up.” Could you tell us again what your thoughts are about the personnel issue?

PM: I haven’t thought about personnel.

Reporter: Does that mean you won’t think about personnel until the Diet is dissolved and there’s a general election?

PM: It means I’m not thinking about it now.

Reporter: Now.

PM: Now look, you’re jumping on everything I say as soon as I say it, and you also did it not long ago. This sort of thing…saying these needless things will just lead to a pointless conversation, so let’s drop the subject…well, that was a close call (laughs).

Reporter: I see.

PM: (Clear voice) I haven’t thought about it.

Reporter: OK. Next…

PM: Do you understand?

Reporter: You’re not thinking about it all?

PM: (Laughs, doesn’t answer)

Update: Well, it looks like this reporter knew more than I gave him credit for. The very next day, Mr. Aso said that he had been thinking for a while about “the most suitable people at the most suitable time”. Nevertheless, it should have been obvious he didn’t want to answer the question when he was asked. That’s no reason to bug the man.

Why would Mr. Aso double back on his word so quickly? Some television journalists speculated that former PM Abe Shinzo, a long-time Aso friend, had been urging him to reshuffle his Cabinet and had nearly convinced him. But then party bigwig Mori Yoshiro told Mr. Aso not to waste his time.

How typical: Mr. Aso’s lack of decisiveness and willingness to listen to either of those men for political advice are two of the reasons his popular support is negligible to begin with.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the latest teacup tempest in an administration known for them is that one of the TV journalists casually commented that “he lied” the first time before moving on to comment about subsequent developments.

That does not speak well of contemporary Japanese politics at the highest level, does it?

Grated Aso

A lower house election must be held within the next few months, and it looks very much like the LDP is going to be trounced, allowing the opposition Democratic Party of Japan to form a government for the first time. The ruling party no longer offers a coherent political philosophy, and their post-Koizumi prime ministers have been the politically clumsy manipulated by the terminal klutzes behind the scenes.

It’s no wonder then that some senior party members want to move up the September election for LDP party president (who would become prime minister) to find an alternative to going down with Mr. Aso and the rest of the mudboat crew before the lower house election.

LDP faction leader Yamasaki Hiraku (AKA Taku) has submitted a petition to LDP MPs and other party members specifically calling for an early election. He also set up a special area on his website for citizens to provide their input.

Said Mr. Yamasaki:

“It’s not (designed) to bring down the Aso Cabinet”.

It is to laugh. No one believes that, particularly because the special area materialized on his website the day after the LDP candidate was defeated in the election for Chiba City mayor. A former Cabinet minister also admitted off the record that the idea is to create a popular consensus to replace Mr. Aso.

Indeed, Mr. Yamasaki later quit beating around the bush. A week ago, he claimed he had 108 signatures from lower house LDP members, though he wasn’t showing them to anyone. That’s about halfway to his goal of signing up an outright majority of LDP MPs in the lower house. He says that would prevent Mr. Aso from calling a snap election out of petulant frustration.

Then came the release of the following poll:

• People intending to vote for the LDP: 16.4%
• People intending to vote for the DPJ: 40.4%

A 24-point differential causes alarm bells to ring so loudly even those with earplugs can hear them. It also tends to shake up senior party leaders with heretofore safe seats because an electoral tsunami that large could just as easily wipe them out as it would the small fry in marginal districts.

The secretaries-general

Said Kato Koichi at a press conference:

In my 37 years as a diet member, I have never seen the reputation of the LDP sink as low as it has now. It’s the lowest it’s ever been. Calling an election now would be an act of suicide…Some MPs say we can take only 165 seats, but I think that outlook is too optimistic.

Said Takebe Tsutomu to reporters at party headquarters:

“We (Diet members) will work hard until the end of the term on 10 September, (but) we should have a showdown in the election with new policies promoted by a new leader.”

Ibuki Bunmei was slightly more optimistic, if optimistic is the word to describe a prediction of the loss of the party’s lower house majority:

“The cabinet support rate has fallen. We could have taken 241 seats with New Komeito, but now that will only be 220 to 230.”

All four of these gentlemen have served as LDP secretary-general, the top position in the party apparatus, so they know when electoral defeat is staring them in the face. Another former SG, Nakagawa Hidenao, has been saying the same thing every day for months now.

The names that arise most frequently as possible replacements are the Acting Secretary-General (i.e., representative) Ishihara Nobuteru, the son of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro; Health, Labor, and Welfare Minister Masuzoe Yoichi, a former University of Tokyo professor who won public favor as a TV commentator slamming bureaucrats for their handling of public pensions; and former Defense Minister Koike Yuriko, a favorite of the Koizumian wing of the party, but disliked by some for a perceived shallowness of loyalty to the LDP. The problem with all three is that none of them are strong enough on their own to serve in that role without substantial help from the old boys in the backroom, most of whom have been out of touch for a generation.

Not everyone has jumped on the dump Aso bandwagon, however. Those who think they can swim–or cling to the flotsam and jetsam–when the ship sinks include former postal rebel Noda Yumiko and former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Mr. Abe may be a man of principle and party loyalty, but he is sorely deficient in the third P of political acumen.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Kawamura Takeo is also opposed to a change:

“Party unity is of the utmost importance before the lower house election. Turmoil in the party will cause its own downfall. Would the people really understand if we only changed the leader? How would we answer the criticism that holding a party leadership election before the general election was done only with the general election in mind?”

Yes, the people would understand if you removed a leader they don’t support who lacks a firm political touch. They’d probably sympathize with you, in fact. To answer the carpers, you could always point out that the parties sitting in the opposition rows don’t get to make policy.

New Komeito, the LDP’s coalition partners, also want to stick with the loser. Said a senior official:

“It will have a negative impact on the election for governor in Shizuoka and the Tokyo Metropolitan District council. It’s also possible the voters would not support (the coalition) in the lower house election.”

You mean the same voters who already favor the opposition over the coalition by a 24-point margin? Those voters?

The official dropped hints the party would withhold support from LDP Diet members who tried to oust Mr. Aso.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that candidates running behind a party leader promoting regional devolution, delinking from the mandarins of the civil service, putting the nation’s finances in order before raising taxes, continued privatization, and a resolute foreign policy probably wouldn’t need New Komeito support to win.

Naturalists speak of the cornered prey summoning all its energy for a desperate counterattack. Some hunters, however, know that cornered prey tracked for a long time often become too tired and dispirited to continue, and willingly surrender. What else could be the explanation for those people who are ready to fight an election campaign led by Mr. Aso—a man who has demonstrated no leadership ability, is not amenable to the reforms the public knows are needed, and who thinks that promising a large tax increase will earn the party public favor?

Mr. Aso might even be among those willing to surrender to the hunter. He’s dropping hints that he’ll hold the lower house election in August. Was this done to forestall a putsch? Was it his idea, or did someone put him up to it?

Why is it that the dimmest bulbs invariably think they’re the brightest?

Taro and the pirates

But let’s be fair: Mr. Aso does have his moments. The Diet recently passed a bill that allows Japanese self-defense forces (i.e., the military) to be sent overseas with the authority to fire on pirate vessels overseas if they do not respond to an order to cease and desist their attacks—even on non-Japanese ships—and allows Japan to participate in joint international anti-piracy operations. It also criminalizes piracy, which permits the offenders to be apprehended and punished in Japan.

Yet the DPJ chose to potentially sacrifice Japanese lives and ships by refusing to pass the bill in the upper house. They and the other opposition parties delayed the measure for two months and forced the LDP to use its supermajority in the lower house to get it through.

Said the prime minister:

“Naturally you’d protect yourself if you were attacked by thieves. I don’t understand (their opposition to the use of weapons). What are they thinking about when it comes to the safety of the Self-Defense Forces and the Coast Guard?”

There have been about 150 pirate attacks on shipping off Somalia this year, already exceeding the 111 attacks in 2008. What was the opposition “thinking”? For starters, the DPJ and the Social Democrats were concerned that the bill allows the Cabinet to send the SDF overseas without Diet approval.

Well, their two-month foot-dragging and gamesmanship while piracy continues unabated demonstrates why waiting for the approval of more than 700 people in both houses of the legislature, many of whom are all too willing to create artificial political crises to delay bills on any pretext, is unwise and possibly fatal when real world circumstances demand prompt action.

Meanwhile, the SDP and the Communists think the Coast Guard should be the only military forces involved against the pirates, and called into action only in Japanese territorial waters. They were also opposed to the relaxed rules on the use of weapons. What do they think works against Third World pirates looking for a multi-million dollar payday? Moral suasion? Do they expect the Somalians to start raiding along the Seto Inland Sea?

Let’s be clear: Many in the DPJ supported this bill as it was. That meant it could have sailed through the upper house with little or no problem, but the party leadership felt compelled to object. That’s partly because they lack the political sophistication to understand that for critical areas of national interest, it really is OK to agree with the government and not to oppose something merely because they’re the opposition. It’s also because they chose again to ignore the national interest by playing a numbers game for their own political ends and ally with the SPD solely to bring down the government.

What this demonstrates:

1. The SPD hold their countrymen in such contempt that they believe Japanese are still too irresponsible to be trusted with lethal weapons overseas in matters of self-defense. (It’s also possible that the wool in their heads has grown so thick they’re no longer capable of coherent thought.) That, combined with their other positions, past associations with North Korea, their socialist/Marxist background (which includes circumstantial evidence linking a leading party figure to the Japanese Red Army terrorist group of yesteryear) reveals serious character flaws.
2. That the DPJ would put to risk Japanese lives, commercial interests critical for an island nation with limited natural resources, and nascent efforts to show that the country is a responsible international partner willing to help enforce the basic concepts of right and wrong, solely to feed the fantasies of miniscule fringe parties for the sake of gaining power, is another sign that they are too immature to successfully lead a government.
3. Communists always behave like Communists.

Want more? DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio was asked if he would roll back the decision if they gained a lower house majority and formed a government later this year. You know, if you’re opposed, you’re opposed, right? His answer:

“We will not make a hasty decision to do an immediate about-face.”

Bless their pointed little heads, but aren’t they dependable? The DPJ can always be counted on to choose expediency over principle.

Some claim the DPJ maintains its alliance with the SPD because it “needs them” in the upper house.

“Needs them” for what? It’s not as if the SPD is going to start voting with the LDP if the DPJ tells them to bugger off.

The Democratic Party of Japan—still shameless after all these years.

Getting real

During the same discussion, Mr. Aso continued:

“It’s the same with North Korea. At a minimum, we must fight when we should fight. If we aren’t prepared to do that, we won’t be able to defend the nation’s safety.”

Added current LDP Secretary-General Hosoda Haruyuki in a Yurakucho speech:

“Who knows what North Korea, which has nonchalantly abducted hundreds of people, will do if they develop nuclear weapons? We must apply more pressure to North Korea. Our ultimate objective is to bring about a collapse of the current regime and have the country be reborn as a peaceful state. The DPJ’s response to (this issue) is extremely soft.”

And why not? Who better than the Japanese to understand that a malevolent regime can become a peaceful state?

Messrs. Aso and Hosoda aren’t the only ones tired of the international pussyfooting. The aforementioned Koike Yuriko resigned last week from the chairmanship of a special LDP committee studying the question of enemy military bases. A party council submitted a statement to Prime Minister Aso on whether Japan should maintain the capability of conducting an attack on enemy military installations. The council adopted a policy of ruling out preemptive defensive attacks, which caused Ms. Koike to walk.

Instrumental in adopting that policy was Yamasaki Hiraku (also mentioned above), who said:

“We must not cause misunderstandings overseas”.

Retorted Ms. Koike:

“A policy exclusively oriented to defense is too restrictive, and a defensive preemptive attack policy is even more restrictive. All we talk about is limiting what we can do. Is it such a good idea to continue to limit Japan’s policies for defense? People say it’s done out of consideration for neighboring countries, but they don’t show any consideration for us at all.”

Bingo. And give that last sentence bonus points.

Duh

The people overseas who might misunderstand could be divided into two groups. The first consists of those in the region who would choose to purposely misunderstand. That would allow them to use Japanese policy as both a diplomatic weapon in bilateral relations, and as a domestic weapon to stir up anti-Japanese sentiment at home. Their feigned ignorance would enable them to continue painting the country as a false enemy, thereby strengthening their base of support.

North Korea threatens Japan with military action every day and has the hardware to make those threats very real. The Chinese are not going to stop until they have made themselves the East Asian hegemon (at least). Russia seized Japan’s Northern Territories after Japan surrendered in 1945 and refuses to return them. South Korea used military force to seize Takeshima in 1954, still illegally occupies the islets, and still refuses international mediation (which Japan says it would accept).

The second group of people who would misunderstand is in the West and principally consists of politicians, academics, and journalists, most of whom can’t be bothered to do the research to get it right to begin with. Perhaps that’s because a real understanding would conflict with their preconceptions.

Japanese diplomatic and military behavior has been the gold standard in Northeast Asia since 1945. Ms. Koike, Mr. Aso, and Mr. Hosoda are right: Japan should choose to defend its legitimate interests as a sovereign nation. The decision-makers in neighboring countries will understand perfectly, regardless of what they say in public for the gullible or the Barnumesque suckers who want to be deceived. As for the people on the other side of the Pacific, there’s a Japanese expression that covers them: Baka ni tsukeru kusuri wa nai. There’s no medicine to cure a fool.

Some people in this country pretended they didn’t understand what Abe Shinzo meant when he said he wanted Japan to move beyond the postwar regime. Well, here you are.

But of course they always knew exactly what he was driving at—they just didn’t want to face the implications. It’s not always easy for adolescents to embrace responsibility and take charge of their lives.

Hatoyama Yukio, Yuai, and the fraternal revolution

The chaos of modern politics will only…find its end when a spiritual aristocracy seizes the means of power of society: (gun)powder, gold, ink, and uses them for the blessing of the general public.
- Practical Idealism, Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi

ON A COLD DAY in Tokyo in 1891, 17-year-old Aoyama Mitsuko rushed to help Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian diplomat whose horse had slipped and fallen on the ice. Her father was an antique dealer and oil merchant descended from a samurai family, and the Count was a frequent visitor to the antique shop because the Austrian legation was nearby.

Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi

As so often happens, one thing led to another, and the diplomat married Mitsuko over her parents’ objections after he had first succeeded in getting her a job as a parlor maid in the Austrian embassy. They had two sons, the second of whom was Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, born in Tokyo in 1894. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi became a prominent political thinker and activist who founded the Pan-Europa movement in 1923, which is widely recognized as the forerunner of the EU.

The primary objectives of the oldest European federalist organization were to create a free and united Europe with a joint foreign policy and currency and a focus on the family and strong property rights. The Count wanted to create an ethnically diverse European nation with a common culture. A polyglot, he expected that the language of common use throughout the European nation would be English, while everyone would use their native language in their home regions. He said that such a nation would be “the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia”.

In the book Theories of European Integration, Ben Rosamond wrote that Coudenhove-Kalergi wanted to create a conservative society that superceded democracy with “the social aristocracy of the spirit”. Others have described him as a social democrat with aristocratic tendencies, and the Count himself said that he favored government by “the best and the brightest”. He sought to reconcile the conflict between capitalism and communism through cross-fertilization rather than the victory of one over the other. He also thought the world should be divided into five blocs, with Japan and China controlling the Far East.

Meanwhile, back in Japan…

Sometime during the period from 1946 to 1951 in the upscale mountain resort of Karuizawa, Nagano, Hatoyama Ichiro happened to read one of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s many books, The Totalitarian State against Man. Hatoyama was a politician who entered the Diet in 1915 and later served as chief cabinet secretary and education minister before the war.

He was elected again to the Imperial Diet in 1942 despite being an “unofficial candidate”, but he was expelled to Karuizawa for his opposition to the Imperial Rule Assistance Association and the policies of Tojo Hideki. He returned to Tokyo after the war and formed the Liberal Party, which became the largest party in the postwar Diet. Just as he was to be named prime minister, the GHQ barred him from holding public office on the charge of cooperating with militarism, and he returned to Karuizawa for a second period of exile.

When reading The Totalitarian State against Man, Hatoyama was so moved by Coudenhove-Kalergi’s idea of a “fraternal revolution” that he translated the book into Japanese. He chose the Japanese term yuai kakumei for fraternal revolution. Yuai is also used in the translation of the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Coudenhove-Kalergi himself believed in this ideal, but thought the French achieved only the first of the three.

Hatoyama was captivated by the European’s insistence that following a fraternal revolution, the world would transcend the limits of race, religion, ethnicity, state, and language to usher in a true age of coexistence among people, and between people and nature.

Despite suffering a stroke in 1951 just before his banishment order was lifted, Hatoyama stayed active in politics. He became prime minister at last when he succeeded Yoshida Shigeru in December 1954, and he served to December 1956. Personal and philosophical differences with Yoshida had caused him to leave the Liberal Party and form the Democratic Party. These and other conservative groups formed the Liberal Democratic Party in November 1955, and it has been the governing party of Japan continuously since then with the exception of an 11-month period in the mid-1990s.

L-R: Grandpa Yoshida and Grandpa Hatoyama

In addition to his political work, Hatoyama formed the Yuai Youth Association in 1953 and served as its first president. The group’s objective was to inculcate in young people the yuai spirit and thus contribute to the rebuilding of Japan during the postwar period. The association still exists and remains active today.

The word yuai is not commonly used in everyday life, and its presence in Japanese politics faded after Hatoyama Ichiro’s death. The term was briefly revived with the formation of the small New Fraternity Party in 1998, which consisted primarily of Diet members with social democrat tendencies. The party was a temporary receptacle that lasted only from January to April that year, when it merged with the newly created Democratic Party of Japan. One NFP member, Naoshima Masayuki, is still a senior executive with the DPJ.

The keeper of the flame

Ichiro’s grandson Hatoyama Yukio was chosen as the DPJ president earlier this month. Mr. Hatoyama is also a champion of the concept of yuai. He is on record as stating that he wants to change the name of the party he helped found to the Yuai Minshuto—perhaps the Fraternal Democratic Party of Japan—and create a yuai shakai, or fraternal society.

His intense focus on that goal and the nature of the goal itself has subjected Mr. Hatoyama to heavy criticism, and his devotion to the cause exasperates even his allies. One of his political associates recently told the weekly Shukan Bunshun that he interviewed Mr. Hatoyama 10 years ago with the idea of writing a book to further the latter’s political career. The associate said that over the course of 30 hours of interviews, Mr. Hatoyama did not express a single idea about policy, but kept returning to the idea of yuai instead.

Last year, he and his brother, LDP member and Cabinet minister Hatoyama Kunio, established the Yuai Juku, an institute to “develop prominent men and women to create a society, nation, and world whose keynote is the concept of yuai”. Their older sister, Inoue Kazuko, serves as the institute’s director. The first class of 20 students began the year-long course in April 2008 and paid an affordable 130,000 yen (about $US 1,350) to attend classes at the former Hatoyama mansion from 6:10 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The criticism

Not everyone thinks yuai has a place in Japanese politics today. Television commentators, particularly the brash types who consider themselves entertainers first, and who come from a different social milieu than either the Count or Mr. Hatoyama, have derided the new DPJ president’s philosophy as being beyond the average person’s understanding. One—who didn’t do his homework—even claimed that it was entirely unrelated to politics. Journalist and political commentator Ito Atsuo, who is sympathetic to the DPJ and promoted in print Mr. Hatoyama’s opponent Okada Katsuya in the party’s recent presidential election, said it cannot be practically applied to policy.

L-R: Grandsons Taro and Yukio

Of course the political opposition knows an opening when they spot one. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has recently raised his public profile after spending almost two years in a self-imposed exile of his own, recovering from medical problems and the strain of office after resigning his position in August 2007. Before becoming prime minister, Mr. Abe published a book in 2005 called Toward a Beautiful Country that presented his policy positions to the general public. He used the “Beautiful Country” phrase as his political slogan during his term of office.

Mr. Abe’s slogan was also mercilessly ridiculed by the opposition, particularly the DPJ and the Social Democrats (formerly the Socialists). SDP President Fukushima Mizuho said she didn’t know what the phrase “beautiful country” was supposed to mean.

The former prime minister has hurled some slings and arrows of his own at Mr. Hatoyama and his pet cause. Perhaps he did it for a taste of revenge, or perhaps he would have used it in any event as a weapon against the leader across the aisle. But at the Hatoyama press conference following his election as DPJ chief, a reporter brought up Mr. Abe’s criticism:

“The other day, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said, ‘Yuai diplomacy will absolutely not pass muster with North Korea.’ Will you apply Yuai diplomacy to North Korea?”

Said Mr. Hatoyama:

“Well then, former Prime Minister Abe may have rejected Yuai diplomacy, but it might be that he doesn’t understand Yuai diplomacy. Yuai diplomacy is by no means an insubstantial thing. It is how countries with different value systems can achieve the position of recognizing the existence of each other in this world. I think that is a very important, significant concept.

“Of course, for countries of the type that no one knows what they’re going to do, such as North Korea…he might simply be envisioning something like a sunshine strategy, as in the story of the north wind and the sun, but it might not be possible to have North Korea remove its cape with the sunshine idea alone. It might be necessary to combine a strategy of both, with the north wind, but I…that’s why we must leave behind the type of diplomacy in which countries with different value systems don’t recognize each other…I suspect we’ve reached an extremely important phase. That’s what I think, and I think it is necessary for the government to delve more into Yuai diplomacy in the future.

Mr. Hatoyama and Prime Minister Aso Taro squared off in a debate of the party leaders in the Diet on 27th. Some were astonished when the former brought up the subject on his own:

Hatoyama Yukio’s question:

“I…just the other day, during the DPJ presidential election…(to hecklers) please be quiet…what I said…I said that I wanted to build a Yuai society. I’ve heard many people criticize this. But, this is an extremely…this in one sense is an old idea, but also a new idea, that’s what I think. What I think this country lacks today, is that the ties in society have been shredded, and all of us as individuals don’t have a place of our own. I think this is a very grave situation. I used the word love, but I want to build a society in which every person can discover their place with ties (to society), in which everyone feels that they are useful, and in which everyone feels happy. In a word, I want to create a world in which people can think that another person’s happiness is their happiness. That’s what I think, but at any rate, politics in Japan today is not like that at all. When people are envious of another person’s happiness, when they are happy to see someone unhappy, this sort of a world, in the end, ruins politics, and doesn’t it also ruin society? Why has such a state arisen? I want to ask the prime minister what he thinks.”

Aso Taro’s answer:

“Well…the spirit of Yuai, that was a word used when Hatoyama Ichiro was prime minister in 1955. I was about in the third year of junior high school, and that’s a word I remember, so, that word is used with great esteem…and I have absolutely no objection to feelings of affection (joai) for other people.”

Are Hatoyama and Yuai the answer?

Abe Shinzo’s grandfather was Kishi Nobusuke, Aso Taro’s grandfather was Yoshida Shigeru, and Hatoyama Yukio’s grandfather was Hatoyama Ichiro. Five of those six men have served as prime ministers of Japan, and the sixth might reach that position before the year is out. If he does, both the older trio and the younger trio will have held that office within fewer than three years of one another. The more things change…

The Yuai concept includes an admirable set of personal ideals that, like all such philosophies, are unachievable in this world. (It also includes a dangerous elitism.) But reality, as the former Marxist Thomas Sowell is fond of noting, is not optional. If these ideals were achievable, we wouldn’t need the political process to begin with. Such a world cannot be created from the top down or the outside in. If it is capable of achievement, it requires a conscious effort by each individual on a personal level from the inside out, and most people have neither the time nor the inclination to bother.

Doubtless Hatoyama Yukio is motivated by sincerity and good intentions, and one cannot help but respect what seems to be his lifelong commitment. But none of us can say for certain why he really got into politics in the first place: a sense of ambition as ruthless as that of the next hack, a sense of idealistic public service, or to enter the family business. It’s also regrettable that he has chosen to ally himself and his party with some unpleasant people. And it’s not out of the question that those same people are using him as a vehicle while viewing him as a sap behind his back for what they consider to be his loopy ideas.

But Mr. Hatoyama is an adult responsible for his own actions, and we all understand that people do not pursue and maintain a career in politics unless they are willing to barter their soul, either piecemeal or in a single lot.

In fact, maybe it’s time for the new DPJ president to do some rereading. He could start with this sentence from the Yuai Youth Association website:

Unless the ideal will widely spread over the years to come, politicians will not stop doing such foolish acts as breaking commitments or making election pledges to do what they really are not going to do at all.

Breaking commitments? This is the man who was going to resign from his senior party position together with Ozawa Ichiro, but then chose to run for party president instead.

As for election pledges, Mr. Hatoyama should take another look at his party’s election platform and eliminate the ones that “he’s not going to do at all.” He could then consider the blatant contradition of promises to cut the bureaucracy and promote regionalism, while at the same time proposing massive spending increases that will only enlarge and enhance both the bureaucracy and the central government. Then he could explain how the DPJ’s alliance with the People’s New Party and promise to halt postal privatization will downsize the bureaucracy.

Afterwords

Enough of this strawberry alarm clock incense and peppermints crap. Let’s get funky!

Now you know why Nakasone Yasuhiro referred to Hatoyama Yukio as being like melted ice cream, and why other people call him the man from outer space.

Ozawa Ichiro has finally arranged/blundered into the situation that suits him best, and now he has another semi-aristocratic squish to act as his front man while he wields a tire iron in the alley. Isn’t that a tasty dish to set before the people?

The Shukan Bunshun reports that Mr. Hatoyama was feeling a bit giddy during an impromptu press conference outside his office after winning the DPJ presidency. He started talking about himself without any prompting, and said, “The Hatoyama color (i.e., his defining traits and beliefs) is the power of love!” Then he began speculating about his real hue on the spectrum. He thought that gold was probably an exaggeration and over the top at this point, so he settled on deep crimson.

Prime Minister Aso said that this week’s debate would determine which of the two men would be more suitable as prime minister.

Reading the words of both men, one seems like a teenaged girl, while the other seems like her indulgent uncle.

It’s not hard to figure out which one is which.

P.S: Some people think the Guerlain perfume Mitsuko (originally Mitsouko) is named after Aoyama Mitsuko. It was created in 1919 and has been continuously available since then.

Mr. Koizumi speaks up at last

Kanson minpi
- A Japanese term for putting the government and its officials above the people

WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of the Trobriand Islanders, who thought pregnancy occurred because the ancestral spirit Baloma animated a spirit-child to enter a woman’s belly, the most ignorant people on the planet have got to be the Japanese political class, regardless of their party membership.

Consider: When Koizumi Jun’ichiro, the icebreaker of Japanese politics, left office in 2006 after five years of reform, deregulation, and drama, he bequeathed public approval ratings of 70% to his successor, Abe Shinzo. In the subsequent 30 months, the Three Stooges who followed him as prime minister have managed to drive their own approval ratings down to the teens. Political failure on that scale is no accident—politicians have to actually work at it to be that unpopular.

Messrs. Abe, Fukuda, and Aso all applied the same losing strategy in their own unique ways by rolling back the wildly popular Koizumian reforms. First, Mr. Abe allowed the return of the postal privatization rebels thrown out of the Liberal Democratic Party by his predecessor. Mr. Fukuda followed by allowing the return of the wolves of the Finance Ministry bureaucracy into the political henhouse. And now, Prime Minister Aso is dragging his feet on bureaucratic reform and dropping strong hints about “reexamining” (i.e., killing) the privatization of Japan Post because he never liked it to begin with.

Every one of these examples is a demonstration of kanson minpi in action.

Aso Taro shoved in the direction of progress

Take for example the recent controversy over the practice of watari, an informal job placement program run by government ministries and agencies in which they find employment for retired bureaucrats in enterprises or groups involved in sectors they once supervised.

Where's Baloma when you need him?

Even the Japanese political equivalent of a Tobriand Islander should realize that the Japanese public detests the extreme bureaucratic intrusion into government affairs that makes it tantamount to a shadow government, as well as the privileges those bureaucrats enjoy. The solution should be simple—ban the practice of watari, win the acclaim of the Japanese public, and use that as a springboard for winning elections.

But no, Prime Minister Aso and the rest of the crew members of the LDP’s Mudboat-maru can’t summon the political courage to make the denizens of Kasumigaseki behave as the public servants they’re supposed to be. The prime minister at first did not want to revise current government ordinances to ban the practice. He had to be bludgeoned into it by the LDP’s reform wing and the party’s coalition partners in New Komeito. Another element in the calculations must surely have been that failure to take action would be used as a weapon by the opposition in the next election.

The government eventually established a “personnel exchange promotion center” to consolidate the bureaucracy’s job placement efforts and restrict job placements to one per employee. But this is indefensible—why should the taxpayers foot the bill for an employment agency for personnel leaving government service, must less the upper levels of the bureaucracy? Shouldn’t those who presume to be a national elite and the real power of government use their own initiative to land on their feet in cushy new jobs like the fat cats they are?

Mr. Aso at last began singing a different tune. He said he wanted to create an ordinance to ban watari by the end of the year, replacing the current ordinance that allows it to continue until 2011. The new ordinance would take effect in 2010, thereby moving up the schedule by a year.

Instead of all this rigamarole, the answer is to prohibit all bureaucrats from working at any group, organization, or entity subject to the supervision of the ministry or agency where they were formerly employed.

That would at least partially limit the influence of bureaucrats on government operations and be met with hosannas by the Japanese public. In fact, the only people who wouldn’t care for it would be the bureaucrats themselves. But why shouldn’t they hit the pavement with their resume and use the same resources as everyone else to find employment?

Koizumi: E-nuff!

Prime Minister Koizumi once vowed to produce reform, foster deregulation, and break up his own political party. After seeing his handiwork turned into shambles by his successors, it would be natural if he felt as if he had hacked a trail through the jungle only to have the vines and underbrush grow back over the trail mere months after he passed through.

Are these noodniks the best you could do?

Mr. Koizumi has been strangely quiet since stepping down in the fall of 2006, showing little or no public sign of concern about the course of his reforms since then. There were some brief flurries in the news when his former aide, Iijima Isao, floated a trial balloon last spring about a possible comeback to form a multiparty reform government. Later that year, he also formed a multiparty study group with sympathetic members of his own party and former opposition leader Maehara Seiji. But considering how brusquely his reforms were neutered, and how openly politicians in both the ruling and opposition camps were talking about throwing more monkey wrenches into the path of postal privatization, his weak response seemed to suggest that he didn’t care anymore.

That ended abruptly two weeks ago.

The trigger was the following comments by Mr. Aso on postal privatization:

“I couldn’t support it.” (At the time of the Diet vote on the bill)

And:

“During the election, most of the voters didn’t realize it would be broken up into four companies.”

At a meeting at party headquarters of a group committed to maintaining the process of privatization, Mr. Koizumi was downright scathing about Prime Minister Aso and his behavior:

“Rather than being angry, I have to laugh. I’m just dumbstruck. We won’t be able to contest the election if we can’t trust what the prime minister says.”

He also didn’t have anything good to say about the individual stimulus proposal the budget, which was originally the idea of the party’s New Komeito coalition partners, and Mr. Aso’s handling of the surprisingly unpopular issue:

“The PM has called it sordid, said he personally wouldn’t accept the money, and then claimed ‘I didn’t say that’.”

Ah, well, politicians do like to be on all sides of an issue, don’t they?

More chilling for the LDP elders was his threat to vote against the bill when it comes back to the lower house after the inevitable rejection by the opposition-controlled upper house. A straight party line vote of the ruling coalition would enable this measure to pass through a two-thirds supermajority.

“I don’t think this bill requires a two-thirds override for it to pass.”

But then why did he vote for it the first time?

He has a low opinion of the leadership skills of Mr. Aso as well as the LDP honchos:

“When the younger (party members) express critical opinions of the prime minister, the party leadership says, ‘Don’t fire your rifles from behind’. But considering recent conditions, the prime minister is firing from the front at the people who have to stand for election.”

One of Mr. Koizumi’s favorite games is to use his image of eccentricity as a trump card, so he also trotted out this blast from the past:

“They’re calling me a man on whom common sense has no impact, or a weirdo, but I think I’m a normal man who is full of common sense.”

While the former prime minister enjoys playing this part, it is worthwhile to remember that he enjoyed occasional popularity ratings of more than 80% (and 70% when he left office), he engineered an election victory that delivered the second-largest lower house LDP majority ever, and he served the third-longest term as prime minister in postwar history.

The impact

It is not possible to overestimate the significance of this criticism. First, it gave a much-needed second wind to the LDP reformers. Said upper house member Yamamoto Ichita, a long-time Koizumi supporter (Machimura faction):

“It’s been a while since we’ve seen Prime Minister Koizumi so angry. This speech will be a detonator and breathe life into the party’s reform faction again.”

The speech also generated a barrage of speculation that the party will force Mr. Aso from office before the election that must be held this year. Regardless of what happens, he is essentially a dead man walking.

The prime minister can’t even hand out promotional material without a blowback. The weekly e-mail magazine distributed by the prime minister’s office has seen readership drop by half from its peak during the Koizumi administration (the falloff was not that pronounced during the Abe and Fukuda administrations), coupled with a sharp increase in critical comments from the recipients. Such as:

“If you’re going to ignore the results of the previous lower house election, then you should dissolve the Diet.”

And:

“I didn’t think you would go that far to treat the people like fools.”

Also significant is the venue at which Mr. Koizumi delivered his criticism. The audience for his remarks consisted of his heirs in the party, committed to privatization, deregulation, devolution of central government authority, keeping the bureaucracy on a leash, and commonsense economic policies.

Those in attendance included Nakagawa Hidenao, who is clearly working to organize a potent political force capable of surviving the upcoming election debacle and either outlive the rump elements of a depleted LDP, or take the party over entirely. While still acting as if he is willing to work within the party, he was recently removed from a position of responsibility in the Machimura faction, the party’s largest, for his criticism of Prime Minister Aso.

Said Mr. Nakagawa at the meeting:

“A reexamination of the plan to break up (Japan Post) into four companies is tantamount to reexamining the complete privatization that Prime Minister Koizumi achieved. We must call on all party members to take steps to maintain the (decision) for privatization.”

It is also worth noting that 18 people were present at the meeting. That’s two more than are needed to deprive the LDP of its supermajority in a Diet election and prevent the legislation from being enacted. Did Mr. Koizumi bring up a possible vote against the stimulus measure merely as leverage to maintain the course of privatization, or would he rally MPs to vote against it and therefore reject it entirely. A Koizumi-led lower house defeat for the bill would make it very difficult to postpone a general election that the LDP would surely lose.

Finally, we should also note that unidentified members of the opposition found Mr. Koizumi’s comments risible. One of them suggested the former prime minister was behind the times.

There you have a good indication why the opposition is still the opposition and not the ruling party. It’s been fewer than three years since Mr. Koizumi stepped down, and his ideas are still viable. (Indeed, they are permanently viable, the current financial crisis notwithstanding.) And it’s not as if anyone in the opposition party has a record that comes close to matching his achievements. It’s possible the opposition’s observation gave the former prime minister a second reason to laugh.

Koizumi Jun’ichiro once claimed that he wanted to destroy the LDP. While he certainly remodeled it during his tenure, he didn’t destroy it. But his recent speech might be the blow that eventually accomplishes his original aim. Perhaps the only question remaining is whether the reform wing forms a new party of its own, leaving the mudboat wing to disintegrate and sink, or whether they take control of the party for themselves.

Afterwords: Also attending the meeting was former Defense Minister Koike Yuriko, whom Mr. Koizumi supported for prime minister in the party election that chose Aso Taro. Ms. Koike is a staunch supporter of the policies of both Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Nakagawa. She does not have much support within the LDP, however, as she is seen as something of an opportunist.

The mass media tend to dismiss her, but she is worth paying attention to for at least one reason. Ms. Koike was a member of the now-defunct Liberal Party, headed by current opposition leader Ozawa Ichiro of the Democratic Party of Japan. She became a strong Ozawa supporter after reading his book Blueprint for a New Japan, which called for smaller government and the encouragement of greater individual initiative.

When Mr. Ozawa merged his party with the opposition DPJ, she chose to join the LDP instead, at least partly because the reformers in that party were more kindred spirits. She has publicly taken Mr. Ozawa to task several times for abandoning nearly all of the principles he laid out in his book.

And that is a critically important matter. It would behoove the media to focus on Mr. Ozawa’s core political beliefs—assuming he has any–or whether his political activity is just a semi-permanent political pastime of schmoozing with da bhoys to create coalitions the way some boys trade baseball cards.

What policies would he pursue if he in fact became prime minister?

Anyone else who thinks they know is fooling himself. And those folks who think he is the best bet to achieve the reforms Japan needs might want to consider that with Mr. Ozawa, what you see is not always what you get. They just might find that what Japan would get under an Ozawa Administration would be an unpleasant surprise.

It’s not as if it can’t happen here. Ask the left-wing bloggers in the U.S. what they think of the new President’s wholesale adoption of George Bush’s terror war policies.

The platypus and Japanese politics

THE DONKEY is the symbol of the Democratic Party in the United States, while their GOP rivals are caricatured as an elephant. What animal would best illustrate Japanese politics, the membership of the country’s two major political parties, and their respective factions? Some might suggest the Australian platypus.

Political character goods

The platypus is so odd that some European naturalists in the 19th century thought reports of the creature were a deliberate fraud when they first heard them. One of the few mammals that lays eggs, it has thick fur, a bill like a duck, webbed feet like an otter with nails for digging, and a tail like a beaver. Males have hollow spurs on their ankles that carry enough venom to kill a dog. Females have two ovaries, but only the left one is functional. It finds food by sticking its bill in the dirt and using spots on the bill that detect minute electrical discharges from its prey.

That agglomeration of anomalies is the perfect description of politics in Japan. Members of the same party or faction often have ideologies as different as a turtle and the moon. They can be at such variance it’s difficult to see how they can function as a coherent group.

Nevertheless, the system created by the Liberal Democratic Party not only functioned, it served as the structure for rebuilding Japan from postwar ruins to the world’s second largest economy. More than a half-century later, however, the evolution of the national polity has exposed the rusted girders, frayed wiring, and sagging foundation of the old system. The Democratic Party of Japan has finally given the country a credible opposition, though they are every bit the platypus as the LDP. Nevertheless, the combination of their growing electoral strength and tactics designed solely to generate political crises has created a stalemate that forcing everyone to confront the reality of a major political restructuring. For Japan to continue functioning at a level that everyone now takes for granted, nothing less will do.

When this restructuring is complete, the new entities will resemble animals that are more commonly found in political zoos. Until then, however, we can expect the cloning process to create many morbid failures.

Iijima Isao, once the top advisor to former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro, declared earlier this year that political realignment had already started. But money is the ultimate guarantor of political viability, and Japan’s three foremost political parties are efficient fund raising mechanisms. (The subsidies of public funds given for votes received also help.) Turning one’s back on that cornucopia of cash, going out on a limb, and forming a new party requires more courage that most politicians would like to muster.

By now it is obvious that the Aso Taro administration is going nowhere, mainly because his Cabinet is a front for preventing further governmental reform of the type sought by an estimated 70% of the LDP Diet members, some in the DPJ, and most of the Japanese public. There is also the suspicion that the Aso administration wants to roll back the hard-earned achievements that have been gained so far. Making matters worse for the LDP is that unless the mudboat wing wants to bite the bullet and return to the Koizumi days, there’s not much left in the leadership locker room after Mr. Aso.

Now that the stars have finally aligned, fate is kicking the political class in the pants to reject their inner platypus and launch a political realignment that will be painful, bloody, and last the better part of a decade. Here’s a summary of recent events and the people driving them.

Nakagawa Hidenao

“I want to examine the popular support for the LDP and DPJ reformers to emerge and form a coalition.”

The 68-year-old Mr. Nakagawa is both the most prominent champion of Koizumi-style political and governmental reform and the strongest pro-growth, anti-tax voice left in the LDP. A former chief cabinet secretary and party bigwig, he has written books describing the pernicious influence of Kasumigaseki, the government-within-a-government run by Japan’s bureaucracy. He is also a member of the Machimura faction, the party’s largest and a particularly ungainly platypus.

In a television interview on the 7th, Mr. Nakagawa addressed the coming political realignment and suggested an alliance with some opposition politicians:

“This is not on the minor level of asking who’s going to leave the party, or whether I will be leaving the party. Public opinion wants a reform element to emerge from both the ruling coalition and the opposition to overturn the entire political world.”

He added that he wasn’t yet at the stage of bolting the LDP, and said he would decide his course of action on realignment “in the instant after the lower house election.”

L-R: Abe, Nakagawa H., Koizumi, Ishihara; platypus not pictured

Mr. Nakagawa is perhaps the most important member of a new group launched by Mr. Koizumi to keep his privatization of the postal system alive. As he nears retirement, the former prime minister is concerned that anti-privatization members have received high-profile roles in the Aso Cabinet. He also knows that Mr. Aso was anti-privatization (and anti-bureaucratic reform) to begin with. For all the campaign shouting it does in favor of reform, the opposition DPJ has become a center of anti-privatization activity among the opposition groups. It is not out of the question that postal privatization—supported by 70% of the electorate in 2005—may be derailed.

Who handles the dwindling amount of physical mail that people send these days is not important. Rather, privatization keeps the government’s hands off the money in the postal savings accounts. That prevents it from being used to finance pork barrel public works projects to buy off the construction industry and rural voters at the same time. It is the cornerstone of governmental reform itself, and a highly visible symbol.

The former prime minister, whom some polls still show as the man Japanese view as the person they’d most want to run the government, was applauded by 60 MPs when he said:

“I want to remind people of what sort of election was held three years ago. It seems that many of the people who are doing these incomprehensible things (i.e., anti-reform) were originally opposed to privatization. But they were allowed back into the party after writing a pledge and admitting their mistakes.”

Mr. Nakagawa added a warning against gutting the Koizumi reforms:

“There is meaning in sending a message to the people that we will not reverse course.”

Yet sitting at the head table with Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Nakagawa was this platypus tribe:

• The 56-year-old former Environment and Defense Minister Koike Yuriko (Machimura faction), who was once an ally of opposition DPJ leader Ozawa Ichiro in a party that governed in a coalition with the LDP. A hawkish supporter of Yasukuni visits, Ms. Koike recently ran against Aso Taro for the party presidency as a reform wing candidate and received fewer than 50 votes. (Some question her party loyalty.) Mr. Koizumi was something a realpolitik feminist, and one of his favorite tactics was to put women in prominent positions, either in the Cabinet or in Diet seats. Some think Ms. Koike is being groomed as a potential prime minister of the type that minds the store while Mr. Nakagawa and others handle back-office operations.
• Ishihara Nobuteru, the son of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, Abe Shinzo ally, and Mr. Koizumi’s former reform minister.
• Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, who was responsible for allowing the anti-privatization rebels back into the LDP in the first place. Indeed, one of them, Yamaguchi Shun’ichi (Aso faction), was just tapped by Prime Minister Aso to serve as an aide. Mr. Yamaguchi is involved in another group launched in October to stop the privatization process.

Though he too pursued governmental reform during his administration, Mr. Abe did so because he is first of all a party man. He said at the meeting that he supported privatization because it was a policy that had already been approved by the party and the Diet.

In the audience were many of the so-called Koizumi Children, younger MPs who won their seats on the former Prime Minister’s coattails in the 2005 election. This group has been talking openly since the spring about breaking away and forming a new, urban-based party headed by Mr. Nakagawa or someone like him. There is some irony in their self-description as urban based. In the old days, big city folks tended to vote for the opposition, while the LDP derived much of its strength from rural strongholds.

Also present at the meeting was upper house member Yamamoto Ichita (Machimura faction), generally a Nakagawa ally on domestic issues. Said Mr. Yamamoto of the need to continue privatization:

“The debate in the party now seems to be that since we face a crisis, it’s acceptable to return to the old pork barrel ways.”

The latter complaint is often heard now within the LDP about Prime Minister Aso. Here’s still more irony: It is also the complaint most frequently heard about the DPJ’s electoral platform.

The Nakagawa group

Mr. Nakagawa launched his own 87-member study group on the 11th to examine social welfare issues. The members plan to look for ways to resolve the problem of the botched national pension records that became the final nail in the Abe administration’s coffin. They also want to refine the concept of what is called the Social Welfare Card, an Abe Cabinet proposal that involves combining the social welfare and tax systems into personal accounts. Since the DPJ has suggested a similar idea, they want to explore areas of agreement across party lines.

In addition to Mr. Nakagawa, the members include:

• Koike Yuriko
• Abe Shinzo
• Watanabe Yoshimi (no faction), a crusader and firebrand profiled here a few days ago. Of all the LDP reformers, he has taken the most outspoken anti-Aso, anti-mudboat wing stance in public.
• Suga Yoshihide (Koga faction), who is close to Prime Minister Aso and a former member of the Abe Cabinet. Mr. Suga is another party-first man, and is known for having refused to join the revolt against Prime Minister Mori in 2000.

This group was widely seen as an anti-Aso vehicle for the mid-tier and younger LDP members starting to distance themselves from the prime minister. Mr. Nakagawa insisted otherwise, and asked people not to get excited because it was “an extremely pure study group”.

He added:

“The Aso Cabinet should boldly present its own policies without worrying about the polls. Now is not the time to bring down the Cabinet. No one is farther apart from Prime Minister Aso than I am, so if I say it, it has to be the truth.

Mr. Watanabe chimed in:

“There is such a feeling of obstruction that people even think this serious study group was formed to create a sense of political crisis.”

Not everyone buys that line, however. Some think the group was actually organized to explore post-realignment politics in addition to social welfare questions, but was co-opted by the mudboat wing of the Machimura faction to create yet another platypus.

Here’s why: Mr. Nakagawa called former Prime Minister Abe personally to ask him to join, and Mr. Abe, who resigned from the faction when he became prime minister, agreed. Mr. Machimura later objected to the formation of the group, but Mr. Abe and former Prime Minister Mori, the former faction head, convinced him to let Mr. Abe participate to prevent a factional split.

Their strategy was to use Mr. Abe to neutralize Mr. Nakagawa and dilute the impact of the group’s formation. Indeed, Mr. Mori is said to have angrily telephoned some of the younger faction members thinking about signing up to say:

“Don’t do anything stupid when Mr. Aso is in such serious trouble. Do you seriously intend to install Nakagawa as party president?”

The subtle subversion disappointed many people who wanted to see a Nakagawa challenge. The disappointment grew when former Prime Minister Abe publicly said the group wanted to get together and support Mr. Aso.

Privately, nobody believes that for a second. Nor does anyone believe it is an anti-Aso step so much as the start of several post-Aso steps. Everyone has factored Mr. Aso’s eventual departure into their thinking.

Watanabe Yoshimi

Mr. Watanabe is raising the voltage as Prime Minister Aso’s popularity is falling. He has openly criticized the prime minister, made references to creating a new party, and shifted from merely being anti-Aso to encouraging political realignment.

Here’s a taste of Mr. Watanabe going off on Prime Minister Aso in public:

“He won’t hold an election. He puts off economic measures. Just what the heck’s going on here?”

The critical question is how long it takes for people to move in his direction, or whether they decide to stay put for the time being.

At a party on the 8th attended by 800 supporters, Mr. Watanabe started talking about “mental calisthenics”, which he used as an excuse to segue into speculation about a new party.

He ended his intellectual workout by saying:

“Starting from scratch will have an impact and has the potential for great transformation. (Creating a new party) is possible to do with resolve alone.”

He started ramping up the voltage on 21 November when he and 24 younger Diet members called on Prime Minister Abe to quickly introduce a second supplementary budget and hold elections. Even that group bore a slight resemblance to a platypus—one of its members was Shiozaki Yasuhisa (Koga faction), the chief cabinet secretary during the Abe administration. It was the Shiozaki appointment, his first to an important position, that led critics to use the term “Friends Cabinet”. Somewhat less of a foreign policy hardliner than his former boss, his spat with Koike Yuriko over the appointment of a deputy in the Defense Ministry led to her resignation from the Cabinet after fewer than two months.

Watanabe Yoshimi and his mental calisthenics

Mr. Shiozaki cautioned reporters that the group, which is expected to grow to 40, was not formed as an anti-Aso faction or the predecessor of a new party. But nobody believed that, either. One of the doubters was Koga Makoto, his faction boss and current head of the party’s Election Strategy Council. He made a point of warning his charges, including Mr. Shiozaki, to hold their tongues where Aso Taro was concerned.

Other party elders are getting as snippy as a flock of old maids chaperoning a college mixer. Earlier this month, Mr. Machimura noted:

“Attacking another person’s weakness and preventing them from advancing is not the action of a responsible adult. I hope he (Watanabe) keeps running further away.”

But Mr. Watanabe did not back down. He repeated his call for a new election, and retorted:

“If that voice becomes a chorus, it’s possible (I’ll leave). I’ll prepare myself for any activity to bring down the Cabinet.”

There’s another curious aspect to this situation. When Ozawa Ichiro was fishing for someone to replace Hosokawa Morihiro in 1994 as the head the only non-LDP government of the past half-century, he nearly coaxed Watanabe’s father Michio, a former foreign minister and LDP faction leader, to leave the party and serve as prime minister. (He settled on Hata Tsutomu instead.)

It’s also worth noting that while Mr. Watanabe’s name has not been linked to the DPJ, the party has declined to officially sponsor a candidate for his lower house seat–one of only five seats nationwide that it’s conceding.

YKKK

Another most unusual platypus is not to be found among the reformers, bogus or otherwise, but in a bunk full of strange bedfellows whom the press immediately dubbed YKKK.

Mr. Y

During the 1990s, Yamasaki Hiraku, Kato Koichi, and Koizumi Jun’ichiro worked together as a band of LDP reformers the press called YKK for the initials of their family names. Mr. Kato, assisted by Mr. Yamasaki, led a failed insurrection against Mori Yoshiro in 2000 that ultimately cleared the way for the third musketeer Mr. Koizumi to become prime minister about six months later.

This time, the YKKK platypus is:

• Yamasaki Hiraku (AKA Taku), a faction leader
• Kato Koichi, no faction
• Kan Naoto, acting president of the opposition DPJ
• Kamei Shizuka, representative of the People’s New Party, a splinter group formed of politicians thrown out of the LDP by Prime Minister Koizumi for opposing postal privatization and who chose not to return when invited to do so by Prime Minister Abe.

YKKK appeared together on a recent TV program in the political equivalent of a jam session to discuss political realignment. Mr. Yamasaki riffed:

“Let’s face it–political realignment will happen in the future. An axis is necessary to promote political realignment. At that time, the four (of us) could form one such axis….The gridlock phenomenon must be eliminated. It is clear that a political realignment will occur regardless of what conditions prevailed before or after the election.”

Kato Koichi:

“The LDP has borne an historical mission, and now confusion is deepening among both the LDP and the DPJ, which have neither a mission nor an ideology.”

The other two members of the team are trying to coax Y and K1 to bolt and form a supergroup.

Kamei Shizuka:

“After the next lower house election when an Ozawa Ichiro government (DPJ) is formed, it will be meaningless to say, ‘Me too’.”

Mr. Kato downplayed his suggestion that he leave the party by saying that’s not in the cards for now.

Kan Naoto:

“(What happens) next will not be a mere breakup and reassembly. It will be a major transformation of the system…I would like those people who have courage to leave the LDP, just as Mr. Ozawa fled from right in the middle of the party.”

It’s difficult to see just what’s going on here. Mr. Kato and DPJ head Ozawa Ichiro have not been on good terms for some time. Mr. Kato values party loyalty, and he was highly critical of Mr. Ozawa when he left the LDP. In fact, he fought against his readmission to the party when that was discussed in the late 90s.

It’s also difficult to imagine that he and his longtime ally would join the DPJ. One possible area of agreement might be a shift in foreign policy away from an American orientation toward closer relations with East Asian countries. Mr. Kato in particular is strongly opposed to the hard line against North Korea. But foreign policy questions have little or nothing to do with the crisis in Japanese politics.

Still, Mori Yoshiro didn’t care for this development at all. In Yamagata City earlier this week, he said:

“(YK) joining forces with Mr. Kan and, depending on the circumstances, forming a new party…Mr. Nakagawa joining forces with the DPJ and, depending on the circumstances, opening up a third axis…They say it’s for the benefit of the LDP. But if they start taking off in different directions, it will cause instability among the younger party members. That’s shameful…Japanese politics seems to have nothing but these lightweight, shallow-minded politicians. I apologize to all of you who have worked so hard to create politics (in this country)”.

Perhaps Mr. Mori needn’t have worried abut YK forming a new party, though that seems to have been Mr. Kato’s intention. This week’s edition of the Shukan Bunshun quotes an unidentified member of the Yamasaki faction saying that Mr. Kato had dreams of leading a second rebellion:

“Mr. Kato has been trying to form a new party with an eye on the political realignment after the next lower house election. He thinks it’s possible the head of a small party could serve as prime minister, depending on the election results, just as Hosokawa Morihiro became prime minister in the non-LDP coalition in 1993.”

According to this source, Mr. Kato, now unaffiliated with a faction, called on his former faction members for help, and asked Mr. Yamasaki to “lend” him a few members temporarily. He also suggested that Mr. Yamasaki could join later.

Mr. Y put the kibosh on Mr. K pretty quickly:

“Even if I were to say that I was forming a new party, no one would join. It’s entirely out of the question for me to lend my faction members to anyone.”

But a “new axis” in an informal alliance with opposition party members? That seems possible.

A ruling coalition breakup?

No talk of platypuses is complete without mentioning the ruling coalition of the LDP and New Komeito, an alliance that never has made much sense from an ideological perspective. The latter party is more interested in domestic social welfare policies, and they do not care for the LDP’s more assertive military stance in international affairs. For example, they’ve had to be cajoled into supporting the Indian Ocean refueling mission for NATO forces that the LDP used its supermajority to pass.

Rumors are circulating that both the LDP and the DPJ want to end New Komeito’s influence for good. One story had the two parties continuing discussions about another grand coalition, despite the failure of the first effort, and eliminating the proportional representation districts in the lower house. That would effectively neuter New Komeito as a political force, because the allocation of seats based on the percentage of votes is the reason most of their lower house members are in the Diet at all.

Earlier this week, Koga Makoto (photo below) casually dropped a bomb when discussing the dates of a possible lower house election at a party gathering in Tokyo:

“I’ve said it will be when the cherries bloom. But they bloom in Okinawa in February, and Aomori in May. In fact, there is such a tree as the “October Cherry”. Taking all that into consideration, the current Diet term could end when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.”

This was an astonishing statement on several levels. First, it potentially pushes back an election until the end of the full Diet term next September—nearly a year after Aso Taro was elevated to party president on the assumption that he would have already led the LDP election campaign by now.

Of course the LDP wants to delay the election to prevent a catastrophe at the polls, but that’s not the surprise. Rather, their coalition partner New Komeito has been demanding an election as early as possible to enable them to play what many think is their favorite voting game. Japanese election laws require three months to establish official residency, so the party needs that interval between the national election and local Tokyo elections in July to switch the registered residences of their supporters.

Could this mean the LDP is thinking of writing off their partners?

It might. At the same party, Mr. Koga also hinted that the LDP might reevaluate—a Japanese euphemism for stop—automatically allocating some proportional representation candidacies to New Komeito and keep them for themselves. The Aso ally Mr. Suga is also said to have suggested this to the Prime Minister, who surely must be tempted.

Yet that would alarm those LDP members who won their seats by narrow margins. The voter mobilization efforts of New Komeito and their assumed allies, the lay Buddhist group Soka Gakkai, provides an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 vote advantage in some districts. Those LDP members who squeaked by in the last election could be bounced from office without the New Komeito foot soldiers, as the party ruefully discovered in a recent Yamaguchi by-election.

Still another sign of a possible ruling coalition rupture is that Prime Minister Aso insisted that the party include an increase in the consumption tax in three years in its plan to reform the tax code. He claims this is the only responsible and realistic choice Japan faces to pay for the care of its aging population.

New Komeito is opposed for obvious reasons. It’s not easy to win elections when a tax increase for voters is a key campaign promise. And tax increases are the last thing the small(er) government Nakagawa Hidenao/Koizumi reform wing wants to hear about. Put that all together and it starts to look as if the LDP platypus is an endangered species.

Economist J.A. Schumpeter referred to progress in the free market system as “creative destruction”. By that, he meant that the replacement of obsolete businesses by those with technological and organizational creativity was a natural and beneficial process.

That’s an excellent analogy for the next step that must occur in Japanese politics. But in this case, however, creative destruction must be combined with another natural process—Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

For that next step to occur, the political platypuses must turn pterodactyl.

Korean interpreter saves the day

THE MEDIA OFTEN PUBLISHES STORIES about blunders committed by translators or interpreters that cause international embarrassment.

But this post in DPRK Studies, titled What Roh Actually Said to Bush in Sydney, describes how a quick-witted Korean translator may have prevented international embarrassment by soft-pedaling some statements made in front of television cameras by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to American President George Bush.

Mr. Roh is dismissed by some Japanese observers as an “NGO president”, which I think is the perfect description.

One also could add “third-rate demagogue”. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts at rapprochement with both China and South Korea after the deterioration of relations during his predecessor’s term paid off with China; relations between the two governments are gradually growing stronger. One result was that in April, Premier Wen Jiabao became the first Chinese premier to address the Japanese Diet. During his speech, he gave credit to the Japanese for apologizing for their wartime behavior, and thanked Japan for their financial assistance and support for Chinese modernization efforts.

In contrast, when President Roh met Prime Minister Abe, all he wanted to talk about was comfort women. Mr. Abe rightly concluded the man wasn’t worth taking seriously

While the Chinese may not be high-minded, they are pragmatic. Whereas neither can be said of President Roh.

Wall Street Journal’s error typifies Western media approach to Japan

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in Tokyo before his trip to the U.S. next week. The interview by Mary Kissel is available only to subscribers, but I thought I’d check anyway. There is a preview, however.

Here’s what I found:

He (Koizumi) was a refreshing change after a string of faceless prime ministers that trip off the tongue like ticker tape: Hata, Murayama, Hashimoto, Obushi, Mori.

Obushi?

She wouldn’t happen to mean Keizo Obuchi, would she?

How can names “trip off the tongue like ticker tape” when your foot’s jammed squarely in your mouth? (And I’d love to hear the reporter smoothly reel off the names of those prime ministers without stumbling over or mispronouncing them.)

We can only hope that one of these days the Western media decides to apply the same basic standards of competence to Japan that it claims to apply elsewhere.

Please, no excuses. People aren’t “faceless” to other people interested in basic human interaction. In terms of personal dynamism, that group would favorably compare with Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush any day. Ms. Kissel just never bothered paying attention to them.

And the least journalists can do is spell a prime minister’s name properly.

In 1963, Obuchi traveled around the world on his own, from January to September, taking odd jobs along the way. He decided he wanted to meet Robert Kennedy, so he just walked into the attorney-general’s office. Does that sound like a faceless man to you?

And it’s interesting that Murayama Tomiichiwas included in that group of non-faced people. People are upset because they think Japan hasn’t come to terms with its actions in the war, and that Abe is a comfort woman denier?

Mr. Murayama is the prime minister who publicly delivered Japan’s biggest and most comprehensive apology about the war.

Here’s an interesting article about Murayama’s apology that appeared in the International Herald Tribune at the time:

Japan’s apology to its World War II victims Tuesday was generally well received by Asian leaders, but many veterans dismissed it as inadequate and insincere.

And:

President Kim Young Sam of South Korea…said he hoped that Korea and Japan could put the past behind them. The South Korean Foreign Ministry, however, urged Japan to make “more positive efforts” to examine its history.

And:

In China…(t)he Foreign Ministry called Mr. Murayama’s statement “positive” but regretted that there are many in Japan who fail to take a “correct attitude” to the war period.

That was 12 years ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

It should be obvious by now that these complaints have nothing to do with Japan, now more so than in 1995. Murayama was speaking on the 50th anniversary of the war’s end. The governments in other countries are just looking for a political and diplomatic edge, and the rest either don’t want to let it go, or don’t realize the people they’re talking to didn’t have anything to do with the war and don’t really care about it.

I’m tempted to wish Mr. Abe luck with American journalists on his upcoming trip, but I don’t think he’ll need it. He’s had quite a lot experience in dealing with the media’s kneejerk bias, basic incompetence, and disparagement of Japan.

Besides, he’s not faceless either.

Update

Infimum provides a link in the first comment to the entire article. Here’s another line:

“I’m so sorry I kept you waiting,” he says, in staccato, carefully rehearsed American English…

I’m so sorry to have to put up with journalistic conceits. For starters, the Japanese language tends to be staccato compared to English, so it’s natural that a Japanese speaking English would sound that way. Unless the author’s intention is to play off a Mr. Moto stereotype.

Would she tell us about funky speech rhythms if she interviewed an African head of state?

And I doubt that Mr. Abe had to carefully rehearse that phrase. The man lived in the United States for a year while attending university, boarding with an older American woman. He’s had more experience living abroad than any American president of the past half-century. Bill Clinton attended Oxford, but he didn’t have to learn a foreign language to do it, and the culture differential is not nearly as great.

We should understand and draw conclusions from the fact that the real objective of journalism is not to present the facts as a neutral observer, but to present a fable a particular media outlet has created to portray a situation in the light that it chooses. Whether the facts happen to correspond to the situation is irrelevant. The setting for the fable was already created before Kissel walked into the office. The interview was merely to fill in a few lines of dialogue.

It’s just infotainment without the info.

The foreign press on Abe: Making it up as they go along

THE WORD FOR MASS MEDIA in Japanese is masu komi, short for mass communications, but the verbal graffiti artists have changed that to masu gomi, or mass trash–as in garbage.

That’s what came to mind when I read the following overseas newspaper articles about Abe Shinzo this weekend. Any passing relation to reality is purely coincidental and probably accidental. It starts right from the headline of this Reuters piece by Linda Sieg that ran in the Washington Post:

Japan PM tries damage control over WW2 sex slaves

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought on Sunday to contain fallout from his remarks about women forced to act as wartime sex slaves for Japanese soldiers as the furor threatened to cloud summits with Chinese and U.S. leaders.

You have to read three-quarters of the article to find out that Abe spoke on the subject of comfort women for all of one minute during a one hour interview on NHK-TV without saying anything he hasn’t already said.

Damage control! Fallout containment!

Sieg of course quotes the obligatory college professor, this time Nakano Koichi of Sophia University, about Abe’s summit with US President Bush at the end of April.

“The United States is a democracy … you have a free media,” (Nakano) said ahead of the Sunday interview. “It is quite possible, even probable, that Abe will be embarrassed, even if (U.S. President George W.) Bush doesn’t want that.””

I’d flip a coin–this is wishful thinking on Nakano’s part, or perhaps it’s a puppy-like eagerness to please a foreign interviewer. Had he read Abe’s book—here we go again—he would realize that Abe is probably looking forward to a confrontation with the American media and is unlikely to be embarrassed.

First, the prime minister has detested the left-leaning media all of his adult life. Second, his political hero was his grandfather, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, who had to deal with hordes of screaming demonstrators around his house at all hours of the day and night. Abe also describes Kishi nonchalantly drinking a glass of wine with another Cabinet member in his office while more than 300,000 demonstrators howled for his blood outside.

And Nakano thinks the American media will embarrass Abe?

Nakano continues:

“When Asian governments criticize Japan, no one cares…

In eight words, Nakano sums up the Japanese attitude toward the Chinese and South Koreans, casually disposing of their years of overheated editorials, demagoguery, demonstrations, flag burnings, finger cuttings, ravings, rantings, and shouting at the top of their cyber-lungs for countless hours on Internet message boards.

So sorry you wasted all that time…

“…but when it’s reported in the New York Times, they have to react,” Nakano said. “They care about the American elite being upset.”

If this were the pre-Koizumi days, I might agree, but I wouldn’t be counting those unhatched chickens just yet. I suspect today’s Japanese have come to understand that the New York Times is just another greasy lump of masu gomi, and that Nakano hasn’t caught on yet. Abe certainly isn’t taking a beating in the Japanese media; the worst criticism I’ve seen of him is that he should just let the whole thing blow over. The story just isn’t dominating the news in Japan, and it’s not because people here aren’t aware of it.

“Keeping a lower profile suggests Abe has found his pragmatism again,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Samuels. “No more fuel on the fire.”

You can’t lower your profile if you didn’t raise it, find your pragmatism if you didn’t lose it, or stop adding fuel to a fire you didn’t start and didn’t feed. But ironically this has given Abe the opening to do what he’s always wanted to do and ditch the Kono apology. He’s taken the opportunity offered him by his enemies, practically on a silver platter, and asked the ruling party (of which he is the president) to reexamine Imperial Army documents—knowing full well that at least one-third of all the LDP Diet members would rescind the apology today, before any investigation began.

I think it’s about time the media and the analysts realized the Richard Nixon paradigm is getting a little long in the tooth.

Back to Reuters:

Many conservatives felt betrayed when Abe appeared to soften his stance on history after taking office in September, a step seen as intended to thaw a chill in ties with Beijing.

I don’t think Sieg has even met a Japanese conservative. Abe has 20 years worth of Gibraltar-solid conservative credentials in both domestic and international issues. He’s published book that is a clear conservative manifesto. But this imaginary flipflopping is an attractive scenario for a left-leaning news agency and newspaper.

With his popularity ratings sagging after a series of missteps, analysts say Abe’s original remarks were intended to woo back his base ahead of July upper house elections.

Reuters needs new analysts. Let me count the reasons.

1. The ratings usually are not of Abe, but of his Cabinet.
2. Abe’s only “misstep” came right away, when he allowed party elders to talk him into allowing a handful of politicians thrown out of the party by his predecessor, Koizumi Junichiro, during the dispute over postal privatization to return—for help in the upper house elections. Abe didn’t want to dump them to begin with, but played follow the leader. He probably knew his polls would take a hit and he decided to take his medicine early and get it over with.
3. The Cabinet’s ratings fell because of mishaps related to other members of the Cabinet, not with anything Abe did.
4. His numbers fell from an unnaturally high 70%–which no politician anywhere maintains—to 35-40%. In Japan, that’s still good enough for his party to pick up seats in the July elections, particularly as the main opposition party’s ratings are even lower.

Also appearing over the weekend was this editorial masquerading as a news article in the Australian Age, rehashed by Justin Norrie from an English Asahi piece with a dollop of yellow journalism added. This one is about the effort to amend the Constitution.

Japan’s ruling party will force a national-referendum bill through parliament next week to overhaul the country’s pacifist constitution, in a landmark shift that would strain relations with its neighbours further.

There are 480 members in the lower house of the Diet. The LDP had 306 seats as of the end of 2006, and its coalition partner, the New Komeito, had 31. That adds up to 337.

Perhaps “force through” has a different meaning in Australia than it does everywhere else.

It’s a different story in the upper house—there the coalition has only 134 seats out of 242. But if Abe didn’t think he had the votes now, I don’t think he’d be introducing the legislation at all.

Now look at the English language article in the Asahi Shimbun:

The ruling coalition plans to pass a national referendum bill in the Lower House this month to revise the pacifist Constitution, even if it requires steamrolling the legislation through the Diet…

And then the Japanese language article in the Asahi Shimbun:

与党単独での提出もやむを得ないと判断した。

Or in English, “The ruling parties concluded they had no choice other than to introduce the legislation themselves (after negotiations with the primary opposition party fell through).

Forcing? Steamrolling? Or just using their majority after the opposition made too many demands.

You’ve heard about things being lost in translation? This article gained something in translation!

What the Asahi tells its readers that the Age doesn’t tell Australians:

• The ruling coalition was negotiating with the DPJ, the main opposition party, to ease the bill’s passage.
• As a compromise, the coalition agreed to the DPJ’s request to lower the country’s voting age from 20 to 18.
• Talks fell apart when the DPJ wanted to have other issues placed on the referendum besides Constitutional reform.

The DPJ didn’t want constitutional revision to become the focus of the Upper House election, but party leader Ozawa Ichiro changed his mind, and is willing to let the LDP make that an issue. He wants to make the “widening income gap” an issue instead.

With the addition of the Asahi information and the subtraction of Norrie’s embellishments, Abe comes off as a lot less rigid and inflexible. In fact, the guy trying to play hardball is Ozawa Ichiro, Japan’s most overrated politician. (This article–by another Australian writing for The Age–gives you a taste of Ozawa the politician. Keep in mind it’s more than 10 years old and much has changed in Japanese society.)

Indeed, lowering the voting age to 18 from 20 (and perhaps forcing a change in the drinking age along with it) will probably have a more significant effect on Japanese life than removing the peace clause from the Constitution. And that was the DPJ’s idea.

But back to The Age of Australia. Need I mention that a country’s constitution is the business only of that country, regardless of how the neighbors might want to interfere for their own ends?

Article 9 of the 60-year-old constitution, which forbids “the use of force” in international disputes, and prohibits Japan from keeping an army, navy or air force, has been the principal target of hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe since he took office in September.

Amending the Constitution, particularly Article 9, has been part of the LDP platform since the party was formed in the mid-50s. It’s only now that the party thinks the time is ripe.

Concerned by North Korea’s nuclear program and conscious of China’s strengthening military capabilities, Mr. Abe has said that Japan needs to “break away from the postwar regime” and pursue a more “assertive” foreign policy. “The security situation around Japan has changed drastically,” he warned.

And this is wrong how?

Mr. Abe has cast off all pretence of moderation ahead of upper-house elections in July, when the planned constitutional changes are expected to be a major issue.

Mr. Abe has never pretended to be moderate. Ever.

In his first six months in the job, Mr. Abe’s jingoistic agenda has alienated him from voters, who are more concerned about health care and pension entitlements, and the widening income gap, than the Prime Minister’s goal of creating “a beautiful country”.

If I were trying to write an objective account, I don’t think I’d use the word “jingoistic”, meaning “to favor an aggressive, threatening, warlike foreign policy.” Maybe that word has a different meaning in Australia, too. It doesn’t describe Abe, who is just trying to dump a pacifist Constitution imposed on Japan by some starry-eyed New Dealers and achieve the default position of every other country on the planet.

Abe’s never threatened war with another country. But “jingoistic” does fit several other leaders and countries in East Asia to a T. But the Age can’t bring itself to mention them.

Last year he introduced patriotism as a compulsory subject in schools. Teachers have been charged with “cultivating an attitude which respects tradition and culture and love of the nation and homeland”.

What the Age really should have reported is the type of education in Japanese schools the new approach is meant to replace.

About 20 years ago, I was an English teacher, and one of my classes was a group of junior high school students preparing to enter an English speech contest. They had to give five minute speeches in English.

One seventh-grade boy wrote a speech about America and the atomic bomb. He was a nice kid, calm and well-adjusted, so I was surprised when I read his speech text that harshly denounced the US for possessing nuclear weapons, cowboying other countries with its A-bombs, failing to properly safeguard the nuclear codes that accompanied the President, and generally being an atomic tough guy.

Puzzled, I asked my student if he realized the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons too. He knew.

Then I asked him if he thought the Soviet Union might also be capable of using nuclear weapons the same way. He thought a second and said, yes, they probably would.

Then I asked him how he learned so much about the US and its atomic bombs. He said his teacher in school told the whole class. I asked if his teacher had ever mentioned the Soviet Union in the same context.

Do I have to tell you what his answer to that one was?

Given a choice between teachers who are Soviet apologists and teachers who encourage students to “cultivate an attitude which respects tradition and culture and love of the nation and homeland”, I know which one I pick. It’s easy in hindsight today, but it was just as easy back then, too.

Harry Truman once said that he felt sorry for his fellow citizens who woke up in the morning, read the newspaper, and thereby thought they knew what was happening in the world.

I know just what he meant.