Ever Wonder What Happened to Akira Nagatsuma?

I thought so. Unless you can read Japanese, you won’t have heard anything of the LeBron James of the pre-Hatoyama administration DPJ who is looking more like a Captain Queeg version of Gerald Green (oxymoron?)—until the case of the missing centenarians. There’s more than good reason for Nagatsuma being pushed out of the Kan administration after the September battle for the DPJ leadership (which Prime Minister Kan is increasingly likely to survive), but I’d rather talk about the way the media misinterpreted the case of the missing centenarians when it portrayed it as a sad example of the deterioration of Japanese communities and (extended) families. (It’s in the same vein as the “criminality” of the US military in Japan.) If anyone wants to hear, let me know, and I’ll do my best to pick it up later in the week.

I Watch Movie End Credits Too

Some thoughts on reading this report:

Watch Japanese anime credits and you wonder where all those Latin American animators who replaced their more expensive Japanese competitors dozens of year ago went. Japanese animators are back with a vengeance, now more often than not in collaboration with their South Korean (and some) Chinese counterparts. What happened to Japan’s anime labor force? Technology? The lost decade(s)? Ghibli? Japan Cool?

Watch American movie credits and you’ll see very few names identifiable as obviously African-American, the Chaunceys and DeShawns (and its multiple spelling variations) and Tawana and the like. Instead, you’ll see fully European names, plus a good number of Korean, Chinese, Indian and Japanese surnames. I suspect that liner notes (or whatever they have on CDs or on iTune these days) sport very different looks.

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

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

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

Upper House Long Straw Saves LDP

People not plugged into the Japanese-language media will likely miss this, so I’m reporting it. Today, Hirofumi Nakasone drew the long straw for the upper house LDP’s chairmanship in a tiebreaker against his favored opponent Shuzen Tanigawa. There are some caveats. Mild mannered Nakasone is the son of former Prime Minister Nakasone, but he never bothered to make the switch to the lower house, a distinctive display of a lack of political ambition. (Wanted: prime minister. Only upper house members need apply.) He is twelve years younger than his opponent, but at 64, the heritage politician more symbolizes the past than future of the LDP.)

Nakasone’s real significance lies in his improbable role as the anti-establishment, Koizumian candidate. The 21 upper house members who put their names on his official supporters list include Ichita Yamamoto, Satsuki Katayama, Yosuke Yoshiie, Yosuke Tsuruho and other younger and more policy-oriented and independent parliamentarians. By contrast, Tanigawa received the endorsement of three major (“major” is, here, also a relative term) factions, which had easily made him the initial favorite.

Yes, it’s the lower house where they play for keeps. Still, the luck of the draw for the upper house leadership position fans the hopes of the LDP’ young (relative term) and restless (absolute term). That is good for LDP cohesion, and generational turnover. It poses a setback for Ichiro Ozawa’s hopes of splitting the LDP and also increases the potential for negative fallout from his well-advertised poaching efforts.

Kan could Still Lose in the September DPJ Leadership Election If Multiple Candidates Emerge

What are the chances of Prime Minister Kan surviving the September election for the DPJ leadership? Still good, though I now see a plausible scenario in which another person emerges to replace him. However…

Ichiro Ozawa is not going to challenge Kan directly. There’s no upside for him. If he loses, which would be by far the likely outcome, he’ll be finished as a central political force. If he wins—it’s highly unlikely, but the possibility cannot be dismissed—he’ll have to serve as prime minister. Case closed.

Would an Ozawa surrogate succeed? No. Everybody not in thrall to Ozawa (or owe him one, the two are not mutually exclusive) will fear the mass media implications of a strong, public association with him.

This leaves the chances of a multiple-candidate challenge that leaves the non-Ozawa vote divided between multiple candidates, with Kan being only one of several of his peers. As the voting results come in, Kan will have no choice but to resign, leaving the door open for one of the non-Ozawa candidates to emerge as the majority candidate over the Ozawa surrogate. (If Kan can’t make it on the first round, he’s almost surely a dead, not lame, duck.) Of course there’s always the possibility that the Ozawa candidate will make such a strong showing that the DPJ has no choice but to select him/her. The equivalent of an exit poll for the 400 local votes (in addition to the two per-Diet member votes) could also influence DPJ Diet members and grease the way for one of Kan’s challengers to take over.

It’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T with Shaq

Conventional wisdom has it that the causes of Shaquille O’Neil having a problem with finding a team for the upcoming season other than a chance at another NBA championship are money and playing time. Really? I haven’t exactly seen reports of Shaq declaring bankruptcy anytime soon. And if he can’t secure significant playing time competing against the likes of Miami Heat centers Jamaal Magloire, Zydrunas Ilgauskus, Joel Anthony (who?), and Dexter Pittman (who?)…

As important as if not more so than the material pleasures they bring, money and playing time are measures of your alpha-maleness. In Miami, Shaq would merely be a sideshow to the LeBron-Wade-Bosh AAU All-Star Tour. Boston may not be able to offer the money. And when Kendrick Perkins comes back, his minutes are likely to shrink dramatically, since he cannot slide to the four spot. But the Celtics can offer dignity. Everyone, from the aging future hall-of-famers to the towel waver at the end of the bench (and Brian Scalabrine on the bench) is treated right—by Danny Ainge, Doc, teammates, the fans, the Boston media…

Boston will not shell out the big money, Boston does not offer good prospects for serious playing time. But the Celtics will give its players respect. Speaking as a guy, it makes sense for Shaq.

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I just learned that Shaq is working toward his PhD. Do I hear R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

Who Needs a Coalition for an Upper House Majority?

An email exchange with a financial analyst reminded me that ’s a lot of apprehension out there over the policy prospects of a minority DPJ—let’s face it, the PNP no longer counts—government. Far be it for me to say that gridlock is good, but there’s a case to be made that within the context of a fractious opposition including Komeito—demonstrably flexible and similarly urban, middle class, social spenders domestically and pacifist overseas—a series of flexible issues-oriented alliances will be more consonant with the implementation of a coherent policy agenda than an official coalition. A minority partner will inevitably secure policy concessions that do not match up with the majority partner’s overall policy agenda. It will also be able to exercise control over its cabinet assignments as a virtual enclave, further sapping coherence. Case in point: the Hatoyama administration.

Of course if the opposition ever got its act together, it will be hell for the DPJ. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, when everybody has an eye on a possible, more extensive political reshuffle down the line, most likely sometime after the next lower house general election.

PNP, SDP Tries to Sell DPJ on Lower House Supermajority

The Odd Couple are doing the nasty again. Shizuka Kamei’s People’s New Party and Mizuho Fukushima’s Social Democratic Party, both devastated in the July 11 lower house election*, agreed to join forces to push the three postal “reform” bill (Kamei’s pet project, which will keep the Japan Post group under government control and expand its massive savings deposit and life insurance businesses) and the worker dispatching regulation bill (reverses much of the deregulation of the worker dispatching business (broadly similar to temp agencies) under LDP administrations, its effect on dispatched workers as a class and employment in general is hotly disputed). Prime Minister Kan agreed to work with them to expeditiously introduce the bills. But will they pass in their current form? And will the cabinet raise the ceilings for the Japan Post’s savings and life insurance businesses, if and when the Diet passes the bills?

The DPJ and PNP, which is still in the coalition, have 110 upper house seats between them**. The SDP has four, which gives the group 113 votes. They can probably count on one independent to vote with them. Let’s say that Hiranuma’s Stand Up Japan adds its three votes to the tally. That still leaves them at 114—eight votes short of the 122 votes to ensure a majority, assuming none of the 242 upper house members fails to cast a valid vote for or against the bills. The idea, then, is to throw the bills back to the lower house, where the three parties have between them 318 seats (DPJ 307, PNP four, and SDP seven). Add the two members in the Hiranuma group there, and they have 320 votes, just enough to cross the 319-vote*** threshold for a supermajority. But can the DPJ afford to do that?

Remember how sparingly the LDP-Komeito coalition was in exercising its supermajority after it lost the upper house majority in the 2007 election. If anything, it would bend over backward to accommodate the DPJ on legislative bills, or even abandon them altogether for all but the barest necessities. It did this as a concession to media pressure in line with the perception that the LDP would not be able to regain its public mandate until it faced another lower house election. Likewise the post-7.11 DPJ. It must be looking beyond the two bills. And it must be aware that a supermajority override at the first opportunity after the Upper House election is an effective way of killing any immediate prospects of building a workable upper house coalition or, more likely, fluid issue-based alliances. Besides, there is no assurance that the SDP (and Hiranuma’s friends for that matter) will vote with the coalition on future override attempts (or for that matter that Kamei won’t continue to be the camel that refuses to be housebroken)

A lower house override on the postal “reform” bills will cause immediate and specific harm to the DPJ, since the mainstream media will oppose resubmission in their current form. The DPJ will in essence take a hit on the massive floating vote, with questionable political returns from the postal office electoral machine. It is useful here to remember that the DPJ originally wanted to reduce the Japan Post’s financial operations by half and sell off all of what remained in a public offering. It only reversed its position as part of a broader attempt to destroy the LDP altogether by taking away its special interest support. However, the election showed the waning influence of the postal office vote machine—PNP wipeout!—and, more broadly, special interest politics in general.

The workers dispatching bill should have a more mixed media response, and big labor, which now gives much of its support to the DPJ, supports it, so I expect it to fare better. However, with the SDP out of the coalition and in disarray, there is now a very good chance that the bill will revert to the original business-big labor compromise, rejecting the even tighter restrictions that the SDP and PNP forced on an unwilling DPJ. Here again, though, I can’t be sure that the DPJ is willing to pay the political price of an early lower house override, if it comes to that. Even if the Japan Communist Party pitches in with its six upper house seats, the alliance will still be a couple of seats short there—and that’s assuming that Stand Up Japan will not vote against it or abstain. I’m now leaning toward a scenario—there are other possibilities—where the DPJ will accept an amendment, possibly in the upper house, to secure passage without resorting to the lower house supermajority override.

Those are my immediate thoughts on the initial steps beyond the September election for the DPJ leadership. I still think that Kan will survive an Ozawa-inspired challenge, but his troubles then will only have begun.

* The PNP went in three upper house seats at stake and was wiped out, leaving it with the remaining three, which will be up for grabs in the next, 2013 election. The SDP ironically beat out PNP to keep two out of three, leaving it with four upper house seats, but could not stop the long, steady in voter support. The SDP could still implode, as Kiyomi Tujimoto, one of its few stars took her lower house seat and defected, touching off a blame game/power struggle among the remaining Diet member. Tsujimoto is likely to eventually caucus with the DPJ, vastly more instrumental than the SDP in her election.

** 108 seats if you exclude the upper house president, who by parliamentary custom is nominally an independent and normally withholds his vote. Likewise the vice president, who hails from the LDP, so the two cancel each other out.

*** This is not a typo. Two of the 480 lower house seats are currently vacant, so there are currently only 478 members there. Note that if the president and vice president of the lower house follow custom and abstain, there will be 466 votes. This would bring the supermajority threshold down to 318, in which case the Hiranuma group’s votes will be unnecessary. This may be consequential to the worker dispatching bill.

How Useful Is the Lower House Predominance on Budget Bills?

Not much, it turns out.

In the Japanese Diet, it takes a supermajority of two-thirds in the lower house to override an upper house rejection of a legislative bill. However, in the case of a budget bill, the decision of the lower house by a simple majority prevails if the two houses disagree. This is obviously designed to allow the business of government to continue in the case of a standoff. But it doesn’t quite work out like that in real life.

There are two categories of legislative bills submitted by the cabinet: budget-related and non-budget-related. Budget-related bills are bills that are necessary to execute parts of the budget*. Some of the budgetary links are tenuous and no doubt can be worked around with ease**. However, others are harder to do without. One major example is the plethora of business tax breaks, which collectively keep the effective corporate tax rate well below the nominal cumulative effect of the national and local corporate income taxes and other major business taxes. Must such tax breaks have relatively short time limits. Thus, they will disappear unless the Diet passes legislative bills that extend them or convert them into other forms***.

Now, some anti-businesses will say, good for them. But even unreconstructed socialists will balk at the thought of the government going bankrupt well before the end of the fiscal year. And that is exactly what will happen to the cash-strapped Japanese government unless the Diet passes the mother of all budget-related legislative bills.

Under the Public Finance Act, the government can only issue bonds to cover expenditures for public works, funding****, or lending. Therefore, each fiscal year since 1994, the Diet has passed a special dispensation bill that authorizes the government to issue deficit bonds to cover the projected revenue shortfall in the general account budget. In FY 2010, the shortfall is projected to be 44 trillion yen out of the projected revenue of 92 trillion yen*****. Things are unlikely to get any better in FY2011. Without a special dispensation act, my guess is that the government will literally run out of money by the end of calendar year 2011.

As a practical matter, the budgetary prerogative of the lower house is worth squat without a supermajority. In that sense, the Japanese national budget is no different from laws. Think about that when you consider the need, and prospects, for the Kan administration, or any other administration for that matter, for a meaningful coalition or, more likely, fluid issue-oriented alliances.

* Budget-related bills are submitted before the non-budget-related bills, so they have a much better chance of being passed before the Diet session expires. The Cabinet Legislative Bureau has final say within the bureaucracy on determining the nature of any bill. The distinction is sometimes unclear, and bureaucrats strive mightily to draft their bills to hook them up to the budget in ways that will convince the CLB to concur.

** Preferential lending rates from public financial institutions for specific policy objectives is the example that first comes to mind. Also, most subsidies other than tax breaks.

*** Most of the tax breaks are put together in a single law that covers special tax measures (including surcharges), and are dealt with en masse in an omnibus amendment bill during the annual regular Diet session.

**** Think, equity holdings.

***** The special dispensation acts are also used to dig up “buried treasures.” The FY2010 act, in addition to the authorization for deficit bonds, authorizes the transfer of funds from the FOREX, FILP, and Food Stabilization special accounts to the general account.

Incumbents a Problem for a DPJ-Komeito Coalition

There are so many scenarios in the immediate future of Japanese politics, but you have to start somewhere. Here are some base-case thoughts of mine on an important question concerning Komeito’s future.

Komeito, with its 19 upper house seats, is the only other than the LDP that can ensure an upper house majority by itself in a coalition with the DPJ (not to mention hat would then become a superfluous lower house majority). The policy inclinations of Komeito’s urban, increasingly middle-class Soka Gakkai constituency is relatively easy to accommodate within the DPJ’s policy agenda. So expect a lot of flirting and dancing to go on between the two; otherwise, government will grind to a stop*. But this does not mean that the two parties will be in a position to enter into a formal relationship in the near future.

* Note that the DPJ can pass the budget by itself, but it won’t be able to account for half of it unless it can muster enough votes in the upper house (or a supermajority in the lower house to override its weaker counterpart) so that it can pass the authorization legislation for the multitrillion JGBs needed to cover the revenue shortfall.

Komeito went into the 2009 lower house election with 31 seats and came out with only 21. The loss of all eight incumbents in single-member districts to DPJ or DPJ-supported candidates was particularly keenly felt, since it wiped out the Komeito lower house leadership; not one of the incumbents had been placed on the corresponding regional district list as insurance against a loss in the single-member election. Getting those seats back will the most important part of the asking price—there’s also the upper house and local elections and, yes, policy issues—for a formal coalition.

To accommodate (my hypothetical) Komeito demands, the DPJ would have to force the incumbents (seven DPJ members and Yasuo Tanaka, the maverick New Party Nippon chief) to step down. It might be able to placate its own by putting them at the top of their respective regional tickets, but that would put its own regional district incumbents in peril. These are people who put successful careers on hold, or abandoned them altogether, to cast their lot with the DPJ; they will not go gently into that good night. My guess is that it will take at least another lower house election for the Komeito-LDP relationship to fully unwind—and the DPJ to take Komeito home—if the DPJ and LDP remain in their current configurations if not exact dimensions.

Looking Back on My Pre-Election Thoughts

At least one of my predictions sort of came true: a brief post-election Diet session for purely housekeeping purposes. I say sort of because a couple of minor non-partisan bills submitted by Diet members (bills submitted by the cabinet are far more common and usually more substantial, particularly in their fiscal consequences) are likely to be adopted without going through the usual formalities. The reason for this is that an Upper House majority is difficult to muster on short notice in the aftermath of the election. (My apologies to Climate Morio, who put the question to me here for being so tardy in replying.) And yes, it is increasingly likely that there will be no coalition until the September DPJ election (and for some time after that only case-by-case, floating alliances). However, I’ve changed my mind slightly on Kan’s prospects of remaining in power in that situation. I now he’s more likely to prevail. I’m going over this point, and coalition/alliance prospects, in more detail in a memo that I’m producing for a paying customer. I’ll see if I’ll be able to publicly share at least part of that.

Good thing I avoided making an explicit, last-minute read on the outcome, instead wimping out by referring to media reports. Seriously, I should have paid more attention to the tabloids.

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

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

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

Mrs. Kan Disses Mr. Kan. Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts? Really? More Appropriate for Twitter?

The next 24 hours are crucial to the Kan administration’s survival.

Also, an LDP guy candidate is electedreelected in Okinawa. Go figure.

The Tabloids Called It First, Sorta

I have some thoughts about why tabloids are able to report this kind of stuff. Remind me to talk about it later.

I remember walking past a Kiosk a week ago give or take a couple of days and seeing a headline screaming 45 seat debacle for the DPJ. Still, no one in the mainstream media saw an LDP plurality—knock on wood, Sadakazu Tanigaki—coming. Two immediate consequences of the unexpected DPJ loss: a) All policy initiatives are off the table until the September DPJ presidential election and b) the LDP surge and the poor showing by Ozawa’s candidates diminishes the chances of an outright Ozawa-led split. Point b) is what good news there is for Prime Minister Kan. Right now, I think that it will very difficult to cobble together a workable coalition, but I am stunned—and smashed.

One final point (for now): Floater voters trump special interest electoral machines.

Good night y’all.

Some Thoughts around the Upper House Election, Plus Shoutout

There are 29 one-seat districts, 12 two-seat districts, 5 three-seat member districts, and 1 five-seat districts*. Several observations:

* I am using the conventional and convenient terminology that refers to the number of Upper House seats that are up for election every three years in each prefecture, and not the actual number of seats allocated to the prefecture, which is double that number. This is significant, as we shall see later.

The last surveys showed the DPJ dominating in the one-seat districts to the northeast and the LDP prevailing in the southwest. The historical contrast between the poorer, more radical north and the wealthier, more conservative south continues to resonate in the battle between the two top vote-getters. Not that I’m ready to read anything of long-term significance into this, but I do know that I have to rethink my comment about the periphery.

The two-seat districts are basically a wash between the DPJ and the LDP. No wonder, when a party needs twice the votes of your closest opponent plus a comfortable cushion (unless you could somehow engineer a perfect 1:1 split of the votes, a feat not even the Sokagakkai could accomplish) to take both. Under a two-party system, the two-seat districts matter mostly as a source of votes for the national proportional election, nothing more. And you don’t want to give up a good day job to stand as the non-incumbent on the prefectural ticket unless you can earn a good chance of being placed on the House of Representatives ticket the next time around—or if the incumbent is somehow very vulnerable. Otherwise, you’re little more than a stalking horse for the candidates on the national ticket.

Of the five three-seat districts, three (Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa; the others are Aichi and Osaka) are the Kanto prefectures closest to Tokyo. (By contrast, a couple of more distant Kanto prefectures, Tochigi and Gunma, dropped from two seats to one each in the 2007 election. Each of the two now has three Councillors in the Upper House and will drop to two after this election.) Add Tokyo’s five, and we have as good an index of Tokyo-centricity as there is. There are many, often interrelated, reasons for this, but I’d say natural geography (Kanto is huge and relatively flat), the choice of Edo, later Tokyo, as Japan’s capital, and the post-war explosion in public transport are the three major factors.

I mentioned in passing that Gunma and Tochigi Prefectures are being downsized from four seats in the House of Councillors to two through the 2007 and 2010 elections. They talk about overrepresentation of the peripheral in the Diet, particularly in the Upper House, where each prefecture must be represented by at least one member per triennial election. But the Gunma and Tochigi examples show that the one per election requirement can create wrenching changes in representation in the peripheral as well. What will the prefectural districts look like in twenty years under current rules if current demographic trends continue? The DPJ and LDP are in an unspoken conspiracy to shake out the smaller parties in the name of sacrifice by the political class by cutting back on the national proportional seats. I don’t have a position on that, but I think that a revision of the a-seat-in-every-election rule should come first. More fundamentally, the place of prefectures in the Japanese body politics needs to be revisited.

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I went and cast my two typical floater ballots today, which may account for my unusually prescriptive comments today. I took along an American political scientist along for a look-see and had a long conversation with him after that, which may also be affecting me. Incidentally, the election officials were nice about the presence of an uninvited observer, but did not allow the academic to take photos. And the guy—the professor, not the election official—wants to see you, Jake, before he goes back to the States. Hope you can find the time for him. Hope you come Friday too.

Why Is the DPJ Catching All the Flak on the Consumption Tax Hike Issue?

Here is my response, rearticulated as a blogpost, to an issue raised on an Upper House election-themed mailing list.

It actually overlaps with yesterday’s post. Namely: Why is the Japanese electorate, according to the Japanese media, taking it out on the DPJ for Prime Minister Kan’s enthusiasm for a consumption tax hike, but not on the LDP, who broached the subject in the first place by putting a five percentage point hike in its election manifesto? Well, the LDP isn’t exactly gaining traction as far as overall voter sentiment is concerned—it’s the single-seat races where it’s surging in the surveys*—and I’m not a mind reader and do not have the benefit of a newspaper or grant to cover the costs of a survey, but here are a few observations/conjectures.

First, higher taxes are never popular, so there’ll be a temptation to shoot the messenger under the best of circumstances. In fact, the consumption tax in its various permutations has been the third rail of Japanese politics since the days of Prime Minister Ohira, so it would have been doubly prudent to have crafted a game plan before touching it. Instead, Prime Minister Kan threw out ideas about the tax rate, timeline, and exemptions as if he were engaged in a brainstorming session. We saw another case of analogous, if far more trivial, competence issues causing damage to the Fukuda administration during the rollout of the Late-Term Medical Case Insurance system.

Second, there’s the arithmetic. Which is more likely, pro-tax hike people who were inclined to vote for the LDP changing their minds and opting for the DPJ because Kan got religion, or anti-tax folks abandoning the DPJ and voting for a third party or abstaining altogether?

Third, this election is a referendum on the DPJ, not the LDP. The LDP would like to have as many of those floater voters coming its way as possible, but it’ll be okay if they stay away come 11 July or even throw in their lot to Your Party, as long as they don’t put the names of DPJ candidates on their prefectural district ballots.

What’s interesting is that the outcome—assuming the media surveys are correct—will make the LDP more of a party of the peripheral. That’s the other side of winning in the singe-seaters. Given demographic trends, i.e. concentration in the large metropolitan areas, which will continue to be reflected in the periodic census-based reallocation, it can’t be happy about that, as I’ve mentioned before.

* There’s a pattern here that highlights the north-east/south-west political divide. I can’t say more about this now since I don’t want to give away anything that Aurelia George Mulgan might be posting later on the SSJ Forum (it’s a useful site, I recommend that you subscribe if you aren’t subscribed already) regarding an interesting finding of hers.

Some More Thoughts on the DPJ Slippage. Plus, a Kan Story

The flap over Shizuka Kamei’s resignation from his cabinet post in protest over the Kan administration’s decision not to pass the postal reform bills during the regular Diet session* did not help. But mostly, it appears to be Prime Minister Kan’s handling of the consumption tax issue that is responsible for the precipitous fall in the DPJ’s electoral fortunes.

* The DPJ’s promise to do it ASAP when the Diet reconvenes after the election and Kamei’s replacement by his PNP cohort Shozaburo Jimi give the impression that it was more of a pre-election stunt than a show of genuine dismay.

Three days ago, on our way home from a talk given by the esteemed Professor Koichi Hamada, a journalist raised the question: If the majority of the Japanese public favors a consumption tax hike, why were Kan and the DPJ catching so much flak? My short answer in essence was that they alienated the entire anti-hike crowd while they had to share support from the pro-hike folks with the LDP, so they ended up getting bad marks from a majority of the whole*. That’s broadly what the subsequent polls are revealing in painful (to the DPJ) detail. And it’s also true that the consumption tax has always been the third rail of Japanese politics—just ask Prime Ministers Ohira, Nakasone, Takeshita, Hosokawa, and Hashimoto. There was the added stigma of the DPJ’s failure to come up with the massive savings that it had appeared to promise the Japanese electorate in the 2009 election. So there were caution lights everywhere calling for a very careful rollout plan. Instead, he seems to have had only the haziest of game plans if any, tossing out ideas about tax rates and timelines and exemptions as if he was engaging in a brainstorming session.

* So I can’t understand what we’re hearing from the media, that Kan and his associates intended to take away the issue from the LDP, which is advocating a 5 percentage point hike, to 10%. This isn’t rocket science; it’s really simple fractions.

One other takeaway: If the election plays out like the media surveys say that it’s trending, the DPJ will have to add a half dozen seats or so after the election for a simple majority (and, for a coalition majority, make up for the loss of two, perhaps all three, PNP seats at stake). Finding LDP defectors is the preferred option, but the low-hanging fruit have already been picked. One or two more perhaps, but half a dozen? That looks like part of a broader realignment, and only the DPJ can kick-start that process. The big bang, of course, is Ozawa’s game, but so is cherry picking. Kan and his team do not have the contacts and the expertise.

Coalition partners? The LDP? Ozawa came close to engineering a grand coalition in 2007 after the Upper House election that year. But is the cabinet large enough to share? Would the LDP want to? Both Komeito and most likely Your Party will each have enough seats to bridge the gap without the PNP’s help—good-bye postal reform bills?—but it will be a hard sell right after the Upper House election. Komeito is better equipped to enter a coalition, as I’ve explained here before, but media reports on the campaigning tell us that there has been substantial Komeito-LDP cooperation going on at the prefecture-chapter level.

I suspect that it’s going to take time to craft a stable DPJ-led regime. In the meantime, the extraordinary Diet session right after the election is likely to be limited to taking care of housekeeping matter such as committee assignments, so the postal reform bills will have to wait, perhaps substantially reengineered. And if all the opposition parties hold out long enough, Kan will be very vulnerable in the September election for the DPJ presidency.

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Finally, an anecdote from Professor Hamada’s talk. During the Q&A, Kazuyo Katsuma, a do-it-all consultant (from personal finance to management and everything in between) and high-profile talking head, claimed that she briefed Kan and found that he didn’t know the difference between nominal and real interest rates. This comes on the heels of another piece of information that I gathered last previous week. During a conversation only tangentially related to the Kan administration, an unimpeachable source told me that Kan hadn’t known about the multiplier effect when he became Finance Minister. For someone with such limited economic literacy—RS tells me that Dick Cheney for one showed similar ignorance as Vice President, which I guess should be reassuring—Kan shows uncommon conviction in the righteousness of his big government approach.

Addendum: Anonymous reminds me that the multiplier mishap Finance Minister is “very old news.” So true.

DPJ Slipping, LDP Entrenching Itself on the Periphery

The most recent media surveys (6-8 July; polls and legwork) on the 11 July Upper House election put the DPJ around 50 and the LDP in the mid 40s. The DPJ continues to kick ass in the national proportional ballot, but the LDP is coming on strong in the prefectural districts. Specifically, it’s the one-seaters. Sankei’s 7 July district-by-district survey has the DPJ and LDP leading in 9 and 16 respectively, and the two neck-and-neck in 4. The LDP is becoming the party of the peripheral, of ura-Nihon—don’t use this word in polite company, it has been politically incorrect for some years—Shikoku, and Kyushu (it even leads in Okinawa).

If this trend will plays itself out on 11 July—there still are a lot of undecideds out there, though that factor has to be discounted by the prospects of their sitting it out—there will be a multitude of implications, short-term and long-, politics and policy, that require analysis. A lot of work to do.

The Upper House Election and Some Political Implications

If media reports on the upcoming Upper House election are to be believed, the DPJ is sure to post some gains but is likely to fall short of an outright majority. Media estimates based on proprietary polls and old-fashioned legwork suggest that the DPJ will do well in the national proportional ballot but will not achieve the near-sweep that it made in the 29 one-seat (per election, every three years) districts in the 2007 provincial ballots. The lack of an outright majority not only will have a significant impact on policy issues but will also likely affect the political game; Prime Minister Kan needs an outright DPJ majority to make sure that Ichiro Ozawa does not attempt to engineer a DPJ split and a broader, parliamentarian realignment around the September election for the DPJ leadership.

The same estimates indicate that the LDP will more or less break even in the national proportional ballot (12 seats up for reelection) but will claw back some seats in the one-seat districts. This will make it lean even more heavily towards provincial interests, which is not where you want to bet the future of your political viability as a national party. Your Party is likely to place a distant third and will represent free-market reformist interests in the march to the next Lower House election, to be held no later than 2013.

The SDP and PNP will wind up losing most of their leverage over the DPJ. Specifically, the SDP will end up continuing its slow but inexorable slide to oblivion, picking up 1—with great luck 2—seats (3 seats up for reelection). Every time that the 1955 Socialists cozied up to the powers that be, they have lost that much more of their political cachet as the safe haven for the protest vote; this election looks to be no exception. I suspect that we’ve seen the last of the SDP as a member of any coalition government. The PNP has three incumbents whose terms end this year, two in prefectural districts and one proportional; it is likely to end up with none. (It does have three seats, up for election in 2013.) That’ll be two more seats that the DPJ will have to cover just to maintain a coalition majority. More significantly, the roar of the postal-office electoral machine appears to be mightier than its bite. Is it really worth catering to at the expense of alienating floater voters?

Last but not least, on what is likely to be a slightly diminished Komeito. Barring an outright DPJ majority—still a real possibility—expect a draen out courtship of the Komeito by the DPJ to forge a manageable coalition—first base, second base...

Incidentally, I find it interesting if not surprising that the two most obvious causes of Hatoyama’s fall—Futenma Air Station and the political financing scandals—figure very little in the election. Instead, it appears to be Kan’s handling of the consumption tax—the casualness with which he has been throwing words around regarding tax rates, exemptions and rebates—that has been the biggest drag on the DPJ. Careless words regarding a make-or-break policy question, plus the embarrassment over Kamei’s fit and resignation over the postponement of the postal reform bills to the post-election Diet session, and you have a situation looking somewhat like that under Prime Minister Hatoyama.

Will the DPJ win a simple majority in the Upper House in the July 11 Upper House election?

Will the DPJ win a simple majority in the Upper House in the July 11 Upper House election? This is a very important for policymaking because a bicameral majority will enable the DPJ to 1) pass any bill short of a constitutional amendment on its own and, just as significant politically, 2) claim a renewed mandate from the electorate. It will also help snuff out any prospects of a September rebellion by Ichiro Ozawa and his minions. The media reports suggest that a simple majority is unlikely, but a couple of people whose reading of the political winds I respect say otherwise, so keep an open mind about it. In the meantime…

The eventual outcome turns on the extent to which a) undecided voters will break for the DPJ in the two-seat (one elected every three years to a six-year term) provincial districts and b) Sokagakkai voters help LDP candidates there.

On the first point, the most recent media polls show the DPJ trailing the LDP in convincing its “supporters” to actually vote for it. Given what must be the relative softness of this support and the presence of Your Party as the New Charice, this indicates the DPJ’s difficulty in convincing large numbers of undecided floater voters to opt for its candidates on the provincial ballot. The voting procedure does not help the DPJ if I remember correctly. First, the voter receives the national proportional ballot, in which he must write in the name of a party or a specific candidate. (Japan for all practical purposes has a literacy test.) After he puts the ballot in the ballot box, he receives another ballot on which he is expected to write the name of his choice from the list of provincial district candidates. Most two-seat districts will be contested between DPJ and LDP candidates, but there will be other candidates, Communist and otherwise, available. Specifically, I have a hard time imagining many people explicitly voting against the DPJ on the proportional ballot then turning around and choosing the DPJ candidate on the provincial ballot. My guess is that the average voter would behave differently if the ballots were given out in the opposite order. (This is something that could be confirmed in a behavioral psychology experiment. Any takers?)

Addendum 6 July: I was dead wrong on the voting order, as you will see if you go through the comments. That said, the importance of choice architecture (a term that I just learned a few days ago) in this election should be explored by a combination of exit polls and controlled experiments.

On the second point, media reports show in a large number of provincial districts 6/10th of Komeito supporters leaning towards LDP candidates. Some remain at 5/10th while others reach 7/10th and 8/10th. (There is one district in which it only reaches 2/10th, a sign of some very bad history, no doubt.) The LDP-Komeito coalition is battered, but is obviously not dead.

Why Would Obama Want to Fire McChrystal?

This article all but shout out the lack of judgment/discretion on his—and far more materially his staff—but military officers saying rude things about their civilian overlords? How different is this in substance from what employees are likely to say about hard-ass/blowhard bosses in any firm? I say they make up, and McChrystal goes back to Afghanistan; it’s what he wants to do.

Sorry, I’ll get back to Japan later in the week..

Could DenominationRedenomination* Be the Answer to Japan’s Economic Woes?

* Thank you, Anonymous.

Back in the day, my hopes for Japan’s future diminished every time otherwise serious politicians—I think PM Fukuda Pere was one—suggested denomination as a means to boost Japan’s economic performance. I mean, seriously…But I’m much older now yet no wiser, so my faith in human wisdom is not what it used to be. Now, Daniel Ariely, one of my favorite people that I don’t know personally, has this to say about the irrational hold that numbers have on us. Now, I’m not so sure it won’t have Read the whole piece, and, if you liked it, go look up his other stuff.

A Quarter of South Korean Households with TVs Watch Late-Night Japan-Cameroon Match

According to this Kyodo report courtesy of the Japanese tabloid Sponichi, the South Korean equivalent of the Nielsen TV ratings reached 24.1%* for the 14 June Japan-Cameroon game in the World Cup in South Africa—a match that began at 11PM Seoul (and Tokyo) Time. Two questions came to mind: First, what was the percentage of the Japanese TV audience that watched South Korea thrash Greece? Second, what was the percentage of the South Korean audience that rooted for the Japanese side?

That is about as good a snapshot of the asymmetry in the cross-straits relationship as there is.

* It peaked in Tokyo at 49.1%, just before the match eneded.

Legea Is Not Planning to Sell Any Sportswear in Japan Any Time Soon

Oh…kay… Legea has also signed up the Zimbabwean and Iranian national teams as well, according to this Yomiuri report.

So I guess my question is, what do they have that Myanmar doesn’t? Explain it to me, Legea.

My Two Yen(=0.018182 Euros) on the BP Spill

I was talking to a business strategy consultant today when talk turned to communication strategy, which reminded me of BP and its continuous oil spill. That is, how can BP, pump so much obvious money into corporate branding, then fail so badly when the shit hits the fan? Haven’t they heard of Yukijirushi? Okay, Enron? And every other corporation whose media minders and top executives put stuff out that was likely to be contradicted later for no visible motive other than to snatch a short reprieve from public scrutiny?

It’s cold comfort to know that we in Japan are not alone.

Even more surprising, though, is the amateurish look of the effort to stop the oil spill. They look like a ten year-old kid and his friends, coming over while his parents went out, who set the kitchen on fire; they’re doing their best to put it out before the parents come home—but they’re ten year-old kids!

Re Mark’s Wish List for Realignment

Blogger.com says that the following response to Mark’s comment is too long, so I’m posting it here. Sorry I don’t have time to post on the ongoing chicken race between Kamei and the DPJ. Will Kan call Kamei’s bluff? Stay tuned.

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Mark:

As a typical floater voter, I have my own set of wishes, but my aunts stubbornly refuse to turn into teacarts. So you’ll have to content yourself with what I think is likely/unlikely as per my current line of work, and I’m not going in the policy implications:

Now that it seems likely Japan will realign its political parties, I thought I’d weigh in with some suggestions.

I’d like to see the SDP and the JCP merge. This new party would focus on providing social security, child care, health care, and education. It would support government spending in those areas, but not necessarily in public works. It would try and raise taxes on the rich (particularly the capital gains tax). It would oppose raising the sales tax. It would try to reduce defense spending and it would do its best to uphold Article 9. It would call for a reduction in U.S. forces in Japan. It would also call for strong regulations for industry.

Policy-wise, a merger makes sense. It won’t happen. There’s too much history behind them. Besides, the remainder of the old Socialists that form the SDP are too unruly a group—reminds you a bit of the US Democratic Party—to be able to submerge themselves in the orderly, disciplined world of the JCP.

I’d like to see the Ozawa faction split off from Minshuto and form a new party called the Rural Revival Party. This party would be a sort of pork barrel politics party, focused on spending money in rural areas to win votes. It would, of course, oppose redistricting. I think Kokumin Shinto should get merged into this new party, as the new party would try to boost Japan Post and its affiliates, particularly in rural areas. This party would also oppose raising the sales tax. It would support infrastructure projects.

Makes a lot of sense. And don’t rule out the possibility of likeminded friends in the LDP joining them. Think big, Mark.

I’d like to see Your Party merged into what’s left of Minshuto. Yoshimi Watanabe, Yukio Edano, Seiji Maehara, Katsuya Okada, and Renho would be in this party. This party would focus on transparency, accountability, and the control of the bureaucracy by the politicians. This party would focus on reducing wasteful government spending, particularly public works spending.

What do you mean, “what’s left of Minshuto”? I’m willing to take under 100 in the over/under on the number of Diet members that Ozawa will be able to take with him if he decides to split. That said, your “New Party” does make sense—in the mid- to long-term. I don’t think that will happen before the next lower house election though; The post-boomers in Your Party has to see how far they can take its current configuration before they decide to submerge its identity in a bigger whole.

I’d like to see Shinzo Abe, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yuriko Koike move over to Tachiagare Nippon. This party would focus on international affairs. It might call for revising Article 9. It might call for increasing the ODA budget. It would call for reducing social welfare spending and public works spending. It would try to balance the budget.

Did you say Tachigare Nippon? Kidding. No. they are not a good fit.

What’s left of the LDP can form a new party called Kanryoto. This party would include Shinjiro Koizumi, Tadamori Oshima, and Taro Aso. This party would let the bureaucrats do what they want while the politicians did their political theater.

Doesn’t make sense, and that’s not what they are about, individually.

I don’t think it’s necessary for Japanese parties to have different trade policies. Japan already has low tariffs, which means making trade deals makes sense for Japan. The only thing Japan has to protect is its agriculture sector. Given that Japan only produces 40% of the food it consumes, I don’t think it makes sense for Japan to reduce protection in that industry.

But we could have a more rational agricultural policy, which would call for a different trade policy.

I don’t think immigration should be a focus of the new parties. I don’t think Japanese voters want a substantial increase in immigration and I don’t think it makes sense for Japan to do that. There aren’t many politicians who want that anyways. Hopefully, in the next election, Hidenao Nakagawa will lose and go away.

Don’t worry, it won’t be. Not yet.

As for the other parties, I’d break them up and have their members join the remaining parties.

That’s possible only when (if?) Daisaku Ikeda passes away.

Koshiishi to Ozawa, No Hard Feelings, Just Business?

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

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

Futenma to Henoko: Easier Said Than Done

Sorry I missed your previous comment, Janne. Actually, Futenma doesn’t need a legislative bill to go forward. It needs the following:

1) The Okinawa governor’s permission for the landfill that is necessary for the runway.
2) Appropriation in the FY2011 budget.

Note that 1) is unlikely to be forthcoming in the immediate future, although the Japanese and US authorities have agreed to come to a definitive conclusion by the end of August if I remember correctly. 2) is not hard to do. But once the US side has its own 2011 budget in place and actually starts spending the money, something is going to hit the fan and it won’t be pretty. Or at least that’s how I see it.

Hatoyama’s Resignation and My 176 Seconds of Fame

Here, in related videos, I’m talking just after the news broke on NHK that Hatoyama had announced his intent to step down. They posted the second half only (and only an excerpt at that), which is a good thing actually; I was in the usual storytelling mode in the first half so I got cut off in mid-paragraph every time that I tried to answer a question. I went off for a few minutes while they delivered more news, during which the producer told me to try to make to brief. It worked, as I hope the clip shows. “Don’t bury the lead”—it’s even truer in the electronic media.

At the time, the media did not know that Ozawa was also going to step down, and I thought that I responded adequately to a follow-up question on that point in the second half. Note that they’ve edited this out and otherwise clipped the interview (the question to my first point doesn’t appear in the clip) so that the excerpt will lose its freshness as slowly as possible.

I learned many things in just that one experience. Like I’ve really, really aged. I also think that I enjoyed myself too much. That gave me a little insight on what got into the heads of those liberal wusses who show up on the O’Reilly Show for their 15 minutes of ignominy.

Back to work.

DPJ Schism in the Works?

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

Who the Heck Is Fifty Year-Old Shinji Tarudoko?

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

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

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

Q&A, the Day Before Hatoyama Resigned, Taking Ozawa Down

As a timesaving measure (for me), here’s a Q&A that I had to fill out in the course of my work broadly defined the day before Hatoyama resigned. The copy right to the Qs belong to someone else, but he won’t complain, I’m sure, even if he noticed.

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-Why are the DPJ's supporting rates keep falling? It is because of how they handled Okinawa issues or are other factors in play?

There’s a host of problems beyond the inevitable post-honeymoon let-down, most prominently and persistently the terrible handling of what was really a local issue—the Futenma helicopters. But the persistent political financing scandals of Ozawa and his retainers, and to a lesser extent Hatoyama’s, also played a major role. Significant policy questions that sapped Hatoyama and the DPJ’s popularity include the ballooning public deficit and the Hatoyama’s administration’s inability to control it, the balance between highway tolls and highway construction, the rollout of the child allowance, etc., etc. That’s not an exhaustive list, but this is what happens when a political party comes to power with a big policy agenda and has to come to grips with the realities of governance. So the 70 % plus figures had to come down, but that would just have been a return to normalcy, par for the course*.

* Ross Schaap had a less understanding view of the Hatoyama administration’s inability to present a coherent set of policies and explain what they meant in addressing national concerns, and I had to agree with him. Thanks again, Ross. (No, he’s not the one who put the questions to me.)

-If Hatoyama resigns, how much will that help the DPJ ahead of July upper-house election? What implications will his resignation have for the Japanese market?

My guesstimate before the whole thing fell apart through the weekend for the DPJ had been 40-50 seats, 45-50 if I had to narrow it further, and I’m going back to it with the assumption that Hatoyama leaves. The coalition loses its upper house majority in any case. Caveat emptor: I used very broad assumptions about the overall voting patterns for the prefectural-district seats and the national proportional seats and reserve the right to change my mind on closer examination.

The plausible replacements—a couple of them are improbable—are all more policy-oriented, steady hands. That should be reassuring to financial market players. Naoto Kan, easily the leading candidate, has emerged as a fiscal conservative; he should have an immediate, positive effect. Longer term, Kan surely, but also any one of the others, is sure to push tax reform without abandoning the social safety net agenda. A future consumption tax hike definitely comes with sight, and the extremely high corporate tax rates should enter the policy agenda with a view to lowering them to internationally competitive levels. So it’s a positive story for the post-election scenario too.

-What other coalition partners are possible after the SDP quits (New Komeito?)

Komeito, obviously. It’s much easier to handle as a coalition partner, as the LDP will be the first to admit. Like the DPJ, it’s a predominantly centrist-left, urban middle-class party. As such, it’s more compatible for the DPJ policy-wise. If that’s not enough, it’s rock-base constituency allows it to be more flexible on policy issues. Also important, Komeito will wind up with 20 or so upper house seats overall, enough to ensure a coalition the upper house majority all by itself. There’ll be no need for the opportunistic, vested-interests PNP. The up-and-coming You Party just might be able to provide a majority on its own as well, but there’s a problem. It needs to create a singular identity with a view to the next lower house general election, likely in 2013, when the other half of the upper house also faces a general election. It can’t do that in a coalition unless it gets a huge portion of the policy-making pie. It doesn’t help that it’s very much in the Koizumi mold policy-wise, and that may be too much for the DPJ to swallow. In any case, it’s not going to happen before the election.

-Who would the next leader be for the DPJ?

My top four candidates: Naoto Kan, Naoto Kan, Naoto Kan, and Kazuhiro Haraguchi. Kan is highly ambitious, next in line, hasn’t made any major gaffes as a cabinet minister, and, very importantly, is on cordial terms with Ozawa. Haraguchi is an articulate and policy-oriented cabinet minister on good terms with Ozawa, but his time has not come yet. I don’t think that the DPJ wants to run the risk of people thinking he’s an Ozawa sock puppet. (Unfair, but that’s what many people also mistakenly saw Hatoyama as being.) Katsuya Okada: Ozawa doesn’t like him, and wasted some political capital with his handling of Futenma as well as the Japan-US secret agreements. Seiji Maehara: Ozawa dislikes him, worse in his political books, probably thinks he’s a political amateur. There’s also the small but undeniable chance that the JAL situation blows up in his face in the near future.

-What is the LDP doing to capitalize?

HAHAHA. Okay, that’s not really an answer. Actually, very little. Very little that works, that is. From a public communication point of view, a pleasant but lackluster leader in Sadakazu Tanigaki and lack of interest from the media mean that the LDP receives minimal attention. In the political game, one-time ally Komeito’s ardor has cooled, so the LDP has trouble putting up any kind of a united front against the DPJ. When it comes to policy, they’ve been a coalition of a variety of supplier-oriented interests for so long. They were able to do that because they were willing to put aside differences on emotive but non-essential issues—constitutional amendment for one. This works nicely when you are trying to maintain the status quo, but it’s very inconvenient when you are trying to put together a coherent, attractive policy platform for a general election. Which makes for an uninteresting media story—which brings me back to my point about public communication.

Do Any of You Watch Bloomberg TV?

If you do, why not tune in tomorrow (2 June) around 9:30-9:40AM Tokyo Time (that’s June 1, 8:30-8:40PM DST, in New York, I think)? You’ll be in for a surprise.

Just sayin’, you know.

Will the Prime Minister Take Last Orders?

A couple of stories on the Sankei website here and here. In the first one, cabinet ministers including Naoto and Kazuhiro Haraguchi, the most likely candidates as Hatoyama’s replacement, line up behind the prime minister in support. Well, what else could these people, handpicked by Hatoyama himself, say when accosted by reporters, right? But it is a useful reminder that the business of government goes on, even while people like me speculate on the political game for fun and (modest) profit. And Hatoyama is indicating in his typically roundabout way that he intends to soldier on. The second one has Azuma Koshiishi reassuring the harried DPJ leadership that he (and Ozawa?) will resolve the problem within a couple of days.

So what happens when the hard-to-resist force meets the hard-to-move object? How about a lame-pigeon prime minister finishing up the legislative agenda in the next two weeks, then a DPJ presidential election immediately after the Diet session ends, and fighting the election under the new president, who would be elected prime minister in the post-election extraordinary Diet session?

Dead Man Walking; What I think It Means

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

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

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

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

The Danse Macabre around the Prime Minister

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

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

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

Coalition Update: Officially Dissolved but Collaboration in July Election Still in the Cards

The SDP meeting of its prefectural chapter director-generals in a near-unanimous decision—the Niigata and Oita chapter DGs dissented, go figure—Sunday afternoon to opted to officially leave the three-party alliance supporting the Hatoyama administration but to seek to continue to cooperate with the DPJ in the July upper house election. This makes tactical sense but is likely to be pillaged by the MSM (except tabloid Nikkai Gendai). I don’t think that it’s a good idea if the SDP wants to survive as an anti-business, anti-Japan-US alliance protest party. But maybe that’s just me.

What about the Lower House? The SDP Revisited

Yesterday, when I looked at what the coalition meant to the SDP, I went to bed without going into the implications for the next lower house election, which would come no later than August 2013, most likely as part of a bicameral election, that is, in tandem with the election for the other half of the upper house. That won’t do. After all, the SDP does hold 7 lower house seats, two (wrong, it’s three; see blooper alert at the end of the main body of this post) of which hold down first-past-the-post, single-seat districts. Isn’t it likely that the SDP will lose the FPP seats if the DPJ not only withdraws its support but also fields its own candidate?* The short answer? It’s complicated.

The DPJ’s two FPP lower house seats are held by Kantoku Teruya in the Okinawa Prefecture 2nd District and Yasumasa Shigeno in the Oita Prefecture 2nd District. Of the two, Teruya’s seat is more likely to remain with the DPJ if it leaves the coalition. Shigeno’s situation is harder to read, but it’s not clear that the SDP will be better off here if it remains in the coalition.

Teruya was first elected as an anti-military independent to national office in 1995 to the upper house for the single seat that was up for election that year in two-seat Okinawa. He yielded his position as the anti-military candidate in the 2004 upper house election to Keiko Itokazu (who easily defeated the LDP candidate), but returned to the Diet as the lower house member from the Okinawa Prefecture 2nd District as a member of the SDP. He was reelected in 2005—when the DPJ candidate finished a near-fringe candidate third behind the LDP also-ran—and 2009. Through all this, he has also enjoyed the support of the Okinawa Social Mass Party, which has drifted to the left over the years as it lost a good portion of its support base to the LDP and DPJ. My guess is that he will be more helped than harmed by a DPJ challenger, who would only wind up as a spoilsport for the LDP candidate by splitting the pro-military vote. On the other hand, if the DPJ remains in the coalition, Teruya may bolt the SDP and run as an independent in the next lower house election, which would be the surest way for the DPJ to lose that seat.

Shigeno’s situation is different. A dyed-in-the-wool SDP member who worked his way up the prefectural civil service labor union ladder, then turned to politics fulltime, serving as a prefectural assemblyman for 26 years, and winning a national office in the 2000 lower house election as a regional proportional candidate. (He ran simultaneously in the Oita Prefecture 2nd District, where he lost to Seishiro Eto, the LDP incumbent.) His subsequent track record: (2003) FPP loss, regional loss; (2005) FPP loss, regional win; (2009) FPP win—finally beating Eto in a close race. Shigeno had been gaining votes in each election even before the historical alliance in the 2009 election, so it’s not a given that he will lose his FPP seat—possibly against a rookie if Eto, 72 by the time a 2013 election rolls around—if he DPJ withdraws its support, in which case, he will still have an excellent chance of making it back on the SDP’s regional proportional ticket. On the other hand, he is not a shoo-in even if the SDP stays in the coalition, given that Eto managed to run a close second in an election that turned out to be a disaster for the LDP overall.

To sum it up, if the SDP remains in the coalition, it may lose the Okinawa FPP seat through defection while the Oita FPP seat is not a sure thing even with DPJ support. If the SDP leaves the coalition, it is highly likely to retain the Okinawa FPP seat while there is a good chance that it will lose the Oita FPP seat.

The SDP is not, or course, a single-issue party, and many things can happen between now and whenever. But the impact of a withdrawal from the coalition on the SDP’s FPP seats is ambiguous at worst. Given the predictable, immediate fallout on the upper house proportional ballot and its reputation as a party of principle/protest as well as the institutional memory of the disaster that the 1994-1995 cohabitation under Tomiichi Murayama turned out to be, I have to put my money on a formal split.

And I’ll know soon enough if I’m wrong.

Addendum (blooper alert): Anonymous reminds me in the comments that Kiyomi Tsujimoto made it through in the Osaka 10th District. Thanks. That also provides a good motive for Tsujimoto’s reluctance to speak out against Hatoyama after Fukushima resigned. The SDP will most likely have to kiss her seat goodbye if the DPJ decides to field its own candidate there, meaning that she would have to take up the 1 seat that the DPJ will win in the 29-seat Kinki region proportional district. Add this long-term outlook to the threat of a second DPJ upper house candidate in the Niigata Prefectural District and a collaborative relationship on an issue-by-issue basis becomes attractive from a purely electoral point of view. After all, the SDP should be able to maintain its 2 upper house proportional seats even if its share of the national vote falls to 3%. Whether the SDP activists will accept this line of reasoning—if indeed the SDP leadership iss thinking along these lines—is another matter altogether. And that’s about as far as my arithmetic takes me.

* In fact, some DPJ political operatives are reportedly threatening to field a second candidate for the two Niigata Prefecture upper house seats coming up for the 2007 election. The SDP and the DPJ currently hold one seat each. Ichiro Ozawa is pushing a second candidate in all the other two-seaters but has refrained from doing so as a favor to the SDP.

Kicked Out of Cabinet, Protest Party Ponders Next Move

Sorry I haven’t been following up on my promises, and comments. Here’s a piece, a little too wonkish to make its way to Eurasia Group clients, but hopefully informative for people who want some background on what’s going down in the Japanese political scene. Unedited, but I have to cook some pasta; it’s 20:31 in Tokyo.

Now that Prime Minister Hatoyama has dismissed Social Democratic Party leader Mizuho Fukushima from her cabinet post for making it clear that she would refuse to add her signature to the cabinet decision—by custom, all cabinet decisions and other official cabinet acts must be unanimous—speculation turns to whether or not the SDP will remain in the coalition, a course of action Prime Minister Hatoyama and DPJ don Ichiro Ozawa are more than willing to oblige.

The quid pro quo in the alliance between the DPJ and SPD is fairly straightforward. The SDP gives its support to DPJ candidates in return for input on policy*. It’s easy to forget that the SDP stands for anything more than post-war pacifism, but it continues to push policies to help the socio-economic underdogs and otherwise support antiestablishment causes. Its landmark achievement in this Diet session is a legislative bill that severely limits the labor dispatching business. Seeing dispatched workers and other non-permanent forms of employment as the major cause of falling wages, it teamed up with the PNP, the other minority coalition partner, to overturn a compromise between the government, business, and big labor and force the Hatoyama administration to further tighten the screw. But inevitably, there have been far more disappointments than accomplishments. The SDP has had to set aside its anti-nuclear power stance in favor of the DPJ’s climate change agenda, all but give up on enfranchising permanent residents in local government elections, and accept the dispatch of Maritime Self-Defense Force escort ships for anti-piracy patrol near Somalia**, to name a few prominent examples of its typical left-wing protest agenda.

The setbacks can take its toll at the voting stations. Its leaders remember well that it was decimated (in the original sense) when it gained the prime minister’s chair in 1994 in exchange for abandoning its opposition to the Japan-US alliance and accepting the constitutionality of the Self-Defense Forces. Since then, it has steadily declined in the polls as protest voters shifted to the Japan Communist Party*** and floater voters found other, new non-LDP alternatives to turn to. The reversion, more or less, to the original 2006/2009 plan for moving US Marines helicopters from Futenma to the vicinities of Camp Schwab came to strike at the heart of the SDP’s reason d’être as the anti-alliance, pro-underdog party because of Hatoyama’s near-criminal negligence around the issue. Acquiescing would have meant running the risk of further alienating its core left-wing supporters.

It is clear that Ichiro Ozawa, by far the single most powerful man in the DPJ now, want to keep the camel in the tent. His priorities seem to be: 1) stay in power in the DPJ, 2) minimize losses in the July upper house election, and 3) destroy the LDP. Priority 1) means that he must give up the floater vote and concentrate on roping in special interests/captive voters****. That explains his courting of the Japan Post cadres in defiance of MSM. And the 4% more or less of actual voters that the SDP may be able to convince to vote for DPJ candidates—I’m guessing less if the SDP stays in the coalition—will be more than enough to tip close elections.

The big question for the SDP is: Should it consider continued input on policy questions—there is no one in Japanese politics whose reward and punishment are as sure and swift as Ozawa—is worth risking its long-term viability as a focal point for the protest vote? After all, you can’t root for the underdog if you are dead.

We’ll know the answer on Sunday, when the SDP leadership convenes to decide what to do next.

* It’s actually a little more complicated than that. The DPJ supported a few SDP candidates in single seat districts in the 2009 lower house election and has agreed in the July upper house election to refrain from putting up a second candidate in the two-seat upper-house Niigata-Prefecture district. The latter is little more than symbolic, since the SDP has little hope of outpolling the LDP candidate for the “other” seat.

** Kiyomi Tsuji, a member of the SDP leadership and sub-cabinet appointee, is the founder and major supporter of the Peace Boat initiative, which according to its website is “a Japan-based international non-governmental and non-profit organization that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment.” In May 2009, the Peace Boat sought and received protection from the JMSDF escort ship on duty when it passed through the Gulf of Aden. The irony was not lost on the Japanese public and media.

*** Take a look at the post-Murayama cabinet upper house elections. The DPJ SDP (thank you, Michael) has steadily lost ground, with 7.79% of the national proportional seat vote in 1998, 6.63% in 2001, 5.35% in 2004, and 4.47% in 2007. The JCP has done somewhat better, surging to 14.60% in 1998, though slipping to 7.91% in 2001, 7.80% in 2004, and 7.48% in 2007.

**** Special interests include labor; a typical group of captive voters is the Sokagakkai.

The End of the Free Market: For People Too Busy to Read the Book

Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group—disclosure: I work part-time for Eurasia Group—gives a talk on his new book The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and the Corporations? on the New America Foundation website. Despite the dismal title, he gives the long-run edge to free market capitalism over state capitalism, basically the state using economic tools—state enterprises and flagship companies, sovereign funds, regulatory powers—to achieve political goals and not the other way around. However, he explains that it won’t be easy to get there.

Actually, watch the video, then go buy the book. (No, I can’t lend it to you; I only have the electronic galley proof. Besides, Ian needs the money; look at his clothes if you don’t believe me.) There’s obviously a lot more to the story than seventy-one minutes of talk, some of it from Steve Clemons, the interviewer. Ian always makes the extra effort to make his books an easy read*, and this one is no exception.

* This is a very desirable if often overlooked trait. One of the reasons that I respect Bernard Lewis so much is the overwhelming clarity and eloquence that he brings to his writing. At the other end of the spectrum is Francis Fukuyama, for whose books the word “turgid” was invented.

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…