Mr. Sasagawa’s Did He Really Say That Moment

According to LDP By-Laws, “The General Council deliberates and decides all important matters concerning the management and Diet activities of the [LDP].” As powerful as its mandate looks on paper, though, in fact the General Council is sen as something of a rubber-stamp institution. Thus, its Chairman is considered the least powerful of the Big Three (the other two being the Secretary-General and the Chairman of the Policy Research Council), and LDP Presidents/Prime Ministers (usually) have at times used the appointment to reward hardworking if not quite stellar denizens of the party sub-leadership. In fact, when Yasuo Fukuda tried to put faction leader Makoto Koga there, Mr. Koga thought so little of the post that he refused to take it and instead requested and got the Head of the Election Strategy Headquarters, elevating it to Big Four status in the process. In August, then Prime Minister Fukuda elevated Takashi Sasagawa to the GC Chairmanship, likely as a sop to the Tsushima faction. Prime Minister Aso decided to keep him on.

Mr. Sasagawa seems to be just the kind of inoffensive, long-serving chap that you want for the GC Chair. A septuagenarian like Mr. Fukuda, he is something of a social progressive; he favors allowing both spouses to keep their pre-marriage surnames and generally supports legislation upholding women's rights. He also thinks teenagers should be allowed to ride motorcycles. He also favors normalization of relations with North Korea, a dead giveaway of a liberal outlook on foreign policy. His permissiveness extends to grown-up men, where he was instrumental in bringing back 11 penitent Post Office privatization rebels back into the LDP fold. (Note that 10 of the 11 Lower House members were men.) So all this meant that the following thought of his on the collapse of the financial bailout bill in the U.S. Congress came as a great surprise to this blog:

”The House Speaker is a woman. I think it’s a little different than a man, her leadership. That’s why it fell apart.”
下院議長は女性。ちょっと男性とはひと味違うような気がする、リードが。それで破裂した。

In his defense, he does not spare himself, for the richest member of the Diet—we know that because disclosure rules allow us to satisfy our curiosity—went on to say:

”We should make it tax-free when young people buy stocks. It is not appropriate to make it tax-free in the case of old people who have money.”
若い人が株を買ってくれたら非課税にする方がいい。お年寄りで金を持っている人が非課税なんておかしい

It’s been an eventful day for me already, and I have many more things to think over, find workarounds, etc. before I can go to what I believe to be my just, heavenly, reward—dinner with an American friend that I haven’t seen for years and her colleague. In the meantime, in this the most cloudy of days, I shall enjoy the little ray of sunshine that Mr. Sasagawa has interjected. Thank you, Mr. Sasagawa.

What Prime Minister Aso Really Meant by an “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity”

Anyone who has read Taro Aso’s speech as Foreign Minister will realize that it is very far from the confrontational “League of Democracies” that John McCain has been pushing. In March, I issued a warning of sorts. Now, Prime Minister Aso’s inaugural speech reinforces my point. Here’s a translation of the salient points:

To create stability and prosperity in our region and grow together with our neighbors China, South Korea and Russia, as well as the nations of Asia and the Pacific—this is point two.
…
We shall not spare our assistance, so that the irreplaceable values that we believe in will take root in youthful democracies.

The McCain administration, I’m sure, will be disappointed to hear all this, Can’t you guys see Russia on a clear day too? And I’m not talking about your … “Northern Territories”?

Prime Minister Aso’s Inaugural Speech Takes It to the Opposition

In a major strategic shift from the consensus-seeking Fukuda administration, Prime Minister decided to go on the attack in his inaugural policy statement address to the Diet. In an unprecedented move, Mr. Aso accused the DPJ of putting the political game ahead of the public interest and challenged them to respond to the following five points:

1. Is the DPJ ready to establish rules for consensus-building, or will it dare to betray its own beliefs by rejecting the decision-making process in the Diet and once again putting the livelihood of the people second?

2. I ask the DPJ, are you willing to agree to establishing a consumer [protection] agency or not? If not, are you willing to engage in a discussion quickly to reach an agreement? Thus do I pose the question.

3. The UN is currently swayed by the policies of a small number of countries and otherwise is not in a condition in which we can entrust the fate of our nation to it. So, the Japan-U.S. alliance and the UN: Which comes first and which comes after? The DPJ has the responsibility to make that clear to the people of Japan and the world. I would like to hear it, together with the reasoning behind it.

4. Other nations are about to increase their engagement in Afghanistan despite invaluable sacrifices [read fatal casualties]. At this point, Japan, as a member of the international society, does not have the option of washing its hands of operations there. Does the DPJ think that it’s alright to do so regardless? I seek their opinion.

5. On top of the economic downturn, financial uncertainties are spreading from the United States. Is it not our political responsibility to the people of Japan to enact the supplementary budget that substantiates the Emergency Comprehensive Measures and the legislative bills that compensates local governments for the lost road construction and maintenance funds?

Looking at these points—I’ve only slightly paraphrased them—1 and 4 in particular, I don’t think Mr. Aso is willing to take a yes for an answer. In fact, the media—and I agree—see the speech as an attempt to challenge the DPJ and push his own stimulus agenda, then take the resultant momentum into the snap election. Mr. Aso himself advocates a three-year recovery process that apparently tables for the time being the tight-fisted fiscal rebalancing program from the Koizumi era.

A couple of points that will not be mentioned in the media reports. First, the address arranges crisp, forceful sentences into a concise, rhythmical package. There is a nice touch of the familiar, even a hint of the vernacular; this is not the usual accretion of bureaucratese. Let me put it this way: this appears to be the easiest Prime Minister’s address to translate that I’ve ever seen.

Second, the speech focuses on the DPJ, totally ignoring the rest of the opposition. It also personalizes the coalition’s position by the perception of an “Aso” shift in economic policy. The LDP hopes that this sets the stage for an Aso-Ozawa showdown, one that the ruling coalition has a much better chance of winning than a battle between the LDP-New Komeito coalition and the opposition.

One speech does not an election victory make. But at least this one puts the ball in the ball in Ichiro Ozawa’s court, something of a feat for an inaugural address.

Identifying Flaming Right-wing Nationalists

Here, for the sake of argument, I conceded that “[Hirofumi] Nakasone[, the new Foreign Minister] is a flaming right-wing nationalist” by way of his membership in the Nihon Kaigi, or Japan Conference (motto: English language page last updated April 15, 2003). By the same token, Yasuo Fukuda, Shigeru Ishiba, Makoto Koga, and Sadakazu Tanigaki are all flaming right-wing nationalists too.

Yes, the more a Diet member’s name pops up on the membership lists of certain groups and associations, the more likely it is that he/she holds a conservative/nationalist/right-wing outlook. But a single membership is a poor tool to judge the ideological coloring of that particular individual with unless he/she happens to belong to the The Teachers’ Union of Japan Believes that the Nanking Massacre Happened and the Government Was Involved in Rassling Up Comfort Women HAHAHA So Let’s Go Build Us Nihonjin Some Nuclear Weapons Committee.

This is an issue that I’ve taken up before, but I hope that a reminder will be useful to casual visitors to my blog.

Nakayama Update

The media were full of reports about LDP and New Komeito members, including cabinet members Seiko Noda, Takeo Kawamura, Shigeru Ishiba, Takeo Kawamura, and OMGWTF (pardon my French) Kunio Hatoyama, dumping on the ex-Minister Nariaki Nakayama. Meanwhile, Mr. Nakayama remained unrepentant in his animosity towards the Teachers’ Union of Japan, appearing live on national TV the morning after—his resignation had been accepted at an emergency Cabinet meeting on Sunday—to once again vent his rage. He is clearly going to keep talking, and he intends to keep his Lower House seat in the upcoming election, so I expect him to pop up from time to time to the embarrassment of the LDP as the opposition uses him as a club to keep bludgeoning the Aso administration with throughout the election campaign.

---

Sorry. The Fuji TV poll that I had been waiting for turned out to have been taken on September 25, the very day that Mr. Nakayama made those assertions. Thus, the effects of the uproar will only be reflected in the following week’s poll. I should have taken note of the usual three day delay.

Kazuyoshi Kaneko MLIT Minister: Doves 1: Hawks 0

Whatever else the new Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kazuyoshi Kaneko, the replacement for the teachers union-hating Nariaki Nakayama, does, one thing he won’t do is offend Western liberals. A member of the LDP Subcommittee on the Korean Peninsula Issue built around ultra-dove Taku Yamazaki, the milquetoast Mr. Kaneko ‘s political wanderings have taken him from being a close associate of another notable dove Koichi Kato to subbing for Makoto Koga, bane of Class A War criminals and head of the eponymous Koga faction. Mr. Kaneko is also a member of the Japan-South Korea Parliamentarians’ League, all in all a very neighborly resume.

Memo on DPJ’s New Election Manifest; Also, More Scrambling by LDP-New Komeito

I’d mentioned briefly that the DPJ was exploring the need for sequencing its multitrillion-yen election-manifest upgrade package. The DPJ had been working on an update for the 2007 election manifest for the last three weeks with exactly that in mind. Given all the fanfare around the LDP makeover and the most recent flap leading to the MLIT Minister Nakayama’s resignation, the media attention had not been giving much space to this process. But in recent days, the basic framework has emerged (25 September Asahi; Yomiuri, 27 September)). Asahi reports that party leaders have already agreed on the main features of the program scheduled to officially debut next month.

The manifest will be a four-year program, neatly fitting into the four-year Lower House term of office, and will be implemented in one-, two-, and four-year stages. According to the Yomiuri report, the main items to be implemented in the first year are: establishing a monthly 26,000 yen allowance per child (5.6 trillion per year), making highways toll-free (1.5 trillion yen), abolishing the gasoline tax surcharge (2.6 trillion), and reforming the medical care system (2 trillion; abolishing the late-term elderly medical care insurance system etc,). The second year will see income subsidies for individual farmers (1 trillion). A fully tax-funded public pension system—Prime Minister Aso himself has talked favorably about this idea—(5.8 trillion) is to be implemented in the fourth year. The program, costing 22 trillion in its final year—around 21 trillion according to Yukio Hatoyama today, but what’s a trillion more or less?—will be funded by savings of 12.6 trillion yen from downsizing national public works programs, savings on public procurement, 20% reduction of human resources costs for public servants (retirement pus pay cut?), and reducing subsidies to state-owned entities; 3 trillion from sales of state assets and elimination of business income tax benefits; 2.7 trillion from reducing personal income tax deductions; and 4 trillion yen from special account surpluses (the most fungible of the “buried treasures”, the Yomiuri report mentioned only the Foreign Exchange Special Account, but this figure appears to include the Fiscal Investment and Loans Program Special Account surplus as well). The figures in the Yomiuri report do not add up and the DPJ leadership have yet to grasp the full implications of the details—Mr. Hatoyama did not have a ready answer when Kazuo Kitagawa, the brainy no.2 man for the New Komeito, pointed out a major hole in the child allowance/income tax deduction exchange scheme—so I’ll leave the numbers at that for the time being. I hope to have more to say when the full program emerges.

An interesting development on the LDP-New Komeito side is that under the new Prime Minister and the prevailing economic circumstances, half-baked talk has broken loose about vastly expanding the 1.8/11.7 trillion stimulus package. True, it’s about short-term measures, but it does make their accusations against the DPJ of fiscal irresponsibility less convincing to public ears. The scrambling over Health, Welfare and Labor Minister Yoichi Masuzoe’s expressed intent to “fundamentally review the Late-term Elderly Medical Care Insurance System” and seconded by Mr. Aso—if I’m not mistaken, the ruling coalition has been frantically trying to scale back expectations—also has the feel of an administration calling audibles and not doing a very good job of it. Add to that Mr. Aso’s previously expressed sympathy for a fully tax-funded basic pension system, albeit shelved for the time being until the LDP can resume talk about a consumption tax hike—and it’s like having a new coach with a different offensive system coming in the day before the championship game.

What the Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Said and Other Matters

Nariaki Nakayama may be gone as early as Monday, with New Komeito and LDP Diet members both desperately trying to push him under the bus. The only thing that can prolong the agony is Prime Minister Aso’ s possible inability to crack down on loose-lipped adiminsitration member. We saw this with Prime Minister Abe; Mr. Aso runs the same danger because of his lack of a solid power base in his own party*. In the meantime, for the record and your amusement, here’s a translation, with commentary, of the fullest online account of what he actually said, on the Mainichi website (which is, again, having problems of its own.)

◇中山国交相の２５日のインタビューでの発言（要旨）

＜成田空港＞（かつて滑走路が１本の）１車線がずうっと続いて日本は情けないなあと（思った）。ごね得というか、戦後教育が悪かったと思う。公のためにはある程度は自分を犠牲にしてでもというのがなくて、自分さえよければという風潮の中で、なかなか空港拡張もできなかったのは大変残念だった。

Only one lane (one runway) for so long, and I thought Japan was pathetic. Call it profiting by holding out, I think post-WW II education was at fault. Where the public mood is that there's no willingness to sacrifice yourself to some extent for the common good and it only matters that you're okay, the airport could not be expanded for so long; which was so regrettable.
Offended the good people of Chiba Prefecture, and post-WW II Japanese. Significantly, the issue falls within his jurisdiction.

　＜日教組＞大分県の教育委員会の体たらくなんて、日教組ですよ。日教組の子供なんて成績が悪くても先生になるのですよ。だから大分県の学力は低いんだよ。私はなぜ全国学力テストを提唱したかと言えば、日教組の強いところは学力が低いのではないかと思ったから。現にそうだよ。だから学力テストを実施する役目は終わったと思う。

The sorry state of the Board of Education in Ooita Prefecture; it’s the Japan Teachers’ Union’s fault, it is. The JTU offspring become teachers even when they get poor grades, they do. That’s why scholastic achievement levels are low in Ooita Prefecture. The reason why I proposed a nationwide Scholastic Achievement Test was because I’d guessed that scholastic achievements were low in places where the JTU was strong. And it sure is. So I think that the role of the scholastic test is over.
Offended the good people of Ooita Prefecture. Offended the JTU as well, but since the JTU is unpopular with LDP and New Komeito supporters.

　＜単一民族＞日本は単一民族といいますか、世界とのあれ（交流）がないものですから、内向きになりがち。（訪日観光客を増やすには）まず日本人が心を開かなければなりません。

Japan is, shall I say, one ethnic group; (interchange) with the world is lacking, so it tends to be insular. (To increase the number of tourists who visit Japan, [we]) Japanese must first open our hearts.
Offended the Ainu people.

Mr. Nakayama apologized to Chiba Prefecture and the Ainu. It is not known whether he also apologized to naturalized Japanese citizens. He certainly did not apologize to the teachers’ union.

Actually, the underlying issues that he raised begs for serious improvements. Get the facts right and actually try to do something about it, add a little flair and vision, and the public will be surprisingly responsive. Prime Minister Koizumi did that with the national agenda, if some of what he did/didn’t do turned out in the end to be more smoke and mirrors than substance. And Governor Hashimoto is having even greater success with Osaka voters, taking on, among other things, the entire local public education establishment (instead of singling out the teachers’ union for the blame). More generally, there’s a battle to be fought for the hearts and minds of the Japanese people, though it will not be waged in this election cycle; Ichiro Ozawa can be the Great Destroyer, not Constructor.

* Would Mr. Nakayama, as a former fast-track official at the super-elite MOF, have been a little more careful with his words or be a little more willing to take an immediate hit for the team instead of dragging it out over the weekend as if he were daring the Prime Minister to fire him, if Prime Minister Aso had more intellectual credentials? Or been the head of a more substantial habatsu instead of the mini-faction that he had inherited from the mild-mannered dove Yohei Kono? Are we seeing a curious lack of respect for the new Prime Minister in this, as well asin Junichiro Koizumi’s retirement announcement?

ADD 28 September: I’d obviously underestimated the LDP’s sense of urgency. Mr. Nakayama is gone as of this morning, and the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Takeo Kawamura, is doubling as pro tem MLIT Minister. Mr. Nakayama’s rage against the teachers’ union if anything intensified as the denouement approached. If the LDP cannot shut him up, he’ll continue to provide embarrassing sound bites to the media. I’m keeping an eye on the weekly metropolitan Tokyo area poll conducted by the Fuji TV network. The LDP had been gaining ground on the DPJ since the dismal days of June and July. Last week, in the first poll under Prime Minister Aso, LDP overtook the DPJ on the “likely to vote for” for the first time since the 17 January poll. If those numbers return to June and July levels (and are indicative of what privately commissioned polls tell the LDP), the ruling coalition will have second thoughts about the timing of the lower house election, conventional wisdom placing it at 2 (preferred, LDP-NK) or 9 (DPJ) November. Not that a long delay will help much, and I still think the show will go on. But they’ll be desperately seeking another bounce, likely from an expanded stimulus package.

Matt Drudge Links to JapanToday: A First for Japanese Websites?

Matt Drudge has linked to a Kyodo wire by way of a JapanToday post on Lehman Europe’s sale to Nomura for two dollars. It’s… taking… a… lot… of… time… to… download…

Congratulations, JapanToday, you've made it; it’s like Ai George playing Carnegie Hall.*

* Too furui!!

More on Aso Polls, Koizumi Addendum

A follow-up to the previous post:

Taro Aso does no better in the Yomiuri poll, where the numbers are 49.5-for, 33.4-against. The Koizumi-Abe-Fukuda-Aso drop-off is slightly more pronounced than in the Asahi poll, at 87.1-70.3-57.4-. The LDP does somewhat better over the DPJ at 37.4 to 22.8. He does even worse in the Sankei poll and Mainichi poll, at 44.4% and 45% support respectively.

It’s hard to draw any hard conclusions for the upcoming election from the major media polls since the numbers for party preferences and voting intentions are all over the place. But the support figures for the Aso Cabinet are clustered in a remarkably narrow range; expectations are low across the ideological spectrum. Moreover, the steady decline in the initial support for the three administrations following Junichiro Koizumi’s looks suspiciously like a series of dead cat’s bounces. The DPJ must be hoping, All we need is yet another series of misstatements—Hello, Land, Infrastructure and Transport Minister Nariaki Nakayama; here’s looking at you, Kunio Hatoyama and Shoichi Nakagawa and maybe even Taro Aso himself—and unseemly revelations—thank you, Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura—and we are set.

Prime Minister Koizumi’s decision to cede his seat to his 27-year old son is widely seen as a slap in the face for Prime Minister Aso. Perhaps. But I think that the immediate damage will accrue to the reformists and particularly the vulnerable first-term Koizumi Kids. Mr. Koizumi is likely to campaign hard to make sure that his offspring is the first through the stile, leaving him less time to stomp the sewer covers and wade through the rice paddies on behalf of his erstwhile supporters.

If Anything Says Now to Fran Aso, It’s This Asahi Poll; Plus, Yet Another Generational Change in the LDP

An Asahi poll, of all things, puts the Aso Cabinet’s favored/unfavored numbers on the net plus side at 48-to-36. True, 48% is nothing to write home about, considering that Prime Ministers Koizumi, Abe and Fukuda began their terms in office at 78%, 63% and 53% respectively. That’s right, the numbers have gone down for four consecutive regimes. Mr. Aso can console himself by the fact that LDP is outpolling the DPJ 36-32, and he himself trounces LDP-New Komeito nemesis Ichiro Ozawa by a Dream Team-like margin of 54-26. But he also remembers what happened to his two immediate predecessors afterward. So it’s still a snap election, now now.

And on a sad note for Japan bloggers and Western media folk, Junichiro Koizumi has decided to hang up his white campaign gloves for good. And guess what, he’s bequeathing his seat to his 27-year old son. Well, what did you think, he is an LDP politician, isn’t he? Great sense of timing, though, stealing the scene from his most recent successor. Let just say that he did a perfect “Clinton”.

... Regarding My Mass Media Appearance No-Show

I’ve been informed that (no, not that) ABC decided to scotch my interview on the LDP presidential election. I prefer to believe the explanation I was given, that it had been superseded by the rush of events while they were editing the raw tape.

It’s not that bad, really. You now have only my account of what I actually said. It’s not often you get to write your own history and keep it that way.

BBC Fails Mightily with Its Evaluation of the Aso Cabinet

I shouldn’t BUI, but I found this while browsing after I came home late, and I couldn’t resist. I hope you’ll still love me tomorrow.

According to BBC:

A stable of well-established right-wing politicians emerged as the likely members of Mr Aso's new cabinet.

So who are these “right-wing politicians”?

Ruling party hawk and former economic minister Shoichi Nakagawa was identified as the likely new finance minister.
Hmm, nice start. Grade: A

Hirofumi Nakasone - son of one of Japan's most best-known premiers, the nationalist Yasuhiro Nakasone - was thought likely to acquire the foreign affairs ministry.
So what? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon their sons? Maybe in collectivist Great Britain, but that’s not the case in Japan. Well, legally, at least. Actually, if BBC had done its homework, it would have known that Mr. Nakasone Jr. is center-right, but not quite the nationalist/internationalist that his father is. (But then, who is?) Grade: C.

Mr Aso's erstwhile rival for the LDP leadership, fiscal conservative Kaoru Yosano, was tipped to remain in his post of economics minister despite apparent key differences with Mr Aso over the right way to revitalise the Japanese economy.
He may be a fiscal conservative, but he’s left-center when it comes to foreign policy. It’s like calling Bill Clinton a right-winger. Grade: F.

Another former rival, Shigeru Ishiba, was also thought likely to appear in a new cabinet.
Anybody who has done his homework knows that this national-security otaku is actually to the left of Mr. Yosano as far as foreign policy is concerned. Grade: F.

Is that all? Apparently, yes. BBC has earned a gentleman’s CD. So I guess my question is: Do people actually receive ex-pat pay packages for this four-letter word effort? Apparently, yes. Nice job, if you can get it.

Taro Aso, Fellow Traveler?

Described by one nationalist blogger as a bunch of “parliamentarians who are selling out Japan to North Korea (kitachousen he no baikoku giin)”, the LDP Subcommittee on the Korean Peninsula Issue (Jiyuuminshutou Chousen Hantou Mondai Syouiinkai)was created under the aegis of its Supreme Advisor (Saikou Komon), the most peaceable Taku Yamazaki, during the Fukuda administration last year, and is dedicated to normalizing relations with North Korea. With such impeccable pacifist credentials, the 20-member subcommittee includes notable left-wingers such as Hiroyuki Hosoda, Akira Sasagawa, and Takeo Kawamura. Mr. Kawamura is adding insult to injury by lobbying to give gaijin—read Korean permanent residents—the vote in local elections. Really, just the kind of people Taro Aso… hates… to keep… out of his administration?

Hiroyuki Hosoda, Secretary-General (one of the Big Four LDP; deputy to LDP President)
Akira Sasagawa, Chairman, General Council (one of the Big Four; Mr. Sasagawa is the incumbent)
Takeo Kawamura, Chief Cabinet Secretary (think, White House chief of staff during the Reagan administration)
Makoto Koga, another notable dove—he blames the Class-A war criminals for making him an orphan—is also being kept on as elections czar, the fourth and newest member of the Big Four.

Talk about Manchurian Candidates—who knew that the new Prime Minister was a crypto-commie? At least news reports have skinflint Kaoru Yosano staying on as Economics Minister to strike a blow for old-fashioned, fiscal conservatism. (What?)

News reports have the loquacious Kunio Hatoyama joining the Cabinet as well. Enjoy. News reports also have the dyspeptic Shoichi Nakagawa joining the Cabinet… Not so enjoy.

Okay, enough of the serious stuff; let’s get silly and make a really stupid statement: For better or worse, there’s more to Taro Aso than the manga-loving, right-wingnut, cardboard-cutout caricature that Western liberals love to haul out every time they are forced to talk about him. Yes, I feel your pain.

Another point: There are practical reasons for Mr. Kawamura and Mr. Hosoda to be nice to Koreans (and Chinese). Likewise, I venture to say, for Mr. Koga… and also Mr. Aso. I would even add Mr. Sasagawa to this mix, but for somewhat different, more speculative reasons. Can you guess why?

And finally, for great overview of the big picture, read this. Yes, it's The Economist. A couple of caveats:

Socialists and Communists also form part of the DPJ’ s ragbag alliance. The Communists? That’s a hard call, but I wouldn’t quite put them in an “alliance”… I’ve got it, fellow travelers!

The DPJ’s proposals for paying for this are not credible, but while the opposition is on the attack, that hardly matters. Yes, but nobody’s supposed to win a championship without defense, right? Either way, we’ll know in a month or a two.

Would I Enjoy This Even More If I Were Gay?

Who knows? Anyway, it’s funny, and cool. And to the point, I suspect, but what would I know? By way of Princess Sparkle Pony.

The Big Oh Retiring as Softbank Manager…Can WBC Manager Announcement Be Far Behind and Other Thoughts

Sankei is first with the news that Sadaharu Oh has decided to retire after this baseball season. This may be just the answer to Japan’s most recent baseball woes.

Mr. Oh is a national icon In 1977, he became the first recipient of the People’s Honor Award (Kokumin Eiyo Shou) for breaking Hank Aaron’s lifetime home-run record with his 756th home run*. (Where that left Josh Gibson’s even longer if less-well-recorded string of home runs, we Japanese preferred not to dwell on.) Much later in 2006, he led the Japanese national team to the first World Baseball (Instant?) Classic championship and enhanced his already godlike status. In fact, after the Beijing Olympics debacle, where the Japanese team failed to win even a bronze medal against a motley crew of American minor leaguers, he is probably the only man who can lead the Japanese team during the second, 2009 WBC games in the United States and be forgiven in case our team fails to win a medal.

One thing stood between him and a repeat performance: his health. Noticeably frailer from his bout with cancer—now in remission—and battered by family issues, he is in no shape to manage the Softbank Hawks full-time then shoulder the burden of assembling a Japanese WBC squad including some genuine major-league all-stars and taking them half way across the globe under the watchful eyes of an expectant Japanese public to compete against the best that the United States, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic (not to mention those pesky South Koreans and Cubans) have to offer . Leaving the Hawks clears the way for an international farewell tour that would tug at the hearts of the Japanese public and put a capstone on his career and not so coincidentally provide more than a boatload of stories for Yomiuri—he made his reputation as a slugging first baseman for the Yomiuri Giants—and the rest of the Japanese media.

Mr. Oh also happens to be a citizen of the Republic of China/Taiwan/Chinese Taipei. His mother is Japanese, but that was not enough in those days for him to retain Japanese citizenship. For your reference, our first post-WW II national sports hero, the professional wrestler Rikidozan, happened to be a North Korean national. Think about it.

On the other hand, we Japanese don’t really talk about these things. In fact, the public was mostly in the dark about Rikidozan’s nationality. Think about that, too.

* For the record, Mr. Aaron was very gracious with regard to Mr. Oh’s achievement and the Japanese celebration thereof.

Random Factoids around the LDP Election

Taro Aso won most of the local chapter electoral votes, as I’ve already noted. And he didn’t do too badly with the popular vote either, according to today’s hardcopy Yomiuri. In the chapter-by-chapter voting to award the 141 electoral votes, Mr. Aso took 416,497, while Yuriko Koike came in a distant second at 71,820 votes. Nobuteru Ishihara, Kaoru Yosano and Shigeru Ishiba tallied 60 thousand, 42 thousand and 33 thousand respectively. This means that Mr. Aso won two-thirds of the total popular vote, almost the same as the percentage his share of the overall electoral vote, a coincidence, but notable nevertheless.

A Japanese commentator appeared on BBC (and yes, Chris Hogg made his obligatory homage to the liberal gods by describing Mr. Aso as “right-wing” and “foreign-policy hawk”) and explained that the reason that Mr. Aso all but swept the local chapters was that the locals liked his talk of fiscal stimulus. Perhaps. But note that he also swept urban centers Tokyo, Kangawa, Aichi and Osaka. In fact, the only places where he lost electoral votes were Tokushima, Shimane, Kochi and Tottori, which placed 44th, 45th, 46th and 47th among all 47 prefectures in per capita GDP (FY2005), and you can’t get more chiho than that. That’s right, the LDP members in the four poorest prefectures were the only ones to refuse to pay absolute fealty to the public-works-friendly Mr. Aso. True, Mr. Ishiba won only one electoral vote beside his three Tottori Shimane, favorite-son votes, and that came from neighbor-province Shimane. And I can’t deny that he had the message of the times for the LDP faithful. But you have to also credit his my-time-has-come party favorite status, his tireless stumping in the boondocks, his folksy, voluble, talking style (which irritates Western liberals no end)—all the things that said, we have a chance with this guy going up against Ichiro Ozawa—for his strong showing in all the provinces.

Speaking of foreign policy—more broadly including national security—it was not much of an issue in the LDP election and won’t be in the Lower House election either, unless something of catastrophic proportions happens. North Korea could do another nuclear test, and I don’t think that it will have any effect on the election outcome.

Junichiro Koizumi is an heirloom Diet member (third–generation). Shinzo Abe is an heirloom Diet member (third-generation). Yasuo Fukuda is an heirloom Diet member(second-generation). Mr. Aso is an heirloom Diet member (fifth-generation). That’s a Prime-Minister fourpeat for the LDP Heirlooms; MJ didn’t do it, Kobe hasn’t done it—in fact, you have to go all the way back to Red Auerbach and the 58/59-65/66 Boston Celtics to top it.

The Western media has focused on Mr. Aso’s Roman Catholic faith. In fact, he will be the third Christian Prime Minister in post-WW II Japan, after Tetsu Katayama (1947-48) and Masayoshi Ohira (1978-80), non-Catholics both. That’s three Christians out of 29 PMs, not bad when you consider that only 2 million out of 130 million Japanese are Christians. Sokagakkai has what, 16 million members? And all they get is one measly Minister per Cabinet. I’m pretty sure that you won’t find any Christians among the pre-WW II PMs though.

Since When Is 55% “Most”?

The headline reads Guardian Angels Are Here, Say Most Americans but the report says, “More than half of all Americans believe they have been helped by a guardian angel in the course of their lives, according to a new poll by the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion. In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, ‘I was protected from harm by a guardian angel.’”

In fact, this is not an isolated case. There are many examples in otherwise respectable media outlets that identify amounts little more than razor-thin majorities as “most”.

Another of my pet peeves (cheaper than pet rocks, and much easier to grow) is the substitution of “momentarily” for “in a moment”, as is, “I’ll be with you momentarily”. I’d been seeing this one so often that I’d begun thinking that I’d missed something that anyone who hadn’t dropped out of elementary school should have known. Recently, I read George Carlin’s Brain Droppings, where he made the same complaint. At least Mr. Carlin made it to high school, so he should know.

LDP Election Results in; Aso Near-Sweep of Local Chapters. Not So Cozy with Diet Members

Taro Aso: (local chapter votes 134, Diet member votes 217, total 351)
Kaoru Yosano (2, 64, 66)
Yuriko Koike (0, 40, 40)
Nobuteru Ishihara (1, 36, 37)
Shigeru Ishiba (4, 21, 25)
Total (141, 378, 519)

519 out of 527 eligible votes were cast, of which Mr. Aso won 351. That’s 67.6% of the votes actually cast. He owes this overwhelming majority to the local votes, where he cleaned up 134 out of 141, or 95% of the total. True, a large number of chapters held winner-take-all elections and the proportional chapters also heavily favored the across-the-board frontrunner. Still, the near-sweep was pretty impressive. Among the other four, only Mr. Ishiba apparently managed to carry his own, admittedly small, prefectural chapter. None of the Diet members who voted for any of the four appears to have been able to convince the local chapter to throw its votes to his/her candidate of choice—if he/she tried at all.

Mr. Aso did less well among the Diet members, where 578 out of 386 LDP Diet members cast their vote. He won 217, or 57.4% of the votes, a solid, but not overwhelming, majority. Personal or factional loyalties and policy choices appear to count at this level. This may not carry over to the local level, where national exposure and media coverage has a great effect.

I can easily envisage a situation where an attractive candidate wins a majority against a number of other candidates among the local chapters but only a plurality in the overall vote. Can the other candidates gang up against the public favorite and beat that person in a run-off? Unlikely, I think. We may have a chance to find out, sooner rather than later, if Mr. Aso leads the LDP to defeat in the Lower House election.

Quo Vadis? The Communist Vote in the Unrepresented Districts

Ross has reminded me that the Japan Communist Party’s decision not to field candidates in half, likely more, of the 300 single-seat seat Lower House elections are likely to have substantial consequences, in the DPJ’s favor. True, but it’s the magnitude that is so hard to guess at.

The JCP announced 138 candidates to contest single-seat races. That leaves 162 without a JCP candidate. Reports say that the JCP will be naming a small number of additional candidates later, but that’ll be it. A rough, sample scan of Hokkaido districts shows that the JCP typically reaps votes at somewhere in the 10,000s to the 30,000s per district. If the DPJ can capture a big chunk of those votes, that will make the difference in close and possibly even some not-so-close races. The question is, how likely is this to happen?

For me, the difficulties in making a plausible guess at the actual impact are at least twofold. First, I do not have access to the kind of detailed polling data that enables me to understand how the JCP vote breaks down into hardcore socialist and plain-vanilla protesters against the status quo. The JCP vote fluctuates substantially from election to election—a swing of 10,000 votes or so between elections in a single-seat district is not unusual—so a detailed, district-by-district examination coupled with a more macro analysis may yield a clue here. Second, the DPJ has been taking a decidedly populist/politics-first turn under Mr. Ozawa. I have no idea how this much this works against it in wooing the protest vote. If I have to add a third, it is that I don’t yet know if the JCP will try to influence their supporters one way or the other. My guess is that it will stay neutral and its core supporters in the unrepresented districts will mostly abstain.