Let’s Be Nice to Our Prime Minister; It’s a National Holiday, for God’s Sake

Kaoto Kan, currently Japan’s prime minister, is not exactly my favorite politician, but surely he deserves some credit for what he is trying to do. He does have a policy agenda that is relatively coherent and more consonant with the pre-Ozawa manifesto as well as the post-3.11 realities. Moreover, the opposition parties as well as Ozawa’s allies in the DPJ are not well-positioned to force him out. That doesn’t mean that he’s in the clear until the DPJ leadership election in 2012, but I think that reports of his imminent demise are very much premature. If you’re interested, please read on.

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He continues to push ahead on social safety network reform coupled to a consumption tax hike despite last year’s upper house election setback. This is a reversion to the DPJ’s pre-Ozawa manifesto. Scaling back the child allowance also brings it more in line with the pre-Ozawa manifesto. Add the reduction in scope for agricultural income subsidies—remember that the DPJ linked the money to trade liberalization—and it’s pretty clear that Kan is trying to pull the DPJ back toward the urban orientation of its pre-Ozawa/Hatoyama days. From this perspective, I see no reason to think that he won’t revive his TPP initiative, once the relief and recovery process is fully on track and the nuclear situation is stabilized so he won’t look like he’s kicking the Tohoku and Kanto farmers while they’re down. Toll-free highways—another big ticket item—had already been scaled back substantially by Seiji Maehara as Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism when he was forced to cough up gasoline tax revenue to finance Ozawa’s old-school politics road-building plans, but the majority of the Japanese public won’t be sorry to see that experiment die.

So Kan certainly does have a policy program, though it is poorly articulated. Perhaps that is by design; he doesn’t want to completely alienate the DPJ’s pro-Ozawa wing, which has pretty much been frozen out of the policymaking process and is using the manifesto as a rallying cry. There’s also the matter of his surprising—to me at least—lack of communication instincts judging from his performance as prime minister. Still, if you look beyond the headlines in the media and the criticism from his DPJ detractors, his policy agenda in my view is both more coherent and more consonant with the PDJ policy agenda before Ozawa altered it, likely for electoral purposes.

But what are his political prospects? A few things to keep in mind. First, the LDP calls for Kan’s resignation are not to be believed. The last thing that they want is to go into an election against a DPJ under rejuvenated leadership. Second, Komeito does not want to lean on the Sokagakkai troops again so soon after the “nationwide” local elections. Besides, it currently has enormous leverage over the DPJ now because of its ability to deliver an upper house majority by itself. Komeito can marginally increase its leverage through a lower house election if it results in a near-equal DPJ-LDP split, allowing Komeito to give a lower house majority to either of the two major parties. I say “marginally” because choosing the LDP would mean that the administration would have to work with an upper house minority. Why upset the political cart for a new lower house configuration that could trigger further political realignment? On this side of the aisle, the SDP has lost just about every general election since it sold its pacifist soul to buy the prime minister’s office for Tomiichi Murayama. There is no reason to believe that the next election will be any different. And the formal coalition partner PNP is what it is. The DPJ loses one seat and there goes the DPJ-PNP-SDP’s joint lower house supermajority, and with it what remains of the PNP’s (and SDP’s) leverage. As for Ozawa’s DPJ allies, if they manage to secure enough breakaways to pass a lower house vote of no confidence in the Kan cabinet, their lower house members will have to fight a three- or four-way battle against the DPJ, LDP, and Your Party. And many of them are first-termers, who will surely be at least as vulnerable as the Koizumi Kids. All this does not mean that

This does not mean that Kan’s path leading up to (but not including) the 2012 DPJ leadership election is clear. There is always the chance that the opposition parties and Ozawa’s allies will wind up pushing Kan too hard, with results that at least some of them do not want at all. Wars have been started that way. More plausibly, if Kan looks so bad that his DPJ supporters start abandoning him, that’s the end for him. He may be stubborn, he may have a massive ego, but he’s not so selfish that he’ll take the DPJ down with him by calling a snap election. He’ll step down, leaving it to someone more articulate and telegenic to lead that charge. Don’t even rule out Ozawa’s arch DPJ nemesis Yukio Edano in that case; politics makes strange bedfellows.

And beyond all the politics, there is the matter of genuine policy differences. Kan does have a policy agenda that is significantly at odds with what Ozawa and his DPJ allies profess, never mind their motives. This chasm also exists within the LDP as well. And reform is afoot in the upper house, although the next election there is not due until 2013. Feel free to make your own inferences here.

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.

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.

Kan Looks More Like a Survivor with Every Passing Day

There’s exactly one month to go before the DPJ presidential election, which perforce determines Japan’s prime minister and Banri Kaieda, a 61 year old moderately famous freelance economist turned politician who never made his way into the DPJ’s top leadership circles, is the only one who appears to be actively looking to challenge Naoto Kan. And that, only if he can manage to secure Ichiro Ozawa’s blessing. Ozawa capo Kenji Yamaoka is trying to whip up anti-Kan sentiment in the DPJ, particularly among the vulnerable lower house rookies, but is not securing too many followers. No one moves until Ozawa moves. Meanwhile, Kan has been keeping a low profile, and making nice with the opposition to the point of near-obsequiousness. The media does like this, but it keeps the own goals at a minimum. And the Japanese electorate has little stomach for a new administration or, heaven forbid, a snap election.

Go figure.

Kan Statement on Japan’s Recent Past on the Korean Peninsula

The Kan Statement on the eve of the 100th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula has passed the Yomiuri test—which means that it will go down with the populist-nationalist wing of the Japanese political center. Sankei is coming out fiercely against it, but its smaller print circulation gurantees that active opposition will represent no more than a small minority of the national vote.

That said, it will only be success diplomacy if the Japanese authorities are able to put an end to apologies once and for all and south Korea to accept the latest one for what it’s worth. An apology repeated is an apology not accepted. That should be obvious to anyone.

A Mrs. Kan Addendum, Plus Komeito/LDP/DPJ Commentary Lite

I just finished watching a 1 hour, 45 minute Sunday news show (Asahi TV) that I watched regularly. It gave Mrs. Kan’s book at most 5 minutes in a lightly humorous vein, more than the news clips that preceded it, but less than the 15 minutes for the following segment on zoos, 25 minutes for a three-piece set of political stories using two guests from the DPJ and Your Party, and the 30 minutes for an investigative piece on Komeito and electoral collaboration between Komeito and the LDP. It’s only one example, but I think it puts the story in proper perspective.

The last piece was of interest, because it shed light on an important obstacle to full-fledged collaboration between the DPJ and Komeito. Now, the program regulars were of the view that it didn’t work for Komeito on the proportional ballot, where it received help from LDP local chapters in exchange for the Sokagakkai vote for the LDP’s local prefectural district candidate (the same kind of collaboration that has gone on in previous elections, this time without the usual official sanction from party headquarters in Tokyo), since it lost on the proportional vote more than 100,000 votes and one seat from the last Upper House election. I wonder. After all, the LDP lost about 2.5 million proportional votes. Either the LDP bled itself dry for the Komeito proportional ballot, or it hadn’t made good on its promises before. Now, all that Komeito has to do is check the number of local votes against the Sokagakkai members to figure it out. And if the LDP help had been ineffectual in previous eletions, the Komeito/Sokagakkai authorities would have known.

Mrs. Kan Disses Mr. Kan. Not

A seasoned Asianist sends without commentary this news report headlined “My husband Naoto Kan the PM of Japan: a lightweight with no dress sense,” a straight-faced account of Prime Minister Kan’s latest embarrassment, a book full of unremitting criticism from his wife… or is it? For context is everything—everything that is missing from this report. Let me explain.

The fearless lion in the workplace who turns out to be a docile lamb at home is a popular archetype in Japanese culture, with some foundation in fact. Foreigners often marvel at the control that the typical Japanese fulltime housewife exercises over family finances.

Modesty, and humility, pays in Japan. We’ve mastered the art of the backhanded insult; this book is a prime example, no doubt helped by Mrs. Kan’s reputation as an acerbic, politics-first personality. Tellingly, and typically for her generation, she does not have a political career of her own. Go figure.

The book has admittedly taken the archetype/humility ploy to a new level, a tactic that was not totally without risk. However, that risk is mitigated by the fact that in Japan, what happens in the family tends to stay in the family. Revelations of Hatoyama’s youthful affair with and subsequent marriage to the wife of a friend became tabloid fodder after he became prime minister, but did not have any effect on his popularity (or lack thereof) as prime minister; likewise, the first lady’s wacky New Age persona.

Since the mainstream print media tend to underplay these items, I rely on newsstand and newsprint ads for tabloid and weeklies to get a better feel of how things are going down. My impression is that Mrs. Kan's efforts will be mildly successful at best, sink with little trace at worst.

The writer is the Daily Telegraph’s “Showbusiness Editor.” Seriously. I’m looking forward to her next piece on Shakespeare, where she offers a critique on Marc Antony’s eulogy as a Julius Caesar takedown.

DPJ Schism in the Works?

The other Magistrates, all with arms-length or worse relationships with Ozawa, appear to have lined up behind Kan, who was supposed to be in good standing with Ozawa. Is this about DPJ 1.0 reasserting its DPJ-ness against tenant-turned-squatter Ozawa and his allies? Stay tuned。

Who the Heck Is Fifty Year-Old Shinji Tarudoko?

He’s one of the Seven Magistrates, the up and coming (at the time) boomer/post-boomer DPJ members—the others being Yukio Edano, Koichiro Gemba, Seiji Maehara, Yoshihiko Noda, Katsuya Okada, and Yosihito Sengoku—that Kozo Watanabe, long-time ally and now noisiest critic of Ichiro Ozawa, brought together during the Koizumi administration as the future of the DPJ, that’s who. The reason that we had heard so little of him in contrast to his more illustrious cohorts may have been due to the inconvenient fact that he was out of office at the time of the Gathering…that, and the fact that he appears to be the only one among the Magnificent Seven who has not distanced himself from Ozawa, if his reported support base of second-tier and younger Ozawa followers in tomorrow’s DPK presidential election is any indication. So maybe we’ll finally learn how strong the fear-free support for Ozawa is. Or not.

In the meantime, overwhelming favorite Naoto Kan has added insult to injury in a way only he can in a press conference today (3 June) announcing his candidacy, when he said, “Since Secretary-General Ozawa invited the suspicion of the Japanese people, it is for the good of himself, the DPJ, and Japanese politics that he keep quiet for a while.” ZING!

Oh Kan. And you wondered why Kan isn’t popular with his colleagues. No matter. Ask Michael Jordan’s former teammates if winning doesn’t beat nice every time. Stay tuned. Until 11 July.