21st century Class A war criminals

It’s been one year since the Tohoku earthquake. What we need now is not words, but actions. Not repeated words, but repeated actions — actions in which everyone shares a bit of the burden. There is nothing else.
- Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru

If Australia is to get the government it needs (and deserves) it must first experience the full horror of the government it doesn’t deserve.
- James Delingpole, who could just as well have been speaking of Japan

LAST Sunday was the first anniversary of the Tohoku triple disaster — the fourth-largest recorded earthquake in history, a monster tsunami, and the nuclear accident at Fukushima. The Nishinippon Shimbun presented the numbers in a small box on the front page of its Monday edition:

Dead: 15,854
Missing: 3,155
In shelters or temporarily in other areas: 343,935

Also in the Monday newspapers were the results of a recent poll:

* How would you evaluate the government’s response to date for recovery efforts in the stricken area?
Good: 25%
Bad: 67%
No answer: 8%

* How would you evaluate the government’s response to date for the nuclear accident at Fukushima?
Good: 12%
Bad: 80%
No answer: 8%

There are no excuses when four out of five people think you stink. It’s time to reach for the soap.

Fortunately, the public is doing it for them. Among the noise and distortion and useless pallid confetti of media discourse, a low but distinct signal is emerging. Long before 11 March, people understood the crimes of commission and omission of the so-called Iron Triangle: the political establishment in Nagata-cho, the governmental establishment at Kasumigaseki, and the business establishment everywhere else. The voters have persistently expressed the wish to destroy that triangle. But the national disaster seems to have focused their attention and made vivid the futility of relying on the long-running disaster that is the triple establishment. Another poll released this week revealed that pre-existing political trends are accelerating. The question asked was about the contours of the government they’d like to see. The answers:

A government centered on the Democratic Party (the current ruling party): 7%
A government centered on the Liberal-Democratic Party (the largest opposition party, and the ruling party for more than half a century): 10%
A DPJ – LDP coalition government: 26%
A government with a new framework after a political reorganization: 50%
No answer: 7%

Note that the current DPJ government could manage only a rating equal to that of the stragglers in any poll who can’t be bothered to form an opinion. It was lower than the No Answer response to the previous two questions. The LDP is not viewed as an acceptable option.

The people have thus disqualified the major political brands from serious consideration. While their enthusiasm for alternatives was evident before, it’s so strong now that even the Three Disasters in Tokyo have noticed. They see that the tsunami of popular will is surging in their direction. No one knows when it will break, but when it does, there is no levee big enough to stop it.

Kusaka Kimindo, born in 1930, a former director of the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, and a commentator on business and governmental affairs, recently released a book called The Collapse of the Japanese Establishment. He welcomes that prospect. The blurb on the front cover reads:

The government-patron academics, the Western-worshipping intellectuals, and Big Mass Media have lost their authority.
A new wind has begun to blow.

The next few posts, and others from time to time in the future, will focus on aspects of the speed and direction of that wind. Perhaps it might blow as strong as a third kamikaze, the divine wind, combining the salvation of the first with the internal origins of the second.

First, however, we must look at what is collapsing, and why.

The Kan Cabinet: Class A War Criminals?

That’s the question asked in the lead article of the 18 March weekly Sunday Mainichi, issued to coincide with the anniversary of the disaster. The tone of Japanese weekly magazines is often wild and woolly, but this time they’re quoting someone else: political commentator Kinoshita Atsushi, a former lower house member from the Democratic Party — the same party as Kan Naoto.

It’s the job of a leader to create a more comfortable working environment, but Mr. Kan did the opposite. You could say he was a Class A war criminal.

Mizote Kensei is the secretary-general for the LDP bloc in the upper house, and a former Minister for Disaster Management. He expressed the same sentiments in a different way:

If this were a backward country, they’d be taken to court, and might even be executed.

The Sunday Mainichi thought that was extreme, but they did spend an entire page discussing the possibility of court action against several former Cabinet members, including whether it would be a criminal or civil proceeding, the precedents for such action, and what might happen. (They conclude it would be possible in theory, but difficult to pursue in practice.)

Lower house LDP member Kajiyama Hiroshi doesn’t have Mr. Kan to kick around any more, but he called for the immediate resignation of Madarame Haruki, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission:

The LDP certainly has responsibility for promoting nuclear power. But beyond that, Tokyo Electric and the government, particularly Prime Minister Kan, bear a heavy responsibility. After the Fukushima accident, Mr. Kan spoke only to Madarame Haruki, chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, about technical matters. That’s because no one else capable of expressing a different opinion was there.

That only Mr. Kan would listen to Mr. Madarame’s personal views on technical matters was decisive. Also, there are no records of their discussions. There is no choice but to assume that the information we’ve received has been doctored, and there are even doubts he didn’t want to hear the views of other technicians….The other members of the commission should have met together to create a consensus, and that should have been the advice given to Mr. Kan.

In addition to allowing other people to use the term Cabinet Class A war criminals, the magazine referred to Kan Naoto as a “self-righteous hothead” and said that Mr. Madarame was “unconnected to the real world”.

Then again, it’s not as if Mr. Kan listened to Mr. Madarame even when he was listening to Mr. Madarame. During the prime minister’s universally lambasted helicopter trip to Fukushima on the morning of the 12 March 2011 to view the facility from the air, the NSC chair tried to communicate several of his concerns en route. Mr. Kan issued an order: “Just answer my questions.” (It sounds even worse in Japanese.)

One of his questions was whether there would be a hydrogen explosion. Mr. Madarame thought not. There was an explosion, however, about eight hours later. When the prime minister saw it on television, he exploded himself:

Isn’t that white smoke rising? It’s exploding, isn’t it? Didn’t you say it wouldn’t explode?

See what they mean about “self-righteous hothead”?

The technicians thought a meltdown was possible at Fukushima the night of the accident, and detected evidence that it had started early the next morning. They informed the government, but Kan Naoto lied about it, not only the next day, but for several months thereafter — including on the floor of the Diet.

He also says he failed to receive information from SPEEDI, the system that generates projections on the dispersion of radioactive material. There are even claims that he didn’t know the system existed. Had the information from SPEEDI been employed, it could have limited the region’s exposure to radiation.

Itabashi Isao, a senior analyst for the Council for Public Study, explains that Ibaraki Prefecture publishes a book for high school students to explain nuclear energy, and that the book contains a description of the SPEEDI system.

They say the data reached the crisis management center and stopped there without going to Mr. Kan or the others. When politicians say they didn’t know something that’s being taught to high school students, it should not be the end of the discussion.

To continue the discussion, in October 2010, five months before the earthquake, a disaster prevention drill and simulation were conducted based on the premise of failure in the cooling function of Chubu Electric’s Hamaoka nuclear plant. The drill used data generated by SPEEDI. The government formed a group to oversee and monitor the drill and simulation. The head of the group was Kan Naoto, the man who supposedly didn’t know about SPEEDI.

But of course he did. Hosono Goshi was then an aide to Mr. Kan. He was later appointed as the minister in charge of dealing with the nuclear disaster, and added the Environmental Ministry portfolio with the inauguration of the Noda Cabinet. Last May, two months after the accident, Mr. Hosono said that SPEEDI information was not made public because of worries the people would panic. (There are also suspicions in some quarters that he held on it to it to enhance his career prospects.)

The Sunday Mainichi quoted a journalist:

They hid information because they thought if they told the truth, the ignorant people would panic. It is an indication of their viewpoint based on the premise of stupid people, stupid thinking (gumin guso).

We already know that’s the way they think — it was clear in the fall of 2010 during the incident in the Senkakus with the Chinese “fishing boat” captain. The government wouldn’t release their video of the incident because they thought it would inflame both the Chinese government and the Japanese people, but someone in the Japanese Coast Guard solved that problem by uploading it to YouTube. The government also claimed that the Naha prosecutors were in charge of the disposition of the case. More than 80% of the public thought they were lying.

Now the phenomenon of the circular firing squad is emerging as the Fukushima investigation continues. Mr. Madarame has been testifying to the Diet committee looking into the nuclear accident, and said the following about then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio:

From the perspective of those of us who work with nuclear power, saying (as Mr. Edano did) ‘there will be no immediate effect’, sounds as if he is saying the effect would be late-developing cancer. We would not say anything like that. Therefore, I did not make any suggestion of that sort to the chief cabinet secretary.

Not everyone in the Cabinet was complicit in the war crimes. One of those was Katayama Yoshihiro, then the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications. A former governor of Tottori Prefecture, he has an idea about the way government executives are supposed to conduct themselves. He’s on the record about Mr. Kan:

Who was the leader of the operations? It was impossible to understand the intent of too many of the various demands and requests (from the government command center). They were fragmentary and childish. There was no leadership at all.

Mr. Katayama also cited the breakdown in communications between the underground command center for the crisis in the basement of the Kantei, and Mr. Kan’s fifth floor office. He said that the prime minister never took the elevator downstairs, but communicated with the center only by cell phone. Mr. Kan, meanwhile, complained that 90% of the raw data came through Tokyo Electric, and that “the gears of communication did not move”, even when he put Mr. Hosono and then-METI Minister Kaieda Banri on the job. Shifting the blame to someone else is a Kan hallmark.

It will be difficult to find out exactly what happened in the Kantei because no record was kept of governmental discussions immediately after the disaster. It is widely assumed that Kan Naoto didn’t want people to know.

There are no records of the first 18 of the 23 meetings of the main group tasked with dealing with the Fukushima problem. An official with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency took records of the 19th meeting on his own initiative, but there is no organizational record.

One of the unindicted co-conspirators is then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, who as the government spokesman said a meltdown had not occurred, and repeatedly insisted there would be no harmful effects from the nuclear accident. Mr. Edano is now the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, the body overseeing nuclear power operations in Japan. He has reportedly aligned himself with the METI bureaucrats promoting the continued use of nuclear power. He’s interested in becoming prime minister, and thinks this will help him win the support of Big Business. (A former attorney who defended radical labor unionistas, he could use the credibility.)

Mr. Edano is also backing the METI position in the ministry’s dispute with Tokyo Electric Power. Remember how the Democratic Party was going to take political control of the bureaucracy?

Showdown at the hypotenuse

METI and the past two DPJ governments want to temporarily nationalize TEPCO. Their plan is to inject JPY one trillion of public funds into the company to help offset what could be tens of trillions of yen in eventual liabilities. They would receive a two-thirds ownership stake in return, replace all the top executives, and sell off the generating division. (That last one’s a good idea, and should be applied to all the power companies as part of the implementation of a national smart grid, but that’s yet another one beyond the capabilities of this government.)

Tokyo Electric objects. They think the government is incapable of operating a utility — can’t argue with that — and charge the government has no clear plan for divesting itself of ownership in the future.

So in classic Old Japan fashion, Tokyo Electric Chairman Katsumata Tsunehisa is getting chummy with the Finance Ministry to head off nationalization. The Finance Ministry is sympathetic to the utility, if only because they don’t want to put the government on the hook for paying off the liabilities. Katsu Eijiro of the ministry, serving as an aide to Prime Minister Noda (and dubbed his puppeteer by the press), told his subordinates they should not permit government control of the utility in negotiations, and to draw the line at 49% ownership, no matter how much they have to compromise before reaching that point. With that capital stake, the government could only reject major proposals, and the Tokyo Electric leadership would stay.

Prime Minister Noda, however, has left the responsibility for negotiations with Mr. Edano, as he is said to be too involved with a consumption tax increase to handle anything else. Mr. Noda wants to unify social welfare programs using the consumption tax as funding. The people backing this idea are calling it a “reform”, a term the Western media echoes. Yet the reform so far consists of allocating just one-fifth of the assumed revenues from the tax increase to social welfare programs (JPY 2.7 trillion) while earmarking JPY four trillion to public works projects. Remember how the Democratic Party was going to shift the emphasis from concrete to people? Nor has the Noda Cabinet come up with a specific proposal for the future form of the social welfare system. They just want the taxes first.

What they don’t want is to remind everyone that the last time the consumption tax was raised, during the Hashimoto administration, it had a negative impact on the economy that further decreased tax revenue.

Edano Yukio, however, says there will be no government support without a two-thirds stake. For negotiations, he has enlisted his political patron, Sengoku Yoshito, who became a Class A war criminal as chief cabinet secretary in the first Kan Cabinet during the Senkakus incident.

The METI bureaucrats are said to like Mr. Sengoku, including those with greater political ambitions, as well as banking industry veterans now in subordinate Cabinet positions. They think he’s a genius at lobbying and working behind the scenes. (Yes, they said “lobbying”; in Japan, the politicians in government are the lobbyists.) Mr. Sengoku is thought to be interested in shifting the power industry’s votes and money from the Liberal Democratic Party to the DPJ.

Another aspect of the stalemate is another Old Japan struggle for the authority over the nuclear power industry itself, with METI, the Ministry of Education (which includes science affairs), Defense, the National Police Agency, and the Cabinet Office duking it out.

While the servants of the people have been attending to what they perceive as national affairs, others have offered many good ideas for recovery programs. These included making the Tohoku region a special economic development zone as a trial for a move to a state/province system, giving tax breaks to donations (there are donation boxes nowadays in most public places and commercial establishments), and issuing long-term bonds bought by the Bank of Japan.

Neither the Kan nor the Noda governments could manage any of that.

Shiva’s second coming

Talk of dinosaurs brings up the subject of Ozawa Ichiro, the former president and secretary-general of several political parties, and now suspended as a member of the ruling DPJ, though he was their secretary-general until May 2010 and president until a year before that.

He’s back in the news because the government he wants to topple this time is the one led by Mr. Noda — ostensibly for failing to uphold the party’s 2009 election manifesto, but really for not paying attention to him.

One of the weekly magazines conducted an interview with him on 14 December 2011 and published it in their 31 January edition.

Ultimately, I look at Japan with doubt, wondering whether it is a democratic state…In Japan, the power of the citizenry is not linked to changing politics.

No one has to doubt who’s ignoring the democratically expressed desire for change. The Japanese say hansei, or reflecting on one’s past conduct, is a national trait, but that’s one mirror Mr. Ozawa passes by without looking in.

The interview contained the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here’s the good (or at least the accurate) part:

If Japan had the ability to negotiate with the US as equals, there would be no worry about TPP. But the present government isn’t capable of doing anything like that. The people are concerned that in the end, it will turn out the way America wants it.

It isn’t just TPP. It’s everything, including the security issue, starting with the Futenma base. It’s the same with economic issues. What has to happen is that the Japanese become independent. But the government has to be able to stand up for the Japanese national interest….I agree in principle with free trade, and we should negotiate based on that. If the government had any ability to negotiate, there’d be nothing to worry about.

Now for the bad:

To prepare for the market opening, the DPJ put in the manifesto a domestic policy of income supplements for agricultural households. If we (upheld) that, agriculture would survive.

The legal vote-buying schemes of power politicians might buy a few votes, but that wouldn’t ensure the survival of agriculture. The romantic vision of the family farm is no longer enough to put food on the nation’s table, especially considering that most farmers in Japan are not exclusively engaged in farming. Policies that promote agribusiness are the means for survival, but few politicians want to campaign on that.

Now for the ugly:

People who criticize my assertions don’t understand anything at all.

He also sat for an interview with the Asahi Shimbun earlier this month, which they thoughtfully translated into English:

Question: It has been two and a half years since the change of government, but the political sector does not appear to be functioning. Why?

Ozawa: That means that democracy has not matured to a point of taking hold in Japan. It is often said that politicians are only as good as the people who elect them.

Remember what the journalist said about stupid people and stupid ideas?

Ozawa: The change in government with the Lower House election of August 2009 was a major decision by the Japanese public, which dislikes change. I believe they held a dream.

The Japanese public likes change a lot in politics. They keep voting for it. They don’t get to realize the dream they hold because Mr. Ozawa and his party keep stepping on it.

Ozawa: However, the DPJ did not have the qualifications necessary to respond to those expectations. It was unable to fulfill its role because the responsibility may have been just too large.

Either that or their capacity to fulfill their role was too small.

Noda Yoshihiko: a chip off the old blocks

Noda Yoshihiko isn’t as appalling as the vaporous Hatoyama Yukio or the repellent Kan Naoto, but the performance of those two has jaundiced the media’s view of anyone who would lead the DPJ government. Here’s the 16 March edition of the Shukan Post:

It is usual for prime ministers to make frantic efforts to get the people on their side when managing the affairs of state becomes difficult, but this man, who has little experience or few accomplishments at the upper levels of government, does not understand the meaning of authority. He increasingly curries favor with the bureaucrats, the Americans, and his powerless supporters, while showing his fat ass (肥えた尻) to the people.

What has been appalling are his Cabinet appointments, despite his trite claim that he was putting the right people in the right places. A career bureaucrat was quoted on his opinion of Finance Minister Azumi Jun, a former NHK broadcaster:

He’s pretty good. Like Kan, he doesn’t pretend that he knows anything. He admits that he doesn’t understand fiscal policy. He stands up for (Finance Ministry policy positions) in the Cabinet. He’s also cute, and has a cute personality.

Yes, he said kawaii.

With public sentiment running against his plan to increase taxes, Mr. Noda is trying to trim expenditures to convince the public that he actually is the fiscal hawk in the portrait the spin doctor present.

He’s announced a plan to reduce public sector hiring 40% from 2009 levels in 2013, to about 5,100 people. The figures are likely to be similar in 2014. Hiring was already down in 2011 and 2012, however.

Another plan to cut civil servant salaries by 7.8% passed the Diet rather quickly. Japan’s industrial media played up the legislation, but one of the jobs of kisha club reporters is to circulate the PR handouts for the Finance Ministry.

The Shukan Post points out that’s officially only JPY 300 billion a year for two years, and probably closer to 270 billion. The politicos said the savings would be spent on Tohoku recovery, but the bill contains no specific mention of that, nor has a framework been created for that expenditure. It hasn’t even been allocated to the special recovery account.

Meanwhile, Mr. Noda not only rescinded the freeze on civil servant salary increases in place since 2006 this spring, he gave them a double bump. That increase will also be reflected in overtime allowances. The bureaucrats still get overtime while attending to Diet members, i.e., sitting and watching the Diet in session or going out drinking with MPs after the session is over. They also get taxi vouchers for the trip home.

He’s also retained the special allowances public employees receive in addition to their salary — JPY 26.4 billion a year in residential allowances, apartments in Tokyo at roughly 20% the rent of commercial properties, and JPY 7.1 billion for cold weather assignments. There’s even a special allowance for those assigned to work at a ministry or agency’s main office, which eats another JPY 10.2 billion a year.

Former bureaucrat and current freelance journalist Wakabayashi Aki asked them why they needed a special allowance to work at headquarters. She was told assignments there had the unique and difficult responsibility of formulating legislation and policies.

In other words, they get a bonus on top of their salaries to do the jobs they were hired to do.

But the generosity of the Japanese public sector doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. They’re also giving the money away overseas.

International exchange

This week the Foreign Ministry released its 2011 white paper on ODA, which offered their explanation of the reasons for foreign aid. They emphasized the importance of international cooperation and pointed out that the feelings of trust and thanks toward Japan from overseas were fostered by lavish ODA. To support their assertion, they cited the assistance received from 163 countries, including developing countries, after the Tohoku disaster.

You might have thought money can’t buy you love, but the Foreign Ministry has other ideas.

Some of it read as if it were a script for the TV commercials of the kind that oil companies produce to convince viewers of their environmental awareness: Students in Sierra Leone sold their meals and collected US$ 500 for donations, and all the national civil servants of Mongolia donated one day’s salary to Tohoku relief. While Japan’s ODA has declined for 13 straight years, the Foreign Ministry touts it as a great success, saying “active donations to the international community are connected to Japan’s own benefit.”

The prime minister thinks so too. Mr. Noda met Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on 7 March in Tokyo and promised to help rebuild her country’s infrastructure, including expressways, railroads, and IT, after last year’s floods.

Said Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osama at a news conference:

A friend in need is a friend indeed. We will never forget the goodwill of the Thai people, who offered us support as a country during the Tohoku disaster. There are many Japanese in Thailand working for companies in the Japanese manufacturing industry, and the expectations toward Japan are great. We want to formulate solid measures that will not betray those expectations.

The folks at the Seetell website are on the case again. They quote this from the Nikkei:

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has decided to provide Japanese companies with subsidies for their 18 infrastructure-related projects in China and other Asian countries, The Nikkei learned Saturday. The subsidy program mainly targets projects for building smart communities in China and Vietnam. It covers not only exports of infrastructure facilities and systems but also smart community projects involving land development in China, Thailand and Vietnam, sources said.

After providing some details about the programs, the paper added:

The ministry will extend subsidies of tens of millions of yen to these projects, sources said.

Seetell asks several excellent questions:

So, the bureaucrats at METI can allocate funds to build cities in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, but no one in the government can seem to rally any focused effort to rebuild cities in Japan? What could possibly cause such a mismanagement of resources and priorities? Are not the Japanese people of greater concern than the Vietnamese, Thais, and Chinese?

And how does it fit that Japan is building cities in China when the US occupation of Okinawa continues for its 67th year because China is seen as a threat to Japan?

Here’s one Seetell missed:

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today welcomed a $340 million contribution by Japan, the highest amount that Japan has ever made in 10 years of vigorous support for the Global Fund. Japan is now making its first payment of US$ 216 million for its 2012 contribution.

“Japan has always been a leader in the fight against disease, but this is a great vote of confidence in our commitment to saving lives,” said Gabriel Jaramillo, General Manager of the Global Fund. “We recognize Japan’s determination to see real advances in global health, and we are equally determined to deliver.”

This new contribution represents a significant increase over Japan’s previous highest contribution of US$ 246 million in 2010. In 2011, Japan’s contribution was reduced to US $114 million following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan in March of last year, but this new contribution demonstrates that Japan’s commitment to the Global Fund remains steadfast.

The Boy Finance Minister Azumi the Cute is warning of a Greek-like catastrophe, people in the cold Tohoku region spent the winter in prehabs, but Japan had to almost triple the amount of money it gives to this group? The Global Fund couldn’t get by with just 100 million again this year? Japan was the only country they could tap for cash?

Here’s another from the Shukan Post. The IMF wanted $US 100 billion (about JPY 8 trillion) from Japan to help bail out the Europeans. Japan said it could only contribute about half of that, but the IMF insisted. The Finance Ministry finally told Mr. Azumi to cave again, so now Japan will help bail out the unbailable Greeks. The magazine points out that this amount of money, if kept in Japan, would remove the necessity to raise taxes for the Tohoku recovery, and the necessity to float bonds to cover national pension outlays.

To be fair, returning favors and gifts for favors and gifts received is an important element of Japanese culture. Nonetheless, one has to suspect that part of the motivation is the fear of government ministries and agencies that they’ll lose the budget money they don’t use. Besides, the government has been selectively generous about which favors it returns. Taiwan, which contributed JPY 20 billion to the Tohoku recovery, sent a representative to the memorial service in Tokyo last Sunday. They were left off the list of donor acknowledgments, and the representative was shunted to the general seating area on the second floor while the other foreign delegates sat downstairs in a VIP section.

Prime Minister Noda later said he was sorry if he offended anyone, but his lack of sincerity was offensive in itself. Chief Cabinet Minister Fujimura admitted the seating arrangements were settled at the Foreign Ministry and the Cabinet Office.

Na Nu Na Nu

Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio enjoys his nickname of The Alien, but one has to wonder if the entire DPJ that he once led is just the Martian Space Party morphed into human form.

Last week, the DPJ announced the appointment of Mr. Hatoyama as their supreme advisor on foreign policy and Kan Naoto as their supremo for new energy policies.

How fitting. One screwed up relations with the U.S., and the other screwed up Fukushima.

Mr. Kan also gave a speech to a DPJ study group on the 5th, attended by mid-tier and younger party members. The topic: Achieving real governance by the political class. “Japan should give serious thought,” he said, “to its approach toward state governance organs.”

Considering his accomplishments in office, that speech was over before his listeners could settle in for a nap.

If this were a backwards country, as the man said, Ozawa Ichiro might wind up being hung. But civilized Japan instead hung his portrait in a room in the Diet chambers last week.

A rule allows those MPs with 25 years of service to put their picture on a wall as long as the governmnent doesn’t pay for it. One of his political protégées did the painting, so he didn’t have to dip into his well-stocked safe at home for the petty cash.

If this were a backwards country, he might also be in the dock along with the other war criminals. But then again, he already is in the dock for political fund problems.

The party that insisted every day from 2007 to 2009 that elections be held immediately is none to excited about holding one themselves now that the executioner is motioning for them to stick their head into the hole of the guillotine. During a TV interview on the morning of the 10th, Deputy Prime Minister Okada Katsuya said:

If we dissolve the lower house now, the anger of the people will be directed at the existing political parties.

It already is, but then Mr. Okada is not known for his insight into popular sentiment.

They would complain that we were only holding elections without accomplishing anything.

Instead, they’re complaining that the DPJ has done little, what little they did was bad, and what they want to do now is what they promised they wouldn’t do.

Anachronisms

It is clear to everyone that these are men whose time has gone. They are living relics of a now irrelevant age. Their approach and viewpoint, while stemming in part from the self-interest endemic to politicians everywhere, is as obsolete as the Cold War. Adding their evident contempt for their own citizens to the list of charges means they’ll have a dread judge to face in the next election.

Disturbed as much by the failure of the Iron Triangle to deal with the triple disaster as they were by the disasters themselves, the people — wiser than their leaders — have moved on. Former Koizumi privatization guru Takenaka Heizo recently published a book-length dialog with former Yokohama Mayor Nakata Hiroshi, who is working as an advisor to Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru. Mr. Takenaka observed:

The people now have high hopes for new regional parties, and I think there’s a good reason for that. The era of putting government administration in the hands of the bureaucracy and somehow achieving consistent growth is over. This is now an era for solving our problems. In society’s terms, people are looking for new CEOs. In fact, the best CEOs are the heads of local governments.

The next posts will examine Mr. Hashimoto, the most prominent of those local government heads.

Afterwords:

Try this for a refresher of what democracy means in Ozawa World.

Worried about the potential unpleasantness of Kusaka Kimindo’s comment about “Western-worshipping intellectuals”? Don’t be. Nothing bad will happen, and a renewed appreciation for Japanese values might be salubrious. Besides, even a cursory glance at current social, political, and economic conditions in the United States and Europe is enough to know how well contemporary Western values are working out.

*****
Here’s Takeuchi Mari singing Genki wo Dashite (Cheer Up!).

There’s a good reason this is an evergreen song in Japan, and it’s not just the melody. The premise of the song is that a woman is singing to a friend who’s down in the dumps because she’s been dumped by a man.

But the lyrics have other applications as well:

All you have to do is start again at the beginning…

If you feel like you want to be happy,
Tomorrow will be easy to find.

Life isn’t as bad as you think
So cheer up and show me that smile.

Corrupt

Corrupt: 1. orig., changed from a sound condition to an unsound one; spoiled; contaminated, rotten 2. deteriorated from the normal or standard; specif., a) morally unsound or debased; perverted; evil; depraved…c) containing alterations, errors, or admixtures of foreignisms; said of texts, languages, etc.
- Webster’s New World Dictionary

THE Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a panel consisting of 30 “university professors, lawyers, and journalists”, released its report this week on the response of the Japanese government and industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster last March.

The coverage of that report by some elements of the mass media, both in the Anglosphere and Japan, can only be described as corrupt.

The foundation’s founder, Funabashi Yoichi, is the former editor in chief of the Asahi Shimbun. The New York Times’ Martin Fackler writes the following in his article on the release of the report:

“(Mr. Funabashi) said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the government’s own investigation into the accident, which were released in an interim report in December. A big difference involved one of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked nuclear plant.

“The government’s investigation sided with Tepco by saying that Mr. Kan, a former social activist who often clashed with Japan’s establishment, had simply misunderstood the company, which wanted to withdraw only a portion of its staff. Mr. Funabashi said his foundation’s investigators had interviewed most of the people involved — except executives at Tepco, which refused to cooperate — and found that the company had in fact said it wanted a total pullout.

“He credited Mr. Kan with making the right decision in forcing Tepco not to abandon the plant.

“‘Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses,’ Mr. Funabashi said, ‘but his decision to storm into Tepco and demand that it not give up saved Japan.’”

Ah, so. Kan Naoto is the savior of Japan.

The AFP news agency report identifies Kitazawa Koichi as “the panel head” and contains the following passage:

“The panel said as the situation on Japan’s tsunami-wrecked coast worsened, Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) had wanted to abandon the plant and evacuate its workers.

“But the utility, which refused to co-operate with the study, was ordered to keep men on site by then prime minister Naoto Kan.

“Experts concluded that if the premier had not stuck to his guns, Fukushima would have spiralled further out of control, with catastrophic consequences.

“‘When the prime minister’s office was aware of the risk the country may not survive (the crisis)…TEPCO’s president (Masataka) Shimizu….frantically called’ to tell the premier he wanted his staff to leave the crippled nuclear reactor, panel head Koichi Kitazawa told a news conference.

“Kitazawa said Kan threatened to break up the powerful utility if the company insisted on pulling its men out.

“He said Kan’s refusal to bow to TEPCO’s demand had averted a worse crisis.

“Kan told Shimizu: ‘It’s impossible. If you withdraw staff, TEPCO will be demolished,’ according to Kitazawa.”

That last sentence is a mistranslation, perhaps deliberate, but we’ll get to that later.

“‘Consequently, it’s Mr Kan’s biggest contribution that the Fukushima 50 remained at the site,’ added Kitazawa, referring to dozens of operatives who worked to contain the accident and were feted as heroes.”

In their haste to set the agenda and disseminate their narrative, both the New York Times and AFP omitted some details.

For example, here is what Mr. Kitazawa actually said, from the original Japanese:

“(Mr. Kan) himself rushed into Tokyo Electric’s headquarters, which had requested that they be allowed to leave the site. In the end, 50 workers remained on the site. It is thought by some that this ultimately averted the worst-case scenario and was a great achievement. However, most of the excessive intervention on the site by the Kantei (i.e., Japan’s equivalent of the White House or 10 Downing St.), including the former prime minister’s involvement — down to the size of one of the batteries at the site — cannot be praised. In addition, the prime minister’s information disclosure was a failure and caused a sense of mistrust to spread among the people. We have no choice other than to say that overall, their response was a failure.”

(N.B.: The second use of the word failure was fugokaku, which has the sense of failing a school examination.)

Of the English-language reports that I read, only Reuters conveyed the panel’s conclusion that Mr. Kan was a failure, and then only on the second page of the website report I saw (The Chicago Tribune).

Fackler and the New York Times quotes Mr. Funabashi as saying that Kan Naoto saved Japan. No Japanese media report I’ve seen — and I’ve read several — has quoted that statement. Of course they quote extensively from the report on the behavior of Mr. Kan and the Kantei, but the tone is quite different.

Some direct quotes from the report follow. In regard to the intervention of Mr. Kan and the Kantei:

“It is not clear that it was useful in preventing the spread of the damage, and it undeniably increased the risk of needless confusion and the further development of the accident.”

And:

“The prime minister and the Kantei command center fell into an abnormal state of tension and confusion.”

That allows you to put into context the breathless “reporting” in the West, such as this from AFP:

“A worst-case scenario sketched out by the Japanese government foresaw the end of Tokyo in a chain of nuclear explosions as the Fukushima crisis erupted, an independent panel said.

“Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano told investigators: ‘I had this demonic scenario in my head’ that nuclear reactors could break down one after another. If that happens Tokyo will be finished’.

“Plans were drawn up for the mass evacuation of the capital as Edano — the government’s point man on the nuclear crisis — fretted that reactors all along the coast could go into meltdown and engulf the city of 13 million people.”

No excerpt of the official report I read contained the conclusion that Tokyo was in danger of being “finished”. They did say that Mr. Kan and Mr. Edano had lost their heads, however. Though the AFP calls Edano Yukio the government’s “point man”, it does not mention that Mr. Edano’s sole professional experience before becoming a politician was that of a lawyer specializing in the defense of labor union radicals.

The portions of the report the Anglosphere media omitted present a rather different picture of events. Such as this in regard to the venting of Reactor #1 on the night of 11 March and the morning of 12 March:

“At a minimum, it cannot be recognized that the decision of the Kantei, the order of the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and the prime minister’s demand were useful in promptly achieving the venting.”

In regard to the decision to insert seawater into the reactor on the evening of the 12th:

“The debate at the Kantei had no effect in the end, but if the Kantei’s (Kan’s) order to stop the insertion had been obeyed, it would have resulted in a dangerous situation with the possibility that the work would have been delayed.”

In regard to the insertion of seawater in Reactor #3 on the 13th:

“The Kantei expressed the opinion that fresh water should be preferred to seawater, and that opinion was conveyed from Tokyo Electric to (Fukushima plant manager) Yoshida….the switch to fresh water in the end brought about little or no improvement in conditions. The change in course had the possibility of needlessly exposing the workers to radiation. Not only did the Kantei’s instructions delay the work, there are suspicions that it increased the danger of failure of the water insertion into the reactor.”

There’s more:

“There are few examples in which the Kantei’s intervention into accident management on-site were an effective response to the accident. In most cases, it had absolutely no effect, or it increased the risk of worsening the situation due to needless confusion and stress.”

And:

“The risk involved in the leader of government intervening on-site in the response to the nuclear disaster should be an important lesson from the Fukushima accident to be shared by all.”

And:

“The Kantei’s initial response after the Fukushima accident was a series of crises. During the systemically unexpected developments, the core (of those responding) consisted of a handful of politicians without specialized knowledge or experience. Their grandstanding response continued as the crisis unfolded. It cannot be said that (this response) was at all sophisticated. Rather, this was immature and slapdash crisis management.”

Remember, these are direct quotes from the report.

On Mr. Kan specifically:

“The excessive involvement and intervention under Kantei leadership was criticized for its micromanagement. The Prime Minister was deeply involved in accident management, and it is undeniable that he was negligent in providing sufficient attention to overall crisis management.”

But wait: Martin Fackler and the New York Times quoted Funabashi Yoichi as saying that Kan Naoto saved Japan. In fact, Fackler also wrote:

“Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected public intellectuals.”

Keep in mind which newspaper that respected public intellectual edited as you read the following website commentary by Abiru Rui of the Sankei Shimbun. Mr. Abiru begins by noting that every major Japanese newspaper extensively quoted the report’s criticisms of Mr. Kan and used that criticism for their headlines.

Except one.

He explains the reason for that:

“Though all of the newspapers accurately reported the private sector panel’s severe criticism of Mr. Kan and the Kantei, the Asahi did not include any of these problems in its headlines. The text of the articles does not refer to them at all. The newspaper ignored them completely. This can only be said to be abnormal.

“The Asahi (previously) ran a series of articles titled The Trap of Prometheus. They praised Mr. Kan to an unbelievable degree, and continued to beautify his behavior to the extent it sets one’s teeth on edge…Of course, the Sankei will insist on its own viewpoint, and it can be understood that the Asahi will do the same. But to go to this extent to avoid writing about Mr. Kan’s problems, and not informing its readers of the facts, is to betray its subscribers.

“The articles in The Trap of Prometheus are written as if Mr. Kan’s behavior was calm and collected from start to finish, but the panel’s report says that he panicked. Were the circumstances inconvenient for them? In any event, (the articles in) The Trap of Prometheus had the appearance of thoroughness — they even captioned a photograph of a sandal of Terada Manabu, one of the prime minister’s aides.

“The chairman of the group that conducted this investigation was the Asahi’s former editor in chief, Funabashi Yoichi. It seems as if they didn’t care what anyone unconnected with the company had to say. Rather, it was a case of “We will convey the Asahi’s strong determination and resolve to protect Mr. Kan.”

Do I need to mention that the New York Times, the Asahi Shimbun, and Kan Naoto share the same political philosophy?

The sober and steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state

You also won’t read that when Kan Naoto “ordered” the Tokyo Electric Power officials to keep personnel on the site, he had no authority to issue an order to them, as a private-sector company, to do anything at all. There are only glancing references to his threat to dismantle the company if they didn’t listen to him (which he also has no authority to do). His threat to break up the utility was the mistranslated part of the AFP piece.

In fact, there’s quite a lot of information that you won’t read in these accounts — That Mr. Kan did order the Self-Defense Forces to leave the site when he thought it was too dangerous. (Government employees should be saved, but private-sector employees should be sacrificed?)…That Mr. Kan told Tokyo Electric that employees “60 years old or older” could be sent to the site (Younger employees should be saved, but older employees should be sacrificed?)…That it is widely suspected Mr. Kan promised to save Tokyo Electric if the utility started contributing to his Democratic Party instead of the opposition LDP.

The Japanese mass media — other than the Asahi — didn’t miss any of that.

It is curious. Many news media consumers in the Anglosphere would never take at face value anything the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, or the BBC had to say about Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or the EU, to cite a few of many examples.

Yet they think that turning the cyberpage somehow waves a magic wand of objectivity and credibility over the cesspool. For some reason, the readers swallow it whole and start “retweeting” and “liking” and getting all social media about everything. You know — “having their say”.

More than 60 years ago, former U.S. President Harry Truman said that he felt sorry for the average citizen who wakes up in the morning, reads the newspaper, and thereby thinks he knows something of what is happening in the world.

Sixty years and many revelations later, however, I am not inclined to be so generous.

It is no longer possible to be sympathetic to people who accept without reservation the work of those who are so clearly corrupt.

Afterwords:

Tokyo Electric Power officials chose not to be interviewed by the panel. The panel thinks there is insufficient evidence for the utility’s claim that it did not intend to fully withdraw from Fukushima. While agreeing that the panel could very well be correct, some people in Japan are now wondering if that conclusion was influenced by the statements of Mr. Kan and other government officials, who might have gotten carried away by their panic and mistrust of the utility. They are even finding some evidence to suggest that might have been the case. But this post is long enough already…

As always, links are only for the legit. Certainly not for the corrupt.

UPDATE: The Asahi English edition finally has an article on line that is critical of Mr. Kan and his government’s response. Some of the Japanese to English translation is amusing. For example:

“He cannot be given a passing grade from the overall perspective of his handling of the crisis,” Kitazawa said.

As I noted above, Mr. Kitazawa clearly said “He failed”.

Also:

The report quotes Kan as saying: “How large is the battery that you need? What are the dimensions? Weight? Can it be transported by helicopter?”

One participant who overheard the exchange told the investigative committee: “I became somewhat frightened when I thought about whether it was good for the nation to have the prime minister looking into such details.”

“Somewhat frightened”, eh? The original was zotto shita. That means “I shuddered to think that…” It can even be rendered in more intense language, such as “It made my flesh crawl”, “I was horrified to hear”, or “It made my blood run cold”.

But in Asahiworld, that’s “somewhat frightened”.

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There goes the last fig leaf

NOW this is getting interesting: The lead story on the front page of the Nishinippon Shimbun this morning is an expose of the Democratic Party government’s policy reviews, in which panels of politicians and private sector experts grill bureaucrats, ostensibly to eliminate wasteful programs and save taxpayer money. The first was conducted to popular acclaim in late 2009 by former cheesecake model/TV personality-turned-Cabinet Minister Ren Ho and Edano Yukio. Mr. Edano later went on to preside over the party’s poor showing in the 2010 upper house election as DPJ secretary-general and the government cover-up of the Fukushima disaster as Kan Naoto’s second chief cabinet secretary. He’s now the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Ministry.

While the public was thrilled by the first such review — Japanese taxpayers know there’s enough pork being distributed to feed every nation in Christendom during Easter — those who paid close attention soon discovered the process was a dog and pony show orchestrated and scripted by the Finance Ministry, both to assert its dominance over the rest of the bureaucracy as well as the DPJ government. Your Party Secretary General Eda Kenji revealed on his website that he was given a copy of the first script. The panels’ only authority was to recommend cuts, most of the cuts the panels recommended never materialized, and subsequent panels were largely ignored by the public.

Now, for the first time, this story has hit the fan of the industrial mass media, or one blade of it at least. The government conducted another policy review last month on the subject of social welfare programs. The Nishinippon Shimbun managed to obtain copies of what they call a “crib sheet” citing examples of issues to be discussed, and another document with suggestions for how to summarize the proceedings at the end. The documents were created by the Cabinet Office with input from the Finance Ministry. The newspaper reports that most of the panel’s conclusions were in line with the ministry’s initial proposals. The crib sheet suggestions on reevaluating social welfare systems were identical to documents distributed at the session presenting Finance Ministry positions.

Here’s what Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko had to say about the recommendations of the policy review on Monday:

All the declarations presented to the people at these reviews are important for the future of our country…The Cabinet takes these declarations very seriously, and we must link them to concrete results.

Mr. Noda, by the way, reportedly gets very upset at the charge that he is a Finance Ministry puppet. He’ll also get upset at this passage from the newspaper’s editorial:

When the Liberal Democratic Party was in power, the Finance Ministry would cut budget requests from each of the ministries when the following year’s budget was formulated at yearend, and each of the Cabinet ministers would negotiate directly with the Finance Minister to restore them. It was a set performance to give the public the impression that the politicians were in charge. The opposition Democratic Party lambasted this as an event staged by the politicians and the bureaucracy. Now, their criticism could boomerang on them.

The paper prominently featured this comment by political scientist and political devolution advocate Shindo Muneyuki, a former Chiba University professor and current director of the Research Center for Decentralized Policies and Systems:

It is clear that the Finance Ministry and the Cabinet Office tried to manipulate public opinion to gain support for themselves by creating a script and employing a group of prominent private sector individuals who favor cutting some expenditures…the government is no longer qualified to criticize Kyushu Electric Power for its fake e-mail campaign (to restart the Genkai nuclear plant).

They also ran some comments from former METI official and bureaucratic reform advocate Koga Shigeaki. Remember that Mr. Koga was on the receiving end of a veiled threat on the floor of the Diet during his testimony last year by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito. Here’s what he wrote:

The Finance Ministry was viewed from the start has having set the boundaries for the policy reviews, but this is blatant. They might have been fearful of getting caught at first, but over time, they lost their sense of caution and no longer bothered to create the impression that the reviews weren’t choreographed. The DPJ and the Finance Ministry just began to accept this as a matter of course. Most of the members of the Government Revitalization Unit in the Cabinet Office are from the Finance Ministry…and the topics they choose to discuss are arbitrary. For example, proposals that would upset the Finance Ministry, such as the one calling for a 20% reduction in civil servant salaries, will never be discussed.

The ministry creates a sense of gratitude in the Democratic Party, which wants to raise taxes, and it benefits by being allowed to eliminate parts of the budget over which it has no discretion. The DPJ benefits from the PR…In any event, there is no meaning in debating serious issues such as these in just a few hours, and it’s only advertising for the government. (The panel) presents conclusions in a tangible form, and all it does is give Ren Ho a stage on which to perform.

Also of interest is that it is not easy to find reports on the panel’s recommendations for social welfare programs, though there were reports on a different investigation last month into nuclear power policy. Thus, it is difficult to know whose ox is being gored by the revelations. And speaking of government PR, here’s a report of Mr. Noda addressing the opening meeting of the panel on a government website (Ren Ho is to his right in the photo). He says:

The ‘proposal-based policy review,’ which was decided in the previous Unit meeting, will start on November 20. I would like to position it as a tool for building a new, stronger Japan moving forward…In order for Japan to regain robust growth potential and bring more prosperity to people’s lives, we need to overhaul outdated regulations as well as regulations and other systems that only serve to protect the vested interests.

Fighting the vested interests, eh? How droll.

Finally, it is most interesting that the national dailies have yet to report this story as I write. A Google news search in Japanese turns up only articles from the Nishinippon Shimbun, though Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu was asked about it at his morning news conference. Caught flat-footed, Mr. Fujimura said he needed some time to make up an excuse would look into it. It would be fascinating to know who leaked the information to the newspaper, surely with the intent of injecting it into the public consciousness indirectly.

The newspaper tries to present some balance by offering the opinions of two professors defending the ministry’s input. The ministry is also known, however, to cultivate a stable of university professors and other members of the commentariat to promote its positions and defend it, and this pair likely are part of the group of steeds.

In two short years, the Democratic Party government’s credibility has been shredded in both foreign and domestic policy. These policy reviews have been their only putative success, and their credibility and legitimacy have been hanging by the slenderest of threads. That thread has now been cut.

****
They’ve got all the answers and lovely dancers too.

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Is the truth a lie?

DURING the past week, a debate has been underway in Japan about whether the government promised the Americans they would join negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or whether they promised only to hold discussions about joining negotiations. Wait, don’t fall asleep — I know that’s abstruse, but the Japanese national conversation, in which everyone is participating except the Noda Cabinet, involves more than just buying and selling. It also includes the questions of whether the TPP is an American attempt at economic hegemony in the Pacific to counteract the move of China to establish its own hegemony, and whether the Noda Cabinet is being honest with the Japanese public and the Diet on a matter of critical importance.

Prime Minister Noda and the foreign ministry swear that he never committed to joining TPP negotiations during the APEC summit last weekend. Perhaps they are telling the truth — and perhaps that truth is concealing a lie.

During that summit, Economy, Trade, and Industry Minister Edano Yukio met with United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk. NTV (Nippon Television Network) this week ran a video that it claims shows a binder with talking points prepared by the METI bureaucrats for Mr. Edano to use in the discussion.

Here’s a screenshot of the document:

Here are the talking points:

● Immediately before departing Japan, and following a national debate, a decision was made by the Noda administration to participate in TPP negotiations.

● There was discussion about why a decision (should) be made now, when recovery and reconstruction (from the Tohoku disaster) is our greatest priority, but it was resolved that Japan’s participation in TPP would be in Japan’s own interest.

● First, using the TPP to foster a regional order that can comply with sophisticated rules in the Asia-Pacific region, and our participation in that process, is in the Japanese national interest.

● Second, overcoming the trials of extensive liberalization will result in greater growth capacity for Japan.

● Japan is prepared to submit all categories and sectors to negotiation, including non-tariff measures. We intend to conduct a strong debate during those negotiations.

● We understand that the approval of all the nations concerned is required for our formal participation in the negotiations. We want to proceed with lively discussions with your country in particular and participate in negotiations as soon as possible. We would like to ask about specific ways for moving those discussions forward in the future.

In re: WTO – ITA

● Expanded negotiations for ITA (information technology agreements) are, with the TPP, one way to break through to trade liberalization in the future, and will be a good stimulus for the Doha Round. We want to continue to be closely linked to this in Japan.

No one other than those directly involved knows the specifics of the Edano-Kirk discussions, or whether Mr. Edano actually said what is written here. (Here’s what he said they said.)

But if this document is on the legit, it would explain the reason the Americans are sticking with their story (and not changing the report on the government website) that the Japanese promised to hold negotiations and to put all goods and services on the table. It would also demonstrate that the Noda government is, as is widely suspected, lying about it all.

One’s position on the TPP pro or con is irrelevant here. What is relevant is whether the government is lying to the people about a matter that will significantly change Japan. Also relevant is whether this decision is being made by the elected government or is in fact yet another decision made and executed by the unelected government of the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy, using politicians as their tools.

It should be remembered that many people, some of who are in the DPJ government, were upset for years because they thought the old LDP governments lied about allowing American naval vessels to bring nuclear weapons into Japan. One of the first things they did was to retrieve and make public documents showing that the LDP governments did, in fact, let the Americans bring nuclear weapons into the country. (The U.S. stopped in the early 90s. The public responded with a collective yawn at the revelations, however. It was an issue for people of an older generation.)

The LDP thought their actions were justified to maintain the alliance with the United States. How then does the current DPJ behavior differ in substance from what the LDP did?

Mr. Edano was in the studio during the NTV presentation (that’s him in the screenshot insert), and he kept insisting that Japan only committed to discussions leading to negotiations.

It should also be remembered that Mr. Edano was the Chief Cabinet Secretary in the Kan Cabinet and began lying to the Japanese public with his boss from the first day of the Tohoku disaster. He’s had plenty of practice before this.

*****
During the recent Question Time in the Diet, upper house MP Sato Yukari made the point that the government’s own research shows the ASEAN + 6 free trade scheme would be more economically advantageous to Japan than the TPP.

In a similar vein, the Seetell website has translated into English excerpts from a Japanese-language article by Waseda Prof. Noguchi Yukio that appeared in the Nikkei Veritas (which requires paid registration to view). Prof. Noguchi is known for writing a book arguing that the reliance on/dominance by Japan’s bureaucracy in policy matters and affairs of state did not start during the LDP era, but dates back to 1940. He’s also pessimistic about a resolution of the government’s fiscal problems without a great deal of economic unpleasantness. Here are the excerpts from his article:

The Cabinet Office released estimates on Oct. 25 of the economic boost from the TPP. Real gross domestic product would go up 0.54%, or by 2.7 trillion yen, according to the projections. But that is the expected increase over the next decade or so, which means a yearly average of just 0.05%, or 269.5 billion yen. In other words, the TPP’s potential for growing Japan’s exports and expanding its economy is so small as to be negligible.

He also brings the Chinese into the discussions:

Japan’s biggest export market is China, which makes that nation’s response to the TPP an important element in Japan’s economic fate. Some say that if Japan joins the TPP, China will seek membership as well. That is not going to happen for two reasons.

First, China itself can expect little export growth from joining the TPP, putting it in the same boat as Japan. In China’s case, however, there is also the fact that its U.S.-bound exports will continue to grow even if it does not enter the trade pact.

The second reason China would not join is the investor-state dispute settlement provision. This is an agreement that lets companies sue member countries for damages caused as a result of national polices.

To understand why the ISD clause is such a big problem for China, just think about Beijing’s clash with Google Inc. If China loses in a dispute involving its censorship, for example, it would have a devastating impact that could threaten the very foundation of the country.

So, should Japan take part in the TPP while aiming for an FTA with China? That would be impossible. The TPP is an element of the U.S. strategy in Asia, which seeks to hold back China’s expansion. America is unlikely to tolerate Japan signing both the TPP and an FTA with China.

There is no way to know for sure how China would respond to the TPP. But Beijing clearly is not going to welcome a policy that seeks to exclude the country.

China could very well react by moving toward economic partnerships that do not include Japan, such as pursuing an FTA with the European Union. Because the EU maintains higher import tariffs than the U.S., China has an incentive to sign such an agreement. For the EU, particularly Germany, China is a major market, making a China-EU FTA perfectly plausible. Should that happen, there is a danger that Germany could sweep the Chinese market, bringing ruin to Japanese manufacturing.

Further, he recognizes some real benefits:

Of course, some aspects of the TPP would have desirable effects for Japan. Lower tariffs on farm imports would be good news for Japanese consumers. Domestic food prices are strikingly high from a global perspective. And among industrialized countries, Japanese have a considerably high Engel’s coefficient, meaning that they spend a high proportion of their income on food. Lowering food prices is an urgent matter. That being said, Japan can lower agricultural tariffs on its own, and there is no need to sign on to the TPP for that purpose.

Note that last sentence. There has been a shift in the arguments made by some pro-TPP supporters away from the economic benefits and toward the benefits accruing from a larger economic alliance with the United States. See, for example, the quote from Prof. Ikeda Nobuo in the last Ichigen Koji, which you can access from the top of this post.

When I first arrived in Japan, politics were still dominated by the LDP (and Tanaka Kakuei, for that matter). The DPJ, the current ruling party, did not exist. The primary opposition was the Socialist Party, which survives today as the greatly diminished Social Democrats.

Those Japanese interested in reform and uninterested in the Socialists (which had close ties with North Korea and kind words for Karl Marx in the party charter) viewed the United States government as Japan’s most effective opposition party. That didn’t mean they liked it; that was just how things were.

Is not the argument in favor of the TPP as a means to form an economic alliance with the U.S. in the Pacific, with the unstated but obvious premise of countering the rise of China, a remodeling of the old Cold War alliance model? Also, the argument that the TPP is necessary for domestic reform seems to be an updating of the logic of the Japanese reformers 30 years ago.

Prof. Noguchi and others argue that the Japanese can (or at least should) handle that on their own, and I agree. It’s time to slough off the old and ill-fitting garments handed down to the American stepchild.

Polls show that people in their 20s and 30s are those most opposed to Japan’s participation in the TPP scheme. Some say this is because they’re concerned about their employment prospects in a freer market, but I disagree. That age group never wore those hand-me-down garments to begin with. That too was an issue for an older generation.

Afterwords:
It’s possible that China’s exports to the U.S. may not grow significantly in the future, in contradiction to Prof. Noguchi. There are studies suggesting that rising wages in China mean such regions as the American South (Alabama, specifically) will become competitive for manufacturing and allow companies to shift procurement there before the end of the decade.

*****
So, which will happen by 2016: Japan officially joins the TPP, or this?

The DPJ promise keepers

IT doesn’t require a Diogenes carrying a lantern at high noon to look for the positive accomplishments of the Democratic Party of Japan since forming their first government in September 2009. Their singular achievement is to have irrefutably proven to their fellow countrymen that anything any politician says should be viewed as balderdash of the lowest order. If they’ve demonstrated any excellence, it is in the margin by which they’ve cleared the bar of the global malarkey standard for the political class.

For example, a dip into the party’s own Japanese language news archive reveals that a group of DPJ legislators submitted a package of four bills in the Diet on 9 May 2007 — when they were in the opposition — to root out amakudari. In general, that’s the practice of giving senior civil servants post-retirement positions in quangos in the sectors they were once responsible for regulating. Many of those organizations were created and maintained with the intent of providing that employment.

The DPJ bills would have amended the national civil servants’ law to limit their employment and to adopt other controls on retirement. They would have prohibited the recommendation by anyone in government for hiring an ex-bureaucrat at the quasi-governmental agencies. They would also have extended the period from two years to five for rehiring a civil servant for government work, and extended the restrictions on employment at for-profit firms to non-profits.

One of the MPs submitting the legislation was Mabuchi Sumio, later to become the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport in the Kan Cabinet.

Matsumoto Takeaki, then the chairman of the party’s Policy Research Council, said at the time:

When the DPJ takes over government, of course a very big broom will be sweeping clean.

Mr. Matsumoto was Kan Naoto’s second foreign minister, and is the great-great-grandson of Ito Hirobumi, Japan’s first prime minister. His very big broom has now turned out to be a foxtail duster.

The primary receptacle for amakudari employment is incorporated administrative agencies. Last month, the Government Revitalization Unit, chaired by Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, submitted a report after examining 103 of those agencies for possible merger or elimination. The unit said that elimination, privatization, or combination for 88 of them — more than 80% — was “either impossible or difficult”. The Cabinet had already decided to eliminate 13 of the remaining 15. As for the other two, the unit “will consider them for privatization”.

Who wants to wager that a private sector auditor or accountant wouldn’t take one pass through those 103 agencies and reverse the ratio of the quick and the dead?

In Japanese, hora is the word for the trumpet triton shell, and the expression “to blow a hora” is a synonym for loud boasting or a gasconade. Another dip into the DPJ archives shows that the party’s bugle boys have been playing seashell reveille for quite some time.

An article dated 8 September 2005 describes a campaign speech by Edano Yukio, then the party’s acting secretary-general. He later became Mr. Kan’s second chief cabinet secretary, and is now the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry. During the speech, Mr. Edano claimed that the then-ruling LDP’s proposed tax reform was actually a stealth tax increase, and said:

Japan has become bound by its debt. What will happen if tax revenues are insufficient? The bill for a tax increase has already been presented to you…It is the LDP who would fill the hole created by debt with reform of the tax code and tax increases….We of the DPJ promise to cut waste and rectify the problem of JPY 10 trillion of wasted tax in three years.

Three years! Just think — one more year and they will have accomplished exactly what Mr. Edano accused the LDP of wanting to do. And that’s after two record-high budgets with record-high deficits and record-high deficit bond floats.

Mr. Edano added that the aging of the population meant that preventing tax increases should be only one part of fiscal policy. The use of tax funds and how to reduce waste is “the most important issue for politics”. He declared that the party would eliminate special pensions for national legislators and reduce the number of seats in the Diet.

He also said that “merely changing the signboard will not eliminate waste.” Rather than “politics that too easily increases revenue, and performance politics that bamboozle the people”, the voters should choose the DPJ, with “politics that will cut out all waste, including that from the body of politics itself, and will present policies earnestly and honestly.”

One of those earnest and honest policies was a promised sweeping reform of the national pension system that would “put people first”.

Last month the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare announced they were considering plans to raise the age of eligibility for welfare pensions to somewhere in the range of 68 to 70. The government is currently in the process of raising the eligibility age to 65 in stages, and they now want to accelerate that process by four years. Their objective is to “stabilize the revenue sources” for the pension program. Another idea they’re mulling, however, is to modify the reduction of pension payments for those people aged 60-64 who both receive a pension and work, if their combined income is greater than JPY 280,000. To encourage the incentive to work, they’re thinking of raising the income limit to either JPY 330,000 or 460,000. That will of course also raise the amount of money the government pays out in pensions. Another part of the plan is an increase in pension premiums.

More news on the putting people first front emerged this week. During the Fukuda administration, a new medical system for the late-stage elderly (people 75 or older) came into force. One aspect of the system was the requirement that the late-stage elderly who could afford to do so would be required to spend more for health care. The DPJ promised to abolish that system in both their 2009 and 2010 election manifestos, and campaigned against it under the slogan, “Don’t torment the elderly”. They said they would create a new system to be put in place in 2013, which means they have to come up with something by next year’s regular Diet session to keep that promise.

Don't torment the elderly, says DPJ pol Watanabe Kozo (79) during an election campaign

The Asahi Shimbun reports that the health ministry has been looking at five plans, two of which include the abolition of the current system. The ministry says they are impossible to implement because they would require an additional JPY 1.1 trillion in funding. The other three plans call for maintaining the system “for the time being”. Two of those plans, however, only change the name of the system and the government body responsible for implementing it. The third would keep it going as a stage to prepare for elimination, and seek additional funding from municipalities to help pay for it. A ministry official admitted to the Asahi: “That means elimination is impossible in all of the plans.”

In a parliamentary democracy, a ruling party that decides to pursue policies that are at such variance with their election manifesto is expected to dissolve the legislature and hold a general election to seek the approval of the people. Indeed, that was another DPJ promise when it was in the opposition, as one more scoop from their archives reveals. During Question Time in the Diet with then-Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo on 21 January 2008, MP Furukawa Motohisa said:

If the party thought raising the consumption tax was necessary in light of a radical reform of social security system, the amount of money to be raised and the use of that money would be written into a manifesto and placed before the public in a general election.

That no election is forthcoming, or will be anytime soon, should not be a surprise, considering the source. In 2005, the World Economic Forum selected Mr. Furukawa as a Young Global Leader. You’ve heard of the Junior Chamber of Commerce? He’s a Junior Davos Man. He’s now a Made Man in the world’s elite.

Not quite nine months after that, on 1 October 2008, then-DPJ President Ozawa Ichiro offered this rebuttal to Prime Minister Aso Taro following the latter’s first speech to the Diet:

Two consecutive LDP presidents have given up their governments in a year’s time, and now here’s the third without a general election. The sight of the prime minister taking office in these circumstances strains credulity.

Not any more it doesn’t. Nothing the DPJ does will ever again be too difficult to believe.

*****
Chuck got there, but the DPJ won’t.

The Hasegawa-Hachiro interview

TAKAHASHI Yoichi might have been the first to smell something fishy in the news media’s version of the second of former Economy, Trade, and Industry Minister Hachiro Yoshio’s two gaffes. Mr. Hachiro might have survived the first one, but the second resulted in his resignation.

Mr. Takahashi, a Finance Ministry veteran and a proponent of a radical reform of the bureaucracy, noticed there were variations in the Hachiro comment as quoted by the major media outlets. He provided the following list.

* “I’ll contaminate you with radiation.” Sankei Shimbun 9 September 23:51
「放射能をうつしてやる」

* “I’ll contaminate you with radiation.” Kyodo 10 September 00:07
「放射能をうつしてやる」

* “I’ll put some radiation on you.” Asahi Shimbun 10 September 01:30
「放射能をつけちゃうぞ」

* “I’ve put some radiation on you.” Mainichi Shimbun / 10 September 02:59
「放射能をつけたぞ」

* “Hey, it’s radiation!” Yomiuri Shimbun / 10 September 03:03
「ほら、放射能」

* “How about if I put some radiation on you?” Nikkei Shimbun / 10 September 13:34
「放射能をつけてやろうか」

* “I’ll give you some of this radiation.” FNN 10 September 15:05
「放射能を分けてやるよ」

To be sure, the Japanese news media tends to be less rigorous than their Western counterparts about presenting direct quotes that precisely represent what someone said. One bad habit in particular is ignoring the use of the ellipsis when eliminating some of the quoted matter. Another is a failure to provide sufficient context.

Nevertheless, Mr. Hachiro’s statement was short and made directly to a small group of people. There should have been little, if any, variation.

Hasegawa Yukihiro, a member of the editorial staff of the Tokyo Shimbun, is another proponent of bureaucratic reform. He became radicalized after serving on what the Americans would call a blue ribbon panel during the Abe administration, when he saw first-hand how bureaucrats attempted to usurp the role of policy formulation from politicians and to destroy politicians that opposed them.

Mr. Hasegawa’s suspicions were such that he arranged for an interview with Mr. Hachiro about the incident. It appeared on the 13th in Gendai Business Online and was updated yesterday. The interview started with Mr. Hachiro’s admission that he did use the phrase “town of death” about the area surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant. That was the first gaffe, and he apologized again for it. Here is most of the rest in English.

*****
Hasegawa: Tell us about your informal discussion with reporters on the night of the 8th.

Hachiro: About five or six reporters were waiting for me when I returned to the lodgings for Diet members in Akasaka after my observation trip. I think they were all from the business/economy desk. Until then, I hadn’t had any relations with (reporters from) the business/economy desk, so I knew none of them by sight. I think there were two reporters from the political desk in the rear. I know them.

I had a radiation dosimeter when I was in the area of the nuclear power plant. My reading for the day was 85 microsieverts (N.B.: Higher than normal but not a serious dose.) I clearly remember telling the reporters those numbers. (The reporter who wrote) an article in the Asahi (on 13 September) said, “I peeked at the dosimeter and read the numbers.” That is not correct. I left the dosimeter in J Village (the base for the plant workers in Fukushima).

Hasegawa: Did you really say “I’ll contaminate you with radiation”?

Hachiro: I truly have no memory of saying either “I’ll contaminate you”, or “I’ll give you some”. I might have said, “Hey”, but I don’t even remember that clearly. There’s a report that I said, “Hey, radiation”, but I don’t know if I used the word “radiation”.

What I can say clearly is that I made no gesture of rubbing my work clothes (the overalls Japanese politicians wear at sites where a suit would be inappropriate) on the reporters. I might have taken a step toward the reporters, but I didn’t make any move as if I were going to rub against them. I would remember it if I had.

Hasegawa: Didn’t the reporters record your statements?

Hachiro: I don’t think they did.

Hasegawa: According to the Asahi article, the first report of the “I’ll contaminate you with radiation” statement was by Fuji Television (FNN). Was the Fuji reporter there that night?

Hachiro: FNN wasn’t there. The FNN reporter is XXX, a woman, so I would know if she was there.

Hasegawa: To ask bluntly, there is a theory that (you) were framed by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. What do you think?

Hachiro: That’s speculation. I have my own guess, but I don’t want to talk about it.

Hasegawa: Didn’t you have a dispute with the bureaucracy? A story is circulating that you were thinking of replacing some of the senior ministry personnel.

Hachiro: I’ve never discussed with anyone what I should do with the senior ministry personnel.

Hasegawa: What are your ideas for reducing the reliance on nuclear energy and energy policy?

Hachiro: There is a two-tiered arrangement for studying this issue. The government has the Energy-Environment Council at the ministerial level, and METI has the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy. The former is not based in law, but the latter is (the Ministry of Economy and Industries Establishment Act). The Advisory Committee will submit an interim report this year and a formal report next year.

In June, before I was appointed, an internal decision had already been made on the personnel for the Advisory Committee. There were 15, three of whom were opposed to nuclear energy, with the other 12 in favor. After the nuclear accident, I thought we would not gain the understanding of the people unless there was at least a 50-50 balance between those opposed and those in favor. So, I intended to add nine or 10 people opposed to nuclear energy to bring their total up to 12 or 13. The number of committee members was not fixed, so there would have been a balance of about 12 supporters and 12 in opposition.

Hasegawa: The bureaucracy opposed that, didn’t they?

Hachiro: Their answer was that they understood. I had already finished selecting the people from my list of candidates, and all that was left was to announce it at a news conference.

Hasegawa: I’ll ask again. Didn’t you have a sharp disagreement with the bureaucracy? Feigning obedience to your face and opposing you behind your back is one of their specialities.

Hachiro: My mind was made up from the start. I did not want a report with content that presented just one opinion. I wanted both support and opposition. In the end, the Advisory Council would make the decision, so (I thought) it would be a good idea to combine both positions in a report from the government. I gave my list to my successor Edano Yukio. Now the decision is up to him.

Hasegawa: One of the reporters at the news conference during which you announced your resignation shouted out “What are you talking about with this ‘creating a sense of distrust’? I told you to explain!” (N.B.: Other people in the news media have also criticized that unidentified reporter, and referred to his tone and word choice as being yakuza-like.) What did you think of that question?

Hachiro: That reporter and his superior just came to my office a while ago to apologize. I didn’t think anything of it. I said it wasn’t necessary to blame either the reporter or his superior. It’s just their job.

*****
After the interview appeared on the web, the FNN public relations office called the Gendai Business editors on the afternoon of the 14th. The person calling said:

An FNN reporter was present at the conversation with Mr. Hachiro. It’s regrettable that you did not ask us about this.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Hasegawa again spoke to Mr. Hachiro. The latter said, “The female reporter wasn’t present.” When asked if a male he didn’t know might have been there, he answered, “I don’t think a male reporter was there either, but…”

*****
You can see where Mr. Hasegawa is going with this. The lobby within METI that favors maintaining nuclear energy saw Mr. Hachiro as a threat and, perhaps sensing some weakness, moved quickly to be rid of him. That also serves as a warning to the Noda Cabinet and the DPJ.

Mr. Hasegawa explains that the bureaucracy considered the Advisory Committee within the ministry to be the critical group. The council at the ministerial level did not have a statutory basis and could be eliminated with a change of government. That would also dispose of their decisions. The Advisory Committee is a different matter, however. They would submit an official government report containing more than one opinion, which might have a major impact on energy policy. Therefore, Mr. Hasegawa suggests, they could not afford to ignore it.

Note that Mr. Hasegawa thinks it is very possible the ministry (or someone) manipulated the news media. Indeed, he has written an award-winning book (and many articles) explaining how the bureaucracy thinks the manipulation of public opinion through the news media, and the formulation of policy through the manipulation of politicians, is part of their job. Media outlets that don’t cooperate get shut out of the information loop. I’ve explained several times here how some believe the Finance Ministry deliberately created an environment that led to an upper house election loss during the Hashimoto administration when then-Prime Minister Hashimoto wanted to create an independent ministry for the oversight of the financial industry. In addition, when the Abe Cabinet moved forward with the privatization of the Social Insurance Agency, agency personnel revealed the mishandling of retirement accounts dating from a decade earlier. That effectively ended the Abe Cabinet.

Most noteworthy of all, however, is that neither Mr. Hachiro nor anyone in the DPJ is fighting back. It is as if they think this is a fight they can’t win.

*****
This just in: New METI chief Edano Yukio has instructed another reform bureaucrat, Koga Shigeaki, to begin preparations for resigning.

A METI official, Mr. Koga has offered sweeping proposals for reform of Japan’s power industry in general and Tokyo Electric in particular. He’s also published two books within the space of a year. This has so displeased his superiors at METI that they first tried to force him to resign, and then treated him as a potted plant and stuck him by the side of the window.

When Mr. Edano was appointed to his position at METI last week, Mr. Koga sent him an e-mail saying that if he was not given some work to do, he’d quit. Mr. Edano said OK.

The media thinks this demonstrates that Mr. Edano is no reformer, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. He’s a long-time associate of Sengoku Yoshito, who barked out a gangsterish veiled threat at Mr. Koga during the latter’s Diet testimony last year.

In fact, the entire DPJ folded like the cheapest of suits on the issue of bureaucratic reform within weeks after forming their first government.

ADDENDUM:

After rereading this, I saw that I left out an aspect of the story that has to do with Hachiro Yoshio’s news conference at which he announced his resignation.

The reporters from the political desk who attended also noticed the discrepancies among the various news outlets in their quote of Mr. Hachiro’s second gaffe. Rather than ask the other reporters who work at the same company about it, they tried to pin Mr. Hachiro down on what he actually said. He told them the same thing he told Hasegawa Yukihiro, but they didn’t believe him. The same reporter who was criticized for his gangsterish attitude (and who later apologized) accused Mr. Hachiro of deliberately obfuscating the issue. He started to harangue the former minister, saying of course it was clear in his memory; if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be resigning. The “I told you to explain” part came right after that.

In other words, younger political reporters saw the inconsistency in the reports of the outlets they represent and badgered Hachiro Yoshio about it instead of making an in-house inquiry.

On the other hand, Takahashi Yoichi and Hasegawa Yukihiro — both older than 50 and both well aware of the bureaucracy’s MO — saw the same discrepancy and what seems to be Mr. Hachiro’s attempt to deny his second statement without directly accusing the media of a high tech lynching, so to speak. Based on their professional experiences, they drew other conclusions.

Are the political reporters playing high stakes charades, or do they really fail to see what’s staring them in the face?

This is yet another example of why I don’t find it necessary to read fiction any more.

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The gaffe overlooked

PRIME MINISTER Noda Yoshihiko’s first choice as Economy, Trade, and Industry Minister, Hachiro Yoshio, lasted all of eight days before two doofus comments, one in public and one to a group of reporters in private, cost him his job. Neither of his comments was related to policy, but they did suggest a level of discretion and common sense lower than that of the average convenience store clerk.

To replace him, Mr. Noda selected Edano Yukio, the second Chief Cabinet Secretary in the Kan Cabinet. The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Mr. Edano asked the prime minister to reconsider because he needed some time to recuperate after the stress from dealing with the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami. He added that he thought there were other people suitable for the position.

The prime minister was faced with two problems, however. First, other party members urged him to appoint someone from the DPJ left wing to preserve the Cabinet’s ideological balance. (Mr. Hachiro was a member of the old Socialist party, and ideological balance was one of the reasons a cuckoo clock ornament was given the job to begin with.) Second, an extraordinary Diet session begins today, and Mr. Noda could not afford to appoint yet another amateur incapable of biting his tongue whenever some stray silliness floated into his brain. Therefore, his choices were limited to the party’s roll of logorrhea-free leftists who knew something about nuclear power plants (which METI is responsible for). That seems to have eliminated everyone except Mr. Edano.

The prime minister called him up for some gentle persuasion. According to the Yomiuri, Mr. Edano said:

It has long been my position that Japan, with its declining population, will not achieve large economic growth. Is that acceptable to you?

“That’s fine,” the prime minister answered.

Soon after the article appeared, former Finance Ministry official, author, university professor, and government reformer Takahashi Yoichi fired off this Tweet. It contains a graph with a comment in Japanese below. The graph is titled, The Rate of Population Increase and Real Economic Growth (2000-2008). The comment below reads:

Japan is in the proximity of the position of origin (of the graph). There are many countries whose population growth is lower than Japan and whose (economic) growth rate is higher than Japan. I do not understand the reason for saying that population decline means there will be no growth.

Mr. Takahashi does not label the axes, but it would seem that the horizontal axis is for population growth and the vertical axis is for economic growth. He also does not identify the countries by name. (This is a Tweet, after all.) I don’t have the time now to do the research, but the first place I’d look for verification is the countries of Eastern Europe that have adopted the flat income tax.

Assuming the Yomiuri report is true, Mr. Edano is guilty of a gaffe much more serious than that of Mr. Hachiro.

Hachiro Yoshio’s gaffe was just dopey. Edano Yukio’s is dangerous.

UPDATE: LDP lower house member Nakagawa Hidenao also jumped on this right away. He examined OECD statistics on population growth and economic growth from 1971 to 2001 and concluded:

While the rate of population growth is an important factor determining a nation’s overall economic growth rate, (the data show that) other fundamental economic conditions such as capital assets, levels of technology, and human capital are equally important.

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The soda pop government

IT’S a tossup which is worse: Finance Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s pledge that he will call for a grand coalition government of national salvation if elected DPJ president, or the ill-disguised squeals of delight by the rapid response team in the English-language media. Their reports on the story appeared on the wires as quickly as the August 1945 news that the Japanese Tenno had agreed to accept the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration.

Here’s part of what AFP had to say:

Japan’s finance minister, tipped as a candidate to become the country’s next premier, proposed to form a government of national unity to spearhead the country’s recovery from natural disasters.

“The ruling and opposition parties must have heart-to-heart discussions with each other. That’s the bottom line,” Yoshihiko Noda said in a political talk show on the TV Tokyo network aired on Saturday.

“We’d rather form a national salvation government. That’ll be a coalition. Otherwise politics won’t move forward,” he added.

Pfui. The ruling and opposition parties have already had successful “heart-to-heart” talks with each other for the second supplementary budget, the legislation for enabling the issue of deficit-financing bonds, and a revision of the national energy strategy. The opposition parties have blocked no serious proposals for recovery. They have tried to put the scotch on extraneous measures unrelated to the recovery, most of which involve the DPJ spending more money that the government doesn’t have.

Saying no to bad ideas is a very good way to move politics forward.

The idea of a national salvation coalition does sound superficially wonderful and heart-cockle warming, especially to those who see the Coca-Cola ® ad campaigns of the past 40 years — saccharine without the saccharin — as the perfect place to live. The objectives of both those enterprises are the same, after all: ephemeral sugar highs.

Here’s a closer look at what a grand coalition would mean, with the caveats that Mr. Noda hasn’t been selected yet, and that his backers might not be able to achieve a grand coaltion even if he is.

* The proposal is a de facto DPJ admission that they are incapable of handling the Tohoku recovery themselves. This will not be news to the Japanese public.

* The opposition parties do not need to be part of the government for effective recovery measures to be implemented. The last time this idea fizzed to the surface, Your Party Secretary-General Eda Kenji objected that mechanisms already exist through which the opposition parties can provide input at the highest level.

The reason these mechanisms haven’t worked is that the DPJ government has been incapable of bringing concrete, specific proposals to the table that it can guarantee the party will support as its final position. The reason it is incapable of making these proposals is that it is incapable of creating a sustainable consensus within the party to support any particular policy or position.

In other words, the ruling party of government can’t agree internally on what it wants to do. This too will not be news to the Japanese public. The DPJ never has been able to reach an internal consensus on anything other than doing what is required to achieve and retain power.

* The DPJ spewed like Vesuvius when it was in the opposition and the LDP brought in its second replacement prime minister (Fukuda Yasuo) without a lower house election. The spew reached exospheric levels when they brought in their third (Aso Taro). Now they’ll have to justify their continued existence as the party of government despite doing exactly what they pilloried the LDP for — and despite support ratings lower than those recorded for the LDP governments.

Thus, forming a coalition government allows the DPJ to avoid the decimation of a lower house election.

But the word decimation does not do justice to what would be an election debacle. That word originated in the practice of the Roman Army to punish mutineers by killing one of every ten soldiers. The unlucky 10% were selected by lot and clubbed to death by the other grunts.

There’s no Latin derivative for killing (metaphorically) anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of an army’s loyal soldiers, i.e., the current DPJ representation in the lower house, for the failures and incompetence of the General Staff.

* It would be manna from heaven for the ruling elite. The three parties can implement the tax increase of the Finance Ministry’s dreams without having to get serious about reducing government expenditures, and no single party will get stuck with the responsibility.

They will offer the excuse that the national crisis makes a tax hike unavoidable. They will ignore the serious proposals offered by more than a few politicians and commentators that would pay for the entire recovery using funds the government already has on hand.

* A grand coalition government will make it impossible to throw the bums out. It would probably last for two years, when the legally mandated term of the lower house expires and the next regularly scheduled upper house election must be held. A tax increase is so unpopular that the mere suggestion of it by Kan Naoto last summer turned a likely upper house election victory into defeat.

A tax hike implemented by a grand coalition followed by a double election in two years effectively disenfranchises the electorate.

* The overseas media seem to be unaware that the LDP is not the only upper house opposition party. The DPJ has negotiated with New Komeito, the Communist Party, and Your Party to successfully pass several bills that the LDP opposed. One of them was an extension of the unaffordable child allowance earlier this year, which the three putative coalition partners recently agreed to scrap starting next year.

The text in the latter part of the AFP article insinuates that the LDP are being killjoys in the upper house by queering all the glorious enlightened plans of the DPJ. That is true — up to a point. Rather than blocking legitimate measures for recovery, they have opposed unrelated measures, such as the child allowance. They balked at the budget or bond proposals because they included the funding for the unnecessary expenditures.

Most of those schemes needed to be thwacked, if not choked until they turned blue. For example, the DPJ still plans to establish a Human Rights Commission based on the Canadian Star Chamber knockoff that effectively functions to limit human rights.

To be sure, the AFP reveals its orientation by describing the DPJ government as “centre-left”. That’s the media weaselword of choice for leftist governments that don’t nationalize lemonade stands or stitch a hammer and sickle patch into the flag.

The approach of many in the DPJ leadership could be characterized as a Japanese version of what Stanley Kurtz refers to as Midwest Academy socialism in the United States. Kan Naoto, Sengoku Yoshito, and Edano Yukio fit this general description. Hatoyama Yukio slurped down the milquetoast version.

And the AFP is again trying to refry the beans of “centre-left” fiduciary responsibility by pasting the label of “fiscal hawk” on Noda Yoshihiko. They said the same thing last summer about Kan Naoto, and we know how credible that was. Mr. Kan would have been incapable of explaining the difference between “fiscal” and “monetary” before he became Finance Minister and his Finance Ministry tutors explained it to him in remedial one-on-one classes before the workday began.

Who other than the industrial media would define a “fiscal hawk” as a person or party responsible for two consecutive budgets with record high deficits and record high deficit bond flotations, and who proposed to double the consumption tax rate to pay for it all?

A definition of fiscal hawkery that fails to include talon-sharp spending slashes means that someone needs a new dictionary, and it ain’t me. But don’t expect to read that in the papers anytime soon.

Speaking of what you’re not reading in the papers, here’s what Noda Yoshihiko said at the same time he brought up the idea of a coalition. AFP and the others thought it wasn’t fit to print.

We will confront the opposition parties and achieve the government/ruling party policy of raising the consumption tax in stages by mid-decade. We must not back down from that.

He added:

Some argue that the timing isn’t right, and that taxes shouldn’t be raised when economic conditions are so difficult, but we’ve been dithering by insisting that certain conditions must be met. This must be done at some point by someone.

Ah, so. In short, Mr. Noda is saying:

* There will be no backing down from the government/ruling party agreement to raise taxes. The LDP and New Komeito should do us the favor of agreeing with the government and forming a grand coalition to cover our butts for a tax increase.

* It doesn’t make any difference what shape the economy’s in. We’re going to raise taxes anyway.

Meanwhile, Mr. Noda said on an NHK broadcast today that Japan’s deflation was caused by a supply-demand imbalance, and that demand was insufficient. He thinks the demand resulting from the Tohoku reconstruction is an excellent opportunity to end deflation, but is oblivious to the effect a sharp consumption tax increase will have on demand.

Did you notice how the “finance minister” fell for the old broken window fallacy that disasters have economic benefits? His Finance Ministry tutors evidently didn’t tell him about Frederic Bastiat.

That’s Noda Yoshihiko — fiscal hawk and founder of the national salvation government. Don’t spit that soft drink out of your nose!

Once again, those interested in reading the AFP article have enough information here to find it with the search engine of their choice. Links belong to the legit.

*****
The idea of a grand coalition makes me bubble up with such happiness I feel like hippity-hopping over to the nearest vending machine. Ain’t the kids cute ‘n funky now? Those with sharp eyes will spot an excerpt from the start of it all 40 years ago.

And isn’t it odd they think it’s still possible to distinguish Monopoly money from the Real Thing?

Going…going…

I have done what I should have done. Unfortunately, the people did not fully understand this.
- Kan Naoto, attributing his failures to the people’s stupidity in the Diet this week

THE great festering boil on the butt of the Japanese body politic is about to be lanced, if the reports that Prime Minister Kan Naoto could step down as soon as the end of the month are to be believed. When or if the national prayers are answered, it will end a stalemate perhaps unlike any that has existed in a modern democracy — a standoff created by the unfortunate intersection of nature, circumstances, and the inbred impotence of the political Chatterley classes.

This time for sure, the media are saying, but let’s wait and see if Jack really does hit the road. People were telling each other he would surely step down by the end of June before they started telling each other he would surely step down by the end of August. But the legend in his own mind is still setting conditions for his departure. His revised terms were supposedly the passage of a second supplementary budget, deficit bond-enabling legislation, and the reappraisal of energy policy. After that, he would hand responsibility over to the “younger generation”, as if it were up to him to determine the age of his successors.

What he should be doing instead is bowing his head at his local Shinto shrine to thank the divinities that he doesn’t live in a country where mobs displeased with their rulers film themselves as they machete off ears, noses, and other protruding body parts before dispatching them.

What, me leave?

People became appalled when they realized he intended to remain in office as long as possible, even though the public had written him off well before New Year’s Day 2011. In fact, a source in the Kantei told the media that Mr. Kan keeps a memo book with a list of the days in office of all the prime ministers and calculates those he’s overtaken. On 30 June he passed Mori Yoshiro’s term of 387 days. The next in line was Ohira Masashige’s 554, but he’d have to stick around until December to beat that.

Last month, Mr. Kan said, “I myself have not used the word quit or resign.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon relayed the news that Mr. Kan told him during their meeting last week he intended to speak at a meeting at the United Nations in September on nuclear power plant safety.

Said the prime minister in the Diet on 19 July:

The never-say-die spirit of the women’s soccer team brought about a wonderful result…I too sense that I must fight and never give up as long as there are things I should do.

From the opposition benches:

Prime Minister! Give up!

Here’s what he said in an interview with the weekly Shukan Asahi that appeared on Monday:

Until whenever the day comes that I leave, I will say what should be said and do what should be done. I want to set a course for the drastic reform of nuclear power regulation. That is my candid thought now.

Nuclear power regulatory reform wasn’t one of the conditions listed in the faux agreement with former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio at the beginning of the summer. In fact, just two months ago he said:

The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry has said the nuclear reactors stopped for periodic inspections will be gradually restarted when their safety is confirmed. I am absolutely of the same position.

When METI confirmed their safety, he changed his mind and decided to put the reactors and the nation through a stress test.

The Koizumi complex

The closest politician Japan has had to a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, Koizumi Jun’ichiro ignored the pleas of the know-it-alls in his own party and dissolved the lower house of the Diet to take the issue of Japan Post privatization to the people. His reward was the second-largest legislative majority in Japanese history.

As you can see from the plan I drew up on the back of the cocktail lounge price list...

Kan Naoto has always been envious of his success (and resentful of the way Mr. Koizumi toyed with him during Question Time in the Diet), and dreamed of becoming the Koizumi of the Left. Another Kantei source reveals that the prime minister vowed: “I’ll do something that Koizumi couldn’t do.” He saw the issue of nuclear power as his path to the same sort of single-issue election that was Mr. Koizumi’s greatest triumph.

According to the 15 July weekly Shukan Post, Mr. Kan began looking at his options on 2 June, the day after the no-confidence motion was introduced. Passage meant that either the Cabinet would have to resign or he would have to call a lower house election, and he didn’t want to resign. He therefore had the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications investigate whether it was possible to hold elections in the Tohoku area, and he demanded a prompt answer. The media outlets and some politicians still deluded themselves that the prime minister retained a modicum of integrity and would resign when “a certain stage had been reached”. Mr. Kan, however, kept badgering the ministry to submit their report, which they did on 10 June.

The ministry thought elections would be possible. The chief municipal officer of Otsuchi-cho in Iwate died in the tsunami, but they had scheduled elections on 28 August for the municipal council. The whereabouts of most people on the voting rolls in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures had been confirmed. The major obstacle was how to handle those evacuated from Fukushima due to the nuclear accident. They’re dispersed throughout country, but compensation payments from Tokyo Electric were to be completed in July and that data could be used. It would take one month to recreate the voting rolls.

The prime minister then ordered the party to search for candidates to replace those who had been suspended from party activities for three months for their abstention on the no-confidence vote. They would be ineligible to run with DPJ backing. He also hinted at the possibility of an election at a meeting of the party’s MPs on 15 June. After that, it became a topic of daily discussion in the media.

Some believed he was only bluffing to keep the DPJ delegates in the lower house in line, particularly the younger ones with little political experience. Their chances of winning re-election are rather less than those of a World War I infantryman for surviving trench warfare. It might have been a bluff, but the major parties hedged their bets; campaign-style political posters started appearing on signboards and shop windows.

At the beginning of August, however, Mr. Kan signaled that he wouldn’t hold an election after all. He explained that most voters thought this wouldn’t be a good time.

Translation: The numbers in the DPJ’s internal polls added up to slaughterhouse.

Fury

The volume of fury directed at Mr. Kan is unprecedented in the modern era of Japanese politics. People have been angry at other Japanese politicians, but not so broadly or so deeply, and even then most of those politicians retained a core of diehard supporters. In political circles, the people publicly backing Mr. Kan can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

For a taste of the intensity, start with this comment by Tahara Soichiro.

Can we say after all that Mr. Kan is a human being? He doesn’t belong to any category of what I consider to be human beings.

Mr. Tahara was the host from 1989 to 2010 of Sunday Project, a live political blabathon broadcast by a national network on Sunday mornings. For American readers, picture the host of Meet the Press, Face the Nation, or This Week pre-Christiane Amanpour.

The largest organization backing Mr. Kan’s Democratic Party is Rengo, the Japanese Trade Union Confederation. Said Rengo Chairman Koga Nobuaki on 28 July:

I want Prime Minister Kan to stop exacerbating the political vacuum immediately.

By 4 August he was saying:

The political vacuum has intensified, and diplomatic issues have come to a standstill. It’s natural for this situation to be resolved by the end of August.

Kawauchi Hiroshi, a Democratic Party MP of the lower house, was once a member of the now defunct New Frontier Party when Mr. Kan was also a member. He said:

The Prime Minister is trying to destroy this country. He is the common enemy of the Japanese people.

Takenaka Kazuo is a magazine editor in Chiba:

Looking for a sense of shame or morality from him (Kan Naoto) is the same as trying to teach a pig how to use a knife and fork….If you idly sit and watch the runaway Kan administration, history will brand you an accomplice to the crime of swindling. That you will be condemned by history is a self-evident truth. The political scientists and journalists who are parasites on the Kan administration are guilty of the same crime.

Most Japanese were willing to give him a chance to deal with the aftereffects of the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami. Here’s how that worked out:

For the stricken area to recover, I want you think about the presence of Prime Minister Kan, the heaviest of the shackles weighing down the recovery.

That was Hatayama Kazuyoshi, the president of the of Miyagi prefectural assembly, on 28 July. He was speaking at a national conference of prefectural assembly presidents, just after the representatives of the assemblies of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima — the three prefectures that suffered the most — submitted an emergency resolution to the committee calling for the resignation of Kan Naoto.

The National Governor’s Conference also met last month in Akita. Declared Hirai Shinji, Governor of Tottori:

(The national government) is not trusted either throughout the world or throughout the regional areas of Japan. The government’s response has been grandstanding from first to last…The national government has been doing nothing but holding conferences. We should express this anger in a special declaration.

Finally, more ominous for a country with little political violence, police in Tokyo last month arrested a man carrying an 11-centimeter fruit knife who wanted to “punish” the prime minister for not resigning.

Why?

University professor and author Ikeda Nobuo wrote a blog entry last week to explain Mr. Kan’s behavior. Here’s an excerpt:

Prime Minister Kan plans to attend the Japan-U.S. summit meeting in the U.S. in September. It seems likely he intends to stay in office indefinitely. Even his aides don’t know what he really intends to do. That can be understood rationally, however, considering the objectives of his life in the past.

His entire life has been spent as an activist working against “the system”. He allied himself with the “Structural Reform Wing”, a group that favored a type of syndicalism in which the workers would manage corporations through “factory evaluation councils”. The state was the enemy to be ultimately dismantled. He was not a violent revolutionary in the mold of the Marxist-Leninists; rather, his strategy was to gain a legislative majority and gradually move the hegemony to the left.

But Japanese corporations once had (a system) close to the worker management type envisioned by Gramsci. Kan’s ideal was realized by Japanese corporations, and then fell apart. Management by the workers failed throughout the world. The structural reformers that were part of what was called Euro-Communism, of which the Italian Communist Party was the first example, disappeared, and Socialism collapsed.

In short, Mr. Kan’s objectives were lost when he was still young. Perhaps his only remaining obsession was to smash the state. His life until now has been spent in an assumed guise for the purpose of achieving hegemony. Consider: now, when he has seized the ultimate power, when he causes political turbulence by staying on after saying he will resign, when he stops nuclear power generation and upsets energy policy, and when he has achieved his objective of trashing the state — it is possible to explain the reason he is behaving in such an uncharacteristically dynamic manner.

The political solution

Along with the rest of the nation, the political class was slow on the uptake and failed to immediately recognize Mr. Kan’s unfamiliarity with the knives and forks of shame and morality.

One more of the same, my good man

Senior DPJ members cobbled together a last-minute solution when it appeared the June no-confidence motion would pass and rupture the party. After realizing they had created a political Frankenstein, the same people put together a new strategy to force Mr. Kan from office. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, DPJ Secretary-General Okada Katsuya, and Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Azumi Jun reportedly set in motion a three-step plot: (1) Hold a new election for party president (2) Ensure Mr. Kan’s defeat, thereby separating the party presidency from the prime minister, and (3) Promote and support a new no-confidence motion.

Some were hesitant to submit another motion because it’s been customary in Japan to limit such motions to one a Diet term. (Some people even wondered if more than one would be unconstitutional.)

That didn’t bother the Destroyer of Worlds and former DPJ head Ozawa Ichiro. He let it be known that he didn’t see any problem at all with a second no-confidence motion. In fact, he said if the DPJ leadership didn’t like it, he’d form a new party and introduce it himself. Meanwhile, he would wait until the end of August to see what Mr. Okada had in mind. This does not seem to have been a bluff; long-time associate and former upper house member Hirano Tadao confirmed it publicly.

New Komeito Secretary-General Inoue Yoshihisa also threatened a new no-confidence motion, and added:

Before that, the DPJ has to take responsibility and return this country to a state of normalcy.

Even former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio had a bright idea. He publicly floated the suggestion of having Mr. Kan’s Cabinet resign out from under him:

Mr. Kaieda (Economy, Trade, and Industry) could resign at any time. Mr. Kaieda is not alone. Mr. Ohata (Land, Infrastructure, and Transport) Mr. Matsumoto (Foreign Ministry), Mr. Takagi (Education), Mr. Hosokawa (Health, Labor, and Welfare)…Five people will probably quit….Mr. Sengoku has resolved to quit at the same time as Mr. Kaieda. That’s also true for Mr. Noda (Finance) and Mr. Edano.

Sengoku Yoshito confirmed that the latter three planned to resign, and added it would be decisive if Edano Yukio were to quit. (Mr. Edano later denied it, however, either pro forma or out of sincerity.) There were also reports Mr. Sengoku got the thumbs up from the Finance Ministry, allowing him to pave the way for their current lapdog, Finance Minister Noda Yoshihiko.

Apart from a few perfunctory jabs, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party followed the grand political tradition of keeping their lips zipped while their opponents formed a circular firing squad, at least in public. Noted Ina Hisayoshi of the Nikkei Shimbun:

The longer Prime Minister Kan holds out, the deeper the cracks run in the DPJ, which will be to the advantage of the LDP in the next lower house election….the LDP is snickering at the idea of a snap election based on nuclear power.

What happened behind closed doors was another matter, however. The DPJ, the LDP, and New Komeito worked together to hammer out the legislation Mr. Kan set as his condition for resignation. According a report in the Sankei Shimbun, one conversation during the meetings went like this:

LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru: Hold the election to name the prime minister by the end of the month.

DPJ counterpart, Okada Katsuya: I understand.

Throwing in the spoon

What changed Mr. Kan’s mind? Was it the realization that he wouldn’t survive a second no-confidence vote, the threatened desertion of his Cabinet, or a message from The Japan Handlers?

It might have been any or all of them, but what seems to have tipped the balance (for somebody) was the continued nose-dive in public opinion polls. Last week’s Asahi poll showed the support for the Kan Cabinet down to 14%, with non-support more than four times higher at 67%. The figures for his predecessor, Hatoyama The Hapless, fell only as low as 19%.

Meanwhile, the same poll showed that 61% of the public had a favorable view of relinquishing the reliance on nuclear power.

In other words, the electorate knew that the continued service of Kan Naoto as prime minister was an issue unrelated to nuclear power generation. There went the dream of becoming Koizumi V.2

Next!

The departure of Kan Naoto as prime minister does not mean that the long nightmare of the Japanese public is over. Rather, they will have been plucked from the fire and placed back in the frying pan.

None of the possible successors (or the DPJ itself) has a strong power base, a feasible vision, or practical executive experience. Former Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Minister Mabuchi Sumio has a whiff of the alpha male about him, but he’ll need more than smooth lines, good looks, and his few months of experience in the Cabinet. Besides, he wrote on his blog that he refused Mr. Kan’s offer of the position of deputy minister of METI because he can’t accept the ministry’s atomic energy policy. He was also critical of the ministry’s safety declaration to get the idled nuclear plants restarted.

As we’ve seen before, Mr. Sengoku will try to maneuver Finance Minister Noda Yoshihiko into the seat. They’ve already been laying the groundwork. An article under his name titled My Vision of Government appears in the current issue of the monthly Bungei Shunju.

Mr. Noda delayed a formal announcement of his candidacy when the Nikkei fell below 9,000 this week. That’s a nice touch for the sake of appearances, though everyone realizes it has no substantive meaning. As with Kan Naoto before him, Mr. Noda’s knowledge of governmental fiscal matters is limited to the information his Finance Ministry tutors fed him after he took the job. There have been exceptions, but the job description of finance minister in Japan most often amounts to serving as the Finance Ministry press spokesman.

In keeping with that job description and his field-specific ignorance, Mr. Noda favors a tax increase. The sound of the world’s social welfare states collapsing is apparently inaudible at the Finance Ministry building. He also favors another stimulus. Why not? The last one didn’t work, so of course they’ve got to do the same thing, only harder this time.

That should not be construed as a criticism of the Japanese political system, incidentally. Japanese behavior is no worse than what the people in charge of economic policy in the United States and Europe have wrought.

No, the one next to the green bottle of shochu

The problem is ultimately the Democratic Party itself. Democrats in America enjoy amusing the dwindling audience for political conventions every four years by telling a joke on themselves that is usually attributed to the humorist Will Rogers: “I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” There’s also the remark by an earlier humorist, Finley Peter Dunne: “Th’ dimmy-cratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itself.”

Whatever the situation in the United States these days, those are perfect descriptions of the Democratic Party of Japan, a group jerrybuilt with spare parts and whose only common element is “We’re not the LDP.” That worked in 2009, but they’ll never be able to play that card again.

As part of the grand bargain to get the deficit-financing bonds passed in the Diet, Mr. Okada (and presumably Messrs. Sengoku and Edano) agreed to repeal some of the legal vote-buying schemes they put in their manifesto in 2009 and later passed. Those include the child-rearing allowance, which will revert to the status quo ante of the former LDP policy of paying only for small children, and the free expressway tolls.

That’s actually a seldom-seen demonstration of common sense to deal with a situation in which annual government expenditures are twice government revenue. Nonetheless, some party members strongly object to that approach, namely Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio. (Some opposition pols agree.) That insistence on preserving the party platform is prima facie evidence they lack the qualifications for higher office. A casual glance at any newspaper should be enough to confirm for even the thickest of bricks that morbid gigantism and philosophical obsolescence is testing the capacity of governments worldwide to survive in a viable form. Either they can’t be bothered to read the newspaper, or they think saving the face of the party takes priority over preventing national bankruptcy.

Other DPJ members insist that no one currently in the Cabinet should run for the post because they are Mr. Kan’s “criminal accomplices”. That’s a capital idea, but politicians never think it’s in their interest to listen to capital ideas that hamper their job prospects.

On the bright side

For all Kan Naoto’s negatives, some good things did emerge as a result of his term in office. For one, the political parties learned to negotiate and work around the absence of a majority party or coalition in the upper house, the source of past gridlock. New Komeito head Yamaguchi Natsuo explained that dealing with Prime Minister Kan was a waste of time, and it was more fruitful to ignore him.

Regardless of the content of the bills or legislation that emerged from these negotiations (and some of it is truly terrible), at least they’ve learned something about compromise. That’s a novel experience for the DPJ in particular.

Also, unlike the electorates of the West, the Japanese public had never before seen the ugliness of the left when in power.

Now it has.

Afterwords:

* Despite Mr. Kan’s insistence on the revision of Japan’s nuclear energy policy before saying his last sayonara, his Hiroshima and Nagasaki declarations of a nuclear-free Japan, and his smartass comment that the Diet should hurry up and pass the bill if they didn’t want to see his face, reports in the media say he left the determination of the content of the bill to DPJ party execs. That will likely result in legislative mush the opposition will slurp down simply to send the man packing. It also makes it easier for subsequent governments to amend or repeal.

* Some people snipe at the Japanese for a narrow-mindedness they claim is a result of their monoracial society, but we now see that the absence of multiculturalism can sometimes have benefits.

For example, consider the tone and content of the wholly justified criticisms leveled at Kan Naoto. If anyone complained about the nature of the criticism, I missed it.

Now imagine what some Americans would say if those identical wholly justified criticisms were leveled at Barack Obama, who shares with Mr. Kan the same political philosophy, character, incompetence, deluded smugness in his imaginary abilities, antipathy toward the nation and political system he is supposed to lead, and lack of interest in legislative detail.

A man could get rich buying stock in companies that manufacture anti-enuretic devices.

* A Rasmussen poll in the U.S. released earlier this week shows that only 17% of the respondents agree with the statement that the American government “has the consent of the governed”, to use the wording of the Declaration of Independence. That’s the lowest figure ever recorded for that question. It’s also been roughly the final approval rate for the past two DPJ governments in Japan.

It’s about time for Japanese pollsters to ask the same question. In the Westminster system, that result should be grounds to call a new lower house election.

******
And now, for the reaction of the Japanese public to the news of Mr. Kan’s tabun maybe perhaps desho departure…

The news media east/west, continued

HERE’S how the Western news media (and the Asahi in Japan) are reporting the personnel replacements at the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, which is responsible for regulating the nuclear power industry.

The Japanese government has sacked three officials in charge of nuclear power safety and policy. Radioactive material is still leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after it was damaged by a devastating earthquake and tsunami on 11 March.

For Japan’s Trade and Industry Minister, Banri Kaieda, the three senior officials were responsible for mishandling the plant and the problems that followed the incident.

For the rest of the country, Mr. Kaieda’s boss Prime Minister Kan Naoto and his Cabinet are responsible for the problems following the incident, as they assumed direct control immediately after the accident. But since we know all that, let’s move on to what those media sources either don’t know or won’t say.

Here’s an excerpt from a Japanese account by the Jiji news agency:

Replacing Matsunaga Kazuo as METI Deputy Minister will be Adachi Kenyu, currently the head of METI’s Economic and Industrial Policy Bureau. The objective is to clarify the responsibility for nuclear power administration, including the accident at the Fukushima power plant, but the post of Economic and Industrial Policy Bureau Chief is referred to as “the designated position for the next deputy minister”. METI Minister Kaieda said he wanted to start over with a clean slate, but the move is likely to generate criticism for being merely a personnel rotation in the bureaucracy.

In early May — two months after the earthquake/tsunami, when the bureaucratic handling of the matter was already apparent — Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio asked that all Cabinet ministers retain senior officials in their positions and refrain from the normal personnel rotation.

Deputy minister personnel rotation usually occurs during the summer at the end of a Diet session.

Mr. Kaieda specifically mentioned the inadequacy of the anti-tsunami measures, but Mr. Matsunaga and one other official had been in their positions for only one year, and the third official for only two years. Their agencies were responsible for those measures.

Tweeted Takahashi Yoichi, former Finance Ministry official, author, university professor, and bureaucracy critic:

These personnel moves at METI seem like an ordinary rotation…It’s a farce that Mr. Kaieda has been squeezed in the Kasumigaseki intrigue to trash Secretary Edano’s freeze on personnel movements. The DPJ is lousy at personnel appointments.

He also dismissed it as a “goldfish shit” personnel move. That Japanese expression derives from the phenomenon in which the dung of goldfish in a tank comes out in a long string and doesn’t separate from its body. It’s used to disparage a person’s long-term behavior patterns or the perennial hangers-on of someone in a position of authority.

Hasegawa Yukihiro, award-winning author and member of the Tokyo Shimbun editorial staff, is just as dismissive writing in Gendai Business Online. He says the elevation of Mr. Adachi means that METI was able to successfully defend its own interests when push came to shove, and that the three “sacked” officials will be rewarded with excellent amakudari positions as a reward for their self-sacrifice for the good of the ministry.

Mr. Kaieda mentioned that he had been thinking of the personnel moves for about a month. What he didn’t mention, and Mr. Hasegawa did, is that during that time he sounded out a few candidates that METI didn’t care for, so METI made sure that the candidates it did care for got the jobs. Mr. Hasegawa also mentions that despite Mr. Kaieda’s claim that the personnel choices were his own decision, a delay in the announcement of Mr. Adachi’s selection shows that the prime minister had to sign off on it. (He provides specific details on the timing and coordination of announcements.)

He concludes that Mr. Adachi will continue to promote METI’s pro-nuclear power position, Mr. Kaieda is completely in METI’s clutches, and Kan Naoto is incapable of significant reform.

*****
You think that’s all? The world’s media is bringing a new dimension to the term auto-eroticism in their coverage of the prime minister’s speech in Hiroshima today, in which Mr. Kan repeated his vision of a Japan that does not rely on have nuclear energy.

Now see if you can find any English-language stories reporting that Mr. Kan’s Cabinet decided to maintain the government’s policy of exporting nuclear technology overseas.

Just yesterday.

The Cabinet statement read:

If any countries want to utilize Japan’s nuclear power technology, we should provide them with (technology) of the highest level of safety in the world.

The statement was issued to gain Diet approval of agreements for nuclear power cooperation between Japan and four countries, including Vietnam and Jordan.

At a news conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio said with a straight face:

We will proceed with the intent of not harming the relationship of trust between countries. There is absolutely no contradiction (with the prime minister’s statement).

In short, not even the rest of the Japanese government cares what Kan Naoto thinks.

I feel sorry for those people interested in Japan who can read about the country only in the English-language media, and thereby think they know something about what is happening here.

All it amounts to is goldfish shit.

*****
The song’s the same; only the performers have changed.

The drama queendom

Generally speaking, a response of this sort to the Diet members who legally entered the country is unacceptable…It is regrettable in view of the friendly relations between Japan and South Korea….The visit to South Korea was made with the intention of following the legal procedures for the purposes of observation. We state that this (refusal) is regrettable, and ask that South Korea reconsider and allow entry.

- Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio

THE Southern Dynasty of the Joseon Drama Queendom continued its long-running series of geo-historical farces this week by refusing to honor the tickets of three Japanese Diet members and a university professor and preventing them from entering the theater. Their cue was the group’s planned visit to Ulleung, the largest island of a South Korean administrative district that contains 44 islands with an aggregate population of roughly 10,000. The less than bravura performance of the Queendom’s thespians demonstrated once again their belief that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women of the Japan of their imagination merely bit players.

Most reviews by Japanese critics say only that the four were on an observation tour, but what they intended to observe was a museum on Ulleung devoted to the Queendom’s illegal occupation and use as a stage property of the Japanese island of Takeshima, which the repertory company refers to as Dokdo. (Those who think it isn’t illegal should read the text of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, using their fingers to follow the text and sound out the words if necessary.)

The professor in question is Shimojo Masao of Takushoku University, who lived in South Korea for 16 years and maintains a second residence in Seoul with his Korean wife. His role was to serve as a guide and translator for the content of the Korean-language exhibits and provide a historical context. The measure taken by the Queendom’s rulers suggests they were aghast at the idea of allowing outsiders a backstage glimpse of the blocking and choreography. There’s a reason they used to call it the Hermit Kingdom, but the peninsula isn’t the only place where time and trends have perverted the standards of gender identification.

Prof. Shimojo is an occasional contributor to this site, and his observations on the incident that appeared this week in the Sankei Shimbun read very much like the texts he’s offered for our use. The following is an English translation of those observations.

*****
My visit to South Korea on this occasion was to make an observation tour of Ulleung with Diet members from the Liberal Democratic Party, visit some acquaintances, and conduct other research. Despite this, we were branded “The advance guard of Japan’s right wing Diet members”, and thrown out of the country.

I’ve been to Ulleung three times. At the Dokdo (Takeshima) Museum on the island, not one document is on display to demonstrate that Takeshima is South Korean territory. Aren’t the real feelings of South Korea, “We would be put in a bind by being observed”?

The Japanese and South Korean mass media have given extensive coverage to the uproar in South Korea, including such protest activities as burning the photographs of Shindo Yoshitaka and the other MPs. This situation requires a calm analysis, however, keeping in mind the (South Korean) presidential election in December next year. One aspect we must not overlook is that President Lee Myung-bak and his allies are using the Takeshima issue to boost their own popularity, and this performance to criticize the group with a moderate position toward Japan.

Shimojo Masao

The activities of Mr. Shindo and the other MPs were based on the extremely natural idea of going to the site themselves to obtain some hints for resolving the situation. They were not able to achieve their objective, but their restrained behavior and refusal to yield to pressure meant that all the decisions about diplomatic ties were made by South Korea. The conflict of opinions within South Korea was exposed as a result.

The internal split within South Korea now resembles the latter stages of the Joseon Dynasty about 100 years ago. In those days, there was a fierce conflict between the Dongnipdang, the forces favoring Korean independence, and the Sadaedang, which favored maintaining the government then in power by subordinating themselves to the Qing China suzerainty. This incident might well be significant for the national interest of Japan through a reevaluation of future Japanese-South Korean relations.

In any event, the refusal to allow entry to the country and expelling those with different opinions — rejecting even the idea of academic research — can be said to have clarified once again the essence of South Korean diplomacy. We should perhaps view this incident as demonstrating the true nature of South Korea.

(end translation)

*****
As with the other units of the world’s industrial mass media, the Yonhap news agency views the presentation of its narrative as one of its prime directives. Here’s an excerpt from one of their reports:

Shimojo Masao, a Takushoku University professor with very rightist views on territorial issues, arrived at the Incheon International Airport on an Asiana Airlines flight at about 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, according to the police.

But the nationalistic professor was immediately denied entry to the country by immigration officials due to the local justice ministry’s disapproval of his visit, they said.

The professor did not clash with officials and boarded a flight back to Japan after an four-hour stay in a waiting room at the Incheon airport, the police said.

Whether Shimojo will try entry to South Korea again is still unknown, but immigration officials said he was not on the list of those seeking to enter the country.

For Yonhap to speculate on whether he will “try entry again” is silly. Both he and his wife are often in the country, usually staying at a condominium they own in Seoul. Whenever I’ve met the man, he seems to be carrying more Korean-language documents than Japanese texts. (His interests include Japanese, Korean, and Chinese history, but both he and his wife also teach the Korean language at Takushoku.) Of course he’s going to “try entry again”.

It is also worth noting Yonhap’s description of him as “right-wing on territorial issues”. The term “right-wing” has become so degraded everywhere that it long ago lost any functional validity it might once have had. To see why, here’s a brief statement from Ichida Tadayoshi, another Japanese Diet member, which appeared in the media this week:

We have expressed the views of our party in regard to the Takeshima issue to the South Korean government and all the political parties whenever there has been an opportunity to do so. We believe the territorial issues (between the two countries) should be resolved by boldly holding bilateral discussions based on historical fact and international reason. Our party’s position is that Takeshima is Japanese territory, but (because its incorporation) overlapped the period of Japan-Korean unification, (this issue) should be resolved through discussion and joint research conducted with South Korea.

Had any of the Yonhap drones read Prof. Shimojo’s book, Nikkan: Rekishi Kokufuku e no Michi (Japan and Korea: The path toward overcoming history), they would have known that the position expressed by Mr. Ichida is identical to that of Prof. Shimojo. Ichida Tadayoshi, however, is a member of the Communist Party of Japan, and his statement was run in their daily newspaper, Akahata (Red Flag).

Japan’s Communists: The world’s first right-wing Reds!

Reader Aceface forwarded a copy of an old Japanese-language Kyodo report explaining that the ushers have slammed the theater doors in a Japanese patron’s face before. The venue operators refused in July 1997 to punch the ticket of Usuki Keiko, the head of the Committee to Clarify Japan’s Postwar Responsibility — someone who was on their side.

Ms. Usuki was involved with the Asia Women’s Fund, which was established with private funds and the assistance of the Japanese government. Her planned visit was to attend a meeting with South Korean women who claimed to have been comfort women and wanted to receive money from the fund. Here’s a reprise of what I wrote about the issue in 2007:

The funds come from private donations, because the Japanese government claims it has already paid war reparations. In fact, the Japanese government reached an agreement with South Korea about reparations in 1965. Seoul wanted $US 364 million as compensation for the conscripted laborers and comfort women during the period of the Japanese colonization. The agreement instead gave South Korea $800 million in grants and low-interest loans. President Park agreed as part of the deal that South Koreans would relinquish the right to make individual claims against the Japanese government. Park paid out only about $251 million to families killed by the Japanese and some more to owners of destroyed property, however. None of the South Koreans conscripted into the Japanese military or workforce, or the comfort women, received anything. Park spent the rest of the money on the Korean infrastructure. The South Korean public only found out about this deal and Park’s use of the money in January 2005.

Local Queendom activists screeched at the thought that the Japanese initiative would be a success and negate their efforts to keep hope alive. The Asian Women’s Fund gave money to seven South Korean women (as well as women from other countries) and a signed apology from the prime minister of Japan. More Korean women decided to accept the money and the apology, but the activists rattled the government’s cages so loudly they declared Ms. Usuki persona non grata.

Allowing the money to be accepted would have been a de facto admission of the reality that the matter of postwar reparations between the two countries was officially closed. That would be an announcement of the end of the season for a drama it is in the domestic political and diplomatic interest, and the interest of the Queendom’s emotional architecture, to prolong.

Rated NC-17

The excuse they found was Article 11.1.3 of South Korea’s immigration law. The government cited concerns of “safety” and the potential harmful effect on bilateral relations — specifically, “the negative effect on good relations between Japan and South Korea”.

One wonders if they really expected (or cared whether) it would prevent a harmful effect on bilateral relations; they’re not so stupid that they failed to realize their decision would be the downer for bilateral relations, as the statement of a Japanese official quoted at the top of the page shows. One of the three Japanese MPs barred from entry is an opposition member of the upper house, and he received the authorization of that body to make the visit. The president of the upper house, meanwhile, is affiliated with the ruling DPJ.

The excuse about safety irritated at least one of the Japanese MPs, who wondered if the South Korean government was treating them like terrorists. He also noted that the immigration authorities never asked them the reason for their visit.

Perhaps he misunderstood. The South Korean government claims it was worried about their safety, not the safety of the national drama troupe. The authorities may have a point, though it is telling this excuse is a tacit admission they are unable to guarantee the safety of foreign government officials on a trip to an outlying island with no more than 10,000 people. The groundlings at Globe Theater East can become so emotionally engrossed in the dramatic spectacle, they chop off their fingers, shoot flaming arrows (onto the grounds of the Japanese embassy), and disembowel birds at the drop of a hanbok.

Japanese television broadcast a demonstration in Seoul in which one the signs carried by the participants contained the Chinese characters for “rabid dogs”. (The rest of the wording was in Korean.) For those who are interested in straightforward examples of what the psychologists term “projection”, there you are.

For your consideration: The following is a photo of a group of South Korean bravados on the Japanese island of Tsushima taken three years ago. They marched to Tsushima City Hall and staged some guerilla theater based on the plot that the island has always been Korean territory. They might have been followers of the Method Acting school — they wrote that claim in blood on the flag they’re holding. (Their own, not the blood of the birds.)

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue...

Now take another look at the photo of Prof. Shimojo and ask yourself who the rabid dogs might be.

Divertissement

There are reports the Queendom’s subjects are convinced the visit was a ruse by the Japanese politicians to divert attention from their own government’s mishandling of the nuclear accident at Fukushima.

If those reports are true, it’s difficult to decide whether to pity the fools, or to laugh at the frogs at the bottom of the well who think they’re worldly wise. (But why bother to decide when both are so easy and so much fun to do?)

Are these people capable of breathing without trying to elbow their way into being the center of attention? The (political) mishandling is the responsibility of the ruling Democratic Party. The three MPs who got as far as Incheon Airport are from the opposition Liberal Democrats. The DPJ can’t even coordinate its own affairs, much less recruit three people from the opposition to serve as cat’s paws. There are more than 700 national legislators in Japan, and the three involved are unknown to the nation outside their districts. Indeed, the source of Prof. Shimojo’s frustration with the Japanese political class is that so few of them care what happens overseas anywhere, much less the Korean Peninsula.

Had they chosen to wave the three legislators through customs into the country, whatever happened during their visit would never have become a story in Japan. But neither would it have become much of a story in South Korea. That’s not a good strategy for box office success, now is it?

The story within the story

Prof. Shimojo suggests in the foregoing that the incident has clarified the essence of South Korean diplomacy. I would agree, though perhaps not in the way he intended. There are some people whose emotional identity is welded to the idea that the Japanese have never expressed enough emotional and pecuniary remorse for the behavior of their great-grandparents, and honest efforts to do so would thaw the most frigid of Joseon hearts.

This is such gloop it’s a wonder people are able to deliver it with a straight face, much less have to sit through a hearing or a reading of it without heaving a tomato at the stage.

In early June, the Japanese government decided to unconditionally “hand over” to South Korea their copies of the Uigwe, records of the royal protocols of the Joseon dynasty. The Japanese governor-general of Korea had taken them to Tokyo in 1922, and few people knew of their existence or whereabouts until 2001. That was a most generous gesture on the Japanese government’s part for three reasons: First, there was no obligation to return that portion of the documents purchased in private transactions by individual Japanese from individual Koreans. Second, the French also have some of the same records, but refuse to return them outright. They’ve retained possession and “loaned” them to the Korean government for five years instead. Third, the South Korean government has similar Japanese historical documents in its possession, but claps its hands over its ears to block out requests that it reciprocate by returning those to Tokyo.

South Korean diplomacy is now so clear that those with the eyes to see should realize that any sincere gesture of Japanese atonement will cut no ice off that Joseon heart. When the subject is Japan and the Japanese, they’re not happy unless they’re not happy.

To be sure, some of those folks who believe any gesture would have an effect are of the transnational type that gets its kicks by hari no mushiro ni suwaru, as the Japanese say, or sitting on a bed of thorns. These Little Jack Horners find it a delightful and bracing exercise to proclaim how terrible they are as a transparent backdoor way to proclaim how wonderful they are. It is a touch of dramatic irony that the only people they fool are themselves.

The rest seem to be dullards who actually believe what they say. No amount of contrary evidence or explanation will ever penetrate the concrete bunkers of their skulls. One might as well try telling a fish that it is swimming in water.

A critical element of a successful drama is tricking the audience into suspending its disbelief. Now that the impresarios of the Drama Queendom have allowed the overseas audience a view behind the curtains and the faces of the players under the masks, the effect is forever ruined.

That will be of no concern to the Queendom’s subjects, however. In that land, you’re either one of the cast or one of the stagehands, and everyone’s part of the audience.

Further reading

One website run by a native English speaker in Seoul uses an 1898 quote from Isabella Bird Bishop for its name and masthead statement: “Gusts Of Popular Feeling, which pass for public opinion in a land where no such thing exists, can be found only in Seoul.” For more on that phenomenon, try this.

Instead of historical melodrama, the Queendom sometimes offers slapstick comedy on its playbill as a change of pace.

To be fair, some of the Queendom’s subjects know how the bologna is ground and do not find it appetizing.

Afterwords:

The dramaturges of the Northern Dynasty of the Joseon Drama Queendom prefer to stage productions of a different sort — they have a taste for a more martial form of Sturm und Drang — but the similarities in thematic approach and content will be obvious to even casual theater-goers.

*****
And while we’re on the subject of queens:

Rubble

ACHIEVING the national objective of rebuilding the Tohoku region after the earthquake/tsunami requires that the rubble from the disaster be removed first. That will be no mean feat — the events of 11 March created an estimated 25 million tons of debris, 21.83 million of which is strewn throughout the three prefectures of Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima.

As of 28 June, however, nearly four months later, only an estimated 32% of the rubble had been hauled to temporary collection sites. The rest of it is still lying where it’s been the whole time. Several reasons have been cited for the lagging effort. First, the law states that private property owners, either residential or commercial, are responsible for their own garbage. Second, municipalities are responsible for handling the refuse of residential households, while prefectures are responsible for industrial material. (It is of course impossible to differentiate which is which in this situation.) Third, the immense amount of debris has overwhelmed the ability of all local governments to pay for its disposal.

It’s been apparent from the start that these extraordinary circumstances would require extraordinary measures by the government to deal with them. Such measures would include temporary exemptions from/suspensions of the law. In addition to the obvious ones, other measures could include providing temporary authorization to deal with the debris for those businesses not licensed to handle refuse, such as construction companies.

Despite the need for this legislation, and despite the opposition parties urging them to get on with it already, the Democratic Party government of Japan unintentionally modeled itself after a character from the Uncle Remus stories: Tar Baby just set there and don’t say nothin’. The difference is that the Tar Baby was created for a specific reason by a character with country smarts. That disqualifies the DPJ.

As we’ve noted before, the municipalities in the region did ask — desperately — the national government for help. The Kan Cabinet told them to handle it themselves.

Mr. Kan’s government managed to rouse itself in some sectors, after a fashion. They created a Cabinet Ministry for Conserving Electricity after the Fukushima disaster and handed the portfolio to a former model/TV personality. It was a waste of time, both the nation’s and the airwaves, because the Japanese knew what to do without any government urging at all. But they didn’t appoint a minister to handle the cleanup until nearly four months later. The man they did appoint, Matsumoto Ryu, disgraced himself in a matter of nine days and had to resign. His name is now so synonymous with mud his daughter is afraid to go to school.

After the Hyogo earthquake, it took fewer than nine days for the Socialist/LDP coalition government of Murayama Tomiichi to appoint a minister responsible for the cleanup and reconstruction.

To get the Kan Cabinet to get off its duff, four opposition parties — the LDP, New Komeito, Your Party, and Sunrise Party Japan — formulated legislation of their own to allow the government to handle the cleanup. It was introduced in the Diet by one of the LDP MPs.

Then, and only then, did the Cabinet finally agree on the bill they’ll submit to the Diet. Last week.

But they haven’t submitted it yet. Their bill and the opposition bill need to be reconciled. The opposition parties think the national government should assume all the expenses for cleanup because it is a national emergency. The Kan administration still thinks local government should pay for some of it, to be partially offset by grants.

That’s not surprising in the least. After all, they still insist on keeping their worthless child allowance payments despite the lack of money to pay for them. Voters won’t see the money the government spends on cleanup — the people in the three prefectures will just notice that somebody finally hauled the crap away. They do see the money the government deposits in their bank accounts every month, however. Thus, there’s no profit in it for the DPJ.

Even the Japanese news media has glossed over the facts of the situation. Kyodo’s article on the Cabinet’s bill devotes only part of one sentence to the legislation “the opposition already introduced”.

Among the rubble that won’t be cleared away are the articles and website postings assuring everyone that the DPJ would be so much more efficient dealing with the disaster than the “hapless” Murayama government, in the word of one academia grover writing at The Diplomat. Indeed, academics with an agenda to flog or with mochi to paint into pictures are the ones primarily responsible for this detritus. They won’t suffer for their willful ignorance, however; they’ve got tenure, and the journos will still call on them to serve as credentialed mouthpieces when they need to peddle their papers.

They also told us that the DPJ/Kan government would be the model of openness compared to the LDP, but we haven’t seen much of that line since it became apparent that Mr. Kan and Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio began lying to the people on 11 March about the 11 March Fukushima accident.

I feel sorry for those people interested in Japan who can read about the country only in the English-language media, and thereby think they know something about what is happening here.

*****
During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoists sent the intellectuals to the countryside for a healthful stint of bracing farm labor to assist their reeducation. My reeducation program for some of the Nagata-cho flybait, however, would start with this video.

Who’s sorry now?

HAS THERE ever been a sorrier crew to steer the ship of state than the Kan Cabinet? Besides the Hatoyama Cabinet, I mean.

The Master of Wit and Repartee

Democratic Party Secretary-General Okada Katsuya has now been reduced to apologizing to the opposition for the behavior of Prime Minister Kan Naoto. Mr. Okada understands that’s a thankless task. He’s already said in public that Mr. Kan is “the most difficult man” he’s ever worked with.

He met yesterday with Ishihara Nobuteru and Inoue Yoshihisa, his counterparts in the LDP and New Komeito, and the Diet Affairs chairmen of all three parties. He told them he was sorry that the prime minister picked Hamada Kazuyuki, an obscure LDP upper house member, to serve as the internal affairs parliamentary secretary in charge of reconstruction. We’ve seen this several times before: It’s the sort of move Mr. Kan thinks is clever, but exasperates everyone else, including his own party.

Mr. Okada asked for their cooperation to resume normal debate in the Diet:

“It is regrettable that (this appointment) severely impaired the relationship of trust. I apologize from my heart.”

Specifically, he hopes to win their cooperation for passing the three bills Kan Naoto cites as his condition for resigning. Could it be that the prime minister has devised a new strategy for dealing with the legislature? Behave so obnoxiously the opposition will give you what you want just to be rid of you.

*******
Speaking of the sorry and the obnoxious, Matsumoto Ryu, the recently appointed minister in charge of rebuilding the Tohoku region, visited the governors of Iwate and Miyagi on Sunday. In a post that same day, I described him as follows:

“…Matsumoto Ryu, a limousine leftist who has never demonstrated the ability to manage a shaved ice stand, much less a national effort that will require the coordination of several Cabinet ministries and the cooperation of the opposition.”

How’s that for cautious understatement? Mr. Matsumoto was unable to get off on the good foot with the governors because he stuck both of them in his mouth. At the same time. As far as they would go.

All that shoe leather must have made enunciation difficult, but everyone understood what he said to Iwate Gov. Tasso Takuya:

“Temporary housing is your job, and we will conceptualize the sort-of permanent housing to follow, so this will be a battle of wits. What sort of wisdom can you provide? We’ll help those who offer their wisdom, but we won’t help the ones who don’t offer any at all. That’s the sort of emotion you should have. That’s why I’m saying to you, don’t tell us you want this and that. Give us your wisdom.”

Nothing like that old “We’re all in this together” spirit to engender a sense of shared sacrifice and effort to recover from a national disaster, is there?

Mr. Matsumoto is also quite the charmer:

“I’m from Kyushu, so I don’t know what Tohoku city is in which prefecture.”

If someone were of a mind to make excuses for the DPJ, he might suggest that Mr. Matsumoto intended to tell a joke at his own expense to make the inakappei feel at ease in the presence of one of the Big Enchiladas from the national government. That would have to be someone from overseas making the excuses, however. Most of the Japanese have stopped trying.

You’ve heard of people with a tin ear? This guy’s got a tin tongue.

During his eventful Sunday, Mr. Matsumoto also called on Miyagi Gov. Murai Yoshihiro. Scenes of the meeting were broadcast on local television. The ratings must have been stunning. Here’s how the newscaster explained the footage to the viewers:

“You could sense a change in (Matsumoto’s) mood when Gov. Murai did not (immediately) come out to meet him. The governor emerged a few minutes later with a smile on his face, and offered to shake hands, but (Matsumoto) refused. There was tension in the room.”

Of course there was tension. Mr. Murai from the sticks made The Very Important Man From Tokyo wait for a few minutes. Before they started discussing other matters — such as the Tohoku cleanup — Mr. Matsumoto felt compelled to deliver a lecture on behavior:

“When a guest visits, you should call for them after you’re in the room. You were in the Self-Defense Forces, so you should already know this. Behave properly without being told. (To the media) This part is off the record. It will be the end for any company that prints this.” (書いた社はこれで終わりだから)

By the end, he presumably meant the end of access to him. At least I hope that’s what he meant.

His discussion of policy was just as enlightening and entertaining in Miyagi as it was in Iwate:

“You can take advantage of our kindness to the extent that it’s acceptable. We’ll be dumping off on you anything we can.”

On the idea in Miyagi to consolidate coastal fishing ports:

“Properly consolidate your ideas in the prefecture. If you don’t, we won’t do anything.”

After the meeting, he explained to the media the reason for his lesson in etiquette to the governor:

“After I was called and entered, he didn’t arrive for three or four minutes. In Kyushu, when a guest arrives, the host is already there. Whether it’s a matter of discourtesy (or not), one should have a clear understanding that the younger should give preference to the elder.”

The hicks in Miyagi weren’t impressed. The next day, the party caucuses in the Miyagi prefectural assembly held a conference. Shortly thereafter, the assembly passed a resolution formally complaining to the government about the minister’s behavior:

“Those statements applied a great deal of pressure, and he lacks the awareness (required of) someone in his position.”

They also reminded the government that they were not in a master-subordinate relationship with them.

But the minister didn’t understand what the fuss was about. He was asked at a news conference yesterday if he thought his behavior was a problem:

“I don’t think it was a problem. Look at the entire conversation from the time I sat down until the time it was over.”

At the same meeting during which Okada Katsuya apologized to the opposition for Mr. Kan’s Cabinet appointment (no, that was a different guy, remember), the opposition told Mr. Okada that they found Mr. Matsumoto’s behavior unacceptable. The DPJ secretary-general replied:

“I will caution Mr. Matsumoto, and also inform Prime Minister Kan.”

The media also asked Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio what he thought. He didn’t want any part of an answer:

“Mr. Matsumoto is working with a strong sense of responsibility and mission. It is not for me to confirm what he really meant.”

In other words, ask his boss, and that ain’t me.

They finally did ask his boss, of course, and that was the sorriest part of the entire episode. One reporter brought up the subject of Mr. Matsumoto with the prime minister at a news conference. Mr. Kan ignored the question.

This morning Matsumoto Ryu resigned after nine days on the job. It wasn’t because he realized he had done anything wrong, mind you. He merely said that his comments might cause difficulties in Diet negotiations.

When the Diet agreed to extend their session by 70 instead of 50 days, Mr. Kan excitedly told his aides that anything could happen in that time.

He was right.

Afterwords:

Gov. Murai tried to be graceful about part of the situation. He said he thought the “off-record” comment was a joke. It might have been, but not in the sense that Mr. Murai meant it.

*****
Jean Knight still understands BS when she sees it:

Frankenstein’s monster in Japan

“The reason people voted for Kan (in last year’s DPJ presidential election) was because they didn’t want to vote for Ozawa, but we wound up really getting screwed.”
- DPJ Senior Advisor Watanabe Kozo in a meeting with New Komeito

IT’S TIME to draw conclusions from the fact that national governments throughout the world are now part of the problem rather than the solution. Those with the eyes to see will realize that the governments run by people who assume they’re the first rather than the last resort are functioning in the way classical liberals have always known they would. That is to say, they are dysfunctional. Consider the following examples.

* Greece is asking for a second bailout after the first in May 2010 and their austerity measures turned out to be yakeishi ni mizu, or water on a hot stone. Everyone expects them to default even after a booster injection of cash, and a second austerity program with more tax increases has the middle class out on the streets. The problem lies more with the Greek polity than with a specific government, but the public sector has become a work-free zone whose employees receive pre-retirement annuities and call them salaries. They’re just as likely to be found at the beach as at work, or actually working for pay off the books. The government allows it to happen, and the ETA for the default is by 2014:

“A new study by Open Europe breaks down the liabilities between the public and private sectors. Foreign financial institutions currently own 42 per cent of Greek debts, and foreign governments 26 per cent, the rest being owed domestically. By 2014, those figures will be 12 per cent and 64 per cent respectively. European banks, in other words, will have shuffled off their losses onto European taxpayers.

“Of course, the outstanding debt will have have risen substantially in the mean time: from €330 billion to €390 billion. Then again, as Eurocrats remind us every day, it’s remarkably easy to be generous with someone else’s money.”

* Ireland had what is officially being called a “credit event” but is a de facto default of Allied Irish Banks, the last financial institution not under government control. The Irish ceded their right to political self-determination to the EU last year for a bailout to save the banks. Instead of a new bailout, the government is negotiating with the EU to reduce interest rates, but the talks are stalled on the insistence of the EU that the country raise its 12.5% corporate tax rates. Here’s one Irish observer:

“Given the political paralysis in the EU, and a European Central Bank that sees its main task as placating the editors of German tabloids, the most likely outcome of the European debt crisis is that, after two years or so to allow French and German banks to build up loss reserves, the insolvent economies will be forced into some sort of bankruptcy…

“In other words, we have embarked on a futile game of passing the parcel of insolvency: first from the banks to the Irish State, and next from the State back to the banks and insurance companies. The eventual outcome will likely see Ireland as some sort of EU protectorate, Europe’s answer to Puerto Rico.”

Another possibility is that the Chinese will charge in as the white knights. They’ve already heavily invested in Greek infrastructure and Hungarian government bonds, and now say they will support the Euro.

* Great Britain has promised to spend as much on the EU bailouts as it saved through the aggregate domestic spending cuts put in place by its coalition government of Wet Tories and the LibDems, a party that Tony Blair marveled was positioned to the left of Labor, led by a man whose name has become a national synonym for “stonkingly silly”. Government spending in April and May was up 4.1% year-on-year, while government borrowing was up 5.7% year-on-year — despite tax increases in the form of VAT, fuel duties, income taxes, and National Insurance. An estimated 750,000 British civil servants, including teachers, struck symbolically for a day because the government wants them to pay more into the pension and work longer before they get it.

* Barack Obama was elected by campaigning on ending the war in Iraq, which he opposed in 2002. Now he’s committed to keeping troops there until 2015, at a minimum. During his infamous “halt the rise of the oceans” speech, he also said his would be an administration that ended a war, but he began an illegal (in American terms) military operation in Libya this year. The response by the American House of Representatives was to reject one motion to authorize military action and reject a second motion to defund the military action.

The president waved the same magic wand over his promise to close Guantanamo. His and the preceding governments’ stimulus measures have been so ineffective, he now wants to increase the debt limit and raise taxes. He appointed a man who cheated on his taxes twice as treasury secretary — the same man who recently warned that government would have to be downsized unless taxes were increased on small business. He also promised a post-racial society and appointed a racialist as attorney-general. Race riots have broken out in several parts of the country on a scale unseen in 40 years, some fomented by flash mobs organized on social networking sites.

*****
Reasonable people might object that these recent difficulties notwithstanding, any government is better than a cat. That’s how the Japanese of an earlier era expressed the idea of “it’s better than nothing”.

Events are proving them wrong in Belgium, which just set a record for a country in the modern era to have no government (13 months and counting). In brief, one group of parties refused to accept the results of last year’s election and chose not to form a coalition government. The former ministers still have the same portfolio, but there is no parliamentary majority, no legislative program, no party discipline, no new government interventions in the economy, no new quasi-public agencies, no new taxes, and few new regulations. Happily, everything outside of government continues to function normally, so the economy is projected to grow by 2.3% this year.

That brings us to Japan, whose situation is an amalgam of all those above. Not only are the executive and legislative branches barely functioning, their operation is subject to the erraticisms of a man of unabashed amorality who has taken the nation aback by his attempts to retain power at the expense of his Cabinet, his party, and the devastated Tohoku region. For the first time in my memory, the Japanese print media is running articles by psychiatrists speculating on the topic: Just what is this man’s problem anyway?

And just what is going on in Japan?

*****
The Kan Naoto Cabinet was a zombie government before the earthquake/tsunami of 11 March. Absent the disaster, it already would have collapsed. The prime minister had shown himself incapable of handing either domestic or foreign affairs, public support was at roughly 21%, and talk was circulating in Nagata-cho about a no-confidence motion. Post-disaster, the opposition realized cooperation was the order of the day and resigned itself to another two years of a Kan government.

Incompetents are incapable of rising to the occasion, particularly those incapable of standing erect to begin with. Rather than being part of the solution, Mr. Kan and his government became part of the problem. It would take a household full of digits to count the examples, but here’s the latest: After the Hyogo earthquake in 1994, the Socialist/LDP coalition appointed someone to take charge of government recovery efforts in three days. It took the prime minister more than three months before assigning that responsibility to Matsumoto Ryu, a limousine leftist who has never demonstrated the ability to manage a shaved ice stand, much less a national effort that will require the coordination of several Cabinet ministries and the cooperation of the opposition. He was already in the Cabinet at the Minister for Environmental Affairs, a portfolio often given to women appointed to serve as window dressing, and the Minister for Disaster Relief. His only noteworthy accomplishment in the latter role since the March disaster was to get out of the way while other people tried to get on with the work.

Mr. Matsumoto immediately wrapped his mouth around his foot by declaring at a meeting that since 11 March, he “hates the DPJ, hates the LDP, and hates New Komeito”. (He is an ex-Socialist who found refuge and political viability in the DPJ.) When asked if that was the sort of magnanimous spirit designed to win the selfless cooperation from other politicians during a national crisis, he replied that he was trying to show his mission was to take the side of the people in the affected areas.

But everyone had lost their patience with Mr. Kan long before that, including members of his own party. One month ago, senior members of the ruling Democratic Party crafted a lawyerly document the night before the Diet was set to pass a no-confidence motion in his cabinet. Passage would require almost 25% of the party’s representation in the lower house to vote for it, and they were going to get it. The hyper-discipline required of political parties in the parliamentary system meant that would have destroyed today’s Democratic Party, as the dissidents would have either been thrown out or walked.

The document was a brief, vague statement of Mr. Kan’s agenda that his predecessor, Hatoyama Yukio, was led to believe implied an early resignation. That was enough to defeat the motion and keep the party together.

By keeping their zombie government alive, however, the DPJ leadership created the Nagata-cho version of Frankenstein’s monster. Almost everyone, including the news media, assumed Mr. Kan had agreed to step down. One of the few who didn’t make that assumption was the prime minister himself. He immediately announced that the document — which he refused to sign by appealing to Mr. Hatoyama’s sense of camaraderie — had nothing to do with his resignation. Since then, he has never specified when he will step down, and keeps modifying the vague conditions he set for his own departure.

Party leaders took turns hinting that they’d remove him from the position of DPJ president if he didn’t leave voluntarily, but he ignored them. Six members of the DPJ’s leadership have tried to talk him into setting an early date for his disappearance, including Secretary-General Okada Katsuya, Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, and Mr. Edano’s predecessor and back-room string puller Sengoku Yoshito, but he dismissed them all. He has work to do, he told them. They started negotiations to pin him down on a time frame, but instead of meeting their requests, he added another condition: The passage of a bill to reformulate national energy policy. Its primary feature is to require the utilities to purchase renewable energy generated by others at exorbitant prices. Negotiations with the opposition parties on the content of the bill haven’t begun.

Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi, who is supposed to be one of the prime minister’s few friends in politics, became so frustrated he proposed that the DPJ change its method of selecting party president by entrusting the vote to all party members. They have a vote in the current system, but the votes of Diet MPs are given greater weight.

DPJ executives met again with the prime minister to discuss his resignation, but he again refused to specify a date because he said there was no guarantee the opposition would cooperate in the upper house for the passage of the second supplementary budget, the enabling legislation for the deficit-financing bonds, and the renewable energy program. Kyodo, however, quoted an anonymous party leader the next day saying that the prime minister would resign before mid-August. They thought he would hold a news conference last week to name the date. He didn’t.

Sengoku Yoshito, who has never been impressed with Mr. Kan’s abilities despite a shared political philosophy, remarked that keeping the prime minister in office was like kichigai ni hamono — giving a sword to a lunatic.

Okada Katsuya then took it upon himself to negotiate with the LDP and New Komeito to get a signed document outlining their conditions for cooperation. (That’s more than the DPJ usually brings to discussions.) Both parties agreed to vote for the second supplementary budget and the bond measures, as well as a 50-day Diet extension, on the condition that Mr. Kan set a date for departure and the new prime minister pass the third supplementary budget.

When the prime minister saw it, he banged the table, shouted that the upper house members of the LDP couldn’t be trusted, and threw out the document. His bullying was successful in winning an extension until the end of August without a commitment to resign.

Quitting

It is a mystery why anyone thought that Kan Naoto would willingly resign, much less in June. Indeed, soon after double-crossing his co-founder of the Democratic Party, he became insufferably smug in public, telling one reporter that if people didn’t want to see him around anymore, they should hurry up and pass the bills he cites as his conditions for leaving.

It is no secret that becoming prime minister has been his ambition since he was a young man. He has put an enormous amount of effort and persistence into achieving that ambition, starting from the days when he won election to the Diet as one of four members of a long obsolete party called the Socialist Democrats. Why would anyone think he would go down without kicking and screaming all the way?

And that’s not even to mention the report in the weekly Shukan Gendai that he was bawling his eyes out to DPJ Vice-President Ishii Hajime, telling him, “I don’t want to quit.”

Finally, Mr. Kan said at a press conference on the 27th that the three bills (budget, bonds energy) were conditions for his resignation, but once again failed to specify a date. In fact, the prime minister said the energy legislation is the paramount of the three bills, i.e., it is more important than the budget for the Tohoku recovery or the means to pay for it.

Some think this is yet another Kan policy lurch, which occur with every new moon. For example, he seems to have forgotten about the TPP free trade negotiations, especially now that his expression of willingness to participate served the purpose of impressing the APEC leaders before their November summit.

Koike Yuriko, former Defense Minister and the Chairman of the LDP’s General Council, said:

“About this renewable energy legislation — he seems to have received a briefing from the bureaucracy about it on 11 March, but I’ve heard he wasn’t interested in the subject at all at that time. I suspect his interest was suddenly kindled after his talk with Son Masayoshi (of Softbank).”

On the other hand, whoever’s been writing Mr. Kan’s “e-mail blog” says he has considered energy reform to be essential for 30 years. There is reason to believe him, at least this once. Based on the posts at his Internet blog, he wants to drive everyone batty with windmills.

Here’s a post dated 21 August 2001:

“We should set targets for limiting air pollution caused by dioxins and other substances, and for the percentage of power generated by wind to establish a policy of creating a ‘nation based on environmentalism’. This should spur advances in technical development and capital investment in the related fields.”

10 September 2001:

“If we set targets for limiting the concentration of dioxins 10 years in the future, it will generate substantial demand for the replacement of incinerators. If we set a target of having 10% of all electricity generated by wind in 10 years, investment in this sector should increase.”

24 August 2007:

“In Japan, the power companies can only purchase the power generated by wind and other clean energy sources at rather low prices. This is perhaps rational from the power companies’ perspective, but from the policy perspective, it isn’t a policy at all.”

13 November 2007:

“Germany is promoting the purchase of power generated by wind, solar, and other clean sources at higher prices, and clean energy now accounts for 10% of all power generation.”

30 November 2007:

“For electric power, wind and solar power…For use in vehicles, biodiesel or bioethanol fuel. I’d like to create a headquarters for that purpose, but that is unlikely at the present.”

During questioning in the Diet after the earthquake/tsunami, he expressed a desire to switch to renewable energy. He reportedly told aides, “Tokyo Electric has neglected wind power, which I really love.” (おれの大好きな風力発電)

It is difficult to imagine anyone using that language — especially a person who invested so much time in the overseas sales of Japanese nuclear power technology.

But then, we’re not talking about a man who brings clarity to policy issues. He offered a mythomaniacal proposal for having 20% of Japan’s energy produced by natural sources in 2020 at the recent G-Whatever summit without having told anyone in Japan about it first. Said a DPJ MP who wished to remain anonymous:

“The sharks in government and industry will spy a new interest in natural energy, and get in bed with the government. It would simply exchange nuclear power interests for natural energy interests.”

Paging Son Masayoshi.

Some are critical of the legislation the prime minister thinks is critical because its primary component is to have the government set prices that utilities must pay to purchase the surplus energy generated by businesses and private homes. These prices, as we’ve seen before, are more than triple the unit price for the power generated by nuclear plants. The utilities will of course pass the expenses on to the consumer.

Others wondered why he would make this a priority given that there are ghost towns in the Tohoku region still filled with stinking rubble, with evacuees still living in shelters, and with little money being distributed, though the government has the mechanisms to handle all of that now if it chose to employ them. Is this man even qualified for his job?

Meanwhile, the government’s National Strategy Office leaked their initial draft of the government’s reform of energy and environment strategy. The primary elements of the strategy include energy conservation, renewable energy, electrical power systems, and “the world’s safest” nuclear energy. The last part was written into the draft by a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry dispatched to the office to work as an aide.

Lest we forget:

* This office was originally intended to be a bureau that served as the DPJ government’s policymaking headquarters, thereby wresting control of policy from the bureaucrats and giving it to politicians. Along with the rest of the party’s promises, its status was downgraded almost immediately after the DPJ took control of the government.

* METI has jurisdiction over nuclear power plants in Japan.

* On the night the no-confidence motion against the Kan Cabinet was defeated in the lower house, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito and former Defense Minister Maehara Seiji (members of the same faction in the DPJ), held a banquet in Tokyo for Truong Tan Sang, tapped as the next president of Vietnam. Both Mr. Sengoku and Mr. Maehara (along with Prime Minister Kan), were instrumental in successfully selling Japanese nuclear power technology to the Vietnamese last year, but the Fukushima accident postponed the export of that technology. The media was not allowed to cover the banquet or their meetings (though a photo was released), but Mr. Maehara appeared on television on the 5th and said:

“Mr. Truong told us that he has no intention of altering the nuclear power agreement. It is important to enhance the safety of nuclear power and sell the technology overseas.”

The Democratic Party paid for the banquet.

For its part, the LDP has already refused to negotiate a reworking of energy policy or help pass the legislation without a new governmental structure in place; in other words, a new prime minister and Cabinet.

Mr. Kan’s prioritization of energy policy, while knowing that the LDP isn’t interested, that members of his own party are still promoting nuclear energy, and that the supposed policymaking headquarters of his party is still pushing nuclear energy through bureaucratic subterfuge, has brought an unsettling new element into the political situation.

Who’s ready for an election?

When the bottom fell out for Mr. Kan’s four predecessors, they chose to resign. All of those men — Abe Shinzo, Fukuda Yasuo, Aso Taro, and Hatoyama Yukio — were reared in political families and were familiar with the national political culture since childhood. All of them understood the concept of noblesse oblige, and all of them have money, networks of supporters and friends, and other things to do, either in politics or out.

Kan Naoto comes from an ordinary background, has no family money, few friends or political supporters, and no sense of honor or shame. His name has been mud since last year. If freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, he has the freedom to chose a different strategy when confronted with the same circumstances. Witness his public betrayal of Hatoyama Yukio. He has also had associates circulate a rumor that many people find all too believable.

In substance, it is this: On either 6 August (the date of the Hiroshima bombing) or 9 August (the date of the Nagasaki bombing), he will announce that he thinks Japan should follow the lead of Germany and Italy and renounce the use of nuclear power. He will then dissolve the lower house of the Diet for an election and run on that single issue. He would hope that the Japanese electorate votes in the same way as the Italian voters who nixed nuclear energy by a tally of more than 90%. He would also hope that the overseas media wets its pants in delight.

Speaking of having nothing left to lose, a look at the poll numbers is instructive. The support for the Kan Cabinet is down to 23% in the Fuji Sankei and Kyodo polls, and 21% in the generally more accurate Jiji poll. In other words, the prime minister has lost all the bounce from the goodwill extended during the disaster and the closing of the Hamamatsu nuclear plant in Aichi. Those numbers have reverted to the pre-disaster figures. The Nikkei poll finds that 42% think he should leave as quickly as possible and another 18% by the end of August, while only 16% want him to stay indefinitely.

The Fuji Sankei poll asked those surveyed positive or negative responses to the following statements. Here are the positive replies.

The prime minister’s leadership abilities: 8.0%
The prime minister’s economic measures: 11.0%
The prime minister’s conduct of foreign relations and security matters: 13.0%
The prime minister’s response to Fukushima: 13.5%
Finally, the reliance on nuclear energy should be reduced: 68.4%

Mr. Kan has long been envious of the success of Koizumi Jun’ichiro — that should be me! — and in particular Mr. Koizumi’s bold dissolution of the lower house in 2005 to hold a single-issue election on the issue of postal privatization. He won in a landslide.

The prime minister’s aides suggest the public would agree it was reasonable to conduct an election on that issue, despite any difficulties in the prefectures most affected by the earthquake/tsunami. The local elections held nationwide earlier this year were postponed in the Tohoku region until 22 September at the latest. When a prime minister dissolves the Diet, an election must be held in 40 days. Forty days out from 9 August is 18 September, the last Sunday before the 22nd. Japanese elections are usually held on Sundays.

Speaking anonymously to the media, the prime minister’s aides even suggest he would recruit “assassins” to run against pro-nuclear DPJ Diet members in individual districts, in the same way that Mr. Koizumi recruited people to run against LDP members opposed to postal privatization.

Many DPJ members would be defeated, but that would not necessarily mean the defeat of the larger issue. A formal study group has been created in the Diet among those who favor a shift to renewable energy. It consists of 206 members of several parties. Among them are the LDP’s Nakagawa Hidenao — a Koizumian who has long been interested in hydrogen — and Shiozaki Yasuhisa. Both served as chief cabinet secretary in LDP governments. The group also includes People’s New Party President Kamei Shizuka, Social Democrat head Fukushima Mizuho, mid-tier DPJ members aligned with Ozawa Ichiro, and Endo Otohiko of New Komeito. Many of these people have either separated themselves from Mr. Kan or are his opponents.

In short, as freelance journalist Uesugi Takashi notes, for this issue Kan Naoto is the leader of the anti-Kan faction. An election victory for the anti-nuclear power group could result in a major political realignment that forces him from office. Having achieved that result, however, he would surely go willingly, having established (in his own mind) his place in history.

Most Nagata-cho sources who speak off the record say it is “very possible” the prime minister would call such an election. He is, after all, capable of any number of cockamamie schemes. When he was pushing for a 70-day extension in the Diet session, Mr. Kan told aides, “If we have 70 days, no one knows what’s going to happen.”

Senior members of the DPJ are aghast at the prospect, and one can detect the realization behind their words that Kan Naoto — the man who once insisted his preference was for mature debate in the Diet — is certainly capable of carrying out a threat he has yet to publicly make or deny, but which everyone is discussing. They’ve gotten together for several meetings and agreed on the necessity of a Kan Naoto resignation. Mr. Kan again ignored them.

Said Finance Minister Noda Yoshihiko, whose prospects as the successor of Mr. Kan would evaporate in such an election:

“It is not possible to dissolve the Diet now. It must not happen.”

Note that second sentence. Doesn’t seem too sure, does he?

Hosono Goshi, the new minister in charge of the Fukushima cleanup:

“I don’t think Prime Minister Kan has that intention in mind.”

He doesn’t think. Sengoku Yoshito is sounding a similar note:

“He hasn’t gotten that weird yet.”

But:

“There are many things we must address as a nation. There must not be a lower house election.”

Said DPJ Secretary General Okada Katsuya:

“It’s a summertime ghost story.”

He added that Mr. Kan could even resign before August if the three bills pass. He also does not think single issue elections are a good idea. No surprise there — he was the DPJ whipping boy in the 2005 elections.

Koshi’ishi Azuma, the head of the DPJ delegation in the upper house, says the prime minister got the 70 days he wanted, but people won’t support him after that. If he chooses to stay 100 days to half year, he is “not qualified as a person to be the prime minister”. He also thought the DPJ would suffer “a meltdown” of its own if Mr. Kan stayed until the end of August.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio helpfully says that reform discussions with the opposition will move forward when Mr. Kan leaves. He’s not necessarily anxious for that to happen before the end of August, however. Mr. Edano has been bingeing on funds from the “secret” discretionary account allocated to his office at a pace much higher than that of his predecessors in the LDP. Chief cabinet secretaries are given JPY 100 million (about $US 1.24 million) at the end of every month, and Mr. Edano (as well as Mr. Sengoku before him), has spent almost all of it. Mr. Edano insists he’s using it for Tohoku relief, but since he doesn’t have to account for it, everyone else assumes he’s using it for DPJ election efforts, perhaps his own. If Mr. Kan stays until the end of August, Mr. Edano will have been given access to an additional JPY 300 million after the failure of the no-confidence motion.

And oh yes, Hatoyama Yukio still trusts him to resign.

The last word belongs to Your Party President Watanabe Yoshimi:

“His tenacious obsession for authority is his own renewable energy.”

Along comes Kamei

Mr. Kan’s attitude seems to be borrowed from a James Cagney gangster movie: Come and get me, coppers! He has slightly reshuffled his Cabinet with the advice and counsel of PNP head Kamei Shizuka. There was a misstep at first when Mr. Kan named Mr. Matsumoto as the minister in charge of recovery (Kamei’s reaction: Matsumoto? Who’s he?), but they regained their footing.

No longer a sweetheart of mine

He also named Hosono Goshi as the minister responsible for dealing with the Fukushima accident. Because the number of ministers is limited by law to 17, he had to drop one, and he made the obvious choice by demoting Reform Minister Ren Ho from her ministerial post to serve as his personal aide. The Kan Cabinet isn’t doing any reforming anyway, and Ren Ho, whose real world experience consists of being a model and TV host, was only decoration to begin with.

The classic Kan behavior of a dullwit who thinks he is clever became manifest again when he and Mr. Kamei talked LDP upper house member Hamada Kazuyuki into joining the Cabinet as internal affairs parliamentary secretary in charge of the reconstruction.

Accounts suggest that Mr. Hamada’s motives for going to work in the Kan Cabinet to help in the reconstruction effort, knowing that he would be tossed from his party, were altruistic. That is not true for the effort made to recruit him. Mr. Kamei reportedly approached 10 LDP members in the upper house, opening with the line, “Do you really want to stay in the opposition?” An approach was also made to Maruyama Kazuya, who turned them down.

The idea was to make it easier to pass legislation without negotiation through the upper house, where the DPJ does not have a working majority, either alone or in coalition. Another factor is that when Mr. Kan is not involved, the cooperation among the DPJ, the LDP, and New Komeito has been smooth. That negates the influence of Mr. Kamei’s single-issue splinter party.

This is not Mr. Kamei’s first involvement in political black ops. He’s the one who detached the Socialists from the eight-party coalition government of Hosokawa Morihiro, the first non-LDP government since 1955, and created an LDP-Socialist coalition. His line then: “Aren’t you tired of that fascist bastard Ozawa Ichiro?” He and the fascist bastard get along quite well now, incidentally.

This move will probably backfire on the Kan-Kamei team, however, because the LDP and New Komeito are now unlikely to cooperate with the DPJ as long as Mr. Kan is in office. The cooperation achieved in extending the Diet session by 70 days ended after fewer than 10.

Others in the DPJ were aware this would happen, and wondered what the prime minister was thinking. Said Finance Minster Noda:

“This has created extremely harsh circumstances by hardening the opposition’s attitude. The thing for us to do is go to their front door and bow our heads (in apology).”

DPJ Policy Research Committee Chairman Gemba Koichiro:

“It is no mistake to say that the hurdle just got higher for negotiations between the government and opposition.”

DPJ Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Azumi Jun wondered why so much difficulty had to be caused over just one official. Another DPJ member chimed in to add that if they were going to go fishing in the opposition for members, what is the point of coming home with one minnow?

Another factor angering the DPJ was that once again, the prime minister didn’t tell anyone what he was doing beforehand, with the exception of Mr. Kamei and Ishii Hajime. Sengoku Yoshito used the phrase tachikurami shita when he heard the news. That’s an expression to describe the brief sensation of dizziness people get when they stand up too quickly.

There was even a report of anti-Kan slogans written on pieces of paper and hung on the walls of the party’s office for officials in the Diet Affairs Committee inside the Diet building itself. One is the Japanese expression hyakugai atte ichiri nashi (100 evils and no benefits), supposedly signed by Sengoku Yoshito.

It has at last reached the point with the DPJ of trying to choose which is worse — a prime minister who elicits that reaction among his own party, or a party unable to do anything about him except create calligraphic graffiti.

Kan Naoto met with the DPJ’s Diet members on the 28th and claimed that the next election would be about energy policy, a position almost no one in the country agrees with. According to the Asahi Shimbun, he was jeered by some of those present.

*******
Higano Harufusa operates the Higano Clinic for psychological counseling in Tokyo. Here’s his professional opinion about the prime minister:

“He’s tough, not in the good sense of the strength to withstand blows, but in the bad sense of being dull. He enjoys it when Dump Kan talk starts circulating, because that makes him the center of attention. He’s not the type to quit unless there are many other contributing circumstances.”

Said Iwami Takao of the weekly Sunday Mainichi:

“In a half-century of political journalism, I’ve learned that the post of prime minister is a frightening one. I’ve seen many crises arise over a prime minister’s continuance in office, but never one in which a prime minister stays after announcing that he will resign. But the post of prime minister is also one in which a politician can hold on for quite a while if he wants to.

“Politicians like the expression mushin furitsu (derived from a Confucian analect used to mean that public officials can’t accomplish anything once they’ve lost the people’s trust). Mr. Kan, however, seems to think it’s unusual that people don’t trust him. This prime minister is starting to become abnormal.” (正常さを失いかけている。)

*****
Littering the English-language sector of cyberspace like so much digitized fecal matter are the assertions/opinions/propaganda of professional journalists, academics, and bloggers that a government led by the Democratic Party of Japan would be just the change that Japan was waiting for. That this was fatuous nonsense was just as apparent before the lower house election of 2009 as the claim that Barack Obama was a man of exceptional intelligence and superlative leadership qualities. Some of the poor sods actually believed it, but the gullible will always be with us. Some of them are parroting what other people told them as a way to fill space or appear relevant. For the rest, it was a convenient method for sugarcoating Social Democracy. (There are also a few who combine the first and the last categories.)

After almost two years, the DPJ has given Japan not one, but two prime ministers of unparalleled incompetence. The party itself is incapable of governance. It has introduced no reforms of significance, nor passed any serious legislation that was a national priority. They are still in thrall to the bureaucracy. They produced back-to-back budgets with the highest deficits in Japanese history, funded by the largest amount of government debt, even before the Tohoku disaster. The Chinese and Russians, immediate neighbors and the two largest malevolently aggressive states in the world, treat them with the back of their hand.

The party’s largest single faction is nominally under the direction of Ozawa Ichiro, whom the rest of the party would gladly heave if it wouldn’t threaten their majority in the Diet. Both the more centrist Ozawa faction and the leftist faction centered on Sengoku/Edano/Maehara loathe the prime minister. The latter group put him in that position, supported him through a no-confidence motion, and now can’t get rid of him. They are reduced to wishing, hoping, and taping pieces of paper to the walls of their offices.

Kan Naoto’s closest confidante is now Kamei Shizuka, who turned down an offer to become deputy prime minister and settled for the title of special assistant. Mr. Kamei has everything the bien pensants told us was bad about the LDP — hushed up money scandals, skills more suited to Byzantine plots than governmental administration, and the philosophy of a social conservative whose core beliefs are 180 degrees opposite from those of the man he serves. His mini-party was formed to neuter the best political idea of the decade in Japan, achieved through rare political insight and courage — the privatization of Japan Post. He is the foremost Japanese example of the reason Friedrich Hayek refused to identify himself as a conservative — they are too often too ready to make common cause with statists.

It is only in the field of political commentary that people would retain their platform or reputation after revealing themselves to be shills, ignoramuses, or ignoramus shills. But all journalistic outlets in print, broadcast, or the Net need content to fill the space regardless of its stupidity. Some of those outlets are happy to push the same agenda.

The nation is desperate to have Kan Naoto gone, but he doesn’t give a flying fut. He loves the attention. Why even bother with an election in September? Indeed, it’s been revealed that he is thinking about a visit to China for a summit meeting around 10 October. If he were planning to leave soon, what could he possibly discuss with the Chinese? Some people wonder if he intends to keep this up until 2013, when the current lower house term ends, or even beyond. He’s now become so abnormal that the normal are no longer able to understand what he intends to do.

Unlike Belgium, Japan has a government, but it is not better than a cat. The government it does have is led by a Frankenstein monster that his own party created. It is so bad — there is no other word — that had Japan been in the same situation as Belgium, more progress might have been made on the Tohoku recovery and reconstruction.

For a year or two before the earthquake/tsunami, credentialed space-fillers who know less about Japan than they do about the Sumerian calendar were warning that the country was becoming irrelevant.

But as it says in Ecclesiastes — you know, the Bible — the race is not always to the swift, nor favor to men of ability. For validation, one need only look at the Kantei in Tokyo.

Every day that Kan Naoto remains in office is one day closer to the time when Japan really does become irrelevant. He’ll guarantee it.

*****
You unlock this door with the Kan of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.

The New York Times: As much currency as the Zimbabwe dollar

“Prime Minister Kan has been extremely busy during this unprecedented disaster. He’s screaming at people in the Kantei, he’s barging into Tokyo Electric and screaming at them, and he’s screaming when he comes back. The problem with the prime minister screaming without regard to time or place is that none of it brought about an improvement in the situation.”
- The 2 April issue of the weekly Shukan Gendai

THOSE still interested in smokestack-industry journalism might find it fun to go slumming at the New York Times website and read their article, Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust, about the Japanese government’s initial efforts to deal with the nuclear accident at Fukushima.

A more apt title would be Media Crisis, Crippling Mistrust. That the article contains a substantial amount of distortion, manipulation, and unintentional, spit-out-the-beverage humor will be no surprise — it’s a collaborative effort by two of the Times’ journalistic gimps, Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler. The former is well-known for his hatchet jobs on Japan when he was that paper’s Tokyo correspondent, while the latter’s primary talent seems to be opening his mouth wide and saying Ahhh to receive DPJ government spoonfeedings.

But perhaps that assessment is too harsh. The pair had to work under a greater handicap than usual because the Kan administration, whose party promised greater access to the media when they were in the opposition, excluded overseas reporters as well as freelance and net journalists from the prime minister’s and chief cabinet secretary’s news conferences updating earthquake/tsunami information because “it was an emergency”.

So the Times did the next best thing and faked it by rewriting the government’s handouts.

The following is a comparison of what the Japanese government wanted the Times to tell those people it still thinks are American opinion leaders, and what the Japanese government doesn’t want them to know.

The Times Tale #1:

The Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclear crisis in the crucial first three days to Tepco, focusing instead on relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, Mr. Terada and other aides said.

What Everyone in Japan Knows #1:

When the earthquake occurred shortly after 2:00 p.m. on 11 March, Mr. Kan and his advisors immediately went to the government’s crisis center. That night, the prime minister himself conducted discussions about ways to deal with the nuclear crisis, drawing up scenarios on a whiteboard. The discussions lasted all night.

At about 5:00 a.m. on the following day, he skipped a meeting of a group organized to deal with the emergency and flew by Self-Defense Force helicopter to view the Fukushima reactors from the air. (The trip itself remains very controversial in Japan. Critics charge it delayed the start of measures to cool the reactors. Others claim the trip had no intrinsic value, and that the prime minister made it only because of his taste for performance politics.)

After he returned, the prime minister told aides:

“The nuclear problem can be handled under Kantei leadership.”

(NB: The term Kantei in Japanese is analogous to the terms White House, the Kremlin, or 10 Downing St. in English.)

At 1:00 p.m., still fewer than 24 hours after the quake, a deputy minister addressed a news conference and said the fuel rods at the Fukushima reactors might already have started to melt. The Kantei was already aware of this possibility. That night, the prime minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio removed him from his job and reassigned him because he had “alarmed the people”.

At roughly 3:00 p.m. on 12 March, slightly more than 24 hours after the quake, Mr. Kan chaired a meeting of all party heads in the Diet and told them:

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The nuclear reactor is fine…Even at the worst, there will be no leakage of radiation.”

TT #2

“…(A) nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.

“Mr. Kawauchi (Hiroshi, an MP from the prime minister’s party) said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.”

WEIJK #2

The Nuclear Safety Technology Center (NSTC), which administers SPEEDI, sends out information in real time during an emergency over dedicated circuits to the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC), all the related agencies in the government, and all prefecture governments. Tokyo Electric informed the government of the power loss at Fukushima on 3:42 p.m. on 11 March, slightly more than one hour after the earthquake. The government immediately instructed the NSTC to operate in emergency mode, which it did at around 5:00 p.m. SPEEDI began sending data hourly, and the amount of data transmitted reached 6,500 pages by 20 April. The government had released only two pages of that data by the end of April. The NSC published the first page on 23 March, 12 days after the earthquake/tsunami, and the second page on 11 April.

An article in the 6 May edition of the weekly Shukan Post claims that Mr. Edano had to have known about the SPEEDI data from the start of the emergency, which means that Mr. Kan had to have known too. The Post interviewed the head of the bureau in the Education Ministry responsible for SPEEDI, who said,

“A senior official at the Kantei ordered that information from SPEEDI was not to be made public (on the 15th). The next day (the 16th) the responsibility for SPEEDI was transferred from the Ministry to the NSC.”

The Post also interviewed the head of the NSC, who denied the story, but the magazine didn’t believe him:

“All the local governments involved told us the (system began functioning immediately). In accordance with the system’s guidelines, maps (showing radiation dispersion) were transmitted to the Fukushima Prefecture government office from the start (of SPEEDI operation). The prefectural government did not issue warnings to municipalities and residents, however. Explained a member of the Fukushima Prefecture group established to deal with the accident, ‘NSC decided whether or not to release the information, and we were prevented from releasing it on our own’.”

Incidentally, the Times found the space for the quote above from Kawauchi Hiroshi, but missed his statement published in the 31 March edition of the weekly Shukan Shincho:

“The prime minister has further stressed political leadership and Kantei leadership, but I do not think that was functioning at all during this crisis.”

TT #3

“(O)n March 14, the gravity of the plant’s situation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at Reactor No. 3, and a startling request that night from Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu: that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plant because it had become too dangerous to remain.

“When he heard this, Mr. Kan flew into a rage, said aides and advisers who were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of the four stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the two remaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4. ‘This is not a joke,’ the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.

“They said Mr. Kan convened an emergency meeting early on March 15, asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors. Then he gave Tepco barely two hours’ warning that he planned to visit the company.

“At 5:30 a.m., Mr. Kan marched into Tepco headquarters and stationed one of his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on the company.

“Mr. Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk, said his aide, Mr. Terada.

“’Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,’ Mr. Kan told them.”

WEIJK #3

That’s not all he told them in the ensuing 15 (not five) minutes. Mr. Kan ordered the press corps accompanying him out of the room. The prime minister grabbed a microphone and started shouting loud enough for the reporters standing outside in the hall to hear. He told Tokyo Electric officials, ‘Kakugo wo kimete kudasai’, (i.e., their workers should be prepared to die) and said that if they withdrew from the plant he would crush the company (100％ 潰れる). He wound up staying for a three-hour conference, but he was still screaming when he returned to the Kantei.

Five-minute impromptu pep talk, eh?

The utility’s workers were exposed to radiation initially reported to be 2.5 times over the acceptable limit. On the 16th (the next day), however, the prime minister ordered Self-Defense Forces dropping water on the reactors from a helicopter to withdraw because of the risk of radiation exposure.

While recognizing there was a lot for which to hold TEPCO accountable, the Japanese media wondered why Prime Minister Kan issued a de facto order to the utility to send its employees into a situation that had the potential of resulting in their death from radiation exposure (which he mentioned himself), though he has no legal authority to tell a private sector company what to do. In contrast, he pulled back the SDF — public sector employees whose job involves receiving orders that might result in their deaths — because of dangerous radiation levels.

That Mr. Kan screams a lot is common knowledge in Japan. One DPJ member — again, a member of the same party — told the media that when the prime minister barged into Tokyo Electric headquarters and started yelling at them it was nichijosahanji. (A daily occurrence; literally, “daily rice and tea”)

“Everyone’s disgusted with him because he calls in officials off the top of his head and starts screaming at them. When an official with a better grasp of the situation tries to point out his errors, he yells, ‘I’m not listening to anything you say!’ When they resign themselves to just conveying the facts, he loses his temper and says, ‘Are you trying to make me decide?’ Everyone knows something serious is bound to happen unless there’s a change, but no one can stop him.”

The cover headline of the subsequent issue of the Bungei Shunju, Japan’s most prestigious monthly, read: Kan Bangs the Table and Yells / Senior Bureaucrat: “I don’t want to look at the prime minister’s face for even a second”

TT #4

“On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to suspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepco liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.

“‘Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,’ Sakae Muto, Tepco’s executive vice president, explained at a news conference.

“Mr. Sassa (Atsuyuki), the former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, said: ‘Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?’”

WEIJK #4

When the man with the ultimate authority is psychologically unsound and is emotionally out of control as a matter of nichijosahanji, sends people over whom he has no authority to their possible deaths, and threatens to destroy their company if he is not obeyed, of course the people who must deal with him make decisions based on his mood. They can’t afford to joke around. Here’s another report:

“When a member of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency explained a point to him, he retorted, ‘You haven’t been to the site and seen it (like I have), have you?’ He phoned a bureaucrat he had never met out of the blue and issued instructions. He concluded with, ‘It’ll be your fault if something happens’.” (That English cannot convey the faux tough guy roughness of the original Japanese: 何かあったらお前らのせいだぞ)

TT #5

“Mr. Aritomi said that even with Mr. Hosono stationed inside Tepco, the company still did not disclose crucial information until mid-May, including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four active reactors had melted down.”

WEIJK #5

Tokyo Electric told the prime minister at about 10:00 p.m. on the night of the earthquake that they expected a meltdown to occur. Their readings of iodine levels at the plant early the next morning confirmed their expectations. In any event, instead of telling other people in the Diet that he wasn’t sure, Mr. Kan was flatly denying that a meltdown had occurred into mid-May.

TT #6

“(T)he Japanese met an hour beforehand (on 20 March) to discuss developments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans. Mr. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministries and Tepco, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time since the crisis began.”

WEIJK #6

Onishi and Fackler pulled that last sentence from their backsides; as we’ve seen, the politicians set the agenda from the day the crisis started. That was the problem.

Here’s one freelance journalist:

“The prime minister and his ‘political leadership’ are suspected to be the reason for the confusion of the blackouts, and the disrupted transport, business, schools, medical institutions, which were implemented on the spur of the moment with no input from ministries. He criticized Tokyo Electric for providing information late, but ignored his own inability to gather information.”

And another:

“Mr. Kan’s greatest mistake was that he was supposed to be the commander but acted like a squad leader on the ground. He established a headquarters within the offices of Tokyo Electric. This was just a performance designed to catch the attention of the mass media and promote himself among the people. Meanwhile, he treated the government’s emergency and disaster relief headquarters as a side job, giving it short shrift. That’s because there’s no glory and no media coverage in it.”

Here’s a headline in the Daily Yomiuri on 17 March:

“Distribution channels blocked; Government has done nothing for six days / No specific plans from disaster headquarters”

The problems extended to foreign affairs. The Taiwanese government got in touch with the Japanese government on the day of the earthquake to tell them they could dispatch an emergency rescue team to the area immediately. The prime minister made them — and the people in Tohoku stranded by the earthquake — wait for two days until after the Chinese rescue team arrived.

All of this goes without saying for the people who know Mr. Kan best. Sengoku Yoshito was the chief cabinet secretary in the first Kan cabinet, and returned as the deputy chief after it became apparent that Matsumoto Ryu, nominally the Minister for Disaster Measures, was incapable of doing his job. He reportedly told a close aide:

“Handling affairs from the earthquake to the recovery is beyond Kan’s ability.”

Here’s an example of what that means: The prime minister has been widely quoted in the Japanese media as telling people that he is an expert on nuclear energy. Meanwhile, the Nikkei Shimbun reported that he wanted a “second opinion” from people not associated with the bureaucracy or Tokyo Electric, so he called in outside experts for a discussion. One of the first questions he asked was, “What is this ‘criticality’?”

Loathe to criticize too harshly someone who shares their political beliefs, the New York Times couldn’t find the space for any of the above. They did find the space for this bagatelle, however:

“Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner.”

Who anywhere has the experience in handling the deaths of more than 20,000 people and more than 80,000 people still in shelters as the aftermath of the fourth-largest earthquake in recorded history, the largest recorded tsunami in an area where large tsunami occur roughly every 30 years, and the resultant meltdown of three nuclear reactors?

As for his alleged inability to grasp the severity of the disaster sooner, he understood a meltdown was likely on the day of the disaster and he started ordering evacuations the next day. He was thrashed by the media and the public when it was reported on one occasion soon after the disaster that he said northeast Japan might be rendered uninhabitable, and on another occasion that no one would be able to live there for 10 to 20 years.

Of the many criticisms of the Kan administration, one of the most frequent is that they never accept responsibility and always blame someone else. Either the New York Times fell for it (which means they need new correspondents in Tokyo) or are acting as accomplices.

One reporter assigned to cover the Democratic Party of Japan told the Shukan Shincho that Mr. Kan’s behavior in the first week after the earthquake/tsunami resembled that of Adolph Hitler in the final days of the Third Reich.

Speaking of the Third Reich, anyone who wants to read the Times article and see what an English-language article in the Völkischer Beobachter might have looked like in the heyday of that publication can use the search engine of their choice to find it. No links from me.

Links are for journos on the legit.

*****
Such dubious souls