DPJ Squeeze on Coalition Partners Begins

I’ve been working on the beginnings of a series of posts on Japanese politics. In the meantime, a quickie:

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Asahi Shimbun reports that the DPJ is including in its Upper House election platform a pledge to reduce the 242 member Upper House by 40 seats. This can be done by the following means, or a combination thereof:

1) Reduce proportional seats, currently at 96.
2) Consolidate prefectural districts, eliminating for most practical purposes the 2-seat floor—one per triennial election, in which half of the seats come up for election—for the smallest prefectures, which are grossly overrepresented as currently configured.
3) Exacerbate the overrepresentation of the 2-seat prefectures.

1) is sure to be a large part of the answer—at the expense of the mini-and micro-parties, who pin their hopes on the proportional voting. Thus the SDP and PNP cannot like this one bit. The SDP should be particularly troubled, since Prime Minister Hatoyama is drifting inexorably towards a intra-coalition showdown on the Futenma question with a proposal that includes relocation within Okinawa. This is anathema to the SDP, whose leadership is fundamentally at odds with the Japan-US alliance. But the LDP is likely to fall in line with some version of this option, which means that a legislative bill on this point will have an excellent chance of passing in the current Diet session. The DPJ may have already begun reshaping the coalition, something that I had not expected to happen before the July election.

Damien Ma Interviews James Fallows

Damien Ma, a Eurasia Group analyst, interviews James Fallows on China Today. Fallows is one of the most thoughtful and graceful bloggers that I follow. (My lists are woefully out of date; I’ll get around to fixing that one of these days.) For those of you who live in the Tri-State area, Damien* is also quite a charmer, and unattached, if I remember correctly.

Incidentally, I agree with most if not all of the arguments being made there.

* Damien is also one of the regulars at Rucker Park, where he is known as DunkMaSter D, and The Ragin’ Asian. True story.

Profiling the (Mostly) LDP Renegades

This has been sitting on my hard disk for ten days. I’m not sure that I can do much more with it, so I’m putting it out here without further editing before it rots on the vine. (The Note will be forthcoming, RS.) That’s it for now.

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The 2 May virtual deadline for starting new political parties before the July Upper House election in Japan having passed without further incident—the names of parties established after that date are not protected from copycats, which can cause serious problems in the proportional seats vote—it’s a good time to take a look at the upside of the flurry of LDP split-offs for the July Upper House election and beyond. None of them should emerge from the vote with more than a handful of Upper House seats. However, the DPJ is increasingly likely to fall short of a simple Upper House majority and the motley three-party coalition faces a growing chance of losing its collective majority. Thus, the new parties deserve a look as actors in a post-election shakeup. True, Komeito, the political arm of the lay Buddhist organization Sokagakkai, remains the best bet as a post-election coalition partner: it will be able to ensure an Upper House majority by itself for a DPJ-led coalition and is policy-wise more compatible with the latter than its troublesome populist bedmates. However, it has limited upside due to its near-total reliance on its religious base. Thus, the upstarts bear watching with an eye to the future beyond the immediate post-election coalition makeup. With that, here’s a roll call.

Your Party (YP): Heads the list in the latest Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll (23-25 April) with 11% in voter intent—after DPJ and LDP at 20% and 4% respectively. Headed by Yoshimi Watanabe, the YP consists of four Lower House members, two LDP and one DPJ defectors and an independent, and one Upper House member, an independent AIDS activist. The YP has by far the biggest upside. First, they share a small-government, free-market orientation that established parties have moved away from in the post-Koizumi years. This makes the YP an unlikely coalition partner with the DPJ under the politics-first Ozawa, but gives it a policy coherence lacking in the other new alternatives. This should serve it well in a broader, if more distant, realignment. Second, it has yout on its side—an appealing quality for an electorate deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. All five Diet members are youthful and articulate post-baby boomers. Third, it will have the largest number of seats among the newcomers—its voter intent share translates into a minimum of five to six proportional Upper House seats in addition to its four incumbents. Finally, it is the only splinter group that has LDP, DPJ and truly independent Diet members.

New Party Reform: Taken over by and renamed for articulate, brainy public favorite and reformist Yoichi Masuzoe, it only took a 2% share in the aforementioned poll, but surged to 7% on the voter intent question. That difference can only be attributed to Masuzoe—he's essentially Moses Malone with four guys from Petersburg, Virginia. If the NPR can hold on to something like that until July, it'll add one or two proportional Upper House seats to the two that are up for reelection in addition to Masuzoe’s, which comes up for reelection in 2013. Still, that’ll only give it five to six, a far cry from the 10-15 seats that the YP is targeting, even if it also retains its one regional seat that is up for reelection. Masuzoe’s star was tarnished when the reform-minded maverick threw in his lot with a group of old-school politicians facing retirement or uphill battles in the July election. Lacking policy coherence and with its leader commanding little to no personal loyalty from his ex-peers in the LDP, the YP’s upside is limited in any post-election maneuvering and the more distant, if roader realignment.

The Sunrise Party of Japan: Middle-of-the-road reformist and fiscal conservative Kaoru Yosano cast his lot with nationalist counter-reform-minded Takeo Hiranuma—to whom he was promptly forced to take a back seat—and friends. The media image of a marriage of convenience among over-the-hill politicians—the average age of its Diet members is seventy—severely limits the SUP’s upside. With three Lower House members and two Lower House members, it will be lucky to break even by holding on to the Upper House seat up for reelection and picking up a proportional seat if the Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll is to be believed,.

Kunio Hatoyama: The sixty-one year old younger brother of the prime minister is the odd man out. He never fulfilled his early promise as the Golden Boy of the LDP; now his peregrinations have left him with no one—not even the members of the LDP rank-and-file to whom he reportedly gave financial assistance early in their political careers—by his side as he impetuously bolted once again in his belief that he would be the precipitator of a new realignment of the Japanese political order.

Your Party: Eight Seats Minimum in the Upcoming Upper House Election with Significant Upside

Urban, well-schooled, and entrepreneurial, the 2010 Your Party Upper House candidates should easily score one prefectural seat—there’s another on the bubble—and seven proportional seats, mostly at the expense of the DPJ and LDP. Actually, I think that they will do better, since Your Party is the one new entry with a significant upside. (The Japan Communist Party and Komeito will benefit from the turnout, which should be lower than it was in the 2007 election.) Look carefully at the 7-9 May Yomiuri poll results and it becomes obvious that the 51% of the responders that did not show any voting preference is definitely going to lean away from the DPJ and LDP.

Your Party is the spiritual descendant of the Koizumi-Takenaka reform team. It even has a former Koizumi Kid in the 2010 Upper House candidate list. With at least nine Upper House seats after the election and five Lower House seats, it’s the one LDP spinout that can become a significant player in a major realignment process.

Do I Really Look Like This, European Chamber of Commerce?

Seriously, now I know how Dorian Gray felt when he looked at his own portrait.

The actual interview took place on 17 March according to my Google calendar and was edited by the following week, and the Hatozawa regime’s slide continues. However, I see no reason to have to substantially alter my outlook.

Responding to Comments

Sorry, I inadvertently posted one of the responses instead of the links to the threads. The following is the intended post.

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I’ve responded to some weeks-old comments if you are interested. Some are quite cursory, particularly when I am in agreement. Sorry, but I just couldn’t tend to my blog for a while.

Will Domino Tiles Fall and If So When?
Why Losing July Election Can Be a Blessing in Disguise to the DPJ
I Would Be Happy to Be a (Paid) Pundit and/or a (Professional) Journalist; That Said…
Stand-Up Guys

Pre-election, Hatozawa Resignation?

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

Another Maritime Incident, This Time with Chinese Research Vessel

The Yomiuri appears to be the first newspaper to carry the story about a Chinese research vessel chasing a Japanese Coast Guard vessel and forcing it to stop surveying the continental shelf on the Japanese side of the median line. The incident occurred on 3 May according to the Coast Guard announcement on the following day. It follows on the heels of two incidents, both involving the PLA Navy, one a fleet including two submarines in plain sight passing through the Okinawa islands—true, in international waters—and the other a helicopter/helicopters buzzing—twice!—a Japanese ship that went to observe those ships. I’ve given some thought to these maritime developments as well as the East China Sea gas fields. The following is the essence of my response to some questions. (They are not from a client, which is why I feel justified in laying them out here. I did leave out one point, because it concerns a novel idea—not quite useful in this particular instance in my view, but possibly applicable in a more general sense and certainly plausible—that did not originate from my side of the exchange.)

1. They are all deliberate acts, and the most recent one involves yet another government agency. It looks like a pattern is emerging.
2. The Chinese authorities, like the Russians, are willing to take risks when they perceive weakness. They keep pushing until there's push-back, serious consequences. And　the Hatoyama administration did act meekly in responding to the first PLA Navy incident, and the second one quieted down after a mysterious intelligence leak about an exchange between the mother vessel and the helicopter that indicated that the pilot had been freelancing.
3. The tipping point will come if and when someone on the Japanese side is killed.
4. It’s surprising that this happened parallel to the unofficial bilateral talks on the South China Sea gas fields. Perhaps they'll finally move forward on the Japanese buy-in agreement under the Fukuda administration. After all, a Japanese company/consortium taking a minority share in a Chinese development company on the Chinese side of the median line makes no concession on Japanese claims. But will anyone other than Asahi and Mainichi buy a Chinese attempt to camouflage its efforts to establish a new status quo?

Incidentally, you don’t want to mess with a Chinese research vessel if my experience 31 years ago is any indication. I was doing UNCLOS and ocean development at time and went to see a Japanese research vessel. There was a Chinese research vessel berth at the same port, there apparently as part of a bilateral exchange program. I went to take a look at it—I think I could actually go on board, but my memory may be playing tricks on me—and saw a piece of equipment rising from the deck and covered with a sheet that looked suspiciously like a large, mounted machine gun.

Alert: Central Bank Becoming Development Bank?

Hard to believe, but there you are: Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri, and Nikkei. It was the page one headline article in the Yomiuri and Nikkeii. It must have been the same in the other national dailies. So I guess my question is: Is Japan becoming another BRIC, or is it…

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.

“‘Oasis of the Seas’: Go Inside the World’s Largest Cruise Ship”?

The underlying message of this PR video not even pretending to be a work of journalism is that you can do everything on this ship that you can do in Tokyo/New York/Florida. Hmm…

My personal takeaway? A reminder of how inherently boring it was on the high seas oh so many decades ago when I crossed the Pacific on a ship—because it was cheaper.

And you wonder why they mutinied on the Bounty.

Twitter: Yuriko Koike

No, I don’t twitter, and I don’t follow anyone either. But in the course of work this morning (I was looking up the World Economic Forum), I bumped into this. Dig around her tweets and you’re bound to run into other LDP twitterers, in case you want to know what they’re up to these days.

Just thought you might want to know. Okay, back to work.

How They are Doing: The Odd Couple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How They Are Doing: Akira Nagatsuma

Now, one of my big misses:

I predicted that he would be a headline generator for the Hatoyama administration. And he was. For a while. For the most trivial of reasons, as well as a more serious flap over the Late-term Elderly Medical Care Insurance. But the news cycle quickly shifted to meatier issues such as Futenma threatening to cast a pall on Japan-U.S. relations, the campaign promises that threaten to break the bank, and, of course, the laborious process of setting up operations (including the inevitable Ozawa questions), leaving Nagatsuma to toil away in relative quiet.

That said, Nagatsuma’s own actions have helped deflect media attention keep the spotlight off his turf. He has genuinely recognized his shortcomings—basically, a lack of any experience in the field except his admittedly substantial investigative efforts—and made a conscious decision to reach into the bureaucracy to learn the explore the territory before striking out on his own.

Nagatsuma showed good judgment on the Late-term Elderly Medical Care Insurance System as well. As the DPJ looked to ways to fulfill its campaign promise to scotch Late-term Elderly Medical Care Insurance, the local governments threatened to revolt over yet another makeover only a couple of years into the new system. In the first place, the unpopularity of the Late-term Elderly Medical Care Insurance had stemmed not from any major flaws in its substance but from trivial complaints* that a bad rollout plan (or lack thereof) had been magnified in the media glare against a background of resentment and mistrust toward the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. As an effective anti-MHLW crusader for the DPJ—his pursuit of the missing pension accounts scandal was arguably the single most important factor in the DPJ takedown of the LDP-Komeito regime—he carried none of the political baggage of his LDP predecessors. Thus, when he quickly backed away from the situation and tabled the matter for future action—most likely as part of a more thoroughgoing reform of the national healthcare insurance system—there remained no substantial vested interests to demand a return to the old system and hence little media attention to the issue. The long-term issues remain, but, at a minimum, he’ll have the rest of this Hatoyama administration’s term to work out a plan—with the cooperation of the bureaucracy.

Of course Nagatsuma’s portfolio is only one lethal genetic mutation away from being overwhelmed with a swine flu pandemic. Which brings me to another point: He is likely to have his hands on the MHLW portfolio for the next 3-4 years—more than enough time for health-related catastrophes large and small to occur. His leadership and communications skills will be tested, when everything will turn on his command of his troops. The much-maligned MHLW has, in the public eye, performed with few miscues on swine flu up till now, so it is to his credit that he has worked to play down his reputation as an MHLW nemesis.

* 1) The name “Late-term Elderly (後期高齢者)” was deemed callous and disrespectful.
2) Deducting the premiums from their public pension checks was deemed callous and disrespectful. But this actually affects only the cases where a) someone else (the oldest son?) other than the beneficiary is paying the premium and b) that someone decides to take the opportunity of the switchover to stop doing so.
3) There were complaints over higher premiums. But they actually fell on average, though they did rise in some municipalities because local subsidies were dropped in the switchover to management at prefectural levels.
4) The new system caps the transfer from the rest of the national healthcare insurance system. This means that the (currently very low) copayments will rise for the elderly as the population ages. This figured less in the public outcry than the trivia, though, most likely since otherwise the DPJ and the media would have had to present alternatives.

How They Are Doing: Shizuka Kamei

I suggested at the beginning of the Hatoyama administration that Kamei Shizuka, the Minister of State with the double portfolio of Financial Services and Postal Reform, would be the wild card in the Hatoyama deck. He has not disappointed so far, predictably putting down his marker on Japan Post and more surprisingly, to everyone’s alarm, calling for a moratorium on bank loans to small and medium businesses—as well as speaking up on other issues as the head of the junior-most coalition partner People’s New Party.

A standstill on the privatization process for Japan Post had been a foreordained conclusion since the portfolio fell to Kamei, who had been exiled from the LDPO when he opposed then Prime Minister Koizumi’s privatization plans. Thus, most of the media attention, mostly unfavorable, fell on the choice of Jiro Saito, a former MOF Vice-Minister, whose appointment (as well as the nomination of another ex-MOF official to the board of directors) was attacked (unfairly in my view) as a “decent from heaven,” as the new Japan Post CEO, while Ayako Sono, the 78 year-old conservative Catholic novelist, also attracted some attention as a celebrity appointment to the JP board. What was overlooked in all this, though, was the overall, old-school LDP look of the new JP leadership. With two ex-MOF officials and one ex-Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (now folded into MIAC) on board as well as Hiroshi Okuda, the previous Keidanren Chairman, and a top executive from Canon, which currently holds the Keidanren chair on the board, it’s about as “1955 System “as it can get without being an LDP selection outright. Sono herself has graced many a government advisory board and was brought in as chairman at the Nippon Foundation by the Sasagawa family to clean up the image of their fiefdom. Also notable is the fact that there is only one member of the board with banking experience, a former executive at the failed Long-Term Credit Bank.

More surprising and potentially far more damaging, at least in the short run, was Kamei’s call for a 3-year moratorium on bank loans to small and medium businesses. Taken at full face value, the populist measure would have wreaked havoc on commercial financing. Subsequent negotiations whittled it down to a non-mandatory measure with a 60% semi-government guarantee and reporting requirements—not that far beyond the scope of past counter-recession measures (though the reporting requirements will serve to exert public pressure on the banks) . In fact, it is likely that the exercise will be repeated if there is a second dip in the economic recovery as many fear and some predict.

What does the future hold for the DPJ with regard to Kamei’s antics? Not much, actually. I think that he’s basically shot the works. He buried Koizumi/Takenaka’s legacy, and made his mark on his other, financial, portfolio. His populist instinct will no doubt lead to more outbursts as we go along, but I believe that we’ve seen the best (or worst, depending on your perspective) of his achievements. And he should be happy with that.

Hatoyama’s Money Woes

I’ve been telling people who’ll listen for some time that there’s a small but non-negligible chance of Hatoyama leaving office before the next Upper House election in September 2010. It’s unlikely that he’ll be indicted, but there is a fairly good chance that the media will conclude that he knew of the arrangements that had funneled personal and family money to his political operations in violation of the political financing law, likely from the very beginning of his political career. He has a fairly good chance of riding it out, though, because he’s not being accused of taking money—essentially, he’s a miniature Bloomberg/Corzine. Still, his past statements regarding LDP politicians who have run afoul of the political financing laws—he has consistently called for their heads regardless of their personal complicity—are coming back to haunt him. His problems are compounded by his consistent fumbling, rambling and bumbling on the issues. He’s definitely undershooting the high hopes and low expectations of the public that swept the DPJ into office. But, as veteran economist AS said, it still beats no hopes, no expectations. (Now what could he have been referring to, hmm?) So he can still win by default.

From the Indian Ocean to Offshore Somalia?

I’ve been telling people that taking the JSMDF escort ship/destroyer that has been accompanying the refueling vessel for the counter-terrorism operations on the Indian and redirecting it to the counter-piracy operations off the Somali coast would be a low cost way to square the circle. It appears that MOD and now the Hatoyama administration are also taking a serious look at this option. Let me put it this way: It certainly beats throwing even more money at the Afghan police than the Japanese authorities are doing right now—for which I’m not sure that the Afghan public in general would be grateful to Japan.

Translating the Titles of Government Officials

I intend to do a one-by-one follow-up of what I hoped were educated guesses about the personalities in the Hatoyama administration as well as the relationship between the Prime Minister and Ichiro Ozawa. I don’t think they’ve been that far off the mark, though some of the actual incidents have caught me by surprise.

In the meantime, for your amusement:

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The Prime Minister’s Office’s lists of the English-language titles of cabinet and sub-cabinet political appointees, specifically the Ministers (大臣), Senior Vice-Ministers (副大臣) and Parliamentary Secretaries (政務官) here. Note the MOFA (and MOFA-only) substitute of the preposition “of” with “for”. MOFA has subtly distinguished itself in this and other ways with regard to its English-language titles, but has really gone overboard on its own website, where it calls its Senior Vice-Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries “State Secretaries” and “Parliamentary Vice-Ministers” respectively. I’m not sure how long MOFA has been doing this, but I do recall that an across-the-board Parliamentary Secretary-to-Parliamentary Vice-Minister upgrade was set in motion during the Koizumi administration when METI Parliamentary Secretary Satsuki Katayama (Lower House) reportedly complained that she would be mistaken for a “secretary.” When the authorities were slow to respond, she took the matter into her own hands and bestowed the “Vice-Minister” title on herself. Soon, all the “Parliamentary Secretaries” were calling themselves “Parliamentary Vice-Ministers.” I looked in fairly recently to find that they had for the most part reverted to “Parliamentary Secretaries” but that the Ministry of (not “for”) Foreign Affairs had retained the upgrade and given its “Senior Vice-Ministers” an additional twist. (Or had things always been so there?)

METI, incidentally, substitutes “of” with “for” in the case of its Parliamentary Secretary but not the Minister or Senior Vice-Minister. I understand the logic behind it— “of” and “for” are used discriminatingly for the non-political appointees as well for basically the same reason.

East Asia Community

Anyone who talks about an East Asia Community should be forced to define that term and stick to that definition through that particular discourse. Otherwise, any talk is at best meaningless. I think that this is a rule that should be generalized through all public discourse. It’s the only way to enforce basic rules of logic.

That’s it for today. Thanks for visiting.

Forward and Backward in Time

I found that I was not the only person with a college degree who had problems with intuitively grasping the meaning of “forward” “ and “backward” in time when I saw the following passage in an analysis of prospects for sanctions on Iran.

“[T]he new revelations will quicken the sanctions timeline, bringing it back to late 2009.”

No one should have problems figuring out that the analyst meant that the sanctions were now likely to come more quickly (this was near the end of September), so the error went mostly undetected, but the correct phrase should have been “bringing it forward.” The antonym phrase is “push back.” It’s confusing for us, who have lived under unidirectional, chronological time for at least a couple of centuries, to have to come “back” from the future, but I didn't write the rules for Christian Europe. If you think I am sampling a Benedict Anderson riff here, you’re right. And not without shame either, since I have an aversion to anything that carries even a whiff of post-modernist narrative and yet I cannot deny that Imagined Communities is a masterful, insightful book.

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Note that time travel eliminates the “unidirectional, chronological” nature of time. That is why “Back to the [already existent] Future” makes intuitive sense.

DPJ Crosses Red Line with Support for Anti-Helicopter Base Candidate

I’ve believed, like many people here, that if only Prime Minister firmed up and took the heat for sticking with the 2006 agreement to move the U.S. Marine helicopters on Futenma Base to a base to be built offshore of Camp Schwab on the coral seas of the remotest part of Nago City, everyone except the pacifist SDP would fall into line, the bulk of the Marine forces at Futenma could be relocated to Guam, and Futenma would revert to Japan to be used for non-military purposes. After all, the DPJ manifesto and the subsequent DPJ-SDP-PNP policy pact had only carried a vague reference to revisiting the U.S. troop realignment, and even the reprisal in the policy pact—hammered out on the DPJ side by Katsuya Okada—had been a grudging concession to the SDP. The DPJ would—did—have more than enough on the domestic agenda without U.S. relations becoming an unwelcome distraction. The projected landfill might be something of an eyesore, but few people would notice, as Henoko, the part of Nago where Camp Schwab now resides, is one of the most sparsely populated areas in all of Okinawa. More significantly, the helicopter base would bring welcome Tokyo money. Perhaps that is why Nago has elected three pro-base mayors—albeit professing great reluctance and a powerful sense of public duty—in a row. Thus, I had believed Foreign Minister Okada’s most recent brainstorm to relocate the helicopters to Kadena Air Base to be no more than a strawman, to be knocked down by the U.S. side—which the Obama administration promptly proceeded to do at all levels from the Defense Secretary on down—and by the Okinawans themselves—which the good assemblymen of the Kadena township immediately proceeded to do, in a unanimous vote that rejected the idea and, for good measure, called for easing the burden on their own shoulders.

So there the matter would end, and the DPJ administration would have to bow to the inevitable. But what do I know? For Okada has continued to pursue the Kadena option as his “personal proposal,” and at least one news report claims that a senior member of the ruling coalition (phrasing that indicates that the person is not a member of the Hatoyama administration) has sounded out the locals with a scrap-and-build plan to move 28 out of the 48 U.S. F-15s stationed on Kadena Base. I am sure that the Obama administration will be very surprised, and not in a nice way, if the Hatoyama administration ever puts this on the negotiating table. I cannot believe that the Hatoyama would put placating the DPJ (and its own most radical, ex-Socialist elements) ahead of Japan and the United States’ individual and joint security concerns, but, as Okada himself admits, there’s no way of moving the helicopters to Kadena if it increases the net burden. Besides, the U.S. side has made it clear that air traffic control requirements preclude the location of the helicopter fleet conjointly with conventional aircraft on the existing space in Kadena.

So is Okada, and by extension Hatoyama, continuing to play the Kadena card as a show of exhausting all possible avenues? Perhaps. But in the meantime, the locals are getting restless. The good assemblymen of Nago have become irritated at the dithering and are threatening to rescind their offer to host the helicopters. An even more ominous turn in local politics, has the DPJ reportedly deciding to back an anti-helicopter base candidate against the pro-base incumbent in the January mayoral election. This, to me, effectively precludes the possibility of the Hatoyama administration giving the nod to Nago as the site within the year—for good, if the DPJ-backed anti-base candidate wins,

What will the fallout of the birth of an anti-base administration in Nago be like? In the near future, nothing—on the ground at least. The relocation of the U.S. troops from Futenma grinds to a stop, and everything is frozen in situ. But frustration and mistrust will build up among everyone involved—the people of Futenma, the Obama administration, the U.S. military, the Japanese national security establishment—with longer-term, negative consequences all around.

My Thanks Go to You

To those of you who have inquired, I thank you for your concern. Family matters have kept me preoccupied. I hope to resume soon, if possible, tomorrow.

Thanks again.

Jun Okumura

Shakedown, or… Shakedown? The First Days of the Coalition

The following is my response to Mark’s comment here. Personal circumstances have forced me to neglect my self-assumed obligation to people who comment on my blog. I’ll cover them all in due course, but now that I have a little more time (for today at least), I’ve decided to adopt the LIFO principle for my backlog. (Sorry, Matt, etc.)

And I promise to get back to those writing proposals of mine as soon as I can. Sorry, GD, NF.

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Mark: Sadly for those of us who need a major Japanese politic theater fix, given the huge DPJ victory in the 2007 HOC election, nothing short of a miracle will give the LDP-Komeito coalition an HOC majority in the 2010 election. That being said, the main bumps on the road so far:

Minister of State for Postal Reform Shizuka Kamei’s turf fight with MIAC Minister Kazuhiro Haraguti, as Haraguti dares to opine on the future of Japan Post, an institution over which he, as MIAC Minister has formal jurisdiction and knows inside out.

Minister of State for Financial Services Kamei’s turf fight with MOF Minister Hirohisa, as Fujii expressesd reservations over Kamei’s 3-year moratorium for bank loans to small and medium enterprises. The MOF Minister has partial or total jurisdiction over all financial Japangos, and will have to cough up the fiscal resources necessary to compensate the banks in the event the Hatoyama administration decides to implement the PNP proposal.

PNP leader and representative for the Intra-Cabinet Party-Leader Trilateral Shizuka Kamei’s verbal jousting with MOF Minister Hirohisa over the DPJ’s promise for an across-the-board child allowance. Kamei wants to set an income ceiling, so as not to benefit the wealthy…

…do I see a pattern emerging?

BTW, in the last endeavor, Kamei is joined by:

SDP leader and representative for the Intra-Cabinet Party-Leader Trilateral—as well as Minister of State for Social Affairs—Mizuho Fukushima.

Speaking of the Intra-Cabinet Party-Leader Trilateral, the third party will not always be the Prime Minister. In fact, the DPJ participant is more often than not likely to be Naoto Kan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for National Strategy, who happens to be p!ssed off (if media reports are to be believed) because his DPJ policy base has been kicked out from under his other foot as Ichiro Ozawa (and Hatoyama) abruptly decided to abolish the DPJ Policy Research Council—not a bad decision per se, considering the new setup replacing it that will potentially tighten the hold of the Cabinet over the policymaking process. (Here, I disagree with some of the MSM thinking on this measure.) The idea (again according to media reports) was to have Kan assume the PRC Chair, which would have made him the Policy Czar, the double-headed eagle as far as substance was concerned.

MLIT Minister Seiji Maehara’s public works woes assumed as the consequence of including the cancellation of the Yanba Dam construction, in Maehara’s words “because it’s in our manifest” (in my view carelessly inserted), as well as JAL’s business woes precipitously dumped in his lap. I didn’t see these two coming, and neither of these lend themselves to easy solution. Yanba Dam reminds me of Tokyo Governor Yukio Aoshima’s fulfillment of his campaign promise to shut down the Tokyo Expo—a very unpleasant precedent for the past and future DPJ would-be-king.

There may be more, but I think that’s enough. I have no idea if these are portents of things to come—in which case the whole of the Hatoyama Cabinet will be much smaller than its parts—or merely a shakedown process of an untested policy vehicle that will soon hit its stride.

Stay tuned, folks.

Quick Note: More on Hatoyama Cabinet Trouble Spots

Bad week for me; so, from my latest email:

Nagatsuma's body language was all wrong. If he'd come in smiling and waving, he would have received a standing ovation accompanied by a collective sigh of relief. In personal relationships, it's easy to get what you wish for, I guess. Just as troubling if not more so has been the report that he wanted the public pension so badly he was willing to take the Deputy Minsister's post. The Hatoyama administration needed him as one of the faces of the administration, so it forced a switch on Sengoku, who had to take the administrative-reform at-large portfolio instead. This, if true—indeed Nagatsuma is only a 4th-term HOR (I like this abbreviation)—highlights Nagatsuma as an obsessive, insensitive figure. It enhances my fear that he will be unable to make the transition from crusader to administrator. That, and Kamei's bully instincts, then Kan, is how I rank the Hatoyama administration's potential fault lines.

Preliminary Thoughts on the Hatoyama Administration

My life has been taking/may be about to take some dramatic turns, so I don’t have enough time to generate meaningful stuff for this blog right now. So for the time being, much of what you see here will be material produced for other purposes. Such as following, which is my end of a Q&A as the response to an email that I received last night soliciting my comments regarding the Hatoyama Cabinet, typos corrected:

1. Very solid Cabinet, the strongest across the board that I've seen in a long time, if ever. Remember, Hatoyama, Kan, Okada, and Maehara are in a sense a throwback to the LDP faction leaders of the 50s and 60s, men who built, not inherited, their power bases from scratch. And old-school Kamei and SDP Fukushima are just as powerful personalities, if not more so. I'm not aware of any weak spots, though Toshimi Kitazawa came as a total surprise to me, with one year as the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the House of Councilors as his only significant exposure to the field. I did go through a few Committee records, where he came across as calm and collected, competent. I was also mildly surprised at not seeing Yoshihiko Noda, the other center-right leader, in the Cabinet*. But otherwise, it's a very Ozawa-Not Cabinet.

2. I don't know enough about the appointees to rank them. I'll give you the following instead.

Nagatsuma and Maehara will generate the most important headlines because they will be going after big game: the healthcare and pension systems, and public works. On the MHLW portfolio, Nagatsuma must remember that it's more than going after the missing pension accounts and the people responsible for that. He must show that he is more than a crusader, that he has the policy chops and leadership skills to bring the two systems in line with our future needs and fiscal constraints. Maehara's job is to slash public spending--a difficult task that is sure to alienate local powers. But he has to do it, if only to go some ways to finance all the spending promises and tax cuts that the DPJ has promised. I see two potential trouble spots: a restless Naoto Kan clashing with the Ministry Ministers, and a turf battle between Haraguchi—by all accounts one of those articulate, new-school policy wonks—and Kamei over the Post Office. Both the DPJ and PNP oppose the Koizumi privatization, but beyond that, I'm sure people like Haraguchi have a rather different view of where to go from that. Also, Kamei's heterodox views regarding financial services, his other portfolio, has a chance of bringing him into conflict with other Cabinet Ministers and the BOJ. I think Kamei is the joker in the pack, particularly since he has less to lose than the other Ministers. Fukushima has a safety portfolio, I think.

3. None of the people that I have an opinion on is "weak." That will be the weakness if Hatoyama is unable to keep everyone on message. He's probably as good as anyone else in the DPJ for that role.

4. It's Hatoyama's Cabinet, and Ozawa's party. Am I the only one that thinks it looks a lot like the Nakasone-Tanaka LDP of the 80s? That didn't turn out too badly, did it? Personally, I don't think Ozawa will meddle on the policy side. I think he has his dream job, another crack at sticking the knife into the LDP heart without the distasteful job of being accountable to the media.

That's it. Back to work. And preparing a late dinner.

Jun Okumura

Perhaps I should have also referred to Fujii in 3. That may have been my contrarian streak kicking in. Let me add that I’m pretty impressed with the way the Hatoyama administration is handling the administrative appointments as well. The message seems to be: If you’re okay with us, we’re okay with you. He trusts (but will verify) that the bureaucracy will follow where his administration leads—which is something I’ve been predicting for a while. He looked klutzy and indecisive throughout the lead-up to the election, but I’m impressed by the javascript:void(0)post-election process. For my sake—as far as I see it, I’m stuck with Japan—I hope the rest of his regime goes at least half as well. Otherwise, there are plenty of floater voters like me, if you catch my drift.

Sorry about your comments. I’ll get back to them later. Honest. I really, really feel bad about not responding, since dialogue is the point of it all.

* Noda is reportedly being taken care of with the Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary’s job on the HOR side, not exactly a political embarrassment, especially for a policy wonk like him.

Quick Note: The Ozawa Party and the Ozawa-Not Administration

I may have touched on this before, but take a look at where the names fingered by the media for the Hatoyama Cabinet were when the Hatoyama-Kan DPJ, the Ozawa Liberal Party and lesser mortals merged to create the bigger, better DPJ in 2003:

Hirofumi Hirano, Chief Cabinet Secretary: independent from moderate labor union and close associate of Hatoyama
Naoto Kan, National Strategy Bureau Chief: DPJ
Hirohisa Fujii, Finance Minister: premerger Liberal Party, but bad blood between when he went public with his desire to see the latter step down during the political finances scandal
Katsuya Okada, Foreign Minister: The People’s Voice, parted ways with Ozawa when the latter split the New Frontier Party
Masayuki Naoshima, METI Minister?: DPJ
Yoshihiko Noda, ?: DPJ
Seiji Maehara?: DPJ
Tatsuo Kawabata?: DPJ

If you think that this looks a lot like the DPJ leadership minus Ozawa’s people—say, Diet whip Kenji Yamaoka and House of Councilors DPJ Chief Azuma Koshiishi—you’re right, it does. So Ozawa and his people run the party while the rest of the party runS policy? The resemblance to the old LDP becomes more than passing if you remember that Hatoyama beat Okada only with Ozawa’s help—shades of the unholy Nakasone-Tanaka union—and that Ozawa’s rivals lead their own group of likeminded Diet members, in contrast to the caretaker faction heads of today’s—yesterday’s?—LDP.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The DPJ leaders reportedly joining the Cabinet are more than just political players. They are mainly first-generation politicians who have shown genuine policy chops over their careers. And Yasuhiro Nakasone turned out pretty well for the DPJ—and Japan.

I won’t be surprised to see surprises tomorrow, when Hatoyama and Ozawa come to an agreement on Cabinet and major party assignments, but this looks like the shape of things to come, so I thought I’d mention it here.

Incidentally, I now think that tomorrow’s assignments will be completed without a major hitch. I still believe the second and third-tier Diet member assignments to the ministries and agencies as well as to secondary party posts is going to be a messy affair—unless Ozawa directs the traffic.

Now, back to work.

Quick Note: DPJ Decision to Let Cabinet Ministers Choose Their Own Political Appointees Will Come Back to Haunt It

I called the looming political challenge over the DPJ rollback of the FY2009 supplementary budget. The next problem in my view is the reconciliation of the Ministers’ right under the Hatoyama edict, the Cabinet’s pro forma right to choose political appointees, and Ichiro Ozawa’s free hand in selecting DPJ members for party and Diet posts? If deciding how to make the Ozawa group swallow Hirohisa Fujii’s candidacy for the MOF portfolio, imagine how difficult it is going to be to decide what to do simultaneously with 17 Cabinet posts and more than 80 other Diet member political appointees, as well as… You see the point.

Quick Note: “Right-Wing” LDP Looks to Tanigaki to Lead It Out of the Wilderness? Figures

The most recent reports have metrosexual, preternaturally youthful sexagenarian—and notable dove—Sadakazu Tanigaki declaring for the LDP Presidency with party elders’ blessings. It’s somewhat depressing, if, with 20/20 hindsight, inevitable that preternaturally youthful baby Nobuteru Ishihara wimp out, but it’s more distressing that his fellow quinquagenerian Shigeru Ishiba continues to dither on the sidelines. Their reluctance to challenge their elders continues even after the historic defeat.

The silver lining is that a Tanigaki leadership will lay to rest once and for all imbecilic pronouncements such as, “Analysts say the party seeks to reverse Japan’s growing isolation in the region under decades of right-wing Liberal Democratic rule.” Any report that is able to ignore all of Japan’s relationship with its Northeast Asia neighbors since no later than its historical accord with China in 1972 under Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka except the fallout from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s stubborn insistence on visiting Yasukuni Shrine is not to be trusted. More to the subject of this post, I cannot help but point out, the LDP switched leadership from a dove (Kozumi) to a hawk (Shinzo Abe) to a dove (Yasuo Fukuda) to a hawk (Taro Aso) before it yielded the stage to the DPJ—which, incidentally, is the closest thing to the old-school, Sankakudaifuku LDP in Japan today, with its own Darkseid overlord and powerful faction leaders—unlike the desiccated “LDP” that desperately needs a business model remake. More about this later, I hope.

Quick Note: Is It the LDP Who Cannot Afford an Alliance with Komeito?

I’ve speculated before that Komeito might be better off without the LDP as its main squeeze—policy-wise, the DPJ would be a more natural ally—and the Komeito leadership has been doing nothing to dampen such speculation. Increasingly evident Komeito antsyness suggests that it’s time to ask, Can the LDP afford an alliance with Komeito?

The DPJ may be Komeito’s more natural ally, but as Ozawa’s aborted efforts at a Grand Coalition in 2007 show, the DPJ is also the LDP’s more natural ally. In fact, a permanent alliance with ideologically narrower—and perforce smaller—parties is inherently confining in that it requires perpetual accommodation of such coalition parties’ defining positions. Thus there is something to be said for the discretion to fight an election on its own undiluted platform, leaving the compromises for later maneuvering.

But what about the Komeito tithe? True, 10 percentage points represent a lot of votes. But it wasn’t that long ago that the bedrock support for the LDP was, say, 10 percentage points higher than the same for the DPJ. And media polls suggest that 1/3 of the voters are floaters. Keeping Komeito in the fold is likely to call for a lot of concessions, new and old, concessions that the LDP cannot afford too many of if it is to position itself opportunistically against the DPJ while lying in wait for the accumulation of a host of DPJ gaffes and errors, the kind of gaffes and errors that, over a period of 3 years and Prime Ministers, consigned the LDP to a severely truncated opposition bench. The odds might be better for the LDP if it went off on its own for the time being, honing its own message; the better to attract the floater vote, which will be looking for the next political black, ready to abandon the DPJ, the same way that it jilted its long time flame, the LDP.

I’m not ready to hazard a guess one way or the other, but it’s at least useful to remember that the coalition entailed costs for the LDP as well.

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I’m seriously behind on counter-comments. Sorry, later. Things happening.

Would It Make More Sense to Translate It as “Conventional State”?

You know, that “normal country” thing. I do believe that post-WW II Japan has been an “unconventional state,” constitutionally speaking. And it worked. But “abnormal country”? I think not.

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No time for anything else today. Tomorrow for sure.