Sunrise in the land of the rising sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(end translation)

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

DPJ’S GOVERNING FIASCO: Party never challenged Finance Ministry

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROTFLMAO.

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

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

Hashimoto Toru (2): The company he keeps

**This is the second of a multi-part series on Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru and the phenomenon he represents. The first is here.**

SOME people in Japan were suspicious: Was Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru just blustering with his declaration of intent to capture the Bastille of Japanese politics at Nagata-cho and implement his revolution from the inside out? That concern is now a very unlikely scenario — to prepare potential candidates for a lower house election, which rumor has it could come as early as June, he opened and begun operating on Sunday a political juku to prep potential candidates running either under the banner of One Osaka, his local party, or as allied forces. Backing down now would seriously wipe out the credibility of a man who’s riding The Big Wave.

Nagata-cho, here we come. Hashimoto Toru announces that One Osaka intends to field candidates in the next lower house election.

The word juku is often mistranslated as “cram school” in English, inspired by those exemplary Western educators who think Japanese children study too much. (Kumon is one of those jukus, and its system was adopted some years ago in a few of the lower southern states in the U.S. as a way to help laggard students.) This, however, is a juku in the original sense of the term — a private facility for the instruction of one’s “disciples”.

Mr. Hashimoto announced his intention to eventually accept 400 students for intensive training, of which 300 will become candidates, and of which he hopes 200 will win election. That’s a bit short of a lower house majority, but with even half that number, nothing happens in the Diet without him. That’s also before the totals of Your Party and other regional parties are factored in.

An article in the 10 February weekly Shukan Asahi (Hashimoto opponents) presented the argument that it won’t be possible for One Osaka to field 300 candidates. They quote one veteran pol as saying that it costs about JPY six million for a campaign, either for a single-district seat or a proportional representation seat, and the party doesn’t have the national organization, money, or bed of existing votes to pull it off. He thinks that even 200 is a pipe dream.

Someone the magazine claims is close to One Osaka is quoted as saying that even Mr. Hashimoto knows its an impossibility to run that many candidates, but he’s using that as a ploy to get the national government to approve his Osaka Metro District plan.

An anonymous source affiliated with New Komeito in the Osaka area suggests that many of his local supporters are ready to back him in local elections, but because they are affiliated with other parties, they will revert to their former allegiances in a national election.

Elsewhere, LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru declared, “They can’t take 100 seats. 30-40 is the reality.”

The magazine appeared on newsstands at beginning of February. Since then, he received 3,326 applications for admission to his school, and after a review of their essays, 2,262 students were accepted. The 400 selected for more intensive study will come from that group.

Some of the applicants were said to be sitting Diet members of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. Now who can blame them? They didn’t learn anything about politics, the popular will, and keeping promises where they are now.

The funding for elections might be a problem because One Osaka is not a national political party with a minimum of five Diet seats. Therefore, it receives no public subsidies, and candidates will have to pay their own way. They’re already paying JPY 120,000 for the tuition to meet five times between now and June, when the winnowing takes place.

If you can tell a person by the company he keeps, Mr. Hashimoto is clearly a respectable but radical reformer. Several of the teachers already work with Your Party and have often been mentioned on this site. (In fact, there are tags for most.) Here’s a list:

Sakaiya Taiichi: Former head of Economic Planning Agency, non-fiction/fiction writer, chief Hashimoto advisor, professor emeritus at the juku

Nakata Hiroshi: Former lower house member and Yokohama mayor, member of the Spirit of Japan Party

Okamoto Yukio: Former diplomat, now foreign affairs commentator and independent businessman, former aide to Prime Minister Koizumi, has served on board of several companies, including Asahi Beer, and served as Mitsubishi auditor

Koga Shigeaki: Former Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry official, author of three books, and the man who became the symbol of the national victimhood when the DPJ betrayed its promises to get the bureaucracy under control.

Hara Eiji: Another METI vet and bureaucracy-bashing author

Takahashi Yoichi: Former Finance Ministry official, devised the original plan for Japan Post privatization under Takenaka Heizo’s supervision, now a commentator, advisor to Your Party, and university professor.

Yamanaka Toshiyuki: Former diplomat, now works in human resource training

Suzuki Wataru: Economics professor

Kitaoku Nobuichi: Professor specializing in foreign affairs and diplomatic history, former personal advisor to Prime Minister Koizumi.

The belle of the ball

Winning big is the best way for a politician to win friends, influence people, and become a supersized enchilada himself, and that’s just what Mr. Hashimoto does. Since his initial success as Osaka governor, many politicians flocked to the political alpha male in the hope some of his shine would reflect off them. Three years ago Masuzoe Yoichi, then the Health Minister in the terminal LDP governments and viewed by some as the last great hope for the LDP reformers, tried to coax the governor into an alliance. Some viewed him as an ineffective political organizer/operator, which subsequent events have borne out. Mr. Hashimoto seems to have understood that right away, and deflected his interest.

He’s also attracted the attention and approval of Tokyo Metro Gov. Ishihara Shintaro, who’s defended him against charges of dictator tendencies:

“People call him a dictator, so perhaps everyone’s a little daunted by him. But that’s just arbitrary. Unless a person with the power of ideas directs affairs from the top down, nothing gets done. It’s the same way here (in Tokyo).”

Mr. Ishihara’s only beef seems to be that the Osaka Metro District plan calls for the creation of an “Osaka-to” in Japanese. That’s a throwback to the Tokyo governor’s emergence into the public eye more than 50 years ago as a literary sensation writing best-selling fiction and non-fiction. (He was also a Vietnam war correspondent on special assignment.) He objects to the use of “to” (都), which he insists should be applied only to national capitals. (He has a point; one meaning of the Japanese reading of the word is “seat of government”. Then again, Osakans have always had a big idea of themselves.)

While Mr. Hashimoto welcomes the attention and is respectful of his elders, he’s also done a good job of deflecting the talk of an alliance with the Tokyo governor. Mr. Ishihara is discussing the formation of a new political party with Kamei Shizuka, an anti-Japan Post privatization non-reformer and paleo-conservative in the Japanese sense, whose party is still officially a junior coalition partner with the DPJ government. Mr. Hashimoto politely gave them the stiff-arm:

“There has to be a certain agreement on policies, such as opposition to tax increases and devolution from central authority.”

Mr. Kamei is not interested in the second of those policies mentioned. He’s part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The Osaka mayor has also developed a close professional relationship with Nakata Hiroshi and Yamada Hiroshi of the Spirit of Japan Party (more here). Both were appointed special advisors to the city after Mr. Hashimoto’s election, and Mr. Nakata is teaching at the juku. Asada Hitoshi, the chairman of the Osaka Prefectural Assembly and the policy chairman for One Osaka, attended a banquet for the Spirit of Japan Party in Osaka. Mr. Asada thanked them for their help in creating the Ishin Hassaku, or One Osaka’s policy framework, and added, “We share a sense of values.” Replied Mr. Yamada:

“We have great hopes for what’s happening in Osaka…We hope to be able to create a third political center by gathering people who share their view of the state and history.”

Former LDP Secretary-General Nakagawa Hidenao, the most prominent of the Koizumians left standing in the party, invited Mr. Hashimoto to Tokyo to participate in a study group and offer his opinions on devolution. Said the mayor:

“The people think that nothing will happen unless the Kasumigaseki social system is changed.”

But he was preaching to the converted. Several younger and mid-tier LDP members are attracted to the mayor’s movement, and there are also rumors of more private contacts with LDP member Kono Taro. The son of a former prominent LDP pol himself, Mr. Kono claims to be an advocate of small government, but sometimes skates onto very thin ice. (He thinks international financial transactions should be taxed and the funds given to multinational public sector do-gooders. He still hasn’t figured out that the global warming bologna was a scam.)

Another LDP member in the Hashimoto corner is former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Mr. Abe recently spoke at an Osaka symposium for a private sector group called the Organization for Reviving Japanese Education. Attending was new Osaka Gov. Matsui Ichiro, Mr. Hashimoto’s partner in One Osaka. Their common objective is to reshape the current educational system, and at a post-conference meeting with reporters, the governor said they were on the same page. Mr. Matsui also said that the schools’ opposition to the amendments of the Basic Education Law passed during the Abe administration means that the popular will is not reflected in the school curriculum.

The most important of Hashimoto’s allies, however, is the reform Your Party. (Reports of their activities often grace these pages.) Party head Watanabe Yoshimi was interested in joining forces when Mr. Hashimoto arose as a political figure (a year or two before Your Party was formed), but was said to have been restrained by his party co-founder and Secretary-General, Eda Kenji, due to concerns that the Osaka mayor was a loose cannon. If that was true, the leash is now off. Said Mr. Watanabe:

“We must work to ensure as a party that this movement (One Osaka) spreads nationwide.”

He says the policies of One Osaka and Your Party are nearly the same, and adds that they have plans to form a joint policy study group and a political alliance nationwide. Those policies include the reorganization of local governments into a state/province system, the creation of an Osaka Metro District, and the idea that the new sub-national units receive all the consumption tax revenue. Mr. Watanabe has created a catchphrase to crystallize the ideas of his party’s policies, which is “giving the ‘three gen’” to local governments. Gen is the final syllable of the words kengen (authority), zaigen (revenue sources) and ningen (people).

L-R: Gov. Matsui, Mayor Hashimoto, Mr. Watanabe, Gov. Omura. The shape of things to come?

Further, Your Party executives as well as others in the party responsible for the candidacies in single-seat districts will study at the One Osaka political juku with the party leadership’s blessing. That includes about 20-30 people from Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo. Your Party plans to run 100 candidates in the next lower house election, and they’ve settled on about 70 so far.

The Shukan Asahi also quoted a Your Party source as saying that Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Hashimoto have reached a private understanding that the former would be “the first prime minister”. They suggest that Mr. Watanabe thinks control of the Diet is in their aggregate grasp.

The Osaka mayor is also an official international phenomenon — he’s attracted the attention of South Koreans. That’s only natural: national elections will be held in that country in April and December this year. KBS-TV sent a crew to hop over to Osaka for interviews. Commenting on the Korean interest, the mayor said:

“I look forward to the emergence in South Korea of new politicians who aren’t beholden to vested interests.”

Asked by a Korean reporter about his political juku, he answered:

“We must create politicians who aren’t under the thumb of vested interests. If South Korea can get excited about the same thing, I’d like to see Japan and South Korea move in same direction.”

The Japanese media spoke to one of the KBS reporters after the interview, and he told them:

“There’s quite a lot of reporting on Hashimoto in South Korea. After actually meeting him, I sensed his strong intent for reform.”

Critical to the success of any politician is his capacity to appeal to people who don’t agree with all his positions, but are on board for the most important of them — in this case, governmental reform. For example, Mr. Hashimoto supports amending the Constitution to permit the Japanese to maintain military forces for self-defense. Chiba Mayor Kumagai Toshihito also supports amending the Constitution, but for the opposite reason — he wants to prevent Japan from becoming involved in any conflict. Nevertheless, he said:

“The structure of the local governments where we live is an important issue, but one that has not attracted much interest. That it became the primary issue contested in the Osaka election is epochal…We of the “government ordinance cities” (cities with authority similar to that of prefectures) strongly seek the transfer of authority from the prefectures. I don’t agree with all of the opinions in Mr. Hashimoto’s Osaka Metro District concept, but our intent to change Japan from the regions is the same.”

Local party time!

Hashimoto Toru is the most visible manifestation of the ferment of regional politics in Japan, but he is by no means alone. This time last year, all eyes were on the newly elected mayor of Nagoya, Kawamura Takashi, and the governor of Aichi Prefecture, Omura Hideaki. Their victory in a February 2011 triple election might have been more impressive than the Osaka result because the Kawamura — Omura alliance is between men originally of different parties. Also, their tax-cutting, small-government message was accepted by people in a region that has been a stronghold for the tax-raising, big government DPJ. (This is the national headquarters of Toyota, and there are plenty of labor unions.)

Mr. Hashimoto actively lent his support to the two men and their respective regional parties last year, and members of One Osaka came to help campaign. (It should not be overlooked that this revolution is occurring in Osaka and Nagoya, Japan’s second- and third-largest cities.) It’s expected that the three men will form an alliance for a national election, and while that will probably happen, there are some differences in viewpoints between them.

For example, Kawamura Takashi’s party is called Genzei Nippon, or Tax Reduction Japan. He favors sharp cuts in taxes (which he has partially achieved in his first year in office). Though Mr. Hashimoto has criticized the Noda Cabinet’s plan to raise the consumption tax, and he is allied with the anti-tax increase Your Party, he has also criticized the Kawamura approach. That criticism provides a fascinating glimpse of his philosophy:

“The awareness I would like to see is not transferring work or duties from city hall to the ward offices, but transferring decision-making authority from the mayor to the heads of the ward offices. The ultimate objective is, ‘We don’t need a mayor’.”

He’s also said that he would be cool to a formal alliance with them unless Mr. Kawamura makes some adjustments, including his campaign for tax cuts:

“At the current stage, let’s stop talking about tax increases, or reducing taxes, or opposing tax increases. It is nonsense in our present state for politicians to be expressing an opinion about either tax increases or cuts. If society as a whole is going to create a system of mutual support, it’s natural for the members of society to assume the liability for an appropriate share. First, we should identify what sort of social system we want to create. Whether or not the residential tax should be cut is a minor matter that should be discussed at the end of the process.”

Mr. Hashimoto has presented this view on several occasions. If he’s serious, that would represent a drastic departure from the political status quo anywhere, much less Japan. He’s talking about bottom up government with the political class last.

The Aichi governor and Nagoya mayor have a plan for the administrative reorganization of their own area, which they call Chukyo-to. (Ishihara Shintaro won’t like that to either.) While they’re working on common ground, Mr. Hashimoto believes they need to do some more thinking about the concept, and he has the sense that they aren’t clear on exactly what they want to accomplish. Representatives from Aichi and Nagoya have had meetings on the Chukyo concept, but they have yet to present a plan for changing the current form of the administrative bodies, such as breaking up Nagoya (The Osaka plan calls for eliminating the administrative entity that is the city of Osaka and creating self-governing wards in the region.)

Mr. Kawamura says, however, that he spoke to Mr. Hashimoto by phone and explained that their plan calls for the merger of Aichi and Nagoya, but that the framework will take into account regional considerations. That will include maintaining the form of a city of Nagoya. Nevertheless, he wants to maintain their alliance.

Complicating this somewhat is that Your Party’s Watanabe Yoshimi has his own plan for the region, which would eliminate Nagoya and its current 16 wards and create seven new regional districts. Each of these special districts would have a chief municipal officer and a legislature. As with the Osaka Metro District concept, the idea behind the Watanabe plan is to eliminate redundant government systems. It would reduce the number of city workers by 20% and save JPY 50 billion. Mr. Kawamura thinks the people of Nagoya would not support it, and Mr. Omura thinks the Watanabe plan lacks specifics.

Meanwhile, both men have decided to establish a political juku of their own. The first was Mr. Omura, who announced his at the end of January:

“I want the three major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Aichi, and Osaka to form an alliance and change Japan.”

His idea is to present candidates for the four Tokai prefectures of Shizuoka, Aichi, Gifu and Mie. Mr. Omura announced yesterday that he had received 751 applications, and after reviewing their documents, 678 have been accepted. About 80% are from Aichi, and include company employees, national and local civil servants, and local government council members. One of the speakers will be Takenaka Heizo, the Koizumi privatization guru, and another will be one of the elder statesmen of Japanese journalists, Tahara Soichiro.

Oddly, Mayor Kawamura didn’t like the idea at first. He told reporters, “I cannot agree with how they’re going about it.” That didn’t change his relationship with the Aichi governor, however. He still supports the Chukyo-to concept, and said, “There is no change in our friendship.”

But Mr. Kawamura suddenly changed his mind — you know what they say about imitation and flattery — and plans to set up his own political science class to start next month. His reasons:

“I want to communicate my thinking to the next generation. It is also for the next lower house election.”

The curriculum at his school will focus on taxes and national defense issues, and he will ask Hashimoto Toru and Omura Hideaki to send over some teachers. He expects to run Genzei Nippon candidates in the next lower house election in the five lower house districts in Nagoya.

He’s sticking to his tax cutting pledge, too. Despite Mr. Hashimoto’s criticism, it’s easy to like his approach.

“To improve the people’s lives, we must not raise taxes. Rather than tax revenue, we must raise (the people’s) income…the revenue source for tax reduction is governmental reform.”

It’s not often mentioned in the media, but Mr. Kawamura would have special committees established in each district of the city to have the residents determine how they would spend the tax revenue in their area. While taxes would be cut, it would give — you got it — power to the people to decide how they want to spend the money.

Now this is the kind of debate I can get behind. One man is opposed to immediate tax increases absent reform and says let the people decide what they want first, while the other man says the issue is raising income rather than taxes and tax reduction should be achieved by cutting government.

That’s my idea of win-win.

Coming next: An overview of other Hashimoto policies and a first look at his critics. Here’s a taste — He’s backing an idea proposed by the man being interviewed.

It’s dango time

ONE post yesterday presented journalist Suda Shin’ichiro passing along information that the pro-tax increase faction in the ruling Democratic Party has become taken with the idea of putting off a lower house election over the tax issue — which they’d lose — by raising the problem of the imbalance of voter weighting in individual election districts. A few days before that, we saw that the DPJ has been considering for nearly a year the creation of a grand coalition government following a lower house election unlikely to result in a clear majority for either of the two major parties. Even though many of them would die a gruesome political death, some would still keep the perks of power.

Here it comes!

Former Chief Cabinet Secretary and current backstage DPJ bigwig Sengoku Yoshito appeared on Fuji TV on the morning of the 8th. He suggested a bill to reduce the number of lower house members would be submitted before the legislation for raising the consumption tax.

We have to do “first things first”, and I think that bill (lower house reduction) will come before the other.

Also:

The biggest problem is that politics can’t get anything done. Doesn’t that need to be handled with a grand coalition?

Your Party head Watanabe Yoshimi sees what’s going on and doesn’t like it. Asked about Prime Minister Noda’s call to the opposition parties to discuss legislation, he said:

If you want to raise taxes, submit a bill quickly and let’s deal with it in the Diet. We won’t respond to talks for bid-rigging schemes (dango) beforehand.

(Dango is the Japanese term referring to construction companies holding discussions to determine in advance who gets what public works project in advance for how much.)

Mr. Watanabe knows that the Democratic Party, Liberal Democratic Party, and New Komeito will try to work out an arrangement that keeps them at the top of the power structure and protect themselves from the reform parties. They’re particularly worried about the new local parties pushing for major reforms that have been winning sub-national elections handily against the Old Guard.

He also knows that the LDP mudboaters want to restore the old multiple-seat districts that facilitated their political dominance in the second half of the last century, and that New Komeito will fight any reduction of proportional representation seats. That is an existential issue for them.

The DPJ announced it would build a new Japan when it took power in the fall of 2009. Their version of a “new Japan” turns out to be the spitting image of the old Japan with a bigger table to make room for their seats at the banquet of power.

It’s dango time!

*****
If an Argentinian singer, American ukelelean, and Bolivian sanshin player, all of Japanese heritage, can peform La Bomba in a university lounge in Okinawa, those three parties can surely cut a deal they’ll be happy with.

Ichigen koji (80)

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

The most recent FNN/Sankei poll showed disapproval of the Noda Cabinet at 51.6%, a 14.5 percentage-point jump in a month, and an approval rating of 35.6%, a 6.8-point decline. This is the first of the major media RDD polls to show a thumbs-down majority.

Said Watanabe Yoshimi, Your Party president:

The Noda Cabinet has bought into the abnormal beliefs of the Finance Ministry and is running hell bent for leather on the tax increase track. Hasn’t their shallowness been exposed?

Said Motegi Toshimitsu, the LDP Policy Research Council chairman:

We still have a “learner’s permit” Cabinet. The prime minister’s leadership or message to the people are nowhere to be seen.

And LDP head Tanigaki Sadakazu:

I suspect the feeling of most people is that (the Cabinet) lacks the ability to appropriately deal with important problems.

The numbers for party preference in the same poll:

Liberal Democratic Party: 19.7% (down 1.2 points)
Democratic Party: 18.0% (down 1.4 points)
Your Party: 8.8% (up 3.0 points)
New Komeito: 3.3% (down 0.1 point)
Social Democrats, led by one of the top 100 global thinkers for 2011: 0.6% (down 0.6 points)

Said Kishida Fumio, the LDP Diet Affairs Committee chairman:

It is natural that we cooperated in the three-party conference (with the DPJ and New Komeito) and the recovery effort…but we must graduate from the three-party conference to draw a distinction between ourselves and the DPJ. The time for that will come next year…There are many issues on which we cannot cooperate with the DPJ, even if we wanted to, such as the Constitution, education, and foreign affairs and security. Some legislative proposals absolutely must not pass, such allowing foreigners to vote, and permitting collective bargaining agreements for public employees.

Meanwhile, the Asahi poll was also released. The disapproval numbers exceeded those for approval for the first time in that poll, but did not exceed 50%.

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Central bonkers

A half-century experiment in draping steam­ship anchors around the necks of the productive class and expecting them to run a four-minute mile has ended in failure. The confiscation of rights and property, the moral impoverishment of generations caused by the state’s usurpation of parental obligations, the elevation of a credentialed elite that believes academia’s fashions are a worthy substitute for knowledge of history and human nature, and above all the faith in a weightless cipher whose oratorical panache now consists of looking from one teleprompter screen to the other with the enthusiasm of a man watching someone else’s kids play tennis–it’s over, whether you believe in it or not. It cannot be sustained without reducing everyone to penurious equality…

To which some progressives respond: You say that like it’s a bad thing.
- James Lileks

WERE dunking stools still an accepted means of punishment, most of the world’s lawyers, politicians, and journalists would never spend a dry day in their lives, such is the level of contempt in which they are held by the public. (Higher level academics skate, if only because they have so little impact on anything outside of campus life.)

A recent addition to the members of these unhelping professions are those in positions of authority at financial institutions and central banks. The negative interest of the public is being compounded daily now that the politicos and banksters have joined forces in a tag-team match to apply a choke hold on the people who are supposed to be on the same side. As in professional wrestling, their acting is every bit as bad as that of the hams in the ring, and the fix is just as much on.

Europe and the EU are being run as if it were a Goldman-Sachs subsidiary. The financiers did such a boffo job of disguising Greek and Italian debt in 2002 to enable it to join the monetary union, the EU returned the favor by placing a G-S alumnus in charge of the Italian government. They didn’t need no steenkin’ elections, either.

Notes the Independent:

It is not just Mr Monti. The European Central Bank, another crucial player in the sovereign debt drama, is under ex-Goldman management, and the investment bank’s alumni hold sway in the corridors of power in almost every European nation, as they have done in the US throughout the financial crisis. Until Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund’s European division was also run by a Goldman man, Antonio Borges, who just resigned for personal reasons.

In the United States, a Government Accounting Office audit revealed this year how the Federal Reserve behaves when no one is paying attention. Said the Socialist Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders:

As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world…No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president.

The interest rate on those loans was 0%.

Incidentally, that last sentence demonstrates how little even Mr. Sanders has been paying attention. The Fed isn’t a government agency — it is a banking system whose stock is owned entirely by the member banks. The confusion is understandable, however: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, for example, is the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He worked with former Goldman-Sachs exec Henry Paulson to implement the American economic stimulus that’s worked so wonderfully.

That audit also showed that Goldman-Sachs received $814 billion in interest-free loans from the Fed, by the way.

Meanwhile, Japanese politicians are getting mightily cheesed off by the Bank of Japan and its governor, Shirakawa Masa’aki. Some Diet members from several parties have formed a group to amend the Bank of Japan Law. They conducted a symposium on 24 November and held a news conference afterwards. What they’re worried about is the BOJ’s response to deflation, but what we should be worried about is that they think inflation is the answer.

That noted fiscal and monetary policy expert, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, spoke at the news conference and said one of the changes he wants is for “inflation targets” to be introduced. He thinks the BOJ should be required to achieve a certain rate of increase for specified prices.

As the European debt crisis starts to descend on the U.S. and Asia, it is extremely likely this will accelerate the appreciation of the yen and deflation.

Mr. Hatoyama reported that when he was prime minister, he personally asked the BOJ governor to introduce inflation targets, but Mr. Shirakawa ignored him. He added:

I don’t think we can eliminate deflation at this rate.

Another former prime minister, Abe Shinzo of the LDP, said after the symposium that “maximizing employment” should be included in the BOJ mission in addition to price stabilization. Your Party head Watanabe Yoshimi said the Cabinet and the Finance Minister should be given authority, subject to Diet approval, to remove BOJ top executives.

Watching the political/financial face off creates a sigh of regret similar to that involuntarily generated after one tunes in to a Yankees’ – Red Sox baseball game: If only there were a way to ensure that both teams would lose.

Hatoyama Yukio still blathers on about an East Asian version of the EU to the few people who stumble on his wavelength, but he’ll never figure out that what he thinks is the solution is the problem he’s warning about. The structural differences in East Asian economies and polities ensure that the failure of an East Asian entity would be worse than the failure in Europe.

And why would people think that forcing the central bank to create inflation is a good idea? It’s understandable that Mr. Hatoyama would want to smudge over the memory of his one and only budget as being the highest and most debt-reliant in Japanese history, but locking inflation targets into law locks in a de facto increase in taxes and a de facto decrease in the value of money. Events of the past three years alone should have been enough for anyone to recognize the impotence of central banks, and that no financial or government institution is capable of acting with precision. Evidently, shuffling between sitting atop a mountain of money as large as the Hatoyama family fortune and sitting in the bowels of the Diet deprives a body of its eyesight and common sense.

Mr. Abe wants the bank to boost employment? Here’s how to boost employment: create a climate that encourages the private sector to boost capital investment. If there’s anything Japan’s politicians should have learned over the past 20 years, it’s that central bank actions won’t contribute to improving employment, or whatever polite U-digit fictions that governments use nowadays for employment statistics.

Mr. Watanabe’s proposal seems to be yet another demonstration that Your Party rates highly on their problem-identification ability, but struggles to receive a passing grade with their problem-solving ability. A political mechanism for removing BOJ officers is a good idea in theory, but putting that in the hands of the Finance Ministry puppets or veterans who serve as Japan’s finance ministers, or the Diet MPs, whose negligible knowledge of economics and finance is supplemented by teams of Finance Ministry bureaucrats operating as Kasumigaseki lobbyists, is a bad idea in fact.

But these are not normal circumstances. There’s an excellent reason Mr. Watanabe and the rest of the politicians are out for the Shirakawa scalp — if the Bank of Japan governor hasn’t been lying, he’s incompetent.

Addressing charges that the BOJ’s quantitative easing has been insufficient to create the inflation the politicos are looking for, Mr. Shirakawa stated in a September news conference that the effect of quantitative easing to stimulate the economy can’t be appropriately measured, and added:

The ratio of the Bank of Japan’s monetary base to GDP is 24.6%, exceeding the 17.4% for the Federal Reserve and 11.5% for the ECB….Japan exceeded the 17.4% ratio in 2002, (showing that) we began monetary easing earlier than the FRB.

Takahashi Yoichi quickly whipped out this graph comparing the ratio of the monetary base to GDP between the United States and Japan as proof that the Bank of Japan governor is wrong. It shows that Japan is falling behind in the race to create more money of the mind.

1 January 2000 is the date used to set the value of 100 as the index for the graph. One possible reason for Japan’s higher level throughout most of the decade is that people here more frequently use cash for transactions and settlements than in the U.S. and Europe, though that’s always been the case.

The graph also shows, however, that the U.S redline in money supply starts to skyrocket with the financial crisis of 2008. Why anyone thinks Japan should try to keep up with that misery maker is beyond comprehension.

Another blogger used official statistics to create this chart of the monetary base alone. Japan is blue, the U.S. is red, and Europe is green.

But Mr. Shirakawa is sticking with his story:

Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa said Tuesday the comprehensive credit easing policy introduced by the central bank in October 2010 has not yet sufficiently fed through to the real economy due to low growth expectations among firms and households. “The powerful credit easing has generated extremely easy financial conditions for firms and households,” but the policy’s effect on the real economy is “not enough,” Shirakawa said at a parliamentary session.

That’s because companies and households are not investing and spending money amid low growth expectations, Shirakawa said.

And that’s because companies and households are not going to invest and spend money until the government and central banks get out of the way.

As the Seenow website points out:

Of course, the failure of modern-day Keynesian policies, the basis for Shirakawa’s asset purchase program, is the assumption that increasing the supply of something will lead to an increase in demand. That might be true for iPads if the increase in supply was accompanied by a decrease in price, but it doesn’t hold for credit, especially when excess credit is a primary cause of economic malaise.

Unlike governments and central banks, households and businesses – which are required by law and the fundamentals of sound stewardship to live within their relative means or suffer the consequences – understand the need to deleverage, to reduce their exposure to debt. More debt is simply not the solution for too much debt and it should not take a degree in economics from the University of Chicago to understand that.

Once upon a time — almost a century ago, now — the wiser heads did understand that. They realized the best solution was usually to just stand there instead of doing something. Human nature means that booms and busts will always be with us, but a policy of non-interference allows the poison to work itself out of the system, soon rather than late.

But even the wiser heads have gotten dumb and dumberer over the years. The elites of finance and politics will continue to make themselves part of the problem instead of the solution, and they will find a way to make themselves comfortable in the rubble after the inevitable collapse. The rest of us won’t have time for schadenfreude. We’ll be too busy fending for ourselves.

*****
It’s more entertaining to watch this Taiwanese dawg give away bank notes instead of the credentialed elites. True, that part of the video lasts only a few seconds, but the background scenery before and after more than makes up for the brevity.

Those homiez who don’t care for rappers can turn the sound down, because that’s not the point. Unless of course, you understand Chinese — rumor has it that the lyrics are rather trashy.

Yomiuri poll on the popular perception of politics

THE Yomiuri Shimbun conducted a nationwide poll on the 12th and 13th — by direct interview, for a change — of the popular perceptions of today’s politics.

They were asked whether they thought politics in Japan had gotten worse in recent years.

Yes: 76%

The DPJ diehards will be tempted to shift the blame to the opposition for that — until they see the answers to some of the other questions. For example: Is the vote you cast in elections reflected in actual politics?

No: 81%

The last time this question was asked was in February 2008, under a LDP government. The percentage of noes then was 67%. The current percentage is a record high for the Yomiuri surveys.

One result the people hoped for with the change of government in 2009 was a move toward politican-led government (as opposed to bureaucrat-led government). Effecting this change was one of the major DPJ promises. Has the DPJ delivered on that promise?

No: 88%

The public was also asked to cite the most important problems with politics today, and was given the option of multiple answers. Here are the top three responses:

1. Politics is not conducted from the people’s perspective: 45%

2. Decisions on policy take too long: 42%

3. There is no vision for Japan’s future: 33%

“Margin of error” cannot be used to fudge these results. Has there been a more epic failure in postwar Japanese politics than the past two years of Democratic Party governments?

If you give me a week, maybe I can think of one.

Afterwords:

During the past week, former DPJ President and Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro, former DPJ President (and Foreign Minister) Maehara Seiji, and LPD Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru raised the possibility of an early election next year. Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Maehara warned their supporters in the Diet that many of them could lose their seats unless they get on the stick. Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Ishihara suggested that the election would be held on the issue of the tax increase. The former, who opposes higher taxes, suggested that the DPJ might split as a result. The latter suggested that both parties might split as a result, and that two new parties could be created: an anti-tax-increase party, and a pro-tax-increase party.

If an election were to be held on that basis and an anti-tax party won, it might still be too late to stop the initial tax hike. In that scenario, the polling figures for some of the questions above would likely rise even higher.

Meanwhile, People’s New Party head Kamei Shizuka is dissatisfied with the DPJ’s progress on blocking Japan Post privatization, and that’s the only reason his splinter group joined the coalition. He’s also opposed to a tax increase. It’s been widely reported that he’s now approached Tokyo Metro District Gov. Ishihara Shintaro about leading a new, anti-tax “conservative” party. He’s also trying to get younger members of the DPJ and the LDP interested in the idea, as well as Osaka Gov. Hashimoto Toru, who recently resigned to run for mayor of the city of Osaka (that’s a long story).

The elder Ishihara was one of the not-so-silent partners in the formation of the paleo-convervative (in Japanese terms) Sunrise Party with Hiranuma Takeo and Yosano Kaoru. The little viability that party had was in helping media outlets fill space, and that was lost when Mr. Yosano joined the Kan Cabinet as part of the effort to raise taxes.

Always quick with a quip, Your Party President Watanabe Yoshimi observed that such a party would be radically backward-looking, and be indistinguishable from a faction in the old LDP. He added:

If they’re going to apply the term “conservative” to the course of purified socialism, that might create one grouping.

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Your Party’s Diet reform proposal

JAPAN’S Your Party has become something of an enigma. Since their formation in February 2009, their agenda of serious political, governmental, and civil service reform, coupled with their refusal to compromise that agenda by forming an alliance with one of the larger parties, has won them a level of recognition and approval that often places them third in public opinion polls for party preference. (The first two are the ruling Democratic Party, and the former long-term ruling party but now primary opposition party, the Liberal Democrats.)

They have benefited from the public’s disillusionment with the DPJ, as shown by the increase in their representation from one to 11 in last year’s upper house election. One of their new upper house MPs is Eguchi Katsuhiko, a long-time associate of Panasonic founder Matsushita Konnosuke, former president of the PHP Institute, and active in civic affairs for many years. Another is the stylish and handsome 43-year-old Matsuda Kota, who became fabulously well-to-do after launching Tully’s Coffee in Japan, building a 300-store chain, and selling a majority stake in the company eight years later.

Here’s the reason for the enigma: Their insight into the structural problems of Japanese politics and government is unmatched in the political class. They have refused to water down their reform objectives, and they have rebuffed feelers to enter the government as coalition partners of the DPJ. Yet despite their solid analysis of the problems, the solutions they offer range from the merely acceptable to the awful.

This week, their secretary-general, Eda Kenji — an intelligent man who is one of the few people in modern Japanese politics to have maintained a Diet career as an independent before forming the party with Watanabe Yoshimi — briefly explained their program for reforming the national legislature on his website. While the premise is, as usual, dead on, he followed it with self-interested hypocrisy so blatant it’s astonishing that Mr. Eda thought anyone would fall for it. Here’s most of it in English, with my comments.

A sweeping reform of the election system is required to achieve equality in the value of votes and large reduction in the number of seats in the national legislature.

Japanese courts have ruled that the disparity in the number of people represented by individual Diet members was too large in the last election. That means there’s supposed to be a redistricting, if the parties can find the time, the willingness, or the ability to get around to it. Further, Japan has 722 national legislators in the bicameral Diet, almost 200 more than the 535 in the United States, despite having less than half the population.

Three hundred of the 480 of the lower house members are elected on the winner-take-all system in single-seat constituencies, and the rest are selected by proportional representation from party lists in 11 electoral blocs. Those who run in the single-seat districts can also appear on their party’s PR list. One of the perversions of the system is that it allows an incumbent to retain a Diet seat through PR even if his constituents turn him out of office.

In the upper house, 146 members are elected from the 47 prefectural constituencies, with multiple delegates chosen for each of the prefectures. The other members are PR members chosen from each party’s national list.

The ruling DPJ promised to reform this system in its 2009 campaign platform, as did the LDP in its upper house election manifesto last year.

Your Party has pledged to reduce the seats in the lower house by 180 to 300 and by 142 in the upper house to 100.

A capital idea!

When the Constitution is amended in the future, further large reductions will be achieved by creating a unicameral legislature.

This idea leaves me cold, even with the potential for downsizing. The advantage of a second body is that it can perform an important check-and-balance function — if it is properly structured. For example, U.S. Senators were originally chosen by either state legislatures or state conventions. That was a superb mechanism for governmental devolution and decentralization until the 17th amendment to the Constitution converted the selection of Senators to statewide popular vote. One reason was that people of the era thought that the Senate had become a rich man’s club. That’s a classic example of a solution making a problem worse — it’s still a rich man’s club, and since the rise of the centralized national government, state governments now have no way to prevent Congress from forcing them to assume unfunded mandates.

Giving Japanese prefectural assemblies the power to select upper house members would bring about immediate and drastic change for the better in the way the national government conducts business.

There are also several ideas floating around to modify the functions of the two bodies. One of those ideas is to provide the lower house with the function of formulating the budget, and giving the upper house the function of account settlement at the end of the fiscal year.

I’m also not sure about the need for 100 members. There are 47 prefectures; two from each should suffice.

There must not, however, be superficial reform of the type in which there is an increase by six and a decrease by six, or an increase by six and a decrease by nine.

Of course everyone can get behind this. But now watch Mr. Eda go off the rails.

We believe reform must be based on a proportional representation system that faithfully reflects the popular will, rather than the current predominately single-district system in which there are many “dead votes”.

The political system functions only when there is a rough agreement on direction in which to proceed. If a large group is traveling on a road that breaks off into five directions, one path must be selected, not the median point of the five.

As we’ve seen from the DPJ-led coalition that took power in 2009, mini-parties that reflect the will of only a sliver of the population — the Social Democrats and the People’s New Party — become tails wagging the dog. The DPJ promised reform, the PNP is a single-issue party opposed to reform, and the SDPJ lives in an ether of its own creation. Neither of the junior partners got what they wanted, and the SDPJ left the coalition, but then reform for the DPJ was only a cosmetic to begin with.

Most Western European coalition governments seem to be a bland porridge of center-left groupings with slight variations in the proportion of the ingredients. Few, if any, British seem to be happy with their coalition government, which is a marriage of political forces just as absurd as the original Japanese coalition.

Both the Americans and the British have winner-take-all systems. There are no serious complaints about that in the former, and the voters of Great Britain just trounced a proposal for a PR system in a national referendum. Few people in those two countries buy the concept of “dead votes”. The right to hold a political opinion does not imply the right that it be taken seriously.

As for the idea of a system that represents the popular will, the problem in those countries is not that single-issue splinter parties can’t be heard, it is that the major parties ignore the popular will as clearly expressed by the voters in elections. That problem also exists in Japan, but proportional representation hasn’t done anything to change that.

Now for the hypocrisy:

We are not saying this for partisan interest as a way to ensure the survival of smaller parties. This is also the mainstream thinking at the Japanese Political Science Association and the Japan Association of Electoral Studies.

Whenever anyone says, “We are not saying this for XXX,” bet your sweet bippy that’s exactly why they are saying it. Your Party doesn’t want to lose its PR legislators and have to survive on winning elections outright.

The Social Democrats make the same claim. Indeed, their president, Fukushima Mizuho, has never won a single-district seat, and she knows she never will. Proportional representation is her only ticket to a Diet seat.

This actually represents a change from Your Party President Watanabe Yoshimi’s original position. He supported the elimination of PR on the condition that redistricting be conducted first.

Finally, citing the positions of the two political associations is irrelevant. Even if they supported a winner-take-all system, Mr. Eda’s preference for PR would still not change.

In the current system that combines both single-seat districts and proportional representation, 80 new MPs known as the Koizumi Children were elected in 2005, and 140 new MPs known as the Ozawa Children were elected in 2009. This fluctuation is too large. Even though these legislators have been tutored for four years at taxpayer expense, they disappear in the next election.

Excellent! Turnover of that sort shows that Japanese democracy — at least at the ballot box — is healthy and vibrant. A semi-permanent political class funded by taxpayers is the ideal only for the members of the semi-permanent political class and those striving for membership in the class.

It is time for the major parties — the Democrats and the Liberal Democrats — to cast aside their partisan interests, show some generosity, and make concessions for creating a system based on proportional representation.

People are so disgusted with the current system that a few commentators have now floated the idea of a complete ban on political parties. If the major parties were really interested in casting aside their partisan interests, they’d dissolve. That’s not going to happen, of course, but frustration with parties unresponsive to even their primary supporters has become so extreme and widespread, former President Jimmy Carter’s chief pollster Patrick Caddell has described sentiment among the voters in the U.S. as “pre-revolutionary”.

Is it not worth remembering that political parties are not mentioned in either the Japanese or the American constitutions? It isn’t for the people to sacrifice their interests for the sake of the political class, but for the political class to sacrifice its interests for the sake of the people. Unfortunately, they are as likely to relinquish their taxpayer-funded subsidies and other perquisites as shrimp learning how to whistle.

Your Party has now revealed itself to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It’s a shame, but it is what it is.

UPDATE:
Fancy that. I was away from the news yesterday, so just found out this morning that the DPJ and the LDP decided to postpone discussions reducing the number of proportional representation MPs in the face of objections from the smaller parties. They will give priority to redistricting instead.

*****
The only way to end after all this glumness is on an upbeat note: Dangdut and healthy young women!

Ichigen koji (58)

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

The Nikkei Shimbun quoted the responses of the leaders of the five major opposition parties to Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s inaugural speech in the Diet this week. Here they are.

That method was straight out of the past. The bureaucrats wrote it.
- Tanigaki Sadakazu, Liberal Democratic Party

There was no explanation of any specific approach on their part as a government. I felt that it left something to be desired.
- Yamaguchi Natsuo, New Komeito

My impression was one of flowery language connected by bureaucratic boilerplate.
- Watanabe Yoshimi, Your Party

An examination and soul-searching of the DPJ’s response to the earthquake/tsunami and nuclear accident is needed.
- Shii Kazuo, Communist Party

It was a bureaucratic composition with no central axis. It was like the LDP before the change of government.
- Fukushima Mizuho, Social Democratic Party

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Quick hits on the Noda Cabinet

“Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s personnel choices for his first Cabinet are a safety-first lineup that emphasizes intraparty reconciliation, as were his selections for party officers. After some soul-searching, they realized the loss of the government’s momentum was due to the party’s internal disputes. But an introspective approach that places priority on the party’s internal stability makes it difficult to see a path to Japan’s recovery during this national crisis.”
- Front page editorial in the Nishinippon Shimbun, which generally supports the Democratic Party of Japan

“It’s a mosaic Cabinet into which pieces of different colors and shapes have been forcibly jammed.”
- Yamaguchi Natsuo, New Komeito president

“It’s a Cabinet designed to prevent intrigues and prevent an internal party revolt.”
- Fukushima Mizuho, Social Democratic Party president

“It’s a Cabinet with internal party balance, just like in the old days of the Liberal-Democratic Party.”
- Oshima Tadamori, vice-president of the Liberal-Democratic Party.

“The Cabinet’s directly connected to the world of business and finance.”
- Shii Kazuo, Chairman of the Japanese Communist Party, referring to Mr. Noda’s immediate visits to the heads of the country’s three largest business organizations, including Keidanren. (Members of the Kan Cabinet visited Rengo, the trade union organization, instead.)

“Posts were handed out as rewards, and the Cabinet is straight on the path to tax increases.”
- Watanabe Yoshimi, president of Your Party

“The composition is good, isn’t it? (Prime Minister Noda) was quite mindful of everyone.”
- Ozawa Ichiro, former Democratic Party president

“If this Cabinet is unable to meet the people’s expectations, the Democratic Party of Japan does not have the ability to be responsible for government. This is a do-or-die Cabinet.”
- Watanabe Kozo, senior advisor of the Democratic Party of Japan

*****
“Though Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko stresses that he is the son of an officer in the Self-Defense Forces, he appointed Ichikawa Yasuo, a novice in defense and security matters, to the post of Defense Minister. I am unable to understand the intent behind this appointment.”
- Abiru Rui, Kantei correspondent for the Sankei Shimbun. Mr. Ichikawa has a degree in agricultural civil engineering, and once served in the Agriculture Ministry. He is also a member of Ozawa Ichiro’s faction.

“I am a novice in defense and security matters, but that represents true civilian control.”
- Ichikawa Yasuo, Defense Minister in the Noda Cabinet

“That (statement) merits immediate dismissal from the Cabinet, and it also calls into question Prime Minister Noda’s discernment.”
- Ishiba Shigeru, former Defense Minister in an LDP government

*****
Mr. Noda’s Cabinet selections have impressed the news media as being singularly unimpressive. Journalist Kakutani Koichi went so far as to suggest that people of such little consequence were chosen because it would be easier to shunt them aside if the prime minister were able to create a grand coalition with the opposition parties. The Cabinet includes:

Azumi Jun as Finance Minister. Mr. Azumi was an NHK announcer before becoming a politician and has no discernible qualifications for this post. In fact, he has never been a full Cabinet minister before, yet was given one of the three most important portfolios. He is, however, a dependable partisan attack dog. The Nikkei share price index fell 146 points shortly after his appointment was announced.

Gemba Koichiro as Foreign Minister. Mr. Gemba has been a professional politician since the age of 26 and has no discernible qualifications for this post, either. He is in favor of reinterpreting the Constitution to allow for collective self-defense. He opposed the efforts of Kan Naoto and Sengoku Yoshito to reopen discussions of reparations payments to South Korea by reminding them that the issue had been resolved by the 1965 treaty between the two countries when Japan paid the South Korean government the equivalent of $US 800 million.

Hachiro Yoshio as Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Mr. Hachiro also has a degree in agriculture and is a veteran of the Socialist Party, which speaks eloquently to his qualifications for his new job. He is also a member of a Diet group (mostly from the DPJ), who urge friendly ties with North Korea and think the problems with that country’s nuclear missile program can be resolved by closer ties with South Korea. Mr. Hachiro is opposed to participating in the discussions for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade agreement, which Mr. Noda supports. The prime minister retained in his Cabinet another prominent TPP opponent, Agriculture Minister Kano Michihiko.

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Ichigen koji (42)

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

The true form of Kan politics is a fight between stray dogs. He just randomly barks in the direction of whatever enemy happens to be in front of him. Now he’s going to die (a political death) in the ditch, like a stray dog. That is a fitting end for Mr. Kan.

- Watanabe Yoshimi, president of Your Party. The description of politics as a fight between stray dogs originates with Kan Naoto.

They say it’s like a Grade B gourmet contest, but that’s an insult to Grade B gourmets. Instead, they should say it’s a Grade D gourmet contest for failures.

- Watanabe Yoshimi again, this time on the people mentioned as likely candidates for the post of DPJ president to succeed Kan Naoto.

Grade B gourmet contests have become popular in recent years. Rather than luxury food items, they feature inexpensive and popular dishes often eaten in the home.

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Ichigen koji (38)

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

ACT ONE
Having had the ladder pulled out from under him by Prime Minister Kan Naoto in the matter of restarting those nuclear reactors idled for normal inspection and maintenance when the Tohoku Earthquake struck, Minister of Environment, Trade, and Industry Kaieda Banri said he planned to resign soon.

During Question Time in the Diet this week, an opposition lawmaker told him, “Your failure to resign while saying that you would resign is the same (thing) Prime Minister Kan (did).”

Mr. Kaieda burst into tears at the remark.

ACT TWO
A person who cries like that can’t be a Cabinet minister. If it were me (i.e., if he were my husband), I’d dump a man who cries like that.

- Kan Nobuko, the wife of Prime Minister Kan Naoto

ACT THREE
The people are the ones who are crying over today’s politics.

- Watanabe Yoshimi, president of Your Party

ACT FOUR
At a news conference yesterday, Mr. Kaieda announced the replacement of three METI deputy ministers rather than his resignation.

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Frankenstein’s monster in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And just what is going on in Japan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quitting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a post dated 21 August 2001:

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

10 September 2001:

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

24 August 2007:

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

13 November 2007:

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

30 November 2007:

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

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

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

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

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

Paging Son Masayoshi.

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

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

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

Lest we forget:

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

* METI has jurisdiction over nuclear power plants in Japan.

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

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

The Democratic Party paid for the banquet.

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

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

Who’s ready for an election?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He hasn’t gotten that weird yet.”

But:

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

Said DPJ Secretary General Okada Katsuya:

“It’s a summertime ghost story.”

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

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

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

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

The last word belongs to Your Party President Watanabe Yoshimi:

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

Along comes Kamei

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

No longer a sweetheart of mine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DPJ Policy Research Committee Chairman Gemba Koichiro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Said Iwami Takao of the weekly Sunday Mainichi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remakes

“Help me build a new Japan.”
- Hatoyama Yukio in October 2009 during his first speech to the Diet as prime minister

MOVIE MOGULS in their endless quest for a buck often remake hit flicks of the past for audiences turned off by the sight of monochrome, out-of-date fashions, or actors half their current age.

The cliques at the apex of the Japanese political pyramid in their endless quest to perpetuate their interests and authority behave in much the same way. Indeed, the clapperboard’s already been slapped as the power brokers of the Democratic Party are filming a shot-for-shot adaptation of the bad old LDP’s years in power. The storyboard starts with excerpts from the Gendai Business Deep Throat column:

“The government has yet to send any money to the stricken area for relief. It’s been revealed there were meltdowns at three of the Fukushima reactors. They are on the verge of giving up.

“Yet the government is behaving the same way it always has. Trivial personal entanglements prevent action. Prime Minister Kan and Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito are said to have reconciled, but the relationship is still touchy. The Dump Kan coup d’etat effort by the LDP and New Komeito suddenly arose after Mr. Sengoku returned to government, for which the prime minister holds a grudge. Mr. Sengoku is fed up with the prime minister, telling people that what Kan is doing is all nonsense. Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano (Yukio), who is close to Mr. Sengoku, is scornful of Mr. Kan and treats him like a child (菅ちゃん扱い), according to Kantei sources.

“Because the prime minister cannot trust those around him, his self-centeredness grows daily and has reached alarming levels. One DPJ mid-tier MP said he talks only to part of his Cabinet and subservient associates, such as Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Fukuyama Tetsuro.”

Mr. Sengoku is busy frying bigger fish. On television this morning, he said:

* “The only option in moving to the next stage is for (Prime Minister Kan) to sacrifice himself…Unless the prime minister makes a clear statement (of his intentions), the LDP will not enter into discussions (about the enabling legislation for government bonds).”

* On a Grand Coalition: “There is no other way for Japan to overcome its present (circumstances).” He isn’t down with the idea of an LDP prime minister, however: “It would be difficult because the gap in the number of seats (held by the two parties) is too large.”

He knows better than anyone that the gap would be reversed if an election were held today, but that’s how lawyers negotiate.

The LDP once had a technique referred to as tarai mawashi, which is literally the term for a vaudeville routine of balancing a spinning washtub. Applied to politics, it means the monopolization of power by rotating it among one’s colleagues. Rather than call for a general election, the LDP would choose new prime ministers of different personalities and somewhat different policies to create the perception of an actual change of government. They would alternate between the wets and the dries, the aggressive and the passive, and the quick and the dead.

The DPJ is now making arrangements under the backstage direction of Mr. Sengoku — in consultation with LDP Vice-President Oshima Tadamori — to spin the tub from Kan Naoto to the bland, semi-rotund, and less objectionable Finance Minister Noda Yoshihiko (photo with Mr. Kan), assuming the prime minister doesn’t let the tub drop. There are likelty to be three other candidates running against him in the election for a new party president, but Mr. Noda is the puppeteers’ choice. Your Party Secretary-General Eda Kenji offers this review even before the filming has wrapped up:

“If we have a Prime Minister Noda, it will be another step toward the destruction of Japan. The Finance Ministry bureaucrats have showered this worthy with such praise as “well-versed in policy” and “a quick study”. Translated from the language of Kasumigaseki, that means he’s a puppet who follows the instructions of the Finance Ministry bureaucracy to the letter.

“In fact, when I proposed during Question Time in the Diet to conduct reconstruction without a tax increase, his sustained opposition was just as choreographed by the Finance Ministry. As a politician, he is exceptional for the worthlessness of his rote readings of prepared answers.

“A politician with no policies, no knowledge, and no experience in the real world is being nominated for what the newspapers refer to as ‘the next prime minister’. That Japan’s politics has fallen to these depths is a sign that the game is up. If we get a two-actor play with the addition of the puppet Tanigaki (of the LDP), the Reconstruction Tax Increase and Large Consumption Tax Increase drama will begin.

“The next move in the game has already been played. On the first page of today’s Yomiuri Shimbun was the headline, ‘Temporary Tax Increase Proposed as the Funding for Reconstruction’…”

The president of the same party, Watanabe Yoshimi, granted a newspaper interview two days later:

- The front-runner Mr. Noda argues for a consumption tax increase. The LDP says there’s no other option…

“That’s just how the tax-increase bureaucrats planned it. Also, both Sengoku Yoshito, who’s orchestrating a grand coalition, and LDP Vice-President Oshima Tadamori are the type who love to make backroom decisions. The level of black box policymaking will be even worse than under the current administration, and the people will pay the bill….A grand coalition will place our economy in peril, and will be the advance guard for the bureaucratic fascism that will consign the people to destruction. It is the road that leads to hell.”

- Mr. Sengoku and Mr. Oshima seem to agree that they cannot permit the rise of Your Party-type populism and want to crush it.

“Those people have not reached an agreement on what they want to do, but have bought into the bureaucrats’ scenario and are pursuing politics that will not permit minority opinions, in a structure reminiscent of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. We are a party that has come together because we have an agenda for what we want to do, so of course they are our sworn enemies.”

That’s not just political brinksmanship; freelance journalists outside of the mainstream media are every bit as scathing. Here are some comments from Uesugi Takashi — a long-time DPJ supporter:

“Prime Minister Kan, who has destroyed the world’s trust in Japan by repeatedly concealing information about the nuclear accident, is already useless. Prolonging his stay in office by even one day harms the national interest. He should withdraw as soon as possible to facilitate the recovery of the trust in the nation.

“The same can be said about the accomplices who have supported Prime Minister Kan. Politics is about taking responsibility for results. Regrettably, however, a sense of collective responsibility has arisen among the politicians in the Cabinet who have supported him. But these ‘criminals’ have convened to select Mr. Kan’s successor from among themselves. What sort of poorly plotted comedy is this? It’s a form of treason against the state, and a laughing betrayal of the people.”

Itagaki Eiken also indicts the mass media as accomplices:

“I have the greatest sense of despair about the mass media, who are watching this badly performed comedic intermezzo and reporting on it as if it were something serious. I want to shout, ‘Stop releasing this idiotic news coverage!’”

To the growing list of those who have abandoned Kan Naoto we can add Big Labor and Big Capital. Koga Nobuaki, the chairman of Rengo, the DPJ’s largest support group, visited the prime minister on the 10th and hinted that he asked Mr. Kan to step down:

“I can only sense the greatest danger in the current political conditions. If these conditions continue, the political void will worsen day by day.”

Yonekura Hiroaki, the chairman of Keidanren, no longer bothers with the pretense of courtesy. He skipped a meeting of the so-called New Growth Strategy Council convened by the Kantei this week. Okamura Tadashi, chair of Japan’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, lamented, “Recovery isn’t going as well as we’d hoped, much less the rebuilding of the destroyed area.” Mr. Yonekura has also called on Mr. Kan to sacrifice himself: “A Grand Coalition would be fine, anything would be fine, I just want a structure capable of conducting (rebuilding measures).”

Mr. Yonekura also charged that the cleanup wasn’t going as smoothly as the one after the Hanshin earthquake in 1995. “Those efforts aren’t being made now. I’ve heard that whenever a local government asks for help (in disposing of the rubble), they’re told it’s the municipality’s problem.”

When Mr. Uesugi used the term “poorly plotted comedy”, he wasn’t exaggerating. Compare Mr. Yonekura’s last sentence above with Mr. Kan’s latest thoughts on when he might step down:

“I am going to do my best to ship all the rubble out of the areas where people live and work by August. That will be linked to the secondary and tertiary cleanups, but that is my major responsibility.”

There you see the reason for the frequent criticism that Mr. Kan is holding the people of the stricken area hostage to extend his political career. But as Uesugi Takashi suggests, he’s not the only kidnapper on the loose in Nagata-cho.

Afterwords:

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances...

Eda Kenji is serious about rebuilding without a tax increase. In the June issue of the monthly Voice, he writes, “If there is political resolve, JPY 20 trillion would be available tomorrow.” He proposes using JPY 10 trillion from the special account for government bond redemption, which always has that amount left over every year, and which is always rolled over to the next year. The money can be used without worrying about the payment of the premiums, and it’s already available. Mr. Eda also notes those funds were used 11 times from 1982-1989 and 1993-1995 when the budget was tight. “I cannot understand at all why the prime minister won’t do that now. It is incomprehensible why the Japanese mass media does not pursue this.”

He’s just saying that for the public, because he knows exactly what’s happening. The Finance Ministry is again conducting a policy offensive in the editorial offices of the national print media. One clue is that all of them except for the Sankei are calling for a tax increase, but none of them are explaining why a tax increase is necessary. They’re just editorializing that there’s no other option, without examining the options that others have proposed.

Mr. Eda also claims JPY five trillion could be immediately sprung from the surplus in another special account, by the way.

*****
It will be mildly entertaining to see how the equally spoonfed Western media present Mr. Noda if the deal goes down as scripted. This time last year they were reading from the PR handouts and hailing Kan Naoto as the Fiscal Hawk son of a salaryman. Some of them even swallowed the silly DPJ PR campaign that included hawking t-shirts that read “Yes We Kan”. Those garments were quickly remaindered or used as summertime sleepwear by secretaries in the party office; that was never the sentiment of even a sliver of the Japanese public. (The DPJ remains eternally envious of Koizumi Jun’ichiro’s popularity without understanding why it happened or realizing they have no one capable of duplicating the phenomenon.)

It will probably soon be reported, if it hasn’t been already, that he is the son of a military man and was once a city gas inspector. His national political career began as a member of former Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro’s New Party. That doesn’t say much about his political beliefs; the New Party contained people whose ideology is as different as the mud and the clouds, such as Eda Satsuki on the left and Koike Yuriko on the right.

He is supposed to be a convincing public speaker, and one would hope so for the public’s sake if he decides to reprise the harangue-a-thon he once staged for 12 straight hours at a train station during an election campaign.

The Japanese media say that Mr. Noda has a “conservative” perspective. While that could mean anything in the DPJ, which is home to both de facto Reds and admirers of Margaret Thatcher, they do have a point. Unlike most of his party’s leadership, he is opposed to giving permanent residents (i.e., Japanese-born Korean nationals) the right to vote. More telling is this excerpt from a document he submitted to the Diet on 17 October 2005 about then-Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine. Others in his party objected because Class A war criminals are enshrined there. Mr. Noda insisted they weren’t war criminals, and added:

“A debate on the visits should be conducted in view of our international political interests. But that debate, when based on the mistaken understanding of Class A war crimes, infringes the rights of those deemed to be Class A war criminals, and is an issue that affects both human rights and the honor of the state.”

Kan Naoto, Sengoku Yoshito, Edano Yukio, and scores of others in the Democratic Party would sooner drink kerosene than write the same passage themselves. (They might even refuse under threat of torture.) That some of them think Mr. Noda is just the man for prime minister, and that the DPJ’s substantial left flank will ostentatiously hold up their party badges if it comes time to vote for him in the Diet, demonstrates why the DPJ government has become just a remake of the old LDP version, and why remakes are never as good as the originals.

*****
Once Mr. Kan goes, scenes such as this are likely to break out spontaneously in living rooms throughout the country.

Goodbye hello

大山鳴動して鼠一匹
- The great mountain rumbles and brings forth a mouse (Japanese proverb)

Kan Naoto's impersonation of Foster Brooks

ON THURSDAY 2 June, the opposition no-confidence motion was voted down in the lower house of the Diet at about 3:30 p.m., even though just before lunch it seemed as if it would be carried. Here’s what people had to say about the day’s events.

Before the vote

Prime Minister Kan Naoto spoke with a group of DPJ and LDP Diet members in the Kantei on the night of 1 June:

“I and others of the baby boomer generation will withdraw. We want you to create a new Diet.”

Former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, when asked about the possibility he would leave the DPJ:

“Rather, I think we must renew the Democratic Party. It was not my intention to create this sort of Democratic Party.”

Nishioka Takeo, president of the upper house and DPJ veteran who backed the no-confidence motion:

“I think this opportunity today will be a turning point for overcoming the national crisis.”

Former chief cabinet secretary and current deputy chief cabinet secretary Sengoku Yoshito on Ozawa Ichiro, one of the two primary leaders of the rebellion:

“We will not be able to maintain the parliamentary cabinet system with people of that sort, who are out of control.”

Former DPJ president and defense minister Maehara Seiji on the no-confidence motion:

“This is not for the greater good.”

Aisawa Ichiro of the LDP:

“We submitted this motion in the belief that it was the best choice for the state and the people. This will be an important day from the perspective of thinking about the future of Japan and its politics.”

Prof. Kobayashi Yoshiaki of Keio University:

“In view of conditions in the Tohoku region and the Supreme Court decision (on the unconstitutionality of the difference in district sizes), I do not understand why politicians can make the judgment that it is appropriate to dissolve the Diet and hold a general election.”

Miyazaki Gov. Murai Yoshihiro on the motion:

“I hope they avoid it, because it would pointlessly create a political vacuum…there’s a shortage of people in the coastal area, and we can’t even issue a verification of damage. Making us create a new registry of voters would be inhumane…

On Prime Minister Kan’s threat to call an election:

“An election is physically impossible. I’m astonished that even though he’s been to the area and seen the damage for himself, he would say that without taking (the situation) into consideration.”

Before addressing the DPJ Diet members’ meeting at noon, Mr. Hatoyama met with Mr. Kan and talked him into resigning at an unspecified date —- something he was unable to do the previous day. Here’s the full text of the memorandum to which they agreed, as released by the news media:

* To not destroy the DPJ
* To not allow the return to an LDP government
* To have a sense of responsibility for rebuilding the earthquake-damaged area and saving the victims.
1. Establish a basic law for recovery
2. Establish the prospects for formulating the second supplementary budget

Most people think they listed their priorities in the order of importance to them. Everyone noticed right away that the document contains nothing about a resignation.

The two men then addressed the DPJ meeting at around noon, and Mr. Hatoyama announced he was changing his vote. That’s when everyone knew it was all over but the shouting — of which there was quite a bit during the later Diet debate.

Matsuda Kota, Your Party upper house member and the founder of Tully’s Coffee Japan, when he heard the news:

“Prime Minister Kan brought up three points at the DPJ Diet members’ meeting: (1) Expend every effort for rebuilding and recovery (2) Not split the DPJ (3) Not hand over the government to the LDP. Those are not objectives, those are one person’s wishes. Other than (1), none of them make any difference to the people.”

Kumagai Yutaka, LDP upper house member:

“There’s already no prospect (for recovery). That’s why we’re demanding he step down.”

The no-confidence motion was defeated by a vote of 293-152. Seventy DPJ MPs showed up for a meeting with Ozawa Ichiro the night before in an apparent expression of intent to vote for it, but only two did. They were former Agriculture Minister Matsuki Kenko, an Ozawa supporter, and 29-year-old Yokokume Katsuhito. The party intends to kick both of them out, though Mr. Yokokume already quit the party in disgust last week.

A total of 33 MPs weren’t present for the vote, 17 of whom were from the DPJ, including Ozawa Ichiro and Tanaka Makiko, Kakuei’s daughter and former Foreign Minister in the first Koizumi Cabinet. There is some sentiment for booting them out too, but a decision on that has been postponed.

After the vote

Prime Minister Kan:

“Well, that was good.”

LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu:

“He made absolutely no reference to when the prospect for recovery would be established. This is nothing but a farce.”

Toyama Kiyohiko of New Komeito, whose party voted for the motion:

“Rather than declare he would resign, Prime Minister Kan declared he would stay in office. There’s a problem with the news media reporting.”

Kumagai Yutaka:

“The mass media is showing captions on TV calling it a declaration of resignation, but what is the basis for that?”

Your Party President Watanabe Yoshimi:

“The prime minister didn’t specify when he would resign. Unless a deadline is reached, the incentive will be for him to be to prolong it. We can’t have that sort of irresponsible politics.”

On the last-minute change of mind by Mr. Hatoyama and his former Internal Affairs Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro, who the day before said he was ready to vote for the motion and leave the party:

“They just created a disturbance to bring down Prime Minister Kan. Their motives were impure.”

When he saw which way the vote would go, Mr. Ozawa told his supporters they were free to vote as they wished:

“We’ve gotten something out of him (Kan Naoto) that we’ve never been able to get before, so it’s probably best to leave (the resignation) up to him.”

Mr. Hatoyama was asked several times when Mr. Kan promised to step down, as some people thought they were just blowing smoke.

“He won’t be staying until the secondary budget is passed, it’s when the prospects are there for the early formulation of the budget. That will happen in mid-June.”

And:

“I reached an agreement with the Prime Minister to step down when the prospects are established for formulating the second supplementary budget. I don’t think it’s that far off. Summer is too long.”

And:

“The content of the second supplementary budget will be decided by about the end of June. In other words, the outlook for its passage will have been established.”

That’s not what DPJ Secretary-General Okada Katsuya said, however:

“Former Prime Minister Hatoyama’s statement about the passage of a second supplementary budget and a basic law for recovery are not conditions for the resignation.”

That’s not what Financial Services Minister Yosano Kaoru said either:

“(Prime Minister Kan) did not use the word “resign”. It’s not as if he reached an agreement with the opposition parties to resign.”

The Asahi Shimbun was confused:

“The prime minister has already said several times that he expects to formulate the second supplementary budget sometime around August, and then submit it to the Diet. He’s also said that he thinks the problems at Fukushima will be resolved by next January at the latest.

Seko Hiroshige, LDP upper house member:

“He’ll resign when there’s an outlook for a response to the earthquake and the nuclear disaster? I think he’ll stay put with the excuse that there’s no outlook in sight.”

Kakizawa Mito, Your Party MP:

“Here’s the reason I can’t trust the Kan Cabinet. No matter how often he says something, he doesn’t do it. Even though he understands, and he’s been warned that a situation will grow serious without a change of approach, he can’t do anything to prevent it. Then, when it happens, he gets angry. That pattern keeps repeating itself. It’s really futile. The damaged region will continue to suffer if a change is not made.”

Maehara Seiji:

“I have extremely mixed feelings about this. Just because the motion was defeated doesn’t mean we’ve settled anything. There’s no change in the problem of the legislation for the special government bonds and other issues. We’re really going to have to rack our brains.”

People outside the political world also had some choice words:

Kurogane Hiroshi, manga artist:

“They talk about the great mountain rumbling and producing a mouse, but this didn’t even produce a mouse. What was this slapstick of the past few days all about? The people have a sense of powerlessness and exhaustion over the DPJ’s lack of ability to conduct the affairs of government. Though they’ve been spiritually beaten, the people who suffered in the disaster have suffered even further by being shown this farce.

“Prime Minister Kan said he would resign, without specifying when he would resign. The people won’t have any expectations for a lame duck prime minister to begin with, and it’s not possible for him to manage Diet affairs. It would have been better to make a change at the top. Mr. Hatoyama, who lent his power to Prime Minister Kan…Mr. Ozawa, who misread the situation…and the LDP, who couldn’t corner that DPJ. If politics of this sort continue, the people will suffer a real misfortune.”

Rengo Chairman Koga Nobuaki, the largest support group for the DPJ:

“The DPJ has not developed into a ruling party of government….Just because the no-confidence motion wasn’t adopted doesn’t mean anyone should raise their hands and shout hallelujah, or say they’re relieved. Unity is not that simple a matter.”

On the motion:

“The act of submitting a no-confidence motion itself at this time means they’re completely divorced from the sense of the people. I am angry at the lack of (good) politics in this situation, and deeply regret it.”

Back to Matsuda Kota:

“I’ve never been as disappointed in Japan’s politicians as I am today. All those Diet members who said they’d support the motion until just a few hours beforehand — how impressive of them to calmly mount the podium and cast their nay votes! More for the party than for the country, more for their faction than for their party, and more for themselves than for their faction.

“Were they afraid of losing their seats in a general election? Were they afraid of being disciplined by the party? Just who was it who shouted that Japan would never recover unless Prime Minister Kan stepped down. If it’s so easy for you to stick your finger up and wait to see which way the wind is blowing, don’t put on airs and tell other people what you think. Don’t make any comments for the TV or mass media. Don’t say anything that would confuse the people.

“This was really pathetic.”

At a post-vote news conference, reporters asked Mr. Haraguchi why he changed his mind in less than 24 hours:

“Going along with an opposition no-confidence motion is the path of evil.”

They also asked him whether he would be a candidate to replace Kan Naoto when the latter stepped down:

“I don’t know whether I have the qualifications, but if I’m asked, I won’t run away.”

Freelance journalist Nitta Tamaki:

“Just what sort of a man is Hatoyama Yukio? He couldn’t do anything when he was prime minister, he talks smooth, and he’s the DPJ’s posturing millionaire.”

On what almost happened instead:

“His brother Kunio can’t figure out Yukio. A few days ago, he asked Masuzoe Yoichi to join them in a new party.”

Mr. Kan at a news conference at 9:00 p.m., on when he would resign. Emphasis mine:

“We must be headed toward recovery and reconstruction, and have the second supplementary budget for 2011 for reconstruction. I said (I would resign) when there are prospects for moving in the direction of building a new society.”

Finally, one of the two DPJ rebels, Yokokume Katsuhito, who left the party last week. He’s wise beyond his years:

“I am extremely appreciative and thankful for the help I received from everyone in the DPJ. But beyond that, I daresay the DPJ has already completed its historical role, and the meaning for its existence has been lost.”

Afterwords:

Even Richard Nixon resigned when it was time to go. Kan Naoto is incapable of even that.

Politicians who think they can contribute to “building a new society” have demonstrated by that statement their unfitness for public office.

Some in the DPJ were pleased at their victory and the large vote margin. That is akin to expressing marvel at one’s particularly large and well-formed bowel movement.

Some still think it’s possible the Hatoyama Brothers will create a new party using their money, Ozawa Ichiro’s retail political skills, and Masuzoe Yoichi, former LDP Health Minister, as prime minister.

*****
“I can stay until it’s time to go.”

Ichigen Koji (5)

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

“The in-house power generation by corporations totals 60 million kW, equal to that of Tokyo Electric Power alone. It’s unfortunate that regulations prevent this vast amount of reserve power from being used. Since the earthquake, we’ve been facing a power shortage whether we like it or not, and the sweeping regulatory reform of opening up the transmission network is an urgent necessity. The twisted logic preventing this is the claim that it prevents reverse power flows. Nonsensical regulations that exclude those outside the system because of reverse power flows should be relaxed or eliminated. I think we’ve reached the limits for regional power monopolies and a unified system of generation and transmission. We must consider Tokyo Electric’s compensation for the nuclear accident and the future (of the system) as a single issue.”

- Watanabe Yoshimi, President of Your Party. The original Japanese for twisted logic was literally “fart logic”.