Japan’s DPJ: The LDP redux?

MOST OF THOSE PEOPLE interested in Japanese politics have already discounted a Democratic Party of Japan landslide victory in Sunday’s lower house election, to use a Wall Street term. Though the expected result will be a positive development (while still being no more than a first step), many have misgivings about what a DPJ-led government will bring. Let there be no mistake—this presumed result will most certainly not be a vote of confidence in the DPJ, who once again put their incompetence on parade within the past month when they proved incapable of writing a coherent party platform. It will instead be a resounding no the Liberal Democratic Party-dominated political system that has prevailed since 1955, and whose sell-by date has long expired, as many Japanese wags have noted.

Some of those observers are beginning to ask whether Japan’s new boss is starting to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the old boss, declamations of reform and political cleanliness notwithstanding. The Nishinippon Shimbun recently ran a series of articles about the DPJ’s likely formation of a government. This specific article, which ran on 15 August, wonders aloud if they’re on the way to becoming a second LDP. Here’s my translation.

*****

A doctor in private practice who is also an officer in the Japan Medical Association is concerned about one section of the Democratic Party of Japan’s political platform.

“That’s the clause that reads, ‘Provide greater remuneration for medical examinations (hospital admissions) to medical institutions that strive to increase the number of medical practitioners’. Why was it necessary to add the part about admissions? That limits the eligibility to institutions that admit patients. Almost all the medical institutions that admit patients are large hospitals. Isn’t this giving too much weight to the opinions of those groups consisting of doctors employed at hospitals?”

Another doctor is suspicious of the clause that limits the mention of (financial support for) cancer vaccines to cervical cancer. The explanation was that budget limitations forced them to focus on cervical cancer, for which preventive methods have already been established. But the doctor does not accept that explanation, saying “There are a lot of patients with other cancers.”

Are there not zokugiin within the DPJ too?

Zokugiin

The zokugiin, national legislators who act on behalf of the interests of specific industries (i.e., legislator-lobbyists), are a product of the ties between government, the bureaucracy, and industry. Authority is required to obtain the benefits of those ties, and this has been seen as the trait of the Liberal Democratic Party, the ruling party of government for many years.

Today, however, with a change in government a real possibility, slight changes are becoming apparent.

Recently, an aide to a long-serving member of the upper house noticed there were many names of mid-tier construction companies printed on a visitor’s name card. The aide wondered if the visitor was hoping to receive orders for government construction projects. He thought that associating with this visitor had the potential for danger unless the background of the person was thoroughly vetted, including whether he had made any political contributions.

The Japan Medical Association, agricultural cooperatives, and construction industry groups have traditionally supported the LDP. Some groups are looking beyond a change of government and starting to disassociate themselves from organizations that support the LDP, and to make approaches to the DPJ, which is crafting specific industry-friendly policies. Does this not invite the formation of warped ties with industry rather than promote the DPJ’s announced policy of creating a government out from under from the bureaucratic thumb?

The chairman of the Ibaragi Prefecture Medical Association, which has decided to back the DPJ candidates in all seven of the prefecture’s election districts in a switch from their prior support of the LDP, is concerned. He says, “I’ve listened to the opinions of my friends, and I think this is a general phenomenon. There is danger in this policy, if only because these people (the DPJ) have never done anything.”

Control by Ozawa

Another matter of concern is the potential for control by Ozawa Ichiro. Last month, one DPJ employee heard a close Ozawa associate say, “After the election, Mr. Ozawa will probably become the party secretary general.” As the person responsible for the party’s election strategy, Mr. Ozawa has been sending his own aides out to help new candidates. It is very possible that a big victory by the “Ozawa Children” in the election could result in an “Ozawa faction” of nearly 100 MPs in the lower house.

As party president, Hatoyama Yukio has authority over party personnel matters, but the DPJ took the associate’s words to mean, “Mr. Ozawa’s sentiments cannot be ignored.”

Mr. Ozawa was schooled in politics by former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, whose political philosophy was “There is strength in numbers”. Will he bring his patron’s philosophy to the DPJ?

One young DPJ MP warns, “If Mr. Ozawa does create something like a second power base, he’ll attempt a coup d’etat.”

Whitewashing

Zokugiin, control by Ozawa, alliances with industry groups, internal conflict—all the negative aspects of the party in power. The groundwork can be glimpsed for the potential of the DPJ to become a second LDP.

“I’m not going to whitewash anything by saying that it’s impossible for zokugiin to be created in the party,” observes a senior member of the DPJ’s upper house delegation with a laugh. “Before the election, I guess it’s inevitable that people would be worried about that.”

But the DPJ party platform has vague sections with many points that need to be clarified in order to determine whether they can be entrusted with forming a government. Those points are not only about the issues surrounding the financing of their show window policies; they also involve their fiscal policy, diplomatic and security matters, and regional devolution. It isn’t out of the question that these problems could lead to the decay of the DPJ in the future. Those questions will be asked of the DPJ during the campaign.

Afterwords:

1. The Nishinippon Shimbun has long taken a harsh editorial line against the ruling LDP, so this article was not written from an LDP perspective.

2. The possibility of a lower house with more than 20% of its members loyal to Ozawa Ichiro rather than to the DPJ–or any other party–should give all sober-minded people pause. Some journalists in Japan would not be at all surprised if the man they call The Destroyer finds a way to break up the DPJ and realign Japanese politics on his own terms.

2. Keio University professor Kusano Atsushi published a paperback a year ago called Seiken Kotai no Hosoku, for which there is no elegant English translation, at least off the top of my head. It could be called the Law for Changes of Government, i.e., different parties alternating as heads of government in parliamentary systems. It’s an analysis of factions in Japanese political parties, and the professor also examines the “groups” in the DPJ. He holds that factions will inevitably form in the DPJ. One of his chapter headings is called “The Limits of Idealism”.

3. The last several posts have been translations rather than original material. That’s because I think the articles I translated need to be in English, if only to provide the Western press corps in Japan with chum. I’ve also been a bit busy with work.

The DPJ and the pero-guri pol

IT SOMETIMES SEEMS as if the only person with the skills required to describe Japanese politics today would have been the novelist Charles Dickens–and sometimes it seems even he wouldn’t have been up to the task.

Tanaka Yasuo

For example, spearheading the drive for the devolution of governmental authority are Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru and Miyazaki Gov. Higashikokubaru Hideo, two Dickensian characters who have parleyed their celebrity into a national soapbox to present the case for stronger local governments. The former is an attorney turned television performer, and the latter was a television comedian associated with Beat Takeshi, himself a famous comic and film director under his real name of Kitano Takeshi. The nation’s mass media are happy to give the TV veterans and audience favorites that soapbox, and the pair are just as happy with the chance to perch themselves on top and promote their cause while indulging their inner publicity hounds.

Working in a loose alliance, they’ve had a significant role in shaping the parameters of the national political dialogue this year with a potentially landmark lower house election due next month. But constant media attention and popular support is a dangerous combination that can drive anyone over the top. Over the past month, Mr. Hashimoto might finally have found the adult supervision he needed, while Mr. Higashikokubaru did indeed go over the top, but we’ll save that for later.

Of interest this week was the sudden reemergence of the celebrity governor who foreshadowed nearly a decade ago the appearance of the Dynamic Duo on the national political radar. That would be Tanaka Yasuo, an award-winning and best-selling novelist, governor of Nagano for six turbulent years, and now a national at-large delegate in the upper house of the Diet for his vanity party, New Party Nippon.

Mr. Tanaka has agreed to act as an electoral assassin for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan by running in Hyogo’s 8th district against incumbent Fuyushiba Tetsuzo of New Komeito, who has a Dickensian background of his own. Mr. Fuyushiba began his lower house career as a member of Komeito in 1986, switched to the New Frontier Party in 1994, served as a party official when former DPJ head Ozawa Ichiro led the group, and then switched back to New Komeito when it reorganized in 1998. He later served as New Komeito’s secretary-general, but resigned that post in 2006 to serve for two years as the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport.

With his New Frontier Party background, Mr. Fuyushiba might be considered an Ozawan-style conservative, if that concept still has any meaning. Like the DPJ, he supports voting rights in local elections for those people of Korean ancestry born in Japan who choose to retain Korean citizenship. Yet the DPJ, depending on who’s doing the interpreting, is either trying to eliminate New Komeito as a political force because Mr. Ozawa detests them, or making them an offer they can’t refuse to have them defect from the ruling coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party. But let’s get back to Mr. Tanaka.

The incumbent might seem to be in a strong position. New Komeito is backed by Soka Gakkai, the lay Buddhist group. The membership of that group is said to have a relatively high proportion of Japanese-born Korean citizens, as does the population of Hyogo.

Mr. Tanaka might be able to overcome these disadvantages because he is well-known in the area for his hands-on volunteer work during the recovery from the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people. He told the Sankei Shimbun that those volunteer activities opened his eyes to the necessity for changing politics and society. He added, “I want to create a type of politics with a close connection to the local residents, and destroy the vested interests of rule by the bureaucracy.” And this is definitely a year for the anti-incumbents.

La vie est belle

What would Dickens make of him? He wrote a best-selling novel while still a university student, as did the granddaddy of celebrity governors, Ishihara Shintaro—with whom he is engaged in a long-running feud.

After a career as a novelist and critic, and recording one LP as a singer, Mr. Tanaka became involved in community grassroots activities. He spent six months helping the earthquake victims and then campaigned against the construction of the Kobe Airport. He was asked to run as the governor of Nagano, where he lived as a child after his father began teaching at Shinshu University. He originally declined, saying that he thought he could be more effective outside politics, but changed his mind.

Sui generis is the only term to use to describe his politics. He favors stronger local government, but is opposed to municipal mergers, particularly in remote areas. He is an anti-bureaucracy reformer who was blood-in-the-eye-angry over former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s privatization of Japan Post, citing as his reason concerns that the measure would allow foreign interests to purchase it. Though he is known to have a personal relationship to some degree with Ozawa Ichiro, he dislikes both the LDP and the DPJ and calls himself an “ultra-independent”. He dismisses both the major parties as “department stores”, staffed by personnel seconded from business and industry groups in the case of the former, and labor unions in the case of the latter. He is critical of the influence of what he calls the Labor Aristocracy in the DPJ.

Mr. Tanaka also says he combines the best qualities of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, though it isn’t clear if he knows what they actually did, or is attracted to what he perceives as their image. He has somewhat nativist tendencies—the URL for his party’s website includes the string “love-nippon”–and he thinks that Japan should stake out a more independent international position. Yet he is also well-known for his taste in foreign automobiles, particularly Audis and BMWs. He rejects the label anti-American, preferring to refer to himself as a critic of America. (The Japanese expression he uses is the difficult-to-translate 諫米, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.) But he strongly supported Bill Clinton and redoubled that support after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. (We shall see the probable reason for that shortly.)

He ran for governor in Nagano after his predecessor became embroiled in scandals, which parallels Higashikokubaru Hideo’s entry into prefectural politics. He campaigned in opposition to unnecessary public sector projects, most notably a local dam. He was opposed by every political group except the Communist Party, as well as local legislators. But he was one of the few people in the country to understand and act on the hunger of the Japanese electorate for anti-establishment politicians. Assisted by the publicity that a friendly national media provided, he won the election and assumed office in 2000.

The media coverage lavished on his administration very much prefigured that now bestowed on Mr. Hashimoto and Mr. Higashikokubaru. At one point his approval ratings were slightly above 90%, outdoing even the other two, whose ratings still languish at the 80% level.

Mr. Tanaka recently sat for a long interview with the Sankei Shimbun, but his scattered line of thought makes it too difficult to describe concisely what he said, much less translate. Let’s look instead at this interview from four years ago in the Japan Times. It too is scattershot, combining a serious discussion of legitimate issues, grandiose unsupported statements, and more holes than a pound of sliced Swiss cheese. There are too many hard truths to keep it from being useless, but too many flaws that prevent it from being important. Complicating matters is an amateurish interviewer who seems more interested in producing hagiography than bringing to the attention of a non-Japanese audience a man who then was a nationally prominent politician. It all starts with the second sentence.

After converting his private office into a glass-walled room to make his work as transparent as possible…

Excellent PR, isn’t it? “I have nothing to hide.” It also screams, “Hey, everybody, look at me!” The glass substantiated one of the most common criticisms of Tanaka—that he’s nothing more than a publicity hound.

It’s puzzling why a journalist would be making positive references to the glass-walled room at that point in his term. Not long after he became governor, Mr. Tanaka demonstrated his transparency by entertaining a female television personality in this office. They shared a drink together while she sat on his lap. The glass walls made it easy for someone to take their photo and send it to a weekly magazine, which promptly published it. That embarrassed the people of his prefecture, who probably expected him to behave like most politicians and dally somewhere other than his office on his own time. For Mr. Tanaka, however, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Gov. Yasuo Tanaka defiantly declared “No More Dams” in a direct counter to the local economy’s heavy reliance on public works projects at the expense of ecological concerns. He also abolished the traditional, self-serving press club system in his prefecture.

Here we give the man credit where credit is due—Japan could use more governors (and prime ministers) who pursue the same policies, even when the ecology isn’t a consideration. He brings up other worthwhile points in the interview.

Besides tackling local politics, the flamboyant 49-year-old devotes his time to writing columns for magazines and criticizing and analyzing national and local politics on radio and television programs. He is also a well-known restaurant critic….When he was still a student at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 1980, he received the prestigeous Bungei Award for his novel “Nantonaku Kurisutaru (Somewhat Like Crystal).”

But he hasn’t written a worthwhile novel since then. He has, however, written a regular column for a magazine called The Pero-Guri Diaries. Here’s how Time Magazine explained it a few years ago:

“To understand Yasuo Tanaka, you need a piece of slang you won’t find in any Japanese-English dictionary. Pero-guri is a phrase Tanaka coined himself to describe the sexual act. More specifically, his sexual acts. It’s an onomatopoeic word, the pero coming from the slang pero-pero, which means to lick. The guri comes from guri-guri, which means to grind….Tanaka is Governor of Japan’s mountainous Nagano prefecture, west of Tokyo, but he’s also a writer, specializing in autobiographical pero-guri tales, which reveal a predilection for flight attendants, married women and fine champagne.

“‘Appointment with Mrs. U. Nap at Park Hyatt. The entire floor must have heard us. Midnight. She goes home to her husband… Dom Perignon at Roppongi’s Kingyo. Head to Chianti at Iikura for an espresso chaser but end up on the roof of the adjacent building, pero-pero guri-guri with the Tokyo Tower in the back. Her screaming fills the air. Pull out moist wipes from the bag and clean up.’”

Once upon a time, they used to say a gentleman never tells…And leave it to the Japan Times to fail to mention any of this in the interview.

After graduation, Tanaka at first joined the oil giant Mobil, only to leave three months later to pursue his career as a writer.

Tanaka also got married soon after joining Mobil, but got divorced 11 months later to pursue his career as a pero-guri writer.

…in 2002, conservative assemblymen who were upset by Tanaka’s challenge to tradition and decades of pork-barrel politics passed a no-confidence vote against him, and forced him from office.

Yes, they were upset by his challenge to pork-barrel politics…and creating undesirable attention for Nagano Prefecture by drinking in his glass-walled office with celebrities on his lap, his pero-guri tales, and endless self-promotion.

In the ensuing gubernatorial election, however, Tanaka made a successful comeback, thanks to overwhelming popular support.

Showing once again how desperately the Japanese voting public craves a reformer.

Then…he expanded his curriculum vitae yet again when he became leader of New Party Nippon, a new political party founded to challenge Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party in the Sept. 11 general election.

His party mates are strange bedfellows for a reformer—in addition to Mr. Tanaka, the other four members of his party all voted against Mr. Koizumi’s reforms in the Diet. In other words, they are anti-reformers who support the status quo of tradition and pork barrel politics.

At least the other members ran for the Diet, but Mr. Tanaka didn’t. He just went around the country giving interviews about his new party, leaving the citizens of Nagano to shift for themselves in his absence.

Though (the party) is small…

So small, in fact, that they had to “borrow” one member from another party of anti-reformers to meet the minimum requirements for selection in the proportional representation phase of the election.

Tanaka hopes his fledgling party will make a difference in Japan by encouraging people to think twice about Koizumi’s ongoing reform drives, which he believes fall far short of being true reforms.

Though his interview strangely lacks any concrete suggestions for reform.

On to the content:

Many young Japanese can only define themselves by naming the company they work for or the designer brand they wear. Our society is filled with people who can’t objectively describe themselves without the help of company names or brand products.

If I were Mr. Tanaka, I wouldn’t be so quick to complain about people incapable of objectively describing themselves.

Just as I described in my book, Japan is an affluent society with an abundance of material goods, where people have no need to worry about food or clothes. But who can be proud of, or be happy about, being a member of this society?

The basic needs of human beings are food, clothing, and shelter. Despite admitting that Japan is remarkably successful in providing the basics that so many other countries lack and offering an abundance of pero-guri opportunities, Mr. Tanaka thinks this is nothing to be proud of or happy about.

Japan’s debts have increased by 170 trillion yen since [Prime Minister Junichiro] Koizumi took office four years ago. What’s more, 100 people take their own lives each day.

That’s called a non sequitor. He might be able to do something about the first, but he’ll never be able to do anything about the second.

The interviewer, Sayuri Daimon, pipes up:

How can we reform this sick society?

Before you can call it a sick society, Sayuri, you have to show us some of the symptoms. Too much food, shelter, clothing, and pero-guri? Plenty of countries are just waiting to come down with that disease. But if the problem is pork-barrel politics, why is Japan being singled out for an illness that is endemic over the globe?

Back to the governor:

In my case, if someone gives me a hard time, I write or speak publicly about it. So I think people decided not to give me a hard time.

Was that before or after you were removed from office in a no-confidence vote?

Question:
What do you think about Koizumi’s postal reform drive?

Answer 1
Where would the money in the postal savings and postal life insurance go once they were privatized?

Uh, nowhere?

Answer 2:

What happens if a foreign company takes control of the privatized postal savings company and the postal insurance company?

Is his alliance with the anti-reformers beginning to make more sense now?

I think politics should be about what politicians actually say. For example, South American countries may have some political turmoil, but the debates in their parliaments are like an art formed by the politicians’ speeches.

Yes, Japan could learn a lot about parliamentary democracy from the politically stable and economically thriving South American countries.

…in other non-English-speaking countries, such as Thailand, there are foreign-language media that enjoy a leading position in those countries. But in Japan, unless something is reported in Japanese-language newspapers or it appears on Japanese TV, it does not become “evidence” to be taken seriously.

If the foreign-language media in Thailand have a leading position, what does that say about the indigenous media? And how can media that the Thai people—or Japanese people–can’t understand have a leading position?

My current girlfriend doesn’t seem to want to get married.

No surprise there.

Question:

Are you going to run for another term as governor?

Answer:

I will do what the Nagano people want me to do. I want to listen to what people in Nagano say, whether they say I should stay or leave office.

The people of Nagano were already speaking, but he wasn’t listening. As of the date of that interview, Mr. Tanaka had the lowest approval ranking of any Japanese governor. (35% unqualified approval, 40% unqualified disapproval; when combined with those who approve somewhat, his approval rating exceeded 50%)

In fact, he was defeated for reelection the following year in 2006. He began his term as a media favorite, but his stance against the kisha club system that allows major media outlets to monopolize information put the kibosh on that. (More than politics and government needs reforming in Japan.) He certainly didn’t help himself with the prefecture’s voters by neglecting local affairs to start his own political party and get involved in a national campaign. And what can you say about the lack of common sense demonstrated by his failure to escort a female companion to a private spot for a tête-à-tête rather than share a drink with her in his glass-walled office on government property?

Nevertheless, to his credit, he did succeed in producing budget surpluses seven years running and slashing the amount of money required to win bids on local public works projects by making bidding practices more transparent.

Now imagine what will happen if he wins the Hyogo seat and joins an alliance with a government led by the DPJ, whose membership ranges from Nanking Massacre deniers to de facto Socialists looking for a piece of the action instead of holding meetings in coffee shops with the rest of the faux Social Democrats. Team them up with the corrupt petty baron Suzuki Muneo, the paleos of the People’s New Party, and the Social Democrats themselves, and circus will not be the word to describe what ensues.

But even Charles Dickens could not find the words for that.

Afterwords:

Japan’s lax residency requirements for running in an election, which allow Mr. Tanaka to parachute into Hyogo at the last minute (though Ozawa Ichiro claims the decision was made a long time ago) are more conducive to political maneuvering in the back rooms of upscale Tokyo restaurants than they are to serving the people of a particular area.

The longer I’m in Japan, the more I’m convinced that the political class remains stuck in the Warring States Period:

(F)or all practical purposes, Japan by 1467 was in fact 260 separate countries, for each daimyo was independent and maintained separate armies. The political and territorial picture in Japan, then, was highly volatile. With no powerful central administration to adjudicate disputes, individual daimyo were frequently in armed conflict with other daimyo all through the Ashikaga period.

The only way this ends is if the electorate reminds these people just who serves whom and makes them unemployed every time they get the chance to vote.

Japan’s political Big Bang, V.2

WE’VE ALL HEARD THE EXPRESSION about running around like a chicken with its head cut off. That’s derived from the way in which chickens will thrash around the barnyard in a headless state.

After the reports on the radio I heard yesterday morning about how the pols in the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party were taking their party’s defeat in the Tokyo Metro elections on Sunday, I can imagine what it must have been like to see dinosaurs with their heads cut off.

Some thought a lower house election should be called right away, while others were aghast at the prospect. Former Cabinet member Hatoyama “Little Brother” Kunio was uncharacteristically lucid when he said that holding an election now would be like group suicide. Yamasaki Hiraku (AKA Taku), who’s already pushing a petition from within the party to oust Mr. Aso, observed that dissolving the lower house would be fine if the prime minister intended to leave the LDP a burnt-out wasteland. Mr. Yamasaki purposely chose a phrase the Japanese use to describe the state of their cities after the flyovers of Allied bombers during the war.

About an hour later, NHK interrupted their broadcast to announce that Prime Minister Aso had chosen the group suicide/wasteland option after briefly consulting with leaders in the LDP and the party’s New Komeito coalition partners. He’ll dissolve the Diet later this month and scheduled an election for 30 August.

Some reports claim there was shock over the election results in the LDP camp, but surely they jest. Japanese pollsters can add just as well as those elsewhere, particularly the ones hired by the major parties, so they already had to have put two and two together. Not that anyone needed a pollster to know in advance. Indeed, if they really are shocked, they need to be looking for another job, and as soon as possible, please.

Mr. Aso put on a brave face and said the Tokyo Metro results were unrelated to national issues. He plans to campaign on his government’s financial policies, i.e., a promise to be responsible and raise taxes. (The more responsible position would be to eliminate wide swaths of the Nagata-cho and Kasumigaseki Leviathan while cutting some taxes, but I digress.)

He knows that’s nonsense, of course, because his party’s national polls have to be showing the same numbers as the Tokyo results writ large. Does he think he can prevent the opposition Democratic Party of Japan from obtaining a majority and limit them to replacing the LDP as the largest party in the Diet? A DPJ government in an alliance with their motley crew of potential coalition partners would certainly be a chabangeki, the Japanese term for a farce or burlesque. Perhaps the party poobahs are calculating that a DPJ-led coalition government likely to strew its own path with banana peels would cause a voter revulsion and reversion back to the LDP that much sooner.

Or does he and the rest of the party realize that Nagata-cho needs a political realignment, and it won’t start unless the LDP is in the opposition? The party isn’t capable of resolving its internal conflict between the mudboaters and the reformers while it’s still in power, so they can conduct their headchopping out of public view while the DPJ circus occupies center ring.

Reorganizing around philosophical viewpoints rather than personal associations—if that’s what they intend—will be a lot easier after the smoke clears, the bodies are counted, and the identity of the survivors is known next month.

Quo Vadis?

Political predictions in Japan are pointless, which is why I seldom read or write any, but here’s one anyway: The upcoming lower house election will be Part Two of the Japanese political Big Bang, following an interval of more than a decade after Part One and the short-lived Hosokawa administration. Or from a scatological perspective, it will be the second flush of the toilet. There’s still too much residue in the bowl that needs to be sent to the sewer, and political health demands proper hygiene.

With some luck, it just might happen. For example, former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro is worried about the challenge in his district from ex-tour conductor Tanaka Mieko, who is less than half his age. On the one hand, it was already time for him to go during the 20th century, and I’m of the school that holds we’d get better government by picking names at random from the phone book. Then again, Ms. Tanaka’s voting choices will probably be determined at party headquarters by people who should be shuffling on board the same ferry across the Styx as Mr. Mori.

Here’s something else that shouldn’t be a surprise: DPJ leader Hatoyama Yukio now says a DPJ-led government won’t end the refueling mission in the Indian Ocean for the NATO-backed effort in Afghanistan. That should make some people feel foolish—including some English-language journalists—for taking the party seriously in the fall of 2007 when they tried to leverage Japan’s reputation abroad for petty political advantage at home. There’s a reason the LDP calls on its opponents to pursue policy rather than political crisis, but the Japanese phrase for that is uma no mimi ni nembutsu: Like a sutra in a horse’s ear.

Why should anyone be surprised about their about face when that’s the only dance step they know? Mr. Hatoyama promised to vacate his office to accept responsibility if Ozawa Ichiro resigned as party head, but instead wound up in Mr. Ozawa’s old office less than a week after the resignation. Now that’s a golden parachute! The party also opposed the bill dealing with the Somali pirates, but also said they wouldn’t eliminate it if they formed a government.

And now comes the report that DPJ and three smaller parties will introduce a motion in the upper house to censure Prime Minister Aso, coupled with a no-confidence measure in the lower house. Well, what’s the bleedin’ point, as Basil Fawlty would ask. The man will be gone before autumn. Then again, what’s the bloody point of bothering with serious criticism of the DPJ when they’ve demonstrated the only thing they take seriously is a manufactured political crisis? At least the Koizumi Children—or most of them—behaved like adults.

What to do?

If the LDP had an ounce of wit left in their collective DNA, they’d see the DPJ’s bet and raise it by agreeing with them. They could say yes, we know, but since we’ve already set the election date, we’ll replace Mr. Aso with (Fill in the Name of Plausible Reformer) until the election. That seems to be a longshot now; the members most likely to be interested are heading back to their districts to keep their own necks off the chopping block. Some say one of the men who could lead that effort, Nakagawa Hidenao, is thinking of developing his own platform to position himself and his fellow travelers for an apres-election aligment with Watanabe Yoshimi and other reformers.

Some well-meaning and serious people are urging the citizens to read the political platforms of the parties before deciding how to vote. Now what would be the bleedin’ point of that? It’s obvious even to real children that policy for a DPJ-led government will be an ad hoc affair. Why read their platform when the key point about the DPJ’s behavior regarding the Indian Ocean refueling mission won’t be in it? That might let down the policy wanks, but it isn’t as if there’s anything scientific about “political science”, now is there?

An additional benefit of the upcoming election will be to set the fuse for Part Three of the Japanese political Big Bang, whether it is lit soon or late. Or, to put it another way, there’s so much crap in the system it will take another flush—at least—to get rid of it all.

For the next two months, many in the old and the new media will be making the cyber-welkin ring with unreadable/unwatchable meta-commentary on Japanese politics, but it’s safe to predict they too will miss the bleedin’ point. Flushing away this layer of crap won’t result in a clean toilet bowl: It will just expose the next layer of crap outside the LDP that the older layer has partially obscured until now.

Looks like a job for Ben and Joe the Plumbers!

Who’s the servant and who’s the master?

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.”

“People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.”

- Frederic Bastiat

“Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

- Oscar Wilde

THE PARAMOUNT POLITICAL ISSUE of our time is not the death of “capitalism” or the end of the free market, the premature ejaculations of wishful thinkers and the commentariat notwithstanding, but rather whether the members of the political class demonstrate by their behavior the belief that the state should serve the people or the people should serve the state.

The electorate must insist that politicians demonstrate their beliefs by their behavior. The first rule for dealing with politicians, after all, is that nothing they say can be taken at face value.

The litmus test for the political behavior of politicians is how they treat the subject of taxes. Are their views on taxation based on the understanding that tax revenue is not their money to begin with? Are they aware of the concept of fiduciary responsibility? Are the uses to which they would put the money the legitimate concern of government? Would those uses penalize innocent people at the expense of others? Are there no solutions other than taxation and the inevitable growth of the program and the taxes levied to maintain it? Are the politicians making every effort to keep government spending to a minimum? Have they evaluated policy options based on the knowledge that the best solution is most often to do nothing at all—thereby allowing the citizens to keep their own resources instead of forking it over to the government? (This one never occurs to the policy wanks.)

The national pension

Japan has a national pension for which all residents aged 20 or older must register, including foreign nationals. Individuals are responsible for their own payments, however, and they must pay into the system for at least 25 years to receive retirement benefits. That quirk makes the system voluntary, in a manner of speaking. There is also an employee pension insurance system, but all the participants are automatically enrolled in the national pension system. The premiums paid in the latter scheme are in addition to those of the basic national pension premiums, and they are deducted from the employee’s salary.

The 2004 and 2005 campaign platforms of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan included planks stating it would be necessary to increase the consumption tax, currently 5% for all purchases, on the premise that the tax revenue would fund the pensions. The platforms treated this as an issue to be dealt with in the future and did not call for an immediate tax increase.

During the collegial discussion that masqueraded as a debate in the DPJ’s presidential election last month, both the winner Hatoyama Yukio and the unsuccessful challenger Okada Katsuya vowed to fund the national pension through compulsory taxes. Mr. Okada held that the consumption tax must be raised by three percent right away. Mr. Hatoyama allowed only that it was not necessary to pay for this immediately, nor was it necessary to discuss the issue just yet. He also thought the funds for the pension could be found by eliminating government waste.

Politicians promising tax increases of this magnitude and with such an impact on the way people conduct their lives, without fully discussing the alternatives, should be easy prey for their political opponents. But the politicians currently in control of Japan’s ruling party, the Liberal Democrats, are an odd exception. Finance Minister Yosano Kaoru (technically the Minister of State for Financial Services, Economic and Fiscal Policy) found Mr. Okada’s argument refreshing and serious, and dismissed Mr. Hatoyama as being vague. “I heard that he was spouting a fairy tale, so I wasn’t surprised.”

Mr. Yosano also approvingly noted that Mr. Okada will not run away from the problem, but that Mr. Hatoyama will.

What exactly it is that Mr. Okada will not run away from was not made clear. Mr. Yosano didn’t specify the monster in the fairy tale, or if he did, the mass media didn’t tell us about it.

In fact, he and his nominal boss in the Cabinet, Prime Minister Aso Taro, believe raising taxes is a red-ink badge of courage. They think it demonstrates their higher qualities as politicians. Mr. Aso actually wants to promise to raise the consumption tax in the LDP’s election platform. He thinks this will win the party popular acclaim by displaying what he calls his sense of responsibility.

His sense of responsibility to whom? The green eye shades in the Finance Ministry, or the people who will actually have to do without the money? It goes without saying, of course, that neither he nor Mr. Yosano have bothered with the litmus test above. Nor did the Finance Ministry drones who insisted on the idea to begin with.

It’s not just the consumption tax, either. It never is when politicians devise ways to spend the people’s money for legal vote-buying schemes. Here’s Mr. Yosano testifying at the Diet:

“I believe there will be consideration of raising the highest rates on the income tax. The opinion is overwhelming within the LDP too that the highest rates should be raised.”

Within the LDP too? They’re really not serious about winning that next election, are they?

The Cabinet Office has it all figured out. They suggest starting in 2011 to increase the current consumption tax of 5% in stages to reach 10%. This, they claim, will enable them to achieve “fiscal soundness” by the early 2020s. Their original projections called for budgetary health by 2018, but the money borrowed to deal with the fiscal crisis and the economic downturn will reduce anticipated tax revenues.

They’re basing their projections on an economic recovery that won’t die a crib death, suffocated by the consumption tax increases. Oh, and the fiscal balance they project in the 2020s will not include the expenditures to pay off the debt incurred from the recent financial crisis.

Nakagawa Hidenao

These people remind me of a doctor who told a friend of mine not to worry about a certain condition because medical science can easily handle problems such as his nowadays. What the doctor neglected to mention was that one of the primary options was the removal of the organ in question. He would survive, but at the cost of his quality of life. He would be medically sound, just as the Cabinet Office, and Messrs. Okada, Yosano, and Aso would make Japan fiscally sound in their theoretical world. But what would happen to the quality of life of the people?

Is there someone who still realizes it is not possible to increase the role of the central government and reform the bureaucracy at the same time? Is there someone who still understands that free markets are always a better solution than government paternalism or the nanny state? (Pick the authority figure of your preference.)

It’s not as if we don’t know the revenues to fund the welfare state will run out again in another few years, and a new generation of politicians will promote themselves as responsible public servants while pointing their fingers at others for running away. That’s why they say the only two certain things in life are death and taxes.

Is there someone who still realizes that the self-proclaimed responsible politicians have it backwards by expecting the citizens to serve the state, rather than having the state serve the citizens? And who understands that serving the citizens often means just getting out of the way?

Yes, there is. He’s Nakagawa Hidenao, and he’s known as the leader of the Ageshio, or “Rising Tide” movement in Japan. In brief, his platform is:

1. Ending deflation
2. Reducing government assets
3. Cutting government expenditures
4. Systemic reform, including major invasive surgery on the bureaucracy
5. Then, and only then, increasing taxes

Mr. Nakagawa has taken the trouble to write books outlining his proposals both for fiscal policy and systemic reform. The standard-bearer for small government in Japan recently sat for an interview with the Sankei Shimbun. The newspaper didn’t print the questions, but Mr. Nakagawa has the answers anyway. Here’s a quick translation.

***
Yosano Kaoru and the consumption tax

It seems that Mr. Yosano wants to use the consumption tax in the lower house election campaign. It’s not my intention to critique an individual’s statements, but I’m absolutely opposed to a major tax increase during a deflationary period, or to pledging a major tax increase when the economy is in the doldrums. If we were to do that, the bottom would drop out of (our) economy and have a negative impact on the global economy.

Fighting deflation and moving toward structural reform

The LDP should promise fiscal reform before they raise taxes. The first priority is to formulate a growth strategy based on fighting deflation and structural reform. Even if you accept that increasing the citizens’ liability for social welfare expenditures will be inevitable in the future, it’s incomprehensible to say you’ll increase taxes without implementing such reforms as making government more efficient and strengthening its functions.

We’re in a critical period for the economy now, so we must formulate economic measures of the type used only once every 100 years. But when normality returns, we must resume the process of the 2006 Robust Policy Statement, compiled when I was the head of the Policy Research Council. That calls for a primary balance in national and local government finances by 2011.

Systemic reform

The reform of Kasumigaseki (the bureaucracy) is critical. I’ve formed a group of Diet members to study ways to reform Kasumigaseki, and we created an outline of member-initiated legislation to supplement the bills submitted by the government to reform the civil service system.

We did this to obtain the consent of the DPJ, which claims that the reforms in the government’s legislation related to senior members of the bureaucracy don’t go far enough. Our proposals remedy that insufficiency. Without an agreement between the ruling and opposition parties, the bill won’t be passed during this session of the Diet. The LDP must show that it is more passionate about reform than the DPJ.

I haven’t talked to Prime Minister Aso about this issue, so I don’t know if there’s any common ground. But whenever I try to speak out, you in the mass media immediately start writing about a confrontation. I don’t care about such petty things. I made it my priority to make Japan better.

Trouble with the LDP

I haven’t been to a meeting of the Machimura faction since February. Interpersonal relations are important, but if the only objectives are just to maintain the old senior-junior relationships and to listen to the “wisdom of the elders”, then I can only call that an old faction. The Machimura faction should be a policy group. The issue is whether the member MPs share the same philosophy and direction, and trust each other.

I’ve fought for reform at every general meeting of the faction. But when that becomes a dispute, (you) play up the idea that the split is widening, and that causes trouble for the members. That’s why (I haven’t attended). I haven’t said that I’ll leave the faction.

The points at issue in political realignment are tax increases and reform of Kasumigaseki

I have consistently maintained that it is important to have a lower house election at the earliest possible time, and for the LDP to put every effort in promoting policies to win the trust of the people. But the timing is up to Prime Minister Aso.

I suspect we still haven’t won the support of the independent voters who want to see reform. (But) our support will rise if we formulate a platform that serves as a bridge between conservatives and independents. One of the people who could write that platform is Suga Yoshihide (Koga faction; the deputy chief of election campaigns for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party), who is expected to chair a research team. In principle, I am not opposed to restrictions on hereditary candidacies (which Suga supports).

In the future, the points at issue for political realignment may become the debate over raising taxes during an economic crisis and reforming Kasumigaseki. Do I want to become party president (with the implication of possibly being prime minister)? I won’t answer questions like that. It depends on the will of the people!

***
From a later speech

“The ruling party will not earn public support as long as it does not incorporate sweeping reform of Kasumigaseki in its platform.”

He added:

“Superficial responses such as the division of the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare are insufficient. We’ll be playing second fiddle in the lower house election if people have the impression that the DPJ’s reform plan is more advanced than ours.”

On raising taxes:

“That is a far cry from the popular will. The people want us to eliminate waste before we raise taxes.”

Some numbers

Mr. Nakagawa knows he has the numbers on his side. From a public opinion poll conducted 11 June:

What do you think of government by bureaucracy?

I prefer government by politicians: 72.2%

I prefer government led by the bureaucracy: 16.2%

I don’t know: 11.6%

His political future

Speculation continues to mount in the press about Mr. Nakagawa’s next move. That an unbridgeable chasm separates him from the mudboat wing of his party is now clear. Most observers expect there will be a parting of the ways, his excuses for not attending faction meetings notwithstanding. The only questions are when and under what conditions. He is not expected to have much difficulty in holding his Diet seat in the upcoming election.

One set of rumors has him trying to snatch back control of the LDP for the reformers. At a fund raising party in Tokyo last week, he said:

“Like-minded comrades will, using the common sense of the people, battle it out with common sense in Nagata-cho, which is the antithesis of the common sense of the people. This is a declaration of war.”

He threw down a challenge:

“The LDP is the party promoting reform. We reformers are not the ones who will leave the party—the ones who are not reformers should leave.”

On the DPJ:

“I can state with certainty that they lack the common sense of the world. We will make the common sense of the world national policy.”

That sounds as if he is thinking of trying to unseat Aso Taro before the election and have the party run a reformer in his place. (It might not be out of the question if the poll numbers have made enough of the party’s lower house MPs desperate. They ought to be.)

Having served as both chief cabinet secretary and LDP secretary-general, Mr. Nakagawa was being groomed for the job of prime minister himself, but he became embroiled in scandals involving both women and money. They were of a level that prevented him from rising further, but permitted him to stay in the Diet and out of jail.

As a result, he backed Koike Yuriko in the party’s election in an unsuccessful bid to replace Fukuda Yasuo (which Aso Taro won) rather than run himself. (Ms. Koike was also supported by former Prime Minister Koizumi, a Nakagawa soulmate.)

A different set of rumors has floated up in the current issue of the weekly Shukan Shincho. Those have him waiting for the election results to bolt the LDP and form a new party. The rumors include the new party’s name (Kaikaku, or Reform), and sounding out Takenaka Heizo to be the standard bearer. The magazine also noted that an alliance with independent reformer Watanabe Yoshimi would be a natural, and it would attract the first-term Diet members elected on Mr. Koizumi’s coattails in 2005.

Why government pensions?

In their 12 June issue, the editors of the weekly Shukan Post thought their readers might be interested in seeing how they would be affected if the national pension were eliminated altogether. They found what other simulations in other countries have long shown—people would be financially better off by handling their own pensions.

Their simulation postulated a 45-year-old man who started work at age 22 after college, and whose wife did not work. They calculated that he would have already paid in JPY 13.41 million, counting the employee pension insurance, in which the employer kicks in an amount equal to the employee contribution above the basic national pension.

Simulation Man will have to pay an additional JPY 17.42 million until he retires at age 60. Therefore, he will have paid total pension premiums of JPY 30.83 million during his working life. If he starts receiving a pension at age 65 and lives out an average lifespan, he and his wife will receive about JPY 36.90 million (about $US 375,000) in benefits.

But if the pension system were to be eliminated, all premiums returned, and if his future contribution (including the company’s contribution) is added together and invested under the same conditions as those in the present system, the 45-year-old man would wind up with JPY 48.60 million in benefits, or JPY 11.70 million more than under the current system.

The Shukan Post article might not be an isolated phenomenon. The current edition of the Sunday Mainichi weekly magazine has an article about how one can enjoy a comfortable life in old age with JPY 30 million.

Of course, if the pension system were to be eliminated, not everyone would employ a mechanism to provide for their old age.

But why should the ants who would find a way to handle their own retirement be forced to fund a system that rewards the grasshoppers?

Update:

Yes, the paramount political issue of our time. Here’s an article in the Telegraph by London Mayor Boris Johnson, showing himself to be a kindred spirit of Nakagawa Hidenao. The headline? Public Spending Begins with Private Enterprise.

He writes:

This whole debate is back to front. We are putting the cart before the horse. Every time you hear a politician stand forth and invite your good opinion by offering to “cut” this or “invest in” that, ask yourself the prior question: just how did the politicians come by this money? Who created it? And what are we doing to help them create more?

This is taxpayers’ money, amigos. It was produced by the sweat upon the brow of the 23.6 million private-sector employees, and by the hundreds of thousands of British businesses – 80 per cent of them with five employees or fewer – that are struggling on in spite of the recession.

And:

Instead of this arid debate about “cuts versus spending”, we should be having a grown-up national conversation about the cost of regulation to business, and the growing burden of public-sector pensions.

(The emphasis is mine.)

He concludes:

I want to hear politicians talk less about themselves and their priorities and more about the entrepreneurs, the people who get up at 5am to organise their business or cut deals with the other side of the world. Every time you hear politicians swanking about what they are going to do with public funds, remember that wealth was ultimately created by private enterprise; and, if they don’t help the wealth creators, they won’t have any money to spend.

He also seems to have invented a word: necrarchy, or a zombie government. Not only is that a perfect description of the mudboat wing of the LDP, that’s what Takenaka Heizo called them in a Bungei Shunju article in December 2007.

Japan’s political kaleidoscope

NOW THAT THE OPPOSITION Democratic Party of Japan has stuck a feather in former leader Ozawa Ichiro’s cap and called it macaroni instead of calling on Jack to hit the road, events in the world of Japanese politics are accelerating with a potentially historic lower house election just a few months away.

Here are some reflections from Japan’s ever-revolving political kaleidoscope while we wait to see how long it takes the mudboat of the ruling LDP’s zombie wing to dissolve, whether the party dumps Aso Taro and replaces him with Hatoyama Kunio to set up a brother-take-all election, and if the members of the DPJ will ever start acting their age instead of their (Western) shoe size.

Kato and Takenaka: Off with the gloves!

Former LDP Secretary-General Kato Koichi has just published a book critical of the Koizumi administration’s structural reforms. To borrow a term used to describe some members of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, Mr. Kato would be a “wet” in the LDP. He and the very dry Keio University Prof. Takenaka Heizo, the lead privateer of the Koizumian reforms, went toe-to-toe on a recent TV Asahi program.

Mr. Kato’s first punch:

“The reforms exceeded the limits of the weakened regional areas. Your ideas (were inconsiderate of) society.”

Countered Prof. Takenaka:

“(You’re) the man responsible for “ten lost years” (of sluggish economic growth). It’s odd that you would attack Mr. Koizumi, who ended all that, as if you were some cultural critic.”

Mr. Kato thinks the Koizumi administration’s approach of zero interest rates and what he saw as a focus on corporations, reduced personal assets and income, upsetting the public:

“All of society is now irritated!”

Prof. Takenaka pointed out that his antagonist held several important positions in the 1990s, including LDP secretary-general, after the collapse of the bubble economy.

“(You) failed to deal firmly with the non-performing debt, so we did. It’s a mistake to argue there’s a future in going backwards.”

Expect to see more of these arguments, particularly if the LDP falls apart after going into the opposition, thereby liberating its reform wing.

Going backwards

Speaking of retrograde movement, Finance Minister Yosano Kaoru continued his own backwards march into the future, slapping himself during a meeting of the lower house finance committee for daring to support the complete privatization of the Development Bank of Japan as scheduled:

“I’ve done some soul-searching over the shallowness of my thinking for failing to anticipate the current economic crisis. The DBJ should remain as an important tool of the government.”

Which shows that Mr. Yosano remains an important tool of the Finance Ministry, the Big Swinging Dick of the Japanese bureaucracy. The bureaucracy will do anything to maintain its stranglehold on government policy short of strangling babies in the crib. Prime Ministers Koizumi and Abe made some headway on blasting a path through the mountain, but their two successors let the Sisyphean rock roll back down the hill again.

Not only did the lower house committee agree with Mr. Yosano, they also voted to expand the range of assets the bank can buy. The media report said the bank was scheduled for full privatization in three years, but their website (right sidebar) says about five.

Failing to foresee a once-in-a-century economic crisis is forgivable. What is inexcusable, however, is failing to see that it originated in a meddlesome government’s interference with banking practices, and that partial government ownership of those banks to facilitate further meddling will be a cure worse than the disease.

All politics is local, #1

The news media got interested in the usually uninteresting mayoral election in Saitama City last month because it was the first local poll after Ozawa Ichiro resigned from the DPJ presidency. Politicos wanted to know whether his retreat from center stage to the control booth in the wings would boost the local DPJ candidate.

The local DPJ group supported newcomer Shimizu Hayato (47), who easily defeated the incumbent backed by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The café commentariat saw this as a win for the new Hatoyama-led LDP, especially as Hatoyama Yukio himself campaigned there.

They’d have a point if people always elected municipal chiefs based on the behavior of national political parties, but other factors confirmed the only coherent point former U.S. House Speaker Thomas O’Neill made in his career: “All politics is local”.

Mr. Shimuzu was a newcomer nearly 20 years younger than his opponent, Aikawa Soichi (66). Mr. Aikawa was seeking a third straight term, or a sixth straight term if you count his time as mayor of Urawa before a municipal merger. Many people were looking for a change.

Some of them were in his own party. While Mr. Aikawa had official party backing, a third candidate in the race was Nakamori Fukuyo, who had been a former LDP lower house member with a proportional representative seat until March. The party didn’t support Mr. Nakamori, but former Secretary-General Ibuki Bunmei and former postal privatization rebelette and current Minister of Consumer Affairs Noda Seiko swung by to campaign for him. Intraparty vote-splitting is the royal road to an election loss.

Then again, Mr. Aikawa ran a mudboat campaign of his own. After winning the primary, he played up his LDP ties and had Hatoyama Kunio, the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications (and Yukio’s brother) campaign for him. Mr. Shimizu figured he had the election cinched at that point, because his strategy was to highlight party identification, and he knew he was running against a split opposition.

The LDP nameplate has negative cachet regardless of who’s running where, but it must take a brick wall to fall on some people before they get it. Just last month, Morita Kensaku was elected Governor of Chiba despite his LDP ties because he pretended they didn’t exist. But the law of natural selection is valid for politics too.

All politics is local, #2

When Hatoyama Yukio claims to be the champion of regional devolution, that has to mean it’s an idea whose time has come at last in Japan. Since his selection as DPJ head, he has proclaimed:

“What I want to do most after I become prime minister is to change the country into one of regional sovereignty.”

He also lifted a line from former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro:

“Leave to the regions what the regions can do.”

(Substitute “private sector” for “regions” and you have the Koizumi mantra. Combine the two and you’re cooking with gas.)

People knew this was a good idea a long time ago. From Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859):

“Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people.”

But how does that translate into practical policy? And just how serious is Mr. Hatoyama? Here he is answering a reporter’s question:

Question:

“The DPJ claims in its party platform that it will reduce personnel costs for the central government’s civil service by 20%. But establishing regional authority and transferring that authority to local governments will require that (same) amount of personnel, and the national civil servants will probably become local civil servants. So, as for the reduction of personnel costs for local civil service…”

Answer:

“I probably haven’t given any answer. I understand of course that (required) personnel are part of the central government’s public employees. I also think that with the emergence of regional sovereignty, the people working in the regional areas will be necessary. Therefore, I hope that many of the central government’s civil servants employees will become local civil servants and do that work.

“But, it’s natural that when local sovereignty emerges, it will be quite difficult to entrust a large amount of authority and funding resources to such places as small villages. That will have to be decided by the people in the regions, but it is inevitable, you know, that authority, if you devolve a great deal of authority, then municipalities will discuss mergers spontaneously on their own. That is a forward looking discussion. That’s not because they don’t have enough money; they’ll discuss it to perform their work.

“Of course the municipalities that exist will discuss mergers to become ‘basic local governments’. And if that happens, you see, they’ll be able to decrease the total number of public employees. That’s what I think. The national government’s role will decline. Therefore, we will be able to drastically cut the number of national civil servants. On the other hand, there will be an increase in the number of national civil servants becoming local civil servants. But it’s entirely possible that the total of local civil servants will decrease rather than increase.”

I read that three times and agree with Mr. Hatoyama. He probably hasn’t given any answer.

(Mr. Hatoyama’s use of “basic local government” here is confusing; municipalities already are the basic local government unit in Japan, even if they are technically classified as villages.)

To be fair to the nominal DPJ chief, the party policy wanks still haven’t been able to clear their ideas with Ozawa Ichiro, whom many suspect is still pulling the strings behind the scenes. The New Boss publicly supports the LDP state/province system of devolution and sub-national rearrangement, but heaven forbid that an opposition party would officially agree with one of the golden planks in the ruling party platform. The Old Boss favors a different plan, fortunately. The DPJ’s decision, whenever they get around to it, will provide some hints on the identity of The Real Boss.

Meanwhile, last November Prime Minister Aso said:

“Our ultimate objective is a state/province system based on regional sovereignty in which national government offices are transferred to the regions.”

Whether he means it or not–and many in his party do–at least it has the advantage of being short, clear, and to the point.

Answer the phone, Yukio!

Constitutional reform in Japan means more than rewriting Article 9, the so-called peace clause. Some want to remove any obstacles to the innocent use of Shinto rituals in government-related activities, while others want to shift to a unicameral legislature. But since the Japanese have never amended the Constitution, they’re still working out how to go about it.

Both houses of the Diet have a Deliberative Council on the Constitution, but it lacks internal regulations on the number of members and its procedures due to opposition party foot dragging, including the DPJ.

Notable for his silence is new DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio, though he was once so hot for constitutional reform he published his own ideas on the subject in 2005 called A Proposal for A New Constitution (PHP). Given his interest in the issue, the LDP thought his election might signal a change in DPJ policy.

They should know better than to take a politician at his word. He isn’t returning their calls. Both the LDP and junior partner New Komeito have repeatedly asked the opposition to help to formulate regulations, and even submitted a proposal for their consideration. No answer.

Some LDP members are now irritated enough to consider passing their own regulations in the second half of the current Diet session while the party still has a supermajority in the lower house and can override a rejection from the DPJ-controlled upper house.

After pointedly mentioning Mr. Hatoyama’s interest in the issue, LDP Diet Affairs Committee Chair Oshima Tadamori said:

“We really want to reach a settlement (on these regulations) during this session because (the issue involves) the sovereignty of the people. Of course we should determine procedures for Constitutional amendments.”

Replied senior DPJ poobah Okada Katsuya at a press conference:

“This should be thoroughly discussed first. I’ve talked to Naoshima Masayuki (chair of the party’s Policy Research Council, member of the Hatoyama group, and the Chief Cabinet Secretary in the shadow cabinet), and I want to use the council first. It’s not something I should talk about over my head.”

Above his pay grade, eh?

The DPJ can’t use their own committee for constitutional research because they’ve left the chairmanship vacant since the upper house election in 2007.

The reason the party is covering its ears and pretending it can’t hear is because the plethora of tails wagging the dog is making too much noise. With the DPJ so close to taking power, that means there’ll be a whole lot of shaking going on. They’re still holding hands with the pacifist/green/anti-free market–nuclear power—automobile—common sense Social Democrats, who are just fine with the Constitution the way it is except for the positive references to the emperor.

More or less within the party is the notorious Japan Teacher’s Union (see right sidebar), which backs the DPJ in the same way that teachers’ unions everywhere back political parties on the left. In the past, they’ve been caught squeezing members to donate to the political campaigns of DPJ Acting President Koshi’ishi Azuma in Yamanashi and harassed a Hiroshima school principal to suicide. They think competitive tests are bad for education and singing the national anthem is bad for any reason at all.

While serving as Foreign Minister in 2005, the LDP’s largest faction leader Machimura Nobutaka claimed the reason the government did not want Japanese schools to focus more intensively on the country’s behavior in the early part of the 20th century was that too many JTU members were Marxist-Leninists. An excuse? Maybe, but he has a point.

Another favorite JTU technique is to mail razor blades to the people that displease them. Mr. Hatoyama apparently prefers to buy his at the store for the time being.

Kasumigaseki reform

Executives of the self-proclaimed reform kings DPJ and the anti-reform People’s New Party agreed to coordinate policy proposals in their respective platforms in the upcoming lower house election, particularly for postal privatization. In other words, they promise to stand athwart the course of reform and yell Stop! The two parties also called on the SPD to join them for some coordination-a-trois, and confirmed they would work together during the election.

One wonders how many words Hatoyama Yukio can use to avoid answering a question about this contradiction while folding back his forked tongue at the same time.

Ishihara Nobuteru speaks

LDP official Ishihara Nobuteru spoke truth to power regarding the DPJ and Ozawa Ichiro during a recent television interview:

“If he were a member of the LDP, he would have resigned his Diet seat…Mr. Ozawa did not resign his Diet seat, he resigned the party presidency and became acting president without reflecting on his errors and without an explanation. This reveals the nature of the Democratic Party of Japan today.”

In your heart, you know he’s right.

A Kan junket?

DPJ Acting President and former leader Kan Naoto will be jetting to England for a four-day stay starting on the 6th. He says he wants to observe how the country’s Cabinet operates because both Great Britain and Japan have a parliamentary cabinet system.

Mr. Kan has been sitting in the Diet since 1980 and was in the Cabinet as Health and Welfare Minister in 1996. And he needs to go to England for four days to see how Cabinets and Parliaments work?

They say London is nice this time of year.

More fad Diets

The Asahi Shimbun enjoyed running an article describing how the LDP is trying to work out its preference among various internal plans to downsize the lower house of the Diet—ranging from cuts of 50-180 seats—while pacifying junior coalition partner New Komeito. If they cut only proportional representation districts, New Komeito would lose 23 of its 31 MPs. That party, widely seen as the political arm of the lay Buddhist group Soka Gakkai, provides the campaign foot soldiers for the LDP in the same way the unions back the DPJ.

A recent meeting of a parliamentarian’s group formed to slash 180 of the seats and bring the total to 300 drew LDP Election Strategy Council Chair Koga Makoto, the keeper of the Koizumian flame Nakagawa Hidenao, and Sato Yukari and some other Koizumi children (figurative, not literal).

They discussed three plans:

1. 300 winner-take-all districts
2. 200 winner-take-all districts and 100 proportional representation districts
3. A 50-50 split.

But the Asahi, the print wing of Japan’s leftist media voice, didn’t mention that the DPJ, their horse in the race, faces the same problem. Party boss Hatoyama Yukio wants to shed 80 seats, but the survival of the DPJ’s small party allies depends on proportional representation too.

Just an oversight, I guess.

Padding the bill

Governments at the prefectural level are mad as hell about the money they’re forced to fork over to maintain the local agencies of central government ministries, and they’re not going to take it anymore. (See this post for plenty of details.) Every year the national government just hands them a bill and tells them to pay up. The local governors demanded the bills be itemized, and the government finally complied. Now it probably wishes it hadn’t.

Saga Prefecture discovered that personnel costs, including pensions and the operating costs for agency buildings and employee dormitories, accounted for 10% of their financial liability to the central government. In addition to being seriously displeased at the discovery, they claimed the standards for determining payment were vague and demanded further disclosure.

This is a critical issue for some prefectures. Saga Governor Furukawa Yasushi has warned the prefectural government will be bankrupt by 2011 unless present conditions change.

In fact, prefectural governments are being billed for the mutual aid association liabilities of national civil servants for their retirement benefits and annuity reserves. The national government’s justification was that the local regions are the ones to benefit from the work of the national bureaucracy, so they should be the ones to pay.

The governors didn’t buy that for a second. Wondered noted devolutionist Gov. Higashikokubaru Hideo of Miyazaki:

I’m having a hard time understanding why these benefits are included in the bill.

But here’s some good news for those who think you can’t fight the central government and win: Minister of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Kaneko Kazuyoshi said the government will probably not bill local governments this year for those retirement benefits.

Here I go again: devolution could be a reform whose time has come.

Chips off the old block

The DPJ successfully created a new wrinkle in the political numbers game by claiming they will nail into their election platform a plank denying official party support to new candidates with family members who’ve served in the Diet in the past three generations. They insist this has something to do with “reform”.

What it really has to do with is making the retiring Koizumi Jun’ichiro look bad for trying to pass his Kanagawa Diet seat off to his number two son. Former Justice Minister Usui Hideo planned on handing over the family business to his son in Chiba this year, too.

Some LDP members realized the media would froth it up to make them look even worse, so they called for the institution of a similar rule. But local party officials in Mr. Koizumi’s district objected because they had settled on Jun’s boy last November, and there isn’t enough time to find a new candidate. So the party said they would apply a hereditary seat restriction rule for the election after next. They also said they wouldn’t back the two lads as independents and have them sign up for the party after the election. That would be cheating.

Aha, shouted the DPJ, you’re not reformers after all! Asahi TV helped whip up the media froth with some predictable tut-tutting and cluck-clucking on their morning roundtable discussion program.

Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?

If the DPJ were serious about real reform that served the people, they would knock off the political otaku games and spend more of their time involved with the real affairs of government.

If they thought inherited seats were such a bad idea, they could apply the rule to everyone TODAY instead of making it a grandfather clause. But that would erase from the rolls the party’s standard bearer, Hatoyama Yukio, whose patriarchal line of Diet members stretches back to great-grandfather Kazuo. He started the family business during the Meiji period.

You know–the 19th century.

It would also have disqualified in his time Koizumi Jun’ichiro, who managed to accomplish or initiate more reforms in his five years as prime minister than are dreamt of in the DPJ philosophy.

Instead of running numbers in a numbers game and pandering to those who think politics is a spectator sport for the public rather than the means for the public to directly participate in self-rule, the DPJ policy wanks—as well as the LDP mudboaters—should give the power to the people and let them decide who is best qualified to serve in a district through a primary system. If the well-connected kids win, so be it.

You know–make yourselves accountable to the voters. Respect the popular will. Behave like bona fide reformers instead of the mandarins you really are.

Maybe someone will explain it to Kan Naoto during his London junket.

Afterwords:

I just ran across this in The Guardian, Britain’s premier newspaper of the Left:

Political reform can no longer be put aside as an abstract idea, of appeal to dreamers but not to voters who face the harder realities of life. The public is calling furiously for a better system. People want an honest parliament. They want leaders who are prepared to act. They loathe the old system, and many of the people who are part of it.

The subject is the British political crisis, but that same tune works with Japanese lyrics as well.

That’s a story well worth following, but it’s curious that people are overlooking the several intertwined stories in Japan, which in many ways are even more compelling.

The shame of the shameless DPJ

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
- Mark 8:36

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST Ruth Benedict famously described Japan as having a culture of shame and the United States as having a culture of guilt. She elaborated on the latter description by asserting that guilt inculcates standards of absolute morality, which America had but Japan didn’t.

Her viewpoint on the differences between the two countries quickly became both influential and controversial. Some discredit it for being “deeply flawed”, “politely arrogant”, and “anthropology at a distance”. Psychoanalyst Doi Takeo, the author of the equally influential Anatomy of Dependence (Amae no Kozo), criticized the concept for deliberately implying the superiority of the American value system to that of the Japanese.

Regardless of the validity of Benedict’s thesis, events in the 1990s demonstrated that notions of guilt and morality were obsolete in American political culture. The American President during most of that decade was publicly and credibly accused of rape; reports suggested that he might well have been a serial rapist. As a state governor, he committed the most puerile and tawdry acts of sexual harassment on state employees and used the state police as his personal procurers. While President, he toyed with an intern and a cigar in his office while keeping an overseas visitor on government business waiting in the Rose Garden.

Yet 66% of the American public thought the mass media should not follow up the rape accusation. The public was insufficiently aroused to demand his conviction when impeached. (No sniggering until you finish the sentence!) Needless to say, the Democrats, the President’s own party, thought none of this disqualified him to continue serving in the nation’s highest office.

Now, 10 years later, their namesake, the Democratic Party of Japan, seems to have placed a bet that the sense of shame in Japanese culture has become equally extinct.

L - R: Pinocchio, Geppetto

On 10 May Ozawa Ichiro finally took it upon himself to resign his position of party president after his chief aide had been arrested six weeks earlier for accepting a total of $US 3 million since 1995 in illegal campaign contributions from a dummy organization established by a construction company. Had Mr. Ozawa a sense of guilt, morality, shame, or even held himself to the standards to which his party holds other politicians, he would have resigned immediately after his aide’s arrest.

Some in the political class now cling to the legal presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. But like Caesar’s wife, politicians should be above suspicion; their position and their dependence on the public trust demands that they conform to a standard higher than that for a high school dropout caught using a crowbar to jimmy open a vending machine for spare change. That would be the case even if the DPJ had not tried to sell itself as cleaner than thou.

Some insist that Mr. Ozawa should have relinquished his Diet seat in addition to his position in the party, and a few people speculated that he might eventually do just that. But he did not. In fact, his official statement on the DPJ website does not refer to the fund raising scandal at all:

In order to strengthen party unity with a view to ensuring victory in the forthcoming general election and realising a change of government, I have decided to sacrifice myself and tender my resignation as President of the Democratic Party of Japan.

Translation: The only reason I quit was to keep the party from breaking up and to make sure it takes power in the next election.

Well, if that’s the story he wants to stick to, he’s the one who’s going to need a prescription to get to sleep every night. But a political party with integrity and character would insist—at a minimum—that he have the decency to keep his public profile subterranean for the rest of his political career. What did the DPJ do?

They bestowed on him the honor of appointment to an executive position called “acting president”. That’s the same title held by Kan Naoto, one of the party’s founders and a past party president himself.

They also put him in charge of the upcoming election campaign. All five senior party officials appeared on stage together after their appointment looking for all the world as if happy days were here again. In other words, they thought their tainted political meat was still fit to serve to the voters as long as they covered it in enough sauce to mask the stench.

By doing so, they validated the apprehensions of party detractors and supporters alike by behaving precisely as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party might have done 30 years ago during the reign of Mr. Ozawa’s mentor, Tanaka Kakuei. The party has now forfeited any claim to political probity, relative or otherwise.

Some are concerned that the disgraced party president has become a Svengali in his own right who will continue to wield the real power in the DPJ while new president Hatoyama Yukio performs his role in front of the cameras as their public face. Just who, one wonders, is the “acting” president, and who is the real president?

Mr. Ozawa still has not fulfilled his basic obligation of explaining how he used all that money. Who could blame anyone for drawing the conclusion that public disclosure would result in more unpleasant encounters with The Law? Because the party changed only the label without changing the contents of the container, nothing at all has changed.

The LDP response

That made it even easier for the members of the ruling party, the Liberal Democrats, to take their own turn on stage as moralists. Said Prime Minister Aso Taro:

If we’re talking about the citizens’ mindset, their feelings would be that since Ozawa has become the acting president, the questions they most want to ask (Party President Hatoyama Yukio) are about the money connection with Mr. Ozawa. There might be a sense of a disconnect between the popular will and what the DPJ is saying. (Public opinion polls show that) most people think their explanation has been inadequate….

Mr. Aso swung at a fat pitch and nearly whiffed–not surprising for a man with a batting average below the Mendoza Line. But former party Secretary-General Kato Koichi connected more solidly. Mr. Kato was rumored to be examining the possibility of forming a new, small party last autumn with himself at the head. The idea would be to form a coalition with a stronger DPJ after the next lower house election and become a credible candidate for prime minister in a broad coalition government.

That option doesn’t seem to be in play any more. During a television broadcast last week, Mr. Kato said:

“When the people saw the photograph of Mr. Ozawa shaking hands with the new party president, Hatoyama Yukio, I suspect they thought, ‘They’re the same as the LDP’. (It means) the DPJ is no longer able to win an outright majority in the next lower house election…A movement transcending parties might now arise.”

In other words, he foresees the possibility of a post-election political realignment and the creation of a real reform bloc that does not include either Mr. Hatoyama or Mr. Ozawa.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was delivered by Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Hatoyama Kunio, Yukio’s younger brother. The atmosphere might be chilly at the next get-together of the Hatoyama clan:

“It’s apparent to everyone that (Yukio is) Ozawa Ichiro’s puppet. I’ve always thought of forming a fraternal alliance with him, but an alliance is impossible unless he dumps Ozawa.”

Hatoyama the Younger helped form the DPJ in 1996 with Yukio, but later left to rejoin the LDP. Here’s what he had to say about his handiwork:

“I’m the one who gave the Democratic Party its name. Yet, it’s regrettable that what they’ve done is the most undemocratic thing. I didn’t want my brother to get involved with those procedures (that allowed only the party’s diet members to vote for party president)”.

Politicians never pass up the chance to bash the opposition, but seldom does a man call his brother a willing dupe in public, member of the political opposition or not.

The late American humorist Fred Allen once observed, “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.”

The same could equally apply to all the sincerity in politics, and the reason the DPJ chose to praise Caesar’s wife rather than bury her is as we’ve noted before: They’re afraid he’ll take his 50 supporters in the Diet, flounce out of the party, and find someone else to go to the ball with. That has been the chief activity of Mr. Ozawa’s career, after all. The DPJ is also well aware of its electoral impotence with anyone else at the helm, so why muck around with principle and honor when the chance to take power is still up for grabs?

What comes next?

The ultimate verdict will be rendered by the electorate, and if recent polls are any indication, the DPJ might get away with it. The party itself got an eight-point jump in polling after placing Mr. Hatoyama in the shop window. Before Mr. Ozawa resigned, voters favored Aso Taro by more than 10 percentage points in a head-to-head comparison. Now a similar advantage is enjoyed by Mr. Hatoyama.

Yet the same polls show that more than 70% of the respondents found Ozawa Ichiro’s explanation for resigning unacceptable. As always, we’ll have to stay tuned to see whether the polls hold firm, this is just a temporary bounce or a transient phenomenon, or if the DPJ discovers yet another way to fumble its opportunities.

Despite the naked opportunism and alley cat scruples, some good might come of an eventual DPJ victory and formation of a government. It could lead to the eventual creation of a legitimate two-party system in Japan. If the party behaves in power anything like they did in opposition, the voters would soon realize that incompetence and venality transcend party affiliation and start drawing conclusions. The inevitable early crumbling of a DPJ-led government might accelerate the political realignment the country desperately needs. And finally, it would provide people like me with what the American military calls a “target rich environment”.

But even with the accrual of all these benefits, the bad would still outweigh the good. When people such as these win, everyone loses in the end. It would show just what the Japanese are prepared to put up with from their politicians. And finally, it would reveal their contemporary attitude toward shame.

The word for shame in Japanese is haji, and the word for shameless is hajishirazu; literally, not knowing shame. A victory in the lower house election with Ozawa Ichiro pulling the DPJ strings without bothering to stand behind the curtain hiding him from the audience’s view would lay to rest for good Ruth Benedict’s notion of Japan as having a culture of shame.

That’s because it would be hajishirazu its own self.

Afterwords:
C. Douglas Lummis had this to say about Ruth Benedict:

Militarist Japan was for her simply “Japan” – Japan as it had always been, and as it would continue to be unless changed from the outside.

Ruth Benedict, who died more than 60 years ago, worked from second- and third-hand sources. But isn’t it odd that Mr. Lummis’s observation could just as well be applied to contemporary Western mass media and some maladjusted foreigners, despite the accessibility of international air travel and the libraries of information available with just a few keystrokes?

UPDATE:
The U.K. is now undergoing the mother of all political/financial scandals in which, very briefly put, MPs of all parties are being exposed for diverting public funds and the benefits derived from their position to their personal gain.

The Archbishop of Canterbury makes an excellent point here about the limitations inherent in regulating the behavior of politicians:

The question “What can I get away with without technically breaching the regulations?” is not a good basis for any professional behaviour that has real integrity…

…if the culture is such that regulation takes the place of virtue, we shouldn’t be too surprised if public figures show signs of the virus and take refuge in the “no rules were broken” tactic.

Daniel Hannan of England, a member of the European Parliament, approves. He says the concept:

…is the basis of Protestantism, of liberalism, of the British conception of freedom. It is the foundation of modern Conservatism too. As Keith Joseph used to say, when you give people responsibility, you make them responsible. And, although Dr Williams quite properly refrains from saying so, it is the strongest possible argument against Gordon Brown’s plan to subject MPs to an external quango.

I’m neither British nor a Protestant (though I will cop to being a broadly non-denominational, classic liberal), but I wholeheartedly agree.

That’s why I think some well-intentioned laws, such the Japanese law funding political parties (defined as having five Diet members) from the Treasury to prevent a corrupting reliance on corporate donations, are ultimately self-defeating. (Not to mention an infringement of the rights of those people who choose not to contribute to political parties at all.)

That’s also why I think such innovations as the lay judge system, which began functioning last week amidst controversy and some public opposition, are excellent ideas. As the man said, when you give people responsibility, you make them responsible. True reform of the Japanese political system will not be achieved until the people are given as much responsibility as they can handle–and that means downsizing government to the lowest levels possible while enforcing the basic laws governing human behavior.

Regardless of the reasons people give, I suspect the opposition to the lay judge system is based mostly on the absence of a sense of civic responsibility. For some people, it just takes too much time and trouble to assume that responsibility, and it cuts into their social life and TV-watching time to boot.

The attitude I would hold up as a model was that of a former housemate of mine in the United States who was summoned to jury duty. He would be the first to admit that it took a lot of time and trouble. But he has a strong sense of both curiosity and integrity, which meant that he was fascinated by the glimpse his service provided into the legal system and human nature, and that he performed that service in the most conscientious way he could.

The Watanabe-Eda platform for reform in Japan

THE MOST COMPELLING STORY in Japanese politics today is the struggle to eliminate the control of politics and policy determination by largely anonymous civil servants in the bureaucracy rather than elected representatives. Many of those who seek to put the bureaucracy at Kasumigaseki in its place also advocate small, decentralized government. If that movement has a firebrand, it is surely the now-independent Diet member Watanabe Yoshimi, who has already been the subject of several posts here. (Click on the tag at the end of this post for more.)

Working with his political partner and fellow lower house MP Eda Kenji—himself a former bureaucrat—Mr. Watanabe is determined to ignite a citizens’ movement for a drastic change in the face of Japanese government.

On 20 April, the two men presented their political philosophy and objective with the publication of a book-length dialogue titled Datsu Kanryo Seiken, or very roughly, Eliminating the Political Power of the Bureaucracy.

At the end of the book, the authors conveniently provide a summarization and condensation of their objectives in a ten-point program that should serve as the basis for all discussion about governmental reform in this country. Perfection is not an achievable goal for any political system, but Japan is unlikely to find a better action plan for reform than this.

Students of government might find the resemblance of aspects of the program to the American conception of federalism to be striking.

The following is my quick and dirty translation of their platform.

*****
Ten Issues for the Citizens’ Movement, Eliminating Bureaucratic Control, and Regional Autonomy

There are steps that should be taken before taxes are increased! Diet members and the bureaucrats should be the first to sacrifice.

1. The complete prohibition of amakudari (The source of wasted tax money)
(Note: Amakudari is the practice of giving senior bureaucrats important jobs in government-affiliated organizations and private companies when they retire.)

• Immediately and completely prohibit watari recommendations and individual ministry and agency recommendations. (Further note: Watari is the name for the ministries’ arrangement of successive jobs for retired bureaucrats at government-affiliated corporations, with the former civil servants getting retirement money each time.)

• Eliminate personnel banks on a timed schedule. (Specifically mentioned is a center under the jurisdiction of the Cabinet Office that handles employment recommendations for bureaucrats in one organization rather than allowing individual ministries and agencies to make those recommendations.)

• Eliminate the practice of encouraging early retirement, and establish a personnel system based on working until retirement age.

• Revise the seniority-based salary system by overhauling the laws regarding remuneration, and reduce all personnel expenses.

• Conduct a private sector-type restructuring of government by loosening the restraints on the basic right to work for public employees.

• Establish oversight organizations operated by third parties. (Establish punitive provisions for violators and strictly enforce those provisions.)

2. Completely uncover the hidden funds in special accounts (30-50 trillion yen)

• Conduct a complete and thorough accounting of the differential between assets and liabilities in the special accounts, starting with the surplus and reserve funds for the three largest sources of those accounts: government investment and loans, labor insurance, and the special account for foreign reserves.

• Sell state-owned assets and stock held by the government.

3. Sharply reduce the number of Diet members and bureaucrats, as well as their salaries

• Reduce the number of lower house members to 300 (by eliminating the 180 proportional representation delegates) and the number of upper house members to 100 (by eliminating the 142 proportional representation delegates).

• Eliminate the jobs of 100,000 national civil servants (Introduce the state/province system and eliminate the central government’s organizations in regional blocs. There are now 330,000 national civil servants.)

• Cut the salaries of Diet members by 30% and their bonuses by 50%. Cut the salaries of civil servants by 10%-20%.

4. In principle, abolish or privatize independent administrative agencies, and drastically reform public interest corporations.

• The independent administrative agencies and public interest corporations are hotbeds for amakudari. These should, in principle, be abolished. Those independent administrative agencies that cannot be abolished should be privatized. The need for public interest corporations should be reevaluated on the premise of a zero-based review.

5. Eradicate collusive bidding at the initiative of public officials, and eliminate and conduct more rigorous oversight of the single tendering of contracts and designated competitive bidding

• Beef up the law to prevent collusive bidding at the initiative of public officials, thus preventing collusion with the organizations where amakudari is a problem (by expanding the application to former bureaucrats). Strengthen the Fair Trade Commission’s authority in regard to this collusive bidding.

• In principle, replace single tendering and designated competitive bidding with general competitive bidding. When such practices are unavoidable, require the reason for their need and the public disclosure of information on current amakudari-based employment at the contracting partner.

6. Integrate the management of senior personnel decisions through a Cabinet Personnel Bureau under the prime minister’s office, and hire general personnel simultaneously

• Put senior personnel decisions under the control of the prime minister’s office to ensure the primacy of political appointments.

• Foster a bureaucracy whose personnel are aware that they serve the nation rather than individual ministries or agencies. Eliminate vertical administration (of the ministries and agencies).

• Hire private sector personnel experts and place private sector personnel from outside the government in leadership positions.

• Require the provisional resignation of all senior personnel in the bureaucracy at the level of department head and above. Rehire some of those personnel in special positions for limited times only. Employ both politicians and private sector personnel as a state strategy staff and political appointees (political appointments).

• Create a mechanism for identifying the responsibility of bureaucrats for policy failures.

7. Maintain the authority to formulate budgets by a Cabinet Budget Bureau under the prime minister’s office

• Put budget formulation under political control by removing the work for budget assessments, government investment and loans, and tax planning and proposals from the Ministry of Finance and establishing a Cabinet Budget Bureau under the prime minister’s office. Zero-based budgeting will be the general operating principle.

• Disband the Social Insurance Agency and combine its functions with the Tax Administration Agency. In the future, create a public taxation and collection agency and integrate the work for collecting local taxes. This would kill two birds with one stone by improving the collection rate for taxes and social insurance premiums, as well as reducing the number of government personnel.

8. Completely prohibit contributions by corporations and other groups to individual politicians (the source of political corruption)

• Completely eliminate the branch offices of political parties. Allow corporate and group donations only to a party headquarters. (Implement the pledge made to the people when political party subsidies from public funds were created during the Hosokawa Administration.) Crush the connection between politicians and their vested interests on the one hand, and pressure groups on the other.

9. Establish local autonomy and adopt the state/province system to improve the lives of the people and a focus on the regional areas.

• Transfer “the three ‘gen’” (kengen, or authority; zaigen, or revenue sources; and ningen, or people) to the basic local government units: municipalities.

• Establish local autonomy and residential self rule for laws, taxation, and other measures.

• Abolish the system of “subsidies with strings attached” provided by central government ministries and agencies, and national taxes distributed to local governments. Introduce a new mechanism for allocating financial resources among local governments.

• Move to a state/prefecture system based on local autonomy in 10 years.

• Limit the authority of the national government.

10. Use all of the foregoing to dismantle Kasumigaseki (the ministries and agencies of the central government)

• Reorganize the ministries and agencies of the central government (Kasumigaseki) again to leave only the “national minimum” required for diplomacy, the maintenance of safety (including food and energy), public finances, monetary issues, and social insurance. Rid the country of governmental authority concentrated at the national level.

This agenda is ultimately a basis for discussion when forming groups (for political action). It is adaptable, and items can be added, subtracted, or amended in the future through activities in which citizens have the lead role.

Afterwords:

By the numbers:

1. Some people go no further than amakudari when discussing the abuses of the Japanese bureaucracy, but as this list demonstrates, the problems go much deeper than that. The personnel bank to which the two men refer was, ironically, established to reduce the impact of amakudari.

3. Reducing the number of national legislators is another step that would kill two birds with one stone. In addition to cutting the cost of government, a new (presumably) winner-take-all system in electoral districts would result in a real two-party system that sharply curtails the influence of the smaller parties. Even the non-reformers in both the LDP and the DPJ have been discussing this step as a way to eliminate their pesky coalition partners.

This measure would reduce the strength of New Komeito, the LDP’s coalition partners in government, from 31 seats to eight in the lower house and from nine to two in the upper house. The Communist Party would lose all of its seats in both houses—nine in the lower house and three in the upper house, and the Social Democrats would lose six of their seven seats in the lower house and both its upper house seats.

That’s fine by me. While I understand the argument that it shuts out minority views from the process, too often in parliamentary systems those minority parties wind up to be the tail wagging the dog. One of the problems of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is that too many puppies are trying to wag the big dog’s tail, both internally and among the smaller parties aligned with it. The party can function efficiently only when kennel meister Ozawa Ichiro dictates party policy.

That’s no way to run a political party.

4. Yes indeed! These hotbeds of amakudari include:

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the National Agricultural Research Organization, the National Institute of Animal Health, the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, the National Traffic Safety and Environment Laboratory, the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization, the National Institute for Japanese Language, the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, the National Hospital Organization Kyushu Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Kyoto Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Hokkaido Cancer Center, the National Hospital Organization Nagoya Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Kure Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Osaka National Hospital, the National Hospital Organization Yokohama Medical Center, the National Hospital Organization Fukuyama Medical Center, the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, the National Museum of Western Art, the Fukui National College of Technology, the Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Urawa, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, the National Livestock Breeding Center, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the National Agency for the Advancement of Sports and Health, the Commemorative Organization for the Japan World Exposition ‘70, the Japan Student Services Organization, the National Research Institute of Fisheries Science, Fisheries Research Agency, the National Research Institute of Far Seas Fisheries, Fisheries Research Agency, the Japan Water Agency, the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster, the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, the Welfare And Medical Service Agency, the National Center for Seeds and Seedlings, the National Statistics Center, the National Institute for Sea Training, the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation, the Center for Food Quality, Labeling and Consumer Services, Livestock Industries Corporation, the Kansai Advanced Research Center, Communications Research Laboratory, the Urban Renaissance Agency, the National Research Institute of Brewing, the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency, the Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities, and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.

Just imagine all the comfortable sinecures these organizations offer those bureaucrats who descend from Kasumigaseki heaven. They all have English websites paid for by Japanese taxpayers—pop any of them into Google and see if you think any of them really need to be spared elimination or privatization.

6. It is not easy for people outside of Japan to appreciate how a system of “political appointees”–a phrase that makes most Americans cringe–would be an improvement, but that again demonstrates the excessive influence and power of the Japanese bureaucracy in politics and government.

7. This is designed to eliminate the control exerted by the Ministry of Finance on the budget. The Finance Ministry is considered to be the Big Swinging Dick of all the ministries.

8. One can sympathize with the efforts to eliminate the influence of big business on politics through campaign contributions, but it’s probably impossible to do so. Similar reforms in the United States have failed miserably. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Candidate Obama refused public financing, and his website accepting credit card contributions intentionally had the address verification function turned off (which has to be done manually). That allowed people to donate under fictitious names to skirt contribution limits and the law preventing donations from foreigners. A lot of money (just how much will never be known) was collected for Mr. Obama in Africa. His campaign raised a record amount of nearly 750 million dollars, and included website contributions from Adolf Hitler, Mickey Mouse and all sorts of goofy fictitious people that the donors and the campaign, in their contempt for the law, didn’t bother to disguise.

After his election, Mr. Obama appointed Eric Holder as Attorney General. When he served as Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Holder facilitated outgoing President Bill Clinton’s scheme to sell presidential pardons for cash.

Senior Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod said that all fraudulent contributions would be returned, and my eyes rolled while typing that sentence just as much as yours did when reading it.

Nobody is going to be prosecuted for the obvious fraud. And corporate contributors in Japan will find a way to skirt the law, too.

9. I’ve wanted to do a piece on the proposed state/province system for a long time, but that really deserves a magazine-length article. This system would create anywhere from nine to 12 states or provinces that would eventually supplant the current 47 prefectures. The result would be a three-tiered structure of central government, state/province government, and municipal government, each with clearly defined functions and the power to levy and collect taxes.

The reorganization of government at the sub-national level is currently the subject of intense debate among the political class in Japan, and some hold that the introduction of such a system would be a powerful weapon to nullify the bureaucratic stranglehold on government.

This one’s fine by me, too. Anything that removes authority from the central government and puts it closer to the people is always fine by me. Power to the people, don’t you know.

10. Hallelujah!

Who would have thought that two decades after the unquestioned successes of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain that the working politicians most passionately devoted to small government, devolution of authority, and budget hawking would be in Japan?

As a Japanese taxpayer and permanent resident of Japan, I’d love to see all 10 of these platform planks implemented immediately–especially before any tax increase, most of which is likely to be wasted. Will they all come to pass? Probably not. It doesn’t take much imagination to hear the howls of protest from the smaller parties, particularly the ones on the left, that it is undemocratic and unfair to allow only those people who actually win elections to hold Diet seats. Yes, it’s beyond parody, but it also doesn’t take much imagination to know that the mass media will give them as much megaphone as they want.

Nevertheless, Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Eda do everyone a service by presenting these ideas in a coherent program, thereby redrawing the boundaries of the debate. The most successful politicians are the ones who drag the center in their direction.

Ears to the ground

SOMEONE CAME UP WITH A GREAT IDEA for the latest Shinhodo 2001 public opinion survey.

Shinhodo 2001 (New Reports 2001) is a Sunday political blabathon broadcast from 7:30 to 8:55 a.m. on the Fuji Television Network. They regularly conduct political polls, and the results of their great idea are incorporated in their survey for 16 April.

One of the questions asked in the poll is: “What (kind of) Administration are you looking for after the next general election?” The pollsters’ inspiration was to add a new choice to the list of possible answers. The new possibility immediately caught the attention of those surveyed, who liked it so much it vaulted to the top of the list. Here’s how the respondents answered the question:

• An administration centered on a person with experience as the chief executive officer in local government, such as a prefectural governor, and who understands local conditions in Japan: 27.6%

• A grand coalition consisting of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan: 25.4%

• An administration led by the Democratic Party of Japan: 19.2%

• An administration led by the Liberal Democratic Party: 15.0%

• An administration led by a new third force other than the LDP or DPJ: 7.8%

• Don’t know: 5.0%

Japan’s Constitution requires the prime minister to be a member of the Diet, which means he or she must be a sitting member of the legislature. Many of the MPs (but by no means all) have had no executive experience in government. That might be one reason the late Tanaka Kakuei, the former cock of the walk in the LDP roost, decreed his politicos had to serve as the head of important party organizations and Cabinet ministries to be considered for the post of prime minister.

This new survey result suggests that the voters are now anxious to see people with the experience of solving problems in an executive capacity, and who will focus on the problems facing the country, rather than gamesmanship to gain a political edge in partisan battles in Nagata-cho after strategy sessions in the back rooms of exclusive Tokyo ryotei. And it is most interesting that the total seeking executive experience in local government, combined with the figures for those seeking a third force, outnumber the combined total of those who prefer either the LDP or DPJ singly–not to mention the number of those who hope to see a grand coalition.

It would also suggest that many of the 39.8% of the electorate undecided about which party they support (according to this poll) want to see regional devolution, and by implication a reform of the civil service system that vitiates the abnormal control of the Kasumigaseki bureaucrats in the central government.

But neither of the two major parties as presently led is likely to give the voters what they want. Therefore, they’ll have to turn to people who have had executive experience before serving in the Diet, or people serving as chief executive officers now and who may run for the Diet in the future.

Hashi and Higashi

Who might they be? Well, two of the most prominent prefectural governors who have chosen not to affiliate with a party and who champion the devolution of authority to local governments are frequently mentioned on this site: Miyazaki Gov. Higashikokubaru Hideo and Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru. It is surely no coincidence that both have approval ratings among their constituents northward of 80%.

Through a serendipitous coincidence (for this article), Gov. Hashimoto paid a well-publicized visit to Kyushu to have dinner with Gov. Higashikokubaru on the 12th and have private discussions with him on the 13th, as you can see from the photo. He also made a point of mentioning that he paid for the visit by cutting his own belly (in other words, out of his own pocket.)

The two men did not offer a lot of details about their discussions, but Gov. Higashikokubaru made this comment:

“He came to talk about his problems. We discussed what was going to happen to this country. I gave him my ideas.”

They also discussed the Osaka Prefectural Assembly’s recent rebuff of Gov. Hashimoto when they voted down a plan to move the prefectural government’s offices to the local World Trade Center. Mr. Higashikokubaru said he gave his Kansai counterpart some advice on dealing with the assembly. Mr. Hashimoto gushed about his host to the Asahi Shimbun:

“Higashi-san really is terrific! I learned a lot”

Unfortunately, the Asahi has been conducting a vendetta against Gov. Hashimoto (to no avail, evidently), so they neglected to mention that other topics were discussed. That was left to the Sankei Shimbun.

Said Mr. Hashimoto:

“Gov. Higashikokubaru talked about how he deals with organizations. Both the public employees and the citizens in Miyazaki are working very hard. Everyone says that the governor has made Miyazaki a more dynamic place.”

They also talked about a subject of great interest to them both, as well as to many people with an interest in the nuts and bolts of Japanese government:

“We discussed the ideal method of financial subsidies and the fundamentals of tax revenue resources once our financial liability for enterprises operated directly by the national government is ended. We want to be able to handle the work of local regions locally.”

Not only did the Asahi leave out that information while running a quote that made Mr. Hashimoto sound like a gushing schoolgirl, they headlined their article this way:

橋下知事、東国原知事と会談　「悩み相談ですよ」
Talks between Gov. Hashimoto and Gov. Higashikokubaru: “I gave him advice for his problems”

Make that a gushing schoolgirl who needs a shoulder to cry on.

And mainstream journalists wonder why people don’t take them seriously anymore.

*****

There are few earthquakes where I live in Saga, but there were a series of moderately intense temblors two or three years ago that occurred in conjunction with larger earthquakes in next-door Fukuoka. It was fascinating to discover that the approach of those earthquakes was clearly audible a few seconds before the motion of the earth began.

Are the results of this Shinhodo 2001 poll the political equivalent of the audible signs of an earthquake’s approach? The next few years in Japanese politics promise to be very interesting indeed.

Afterwords:

For the psephology folk, here are some other results from the same public opinion poll:

• Support the Cabinet: 30.0%, down 0.2 points
• Don’t support the Cabinet: 61.4%, down 3.8 points
• Don’t know: 8.6%, up 3.6 points

Which party’s candidates do you plan to vote for in the next general election?

• LDP: 24.4%, down 3.8 points
• DPJ: 27.6%, up 4.4 points
• Komeito: 3.2%, down 1.6 points
• Communists: 1.8%, down 0.4 points
• Social Democrats: 1.0%, up one point
• People’s New Party: 0.2%, down 0.2 points…
• Undecided 39.8%, up 1.8 points.

Which of the following two people do you think would make the best prime minister?

• Aso Taro: 40.0%
• Ozawa Ichiro: 25.8%
• Others/Don’t know: 34.2%

Who would be suitable as the next prime minister?

1. Koizumi Jun’ichiro: 10.0%
2. Aso Taro: 8.2%
3. Ishihara Shintaro: 6.8%
4. Masuzoe Yoichi: 6.8%
5. Yosano Kaoru: 6.6%
6. Ozawa Ichiro: 6.0%
7. Higashikokubaru Hideo: 4.8%
8. Okada Katsuya: 4.6%
9. Ishihara Nobuteru: 4.4%
10. Ishiba Shigeru: 3.8%
11. Hashimoto Toru: 3.4%
12. Koike Yuriko: 3.2%
13. Watanabe Yoshimi: 3.0%
14. Kan Naoto: 3.0%
15. Maehara Seiji: 2.2%
16. Hatoyama Yukio: 2.0%
17. Hatoyama Kunio: 1.6%
18. Nakagawa Hidenao: 0.6%
19. Noda Seiko: 0.4%
20. Other ruling coalition MPs: 1.6%
21. Other opposition MPs: 3.8%
22. Don’t know: 12.6%

This might be a fruitful line of inquiry for politicians: Combine the large percentages of undecided respondents, the immense local popularity of reformers (that isn’t reflected here), the miserable support for Messrs. Aso and Ozawa, Mr. Ozawa’s inability to convert his party’s poll advantage to his personal advantage (14 points down head-to-head against Mr. Aso), an extreme state of flux implied by a rate of undecideds near 40%, and the fact that former Prime Minister Koizumi still sits atop the table about 30 months after his departure, to devise a winning electoral strategy.

The aggregate figures only for those committed to reform (which does not include those who have sold their soul to Ozawa Ichiro in the hope of taking power) total 38.4% by my calculations. (It would be higher if the DPJ eunuchs were included.) There’s no telling how far a serious reformer could go if he or she were to use that base as bedrock support and then put the pedal to the metal in a real campaign offensive.

The big problem? None of the current parties is a trustworthy vehicle.

Update: Note that the Shinhodo poll has the Communist Party losing 0.4 percentage points of support, and that only 1.8% of those surveyed said they planned on voting for them.

Now take a look at this article by (sigh) Eric Talmadge of the AP who thinks the Reds are surging in Japan. The article is very short on actual numbers, but the author backs up his assertion by interviewing a single 22-year-old college student (I know, I know) and offering blanket statements without any corroboration. The student later admits that the type of Communism he prefers isn’t the scary type, which makes one wonder whether the undergrad knows as little about Japanese politics as Mr. Talmadge, but that gets tacked on at the end of the article for the 5% of the readers who stuck it out that far. Do BMOC and ET even know that the JCP just sided with China by refusing to censure the recent North Korean missile launch? And Mr. Talmadge also thinks Shii Kazuo is “something of a media star”, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so willfully stupid.

The Communist Party in Japan has always been a receptacle for voter dissatisfaction, and voter dissatisfaction everywhere is high now. (It also started before the economic crisis.) People read Akahata because reporters feed them stories they’re unable to run themselves under Japan’s press club system. Shii Kazuo gets invited on the occasional TV show to speak bluntly because he knows that with a 1.8% support rate, he has nothing to lose.

Mr. Talmadge does not seem to follow actual Japanese politics very closely. He apparently is unaware of the existence of any of the numbers above, much less their meaning.

The Communist Party is not “surging” in Japan. As this poll shows, it’s below 2% and going backwards. A more recent Asahi poll has them at 2.0% on the nose and trending downward. Capitalism is not going to fall from any country’s tree like a ripe persimmon. Shii Kazuo is not “something of a media star”, any more than Eric Talmadge is “something of a knowledgeable journalist on Japanese issues”.

Indeed, one might think that either Mr. Talmadge has a political agenda of his own, or that he’s simply looking to write a Japanese-man-bites-Japanese-dog story. In either case, he’s wasting our time.

If all you know about Japan is what you read in the Western media, then everything you know is wrong.

An interview with Watanabe Yoshimi

AS THE MINISTER in charge of governmental reform during the Abe and Fukuda administrations, Watanabe Yoshimi almost single-handedly pushed through a bill outlawing amakudari. That’s a practice in which former senior employees of the national governmental bureaucracy are hired by public or private sector corporations either connected with or under the supervision of their former ministries. That in turn enables their new employers to receive favorable treatment from the ministries that are supposed to oversee them. It is perhaps the most pernicious of the many misdeeds committed by Japan’s public sector, and one of the ways the bureaucracy, known as Kasumigaseki, maintains its control over governmental policy.

Watanabe Yoshimi

The Aso administration found a way to skirt the law through a Cabinet order, which enraged those in Japan pushing for reform. Mr. Watanabe was so upset he bolted the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to pursue reform through other channels, thereby becoming a national sensation. His departure was widely covered by the Japanese news media, who are as anxious as anyone to see real change instead of the farce presented by the tired hacks who run the LDP and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

I wanted to do a profile of Mr. Watanabe at the time, but I had other pressing matters to attend to and events moved on. Luckily, however, the weekly magazine Shukan Gendai published a lengthy interview with the man in their 31 January issue, and here you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s well worth reading, so I’ve rendered it in English.

*****
When did you finally decide to leave the Liberal-Democratic Party?

I decided at the end of last year. With that resolve, I supported the proposal of the (opposition) Democratic Party of Japan to dissolve the lower house on 24 December. I was prepared for the party to expel me, but they chose to issue only a warning instead. Then my departure got put off until now (laughs).

How did your supporters respond to your decision to be the only one to leave the LDP?

The response was completely different from the chilly reaction at Nagata-cho. There was a flood of telephone calls to my office on the day of the press conference (announcing the decision). I was told that other politicians got calls from their constituents telling them not to take down under any circumstances the campaign posters on which our photographs appeared together.

This is the voice of the people. Some Diet members were concerned about the party’s reaction and canceled speeches they asked me to give (on their behalf), but I have to wonder how the voters will respond in the election that will eventually come. (laughs)

In fact, I’ve gotten several encouraging e-mails from people inside the LDP, but I’m not going to mention any names.

Some people say that he (Watanabe) was able to bolt the party because he’s a big vote-getter, but it’s not that simple. When you leave the party, they’ll send “assassins” (to run against you in elections), you no longer get campaign funds from the party, and you can’t put up party posters or distribute party flyers. Fighting an election without a party affiliation is a hard road.

When you appeared on television news programs right after leaving the party, many of the newscasters seemed to be somewhat malicious by suggesting that you’ll be crushed because you took this step by yourself.

That’s because those people are the so-called political “pros”. They’ve evaluated a politician’s behavior using such scales as the dynamics of party factions or how many other Diet members are lined up in support. The people who view events from the perspective of Nagata-cho, including politicians, are incapable of understanding my actions. As far as I’m concerned, they can go ahead and criticize me all they like.

A People’s Movement

You’ve said that in the future, you’d like to rally other people with the same ambitions, including the chief executives of local government, people in business and financial circles, and academics, to create a people’s movement. Specifically, what sort of activities will you conduct?

The image I have in mind is close to that of Sentaku, the group formed by former Mie Governor Kitakawa Masayasu from the perspective of eradicating the influence of the bureaucracy and Kasumigaseki. Unfortunately, while the Sentaku concept is superb, the group seems to have temporarily suspended its activities. That’s because they added too many Diet members. More than 100 members from all parties joined their association for Diet members. Their joint representative is the current Chief Cabinet Secretary, Kawamura Takeo, and more than half the members are MPs from the ruling party. It’s not possible for them to escape the clutches of the current administration. It turned out to be anticlimactic.

That’s why I intend to limit the membership to the most capable people I can find. There’s no merit at all in an assembly consisting only of Diet members.

What are the main slogans for your activities?

We will work under the banner of the slogan, “Smash the System of Bureaucracy-Led Cabinets”. Prime Minister Aso has said the bureaucracy is not the enemy, but he has completely relinquished public policy to the bureaucrats, and as a quid pro quo, he has restored amakudari, which had been prohibited. The bureaucracy has the Aso administration wrapped around its little finger. My mission is to move forward by creating a great change and smashing the current system, replacing it with one in which the cabinets are led by the prime minister.

Other Supporters

Your belief in eliminating bureaucratic domination and promoting regional autonomy is very close to that of Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru, or at least to the ideas of his principal political advisor, Sakaiya Taichi, former Director-General of the Economic Planning Agency. There are also rumors of your association with Miyazaki Gov. Higashikokubaru Hideo. Will they also become members of your people’s movement?

I can’t give you any names yet. It’s not only a question of my decision—it’s also the decision of the core members who will work with me.

The names of MPs Mizuno Ken’ichi (LDP, no faction) and Shibayama Masahiko (LDP, Machimura faction) also have been linked to you.

I can’t say anything about the members yet.

Who will the core members be?

Eda Kenji (Independent) is one, and in the future, the number of kindred spirits will grow and expand beyond the confines of Nagata-cho.

There’s a story that Gov. Hashimoto met with you for four hours but turned down an offer to join you.

It wasn’t a question of turning me down, but of him saying ‘Let me think about it’. I think he was concerned about his dealings with the Diet. He’s very anxious to move the Osaka Prefecture offices to the Osaka World Trade Center, which is losing a lot of money. That will require the cooperation of Diet members in both the LDP and New Komeito. If he were to join my movement, his relationship with both of those parties would deteriorate. I think that’s the judgment he made.

A Non-Political Movement

Will the ‘People’s Movement’ try to bring down the Aso administration?

This will not be a movement that becomes involved with politics. It will be a pure citizen’s movement.

Will the ‘People’s Movement’ put forth any candidates in the next general election?

That’s different from any movement. People might say that if you’re going to put up candidates, you should form a party. Even if we gathered the five MPs required for creating a new party, the movement wouldn’t spread to the people. A party would be centered on the Diet members.

It’s important to destroy bureaucracy-led politics, but the economy is an urgent priority today.

Mr. Aso has said that his individual stimulus payments will boost consumption, but at 12,000 yen (about US$ 120.43) per person, that’s one digit short. It would be better if the government were to issue bank notes instead of the Bank of Japan, and distribute 20 trillion yen, 10 times Mr. Aso’s two trillion yen, to the people. If this is supposed to be a “once in a hundred years” crisis, you have to show that sort of resolve.

If it’s not possible to implement that sort of bold policy, we should discuss a forward-looking compromise on the two trillion yen stimulus measure with the opposition and allocate it to the regional areas plagued by unemployment. Mr. Aso can’t even do that.

What sort of conversations have you had with former LDP Secretary-General Takebe Tsutomu?

I wouldn’t call them consultations, but detailed reports. Mr. Takebe himself often says that he wants to work with me, but that his priority is the New Wind policy group that consists primarily of the Koizumi Children, the Diet members elected to their first term when he was secretary-general. He has to look out for them, so it’s not possible for him to work with a smaller group now.

My father (former Finance Minister Watanabe Michio) was asked by Ozawa Ichiro, then head of the Renewal Party, to take over as prime minister in 1994 when Hosokawa Morihiro stepped down. His condition was that my father leave the LDP. My father ultimately could not leave the party because he was a faction head. The reason is the same (as in Mr. Takebe’s case). I’m not part of a faction, so I was free.

Did you visit your father’s grave to tell him about your decision?

Yes, I did on 12 January, before the executives of my local support group gave their approval. When he was alive, my father often said, “The party comes before faction, and the country and the people come before party.” If you return to that starting point, I think my father also worked in politics for the country and the people, not party interests. That’s why I said at the press conference after I left the party that I probably had my father’s DNA.

His Political Future

An FNN poll about people who would make suitable prime ministers shows you coming in third behind Koizumi Jun’ichiro and Ozawa Ichiro. Are you interested in becoming prime minister?

It was the same situation with my father–it’s not possible to become prime minister through actual ability alone. Luck is a big factor.

Ozawa Ichiro of the DPJ said when you left the LDP that your political stance and way of thinking are the same as his. What ties do you have with the DPJ?

The DPJ says they’re interested in “alternating governments”. I’m interested in reorganizing government. There’s a big difference between the two. We agree on an early Diet dissolution and getting the bureaucrats out of government, but there are people in the LDP who believe the same thing. That’s why I think reorganizing government is the proper course.

Will you take any steps for governmental reorganization before the election?

It’s important to be established before the election. Then we can have a political realignment after the election based on the people’s judgment. I think that’s how affairs are trending.

Anyway, people are calling me a Don Quixote. I decided to jump out in front and sacrifice myself for governmental reorganization. I might be killed once politically because of it, but if so, I will most certainly come back to life.

Afterwords
The Osaka prefectural assembly rejected the initiative to move the prefecture offices to the World Trade Center. That may make it possible for Mr. Hashimoto to work more openly with Mr. Watanabe.

There are actually two parts to the Sentaku group, and Mr. Watanabe is referring to the liaison group with the national Diet. The original group was formed with the chief executives of local governments.

Now that his chief aide has been arrested in a political contribution scandal, Mr. Ozawa is no longer likely to be at the top of any lists of potential prime ministers. A Mainichi Shimbun poll in the past week shows that 39% of the respondents think he should step down as party boss immediately, and 33% say he should quit before the next election. In other words, almost three-quarters of the people think it’s time for him to take a hike.

The new breed of Japanese politician

“I think the people of Japan and the prefecture seek a method of politics different from that based on political parties. We must change politics at the local level to win the approval of the people of Japan and the prefecture.”
- Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru

THOSE WHO RELY ON the overseas press to keep abreast of Japanese politics would get the impression that the country’s politicians are a faceless, duplicitous lot of hacks with bad suits and bad teeth barely able to conceal a belief that Imperial Japan is destined to rise again. In that version, the one exception was Koizumi Jun’ichro, the “maverick” who represented a “refreshing change”.

But that distorted view is a false impression. That’s what comes from looking through the wrong end of an obsolete telescope.

While it might have contained a measure of truth at one time, the characterization was never wholly accurate to begin with. And now, failing to play attention to current trends means observers are missing one of the most important aspects of contemporary Japan, as well as one of its most compelling political stories.

Mr. Koizumi was not an outlier: rather, he was the first of a new breed of politicians whose dynamism could further transform the face of an already transformed society.

Hashimoto Toru

As with all social trends, it is not possible to separate the chicken from the egg. It was inevitable that the dramatic changes that have occurred in Japanese society since the 1980s would produce a dramatically different type of Japanese citizen. What few people outside Japan have realized is that they also produced a dramatically different type of politician that is earning the enthusiastic support of those citizens.

Regardless of what one thinks about their policies, politics, and personalities, the old labels no longer apply to people such as lower house members Watanabe Yoshimi or Eda Kenji, briefly profiled in a post down the page. Nor do they apply to Miyazaki Gov. Higashikokubaru Hideo, the subject of many posts here and the one immediately below this.

After two years in office, Mr. Higashikokubaru has an approval rating of 88% as measured by his local newspaper. Politicians do not achieve that level of support by accident, no matter how long they spent in show business first, so it would behoove the rest of the political class and those who write about it to examine the reasons for his success.

In an interview in the April issue of Ushio, the first reason the governor cites for his popularity is a conscious effort to act naturally and not behave in the manner of government officials in the past. He also cites a willingness to listen to everyone without making an immediate judgment on their opinions or demands.

These traits have prompted one Japanese Internet news source to dub him “the cooperative type” of new, local politician. While that has worked for the Miyazaki governor, others are using different techniques.

Hashimoto Toru

One of those other types is a youthful firebrand who has made the devolution of authority to local government his calling card–the former attorney and television celebrity Hashimoto Toru, governor of Osaka Prefecture.

As the quote at the top of this post makes clear, the 39-year-old Mr. Hashimoto shares with Mr. Higashikokubaru the belief that the days of party-centered politics in Japan has to end. The Miyazaki governor, an independent, often says that the only party a local politician needs is the citizens.

This is an indirect corroboration of the changes in Japanese society, which traditionally was centered on group activity rather than individual behavior. One political consequence of this social structure was that all the political parties demanded Soviet-style obedience within the party once a consensus was reached, regardless of the individual views of the members.

But the younger generations no longer feel constrained to sacrifice their views on the altar of consensus, and their independent behavior is increasingly influencing that of their elders.

While Gov. Higashikokubaru is considered “the cooperative type”, Mr. Hashimoto, who has been in office only one year, is unabashedly the confrontational type. He seems to have taken a page out of the book of economist John Maynard Keynes, who once remarked that when all else failed “ruthless truth-telling” is the only answer.

This ruthless truth-telling has become such a phenomenon among the public that two newspapers, the Asahi and the Sankei, file daily features on his continuing adventures. The Sankei, being non-leftist and a supporter of devolution, is generally sympathetic to the governor. Just today they quoted him as calling the national bureaucracy “tyrannical” for their plans to erect a new building in Osaka for one of their local branches. A Japanese politician will never go far wrong with his constituents by attacking the bureaucracy in the harshest manner possible.

The Sankei also approvingly noted the stir he caused when he declared that “The regions are the slaves of the nation(al government).” The governor was specifically addressing the financial liability borne by local governments to support enterprises or institutions directly operated by the national government.

This certainly got Tokyo’s attention. Mr. Hashimoto has been invited to debate the issues with the Cabinet Office’s Committee for Promoting Regional Devolution and Reform. (You might keep this in mind if you ever read in English the tired old proverb that the nail that sticks out in Japan gets hammered down. Whoever dares repeat that these days is looking through the rearview mirror.)

Indeed, Mr. Hashimoto seems determined to be the first to do the hammering. He has been so outspoken on occasion that he has been charged, sometimes not unfairly, with intemperance, as this previous post describes.

North Korean schools

This week still more of the governor’s ruthless truth-telling stirred up a minor controversy in some quarters. This report came from the Asahi, which as a newspaper of the left has a vested interest in the character assassination of non-leftist politicians with significant popular appeal.

One of the governor’s primary initiatives has been to move the prefecture offices from the present building, which is more than 80 years old, to the Osaka City-run World Trade Center. The move was backed by local business leaders long before Mr. Hashimoto took office. Most are aligned with the Liberal Democratic Party, the dominant party of the national ruling coalition, but some from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan also supported the move. (Business leaders claimed it would spark greater regional development, and it would also solve the problem of the red ink the facility has been bleeding since it was built in the 90s.) Meanwhile, New Komeito, the Japanese Communist Party, and a significant amount of the population were opposed.

The Osaka Prefectural Assembly this week rejected the proposal to move the government offices, which required a two-thirds majority to pass. When asked about his defeat, Gov. Hashimoto said:

“Japan isn’t North Korea, after all. If I got my way in everything all the time, I’d become a dictator.”

More temperate public officials, hesitant to say something that could cause offense, might have considered blandness to be the better part of valor. They might have said that the people had spoken through their elected legislative representatives and the defeat demonstrates the health and soundness of the democratic process. In other words, the same boring old crap that goes in one ear and out the other.

But the Japanese public is fed up with mush-mouthed politicians, and Mr. Hashimoto was not elected because of an ability to sponge on the soft soap. He is in office because he calls a spade a spade.

The Asahi found (or was approached by) an association of the mothers in the prefecture who send their children to North Korean schools. The newspaper ran an article that reported the association’s demands that the governor withdraw the statement, apologize, and take measures to ensure the safety of the children at the schools.

Their demand says that his statement referring to North Korea in regard to a purely local issue while “North Korea bashing” is occurring due to that country’s upcoming launch of a missile is inappropriate. “We are concerned that the statement could encourage unjustified harassment of the children at the schools,” the mothers said.

The insolence of the North Koreans and their local lackeys is by no means a new phenomenon, but the moral repugnance of this particular complaint is breathtaking. Those of North Korean ancestry in Japan who are allowed to operate schools for the primary purpose of indoctrinating students in the propaganda of an enemy state should be grateful that they have the opportunity to exist at all, much less complain about democratically elected leaders in public. That opportunity certainly wouldn’t be available to them in Pyeongyang, and they know it.

Meanwhile, the North Koreans, who have threatened to turn Japan into a sea of flame, fired missiles in its direction several times, and regularly sent operatives into the country to kidnap private citizens—an infringement of national sovereignty that could also be argued to be a casus belli, is now preparing to launch a three-stage ballistic missile over Japan in violation of a United Nations ban (I know, I know) as soon as this weekend.

The schools themselves are operated by Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, whose chairman and five other senior officials are members of the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly. If anyone by chance did harass the North Korean students—who are made to wear uniforms based on traditional Korean designs—it would be the blame of their schoolmasters, their parents, and the country to which they owe allegiance.

One might make the case that the Asahi is performing a service for the large ethnic Korean population in the Kansai district by reporting the news. But that would not be a credible excuse for a newspaper that has had its knives out for Mr. Hashimoto for most of his term trying to discredit him.

The Asahi seems to think that Mr. Hashimoto is irresponsible and intemperate. Some would agree, but many in Japan are thrilled to see a politician unafraid to say what he thinks and ruthlessly tells the truth as he sees it. I do not use the word “many” lightly. In January the support rate among his constituents was 82%.

Morita Kensaku

It is also worth mentioning in this context Morita Kensaku, who handily won the gubernatorial election in Chiba Prefecture in a race closely watched to see if the Ozawa fund-raising scandals would have an impact on the local DPJ candidate. (Apparently they did, to an extent.)

Morita Kensaku

As a former actor, Mr. Morita already had the advantage of name recognition. But other Japanese observers suggest that one reason for his victory is that he presented himself as the face of the prefectural citizens and a man who transcended party. Despite endorsements by about half of the LDP members of the prefectural assembly, he avoided using those endorsements in the campaign.

His primary opponent, Yoshida Taira, was backed by the opposition DPJ. While that seems to have been a handicap this time around, the same observers note that Mr. Yoshida tried to nationalize the election by campaigning on a platform of throwing the bums of the LDP out of office and replacing them with the DPJ. In short, they say, Mr. Morita’s success may have been due to an approach identical to that of the Miyazaki and Osaka governors. All three have pledged their loyalty to the voters’ interests rather than to those of a political party.

It’s worth noting that Japan is a parliamentary democracy, and that prime ministers must be members of the Diet. That means they are legislators, a group notorious for a lack of executive skills. (That’s likely one reason the LDP usually has its prime ministerial candidates serve in several executive positions in the Cabinet and in party posts first.)

Mr. Higashikokubaru already seems intent on moving from the governor’s office to the Diet, and perhaps he thinks he looks upon the visage of a future prime minister when he faces the mirror in the morning. It remains to be seen if people such as Mr. Hashimoto and Mr. Morita follow his example, or turn to individual initiatives such as Sentaku, the group organized by former Mie Governor Kitagawa Masayasu.

Whatever happens in the future, it must be emphasized that the presence of such men in Japanese politics is a lagging indicator rather than a leading indicator. That they exist is a corroboration of changes that already have occurred in Japanese society, not of changes that might happen in the future. Besides, there is now so much dynamism in political circles in Japan, particularly at the regional level, that further drastic change must be taken as a given.

But don’t expect to see much discussion of this in English anywhere, much less the media. They still think the LDP and DPJ mudboats of Aso Taro and Ozawa Ichiro are the norm.

They still think Japanese politicians are faceless.

Afterwords: Nothing about politics, but here’s an observation of a different sort. Mr. Morita is giving the banzai salute in celebration of his victory in the photo above. Notice that everyone’s hands are facing toward the front.

That wasn’t always the case. Older people with a prewar education invariably raise their hands with their palms facing each other, resembling an NFL official in American football signaling a touchdown. A few sticklers even talk about it.

Time brings about all sorts of changes, does it not?