Pre-election Hindsight

Here are a few thoughts around the outcome according to the polls, which has the LDP-Komeito coalition within reach of a House of Representatives supermajority that would allow it to override any legislative vetoes by the House of Councillors.

The anti-nuclear message has not taken. At the beginning of the race, Toru Hashimoto and the pre-merger-JRP was solidly anti-nuclear. So were Ichiro Ozawa’s DPJ refugees; likewise Your Party. But Hashimoto lost momentum when he recruited a motley crew of opportunists from the Your Party, DPJ and LDP, and compounded his problems by muddling the RP policy platform when he engineered the mancrush merger with the pro-nuclear (and anti-TPP) Shintaro Ishihara and his (political) generational cohorts. Ozawa sweet-talked Yumiko Kada, the anti-nuclear Shiga governor, and her squeaky-clean political persona into fronting his movement, but it merely exposed Kada as an artless, not-ready-for-primetime, one-issue phenomenon. And Your Party never managed to reach escape velocity. And, the (sorta) pro-nuclear LDP is winning by a landslide. Kudos to Chris Winkler.

The Cassandra Award goes to Ozawa, who reluctantly left the DPJ only because his followers were panicking. His innermost premonitions have been vindicated so to speak; his minions are likely to do worse than the DPJ, relatively speaking. That’s understandable. The preponderance of rookies and undead in their midst meant that they would have hit below average if they’d stayed. Still, you have to think that both they and the DPJ would have done better overall if they’d stayed together, since they would not have had to run against each other in the single-member districts and Noda would have been able to project a stronger sense of leadership.

Short of resigning and handing the reins to Goshi Hosono—and not to some retread—Noda had no choice, once Ozawa and his minions defected. A gradual but steady recovery in the opinion polls is always likely in a politically uneventful environment, but how do you keep that up until the HoR term ends in September when your majority is slipping away and you don’t even control the HoC? As it is, he caught the Third Force movements ill-prepared; that benefited the DPJ more than the LDP, which relies less on the floater vote and more on its fixed support base (including the Sokagakkai vote that can mostly be swung to the LDP’s SMD candidates). To repeat, Noda should have passed the torch, but politicians are a famously optimistic lot.

And no, I didn’t think that the LDP would be doing nearly as well as it is doing in the media surveys. It took what little courage I have to forecast a likely LDP majority after it took a dive in the Dec. 1-2 polls. I’m not going against the flow in the other direction now and take a punt on the LDP being disappointed with a result well short of the high 280s, the minimum necessary for a chance at a coalition supermajority. The undecided have, if anything, moved in the LDP’s favor and I can’t see how the remainder will shift significantly in the other direction—if they bother to vote at all.

The Post-Election Outlook

Here’s a memo that I whipped up yesterday morning for an event that took place today. Some of it I didn’t use because I couldn’t, some of it I didn’t because I did not keep my wits about me due to a misunderstanding on my part over the substance of the session. So here it is, their Qs (UPR be damned), my As.

Q. Three years after the historic election of the DPJ, Japan's liberal-left experiment appears dead in the water. The DPJ will be lucky to survive the Dec. 16th election, which is expected to produce a shift to the right. Has Japan's brief flirtation with a 2-party system ended and are we now in for a period of autocracy?

Yes, there was a marked shift to the right in the lineup of LDP candidates to replace Tanigaki, but you are talking mostly about foreign affairs and national security. Domestically, maybe a few more words about national symbols and traditional values, but the Abe administration is not going to send goons to smash Asahi Shimbun headquarters, have the riot police break up the anti-nuclear squatter village in front of METi… but you get the point; authoritarianism my foot. Several factors constrain Abe’s nationalist inclinations on the external front: 1) the permanent need for the pacifist Komeito—read Sokagakkai, since it’s the Sokagakkai votes and Komeito seats, in that order, that the LDP needs—as a coalition partner, 2) the permanent need for the United States as a national security partner, 3) the lack of public enthusiasm for anything more than a reactive stance towards external threats; and 4) Abe’s own cautious character makeup. There’s no reason to believe that a two-aprty system is the default mode for Japan, let alone any democracy lacking a sharp national-values divide. One thing for sure, though, is that authoritarianism is not in the works.

Will Japan stick with two-party democracy, or shift more towards autocracy?

What about muddling through under the current, very democratic constitution under a variety of configurations? The need to appeal to a broad range of constituencies to win elections makes it difficult for the DPJ or any Third-Force movement to really separate itself from the LDP-Komeito coalition policy-wise, while the need to keep Komeito onside makes it difficult for the LDP to follow the more nationalist or any autocratic inclinations of some of its members. And of course big business—all businesses—will also help constrain any administration that wants to engage in truly counterproductive external engagements.

What are future policy priorities?

First and foremost are the challenges of Japan’s rapidly aging demographics. The problem is economic and fiscal, and political too, since it’s one-man, one-vote. Prime Minister Hashimoto recognized the problem but didn’t last long enough to do much about it, Prime Minister Koizumi put a partial cap on expenditures but demurred on revenue—that is, the consumption tax—but it was mostly kick the can down the road after that until Prime Minister Kan came along and popped the consumption tax question. Now, both the DPJ and the LDP-Komeito coalition have gotten behind social security and tax reform. Let’s hope that they muster the courage to face up to the need to raise the age for pension eligibility, raise copayment requirements for the elderly, and do other things that help contain expenditures. Then there’s the need to battle vested interests that stand in the way of reform. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Second, there’s the need to determine how we engage the global economy. The Doha Round is dead, has been for a couple of years, so it’s the free trade agreement route for the foreseeable future. If we don’t jump into the TPP negotiations now, we’ll be faced with a take-it-or-leave it situation a few years down the line. The timidity of the campaign rhetoric from the DPJ and the LDP-Komeito coalition worries me; I hope they all get their act together after the election. There’s the Japan-China-South Korea and Japan-South Korea FTAs too. Let’s hope that a Prime Minister Abe listens to Keidanren instead of the voice in his head—it’s certainly not his grandfather’s voice, whatever you may choose to believe—and follows his tendency to walk softly.

Nuclear power is actually much less of an issue for the foreseeable future. Construction resumed on two nuclear reactors under the Noda administration and will continue under an Abe administration, but no other nuclear reactors will be constructed in the foreseeable future. Nuclear reactors sitting directly on live fault lines were going to be decommissioned under the Noda administration, and an Abe administration is unlikely to push legislation that would be necessary to overturn decisions by the Nuclear Regulation Authority. The others will come back online, one by one, once the NRA goes into full-operation mode.

How can the media engender constructive political debate?

If all media outlets behaved like the Economist, we would certainly have constructive political debate. But they can’t, for obvious reasons. And it would be a very boring world if they did. To be sure, media outlets, at least the mainstream daily newspapers, usually make an honest effort on the substance, the obvious ideological bias and all, but their resources are limited. And the parameters that shape media behavior are not likely to change dramatically in the near future—maybe less newspaper and broadcast TV revenue but what else?—so what you see now is mostly what you’ll get, and the politicians and the members of the chattering class like me will have to take media behavior as a given, and mold their own thoughts and actions around that. Some politicians can handle it, others can’t. I think that the bright minds in a political party that has serious national aspirations should take some time off to study the media and come up with an operation manual on how to engage the media.

Can the public have a stronger say in Japan’s future, via direct democracy?

I assume that you are talking about referendums. I am partial to representative democracy, since I do not trust the public, myself included, to make a truly informed decision on policy issues. And the policy issues are more numerous and complicated and there’s vastly more information out there and we all have more important things to do than to read up on them, like our lives. For now, I’m willing to leave most matters to politicians who I hope broadly share my policy preferences supported by the bureaucracy and non-governmental experts to make the decisions for me, and I suspect that it will be that way for the foreseeable future.

Is a two-party system suitable for Japan?

I don’t see the configuration of political parties as a normative question. Regionalism, ethnicity, religion, castes…the tribal urges that produce multiple, enduring cleavages in parliamentary politics has been weak in post-WW II Japan. Perhaps that is why Japan has been under a quasi-two party system since the 1955 Big Bang that produced the LDP and the Socialist Party. Do we now have a more or less viable two-party system? We’ll know that we do if the Abe administration fails the competence test and the DPJ manages to make a comeback in the event. Two major parties sharing a consensus on the broad parameters of the main issues their solutions consistently challenged by the need to prove their competence? It certainly could be worse.

Presidential or parliamentary politics?

Isn’t a twisted Diet enough? Does this really matter? A prime minister can do as much to mold his nation’s future as a president can if he/she has control of the legislature. If he/she doesn’t, it’s the same thing. Japan does not need two chambers as long as we have a free press.

Does the media hinder Japanese democracy?

If all media outlets behaved like the E…….., we would certainly have constructive political debate. But they can’t, for obvious reasons. And it would be a very boring world if they did. To be sure, media outlets, at least the mainstream daily newspapers, usually make an honest effort on the substance, the obvious ideological bias and all, but their resources are limited. And the parameters that shape media behavior are not likely to change dramatically in the near future—maybe less newspaper and broadcast TV revenue but what else?—so what you see now is mostly what you’ll get, and the politicians and the members of the chattering class like me will have to take media behavior as a given, and mold their own thoughts and actions around that. Some politicians can handle it, others can’t. I think that the bright minds in a political party that has serious national aspirations should take some time off to study the media and come up with an operation manual on how to engage the media.

How to make voters speak out

The voters speak with their votes. To be a better voter, it’s probably more important to listen than to speak. So the politicians and the chattering class share the responsibility to properly inform the public. More generally, though, I am partial to representative democracy, since I do not trust the public, myself included, to make a truly informed decision on most policy issues. And the policy issues are more numerous and complicated and there’s vastly more information out there and we all have more important things to do than to read up on them, like our lives. For now, I’m willing to leave most matters to politicians who I hope broadly share my policy preferences supported by the bureaucracy and non-governmental experts to make the decisions for me, and I suspect that it will be that way for the foreseeable future.

Some Thoughts around Kim Jong Un’s Yoshihiko Noda Pin Down

I do my best not to be judgmental on this blog, since the people that I’d like to be judgmental about typically do not read it. Instead, I do my best to help people understand things that interest me. Now, there’s something that has been on my mind the past week and fermenting on my hard disk there for almost as long, and it’s been hard to keep myself from ranting about the silliness of it all. So, before I drink too much tonight and write things that I’ll regret later—been there, done that—I’m going to post the following, then make dinner and settle down to watch Sanfrecce Hiroshima (hopefully) demolish Al-Ahly.

North Korea’s “de facto missile” has yet to be launched, but has already scored two hits: Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, and Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura. Let me explain.

The North Korean government notified the governments of Japan and the Philippines, the two countries in the way, governments of its intent to fire a satellite launch rocket, providing information regarding the schedule—between 7am and 12am December 10 through 22—and its potential flight path, which includes Japanese and Philippine airspaces. The Japanese government has duly moved two land-based, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 systems* to Ishigaki Island and dispatched three AEGIS-equipped destroyers to the vicinity.**

Now, that is to be expected. True, the chances are extremely small that the “de facto missile” will threaten to hit Japanese (or Philippine) territory in the case of an accident, since there will be lots and lots of water and very little land in the vicinity of its intended flight area and there is material for only so many chunks of debris large enough to be worth making sure that it will fall in a shower of bits and pieces instead of their original sizes. But how could the Self-Defense Force pass up an opportunity to conduct exercises in a real-world situation? For good measure, the rest of the Patriot systems stationed in the Tokyo area have also been put on alert, just in case perhaps, but more likely because it’s a good opportunity to test the overall system.

Let’s hope that the North Koreans get it over with soon, though, since the resituated systems can go back to protecting the potential targets, which are now open to a surprise attack from the more than 200 Nodong ballistic missiles, any of which may be carrying a nuclear warhead.***

So far so good. But here’s the truly stupid part. Prime Minister Noda has decided to stay in his Tokyo office from seven to noon from December 10 until the North Korean government launches the three-stage rocket. Now, the launch is not some unforeseen emergency that requires on-the-fly, high level decisions but an event that can and should be fully prepared for since it has been announced to take place within certain parameters using broadly familiar technology. All that the Noda should be doing when the event occurs is to make sure that he reads from the appropriate prewritten announcement, depending on the actual outcome. Something really bad may happen, say a botched blastoff that sends it in the direction of one of the main Japanese islands. But the prime minister’s presence in his office will be meaningless in that case since the response should be instantaneous and automatic, instead of being formed through a back-and-forth between the prime minister’s office and the relevant ministers on one hand and the operational arms of the government on the other.

As a US national security expert whom I talked to about this on Friday more or less said, does anyone think that US presidents ever refrain from campaigning during the last two years of his terms just because there’s a national security threat afoot. For Japan, the North Korean launch is only remotely and tenuously and certainly not immediately the case? And what if the North Korean government had announced that the window would be open until January, not December, 17? February? March? What if it left schedule open-ended? There must be a technological limit to this since the Paektusan-1 SLV/Taepodong 1 cannot be kept loaded with liquid fuel forever, but you get the idea.

But that is exactly what Noda is doing, and the self-restraint may well last till the end of the election campaign unless the North Korean government decides to take no chances and makes use of the first favorable opportunity for the launch. For the Japanese election will be held on December 16, while the first anniversary of Kim Jong Il’s death and the vote for the South Korean presidency, the two most likely events with which a launch would be associated from a propaganda viewpoint, fall on December 17 and 19 respectively. As it is, the vigil may last even longer, since there is information emanating from North Korea that the launch may be delayed beyond the self-imposed December 22 deadline.

It’s not hard to see the reason why he’s adopting this stance. Miscommunication and delays, or perception thereof, regarding any unexpected events involving anything related, directly or otherwise, to the national security framework has been poison for incumbent administrations. Here’s an extreme example. In 2001, a US submarine surfacing off Oahu hit and sank a Japanese high school training vessel, killing five teachers and four fishery students. Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who was playing golf at the time he was notified of the accident, was severely criticized for not stopping play and tending to the issue. This was not really a national security issue, but it was treated as if it were one anyway by the national media because it involved the US military. If the collision had occurred with a civilian vessel, it would have been treated as an ordinary, if tragic, accident that did not require the prime minister’s immediate action.

The opposition is always ready to capitalize on these events and the media is more than happy to jump on the bandwagon to find fault with incumbent administrations.**** So Noda feels that he cannot take any chances, and I think that he’s right, politically speaking. You could try to explain the circumstances and make a stand, but that’s hard to do when your party has done its best to make the administration bad when it had its hands on the other end of the stick as the opposition.

As it is, Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura proved this point when he told the media that he want the North Koreans to do it as soon as possible so that the Noda administration could get back to serious campaigning. The opposition immediately went on the attack, and no one, not the media, not even Fujimura himself, stood up for common sense.

* They must be the systems already deployed to Okinawa Island, where most of the US and Japanese military facilities in Okinawa are located.

** The United States is also using two AEGIS-equipped destroyers to monitor the launch and may deploy two more.

*** I assume that the Nodong outnumbers those antiballistic missile projectiles and is vastly more numerous that those that can be launched in time to have a reasonable chance of intercepting them. I also assume that we have no way of determining which, if any, such missiles being launched in our direction carry nuclear warheads.

**** As it is, Mori still believes that the media was out to get him in 2001, and I think that there’s a measure of truth to that. Media coverage is affected when the journalists doing the coverage dislikes the person being covered. This has been observed in the US media and could be a universal phenomenon, since most journalists are human.

Some Thoughts around an Imminent DPJ Collapse; Plus, More on the DPJ-LDP Lineup Comparison

Sankei says the DPJ could fall below 100 seats while Yomiuri says that it has managed to secure around 30 regional proportional district seats (RPD)—surely based on the Yomiuri poll—and leading in only 10 single member districts (SMD) and running neck-and-neck in another 21. When a newspaper says what Sankei is saying at this point in the campaign, it means that the DPJ is going to miss 100 by a wide margin. How large? Say the DPJ wins half of the 21 in which it is co-frontrunner and give it 35 RPD seats by extrapolating from the Yomiuri and Asahi polls; the total comes to around 55 seats. By comparison, in the 2005 postal reform election, the previous DPJ nadir, the count dropped to 113 and Katsuya Okada had to go down.

The LDP-Komeito coalition appears to have a core support base of a little over 1/3rd of the effective votes (LDP 1/4+, Komeito 1/10+) while the DPJ has 1/5th in the bag at most. Let’s say that the Communists, SDP, and Ozawa have 1/10th between them. That leaves 1/3rd of the effective votes unaligned, roughly half of them, or 1/6th overall, unlikely to go to the LDP-Komeito coalition under any circumstances. If someone can somehow find a way to add this 1/6th to the DPJ’s 1/5th, you have a roughly 1/3rd of the total, on a par with the LDP-Komeito coalition. That would be a pretty stable two-party/coalition system. But with the emergent opposition divided ideologically temperamentally between what is likely to be the DPJ leadership and the Ishihara-Hashimoto mutual man-crush, the chances of that happening any time soon are slim. And the Big Bang that we’ve been waiting for looks distant if the LDP-Komeito wins big.

In the meantime, a few more details on how the two main parties have been lining up their candidates.

In 2009, the LDP and DPJ fielded 289 and 271 SMD candidates respectively. This time around, the numbers are down slightly to LDP 288 and DPJ 264, modest drop-offs, really, especially for the DPJ, given its massive defections over the past year.

Or are they? Kunio Hatoyama is receiving local LDP support to seek reelection as an independent and will almost surely rejoin the LDP if he wins. That makes the 2009 and 2012 slates a wash. Moreover, Komeito has increased its SMD candidates from eight to nine. So the LDP-Komeito coalition has at least 299 out of the 300 SMDs effectively covered. On the other side, the DPJ is no longer ceding a handful of SMDs to former coalition partner SDP while accommodating far fewer candidates (down to three from nine in 2009) from coalition partner PNP. In short, the LDP-Komeito coalition continues to have most if not all—I suspect that there’s an independent candidate somewhere that I can find if I looked hard enough—of the 300 SMDs covered, while the DPJ-led coalition’s loss is much larger than it looks at first sight.

And the RPDs further highlight the DPJ disadvantage. The SMD candidates have taken out zombie insurance in the form of parallel regional proportional district (RPD) candidacies. But the DPJ “undead” candidates, the RPD-only candidates, who are more like index futures purchased by political parties at 6 million yen a pop, has plummeted from 59 to 3 while the LDP undead has swelled from 37 to 49.

Mainstream Media Calling a Liberal Democratic Party Majority for the House of Representatives Election

Yomiuri Shimbun (paid subscription wall) has run one of its massive pre-election polls (Dec. 4-5, 101,000 eligible voters) and precinct-by-precinct surveys and says that the LDP is on its way to a decisive simple majority in the House of Representatives. If that holds true to December 16, when the Japanese voters go to the polls, then my earlier assessment will be vindicated. The Asahi report (likewise) says the same thing, The Sankei survey is more modestly headlined, forecasting an LDP-Komeito majority, but the actual numbers, again, say that the LDP will win a majority on its own.

That said, the LDP-Komeito coalition needs 320 seats for a supermajority to override a House of Councillors veto. Is that possible? Komeito should max out at 30, 31 if the LDP really busts out in the regional proportional district (RPD) vote and helps one more Komeito RDP candidate in the process. And Kunio Hatoyama, the independent single member district (SMD) candidate who should be readmitted to rejoin the LDP after the election, may pull out a victory. And even in this best-case scenario, the LDP needs 289 seats to make a supermajority coalition.

That’s literally incredible. Collaboration with the DPJ on the social security and tax reform and a case-by-case, collaborator-by-collaborator approach to legislation by necessity remains the most likely post-election outlook.

Komeito ‘Rithmetic

In the 2005 House of Representatives (HoR) general election, Komeito contested nine single member district (SMD) seats and won eight of them, gaining a total of 981,105 votes in the process. In the 2009 election, the numbers were eight, zero, and 782,984 votes. I’ll save you the arithmetic, but drop-off in votes gained proportionally approximates the drop-off in aggregate LDP votes in the regional proportional districts (RPD). This makes sense, since the LDP always throws its support behind the Komeito SMD candidates. Komeito suffered a much more modest decline in the RPDs, where it is supposed to have received some LDP help as well,, resulting in a 2005-2009 decline from 23 to 21. So how’s it going to do this time around?

The RPDs are likely to yield more or less the same proportion of votes in support of the LDP-Komeito coalition. But more parties will be contesting those votes, increasing the likelihood of wasted votes. Let’s give Komeito 21-22 RPD seats.

In the SMDs, the LDP is likely to be about as much absolute help as they were in 2009. However, the nine Komeito candidates only have to run faster than the guys behind them, and the DPJ candidates will be backsliding. In fact, two of those SMDs won’t have any DPJ candidates. Some of the Komeito candidates will also be running against incumbents who defected from the DPJ to the Ozawa camp. But none of them will have to run against candidates from Hashimoto-Ishihara’s ascendant Japan Restoration Party because of a preexisting arrangement between Hashimoto and Komeito through its Osaka chapter. This is particularly significant because six of Komeito’s nine SMD candidates are running in the Sokagakkai stronghold Kinki/Kansai area, where Hashimoto currently dominates, while two more are running in the Tokyo-Kanagawa metropolitan area, home court for Ishihara. 7-8 wins looks reasonable to me.

That’s a range of 28-30 seats for Komeito, a significant improvement from 2009 results and good news for the LDP-Komeito coalition in the first round ballot for a new prime minister after the HoR election. Mind you, this is a very rough estimate. But it should serve as a freeware outline on which you can project more detailed analyses.

LDP Undead Measure of Its Optimism

LDP 43, DPJ 3; that’s the score for the number of “undead” candidates, the regional proportional districts (RPD)-only candidates that a party tacks on at the end of its RPD list in case just in case it wins so many seats in the single member districts (SMD) in the region that it runs out of zombies to fill its RPD quota and has to cede the remainder to the party next in line. (SMD losers fill in the party RPD quota in the order of the ratio of that candidate’s SMD votes to the winner’s SMD votes.) A zombie candidacy requires a 3 million yen forfeitable deposit for the SMD bid, plus an extra 3 million deposit for the RPD insurance. An undead candidacy is more expensive (a 6 million deposit per head to be precise), more likely to be subject to forfeit, and less likely to result in a Diet seat. Thus, the number of undead candidates is a useful indicator of the confidence on the part of the party leadership.

The LDP apparently feels particularly sanguine about its prospects in conservative strongholds Chugoku and Shikoku regions, with zombie-undead ratios of 18:8 for 11 RPD seats and 13:5 for 6 RPD seats respectively. By contrast, it is being extremely parsimonious with its deposit money in the Kanto, Chubu, and Kinki metropolitan. Indeed, in Kinki, where the Hashimoto-Ishihara lovechild looks likely to top the voting, it’s 38:1 for 29 RPD seats.

Internet Campaigning

The media has noticed that Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, the hyperactive co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party (JRP), has continued tweeting about the issues on his popular Twitter account after the December 4 public notice of the upcoming House of Representatives election. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has ruled that any text or image posted on the internet constitutes a document or drawing under the highly restrictive Public Offices Election Act, effectively banning new content, including renewal during the official campaign period, on homepages, blogs, and, more recently, Twitter accounts of the candidates and the political parties that field them. Hashimoto claims that he is not covered by the ruling, but there is a preexisting opinion from MIC—more specifically since the election is under way. However, the National Board of Elections—that the ban covers the internet activities of the members of the leadership of the parties.

Going mostly unnoticed, though, is a pandemic of violations. Kenneth McElwain, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, has spotted the DPJ and LDP, not to mention the JRP* releasing new information on their websites after the public notice. They cannot be doing this out of ignorance because internet campaigning has been a major issue for some time, with the established political parties deeply involved in the debate.

Most likely, they are doing it because they can. Over the years, the Boards of election have issued numerous warnings to offenders, but no candidate, no party, including the most persistent and blatant cases, have actually been prosecuted. Public opinion, and that includes the mainstream media, is near-unanimously in favor of allowing internet campaigning. Given this backdrop, party leaders must have figured that there would be plenty of benefit and little downside risk if they ignored the ban, as long as the substance stayed within legal and acceptable boundaries.

Your Party by contrast is respecting the ban, according to McElwain. Fuddy-duddies! Could this straight-laced behavior be indicative of a broader defect that has limited their appeal despite the fact that they were the first true Third Force movement and remain the least promiscuous? Those types are never the most popular kids in class IYKWIAS.

* The Japan Communist Party, for another, has new content today (Dec. 5). 

The LDP Is Likely to Win a House of Representatives Simple Majority

If the weekend polls are a foreshadow of the eventual outcome, the LDP is likely to be limited to around 30% of the aggregate popular vote in the proportional districts—and still win a simple majority in the December 17 House of Representatives (HoR). Even if it falls short of a majority, the 30 or so seats that Komeito will win should be more than enough to secure Shinzo Abe the prime minister’s office with the first HoR ballot. This means that the LDP-Komeito coalition does not need a third wheel that would create governance issues. However, it will have enough trouble getting legislation done in any case since it should fall well short of the 320 seats needed for a supermajority to override a House of Councillors veto. And with a low percentage of the popular vote, claims of a popular mandate will not generate much sympathy in the media. What follows is an explanation of the cursory look at the figures and the reasoning behind my conclusion.

In the five HoR general elections (1996, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2009) under the mixed, single member district (SMD)-regional proportional district (RPD) electoral system, the LDP has taken as many as 48.5% (233) of the 480 seats while winning only 28.81% of the RPD votes (2000). This was possible because the LDP’s SMD candidates receive an aggregate 10 percentage-point bump or so from the well-disciplined Sokagakkai supporters of Komeito. In the upcoming election, this would give an LPD SMD candidate 40% or so of the vote. That is a pretty high threshold for a DPJ candidate, who under the same assumptions has an average of 25% of the votes. Or a JRP candidate with 15%. The LDP dropped to 25% (119) of the seats with 26.73% of the RPD votes in 2009. But that was because the DPJ was strong enough to sweep 42.21% and 47.43% of the SMD and RPD votes respectively. The JRP is likely to do well enough in its Kansai stronghold to easily emerge as the top party there, and JRP-Your Party coordination will produce some synergy between their SMD candidates’ lists, at a minimum reducing the number of conflicting candidates. However, neither of these parties has the kind of control over their RPD supporters that, say, Komeito or the Communist Party has or a large roster of candidates to take full advantage of its underlying support. Moreover, the JRP is a recent concoction hastily cobbled together in anticipation of the election out of mainly DPJ refugees and long-in-the-tooth LDP exiles bringing together different policy agendas and political styles, making coordination with a third party all the more tricky. Given this backdrop, only a significant lead by the DPJ over the LDP in the underlying support would knock the LDP from pole position when the Diet reconvenes immediate after the election to select a new prime minister. There is a disproportionately large segment of the unaligned voters that has yet to show an RPD preference for any of the 12 parties. But that is more likely to break for one of the Third Force movements, not the DPJ, and the JRP (or Your Party or the Ozawa-Tada alliance for that matter) does not have the kind of national SMD coverage that would enable it to fully cash in on that increasingly unlikely bounty.

Campaigning, “Calligraphy”, and the 21st Century

My good friend Michael Cucek has posted images of the handwriting of the eleven party leaders taking part in a joint press conference at the National Press Club on Saturday. He has a brief description of the role of the handwriting exercise at events featuring celebrities and other public figures, so read it first if you haven’t done so already.

Okay? Now…

The first thing that strikes one’s eyes is the enormous variance in style and the sheer awfulness in terms of proficiency. Mind you, with “sheer awfulness,” I am averaging out skill levels that range from passable to permanent retinal damage-bad. Shintaro Ishihara’s handwriting does appear to show vestiges of oriental calligraphy—it’s hard to make out with the small lettering and the low resolution—but still little sign that any training that he received as a child ever took. I assure you that had a similar event taken place forty years ago, most of the participants would have been writing fluidly and capably in the formal version of traditional calligraphy…and doing it with ink and brush, not felt pen. In fact, a party leader with poor handwriting might have called in sick and sent in a stand-in, except perhaps a progressive or a Kakuei Tanaka-type, who could/would have worn the lack of skill as a badge of their humble beginnings. In fact, it is telling that none of the party leaders are embarrassed at their poor (felt-)penmanship. Martial arts and the ethnic wardrobe are not the only traditions that the post-WW II world has confined to the realm of the aficionado.

It is ironic that Shinzo Abe, the values conservative, does the worst job of them all with his angular, uneven, formless scrawling. Indeed, it is enough to make one wonder if he does any writing at all. There is clearly a need here for real action in the interests of traditional values; in the meantime, I will assume that he wrote his book on his personal computer. Ah, yes, the keyboard. That, of course, is why people can’t “write” anymore. Why I can barely sign my name, and it’s a little early for you-know-what.

The second thing to note is that the cardboards are sidelong rectangles, not the standard square types that are sold in the stationary sections of retail establishments. The sidelong rectangle must be a relatively recent media confection, almost surely to better employ the TV screen in close-up mode. But the square remains the mainstay of the demand for graduation and other farewell occasions, as well as for celebrity autographs that are prominently displayed in modest eateries.

This, incidentally, provides the jumping-off point for a plausible explanation for why Ishihara wrote vertically, instead of left-to-right like the other ten, on a sidelong piece of cardboard. He became the first true celebrity author of the post-WW II era, long before he formally entered politics.* He and, perhaps more so, his actor brother were superstars of contemporary pop culture. As such, he must have written one line or other from his best-selling novels on hundreds upon hundreds of square cardboards and affixed his name to them over the years. And of course, novels—and the standard printed format for novels and many other manuscripts—remain for the most part stubbornly vertical, as do regular newspapers and their weekly magazine counterparts. Ishihara almost surely has rarely written anything from left to right. Moreover, he most likely was personally unfamiliar with the variety/talk show routine, where noisome hosts whip out oblong cardboard pieces for the celebrity participants or party leaders to write on. As a larger-than-life governor of Tokyo he could dictate his own terms of appearance on the small screen, whereas he now has to endure the peer-to-peer ignominies that national party leaders experience, even thrive on, on an everyday basis.

* The après-guerre and third-wave novelists generally received much or all of their education during the long war (1931-1945) and were old enough to be conscripted or imprisoned during that period.

Still More on Ozawa’s Hail Mary

1.    Yukiko Kada, Governor of Shiga Prefecture, is Ozawa’s new party’s Representrative. According to the Asahi Shimbun, Testunari Iida, a nuclear engineer turned environmental activist, is Acting Representative. Three members of the just-dissolved House of Representatives have been appointged as Deputy Representatives: Maskao Mori, Ozawa’s hatchet woman, agricultural enthusiast Masahiko Yamada, who left the DPJ over the Noda administration’s support for the TPP negotiations, and Tomoko Abe, who left what remains of the old Socialist Party after what appears to be longstanding personality clash with its radicalish leader Mizuho Fukushima. The Director-General office, which typically handles the finances of a party and the selection of its electoral candidates, is being left vacant.

2.    In a joint conversation open to the press between Kada and Ozawa, Kada made it clear that it was all Ozawa’s idea, and that Ozawa did all the courting.

Point 1 says that Ozawa is making a full-court press for the women vote by putting three out of five leadership positions in female hands. He knows that women consistently value safety issues (including the restart of nuclear power plants) more highly than men. He also makes it clear that he’s the one in charge by leaving the SG position vacant while he himself remains a party member without portfolio.

Now, I’d like to think that the Japanese public is smart enough to see through this ruse and reject the Nihon no Mirai Tou outright or be reassured that he’s the one in charge and vote for his latest concoction. One or the other. But, as we see in Point 2, Ozawa had to drag Kada out and make sure that everyone knew that he was the boss, as if to make sure that nobody would be so stupid or inattentive as to miss the point.

Or so I thought. I appear to be wrong; this Asahi report claims that it was staged at the instigation of Kada’s entourage. If so, that distinguished Japanese political scientist may have been overly charitable to her.

Open-Ended Questions regarding Anti-Nuclear Voters

It’s been a while since the questions were posted in the comments, so here they are, and my answers to them.

“How serious a force are those who don't want nuclear power in Japan?”

I wonder myself. Specifically, how large is the proportion of Japanese voters for whom that is the overriding issue? And what proportion of those people believe that it’s okay to let the nuclear power plants operate for another ten years when they’ve seen the nation go without nuclear power and without power outages for the relatively hot 2012 summer?

“Where else do they have to turn but the Japan Future Party?”

That is a good question, or was until Kada’s own position became clearer. Now, the Social Democrats, or the Communist Party?

“Perhaps you have underestimated Ozawa.”

That is always possible. He can surprise me by ghaving more than half of his 62 candidates running for reelection back in the House of Representatives when the Diet reconvenes in January.

Governor Kada’s Third Force Movement Not Going Too Far

Unless a couple of political scientists that I very much respect are dead wrong, Governor Yukiko Kada’s new party, which brought new hope to the 61 newly jobless Representatives seeking to retain their seats and 12 Councillors consisting of Ichiro Ozawa’s followers and a handful or two of other mostly DPJ refugees who failed to catch on with any of the more promising Third Force movements, isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. Chris Winkler, a scholar at the German Institute for Japanese Studies, made a persuasive case in an online discussion to the effect that it wouldn’t make much of an impact because the voters would be making up their minds on the basis of a variety of reasons and the nuclear question was not particularly decisive. I was inclined to agree with him and didn’t have much to add by way of argument. The other political scientist, a Japanese scholar who has observed the governor more closely, will go unnamed because he was more dismissive of her as a run-of-the-mill politician who has been all over the place on issues.

The first week of the Nippon Mirai no To (literally, Party of Japan’s Future) has so far validated their predictions. Beyond her signature anti-nuclear stance, Kada has basically adopted Ozawa’s anti-TPP, anti-consumption tax hike posture as well as some of the expensive 2007/2009 DPJ manifesto items such as the 26,000 yen/month child allowance. Keeping her day job as governor and appointing a trusted Ozawa ally as her virtual second-in-command are showing her up as a one-issue figurehead. Even her anti-nuclear platform—a 2022 deadline for phasing out nuclear power—has come under significant criticism as unrealistic (or undesirable by pro-nuclear voices) while no doubt disappointing the hardcore anti-nuclear crowd, who want the nuclear power plants shut down immediately. Her attempts to explain herself on the nuclear question has exposed to charges of waffling. This is unfair, perhaps, since she had never ruled out the possibility of restarting nuclear reactors that meet the test of new safety standards to be set by the Nuclear Regulation Commission, and Toru Hashimoto and pro-nuclear Shintaro Ishihara are still in open disagreement on the nuclear question even after they settled on a compromise wording for the Japan Restoration Party (JRP) policy platform. However, Hashimoto and Ishihara both have well-established national reputations for hard-nosed leadership that transcend any single issue and enable them to weather individual mishaps. Kada by comparison takes center stage with a much smaller national profile, making an initial setback on the nuclear issue or the impression that she is merely a convenient front for Ozawa takeover more damaging and difficult to counter.

National polls taken this weekend should leave the NMT at best a distant fourth behind the LDP, DPJ and JRP. The announcement of a full-fledged policy platform, scheduled for today, should generate some media interest but not much of a bump going forward. The moment for Kada has come and gone in my view.

The LDP Wins a Majority in the House of Representatives? Other Stuff Too

I’m sure that anyone who comes here also follows the Shisaku blog, so you’ve probably seen this already. Please do so if you haven’t before you continue.

Okay? Now then:

If the media polls are to be believed, the LDP should be coasting to victory with one-third to two-fifths of the popular vote producing what is likely to be a massive LDP-Komeito victory as they sweep through the House of Representatives single member districts, possibly even an LDP simple majority, while the DPJ comes in third behind Ishihara and Hashimoto’s JRP. The numbers have not moved meaningfully since the polls from the week before, which suggests that the commotion around the meeting of rather different minds regarding nuclear power (!), TPP(!), and the consumption tax hike(!) has done little to diminish the JRP allure (but may have halted its momentum). Barring an unforeseen game-changer—North Korea delivering the rest of the abductees, a Shinzo Abe (but not Hashimoto) sex scandal are possible, but not plausible, candidates—public perception of the main players appears to be coagulating into a not-too-enthusiastic vote for both Abe and the LDP, which will produce disproportionately large electoral returns for it because of the electoral system. And Japan will wind up with a government that will be hard put to claim a popular mandate, much less a working majority in the House of Counselors.

And Governor Kada is making an announcement tomorrow, not today. In the meantime, I’ve looked around at media reports some, and it appears that she is serious about jumpstarting a new party. But my money is still on Kawamura’s attempt at bandwaggonning to end in failure. I have nothing against Kawamura personally, who seems a forgiving, inclusive, bonobo type of human being. And I like that. And Kada is not your typical academic. She has a political family background that indicates that she will not shy away from an alliance with Kawamura or Ozawa if she believed that it would further her political aims. But unless I’m missing something, that same expertise should be telling her not to hitch her cart to a couple of old nags headed for the…

BTW here’s one thing going on that I don’t understand. Negotiations for the Noda-Abe, head-to-head debate—the other opposition parties are complaining because the pair have a mutual interest in keeping the Ishihara-Hashimoto coalition out of the spotlight—are stalling because they cannot come to terms with the platform for the debate. Not for long, most likely, unless Noda and the DPJ forget to remember that beggars can’t be choosers.

Governor Kada as Leader of the “Other” Third Force Movement? Doesn’t Pass the Smell Test for Me

If media reports are to be believed, Takashi Kawamura appears to be on the verge of merging his Genzei Nippon, a ragtag collection of local and/or unloved B- and C-list Diet members with Ichiro Ozawa and his People’s Life First in a last-ditch effort to remain relevant as a Third Force movement. They are uniting under an anti-consumption tax hike, anti-nuclear, and anti-TPP platform. Ozawa has serious credibility problems that have further diminished the electability of mostly vulnerable candidates, and Kawamura has more recently engaged in a furious speed dating spree, only to strike out completely—the only positive, if you can call it that, being a catch from the DPJ reversing his re-defection when Hashimoto refused to take him in. They are reportedly trying to rope in the Green Wind, yet another group of DPJ defectors who refused to join Ozawa and are able to pass the smell test. The Green Wind leader is on the record that “collaboration is necessary” Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Anonymous sources say that Kawamura is sounding out Yukiko Kada, the (sort of) anti-nuclear governor of Shiga Prefecture, to head the new prospective party and is about to make some kind of announcement later today. She doesn’t have to run for the House of Representatives herself. Essentially, they think that they need a disinfectant. Now this is a story that we’ve heard before, and this is obviously Kawamura or someone very close to him—not Kada—who is doing the leaking. I’m not saying this is in Texas straw hat territory, but I’d say there’s much more than a glimmer of “counting your raccoon dog pelts before you’ve caught them” look to this.

My instant scratch-it ticket says: Kada politely refuses, and Kawamura strikes out again. May come back later in the day with the outcome, plus the broader picture. FYI I'm mildly surprised that the post-merger Hashimoto-Ishihara alliance has maintained its place in the Yomiuri poll, not at all surprised that half the responders have not given any preferences.

Who Are the “中华民族/Chinese Nation”?

These are some preliminary thoughts from my efforts to understand why Xi Jinping referred to the “中华民族/Chinese nation” and not to “中国/Chinese” “国民/people” in his first public statement after the November takeover. I’m sure this is well-trodden territory for China specialists, and these are really baby steps. I’ll be thankful for any leads, online or hardcopy, in Japanese or English.

People have taken note of the fact that the new Chinese Communist Party leader and head of state Xi Jinping made repeated references to the “Chinese nation” and simply “nation”—five and nine times respectively for a total of 14—in his “full remarks to the press.” at the 18th CCP National Congress. By comparison, his predecessor Hu Jintao mentioned the “Chinese nation” just once in his farewell report. Why was this notable? Because the word used for the “nation” is 民族, which is far more commonly used for ethnic groups. Now, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) officially recognizes 55 ethnic groups, but Xi used that Chinese term just once in that sense if the Japanese version is to be believed, and otherwise referred to them as 各族, and in both cases were translated into English as “ethnic groups”*.

And what is this “Chinese nation”? In Xi’s own words, “ [it] is a great nation. Throughout five thousand years and more of evolution as a civilization, the Chinese nation has made indelible contribution to the progress of human civilization. In modern times, however, China endured untold hardships and sufferings, and its very survival hung in the balance. Countless Chinese patriots rose up one after another and fought for the renewal of the Chinese nation, but all ended in failure.” And so on. It is essentially the people who have taken part in the 5000 years old-and-counting sinic civilization.

This cannot be a pleasing thought to the Uighurs, Tibetans and the rest of the other “nations” certainly don’t appreciate that** since it’s essentially the Han “nation” lording it over the rest.***. Their rulers may have pledged allegiance to the sovereignty of the hegemons of the Zhongyuan back in the day—heck, the Mongols actually ruled the place for almost a hundred years and the Jurchids did the same for 267—but that was before nationalism became the norm and ripped up empires old and new.

This may have been less of a problem back in the day when all that those local rulers had to do was to pledge allegiance to the Chinese emperor, adopt the Chinese calendar, and send regular tributes to the Chinese emperor (and receive equal value in return). Other than that, they were mostly left alone. This was a good deal for the rulers and their entourages. There was a cost, sure, but you got legitimacy in return, and swag to boot. As for the plebes, I’m sure that they hardly noticed. So the Ming Dynasty and its Han emperors were replaced by the Qing Dynasty and its Jurchik emperors; same old, same old.

Now this is where the West came in, trying to do what it did to empires everywhere. And now that there was a convenient local model available in Japan, two existential struggles were going on at the same time: one, the Chinese empire’s resistance against the Western imperialists; and the other, the Han nation’s rebellion against the Jurchik rulers. Xi’s narrative conflates the two, for who were those “Chinese patriots” but the patriots of the Han nation? And what else can he do but to do so to maintain the myth of the Chinese nation; to do otherwise would require acknowledging the national identities of the other 55 officially recognized “ethnic groups.” Indeed, the demographics are moving in the opposite direction. The ethnic provinces and regions are fast becoming the domain of the Han nation.

* The care with which the terms “nation” and “ethnic groups” are distinguished suggests that the single instance of the use of 民族 in the Japanese translation for “ethnic groups” was a translation error. This is somewhat beside the point so I’m not going to the trouble of wading through the Chinese home page to figure it out on my own. But simply out of curiosity, I’d like to hear from anyone who has a good working knowledge of written Chinese on that point.

** If you don’t believe me, get to know a non-Han taxi driver or restaurant manager, anyone, really, who doesn’t have a public career to worry about.

*** If you don’t believe me, look at the Congress photos, where they made all the other “ethnic groups” dress up in their ethnic fineries.

Guess What, More Talk about an “Increasingly Isolated” Japan

Is it my imagination or is it always Japan that’s being “isolated,” an “outcast of Asia” when something upsets its relations with China and South Korea? I can understand—though I dispute—the logic behind that talk when it comes to China, but South Korea has a population 1/3rd the size of Japan and an economy even smaller by comparison and it lives next to North Korea, which may or may not implode/explode within our lifetimes. Please? The irony is that people doing China are far more willing to talk about how China’s neighbors are increasingly upset about its behavior. Guess what, the respective markets for the chatter are dictating the vocabulary, language, logic, and narrative.

To those wags out there, rest assured, I am not going to defend Japanese denialists on the Nanking Massacre and I’ll be very disappointed if (unexpectedly) Abe does a Hatoyama and blows his political wad on value issues before he nails the bread and butter stuff. But please, don’t let your take on history issues—and yes, I mean you—blind you to the realities on the ground. Your students deserve better. Tell you what, disappoint me—yes, you—and I might even eats me a Texas straw hat, I might.

Wen Jiabao, as Statesman in Despair: A Fable in the True Sense of the Word?

As any Japanese who managed to stay awake during the compulsory—seriously, no kidding—Classic Chinese Literature classes in high school will remember, Qu Yuan is revered by the Chinese public as the father of Chinese poetry and an exemplary patriot who lived in the kingdom of Chu (circa 1030–223 BCE) during the Warring States Period (475-221 BCE). He was banished from the royal court and later killed himself in despair when he saw that his country Chu was rotting from the inside. Fast forward to 2012, and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, having abdicated his No.3! seat in the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, is retiring from the prime minister’s office in next spring’s government shuffle and the following account surfaces in a Yomiuri Shimbun report from Shenyang. (It’s my translation; it’ll have to do.) Did you read it? Okay, let’s go on.

I think it’s a little fishy. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s hard to believe that anyone who’s waded through the thickets of Chinese officialdom to be prime minister of China for nine years and counting, even in the post-Mao era, would offer such a devastating evaluation of contemporary China and wallow self-pityingly in that shopworn Qu Yuan cliché while talking to Chinese expats. Most likely, it’s just a rumor, magnified in the telling, that reached the attention of some Chinese media outlet in Shenyang. No doubt, denials will be forthcoming if the story has legs. In the meantime, the expression of popular discontent through a legend that has survived and thrived through the millennia and a communist regime, and the typecasting of Wen as statesman in despair, were too good for me to take a pass. Also that such a story could go to print in the post-Hu era. So I’m passing it along to you.

(Seiichiro Takeuchi; Shenyang)

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao,who will retire next spring, while visiting Bangkok from [Nov.] 20, addressed local Chinese merchants and others and said, “I will retire in a few months. I hope that people will forget about me.”

The Chinese media reported this on the 22nd.

Mr. Wen stated that “global respect cannot be gained by economic development and powerful science and technology alone.” He also raised challenged such as “promoting the construction of a democratic legal framework”, “realizing a just society”, and “securing the freedom and rights of the people”, and said that “many things were left undone”.

Mr. Wen, who has been criticized that he has not fulfilled his responsibility to explain suspicions reported by The New York Times in the United States that his family had amassed massive assets, quoted the words of Qu Yuan, a poet in Chu during the Warring States Period, that he “will have no regrets if he dies again and again to seek the truth” and “shall remain faithful and honest even unto death if it is necessary to prove one’s innocence.” It appears that he borrowed words from a poem of the “Patriotic Poet,” who committed suicide in despair because the King of Chu would not heed his repeated council to indirectly plead his own innocence.

Why the DPJ and LDP Keep Posting Crappy Documents. Plus, the Blank Margins

First, the crappy documents. I think I now know why the DPJ and LDP keep posting crappy PDF documents around election time—the few occasions that people might actually read them. And no, I’m not talking about the contents.

Imagine that you and a bunch of fellow party members are in a smallish conference room, taking in a trial screening of material for your election campaign. There’s an election platform mockup on the computer screen, courtesy of your party’s PR agency. Only it’s not your usual 15-20 inch laptop screen, it’s a 45 -inch version that your party could afford well before no one but the very wealthy could because it had the multibillion-yen government subsidy to play with. The 45-inch resolution makes the document a perfect fit, no zooming out necessary. And the letters do not look so densely bunched together.

But if you and your fellow party members ever bothered to take another look at the document on your home computer screen (or Heaven forbid tried to download it on your smartphone), you might notice, right? And if we the voters were actually reading those documents before casting our votes, someone might be annoyed, and complain, right?

I rest my case.

Now, the blank LDP margins. I just realized that Facebook homepages have blank margins, too. Well, the one on the left anyway. The one on the right appears to be there for potential “sponsors.” I see this ad for “Mature Dating” in the right-hand margin of Shinzo Abe’s Facebook page. Do they know something that I don’t know? About Abe? About me?

But that just raises more questions. Does the LDP leadership know that its ad agency might have swiped the idea from Facebook? Is that why the words “intellectual property (知的所有権)” and “creativity (創造)” never appear on the election platform? Does Facebook have a copyright on that layout? Will Facebook sue?

In the meantime, think about taking out an ad on the LDP website. The margin on the right, as pure as the driven snow, is waiting for you, Mature Dating Sponsor.

A Few More Words on the LDP Documents

In all fairness, the DPJ manifestos suffered from the same formatting flaw. In fact, the layout is so similar—fraternal twins, I’d say—that I suspect that the two parties have the same technical team at the same PR agency. I’ll be sorry if that means that we’re not going to see this election’s version of the LDP anime short-shorts attacking Hatoyama. I’ll be even sorrier if this tells something about the choice that we’re about to make..