Saturday, April 05, 2008

Masaaki Shirakawa Receiving BOJ Promotion

It’s in the media, the DPJ has agreed to the Fukuda administration’s proposal to promote recently appointed Deputy Governor Masaaki Shirakawa to Governor and appoint Hiroshi Watanabe, the recently retired MOF Vice-Minister for International Affairs. The battlefield promotion for Mr. Shirakawa came after the DPJ decided to oppose two former MOF administrative Vice-Ministers and, most recently, any MOF official for the job and the Fukuda administration couldn’t come up with anyone suitable from the private sector to take the job. In fact appears impossible to find anyone outside the bureaucracy - the BOJ is also a bureaucracy for most legal and practical purposes - who:

1) has the requisite experience, expertise, and English and (far more importantly) Japanese communication skills;
2) can withstand bear the slings and arrows from the tabloid sheets as well as more respectable quarters of the media; and
3) work full time for an annual salary (including bonuses) of roughly US $350,000 at current exchange rates.

Actually, I fulfill two of these three requirements - you guess which ones; I’m not going to make it easy for you - and would have been willing to work on the other. Too bad they forgot to contact me; they would have had their man much more quickly, and Kōji Tanami would have been spared the embarrassment. Oh well, I still have my privacy, so their loss is actually my gain. And I’m not saying that because THIS BLOG GOT IT SPECTACULARLY WRONG. To be fair to the blog, though, the DPJ was an even bigger loser, since it came out looking even worse than the ruling coalition in the political game, which had been the focus of its actions in the first place.

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