“At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”

BY NOW, the world knows that Ozawa Ichiro, Secretary-General of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, beclowned himself last week when he held forth on global cultural and religious matters to reporters after a meeting with Matsunaga Yukei, chairman of the Japan Buddhist Federation in Wakayama.

Mr. Ozawa asserted that Christianity is “exclusive and self-righteous” and that Western society is “stuck in a dead end” (or “has reached an impasse”, depending on the translation.) He added that “Islamism is also exclusive, although it’s somewhat better than Christianity”.

That the man who controls both the Japanese government’s ruling party and the Diet seems to know so little about the world outside East Asia is disquieting. Did he not learn that America exists because it was originally a haven of religious freedom? Does he not realize how secularized Western society has become? Is he unaware that the continued Islamification of Europe will alter the face of that continent within a generation?

And where did he get the idea that Islamism is less exclusive than Christianity? It isn’t the Christians who treat non-believers as infidels to be given the choice of death or dhimmitude if they don’t convert. It isn’t the courtrooms in Christian countries that give more weight by law to the testimony of believers.

This is not to defend Mr. Ozawa—ignorance is ignorance, after all—but his is not an isolated example. More than a few politicians from the Liberal Democratic Party also exposed their breeches after their climb to the top of the greasy pole. But it’s rare for the politico in any country to have more than a rudimentary knowledge of people and events overseas. U.S. President Barack Obama, for example, thinks the people of Austria speak a language he refers to as “Austrian”. We should have learned by now that the political class devotes its time and energy to schmoozing and outsources the rest to their aides, speechwriters, or the Foreign Service.

The infotainment media worldwide bears a heavy responsibility for this ignorance. The Japanese media’s presentation of conditions overseas is kiddie-pool shallow and usually consists of little more than the superficial translation of a few newspaper or television reports. Meanwhile, the overseas media’s offerings on Japan are filled with enough bologna to launch an international chain of delicatessens.

What he also said

But the spitballers and peashooters missed several comments by Mr. Ozawa that are even more worthy of interest. For example, he also said this at his Wakayama press conference: “Modern society has forgotten or lost sight of the spirit of the Japanese people.” And most interesting of all: “Buddhism teaches you how humans should live and how the conditions of the mind should be from a fundamental standpoint.”

People also seem to be overlooking more of the Ozawa Analects delivered at a press conference on Monday this week, and at another meeting last week on the 11th. None of those bon mots seem to be in wide circulation in English, perhaps because they offer no diversion for the coffeehousers.

During his Monday press conference, Mr. Ozawa not only refused to apologize for or retract his comments, he also gave us further insight into his personal philosophy:

“The Eastern view is that humankind is one of the workings of eternal nature, while Western civilization believes that human beings are of the highest order as primates.”

And:

“(In the Buddhist worldview) people can become Buddhas during their lifetime, and when they die, everyone achieves Buddhahood. Do any other religions allow for everyone to become divinities? I expressed the basic differences in religion, philosophy, and view of life.”

He also quoted Sir Edmund Hillary, the man who gave as his reason for climbing Everest, “Because it was there”:

“Western civilization believes that (everything) exists for human beings, even nature. But Everest is worshipped as a sacred mountain by the people in the region where it is located. Most Asians do not have the idea of trying to conquer it.”

He concluded:

“Both you and I can attain Buddhahood when we die.”

Who knew that the master practitioner of Chicago-style politics in Japan was such a spiritual being at heart?

To be fair, this is nothing new for Shadow Shogun V.2. He has spoken in the past about the importance of symbiosis (kyosei) between person and person, country and country, and people and nature. There seems to be a streak of Buddhism in Mr. Ozawa that informs his views on government, and it ranges from foreign affairs to environmentalism.

In fact, it makes one wonder if he and Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio are political and religious soul mates of a sort. We already know about Mr. Hatoyama’s family heirloom philosophy of yuai. Indeed, the man whose ideas were the inspiration for yuai once wrote (emphasis mine):

“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.”

Here’s the latter day spiritual aristocrat explaining his support of suffrage for foreigners with permanent resident status:

“The Japanese archipelago is not only a Japanese possession. The Japanese are more infused with the Buddhist spirit than anyone else in the world, so why do we not allow foreigners to participate in local elections?”

Giving expression to that Buddhist spirit, he added:

“The earth is for all people who live with gusto. The same is true for the Japanese archipelago. It is not just for all human beings. It is the possession of animals, plants, and all creatures.”

Is there any other government among the world’s economically advanced nations in which the two most important figures talk this way? Had George W. Bush used his Christian beliefs to justify or elaborate the reasons for his policy decisions while head of government, he would have been pilloried in the U.S. for mixing church and state. That would have been followed by a global epidemic of tongue-swallowing. Meanwhile, the Japanese merely roll their eyes over yet another mention of yuai and say, “That’s Yukio.” Mr. Ozawa’s observations are considered unremarkable.

That brings us to another underreported Ozawa comment. The day after his Wakayama press conference, Mr. Ozawa addressed the closing assembly of the third Japan-China Exchange and Discussion Mechanism in Tokyo, of which he is the chair. The top-ranking representative from China was Wang Jiarui, the Chinese Communist Party International Department Minister.

He got all cosmic on us then, too:

“I am convinced that both countries can cooperate and work together in the 21st century to achieve an epochal partnership in the history of humankind in both political and economic terms, as well as in terms of culture and civilization and the global environment. This will enable the world to prosper in peace and stability, and human beings to live together and coexist with each other.”

Mr. Ozawa was not just whistling Dixie for his Chinese guest. He has long been open about his pro-Chinese sentiments while coming as close to anti-Americanism as any mainstream Japanese politician who wishes to hold power dares.

The DPJ Secretary-General has been the leader of a citizen exchange group called the Great Wall Project since 1986, when he was still a member of the LDP. He plans to lead a delegation of the group to visit China again this year. It will be their 16th trip, though this one is being conducted under the auspices of the DPJ. During a visit in late 2007, he was so obsequious to his hosts it even angered some members of his party. (They have since split.) At about the same time, he purposely kept then-American ambassador Thomas Schieffer waiting for 30 minutes before deigning to meet with him and discuss his party’s approach for global anti-terrorism efforts. China was the first country he visited after being named head of the DPJ for the second time in 2006.

Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Wang go back a long way. Their last meeting was in Tokyo in February, when Mr. Ozawa created a minor stir by telling him that he has always had a “special feeling of closeness with China”. As he was then still head of the DPJ and in line to become prime minister after the next lower house election, he promised Mr. Wang that relations with China would be given a special emphasis in a DPJ government. That same month Mr. Ozawa made his more publicized observation that the Seventh Fleet was the only American military force that needed to stay in Japan, and that the country should instead focus on closer ties with China and South Korea to deal with regional issues.

He met with Mr. Wang for 75 minutes during the latter’s February visit, but could spare only a half an hour for American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Mr. Wang’s meeting with then-Prime Minister Aso Taro lasted 60 minutes.

Ozawa The Sinophile

Mr. Ozawa comes by his Sinophilia honestly. At the start of his national political career, he became attached to Tanaka Kakuei, who was the Big Enchilada of Japanese politics for the better part of two decades even when he wasn’t serving a term as prime minister. It was Mr. Tanaka who spearheaded the drive to recognize mainland China when the nation’s political class was split 50-50 on the issue, achieving his objective in 1972. He long worked to improve Japanese-Sino relations and formed close personal ties with members of the Chinese ruling class.

For their part, the Chinese always considered Mr. Tanaka a friend, and that friendship extends to his daughter Makiko, who briefly served as Foreign Minister in the first Koizumi Jun’ichiro Cabinet. A chip off the old block, Ms. Tanaka followed her father’s line during her term in office by urging a stronger relationship with China and South Korea and less dependence on the United States. She also disagreed with U.S. policy on Taiwan and tried to steer the Japanese position on that issue on a course independent of the Americans.

Whenever he meets with the Chinese, Ozawa Ichiro insists that he is simply following the lead of Tanaka Kakuei. He likes to quote former Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai on the subject, saying that the people who drink the water of a well should always remember the people who dug it.

While perhaps not as blatantly pro-Chinese as Mr. Ozawa, Mr. Hatoyama is clearly intent on steering Japan on a course closer to Asia than the United States (the emphasis is mine again):

The one important thing now is the spirit of yuai in foreign relations, which I have devoted the most attention to since becoming party president. That is to say, the yuai spirit elevated France and Germany, which constantly fought each other, into the EU, which does not have wars. I think that is by no means impossible to achieve in East Asia. First, cooperation between Japan and South Korea is extremely important, and then we can add China. If necessary, we can have the Americans join. I’m saying that an East Asian entity, the concept of an Asia-Pacific mechanism, is important. That’s why I said the early creation of a free trade agreement between Japan and South Korea is critical.

That’s Yukio!

Try this on for size: If Buddhism indeed informs the perspective of both Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Hatoyama, might it be one factor underlying DPJ positions regarding political circumstances in Japan, East Asia, and the alliance with America?

Japanese-Korean nationals

For example, both men strongly support suffrage in local elections for foreign nationals who are permanent residents. In practice, that means the people born and raised in Japan of Korean ancestry who have chosen to retain Korean citizenship. Supporters of the measure hide behind the euphemism of “permanent residents”, but their meaning is clear. Openly advocating the vote for that particular group would ensure focused opposition because the zainichi could easily obtain Japanese citizenship, and because of the size and outspokenness of Chongryun, the pro-North Korean organization in Japan.

Is it possible that their position is a statement of East Asian solidarity based on their expressed cultural and religious perspectives?

The LDP

Certainly some, if not most, members of the Liberal Democratic Party understand and share these Buddhist sentiments. It is also certain that somewhere in both the Ozawa and Hatoyama homes there is a kamidana, a small Shinto altar/shrine (usually on a shelf) to honor the family guardian deities.

Yet one seldom hears the LDP politicos express such explicitly Buddhist sentiments. They are more likely to talk of Shinto, and that offers an intriguing contrast between the parties. Explaining the relationship between Shinto and the Japanese would be like trying to explain the relationship between fish and water, but to put it briefly, it consists of two strains. One involves community-based customs and attitudes that have existed as long as there have been Japanese, and the other resembles an organized religion associated with the imperial line. These strains have repeatedly interacted and diverged over the centuries, but when today’s politicians speak of Shinto, it is not tantamount to a referral to the state-established variety that lasted from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to 1945. That was just one chapter of a much longer history.

On the other hand, despite its immense impact on the country, Buddhism is an import that arrived from China via the Korean Peninsula. In fact, it was subjected to attack at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration just for this foreignness.

Thus, the visits of prime ministers Suzuki, Nakasone, and Koizumi to the Yasukuni shrine, and the visits of prime ministers Mori and Abe to the Meiji shrine, might be viewed mainly as an expression of national identity. The invocation of Buddhism by Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Hatoyama, in contrast, would therefore seem to be expressions of regional identity.

Some in the media compared Mr. Ozawa’s observation about Buddhism and Western religions to former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro’s controversial statement to a Shinto group that Japan is a “kami no kuni”, centered on the Tenno (Emperor). That Japanese sentence is impossible to translate in a meaningful way in English, however. Without background knowledge, the Western conception of “divinity” will prevent those in the West from understanding the meaning when they read the commonly used translation of “Japan is a divine country.”.

It might be that Mr. Ozawa’s claim that “Modern society has forgotten or lost sight of the spirit of the Japanese people” sprang from a similar source within. It’s just that Mr. Mori’s approach was from a Shinto perspective, while that of Mr. Ozawa is from a Buddhist perspective.

Therefore—speaking very broadly and generally—could the emphasis on Buddhism as opposed to Shintoism by the two DPJ leaders be one way they differentiate themselves from the LDP, intentionally or not?

New Komeito

The New Komeito political party is widely assumed to be the political arm of the Soka Gakkai lay Buddhist organization. An enigma for many Japanese was their willingness to form a coalition government with the center-right LDP, despite a center-left outlook that includes pacifist tendencies and a program calling for more social welfare benefits. A relatively high percentage of the Soka Gakkai membership consists of Japanese-born Korean citizens, most of whom would welcome the chance to vote in local elections, a policy the LDP opposes. It would seem that New Komeito and the DPJ would be natural allies.

Yet Ozawa Ichiro is known for an intense dislike of New Komeito that dates back at least to his days as head of the Liberal Party, when they were in a coalition government headed by the LDP under Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo. No one seems to be able to explain it, or at least they aren’t trying to explain it in public.

Is it possible that Mr. Ozawa’s dislike of New Komeito stems from a belief that their backers represent a divergent sect of Buddhism whose beliefs have been used for nationalist aims in the past? (Soka Gakkai claims it is based on the teachings of Nichiren. See this previous post for a brief discussion of the influence of Nichirenists on early 20th century Japan.)

Polite fictions

The factual or interpretive accuracy of the Ozawa/Hatoyama cosmology is not the point in any of these matters. Nor is it important whether Buddhism was their point of departure for reaching the political position of regional identity, or whether they started from an awareness of regional identity and then employed Buddhism as a justification. What is important is whether they sincerely believe it, and whether they act on those beliefs.

But Mr. Hatoyama in particular must weigh his public statements carefully and engage in polite fictions, because telling the truth would be asking for trouble both at home and abroad. There is a long-standing debate in Japan whether it should align primarily with the West or with East Asia. Those who favor alignment with the West consist of several elements, including people who think China and the two Koreas will never take Japan’s interest into account in any regional grouping. Mr. Hatoyama’s calls for an East Asian entity are sufficient to arouse their opposition.

These folks are well aware this ground has been covered before. In a 1973 interview with Time magazine, Tanaka Kakuei felt compelled to reassure his visitors that “the U.S. comes first.” After his now notorious article in the September issue of Voice, portions of which were translated into English and published in the New York Times, Mr. Hatoyama has been similarly compelled to reassure contemporary Americans that the U.S. still comes first.

That’s what he says. In his article, Mr. Hatoyama wrote that America is waning and China is waxing. He also wrote that the U.S. is seeking to maintain its dominance, and China is seeking to attain dominance as it becomes economically powerful. He claims that an East Asian entity would be the best way to keep Chinese ambitions in check, bring order to their economic activity, and defuse nationalism in the region. It is perhaps an irony that the U.S. government pre-Obama sought to do something similar through a strategy of simultaneous engagement and balance, though more through friendship than through marriage.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hatoyama is all too sincere in these beliefs, which suggest a level of ignorance similar to that of Ozawa Ichiro’s views on international religion and culture. It is not enough to note that the Chinese naturally assume that regional dominance and hegemony is their national birthright. One has to realize the term they use for themselves is “the flower in the center of the universe”. Mr. Hatoyama is never going to change that, no matter how willing he is to share his cookies and milk.

And his view of the European Union is a mirage. The EU has had little to do with preventing another continental war, for which Europeans thankfully no longer have the stomach. Instead, it has evolved into an oppressive, top-down meddling behemoth of a bureaucracy that is a multinational Kasumigaseki times ten. Czech President Vaclav Klaus calls its governing principle “post-democracy”: “where there is no democratic accountabiity, and the decisions are made by politicians, appointed by politicians, not elected by citizens in free elections.” That sounds like just the sort of thing a spiritual aristocrat could sink his teeth into.

Japanese-American relations

Too much Hatoyama honesty causes too many problems for Japanese-American relations, but we can be frank: some contemporary Americans make too much of themselves for what their ancestors did and act as if they are owed eternal subservience.

As it is unfair to hold contemporary Japanese responsible for their ancestors’ behavior, it is just as unreasonable to remain in liege to America for its past behavior. Yes, the Japanese did what they did, and the Americans did what they did, but Imperial Japan and the U.S. of the 1940s no longer exist, and the world is a much different place. It is as if the Americans perceive a Japanese and Western European failure to pledge emotional and financial fealty as ingratitude.

Christopher Preble, writing on the Cato Institute’s blog, recently expressed this idea:

From the perspective of our allies in East Asia (chiefly the Japanese and the South Koreans), and for the Europeans tucked safely within NATO, getting the Americans to pay the costs, and assume the risks, associated with policing the world is a pretty good gig.

Mr. Preble needs to pay more attention to the details. In 2002 Japan’s contributions represented more than 60% of all allied financial contributions to the US, and covered 75% of the USFJ’s operating costs. That contribution has declined somewhat since then, but it is still substantial. He also overlooks the risks Japan faces if the American military were to use its locally based forces to intervene in a Chinese attack on Taiwan, for example. Does he think the Chinese would consider those bases in Japan to be off-limits for retaliation?

To those Americans who would complain that the Japanese are using the Peace Constitution as an excuse, it might be asked: Just whose idea was that anyway? Americans wanted to create a pacifist culture in Japan after the war, and they succeeded. The legal basis for the Japanese state does not come in a ring binder whose leaves are to be inserted or removed on the whims of politicians in another country according to the circumstances of the day.

And that brings us to the ultimate in polite fictions—unless you’re certain that the United States would come to the aid of the Japanese if the latter were attacked. There is speculation from U.S. sources now circulating in the Japanese media that an American military response would be a 50-50 proposition at best.

Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo called for an end to the post-war regime. Would it not be an irony if his political foes in the DPJ were the ones to achieve it?

But why stop there? Isn’t it high time the Americans moved on from the post-war paradigm as well? Everyone might be better off by letting the neo-Buddhists in the DPJ start the process of Japan seeking a new equilibrium on its own. Owing to its history, Japan is unlikely to ever be wholly aligned with either East or West. And owing to its history, that might be the best course for all concerned, because it’s uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between both.

In that event, the key for the Japanese would be to remain aware that lurking in the shadows of the shining path is the resentment from both for belonging to neither.

Afterwords:

* Some Japanese worry that the DPJ approach will cause the U.S. to move toward the Chinese at Japanese expense. Surely they are forgetting the traditional Chinese outlook toward foreign affairs and other countries. Now that the Chinese are reverting to their default attitude, it would seem that Japan doesn’t have much to worry about.

* Here’s a link to a review of the book Zen at War by Brian Victoria, which describes Zen Buddhism’s intellectual and emotional contributions to the Japanese war effort. The review is worth reading for that reason, despite the self-indulgent prose and the swallowing whole of the claims in Iris Chang’s book. The reviewer also claims the book could never have been written in Japan, and he has a point. The Japanese would not have failed to mention that the Tokugawas used the requirement for families to register with Buddhist temples as a weapon to eliminate Christianity. Nor would they have failed to mention that since the warrior class initially popularized Zen in Japan, it would have been natural for some Japanese Zen Buddhists to get behind the war in their own way. The reviewer also seems to think that “it could happen again”, which is just silly.

* The Time magazine interview with Tanaka Kakuei contains this passage:

“In the big cities, the left tends to support academic men. They usually are not very hardworking, but for some reason they appeal to people, especially since they don’t wave the red flag of their socialist and Communist sponsors but the green flag [of the fight against pollution].”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

* When I taught adult English classes years ago, I liked to do quick surveys of my students to find out what religions they professed to believe in as part of the classroom discussion. About 1% of Japanese are Christians, but historical factors boost that to about 5% in Kyushu, and a slightly higher percentage than that show up to study English on their own time and dime.

I asked students to raise their hands when I mentioned a religion. Almost no one raised their hand when I asked if they were Shinto. Almost everyone raised their hands when I asked if they were Buddhist.

* The quote at the top of the post refers to the behavior of everyone mentioned in the post itself.

TO SLIP BRIEFLY into blogging mode, here are two quick hits from the foreign media instead of another piece I was working on. (My wife suggested a trip to the baths, and that’s a suggestion I always agree to.)

The first item concerns the apprehension of the prime suspect in the Lindsay Hawker murder case, which aroused intense interest in Britain. A long-time lurker sent me this link to an article written by Jenny Holt for the Comment is Free section of The Guardian. I don’t follow police blotter/natural disaster stories very closely, so please accept my apologies if you’ve seen it already.

Ms. Holt pulls no punches in her description of the coverage of this country in general, and of the Hawker case in particular. The Uzai! she snaps off to the media suggests that she had reached her limit and could contain her disgust no longer. For example:

“(T)he mainstream media has seized on the crime as an excuse to indulge in practically the only form of overt racism still tolerated today – the demonisation and denigration, en masse, of Japanese men.”

I’d replace that last word with “people”, but after a start like that, I’m not about to pick nits with Ms. Holt. Then she shifts into second gear, referring to:

“…(T)he same xenophobic caricatures about an uptight society with an underlying streak of insanity that refuses to co-operate with western forces of reason and justice.”

Preach, sister!

“And it is not just the Blackman and Hawker cases that invite this approach. The same ignorant stereotypes are rolled out at any opportunity…Television programmes seek out oddballs to portray as mainstream…And cinemagoers would be forgiven for thinking that every other Japanese was a geisha or a yakuza. Any half-informed piece of disinformation seems to suffice where Japan is concerned.”

Hallelujah!

“I have lived in Japan for nine years, I have a Japanese husband and son, and I can honestly say that the most striking thing about people here is how downright normal they are.”

Lord have mercy!

“This is modern normality, and if foreigners who came here actually bothered to learn the language and find out what ordinary Japanese people think they would appreciate that.”

Yes! And now for the slam dunk:

“The stereotyping also speaks volumes about the western psyche. It suggests that westerners resent and fear successful non-white cultures and that they cope by denigrating and dehumanising them. What Britain chooses to see in Japan says more about its own insecurities than about the Japanese…”

I stand in awe—in a few paragraphs, she’s precisely laid on the line what I’ve been banging on about for several years, though I include the entire Anglosphere rather than just Britain. Thank you, Ms. Holt.

Allow me to make just one addition, if I may make so bold. Of the other countries in Northeast Asia, South Korea has become a successful society, and it isn’t on the butt end of ignorant stereotypes. China is making rapid strides toward success on Western terms, despite some serious handicaps of its own device. It is subjected to serious criticism in the Western media for its failings, but seldom does one see any of the schoolboy raillery aimed at Japan.

I submit that is because neither fought a war with the Western powers and lost. Imperial Japan was flattened and left a smoldering ruin at the end of that war, which is still within living memory for some. Yet while most of the veterans of that war were still alive, Japan not only reconstructed itself, it thrived, and surpassed in economic power all of the victorious Allied powers save one. Additionally, the residents of that one remaining superpower, the United States, had to face the fact as long as 30 years ago that the formerly humiliated Japanese now excelled them in the production and quality of the symbol of their economic power and personal freedom–the mass-produced automobile.

The attitude of the Western media, I suspect, is fueled by chagrin and mortification at the defeated nation’s demonstrated ability to outdo them all, and to do it so quickly.

Uzai, by the way, is a rough expression that packs quite a message into one blunt and compact word. The user is telling the listener that since he has his head up his posterior, just STFU and go away.

The second item concerns one of those minor teapot tempests that I wouldn’t have ordinarily bothered with until I had an uzai moment of my own.

That would be U.S. President Barack Obama’s two-for-the-price-of-one, super-sized bow and handshake offered to the Japanese Tenno and Kogo during his recent visit.

This caused some gnashing of teeth in America for several reasons. They include:

• Heads of state do not bow to heads of state

• Americans in particular do not care for their heads of state to bow to royalty any time, anywhere, for any reason. 1776 and all that.

• He already got slammed for bowing to the Saudi head of state earlier this year, which the ninnies staffing his White House initially denied, even in the face of video evidence.

• He gallivants around the world bowing and scraping but can’t be bothered to put his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem—another breach of American presidential protocol.

In other words, despite spending part of his childhood living as a Muslim in Indonesia, Mr. Obama is no more cluey about dealing with foreign cultures than those Americans in flyover country he denigrates as bitterly clinging to guns and religion.

Some rushed to his defense. A reader of Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit blog, who said he had spent seven years in Japan, pointed out that the Japanese always bow when meeting each other. The correspondent overreached himself, however, by including bows to “repairmen coming to fix the kitchen sink”.

Sorry Charlie, but only a horse’s ass would bow from the waist to a repairman, and that goes double for men. Besides, I would hesitate to use the term “bow” for a slight forward tilt of the trunk combined with an exaggerated but quick nod.

And regardless of the angle of incline, it is never combined with a handshake.

To be fair, it wasn’t just Mr. Obama. It turns out that Richard Nixon also bowed years ago, and Bill Clinton offered a semi-bow to the current Tenno. The New York Times offered some semi-criticism of Mr. Clinton here, observing succinctly that “Americans shake hands.” They also said he “put his hands together”, which is not what Japanese do with their hands when they bow.

Memo to Bubba: Thailand is several thousand miles away to the south.

Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for the American network ABC, consulted a friend in academia whom he described as having some expertise in things Japanese. The response was every bit as excellent as Ms. Holt’s:

“Obama’s handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush’s back-rub of Merkel.
“Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.
“The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms….The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.”

That line about the first-year English teacher trying to impress with Karate-kid level knowledge of Japanese customs is so good I wish I had thought of it myself.

My uzai moment, however, came with this post at the Contentions blog at Commentary by John Steele Gordon. After getting his displeasure with Mr. Obama out of the way, he continued:

“President Obama goes abroad apologizing for the supposed sins of a country that defended and extended freedom around the world at a staggering cost in lives and treasure and then grovels before the man whose country has yet to apologize for the Rape of Nanking. As my mother used to say, ‘Pardon me while I throw up.’”

Before Mr. Gordon heaves all over his CPU and makes a smelly mess, he might consider the following:

• The Japanese government has apologized to the Chinese for its behavior on more than 20 occasions, according to former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in his book, Toward a Beautiful Japan. Those in the nether regions of the commentariat and blogosphere might scoff and suggest we consider the source, but I suspect the source could come up with a list in short order. I also suspect that none of the scoffers would be informed enough to dispute it.

• Since diplomatic relations have been restored, Japan has lavished enormous amounts of ODA on China as de facto war reparations. This largesse continues even though China is likely to surpass Japan as the world’s second-largest economy in the near future.

• The LA Times story to which he links notes that soon after assuming the throne, the current Tenno formally expressed his remorse to the countries that were the victims of Japanese behavior during the war. Yes, those are apologies. They’re also more of an apology than Queen Elizabeth has ever given for British colonial behavior.

• Inputting the name Askew in the Search function on the left sidebar will turn up a paper written by a professor of that name. It will help demonstrate to those with only superficial knowledge of the event the fact that real scholarship into the Nanjing Massacre is broader, deeper, more extensive–and more honest, all things considered–in Japan than in China or the United States.

And I don’t have the time for the research now, but as a regular reader of the Contentions site, I wouldn’t be surprised if the stomachs of most of the contributors there would start jumping at an American presidential apology for slavery.

Isn’t it time to do something about those double standards?

Afterwords:

The LA Times article contains this sentence:

“The future emperor learned English during the U.S. occupation, but, inexplicably, his father ordered that his oldest boy not receive an Army commission as previous imperial heirs always had.”

Why should this be “inexplicable”? The Japanese were determined to eliminate militarism in their country after the war, and what better place to start than at the top? Did not the Americans intentionally try to create a culture of pacifism in Japan? Is it so surprising that they succeeded? Is the LA Times so clueless as to be unaware of this?

The words emperor and empress are inaccurate substitutes for the Japanese terms Tenno and Kogo, so I no longer use them. A case could be made that “pope” is more accurate than emperor, were that a hereditary position. Also, we already have the precedents of the English use of the terms Kaiser and Czar.

To those who would ask why I don’t follow customary usage, I would answer that they have their style manuals, and I have mine.

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.

*****
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.

*****
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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.