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.

The Death of the LDP? Maybe. But Don’t Hold Your Breath.

There’s plenty of media speculation about the future of the LDP, and none of it is positive. With good reason too, what with some of its most media-friendly Diet members flaking off against the backdrop of a lackluster leadership utterly unable to cash in on the difficulties that the coalition government and the DPJ have been running into. I’ve been engaging in idle speculation about the eventual fall of the LDP myself but I don’t have anything useful in that direction to offer—I say idle and nothing useful because I cannot yet put the event on any kind of a timeline with any degree of confidence; mountains will crumble or disappear into the sea, heck, the whole universe is going to stop one day, a broken clock...—so why not indulge myself in a little counterintuitive thinking and try to amuse you by making a case for the LDP saving match point for now?

What touched off the latest flurry of glee/alarm/speculation was the defection of Yoichi Masuzoe, the public’s hands-down favorite over Seiji Maehara, Katsuya Okada, Nobuteru Ishihara, etc., etc. as the politician of choice to join five other Upper House members in in a de facto takeover of the Kaikaku Kurabu (Japan Renaissance Party) and renaming it the Shinto Kaikaku (New Party Renaissance?) as a platform for his political ambitions. The Masuzoe effect is considerable, as the Nikkei-TV Tokyo 23-25 national poll gave SK/KK a remarkable 7% in voter intent in the July Upper House election (DPJ 20%, LDP 14%, Your Party 11%, SK/KK 7%, Komeito 4%, JCP 3%, Stand Up Japan 2%, SDP 1%, PNP 0%, New Party Nippon 0%, others (the Happy Science folks?) 2%, undecided 23%, don’t know/won’t tell 12%). If this is reflected in the actual voting for the proportional seats, the SK/KK will take five out of the 48 proportional seats at stake. With Masuzoe’s seat, it will have six seats, enough to cross the five-member threshold for parliamentary privileges as a legitimate political party. Who knows, it could very well pick up another seat or two in the larger Kanto or Kansai multimember districts.

Now at this point, those of you who have been paying attention to the numbers will be wondering, Masuzoe goes into the election with six seats, emerges with six—seven, eight max and that’s supposed to be a big deal? Yes, it is, and that’s why Masuzoe is not such a big deal after all. And the reason for this can be compressed into the briefest of bios for Masuzoe’s five compadres:

Hideo Watanabe (75): head of the old Kaikaku Kurabu, elected to the UH in 2004 on the DPJ proportional ticket.
Hiroyuki Arai (51) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP proportional ticket.
Tetsuro Yano (63) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP proportional ticket, announced intent to retire (2009 December).
Masakatsu Koike (58) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP proportional ticket, failed to get LDP nomination to run in his home district in the upcoming election.
Toshio Yamauchi (63) elected to the UH in 2004 on the LDP Kagawa Prefecture ticket, announced intent to retire (2009 September).

For the record, Masuzoe is 61, and holds an Upper House seat and will be up for Upper House reelection (Lower House election?) in 2013.

In other words, Masuzoe is teaming up with a group of people whose terms expire in July and a) were not good enough to win locally the last time around but slipped through by way of the national showing of their respective parties, b) are retiring, or c) both. It is not surprising then, that none of his now-friends show sign of affinity to the reformist strain of Japanese politics that Masuzoe is identified with and derives public support from. In fact, the ringleader of the has-beens, Hideo Watanabe, is just as old school as Ichiro Ozawa and Shizuka Kamei, if not more so.

This begs the question: Why did Masuzoe enter into this marriage of pure convenience, and to boot a nuptial with the bride in the Russia joke—but I digress—in the first place? To ask the question is to answer it: because nobody did. Masuzoe by all accounts is the smartest Diet member in all of DPJ but has no personal following whatsoever. The lack of close-up personal charm, the inability to manage up or down, is a charge that apparently has dogged him since his earliest years as a brilliant assistant professor of political science at Tokyo University. So if you’re a middle-of-the-road reform-minded political wannabie and you’ve been rejected by the LDP/DPJ as a candidate in the upcoming Upper House election, who are you going to hitch your wagon to, the SK/KK aka New Party Masuzoe (reportedly the first choice for the new party’s nomenclature), or the more youthful Your Party, with an identity beyond a single, media-friendly individual?

According to the poll, Masuzoe’s defection is paralleled by the LDP’s 2 percentage-point drop (22%-20%) in voter intent. It’s more or less what you’d expect from the rock-bottom LDP, and far lower than the SK/SS surge from virtually nil to 7%. At the same time, the DPJ fell from 33% to 27%. That raises the suspicion that Masuzoe’s defection from the LDP ate into the DPJ’s support from the independent floater voters, and also limited the Your Party’s upside there. As for Kaoru Yosano’s (Takeo Hiranuma’s, actually)—Stand Up Guys, it’s barely treading water.

If there’s a common thread tying Masuzoe, (Yoshimi) Watanabe, Yosano, and (Kunio) Hatoyama (already ripe for one of those vehicles for former B-list celebrities) together other than the relatively favorable media coverage that they have attracted—Hatoyama’s is more mixed than that of the others—it’s the fact that they are political loners. None of them built up a personal following while he were with the LDP. What makes them think that they can do so now? Of these, Watanabe is better positioned, as he is only of the Your Party band of media-friendly, relatively youthful brothers, ex-LDP, ex-DPJ, and independent, the team with the biggest upside.

It could do badly in the Upper House election and would still be the second largest party there by a wide margin. And it will also have 119 seats in the Lower House—knock on wood if you’re an LDP supporter—for another three years. And the LDP still has a few attractive faces to turn to. It would be foolish to count them out before they are down and really out.

Now at this point, ideally, I’d like to turn to the Maehara-Ozawa war and how that could bring an end to the DPJ as we know it, or the Ozayama regime at least. But I’m out of time.

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Promise to respond to pending comments. But not now. Sorry.

Stand-Up Guys

The media have picked up on the oddness of hard-line conservative Takeo Hiranuma and staunch centrist Kaoru Yosano joining hands to form Stand Up Japan. But catholicity was what the LDP was all about*, and these two folks are known for their ability to get along, so there’s really nothing to get excited about. Besides, they are proclaiming themselves friends (sort of) of the LDP. But that doesn't look appropriate for the next stage in political realignment, which looks increasingly sooner rather than later.

Then there’s the other problem: These guys are old. Yosano is 71, and Hiranuma is 70. And the other are in descending order: 72 (Yoshio Nakagawa, House of Councilors), 68 (Hiroyuki Sonoda, House of Representatives), and 67 (Takao Fujii, House of Councilors). Count their days in full and they probably average out to 70, the mandatory retirement age for…the Japanese Supreme Court. Even if you happened to be one of the 2006 Post Office reform expellees whom Hiranuma helped rejoin the LDP, you wouldn’t want to join the Space Cowboys on this ride**. And they aren’t.

I do expect them to pick up a few seats in the July HoC general election though. I haven’t done the math, but I’m sure that the core supporters of the five Diet members plus whatever votes the candidates can muster on their own will be enough to get a share of the proportional seats. The Stand Ups are not going to be the media’s darlings of election 2010—that looks like the Your Party’s role—so I expect them to choose mainly Post Office reform expellees who failed to win seats in the 2006 election and local politicians, people who bring their own support base.

*To be fair, the reincarnation of the DPJ is also quite inclusive, the Hatoyama administration even more so. And going back in time, things didn’t get weirder than the Murayama Cohabitation.

**And christening the group as Stand Up Japan is the increasingly lame-duck, 77 years old Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara. Incidentally, Ishihara appears to agree with Yasuo Tanaka of Shinto Nippon (New Party Japan) in thinking that inverted names are cool, e.g. Shuto Daigaku Tokyo, (Tokyo Metropolitan University). Inversion does pack a punch in Japanese, but in this case has the feel of graying pols dying their hair. I think that Ishihara’s naming powers peaked at the subway Ōedo-sen. Now that’s a name with both historical and contemporary resonance.

Speaking of the name, do a google search in Japanese and the results begin with what appear to be mostly unkind blog posts, some of them using a pun not fit for a family-oriented blog. That is also an inauspicious sign.

I Would Be Happy to Be a (Paid) Pundit and/or a (Professional) Journalist; That Said…

“That said” has become one of my favorite expressions lately. That said…

The other night, I was having a conversation with a professional political analyst whose judgment I value highly, and one of the subjects that happened to be fit for this family-friendly blog—it was a Friday dinner fueled with cocktails and wine—was the noticeable difference between op-eds and even reporting in mainstream journalism on one hand and analysis on the other. Our first conclusion was that the former dug up facts that suited conclusions dictated by ideology and conventional wisdom while the latter tried to let the facts dictate the conclusion.

Confession: We were being unkind and judgmental; we both know many a journalist or talking head who is more than a match for the better-than-average political analyst. (on fact, some of our best friends are…) And you know how badly financial analysts failed their clients during every economic bubble. Perhaps, then, the takeaway is this: The facts, ma’am, just the facts.

But no, the analyst had a further insight: It’s the context created by the analysis that matters, since the consequences of any investment accrue to the investor and the investor alone. At the end of the day, the call is almost trivial,, since it is the responsibility of the investor and the investor alone. The analyst can only provide the context.

Is that a copout? I don’t know. You make the call.

A collateral point that I noticed later is that it’s much easier to agree on the context than on the conclusion. And that, my friends, is the fundamental basis of a civil discourse. JM, with whom I so often have to agree to disagree, will agree to that.

Why Losing the July Election Can Be a Blessing in Disguise to the DPJ

I’ve been saying that the DPJ must dump the SDP in order to bring more coherence to policymaking. But the latest uproar over the joint official announcement on Japan Post by cabinet ministers “Anything But” Shizuka Kamei and Haraguchi to raise the JP deposit limit from 10 million yen to 20 million yen and insurance limit from 13 million to 25 million among other things—I’ll come back to this later if time and professional obligations allow—is yet another piece of proof that the PNP (actually Kamei’s one-man show since Tamisuke Watanuki and Hisaoki Kamei lost their seats in the 2009 Lower House election) is a more expensive drag on the DPJ policy agenda.

Kamei is one of the shrewdest political operators around. He makes outlandish demands, but will settle for what he can get. He has been supremely successful in this game—except for a once-in-lifetime miscalculation in 2005, when Prime Minister Koizumi made good on his threat to toss the LDP Lower House members who voted against his JP privatization bill. Fast-forward to 2010, when the first two rounds of contradictory statements among coalition notables have taken up the better part of the last two days: Kamei’s announcement, the complaints from the other cabinet ministers, Hatoyama’s attempt to play both sides of the debate, Kamei’s counterclaim I had the prime minister’s consent!, Hatoyama and his chief cabinet secretary’s counter-counterstatements---but you get the picture.

However, if the DPJ loses enough seats in the July Upper House election to prevent the current three-party coalition to command a there, the SDP and PNP can become useless, since Komeito—at a minimum likely to break even—will be able to give the DPJ a majority all by its lonesome self. And as I’ve been saying for some time now, Komeito is the natural coalition partner for the DPJ. Now, Komeito may decide to stay out of the cabinet and cooperate on a case by case basis. But how can that be as bad as cohabitation with incompatible bedmates?

I Further Interrupt My Work to Bring You This Warning

Seriously.

I received a very authentic-looking email from the "GOOGLE TEAM" telling me that they were going to block my account for "unusual account activity" and that I'd have to type in my username and password in the sign-in box, the usual one, except that it appeared in the email. The email address of this "GOOGLE TEAM"? NOREPLY at glmail .com! HAR! I rebooted the browser and immediately received it again, so someone (or more likely something) may have planted a cookie or spyware on my PC. Their objective is obvious. Thought I’d pass this on.

So You wanted to Watch Me Quack Like a Duck?

Here you are, courtesy of Temple University Japan Campus—and AGM, who alerted me to it. It’s SFW (and no, it was not directed by Jefery Levy, though he might have given me an appropriate title) but it does have sound.

You have been warned.

Will the Domino Tiles Fall and If So When?

My metaphors of the month: The “gravity well (for the Yoshida Doctrine)”, and the “domino tiles (for the Ubukata-to-Ozawa sequence).”

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I was asked a question related to the second one, namely: When and how likely is it that Yukio Hatoyama will resign—before the July election, or after? My answer was-is: Before the election in late May or early July if, as is highly likely, it becomes clear that the Futenma helicopters revert to their fifteen-year, in situ, default position while the US military embarks on the multiyear redeployment of 8,000 Marines and their dependents to Guam before the Japanese Government has second thoughts about its multibillion dollar send-off. This is guaranteed to leave everyone, including locals whose livelihoods depend on business from the Marines, unhappy. More important to the DPJ, this will create negative headlines and talk show rakings that will push poll numbers down. Hatoyama goes down for squandering political capital on a useless endeavor, taking Ozawa with him by assuming responsibility for his own political financing scandal. There’s a good chance that the better part of this scenario will come to pass, but can Hatoyama take a hint? Nothing that we’ve seen so far suggests that he can, or, on a not unrelated point, that he’s feeling any pressure. Does “blithely nervous” make sense?

After the election, though, the odds of his going any time soon becomes worse since, in my view, the DPJ won’t lose enough seats to make media demands for his resignation so strong that the DPJ can no longer resist.

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.

What, We Worry? Or, China as a Non-Threat, Revisited

This is for the most part a memo that I wrote in the course of certain work that I do. Since it’s not going to see the light of day, I won’t be violating any professional obligations if I post it here.

I have spent the better part of the 21st Century arguing against analyses from the Japanese right and even not-so-right regarding China as a threat that increasingly emanate a sense of urgency. Given this experience, I do not pretend to be able to force on you a radically different perspective. Therefore, I am merely using this opportunity to gather my thoughts and see you what you make of them.

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The Japanese, for better or worse, are not Koreans, not Pakistanis; they are comfortable playing second fiddle. For the first millennia and a half of its existence as a nation, Japan willingly paid (non-tributary) tribute to China. There is no reason to believe that it cannot settle into that East Asian role once again—if it comes to that. In the meantime, after an initial outburst of alarming rhetoric and the high-profile fumbling of the Futenma Air Base issue, Prime Minister Hatoyama has been sucked back into the Yoshida-Doctrine gravity well, naming the United States as Japan’s undisputed No.1 squeeze.

Japan: We’re No.2, so we try less harder.

Pop history aside, China currently does not pose anything approaching an existential threat to Japan. China disputes Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, but has made no overt move to challenge Japan’s possession. It also disputes Japan’s claim that is an island—a charge, if sustained, would cause Japan to lose a big chunk of its EEZ—but has not taken its claims to the Hague. There is a large swath of EEZ/continental shelf that both sides lay claim to, but China has carefully avoided encroaching on the disputed area in developing gas fields there while Japan is unable to do so economically. China, like Japan with regard to the Northern Territories and Takeshima, tacitly recognizes the reality behind the maxim that possession is nine points of the law and sees no advantage in changing the status quo.

Therein lies the falsehood in an Israeli analogy, a juxtaposition of two nations isolated from their neighbors with scant prospects of reconciliation. Israel was born into an overwhelmingly hostile environment. It has improved its security situation considerably since making peace with Egypt and Jordan, but continues to face grave existential threats to this day as a Euro-American—but increasingly nativist—outcrop in a sea of Moslem Arabs. By contrast, the high seas have long served Japan as a natural barrier to China’s imperial outreach. Technology has tamed and shrunk those waters, but has also transformed them into a super-gateway for commerce and interchange. Speaking of which, short of a military blockade, how is China going to seal off Japan’s sea lanes without strangling itself, since both countries are resource-poor economies that depend for the most part on the same trade routes?

Of course it’s always good to plan against capacity, not intent. And we cannot forget the aggressive moves that the Chinese military made in the 1990s against Southeast Asian neighbors regarding disputed islands as they affected claims on seabed resources. Japan does have a substantial navy in its Maritime Self-Defense Force, but just to be sure, all but the left-most politicians in Japan want the US 7th Fleet to stay, if nothing else.

But enough about national security. As I indicated with regard to the Israeli analogy, as China has grown, so has the economic relationship. Some thinkers like to see the rise of China as an undesirable outcome of some kind of a zero-sum game. But most of their arguments confuse ratios with sums. No doubt they will have their followers to the right, but the reality is that, economically speaking, a strong China is a desirable China.

But does China have other ways to crush Japan on the economic front? Could it demand, for example, that ASEAN member countries buy Chinese nuclear reactors in exchange for access to the Chinese market for their own goods? Plausible, if not probable. But remember, China and ASEAN member countries are members of WTO in good standing. More important, a Japanese nuclear power play is a US and quite likely European play as well, as would be an aircraft deal; such is the situation of so many large-scale, high-tech undertakings today. In taking a mercantilist position against Japan, China would be going up against the rest of the West as well. (I have more to same from what I would guess to be the ASEAN perspective, but I’ll leave it to the Southeast Asia analysts to argue the case on its behalf.)

Of course it need not come to that. And it won’t. Akio Toyoda, beleaguered president of the quasi-eponymous Toyota, went straight from Washington to Beijing—not London, not Paris, not Bonn, but Beijing—on a pilgrimage of penitence for his company’s braking mishaps. Make no mistake, Japanese businesses know where the next big thing is coming from, and they are determined not to miss out on it. And where Japanese businesses lead with their money and their time, Japanese politicians will follow. And China will welcome it.

The handwringing that you see on the Japanese right is just that, handwringing. And pundits will do well to avoid association with such thinking.

“Tremors of an Age of the Warring States in International Trade”

Here’s a look into what goes on in the minds of many people here—probably more in the media and political ranks than the business world—regarding the US treatment of the Toyota recalls.

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Yasuhiko Ohta, a member of the Nikkei board of editors, has a column in the 20 March edition entitled “Tremors of an Age of the Warring States in Trade(通商戦国時代の響き)” that criticizes the Japanese Government for staying above the fray on Toyota’s braking problems in the United States. He thinks that “the Toyota bashing in the US carried an element of political and diplomatic problems from the outset,” citing LaHood’s role as a member of the Obama cabinet in “setting fire to the US consumer’s sense of unease through [his] congressional testimony,” the “leading role played by the US Transportation Department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in criticizing Toyota,” and the prominence of congressmen and senators from regions that have strong connections with the UAW and US auto manufacturers as the angry voices in Congress. He goes on to claim that “the pressure leading to trade friction is in the danger zone, where a small incident can lead to a blowup.” He takes President Obama’s State of the Union address and sees Obama’s goal to “double our exports over the next five years” as leading to a push to “take away shares of emerging markets from corporations from other countries by force if necessary.” He closes with the following two parargraphs:

“The curtains are rising on an Age of Warring States in Trade. Shouldn’t the uproar surrounding the recalls be understood within that larger context?

Toyota tripped on its own regarding the safety problems of its product. But it is also true that pressure to trip up competitors is mounting on a level other than safety. Since the Hatoyama administration does not have the diplomatic power against the US to resolve the issue, Toyota must work on the Obama administration on its own.”

Americans probably don’t need me to tell you how incomplete and misguided this analysis is with regard to Toyota’s predicament. But this is no nationalist or conspiracy theorist blogger, but a member of the Nikkei board of editors. So, even discounted for Nikkei’s dislike of the Hatoyama administration and its budget-busting handout policies, you have to believe that this is the kind of thinking that is fairly common in the Japanese establishment. Now, some things that these people miss:

1. LaHood’s personality as a big reason why he wings it, his political cachet as a Republican in a Democratic cabinet as the reason why he is allowed to do so.
2. The NHTSA’s need to cover its butt.
3. The UAW’s grip over the Detroit Three contrasted to its lack of influence over the largely union-free Japanese manufacturers.
4. The countervailing congressional voices from constituencies with Toyota operations.

I hope this helps anyone who has to explain what’s going down over there. And the real trade war story, if there is going to be one, will of course be a US-China story.

Japanese Media Swallow Copenhagen Spin Hook, Line, and Sinker

The headline on the official website reads: A Copenhagen Accord it is. The lead:

“An agreement drawn up Friday night by leaders from the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa has been recognized Saturday morning by the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

However, buried in the actual story:

“The conference of the parties takes note (my italics) of the Copenhagen Accord,” says a final decision.”

In other words, no agreement. Nevertheless, the Japanese media to a man, it seems, uses the word 承認, or “recognition,” to describe the outcome. The Washington Post reporter, for example, has gone to the trouble of actually reading the website report.

So I guess my question is: Why bother spending real money to send functional illiterates to cover an overseas event?

The Persistence of Incumbents and Hatoyama’s New Year Holiday

Slate has a feature entitled “The 10 Worst Predictions for 2009”, and coming in at number six is the widespread media speculation that Prime Minister Gordon Brown would be resigning in the face of the MP expense account scandal. It’s yet another reminder of the staying power of unpopular prime minister in the face of electoral disaster, actual or looming.

I’m referring, of course, to the succession of one-year-and-out LDP Prime Ministers that preceded Prime Minister Hatoyama’s own motley crew of a coalition government. (In hindsight, does that look like a garage sale before they foreclose on the mortgage or what?) Shinzo Abe lost badly in the 2007 Upper House election but the LDP allowed him to keep his job when, very much to most people’s surprise, he decided to forge ahead. After the gods took mercy on the LDP by forcing him out with a debilitating chronic illness took him out, Yasuo Fukuda took over, only to see his own poll numbers fall over the course of a year. Still, he went out on his volition, passing the torch to Taro Aso—under whom the LDP marched willingly to certain defeat in the August Lower House election like a horde of lemmings.

This is something to keep in mind in considering the beleaguered incumbent’s fate. Some of the tabloids are having fun speculating about a Hatoyama resignation, but it will take more than a couple of even significant oops—inevitable given his personality and circumstances—to force his or, more importantly, Ozawa’s, hand. And I predict that Hatoyama is in for a few months of relative calm.

Hatoyam’s weathered the worst, really. His political financing scandal appears to be nearing media closure, as neither his ex-policy secretary nor his mother will be charged criminally. He messed up the Japan-US relationship as much as he could, but he kicked the US military presence in Okinawa down the timeline, and the flap over China—President Hu Jintao’s meet-and-greet for Ozawa and his 143 Diet-member, 600-strong entourage in Beijing and the even more controversial dustup over China’s No.6 securing an audience with the Emperor—was mostly optics. He got sandbagged by PNP leader Shizuka Kamei into coughing up an additional 4.1 trillion for the upcoming supplementary budget bill, when initial plans called for 3 trillion yen, adding to the general impression that he is susceptible to bullying. Still, that’s a done deal; once the FY2010 budget and tax bills are set—admittedly not an easy process, likely to spill over into the new year—Hatoyama will have the numbers to push them through the two Houses against all opposition. The LDP will try to attack the Hatoyama administration for backing off some key campaign promises—for example, the coalition government will impose an income ceiling on the child allowance proposal and is likely to push the abolition of the gasoline tax surcharge back at least one year—but the embarrassment of the about-face will be offset by the sense of relief at the show of realism regarding measures that had been controversial to begin with.

That said, Hatoyama has been tagged, fairly or not, with the notion that he is a waffler, indecisive, easily swayed and susceptible to bullying, yet stubborn*. And of course, everyone believes that it is Ozawa who wears the pants in the family. Unless I’ve missed something big, there doesn’t seem to be much upside to the man. If my guess that the media narrative has pretty much been written for Hatoyama is correct, the DPJ will face the 2010 HC election under a weakened prime minister. Its saving grace is that the LDP is unlikely to present itself as an attractive alternative.

* Some people look at the wild swings in his comments and see someone who is “unstable. I wouldn’t go that far, but one thing that I’ve noticed that does not receive mention in what I’ve read or heard is this: His voice and articulation change drastically with the occasion. He ranges from the near-falsetto crescendos of his inaugural Diet speech to the baritone mumbling when cornered by reporters. I’m not aware of any significant public figure whose emotions are so transparently observable. And he rambles, on and on, leaving his interlocutors to decipher exactly what he meant.

The Hatoyama Cabinet Has Good B Team

Based on what I’ve seen and heard, I’d say that Defense Minister Hiromi Kitazawa, Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Kazuhiro Haraguti (sic), and Economy, Trade and Industry and Minister Masayuki Naoshima have been doing credible jobs of managing their portfolios. Of course the media has generally seen Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii as a steady hand, a welcome contrast to Ozawa, Hatoyama and other more flamboyant headline makers. In fact, it is interesting to me that the top-tier leadership has been found wanting (some more than others) while these second-tier players have flourished. It’s a good reminder that the desirable skill sets for running for office and managing the office are two different things. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ozawa tabbed Haraguti as Hatoyama’s replacement, if it came to that. For Haraguti has something that the other three cabinet members that I mentioned favorably don’t: good relations with Ozawa.

Why the Flip-Flopping on Income Ceiling for Child Allowance?

According to media reports, bowing to fiscal reality, the DPJ is now considering an income ceiling for the child allowance that it had promised in its election manifesto—and had already decided to cut by half for FY2010 for budgetary and other concerns. But the DPJ is not the only one doing a flip-flop. According to Yomiuri and Mainichi, the three-party talks this morning (Dec. 16) to hammer out an agreement on major budget items could not come to a conclusion on this point because the DSP was reluctant to agree to a ceiling. This interesting because the DSP had openly favored an income test at the beginning of the Hatoyama administration two months ago.

Now this may turn out to be an internal schism; SDP leader and Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, Social Affairs, and Gender Equality Mizuho Fukushima and SDP policy head Tomoko Abe, who represented the SDP at the meeting, reportedly do not get along with each other. But it’s also possible that the DSP is doing this just to embarrass the Hatoyama administration. The best DSP bet for surviving the 2010 House of Councilors election, i.e. deny the DPJ or a DPJ-PNP coalition an absolute majority, is to pry away as many floater voters away as possible from the DPJ and hope that they’ll at least abstain if not vote for the DSP. To that end, it should want to go into the election under a weak, unpopular Hatoyama administration, much in the way that the LDP did under the Abe and Aso administrations. Note that the perception that Hatoyama can be bullied makes defiance easier.

The DPJ and PNP will continue to test the limits of the coalition by doing their best to show up the Prime Minister and the DPJ. This is a part of the political dynamics that bears watching.

Namahage, Meet Krampus

Krampus, meet Namahage.

Happy holidays.

GHG Emissions and Demographics; Japan and the US

Prime Minister Hatoyama announced that he would push for a GHG reduction target that would reduce net Japanese emissions to 75% of 1990 levels—the equivalent of 67% of the 2005 level. Caveat: the Japanese target is contingent on major fence-sitters—read US and China—coming up with their own comparable sacrifices. The Obama administration has just come out with its own goal that aims to reduce US emissions to 85% of the 2005 level, or 97% of the 1995 level. The Japanese figures look far more impressive than the corresponding US figures. Does this mean that Hatoyama has far greater ambitions than Obama?

What’s missing from the ongoing debate in Japan is the demographics perspective. The Japanese population plateaued in the post-bubble years and peaked in 2005 at 3% above the 1990 level so it will be back to the 1990 level when 2020 rolls around. The US population, in contrast, was at 21% above the 1990 level in 2005, and is expected to be 38% above the 1990 level in 2020. Do the arithmetic and you’ll find that, on a per capita basis, the Japan target represents a 25% reduction from the 1990 level and a 33% reduction from the 2005 level, while the US target represents 30% and 33% reductions respectively. In per capita terms—the most equitable yardstick according to many pundits as well as most developing countries lacking oil export capacities—the US target is arguably more ambitious than the Japanese one.

There are too other important factors that determine existing energy/GHG-emissions profiles to say anything definite about the relative merits of the goals that state actors have been pushing on behalf of their constituencies. Still, a cursory look at the demographics indicates that the Obama administration’s target is nothing to sneer at compared to the corresponding figure for the Hatoyama administration.

”Hatoyama vs. Obama”? Doesn’t the Emperor Count?

The following is adapted from my response to a visiting scholar whose friend back in the US wanted to know if there was any veracity to this article in Shūkan Bunshun, a weekly general interest magazine whose sensationalism is around 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 in this publishing category. The scholar notes that the Free Republic is a far right blog. He himself comes across as a moderate Republican—hey, if you’re recruiting, HA and LG…

Short answer: Who knows? But leaving aside my views on the veracity of independent (i.e. not published by the major dailies) weeklies, including the authenticity of their sources, the article boils down to two points:

1) The Hatoyama administration is dithering over Futenma because the DPJ fears the SDP.
2) The two sides got into a diplomatic pissing match because Obama administration is pissed off at the Hatoyama administration for dithering over Futenma.

1) is only partly true. SDP’s internal dynamics—the election manifesto, the leftish elements, its unanimously anti-military base Okinawa contingent, Hatoyma’s personality, Okada’s personal attachment to the Kadena option—have at least as much to do with the confusion as the SDP’s position does. To look at it from another angle, I don’t think this is a coalition breaker for the DPJ.

As for 2), this is the first time that I heard speculation that Obama had delayed his departure one day to express his displeasure. I’m sure there has been some speculation about Hatoyama’s motives. Me? I think a tit-for-tat would not be conducive to a satisfactory resolution of the problem. But then, maybe none of the advisors on either side is smarter than your average kindergartener.

I can think of perfectly legitimate reasons for Obama not leaving Washington immediately after a top-priority, inconclusive NIC session with no easy conclusions, leaving most of the principals behind to wrestle with the question in his absence. (Now that would have been Kobe beef for the right-wing media/blogs.) Of course anything is pure speculation unless one has access to his full itinerary—which I assume that the Japanese writer is likewise not privy to.

As for Hatoyama, the reason given in Tokyo was that he left because he didn’t want to skip the APEC inaugural dinner. And what’s wrong with that? So he should have accommodated the last-minute changes in Obama’s itinerary by staying on for the last, ceremonial leg of Obama’s visit and given up engaging, as a newly-minted Japanese PM, in Asia-Pacific summitry in Singapore? What kind of message would that have sent to Japan’s neighbors, especially when he would be hosting next year’s APEC summit? The clincher in my view is our Emperor, who, from a ceremonial perspective, is better than a run-of-the-mill [head of state]. The Chinese authorities have been using their Hu-Wen tag team (and odd-couple Jiang-Zhu before that) to great logistical advantage; now, Moscow is putting Medvedev and Putin to the same task. True, the Emperor has no power—but does Dmitry?

Occam’s Razor, I think.

That said, if some people want to take a single tabloid article as gospel, that's their problem, not mine.

I Should Be Responding to the People Who Stuck with Me…

But I’m weary to my bones, so—and the slacker that I am and to save LCH the trouble of googling—for those of you who come to my blog not named DM… I give you… Jonte Moaning! Channeling J.P. Polnareff?

FYI, that’s his real name, Jonte Moaning, Jefferson High School, class of 2001.

There's Less to U.S.-Japanese Frictions than Meets the Eye

From The Call, a little perspective on Japan-U.S. relations as things heat up around troops realignment. It got out there a little more slowly than I’d hoped because of unavoidable circumstances that I won’t go into here, but it’s not as if it’s already dated, so there you are.

Here’s an earlier piece if you want to know what our thoughts were on the outlook immediately after the DPJ victory. What’s striking to me is that on both issues (refueling operations, Futenma), the Hatoyama Cabinet has been consistently sending mixed signals that add to the problems. I think that I see this elsewhere, and it’s usually a bad thing. If Hatoyama is not careful, the media and hence the voting public will begin dealing with him as a continuation of the recent string of ineffectual prime ministers.