Who Will Jump the DPJ Ship over a Consumption Tax Hike?

For now, only a couple of handfuls, if the Asahi is to be believed. We’ll know in a matter of hours, if not days, but in the meantime, here are a few thoughts around the report that may be useful beyond the immediate future.

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So far, prospective defectors are small in number and are mainly (but not exclusively) first-term Ozawa children (Miwa is a ripe old 69) in the lower house representing the urban expanse between the true outback and the Tokyo/Nagoya/Osaka metropolitan. No upper house names have emerged.

How will they fare in a snap election? Intuitively, not so good. They will have to share the anti-consumption tax hike vote with Your Party, who will also be able to 1) run candidates in more districts, which will help it gather proportional votes, and 2) position itself as the reformist alternative. There are many other factors to be considered, some positive (Yasunori Saito, who has local celebrity status, will rake in votes outside his district; people like Nobuaki Miwa, who have independent political capital, maybe able to wrest away a larger part of the local DPJ chapter than otherwise possible), some negative (political novice rookies may not be able to take much of the local DPJ party machine away with him). All things considered, expect a few other multi-term Diet members as well a rookie or two that have strong local assembly backgrounds to make the leap, calculating that, at worst, they can slip back in on the proportional tickets. Conversely, pure political rookies will not jump ship unless Ozawa jumps with them.

Scattered Thoughts on and around the DPJ Election

All the suspense went out of the process when they announced the party member/official supporter voting results 249 – 51, giving Kan an insurmountable lead. And the 206 – 200 Diet member split (412 – 400 for the point count) that gave Kan the victory in a 3 – 0 unanimous decision (60 – 40 for the municipal and prefectural assemblymen vote) has symbolic value. More significant, though, is the fact that nearly half of DPJ Diet members and two-fifths of the party-faithful preferred someone who had to give up control over the party coffers and party assignments due to political financing scandals that may result in his criminal prosecution as early as next month. That’s not exactly a vote of confidence for Kan.

I do not think that Ozawa is going to try to engineer a split any time soon, if only because a mere fraction of the 201 is likely to follow him into penurious exile. There will be much greater temptation to foment rebellion as the August 2013 deadline for the next general Lower House election approaches, but my money is on a strong challenge from one or more candidates—not Ozawa—in July 2012, when Kan comes up for reelection as DPJ chief. At that point, temptation will be strong to elect a new leader, who can call a snap election before the afterglow dies off. The DPJ can worry about the 2013 Upper House election later. There’s also a good chance of switching party allegiances and maybe even major realignment just before the Lower House election. If Ozawa is going to make a move, it’s most likely to happen then.

Kan did well in the metropolitan areas, while Ozawa did well in the periphery. I think that this reflects real, substantive differences that were evident even if many of Ozawa’s major policy pronouncements were opportunistic and ill-thought out. Can the DPJ forge a coherent set of policies that makes sense for the long-term wellbeing of the Japanese economy while satisfying both ends of the political geography?

Is Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku Prime Minister Kan’s Masaharu Gotoda? He sees to have the intellect and some of the moxy of Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s majordomo, and also manages to cloak his personal ambitions, if any (Gotoda was biologically too old and politically too junior to have any), for higher office. Of course any analogy breaks down at the Kan/ Nakasone level…

Forging an official bicameral majority that shares cabinet and sub-cabinet posts seems next to impossible to me. (I happen to think that, contrary to the majority view, it would have been even more unlikely under Ozawa. But we’ll almost surely never know.) However, flexible, multiple, issue-oriented alliances are eminently doable; if you don’t believe that, look at the substantial, if diminished, amount of legislation that got done without resort to a Lower House override after the LDP-Komeito coalition government lost its Upper House majority in the 2007 election. I’m going to explore this angle and others in a talk that I’ll be giving in a couple of weeks and getting paid for! I may dribble some of my thoughts out over the coming days or, more likely (I’m a terrible procrastinator), present them after the event.

The DPJ Leadership Election: Ozawa’s Charm Offensive Only Skin Deep

The other Ichiro is opening himself up to the media or what? He’s been flashing his million yen smile through most of the obligatory photo-ops as well as the open-air, shades-of-Lincoln-Douglas, head-to-heads against Kan. Which only reminds me of his boast in a fairly recent book of his that he campaigned like hell when he ran successfully for the Iwate lower house seat that had been held by his father until his untimely death but never had to personally campaign in subsequent elections. Here’s definitely a guy who wouldn’t be kissing babies and eating rubber chickens if he could help it.

But how about his direct dealings with the media? According to the headline for this Yomiuri report: “Regular Press Conferences If I Become Prime Minister,” he’s willing to make himself accessible—not. Here again, the new Ozawa is really the old Ozawa. In the text, he is quoted, “I think it would be better to do regular press conferences, rather than those ‘cling-ons.’ The prime minister should do press conferences as often as possible, once a month or twice a month.” Longtime followers of the Japanese political scene will remember that Prime Minister Abe tried to cut back the customary twice-each-weekday, cling-on sound-bite briefings to one a day and caught hell from the mainstream media. And you wonder why Ozawa gets such bad press.

Ozawa Stands for Election and Realignment Draws Nearer

Who’d a-thunk. With former Prime Minister Hatoyama’s surprise (okay, so much for my predictive powers) full-throated support, Ichiro Ozawa is running against Prime Minister Kan in the 14 September DPJ presidential election. Support for Kan appears to be at best of the lesser of two evils variety, but the case against Ozawa remains strong as ever. I refuse to believe that a majority of the 411 Diet members will of their own volition vote for a candidate that is disapproved by an overwhelming majority in opinion polls—by contrast, although the Kan cabinet is beset by negative ratings, a healthy majority still wants to give Prime Minister Kan a second chance—and withstand the heavy and constant media beating that will follow an Ozawa victory. The rookies in particular have to worry about 2013. However, roughly one third of the voters will be cast by local party members and assemblymen, an factor that had largely remained off the radar till now. But from here on, they will matter, for two reasons. First and most obviously, they can be the deciding factor in a close Diet membership vote. Second, they can influence their local Diet members in their voting, especially in the case of fence-sitting parliamentarians. It has been unusual but by no means rare in party presidential elections for Diet members to explicitly vote according to the wishes of their local chapters, and broader if more subtle interactions must also happen. It would be surprising if similar thing did not happen in the upcoming DPJ election. Third, the national voting trends among the eligible supporters and assemblymen are likely to affect the overall voting behavior of the Diet members. Remember that Junichiro Koizumi’s surprise local victories in the 2001 LDP election over overwhelming favorite Ryutaro Hashimoto precipitated a landslide victory in the Diet member vote. True, the DPJ local votes will not be counted until the Diet members have voted, precisely to avoid such a happenstance. However, nothing will stop the national media to sic their local bureaus to provide day-to-day coverage on the intentions of the DPJ voters in the provinces. Expect everyone to know the approximate outcome of the local voting before the Diet members vote in Tokyo on 14 September.

Now most people seem to believe that Ozawa has something of an edge out there, given his formidable political machine and its extensive outreach into the provinces, including plenty of handholding, sewage cover-stomping, and rice paddy-wading on behalf of associate and/or political-newbie candidates past—a lot of political chits to redeem. However, the local eligibles in turn talk to the rest of the locals. And they will all access the media, and be influenced accordingly. It’s a dynamic process, is all I can say right now. I expect the majority to be what I consider to be rational and take the path of least public resistance, which is to reelect Kan, but what do I know?

Whatever the outcome, the election will most likely draw an indelible and permanent line between the pro- and anti-Ozawa forces, with the rest of the DPJ getting back up and sitting, uneasily, on the fence. I expect a Kan victory to be somewhat more reassuring to the markets, largely because of main street support for continuity and rejection of Ozawa’s likely revival of the more costly elements of the 2009 election manifesto. Either way, the two sides will shake hands and pretend to make up, and the winner will make the minimum concessions on cabinet, subcabinet, and political assignments to keep the other side from bolting. (Ozawa won’t want to, but that must be the minimal price of Hatoyama’s support.) However, I doubt that unity will be long-lived. The widening political fissures will threaten to erupt at moments of political adversity, which will surely come, on the economy, Okinawa, and any number of those incidents expected or not of varying consequences that cumulatively sap the political capital of administrations or even manage somehow to morph into major political crises on their own. In other words, schism is in the air, and none of the significant opposition parties, not the LDP, certainly not Your Party (I still fail to understand the logic behind expectations that it would join hands with the DPJ and kill its own brand before it even graduates the phenom stage), not even the New Komeito, the only meaningful party that, through its near-captive constituency, could withstand the curse of an alliance with what is likely than not to be a deeply unpopular DPJ. It looks increasingly as if the moment realignment has drawn closer, if still beyond the horizon—that is a long-term plus for governance in Japan. From that perspective, a Kan victory followed by an Ozawa prosecution would actually be a negative in that it would postpone the day of reckoning and more coherent policymaking.

Long Hot Summer for Kan, Ozawa and DPJ Coming to an Early End?

The following is a memo that I dashed off in response to this WSJ report that an esteemed colleague sent me. Its shelf-life might wind up being as short as a couple of days, or even counted in hours, so I thought that I’d share it publicly. For the record, I edited it slightly.

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More an essay than an op-ed, the WSJ is a good encapsulation of the situation. A few comments:

I still find it hard to think that Ozawa is going to stand, or win if he does. In fact, there’s a growing possibility that Kan will win by acclamation.

For Ozawa, there’s the risk that he will actually win. He is personally unfit to be the head of government in a democracy, what with the highly public grilling in Diet sessions and press conferences (which he could mostly skip when he was merely party chief), and he is surely aware of that. And he’ll be held responsible for policy decisions.

For the DPJ, an Ozawa victory invites a near-unanimously negative media coverage—Nikkan Gendai, the antiestablishment tabloid, a rare exception among widely circulated dailies—as well as the very real possibility that Ozawa will have no choice but to resign if the prosecution review commission forces the Public Prosecutors Office to prosecute him. (Even a one-step downgrade that allows the PPO not to prosecute is likely to lead to a media campaign against Ozawa that will hound him out of office before long.)

But can he win in the first place? I’ve always been skeptical of the 130~150-member Ozawa group headcount that we regularly see in the media. The estimates appear to include up to 2/3rds of the DPJ’s 150 or so first-term Diet members. Yes, those kind of numbers showed up when Ozawa made his annual pilgrimage to Bejing, and appear to show face when they hear the dog whistle. But will they rally for Ozawa when it’s time to vote? Remember, it’s a secret vote, not a show of hands. Besides, last week, when Hatoyama held his annual Karuizawa bash—God, it’s great to have money, even if it’s not quite Goldman Sachs money—up to 100 Ozawa supporters showed up. (There were 150 participants in all, of which up to 50 could have been Hatoyama group members, plus Koshiishi the Upper House don and others including one Kan flunky.) Subtract the core Ozawa supporters (up to 50) and maybe a third of the DPJ rookies. I don’t think Ozawa (more accurately Ozawa’s kitchen cabinet) has the numbers.

Note that all the other likely suspects are back-peddling like hell. Never-ready-for-primetime Kaieda has all but abandoned his non-candidacy; Tarudoko, who fronted the Ozawa group in the June election, says once is enough for now; and the Kan cabinet’s resident otaku Kazuhiro Haraguchi (he himself spells it Haraguti, and how more otaku can you get than that?) says he enjoys his job too much to run.

I think Kan realizes all this, and is appropriately keeping his head down.

Hatoyama will eventually throw his support behind Kan. Hatoyama’s conditions for his support, according to one of his top flunkies, Yoshikatsu Nakayama, local sovereignty, the New Public Interest, the East Asia Community, Hatoyama’s GHG commitment, and one other that I cannot remember. They are expansive and explicit but highly conceptual, so they are easy to accept. The GHG commitment, of course, is only as serious as the extent to which the Japanese government is going to go to fulfill it, a matter which was already seriously in doubt under Hatoyama after Obama and the Democrats—a nice name for a 50s throwback doo-wop group FWIW; do you think Sarah and the Republikettes works?—dropped the idea of any serious US efforts. (And of course there’s always China.) Ozawa keeps bringing up the 2009 Manifesto, but how seriously did the Hatoyama-Ozawa odd-couple take it when they were in control?

The big story, then, is what Kan is going to pull out of his economic tool kit once his summer vacation is over. The last couple of weeks brought a sea change in public opinion. Mainstream editorials, reflecting rising main street voices, have been calling for intervention in the currency market in the face of skepticism over the utility of a unilateral intervention. Meanwhile, Kan is still sticking to what is surely the MOF story of a modest 1.7 trillion yen stimulus package consisting of near equal amounts of emergency funds in the FY2010 budget and unexpected carryovers from the FY2009 budget—No New Money. I’d say that the possibility of intervention, though still less than likely, has risen considerably. Also, I look for a considerable stimulus package, likely including an extension in one form or another of the quick-release eco-point system and some new business tax cuts.

That said, there is one wild card, which I’m surprised to hear nothing about lately: the DPJ local yokel vote. The local chapters and assemblyhumans are allocated 400 points (300 go to the local chapters while the remaining 100 are pro rated among the local legislators), while the 412 Diet members get two votes each. It’s a secret vote, whose results are not to be revealed until the Diet members have voted, but do you think that the media is not going to canvas the local voters as they always do on these occasions? I thought so. And Ozawa is rumored to have a strong following out there because of all the legwork and money he and his henchpersons put in over the years right up to the eve of the July election.

Koshiishi to Ozawa, No Hard Feelings, Just Business?

New Prime Minister Naoto Kan quickly moved to sideline Ichiro Ozawa, political regent to nominal DPJ head Yukio Hatoyama, first verbally with a barb telling him to lay quiet for a while, then naming Yukio Edano, Ozawa’s archenemy, to replace the latter as secretary-general. (As secretary-general, Ozawa had controlled the DPJ purse strings and party appointments.) The nomination of Yoshito Sengoku as Chief Cabinet Secretary could not have pleased Ozawa either. These maneuvers led to news reports about Ozawa and his associates issuing veiled threats to challenge Kan in the September DPJ presidency election—Kan is serving out the remainder of Haotyama’s term, which in turn was the remainder of Ozawa’s original two-year term. But if this Sankei report is correct, Azuma Koshiishi, an abrasive 74 year-old former Nikkyoso leader and head of the Upper House DPJ, is having none of it, warning that an “engaging in something that looks like an internal battle and we would never gain the trust of the people.” Koshiishi had been one of Ozawa’s closest associates as his DPJ second-in-command and frequent go-to guy for dropping the hammer, but he’s standing up for his people (and himself; he faces a competitive election for his Upper House seat), and his people are in the Upper House. It reminds you of the Era of the Warlords.

I’ve been telling people that Ozawa doesn’t have relationships, he has alliances. In fact, I’ll be surprised if he is able to take a hundred Diet members with him in a formal split. I think that the 140-150 Diet member count for a hypothetical Ozawa group is one that has been greatly inflated by the December trip to China, when he took a large number of the rookies with him. I assume that most of the “Ozawa Children” hate that nickname. These are grown men and women, most of whom had enjoyed success in their respective professions, which they’d put on hold or dropped to place a bet.

Dead Man Walking; What I think It Means

Veiled grumbling and anonymous comments in the DPJ trying to wish away Prime Minister Hatoyama are quickly shifting to open calls to do the right thing. Two things coming together over the weekend, 1) the DPJ’s Sunday withdrawal from the three-party coalition and 2) the Monday publication of the weekend media polls that put the LDP ahead of or neck-and-neck with the DPJ for voter intent in the July upper house election, have emboldened the DPJ’s upper house leaders and members up for reelection to speak up. Later on Monday, Hatoyama huddled with Ozawa and his upper house right-hand man Azuma Koshiishi but failed to secure their immediate endorsement. The media appear to be reading this as open season on Hatoyama in the DPJ. The three will meet again today at Hatoyama’s request. In the mean time, a gathering of the DPJ leadership (with Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano sitting in on behalf of the prime minister) reportedly delegated the resolution of the matter to Ozawa and Koshiishi. All I can say to this sequence of events is that in the political game, the end comes swiftly once it becomes inevitable.

So it’s going to happen not after (as I had thought more likely) but before the July election. Ozawa’s immediate concerns should be the following:

1) Keep his DPJ secretary-general post. Ozawa is not one to inspire widespread loyalty. His powers of persuasion depend directly on his power to reward and punish. This means that he must force Hatoyama to resign “voluntarily” so that he can weather inevitable demands for his own resignation that will emanate from the media. Note also that an unwilling Hatoyama would try to take Ozawa with him, possibly by relieving him of his SG post (on which point the DPJ charter is vague).
2) Pass two legislative bills, one on the Japan Post reform process and another to tighten restrictions on the worker dispatching business. They’ve cleared the lower house and have been sent to the upper house. That will be the bottom line for the SDP when it decides how far to go in maintaining its collaboration with the DPJ in the July election. They are also necessary—the JP legislation in particular—to keep the PNP in the fold as its remaining coalition partner.
3) Keep the Diet session as short as possible. The current Diet session ends in a little over two weeks (on 16 June) and the selection of a new DPJ president and his election as the new prime minister is likely to take a week out of that. An extension looks inevitable but the DPJ wants to keep it to the absolute minimum necessary in order to avoid giving the opposition opportunities to draw media attention to DPJ shortcomings. From Ozawa’s viewpoint, renewed calls to investigate his political financing issues (if, as I expect, he retains his DPJ SG position) would be an obvious and highly undesirable ploy. This all means that many of the legislative bills submitted by the Hatoyama cabinet will be deferred to post-election sessions or allowed to expire.

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Until I saw the latest media polls, I had been skeptical of past DPJ leaks about private polls—closely held to the vest by Ozawa—showing DPJ returns at 30-35, 35-40 seats. I thought at the time that they were an Ozawa gambit designed to force the DPJ candidates and rank-and-file to double down. My guesstimate at the time was 40-50 seats and, if pressed to narrow the range, 45-50. Not after the polls. But if Hatoyama’s successor is picked from among the likely prospects—Naoto Kan, Kan, Kan, and Kazuhiro Haraguchi—I’m reconfirming my guesstimate. And no, I don’t think Katsuya Okada makes the short list; he’s not Ozawa’s choice, and he’s also tainted by his role in the Futenma affair. Spending so much time and effort on the Japan-US secret agreements didn’t help him either. Seiji Maehara? I don’t see how Ozawa can ever swallow this one. Also, there’s an outside chance that JAL will blow up in his face as early as before the election.

The Danse Macabre around the Prime Minister

This Yomiuri report citing DPJ upper house DPJ leaders, where Ozawa’s influence is greatest, throwing out feelers to Hatoyama to fall on his sword* and this report on Hatoyama’s own account about how he reaffirmed the support from Ozawa and his upper house confederate Koshiishi are as good as any other if you want to understand the game. Basically, Ozawa is trying to get Hatoyama out of the way without having to leave the scene himself. Ozawa can’t confront Hatoyama directly because the prime minister would then take Ozawa out with him, so he’s using his deputies to try to induce Hatoyama to give up the ghost. So I guess my question is: Is Hatoyama smart enough to take a hint?

This is, of course, just me and my thumb talkin’.

* Goshi Hosono—lower house member, former policy wonk and latest Ozawa favorite—repeatedly made more or less the same insinuation on a Sunday talk show.

Pre-election, Hatozawa Resignation?

Hey, yours truly, quoted in The Telegraph. I actually suggested it as a “very easy-to-carry-out scenario.” I know, I know, first someone has to bell the Tenacious Twosome…

Two Events to Watch Out for: Highway Toll Diet SmackDown and Strike Two for Ozawa

Really no time to elaborate, so let me put down a couple of markers on the DPJ. First, it’s become a matter of course that someone puts his foot down and the prime minister will appear to yield, only to appear to pull back again when someone else complains. This makes the first person unhappy, and the two sides (or more on occasion) goes back and forth with the befuddled prime minister in between until whoever has the greater leverage on the prime minister or can get Ozawa behind himself gets his way. But Hatoyama sent the highway toll rumble between Ozawa and Maehara to a higher dimension when he deferred the resolution of the issue to deliberations in the Diet. He bought a few weeks of relative quiet for himself on the matter, but he’s formally taking the quarrel public. I think that this raises the stakes substantially. Hatoyama’s procedural move has the potential to split the DPJ down the line; as such, it’s the first of its kind.

The second is the decision by the Committee for Inquest of Prosecution—a name right out of a Kafka nightmare if you ask me—to recommend that Ozawa be prosecuted for the political financing irregularities after all. He had it coming, since the Public Prosecutors Office’s announcement that it would not move forward with criminal proceedings against Ozawa had all but begged for political cover in the event it failed in securing a guilty verdict against him. The PPO will reopen the investigation, then prosecute, or telegraph again its desires upon which the CIP will repeat its recommendation, with which the PPO will be “compelled” to prosecute. Note that it’s in the interests of the DPJ that Ozawa—and Ozawa alone—leaves the scene; the problem is, he’s likely to try to take his troops—up to 40-50 Diet members; talk of a third of the DPJ contingency vastly overestimates Ozawa’s sway over the 2007 (Upper House) and 2009 (Lower House) rookies—and leave the camp. Strike two will force his hand. Will he go quietly into the night? Or will he trash the place before his leaves?

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The CIP worked far more quickly than I’d imagined, since I’d based my timeline assumptions on on the one two-strike precedent, the Fukuchiyama Line accident, where the CIP and PPO took years to finally bring the case against railway executives. In hindsight, it makes sense; Fukuchiyama involved reams of technical details of ther kind that Ozawa’s case does not have.

From Dismissal to Reassignment to Good Job, Yukio: The Rehabilitation of Yet Another Yukio and What It Means

On 17 March, Yukio Ubukata, one of thirteen DPJ deputy director-generals—off topic, but that’s lot of DPJ deputies, a revealing detail in itself— gave an interview to Sankei Shimbun, the nationalist/free-market conservative daily, in which he offered a scathing criticism of the concentration of power in the hands of Ichiro Ozawa, the director-general, and the stifling effect that it had on DPJ policy-making. He went on to take Ozawa to task for failing to provide an adequate explanation of his complex political financing operations that brought criminal indictments to three of his political assistants past and present including an incumbent Lower House member, saying that “I guess [Mr. Ozawa] can’t explain.”

Retribution appeared to come swiftly. By the 19th, two days later, Ozawa had reportedly given the nod to Ubukata’s dismissal, which would be formalized at a couple of regular party leadership sessions on the 23rd. As the media unanimously came down against this decision, the decision was downgraded over the weekend to a less punitive “reassignment.” Today, the DPJ canceled the leadership meetings, Ozawa and Ubukata kissed and made up—okay, made up—and Ubukata agreed to stay on, with Ozawa’s blessing.

Now here’s the DPJ’s problem:

Ichiro Ozawa has serious, multiple, political financing issues that brought criminal indictments on three of his aides past and present. He dismisses questions with the assertion that the Public Prosecutors Office has given him a clean bill of health. Only a small proportion of the Japanese public swallow that claim or what little explanation he has given in the past. Few if any mainstream figures outside the circle of DPJ Diet members loyal to him are willing to defend him publicly.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has serious political financing issues that have brought a criminal indictment on a couple of his (now) ex-aides. Hatoyama claims innocence, but doubts remain. Nevertheless, there’s a widespread public perception that Hatoyama is just flaky enough that he may actually have been unaware of the goings-on. In any case, the public is more forgiving—if more scornful—of Hatoyama, since the million-dollar plus equivalent of illegal cash flowing annually into his political coffers came from his mom’s bank account and his own.

Tomohiro Ishikawa is Ozawa’s ex-aide Diet member under criminal indictment. He has left the DPJ of his own volition, but has not resigned from the Diet.

Chiyomi Kobayashi is a Lower House member from Hokkaido whose ex-deputy campaign manager is appealing a conviction for election campaign violations. If his appeals are rejected, Kobayashi will automatic lose her seat under Japanese law. Her fortunes took a further turn for the worse on 22 March when, in a different case, the Hokkaido Teachers Union and two of its leaders were indicted for making illegal campaign donations to Kobayashi, who was called in for questioning but was not indicted. She held a press conference the same day, in which she stated that she would not resign or leave the party.

Public opinion aside, it becomes evident why the DPJ cannot dismiss/reassign Ubukata, or otherwise punish anyone else who speaks up or otherwise embarrasses the party short of a criminal sentence whose appeal has been rejected conclusively by the Supreme Court of Japan. The DPJ has a train of political domino tiles.

Couple this with the rise of the Your Party in the polls and its ability to find willing candidates—not up around twenty—for the July election is making my bet that the DPJ won’t lose more than five seats a little shakier than I had thought. However, I strongly suspect that some of the Your Party gain will come out of the LDP, so I’m still willing to take that wager for, say, a nice lunch—with each of the first five takers?

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I’ll slice the odds to four seats for the first person who guesses the name of the “Other Yukio.”

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Forgot to post the title. Out of practice, I guess.

How They are Doing: The Odd Couple

Rarely does a week go by in the two month old Hatoyama administration without news of yet another outrageous Ozawa incursion on Hatoyama territory. The most spectacular and embarrassing example has been the crackdown on Government Revitalization Minister Yoshito Sengoku and Yukio Edano, the head of Sengoku’s team of parliamentary examiners tasked to squeeze a minimum of 3 trillion yen out of the 95 trillion yen FY2010 budget request submitted by the ministries and agencies as well as the pile of money—buried treasures?—already stashed in their public and private affiliates. Specifically, less than a week after the appointment of 32 examiners, Ozawa showed Sengoku and Edano and by extension the entire Hatoyama administration who was boss, forcing them to drop first-term members from the team; Sengoku/Edano eventually wound up with only 7 Diet members leading a team of 56 private sector experts to comb over the budget requests (closely aided by budget cutters from the Ministry of Finance). Also highly visible has been talk of Ozawa’s support for Diet member sponsored legislation for the extraordinary Diet session in direct contravention of his own ban on freebooting. (Most legislative bills are submitted by the Cabinet, although this is not what the framers of the Japanese Constitution envisaged.)

Such talk actually highlights Ozawa’s religious observance of his division of power. First, regarding the crackdown on the Task Force: Ozawa had installed an around-the-clock program for rookie Lower House members elected in the 30 August landslide victory. The Government Revitalization Task Force appointments, made without his knowledge, clearly interfered with that regimen; Sengoku and Edano, two Diet members with at best chilly relationships with Ozawa, had invaded the latter’s turf. The Task Force reassembled, Ozawa and his closest associates have maintained total silence on its actual work there. Second, talk of Ozawa’s contravention of his (constitutionally sketchy) ban on DPJ Diet member sponsored legislative bills appears to be mostly talk, and not necessarily coming from Ozawa himself. For the only bill that is likely to survive the ban is aimed at assisting hepatitis victims suffering as the result of government malfeasance—a bipartisan undertaking that dates back to the LDP administrations under popular MLHW Minister Yoichi Masuzoe. A couple of other legislative proposals have gone by the wayside, including a controversial if inconsequential—apologies to Yoshiko Sakurai and Sankei Shinbun—proposal, long championed by Ozawa and Hatoyama and Foreign Affairs Minister Okada among many (but opposed by coalition partner PNP’s leader Shizuka Kamei), to give permanent residents the right to vote in local elections. This one has been tossed back, if reports are to be believed, by Ozawa himself to the Hatoyama Cabinet—which appears to be shelving it for the foreseeable future.

In all this, it has often appeared that it is less Ozawa himself than associates of this enigmatic, often laconic, figure to using the shadows that he casts to push their own personal agendas. In truth, Ozawa has not weighed in on any of the substantive issues that are headliners in their own right. Contrary to headlines both mainstream and non, Ozawa has remained faithful to the compact that allowed him to exercise an iron hand on party matters while putting Hatoyama and his cabinet in control of policy.

Does this mean that all is well in Tokyo? No. Ozawa’s failure to discipline his henchpersons (yes, “henchperson” is recognized as a word by Bill Gates) still leaves Hatoyama vulnerable to charges that he is a figurehead for whom Ozawa calls the shots. Now, Hatoyama is doing more than his share to create political distraction by his own stream-of-consciousness explications of his political intent. He doesn’t need the media’s help to further erode public perception of his political authority—a turn of events which would seriously harm DPJ prospects come the 2010 Upper House elections there the DPJ hopes to rack up a simple majority, which would allow it to rule without the help of its demanding coalition partners.

In the meantime, the problem can spill over into substance. The downsizing of the Task Force (which also forced Sengoku and Edano to pick from multiple-term Diet members who had been passed over by Hatoyama and his ministers for sub-cabinet portfolios and by Ozawa for top party and parliamentary appointments) has forced it to narrow its focus, limiting the potential budget savings from its inquisition of the ministries and agencies and their cling-ons.

Failure to meet expectations plus a growing sense of powerlessness, if illusionary, nevertheless will spell a deadly combination for the Hatoyama administration. The Prime Minister must project a credible sense of being in control; otherwise, he runs the very real danger of allowing the situation to slip by him and create a future that will definitely not be to his liking.

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Sorry, have had enough time/energy to go over new comments.

Ozawa, for Better or Worse and Other Hatoyama Thoughts

The political world continues to revolve around Ichiro Ozawa as he is tapped by Yukio Hatoyama to take over the DPJ Secretary-General post. Several things indicate that Ozawa is not going to make it easy for anybody, including the Prime Minister in-waiting:

1) Hatoyama had planned to hit the ground running by pick the head of the National Strategy Bureau, the Finance and Foreign Ministers, and the Chief Cabinet Secretary as soon as the election was over, but quickly gave up the idea when allies SDP and PNP objected for fear of being marginalized in the policy formation process. Now, he has settled on a Chief Cabinet Secretary—close associate and reputed troubleshooter Hirofumi Hirano—as well a new Secretary-General, both decisions precipitated at the instigation of the Ozawa crowd if media reports are to be believed.

2) This slap in the face to incumbent Secretary-General Katsuya Okada undermines his authority just when he needs all the support that he can get from the party leadership in the ongoing negotiations with his SDP and PNP counterparts for a policy agreement as the prerequisite to a coalition government. From their point of view, why bother negotiation with a lame duck when the real power has shifted elsewhere—assuming that it had ever been otherwise?

3) Ozawa already held sway over much of the Diet rank-and-file through his domination of the election process from choosing and grooming candidates to managing their campaigns. As Secretary-General, he will hold the keys to the burgeoning party coffers—the DPJ’s government subsidy alone leaps from 11.832 billion yen (2009) to 17.32 billion yen (2010) while the LDP drops from 15.733 billion to 10.467 billion. Registers—as well as handle appointments to party positions. For most practical purposes, it’s his party now.

4) According to the Yomiuri,, on August 3, Ozawa arrived at party headquarters around 10:30PM to meet Hatoyama. He went into the party President’s room with a frown and came out with a smile because he had received a request—accepted—from Hatoyama to be the Secretary-General. As he is leaving the room, in full view of the press, he says to Hatoyama, “I was having dinner; so, I’m sorry I was late.” It may be nothing more than just another gauche moment for Ozawa; if this were a movie, it would be a classic “I made you, I can break you” putdown.

The Hatoyama-Ozawa storyline is a godsend for the post-election media, and Ozawa is not exactly starving the beast. Other incidents such as Hatoyama’s flip-flop over the impromptu, burasagari-clinger interviews, where the interviewee talks to the reporters in the corridors, in transit and his notorious ”anti-globalism screed*, not to mention the looming political financing prosecution of his ex-aide, suggest that Prime Minister Hatoyama, like his most recent predecessors, will be generating his due share of distractions.

* I am aware that there is a much longer text on his website, and that the condensed version distorts his views. Indeed, the original is prefaced by a lengthy explanation of the democratic impulses that gave rise to the concept yūai. However, I’m not sure that explaining yūai as a response to “totalitarianism, which tried to achieve equality at all costs, and capitalism, which had fallen into self-indulgence m which according to his people,” then depicting Japan as a nation “caught between the United States, which is fighting to retain its position as the world's dominant power, and China which is seeking ways to become one” is not overly impolitic. Note also that the original text repeatedly calls the United States a hegemon (覇権国家) and China as a nation seeking to become one. That is not the language of fraternité.

You Know the LDP Is Doomed When…

Martin Fackler, as his wearable vending machine report shows, is as good as his sources—no more, no less. So, when he’s been mostly spot on in two consecutive articles here and here, on the imminent demise of the LDP, with appropriate anecdotes and interviews, then you can be sure that there won’t be any last minute reprieve for the Aso administration and its loyal supporters. Then, on what the proverbial two-handed blogger used to call the other hand…

Hokuto Yokoyama has run for political office four times, and lost four times, as an opposition candidate in this mountainous region known for its abundant apples, and its equally abundant loyalty to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan almost continuously for more than a half-century.

It is true that Yuji Tsushima served 11 uninterrupted terms in the Japanese House of Representatives before he suddenly stepped aside on the eve of the upcoming election to let his son run in his place. It is also true that Tsushima had won Aomori District 1 in all four elections held since it was created in the 1994 conversion of the House of Representatives from the multimember single non-transferable vote system to the single-member district system. But this singular outcome obscures the fact that in those four elections, Tsushima only once managed to win a majority of the votes cast. In fact, he barely managed to raise his share of the total votes cast to 40.4% in the 2005 national LDP landslide from his personal all-time low of 39.7% in the 2003 election, while Hokuto Yokoyama put up a good fight in both elections. This hardly looks like an LDP stronghold to me. So what has been going on?

The last two election results causes Yokoyama’s claim that it was “a big turnaround from just a few years ago, when he still had to convince residents that the Democratic Party was not ‘a bunch of socialist revolutionaries’” to ring hollow. Besides, it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking Yokoyama, an Ozawa acolyte, for a socialist. Couple Yokoyama’s close-but-no-cigar results with the consistently meager pickings for the Social Democrats and the Communists and we come closer to the truth. Aomori District 1 must be comprised of deeply traditional communities, where personal loyalties run deep. And past debts are not easily forgotten. Call it traditional, call it conservative, but do not call it LDP. And here, I go into some speculation. As one of the seven capos of the Tanaka action, Ozawa’s public works reach must have extended well beyond Iwate boundaries, and continue to resonate—and influence politics throughout the Tohoku region. Note that the DPJ does relatively well there compared to similarly conservative Kyushu. (This, incidentally, was what the Nishimatsu scandal was insinuating.)

Speculation, yes. But given the relative weakness of the LDP in Aomori District 1, shouldn’t Fackler have looked beyond the usual left-center-DPJ-kicking-LDP-butt narrative to possibly reveal the saga that may be playing out there? It almost makes you wish Norimitsu Onishi were here. But not quite. Because if he were, that might be the whole story.

Of Factions, Faction Leaders…and the SSJ Forum

As part of a new wrinkle for this blog, I am answering some questions from Mark about LDP factions, the DPJ, and political leaders. Now, I’m aware that there are at least two people (and probably a few more) who read this blog and happen to be far more competent to answer them. Message to those people: Please feel free to embarrass me.

The other day, the Japan Times wrote an interesting article on the factional politics in Japan. The article discussed the origins of the current factions. But I would like to know more about the evolution of the policies, thinking, and philosophies of the factions.

My take is that ideology was of only secondary interest to the factions in the first place, except perhaps Ikeda’s group, and has diminished dramatically in importance even from those modest beginnings. (That’s my excuse for not knowing much about the subject.)

According to the article, the Ibuki faction used to belong to Nakasone. How would you compare the thinking of Bunmei Ibuki to Yasuhiro Nakasone? The article also notes that Yukio Hatoyama and Ichiro Ozawa came from the Tanaka faction. The media often compares Ozawa to Tanaka. How does the thinking of Kakuei Tanaka differ from that of Ichiro Ozawa and Yukio Hatoyama?

The occasional, politically incorrect statements aside, Ibuki is far more intelligent and thoughtful than many people out there give him credit for. He also shares some of Nakasone’s nationalist leanings. But beyond that, I know little about his political philosophy or his policy preferences. But I’m not really embarrassed about that. For Ibuki has nothing of Nakasone’s vision, drive, or ambition, the last of which is symbolized by his unkempt, graying hair. This is not accidental in my view; given the drastically altered role of LDP factions, Ibuki is more the amicable manager of an intramural flag football team, where Nakasone was the head coach of an NCAA Division I varsity football team. More caretaker than leader, faction leaders have severely limited influence over their nominal subordinates, and if they harbor Prime Ministerial ambitions, they are no more than marginally advantaged over the others. In sum, Ibuki as faction leader is more comparable to his generational peers; likewise Nakasone.

It’s all about winning for Ozawa, winning big, winning it all. In that respect, he is Tanaka’s true disciple. His old school ways with money matters also reminds us of Tanaka. Where he differs most from Tanaka is a certain joylessness, an aversion to the spotlight and the winner’s podium. Tanaka’s political philosophy, if you can call it that, appears to have been: Make everyone rich, make my constituency rich, and make myself really, really rich. Ozawa comes across as someone who is even less interested in the substance of domestic policy. Making everyone rich also colored his interests, what there was of it, in foreign policy; he harbored none of Ozawa’s resentment of Japan’s second-class status in its relationship with the U.S. or desire to project the Japanese military in the near and far abroad.

I have no thoughts about Yukio Hatoyama other than that he’s a dutiful conciliator with few if any enemies but even less charisma. But then, given the quality of the enemy… Oh, he’s a foreign policy dove by inclination, which probably suits the majority of DPJ members and supporters just fine.

Apparently, the Aso faction and the Koga faction will merge. The article says Ikeda and Miyazawa used to lead the Koga faction. How would you compare the philosophies of Aso and Koga to Ikeda, Miyazawa, and Yoshida?

Koga is closer to the Ikeda-Miyazawa(-Koichi Kato) lineage of true, post-WW II doves, while Aso is much, much closer to the nationalist-conservative wing that includes such luminaries as Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa. Perhaps that’s what made it easier for Koga to merge/swallow Sadakazu Tangachi’s group. But, as you can see from the fact that Aso inherited his 20-band of parliamentary warriors from Yohei “Kohno Statement” Kohno, love transcends ideology.

The two ends of the ideological spectrum of the rich-nation, weak-army values underlying the Yoshida Doctrine were: a genuine aversion to the profligate expansionism of the inter-war decades; and the sense that Japan was biding its time until it could emerge glorious once again as a Great Power in its own right. Koga, who lost his father to the war, and Aso, descended from a pre-war magnate whose children married up in socially, are the metaphor for the two poles. As for Ikeda and Miyazawa, they can loosely be included in the aversion school.

But seriously, are they going to merge? Finally? Well, Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni got married, so why not, eh?

Also, I would like you to comment a little on the inter-faction politics. In a separate article, the Asahi Shimbun interviewed Yasuhiro Nakasone. The interviewer made the point that Tanaka had a great deal of power over Nakasone. But he didn't mention the specific issues in which Tanaka manipulated Nakasone. Could you help me out here? Furthermore, both Nakasone and the interviewer thought the relationship between Yukio Hatoyama and Ichiro Ozawa might be similar to the relationship between Nakasone and Tanaka. But the article didn't say how the relationship was similar. Do you have any idea on what the those similarities might be? Lastly, the interviewer said that Ozawa would probably have a harder time influencing Hatoyama than Tanaka had with Nakasone. He did not say why that might be the case. Do you have any idea on why that might be true?

I’m not aware of any substantive issue on which Tanaka forced his views on Nakasone (except, likely, where his personal interests and those of his supporters and constituency lay). I suspect for Tanaka that it was mostly about rewarding his allies with cabinet posts and other political appointments. In that sense and that sense only, I think that Ozawa will wind up reminding all of us of Tanaka, although he displays little of Tanaka’s visceral need for personal gratification.

Nakasone, of course, served at the pleasure of Tanaka. It is also clear that Hatoyama would not have won without Ozawa’s support. (Indeed, he may not even have run without it.) But Tanaka could pull the rug out from under Nakasone any time he chose to, because he had the troops and the control over political funds for it. That Ozawa cannot do, partly because (for now) there are at least as many people in the PDJ who hate him as those who love him, partly because the bulk of the DPJ money consists of government subsidies, which Ozawa is no longer in a position to control, and partly because the competition with the LDP takes the decision out of any kingmakers’ hands and into those of public opinion (including the media).

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Did that work for you, Mark? Incidentally, I’ve begun subscribing to the SSJ Forum. The Japan-U.S. Discussion Forum has many distinguished commenters, but I had a somewhat unpleasant experience there, and the talk there can get pretty cranky, so I haven’t gone there for quite some time now. SSJ Forum appears to be a youthful, nimble alternative.

Bad Polls, More Downside Risk for the Ruling Coalition

Poll results as a whole continue to vary widely between each other, while the newspaper polls reflect their respective political outlooks and the TV polls are particularly volatile. All that being said, if you look at how the numbers have moved as the Nishimatsu scandal broke over DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa’s head and led to his replacement by Yukio Hatoyama, it’s safe to say—knock on wood—the following:

1) The DPJ has closed in on the LDP with regard to bedrock support; the 10% or so lead that the LDP held after the Kozumi administration appears to have dissipated altogether.

2) The switch from Ozawa to Hatoyama has restored much of the DPJ lead among the “floaters”—one-third or so of the electorate—who are going to end up determining the outcome of the Lower House general election.

The LDP gave its best shot on the economy, as it put forth its latest economic stimulus package to mixed reviews. Its game plan going forward appears to consist of bashing the DPJ over a) the unrealistic cost-cutting assumptions as the basis of its four-year plan and b) the lack of a short-term plan of its own. Beyond this, there seems to be little more that the LDP can do except hope against hope for a miraculous third quarter economic recovery; that, and wait for a serious DPJ mistake or two—possible but highly unlikely, given that the DPJ as the opposition won’t have to worry about wayward cabinet members and other high-profile political appointees.

Worse for the ruling coalition, it continues to be distracted by side issues. Kunio Hatoyama, the Internal Affairs and Communications Minister, has been attacking the Post Office at every turn, scoring some political points for himself at the expense of the rest of the LDP and Koizumian reformists in particular. Prime Minister Aso jumped at a proposal to re-divide the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, but the MIAC Minister—Yoichi Masuzoe, the one bright spot in the Aso Cabinet—has come forth with a request for more staff as a condition for going along with it. And that’s not to mention the bullet the Aso administration dodged when Ozawa’s resignation and subsequent race to succeed him pushed the sacking of a Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary for sexual escapades at the expense of public coffers—which Aso foolishly tried to brush off as resignation for “health reasons”—to the media sidelines.

On the DPJ side, there is lingering worry that Ichiro Ozawa’s daily press briefings as he stalks the provinces may cause some grief. I doubt it. The press can only ask the same question—Will you explain yourself regarding the Nishimatsu money—so many times and get the same answer—I’ve explained it already and everything is legal—every time before the editors stop printing it. In fact, that’s what it’s beginning to look like already. The issue will resurface from time to time as Ozawa’s political aide’s prosecution for political financing irregularities moves forward (or fresh allegations are raised*), but the most eye-catching event—the verdict—is not coming down before the general election—assuming that the Public Prosecutors Office decides to bring the case to a trial before the election in the first place.

All this of course has little to do with what the DPJ is going to do after it catches the milk truck. I’ll get back to that if I have something meaningful to add to what I’ve said before. Otherwise, I’ll continue to focus my meanderings on the chase.

* A 24 May Mainichi report relates how the Ozawa team dunned 5 million Yen from major zenecon Kumagai-Gumi from 1996-2000 under a scheme remarkably similar to the Nishimatsu arrangement. No, the report has nothing to say about the LDP side of the picture.

Now It’s the Ozawas’ Turn with the Family Jewels

Yesterday, I considered the implications on Junichiro Koizumi’s son of a idea brewing in the LDP to deny official candidate status to heirloom politicians beginning with the upcoming Lower House general election—the idea clearly being to upstage the DPJ, which won’t implement a ban on heirloom candidates during this election, claiming that it’s too late to find replacements. My take was that such a turn of events would actually benefit Mini-K. There is a very good chance that the Ozawa family will face a similar situation in the general election after that. Ozawa is 66, and has health problems and three sons (to Koizumi’s two). What is he supposed to do?

It is important to remember that there are a number of single-seat districts where the DPJ has yet to put up candidates. It is supporting candidates from the New People’s Party and the Social Democratic Party in some of them, while it has not found viable candidates in others. The exceptions to these are Ozawa’s own Iwate 4th District and a few other districts that have been purposely left open to Ozawa’s choice as part of campaign tactics. Most notably, stage whispers let on that he might challenge Akira Ota, the New Komeito leader, in the latter’s Tokyo 11th District. The New Komeito would likely have to divert campaign resources that could have been expended more usefully elsewhere, just so its leader can avoid the embarrassment of its leader losing and having to slip in through the regional proportionate district backdoor.

Of course such a turn of events would leave the Iwate 4th District without an official DPJ candidate and with little time left for a novice to step in, declare him/herself, go through the vetting process and campaign successfully…unless, of course, one of Ozawa’s three sons steps in with the Ozawa kaban (money), kanban (name recognition), and jiban (readymade constituency and political machine) . There’s the heirloom stigma, but the favorite, favored son could make a big show of foregoing official DPJ support. It won’t fool anybody, but it can serve as a fig leaf. Ozawa himself will run the risk of losing to Ota and not winning enough votes relative to Ota to return to the Lower House as a proportional-district Representative, but that danger should be small if not insignificant.

All this sounds fine and dandy, but there’s a catch. As I said, this won’t fool anybody even if Mini-Ozawa runs as an “independent” and the media will feast on the double rake-off. I’m not sure that it will be a significant story throughout the campaign, but it is sure to harm the DPJ more than the LDP. Koizumi is a spent force, whereas Ozawa is the mind, if not the face, of the DPJ. Just as significantly, the DPJ can’t win by being “no worse than the LDP”.

There’s really no way of knowing what Ozawa will do or, if he decides to take to, how Yukio Hatoyama, the new party leader will respond. Thus, the uneasy slumber of the catfish under the Diet Building has yet to reach its conclusion.

Some Thoughts on Ozawa, “Old-School” and the DPJ Policy Agenda

LB’s comment here got me to thinking: What exactly do I mean by old-school? That led me to more thinking about Ozawa and the DPJ agenda. I decided to put my response up as a separate post—as a prelude of sorts to a more scenario-based examination of the post-electoral prospects for a breakaway by LDP dissidents.

First of all, Ozawa’s way with money (if at least some of the allegations appearing in the mainstream media are to believed) and relative disinterest in policy except as the means to electoral power certainly does make him something of a throwback. However, I was using the term “old school” shorthand for a desire to turn the clock back to the pre-Koizumi years, where the construction industry, the post office network and other conservative strongholds provided the money and muscle in return for public funds and protection from competition, while the Self-Defense Forces stayed put on the archipelago. (The reality was of course more complex, but this is close enough of a caricature to serve our purposes here.) The Ozawa DPJ has been making some concessions to these demands, though only in part to accommodate the PNP and the Social Democrats. However, I believe that there is still enough substance in its policy agenda as well as enough distance from traditionally powerful vested interests to distinguish the DPJ from both wings of the status quo from the pre-Koizumi era.

Now Ozawa may not have much interest in the DPJ policy agenda beyond its electoral implications, but he is not ideologically or temperamentally wedded to what I refer to here as old school either. Thus, he is not per se an obstacle to a reformist administration. The old Socialist wing and the labor unions will stake out their own claim, but it’s not as if they have anywhere else to go if they don’t get everything they want. And their intraparty power should be significantly diluted by a DPJ victory in the Lower House election.

Having said that, the Upper House breakdown will give the PNP and the Social Democrats disproportionately strong leverage over a DPJ administration. This is where the potential for a group of LDP dissident to join a more or less reformist DPJ administration comes in. I’m trying to work out a range of election scenarios against which such a turn of events can be projected. It’s going to take time though, and no one’s paying me to do it, so it won’t materialize in the next couple of days.

The DPJ: Whose Party Is It Anyway?

Ichiro Ozawa is already strongly positioned in the Upper House wing of the DPJ by virtue of the 2007 election victory over the LDP-New Komeito coalition. Add to that his likely dominance over the Lower House as the result of the upcoming general election and the post-election DPJ will have a Dark Overlord that will rival if not eclipse Kakuei Tanaka, Ozawa’s mentor and role model, at the peak of his political power. Let me explain.

As the Koizumi Kids phenomenon shows, rookie Diet members tend to gravitate toward the leadership under which they are elected. Similarly, Ozawa’s group swelled its ranks when the DPJ took 60 out of 121 seats up for grabs in the 2007 Upper House election. Although lingering resentment towards Katsuya Okada over his past expressions of desire for Upper House reform played a major role in delivering the bulk of the Upper House vote to Hatoyama, Ozawa’s influence over their ranks must also have figured substantially in the outcome. The upcoming Lower House election is likely to have an even more dramatic effect on Ozawa’s power, since all 480 seats will be up for election—unlike the Upper House, which turns over only half its members every three years. The 2007 election produced a net gain of 28 DPJ Diet members. But in the upcoming election, a simple majority—something well within the DPJ’s reach—will produce a net gain of 128 DPJ Diet members.

Significantly, Ozawa has exercised near-dictatorial powers in selecting, monitoring, and even coaching the candidates; in the process overshadowing the customary role of the Director-General—Hatoyama!—who is supposed to manage party operations on a day-to-day basis. If anything, his “demotion” to Senior Acting President will enhance his influence over the candidates, since he will not be distracted by anything as trivial as the need to show up for Diet sessions and respond to pesky reporters and instead will be able to devote his full attention to the electoral process—over which he explicitly retains full control*. Thus it is likely that Ozawa will emerge from the upcoming election with behind-the-scenes political might whose likes we have not seen since his mentor Kakuei Tanaka.

All this does not necessarily bode ill for a Hatoyama administration. Remember that Yasuhiro Nakasone, who led one of the most long-serving and effective post-WW II administrations, was also widely regarded as a Tanaka hand puppet when he became Prime Minister. And there is another eerie, if oddly hopeful, parallel in the relative disinterest in statecraft, a trait shared by the two on the part of both Dark Overlords. We are likely to see whether or not the conciliatory and inclusive Yukio Hatoyama has the vision and determination to likewise measure up to his distant predecessor.

* This begs the question: What is the new Director-General—Okada!—supposed to do?

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As a final point, the shadow of the Overlord is obviously not helpful to the DPJ as far as the overall outcome of the election is concerned. I believe that this increases the likelihood of a need for a coalition partner beyond or in lieu of its more or less formal odd-bedfellows alliance with the People’s New Party (old-school-LDP) and the Social Democrats (old school Socialists), while simultaneously complicating any outreach to the LDP reformist wing—the source of the most likely candidates for a post-election breakaway. I’ll try to take this matter up in some detail in another post.

My Latest Thoughts on the DPJ Election

Woke up in the middle of the night (do not ask why), couldn’t resist looking at my email. Which led to an online look at the media’s reaction to the DPJ election. Basically, it boils down to: What the heck is Hatoyama going to do with Ozawa? My immediate reaction to that goes here, in my response to Ross’ comment.

I think I need a life. And sleep. Good night. If you like me, pray for the Celtics. And if you hate me, well, you know what to do.