No, I don’t twitter, and I don’t follow anyone either. But in the course of work this morning (I was looking up the World Economic Forum), I bumped into this. Dig around her tweets and you’re bound to run into other LDP twitterers, in case you want to know what they’re up to these days.
Just thought you might want to know. Okay, back to work.
Showing posts with label Koike Yuriko. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Koike Yuriko. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Taro Aso’s Chankonabe Administration
chankonabe (ちゃんこ鍋) is a Japanese stew (a type of nabemono or one-pot dish) commonly eaten in vast quantity by sumo wrestlers as part of a weight gain diet. It contains a dashi or chicken broth soup base with sake or mirin to add flavor. The bulk of chankonabe is made up of large quantities of protein sources (usually chicken (quartered, skin left on), fish (fried and made into balls), tofu, or sometimes beef) and vegetables (daikon, bok choy, etc). While considered a reasonably healthful dish in its own right, chankonabe is very protein-rich and usually served in massive quantities, with beer and rice to increase the caloric intake. Leftover chankonabe broth can also later be used as broth for somen or udon noodles.There will be no better metaphor for the LDP and Taro Aso’s prospective administration than the all-for-all, all-for-all sumo food chankonabe if “people close to Mr. Aso” talking to Yomiuri are to be believed when they say that he intends to include all four of his rivals in his administration. According to the Yomiuri report, Yuriko Koike will get an important cabinet post, Nobuteru Ishihara will be named to Secretary-General or some other party leadership position, and Kaoru Yosano and Shigeru Ishiba will also be appointed to the Aso Cabinet.
It is not made according to a fixed recipe and often contains whatever is available to the cook
From Wikipedia
Now the media is replete with political ad balloons during these times, so you should take in such reports with more than a grain of salt. But if you think that this incongruous hodgepodge of hawks and doves, misers, reformists and spendthrifts—one of whom has openly speculated about a post-Lower House election realignment—doesn’t make sense, think again. They want to keep the refueling ships in the Indian Ocean and take the Class-A war criminals out of Yasukuni. They want to take more fat out of government before they raise the consumption tax. They won’t issue deficit bonds to finance the stimulus package; they’ll find the money elsewhere, most notably in the special account reserves—the most fungible part of the “buried treasures”. Yes, the reasoning can vary, and there are different degrees of conviction and commitment. But thrown together in a campaign foreshadowed by a looming Lower House election, the candidates are more and more in tune with each other as the process lurches toward an anticlimactic showdown on 22 September. If the resulting “broth” does not wind up in a “weight gain”, at least it will minimize weight loss by providing something for everybody in the Lower House election. Or so the “people close to Mr. Aso”—indeed, the entire LDP—must be hoping.
Ms. Koike, to her credit, still manages to echo the Koizumian battle cry of no pain, no gain. But without a more expressive show of support from Junichiro Koizumi, it will not be easy for her to assume the role of standard bearer for the reformist wing of the LDP. In fact, she continues to draw as much attention as the potential focal point for a post-electoral splittist movement. During the near-obligatory Sunday Project joint performance by the five candidates, she got most of her air time when the septuagenarian emcee Soichiro Tawara badgered her at length on cross-party political realignment, where she had to keep peeking at her CliffsNotes to make sure that she didn’t go off-message*.
* Ms. Koike’s heavy-footed, talking-points-only act comes across poorly in anything resembling a real debate (or cross-examination), but should be quite effective in the whistle-stop main event, when she can whack away in abandon at the unseen enemy. She wields a big stick. I remind you, though, that this is only one, fairly limited, measure of her overall intelligence and aptitude. Barack Obama, albeit in a very different way, has trouble with the rapid-fire, drive-by mode of political discourse, as opposed to his favorite format of big-crowd oratory. If Ms. Koike is doing her own writing, then she is an effective writer. Mr. Obama, of course, is an even better and more contemplative writer.
Koizumi Bump for Yuriko Koike Looking Smaller
Junichiro Koizumi has not surfaced since his endorsement of Yuriko Koike in the LDP presidential election splashed its way on to the tabloids. The tabloids were still carrying Mr. Koizumi today, but with nothing more than speculation to go on, it looks like it is fast becoming yesterday’s story in the mainstream media.
Mr. Koizumi’s endorsement was never going to change the immediate outcome. But with the now reclusive ex-Prime Minister, Ms. Koike’s appeal will be limited to diehard reform purists.
Mr. Koizumi’s endorsement was never going to change the immediate outcome. But with the now reclusive ex-Prime Minister, Ms. Koike’s appeal will be limited to diehard reform purists.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Koizumi Endorses Yuriko Koike, with Long-Term Implications
Yes, it will be far more exciting for political junkies like me if I turn out to be wrong and Yuriko Koike wins. But that’s the stuff of political fiction, I’m afraid.
We thought the LDP presidential race was all but over with ten days to go, with nearly half the Diet members and the majority of local leaders lining up behind Taro Aso, the Man Who’s Time Had Come. The restless media would be free to turn its attention to other matters during the run-up to the actual vote on the 22nd, such as DPJ efforts to slam the LDP with MAFF’s involvement in the diversion of tainted rice and yet another sordid set of revelations regarding SIA falsification of public pension records. This morning, Junichiro Koizumi changed all that, endorsing Yuriko Koike in response to a plea from a group of Yuriko Koike’s supporters including Seishiro Eto, Ms. Koike’s election chief and Tsutomu Takebe, head of New Wind and diehard Koizumian. This brings instant credibility to Ms. Koike as a Prime Minister candidate, and the media is all over the story.
The endorsement became public in a typically unorthodox fashion, by way of a report by Mr. Eto to a meeting of Ms. Koike’s supporters. According to Mr. Eto, Ex-Prime Minister Koizumi said, “I’m supporting Ms. Koike. I’ll vote for Ms. Koike. If Ms. Koike becomes [LDP] President, we can fight on an equal footing with the Ozawa DPJ.” Another Diet member attending the meeting with Mr. Koizumi added that he told them that they could make his endorsement public and that Diet members should consider whom they could win the election with.
However, this will not change the immediate outcome of the election, and Mr. Koizumi should be the first to realize that. Mr. Kozumi for all his weirdness had been a major figure in party politics—enough to be entrusted with the leadership of the Mori faction while its eponymous leader served an unhappy term as Prime Minister—while the well-traveled Ms. Koike is an upstart outsider. Moreover, the narrative has changed; none of the candidates are giving up reform, but there’s a time for soothing and healing the aches and bruises of the Koizumi reform years and that time is now. Besides, the public is worried about the economy. There may be no gain without pain, but even tightwad Kaoru Yosano is pitching a two-, three-year timeout. The pure Koizumi message, such as it was, will not play well in the provinces.
Having said that, Mr. Koizumi’s endorsement will reverberate through the post-election days, and here we are really talking about the Lower House election. For the LDP-New Komeito coalition, retaining a Lower House majority still leaves the Upper House in opposition hands with almost certain veto power—the coalition is sure to lose its Lower House supermajority. If the DPJ defeats the coalition, it may very well fall short of an outright majority and end up cobbling together a coalition with a motley crew of old-school socialists (Social Democrats) and vested-interests politics (New People’s Party). Even if it does win an outright majority in the Lower House election, it will still need the cooperation of other parties to pass a bill in the Upper House, where it falls short of a majority. In other words, no matter who wins the Lower House election, it is likely that the new administration will have a rough go of it. The public will quickly tire of the kind of political game that has driven the last two sessions in a bisected Diet. One possibility is stepped-up across-the-aisle cooperation, possibly even a Grand Coalition of the kind that Mr. Ozawa envisaged. Another is a dynamic realignment of the political parties.
As recently as last January, Ms. Koike talked openly and enthusiastically about a possible realignment revolving around Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Ozawa. The endorsement of Ms. Koike by Mr. Koizumi—his third reform, the political, as aimed at “destroying the LDP”—in the face of overwhelming establishment support for Mr. Aso, brings that possibility closer to reality.
Friday, September 05, 2008
More, More, More, Said the Media… and the LDP Obliges… What It All Means
I thought that I’d given you all the names of the suspects. Silly me. It turns out that Kunio Hatoyama (59) was never in it in the first place—he’s supporting prohibitive favorite Taro Aso (almost 68)—Sadakazu Tanigaki (63) never got his wagon train rumbling, and Taro Kono (45; mentioned in aside) didn’t find enough people to take him seriously. But…
* Mr. Yamamoto is an interesting phenomenon because he is still an upper house member, so he has zero chance of being elected LDP president. He is clearly positioning himself to move to the lower house and becoming a true Prime Minister candidate.
The immediate effect of all this has been to take some of the the wind out of Yuriko Koike’s (56) sails. The nomadic Ms. Koike’s hopes had been to run her banner up the the Koizumian reformist pole, provide a nice, youthful contrast to Mr. Aso (and the newly septuagenarian Kaoru Yosano) and likely use the occasion to build a real power base for the next spin around the tracks. With three new younger reformists in the ring in addition to the seasoned but still youthful Nobuteru Ishihara (51), she appears to be running into trouble corralling the 20 signatures necessary to put her name on the ballot—already a somewhat risky proposition, given her lack of backbench/rank-and-file support.
All this also generates a little uncertainty for Mr. Aso. All these candidates—assuming they manage to collect 20 signatures each, no certainty there—on the local prefectural ballots will inevitably take some of the popular vote away from Mr. Aso. Although Mr. Aso may, in a piece of political irony, do better on the 141 electoral votes as the result of a wider distribution of the non-Aso popular vote, the results of the popular vote will not be lost on the Diet members, who will feel more free to vote on the candidates of their choice, of whom there are now more to choose from. I still believe that Mr. Aso will win the nomination on the first ballot, but I now see the (admittedly very faint) possibility that the vote will go to a runoff, in which case anything can happen.
In any case, youth will have been heard. We have seen the future, and it is them. That perhaps is the point of it all for the newbie candidates.
All this, of course, is a problem for the DPJ, where Ichiro Ozawa is running unopposed for reelection as party leader. Mr. Aso already led Mr. Ozawa 30%-8% as the best candidate for next Prime Minister, in a 2-3 September Asahi poll of all things. The DPJ leadership had already reacted poorly to the upcoming LDP race, allowing Yukio Hatoyama to publicly voice concern over the LDP monopolization of media attention, and later forming a committee (no kidding) to counter the threat, all apparently without a game plan. It is far too early to say that the tide has turned, but the odds have improved for an LDP-New Komeito hold on power in the lower house. The DPJ must be hoping that as few of the new wave as possible will make it on to the LDP ballot.
Yasufumi Tanahashi (45); possibly the most influential leader of the LDP youth movementall decided to throw their hats in the ring. Meanwhile, Fukushiro Nukaga (64), giving up hope of obtaining 20 signatures from his co-factionmates, consolidated his perennial almost-ran status.
Taichi Yamamoto (50); very popular, very articulate*
Shigeru Ishiba (51); popular go to guy on national security
* Mr. Yamamoto is an interesting phenomenon because he is still an upper house member, so he has zero chance of being elected LDP president. He is clearly positioning himself to move to the lower house and becoming a true Prime Minister candidate.
The immediate effect of all this has been to take some of the the wind out of Yuriko Koike’s (56) sails. The nomadic Ms. Koike’s hopes had been to run her banner up the the Koizumian reformist pole, provide a nice, youthful contrast to Mr. Aso (and the newly septuagenarian Kaoru Yosano) and likely use the occasion to build a real power base for the next spin around the tracks. With three new younger reformists in the ring in addition to the seasoned but still youthful Nobuteru Ishihara (51), she appears to be running into trouble corralling the 20 signatures necessary to put her name on the ballot—already a somewhat risky proposition, given her lack of backbench/rank-and-file support.
All this also generates a little uncertainty for Mr. Aso. All these candidates—assuming they manage to collect 20 signatures each, no certainty there—on the local prefectural ballots will inevitably take some of the popular vote away from Mr. Aso. Although Mr. Aso may, in a piece of political irony, do better on the 141 electoral votes as the result of a wider distribution of the non-Aso popular vote, the results of the popular vote will not be lost on the Diet members, who will feel more free to vote on the candidates of their choice, of whom there are now more to choose from. I still believe that Mr. Aso will win the nomination on the first ballot, but I now see the (admittedly very faint) possibility that the vote will go to a runoff, in which case anything can happen.
In any case, youth will have been heard. We have seen the future, and it is them. That perhaps is the point of it all for the newbie candidates.
All this, of course, is a problem for the DPJ, where Ichiro Ozawa is running unopposed for reelection as party leader. Mr. Aso already led Mr. Ozawa 30%-8% as the best candidate for next Prime Minister, in a 2-3 September Asahi poll of all things. The DPJ leadership had already reacted poorly to the upcoming LDP race, allowing Yukio Hatoyama to publicly voice concern over the LDP monopolization of media attention, and later forming a committee (no kidding) to counter the threat, all apparently without a game plan. It is far too early to say that the tide has turned, but the odds have improved for an LDP-New Komeito hold on power in the lower house. The DPJ must be hoping that as few of the new wave as possible will make it on to the LDP ballot.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
It’s Now or Never for Yuriko Koike
Yuriko Koike must stand for the LDP Presidential election, and I think that she will. She’ll lose, but it doesn’t matter; it’s her only chance to become Prime Minister. Someday. And when it’s fight or flee, she fights. Let me explain:
Yuriko Koike has latched on to a succession of political leaders; that’s how she’s made it to here. The downside of this nomadic career path is that she lacks a readymade group of Diet members to support her, and has failed to built up street cred with the LDP ward heelers (rice-planting experience with paddywhackers?). With her political clock ticking—she is 56—it’s time for her to make a move. The LDP leadership race and the sooner-rather-than-later Lower House election give her an opportunity to satisfy both her needs.
Everybody realizes that this LDP election is Taro Aso’s to lose, and the campaign period—12-22 September—is too brief to expect Mr. Aso to make a gaffe big enough to blow it all. But what’s the use of an uncontested election? The LDP will benefit from the media buzz from a clean fight, while the DPJ will struggle to keep itself in the media’s inbox. So, with little to lose and a lot to gain, the LDP will welcome an internal challenge; all she has to do to erase any lingering resentment is to act the gracious loser and vow to do everything to return the ruling coalition to power. In the meantime, she has established herself as the babyface of the Koizumian movement.
And work she will, since she is—assuming that she follows my advice—going to campaign in the Lower House election for all first-termers, the Koizumi kids, who want her to swing her chariot their way. Let’s say that only one-third of the 83 Koizumi children make it back and that she has gone to bat for all of them. That’s 28 Lower House Diet members who will be indebted to her. If half of them decide to support her post-Aso, add her seat to the mix and, right there, that’s 15 in the Lower House alone—more or less the size of a starter-pack LDP faction.
Helping others while neglecting her own campaign could be costly. But the extended attention in the national media that she will draw for her efforts should make up for some of the touchy-feely time that she will be unable to devote to her local constituency. And if she does wind up losing her own seat, she becomes a martyr. Regain her seat in another two, three years, and the people—and their local-yokel volunteers and assemblymen—that she helped out will be even more beholden to her.
At least that’s the way I see the value of this race. Or rather, the way—I think—that a risk-tolerant politician is likely to see it.
Yuriko Koike has latched on to a succession of political leaders; that’s how she’s made it to here. The downside of this nomadic career path is that she lacks a readymade group of Diet members to support her, and has failed to built up street cred with the LDP ward heelers (rice-planting experience with paddywhackers?). With her political clock ticking—she is 56—it’s time for her to make a move. The LDP leadership race and the sooner-rather-than-later Lower House election give her an opportunity to satisfy both her needs.
Everybody realizes that this LDP election is Taro Aso’s to lose, and the campaign period—12-22 September—is too brief to expect Mr. Aso to make a gaffe big enough to blow it all. But what’s the use of an uncontested election? The LDP will benefit from the media buzz from a clean fight, while the DPJ will struggle to keep itself in the media’s inbox. So, with little to lose and a lot to gain, the LDP will welcome an internal challenge; all she has to do to erase any lingering resentment is to act the gracious loser and vow to do everything to return the ruling coalition to power. In the meantime, she has established herself as the babyface of the Koizumian movement.
And work she will, since she is—assuming that she follows my advice—going to campaign in the Lower House election for all first-termers, the Koizumi kids, who want her to swing her chariot their way. Let’s say that only one-third of the 83 Koizumi children make it back and that she has gone to bat for all of them. That’s 28 Lower House Diet members who will be indebted to her. If half of them decide to support her post-Aso, add her seat to the mix and, right there, that’s 15 in the Lower House alone—more or less the size of a starter-pack LDP faction.
Helping others while neglecting her own campaign could be costly. But the extended attention in the national media that she will draw for her efforts should make up for some of the touchy-feely time that she will be unable to devote to her local constituency. And if she does wind up losing her own seat, she becomes a martyr. Regain her seat in another two, three years, and the people—and their local-yokel volunteers and assemblymen—that she helped out will be even more beholden to her.
At least that’s the way I see the value of this race. Or rather, the way—I think—that a risk-tolerant politician is likely to see it.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Taro Aso and the Competition… Plus, the Supermajority Override
In case anyone is wondering…Taro Aso’s positives:
1) Taro Aso managed a highly respectable finish in the 2007 LDP Presidential election with a hard-earned take of 197 votes (132 Diet members, 65 local chapter votes) against Mr. Fukuda’s 330 (254 Diet members, 76 local chapter votes), despite the fact that every other faction formally sided with Yasuo Fukuda as the “safe” establishment candidate.
2) Mr. Aso joined the Fukuda team as Secretary-General, second in command to Mr. Fukuda. He has subsequently been anointed by the LDP kingmaker Yoshiro Mori as the Prime Minister’s heir-apparent.
3) Mr. Aso gets along with the increasingly skittish junior coalition partner New Komeito.
4) Mr. Aso is a good campaigner and the most popular Prime Minister candidate in public opinion polls, easily outpolling Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ leader.
The negatives:
1) Mr. Aso has not always acted according to the wishes of the Fukuda administration, signaling early on his willingness to drop the extension of the counterterrorist refueling operations by the Maritime Self-Defense Force and adopting a personal income tax relief/cash payout as part of the economic stimulus package, both in line with New Komeito wishes.
2) Mr. Aso is known for his loose lips, and some of his utterances have been quite off-the-wall.
The alternatives, in descending order of likelihood:
1) Yuriko Koike: A two-time Cabinet Minister under Prime Ministers Koizumi and Abe, she became one of the first and surely most celebrated “assasins” in the 2005 Lower House election when she famously switched districts to unseat, successfully, a Post Office rebel. For a former newscaster, she is a surprisingly uninspiring debater—she does better with sound-bites. Now, the media is touting her as a stalking horse for Hidenao Nakagawa and his band of diehard Koizumians. The well-travelled Ms. Koike has usually had her way with alpha dogs from Morihiro Hosokawa (Nippon New Party) to Ichiro Ozawa (New Frontier Party) to Ichiro Koizumi (LDP), but her popularity with lesser party lights and the rank-and-file is suspect. It is telling that she has not held down any significant party posts. She also botched the dismissal of her deputy when she was Defense Minister.
2) Kaoru Yosano: The troubleshooter of choice for fiscal conservatives, he is a weak campaigner, who lost his Lower House seat as an incumbent Cabinet Minister just when he was emerging as a possible future Prime Minister candidate. He turned 70 on 22 August, and suffered from serious health problems last year, not a good omen after two successive Prime Ministers have walked away from the seat of power, one of them at least partly for health reasons, in less than a year.
3) Sadakazu Tanigaki the ripe old age of age of 63, he still has the look and, worse, feel of a well-behaved little boy. He recently merged his micro-faction with Makoto Koga’s much larger one. He has all the appearance of a man who is too nice to win.
4) Nobuteru Ishihara: At age 51, he is still young enough in the LDP at least to be counted as an up-and-comer. He enjoys something of a celebrity status, mainly because of his association with his best-selling writer-turned-politician father, the charismatic Shintaro Ishihara. Often portrayed as a conservative in the gaijin media, he recently gave up his independent status and joined the China-lovin’, North Korea-coddlin’ Takui Yamazaki’s mid-tier faction. Like the other LDP policy-wonks of his generation—Shinzo Abe no exception—he has not managed to escape the impression of being the victim of a case of arrested development.
5) Kunio Hatoyama: He appears here only because his name appeared in the media. He is well on his way to becoming the Harold Stassen of Japanese politics, without ever being Harold Stassen IYKWIAS. (If Kunio Hatoyama is here, can Taro Kono be far behind?)
Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks! G’night!
PS: If I were a betting man and betting were legal in Japan, I would bet that a Prime Minister Aso would be using the supermajority override to pass the consumer protection agency, while allowing the JMSDF refueling operations (and Japan’s permanent UNSC membership ambitions) to die a quiet death. My guess is that there are enough NGOs and their lawyer advocates who would prefer to have a friend in the bureaucracy like Mr. Fukuda’s CPA instead of a competitor like the DPJ’s independent government ombudsman to provide cover for an override.
The death of the refueling operations is a less sure thing: if it were my decision to make, I would go for broke; I think that there is enough of a sense of national pride—witness the outpouring of public grief and sympathy for Kazuya Ito, the 31 old NGO volunteer that was murdered in Afghanistan, as well as for every Japanese that died in Kampuchia and Iraq during public service—to gain political points if Prime Minister Aso decided to push the extension legislation in the face of an Upper House veto. In the media, Yomiuri and Sankaei would support him. I want to see how far New Komeito is willing to bend to cover his ass with regard to the LDP right before I really make up my mind.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Oops, Defense Minister Koike Is on the Outs (and Another Minister Has Political Financing Worries)
Yuriko Koike, the Defense Minister, whom I had tagged as the one minister who would keep her job in Abe Cabinet 2.0 (replacing ver.14), won't do so after all. In a press briefing she gave on the 24th at the New Delhi hotel where she was staying, she stated, "Nobody has taken responsibility within the Defense Ministry for the Aegis destroyer information system leak. I wish to take the responsibility. I want to change totally the people and their mindset, and have the new minister take charge…… I have said that I will 'resign' [on the occasion of the Cabinet reshuffle]." She added later to reporters at the New Delhi Airport, "I communicated to the prime minister my intent [not to stay on]. I did not get a direct answer", and "This does not mean that I am taking responsibility for the [confusion over] the personnel decision on the vice minister post."
I took these quotes from the Yomiuri hard-copy front page version (which may have had something to do with the editorial decision to carry Prime Minister Abe's summit with Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah in a much smaller space on page 2).
On her return to Japan at Narita Airport next morning, she seemed to dampen any speculation that she would remain in the Cabinet in another capacity, stating, "I've communicated to the prime minister that 'I want to work hard to support Prime Minister Abe as one foot soldier of the party from now on'". However, she did not completely rule out possibility of serving if asked. This, the latest from the online Mainichi
All this is forcing reporters to chase MOD and LDP sources for comments. They are uniformly critical of her decision, although the reasons seem to vary, whether it be taking it on herself to resign after creating a mess just before, giving a somewhat unconvincing reason for the decision, running away from a confrontation with Ichiro Ozawa, or jumping ship before being pushed out anyway by Mr. Abe.
If her departure takes one awkward problem out of Mr. Abe's hands, he can't be pleased that Ms. Koike took the matter and its announcement into her own hands. This reinforces an image of a passive prime minister that does not take charge of the situation and instead allows the situation to dictate to him. In this respect, it does not help him that the two core personnel decisions he has made so far, creating a dual power structure of Cabinet ministers on one hand and the White House-style sub-Cabinet prime minister's team on the other, and engineering the return of the Post Office privatization rebels, both backfired spectacularly. Another silver lining, of course, is that he will be able to replace her with a more conciliatory figure in dealing with counter-terrorism act whose extension will be the biggest and most urgent issue of the upcoming Diet session.
Ms. Koike is not the only Cabinet minister to run into trouble these days. There is Shiozaki Yasuhisa, inflicted twice-fold by the political financing scandal (imagine the misfortune of having one of your accountants embezzle money from you and your losing your job because of it; well, not quite, but close enough to the truth to feel some sympathy for Mr. Shiozaki) and his latest run-in with Ms. Koike. Then, there's Yoshihide Suga, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications, and close . Scandal- and foot-in-mouth-disease-free---all things being relative in politics--Mr. Suga had been one of the brighter lights in the Abe Administration, and MIAC had been rewarded with an oversight role in rehabilitating the public pension system, bringing some functions of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare under its jurisdiction, albeit indirectly. However, if he had harbored any thoughts of staying on, he surely gave them up, as suspiciously large overhead costs have shown up on his books.
Seriously, politicians who want to keep their jobs should start slipping me fat envelopes filled with unmarked 10,000 Yen bills just so I won't write favorably about their prospects. You already owe me one, Mr. Suga.
I took these quotes from the Yomiuri hard-copy front page version (which may have had something to do with the editorial decision to carry Prime Minister Abe's summit with Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah in a much smaller space on page 2).
On her return to Japan at Narita Airport next morning, she seemed to dampen any speculation that she would remain in the Cabinet in another capacity, stating, "I've communicated to the prime minister that 'I want to work hard to support Prime Minister Abe as one foot soldier of the party from now on'". However, she did not completely rule out possibility of serving if asked. This, the latest from the online Mainichi
All this is forcing reporters to chase MOD and LDP sources for comments. They are uniformly critical of her decision, although the reasons seem to vary, whether it be taking it on herself to resign after creating a mess just before, giving a somewhat unconvincing reason for the decision, running away from a confrontation with Ichiro Ozawa, or jumping ship before being pushed out anyway by Mr. Abe.
If her departure takes one awkward problem out of Mr. Abe's hands, he can't be pleased that Ms. Koike took the matter and its announcement into her own hands. This reinforces an image of a passive prime minister that does not take charge of the situation and instead allows the situation to dictate to him. In this respect, it does not help him that the two core personnel decisions he has made so far, creating a dual power structure of Cabinet ministers on one hand and the White House-style sub-Cabinet prime minister's team on the other, and engineering the return of the Post Office privatization rebels, both backfired spectacularly. Another silver lining, of course, is that he will be able to replace her with a more conciliatory figure in dealing with counter-terrorism act whose extension will be the biggest and most urgent issue of the upcoming Diet session.
Ms. Koike is not the only Cabinet minister to run into trouble these days. There is Shiozaki Yasuhisa, inflicted twice-fold by the political financing scandal (imagine the misfortune of having one of your accountants embezzle money from you and your losing your job because of it; well, not quite, but close enough to the truth to feel some sympathy for Mr. Shiozaki) and his latest run-in with Ms. Koike. Then, there's Yoshihide Suga, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications, and close . Scandal- and foot-in-mouth-disease-free---all things being relative in politics--Mr. Suga had been one of the brighter lights in the Abe Administration, and MIAC had been rewarded with an oversight role in rehabilitating the public pension system, bringing some functions of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare under its jurisdiction, albeit indirectly. However, if he had harbored any thoughts of staying on, he surely gave them up, as suspiciously large overhead costs have shown up on his books.
Seriously, politicians who want to keep their jobs should start slipping me fat envelopes filled with unmarked 10,000 Yen bills just so I won't write favorably about their prospects. You already owe me one, Mr. Suga.
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