Some People Think Out Loud, While Taro Aso…

If you believe Asahi Shinbun (and there’s no reason not to), at a Sunday night talkfest with a group of students:

Student: Isn’t it because young people don’t have enough money to get married that people don’t married and that leads to fewer children?

Aso: It’s better not to get married if you don’t have money; I think so too. You better not do such a thing thoughtlessly. It wasn’t like I was someone who didn’t have money. But I married late. Can you be respected when you’re not earning any money? That’s pretty difficult.

…But admit it though, we do have to agree with our Prime Minister—Money must have been the least of his problems in getting married.

Incidentally, in a new, “non-”campaign pamphlet—sorry, unavailable on the LDP website— the LDP is accusing the Japan Teachers’ Union for (among other things) promoting promiscuity. Now you’d think that with the disastrously low birth rates, the Aso administration would be thanking Nikkyoso for pushing unprotected teenage sex. But what do I know?

ADD: My bad. Here’s the pamphlet. Wait, there’s more!

Aso and Hatoyama: Itineraries Compared

I hating seeing people use insinuations to further their arguments, and I try to avoid doing so myself. However, some things just cry out for…

Today, the government made the announcement as required by law for the August 30 General Election of the House of Representatives. And to launch the formal start of the LDP election campaign, Asahi reports that Prime Minister Aso is giving speeches at:

10:55 Hachioji Station, North Exit (Tokyo)
12:45 Higashi-Murayama Station, East Exit (Tokyo)
15:15 Akabane Station, East Exit (Tokyo)
16:20 Seibu Nerima Station, North Gate (Tokyo)

If some of these names sound unfamiliar to you, do not feel embarrassed. Hachioji is a name that many Japanese hear only during the national high school baseball tournaments and the more studious among them vaguely recognize as former silk industry powerhouse. Higashi-Murayama’s national reputation rests with those old enough to remember “Higashi-Murayama Ondo” (click at your peril), a local booster song picked up and popularized in the 1970s by the mega-hit comedy group Dorifutaazu (Drifters) on their long-running TV variety show. Akababe and Nerima are closer to downtown Tokyo, but still carry, perhaps undeservedly, somewhat seedy, wrong-side-of-the-Yamanote Line overtones. Nerima’s claim to national fame lies in the Nerima Daikon, the big fat local version of the daikon radish that reputedly gave birth to the derogatory phrase daikon-ashi (google if you must). In other words, Aso is basically hitting the closest thing Tokyo has to the boondocks, from west to north, then calling it a day. (I’m mildly surprised that he isn’t hitting my home town, whose motto could be “XXXXXX, proudly on the wrong side of the Tama River.)

Compare this with the same-day itinerary of Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ leader who is poised to take over Aso’s office in the event of a widely-anticipated opposition victory:

09:15 storefront; Takashimaya, Osaka Store (Osaka)
11:05 storefront; Hankyu, Shijo-Kawaramachi Store (Kyoto)
13:30 Toyohashi Station East Exit, pedestrian deck (Aichi)
14:55 Shizuoka, Aoba Event Square (Shiuzuoka)
16:45 Yokohama Station West Exit (Kanagawa)
18:35 Yotsuya Station, SunSun Plaza (Tokyo)

Not only is Hatoyama hitting six spots to Aso’s four, he’s doing it in six different prefectures, along a 2-hours-plus-by-non-stop-bullet-train route. Now I understand that a Prime Minister has other responsibilities, and Aso may yet add a couple of more speaking engagements before he pops back to his official residence to rest up for the rest of the campaign. All I know is that the famously fit Prime Minister’s health is last thing that could be holding him back from hitting more convenient and/or visible locations with more frequency.

Last Thought before the Tokyo Election

Actually, the polls have been open since 7:00AM and Asahi says voting in the first two hours was 3.98% of total eligible voters, up from 2005’s 3.20%. Could be people are out early, with a forecast of afternoon rain, but a high turnout will hurt the LDP and Komeito, who know that non-partisan voters are more likely to float to the opposition. Which reminds me of something that has been nagging me: Why did Aso draw attention to the elction by making himself so visible in the campaign? It drew media attention, and also made his denials of national impact ring hollow. That is like pushing for his own downfall before he gets to call snap election.

That’s it for now. I’ll get to your comments, Ross and Mark, later in the day.

Sights along the Taro Aso Money Trail

The blog gifts you on this the Tanabatas Day with political financing money miscellany.

According to its FY2007 report filed with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, Yukio Hatoyama’s political finances management organization raked in 208,705,324 yen (of which 8,395,145 were carried over from FY2006) that year while incurring 159,665,501 in expenditures. Of the revenue, 49,926,000 came by way of individual donations, while 99,330,000 came from “political organizations” i.e. the DPJ. Most of the difference was made up by 45,830,000 from a single fundraising party held on 3 December 2007. Nastay! But what about the other side?

During the same period, according to the FY2007 report it filed, Taro Aso’s political finances management organization took in 193,343,250 while spending 143,911,327. However, 56,773,691 consisted of carryover from the previous FY, so the true gross revenue for FY2007 was only 136,569,559. Where donations were concerned, Aso received only 9,660,000 from individuals and 39,972,000 from political organizations. Most of the difference was made up by 84,734,240 from a single fundraising party held on 8 June 2007.

The donations from political organizations are of particular interest though. For the sole reason for the existence of six of the eleven organizations named as 50,000-and-up donors and yielding 31,500,000 or 78.8% of those donations appears to be holding once-a-year fundraising parties for Aso and his faction members*…and I don’t think the party tickets were being snapped up by goth-lolis and B-Boys. Unlike Hatoyama’s case, it’s perfectly legal, but it makes you wonder. In fact, if you go through all the reports filed at the MIAC portal, you are likely to come to the conclusion that fundraising parties will leave a gaping loophole in the DPJ pledge to ban corporate donations altogether.

There’s an interesting side story here. The Japanese Communist Party has seized on the corporate money issue**. In fact, their main line of attack for the election season appears to be that the LDP and DPJ are two peas in a pod. Yesterday, a top JCP official drew an unusually large crowd in front of the local train station. He was campaigning for the 12 July Tokyo Prefectural Assembly election, which is being seen as a virtual referendum on the Aso administration. As I passed by twice a couple of minutes apart, the official was hammering on the two-peas-in-a-pod message with a couple of talking points: the Tokyo DPJ’s near-consistent support for Governor Ishihara’s legislative initiatives***—and corporate money. The mostly middle-aged and elderly audience—it’s that kind of a neighborhood—appeared to be soaking it up. I came away with the feeling that the Communists are going to capture a large chunk of the protest vote. It’s a side story worth keeping an eye on, because if that happens, it will have ramifications beyond the 12 July Tokyo election.

* The national associations of doctors and pharmaceuticals accounted for 7,000,000 or 17.5%, or most of the remainder. The expenditures are also of some interest. Filed reports show that Aso’s organizations donated 21,500,000 (including 11,500,000 from his political finance management organization) to his faction’s political finance management organization in addition to 550,000 in annual dues from his own pocket. His political finance management organization received 4,000,000 in return like those of all the other faction members. 21,500,000 – 4,000,000 = 16,500,000 appears to be the price he pays for ownership. Even a twenty-member faction is an expensive plaything. Former owner Yohei Kono and Taro Kono pay 2,000,000 and 2,560,000 respectively. Other faction members only paid the 550,000 each in dues. Incidentally, 4,000,000 – 550,000 = 3,450,000 covers about 5% of the annual costs incurred by an LDP Diet member running a very tight ship.

** The Social Democrats have their own issues regarding labor unions. Besides, they want to hitch a ride on the DPJ bandwagon.

*** Governor Ishihara is campaigning hard for the Tokyo LDP. I think it means that his two political sons will not be breaking out of the national LDP any time soon.

The Prime Minister Appoints Two New Ministers and the Nation Yawns

Yoshimasa Hayashi and Motoo Hayashi joined the Fukuda administration on 2 August 2008 as Minister of Defense and Director-General of the National Public Safety Commission respectively. Sadly, they had to give up their cabinet post seven weeks later when Yasuo Fukuda abruptly resigned as Prime Minister, opening the way for the more campaign-ready (or so they thought) Taro Aso to take up the mantle and call an early snap election. (We all know how that scenario turned out.) Now, as his grandiose plans for a wholesale overhaul of his administration and party leadership has, like so many of his political initiatives, fizzle out, Aso is satisfying himself with appointing Y. Hayashi to take up the Economic and Fiscal Minister’s portfolio while M. Hayashi is being tapped to assume his old NPSA post.

The logic behind Y. Hayashi’s appointment is sound, since Kaoru Yosano had been doing triple duty in charge of the heavy-duty Finance Ministry, financial regulation, and economic and fiscal portfolios. Moreover, Y. Hayashi, though a 4th-generation heirloom turkey, happens to be an accomplished policy wonk in his own right. The NPSC job, though, needs little more than a warm fanny to fill the minister’s chair. Taking it away from the Internal Affairs and Communications Minister does little to ease his not inconsiderable burdens.

I guess the two Hayashis can at least claim that they did manage to grab a chair each when the music stopped. And Aso’s soul can rest easy, having expiated its sins for abruptly terminating the cabinet tenures of these two men to ultimately no political use as the Prime Minister frittered away political capital that he should have devoted to an early snap election.

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I think there are some legal complications to Yukio Hatoyama’s financial contributions to his own political finance organization that are not being discussed in the mainstream media yet. The Public Prosecutors Office can give him a hard time with this, I think. I hope to write about that and what that means politically (and respond to recent comments on my posts) after I sober up—sometime tomorrow, I think.

The Hatoyama Caper in Perspective

There’s really not much to write about Japanese politics these days. The Hatoyama caper (I’ve written a brief explanation at the bottom of this post) would have been a major political story if it had occurred last year, when the Aso administration and the LDP still had a good chance of retaining a Lower House majority. Now, it’s a mere side show. If this were chess, the LDP would be a queen down; losing a bishop would be the least of its worries.

That being said, I am sure that this incident—off-beat appointee causes incident; hands-off Prime Minister allows matters to fester; situation blows up, leaving egg on Prime Minister’s face—will be recorded in the post mortem as symptomatic of Taro Aso’s personal failings. Most recently, one of his Upper House friends that he appointed as one of three Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretaries—the most important sub-cabinet political appointments available—lost his job after he used an official JR pass on a sleep-over golfing trip with a married woman*. Aso’s behavior followed more or less the same pattern then. In fact, he initially pretended to accept the DCCS’s claims of “health reasons” for his resignation. More broadly, I’ve talked before about how his bureaucratic appointments were not paying off. (Yes, I still owe LB (or was it T. Greer?) an explanation about that.) Aso is just not a good judge of talent, nor does he have the ruthlessness to chop heads when they do not measure up.

But is this merely a personal problem? I also believe, as I briefly referred to at the end of this post, is that it will be remembered as a common thread that ran through the last three, short-lived, administrations of the post-1955 LDP era. It all seems to spell the end of an era, showing up as the writing on the wall.

* Let’s call it: Woodgate! DCCS Yoshitada Konoike, not coincidentally, had already been reprimanded early in the year for giving the same woman a key to his Tokyo apartment provided by the Diet.

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Kunio Hatoyama is a well-travelled politician, having migrated from the New Liberal Club to the LDP (the mighty Takeshita faction) to the New Frontier Party (Ozawa et al) to the Democratic Party (with his brother Yukio), and back to the LDP again, where he now resides. There have been a couple of stints in between as an independent. He is definitely one who marches to his own drum. In his latest incarnation as Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications, he has gone after Japan Post, currently on the road to privatization, and its CEO Yoshifumi Nishikawa for a bundled real estate sale to ORIX, whose chairman had been Prime Minister Koizumi’s private-sector point man on his privatization drive, as well as the partial demolition of its Taisho-era Tokyo headquarters. (It’s actually a drab, unimaginative specimen of mostly historic value.) He has vowed that he will not authorize Nishikawa’s reappointment as CEO. This has pitted him against Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano, who will exercise the government’s right as the sole shareholder to appoint the CEO, as well the Prime Minister himself, who is reportedly in favor of reappointment. The majority of the LDP probably also supports reappointment, if only to avoid offending big business—which offered up Nishikawa for the job in the first place and is generally in favor of the Koizumi reform process.

I expect a face-saving resolution that keeps Nishikawa on while allowing Hatoyama to claim partial victory by requiring Japan Post to amend its ways. But that’s just me sayin’.

Containing Novel Influenza (A/H1N1): A Success Story Buried under the Rubble

A rare success story for the beleaguered Aso administration has been its response to the Novel Influenza (A/H1N1). When the news of the virus broke, the authorities quickly set up border checkpoints (it helps that entry points are limited, Japan being an archipelago) and bought time with them while they geared up the domestic response mechanism. When they detected the first domestic human-to-human transmission cases, they quickly wound down border control operations and turned the resource savings over to domestic containment tasks. In the meantime, they did a good job at keeping the public well-informed, giving the latter the public to drop their facemasks almost as quickly as they had put them on*. The trickle of new cases continues (4 June, 15 newly confirmed), but it’s a non-story now—which is probably a problem for Aso. Success in this case is a process leading to normalcy. There are few tangible “kills” to highlight, so the story fades out of the headlines.

Don’t feel too sorry for the Aso administration though; there are big elements of luck to this. For one, there is no doubt that the experience both national and international from the SARS and bird flu outbreaks aided the Japanese authorities enormously in setting up the necessary framework, then forming and executing effective plans to contain the virus. They had in effect dress rehearsals. Moreover, the relative mildness of the symptoms helped maintain public order; there was less urgency, and available resources could be stretched more easily.

This leads me to wonder: How prepared is Japan—any nation, actually—to face an onslaught of a more lethal strain of the virus returning later in the year, which is exactly what happened in 1918 with the Spanish flu? Even if the number of cases will turn out be as limited as they have been in the current outbreak, they will require far more resources for isolation and treatment. They are likely to force more and longer closures of schools and other establishments where they are discovered. The impact will go beyond the pathological, as economic activities world-round take a major hit.

Of course the chances of a lethal mutation are as good as one that works in reverse, making the virus more benign. And nothing guarantees that the virus will come back either. That being said, under the bad-case scenario, a serious flu epidemic will be one of the earliest major political tests, if not the earliest, that the post-election government will face. The danger for a DPJ-led administration is that, coming in to confront large parts of the bureaucracy—the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare with it its national pension system troubles has been a particularly popular target of DPJ criticism—it may have difficulties changing gear so that it can take control of the situation, lest it works the other way around.

* The facemask is part our national costume. We’ll whip them out at the slightest sign of a cold, much the way we unfurl our umbrellas at the slightest hint of rain.

What Aso Can Do to Turn It Around

A look at two last-minute reversals of fortune that saved LDP administrations from devastating election losses gives us some idea of what Prime Minister Aso is up against.

(Case 1: The 2005 Koizumi Theater Election)

It’s all too easy to forget that by 2005, a lousy economy and an ascendant DPJ had the LDP-led administration on the ropes. The Upper House election loss to the DPJ the year before hadn’t helped either. Thus, when Prime Minister Koizumi expelled Lower House members who had voted against Post Office privatization from the LDO and called a snap election, most experts predicted yet another devastating LDP defeat. Instead, Koizumi ran as the candidate standing up to vested interests and led the LDP to a resounding victory that ensured a Lower House supermajority for the ruling coalition.

Moral of the story: It helps to be the good guys.

Strategic advice for Aso: Cast yourself as the antiestablishment candidate. The problem here, of course, is that Aso is the establishment candidate. He has made it clear that he only reluctantly went along with Post Office privatization. He has defanged the initiative pushed by Prime Minister Fukuda (fils) to take gasoline tax money away from the road construction tribe, and quickly backed off from proposals to shake up the social safety net bureaucracy. In fact, he has shown none of the flair and stubbornness that Koizumi drew on as he bucked his party and the opinion polls to victory.

(Case 2: The 1980 Double Election)

In 1978, Masayoshi Ohira succeeded Takeo Fukuda as Prime Minister by wresting the LDP Presidency away from the latter in a bitterly fought election. This was the beginning of a feud between the two and their supporters that saw a devastating general election the following year that took away the LDP’s majority in the Lower House, the subsequent LDP election between the two mortal rivals that Ohira barely won, and the 1980 Lower House vote of no-confidence against the Ohira Cabinet that unexpectedly passed when Fukuda’s allies in the LDP decided to sit it out. The civil war ended only when Ohira died of a heart attack during the subsequent election campaign for the snap election that Ohira called. Ohira’s death not only united the LDP but also managed drew a huge sympathy vote, resulting in landslide victories in both Houses*. It also brought to power new Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki, one of the less effective prime ministers of the post-WW II era.

Moral of the story: Mourning becomes the LDP.

Strategic advice for Aso: Die. This doomsday option, though, has some obvious shortcomings of its own.

* Ohira timed the snap Lower House election to coincide with the Upper House election scheduled to be held every three years.

Bad Polls, More Downside Risk for the Ruling Coalition

Poll results as a whole continue to vary widely between each other, while the newspaper polls reflect their respective political outlooks and the TV polls are particularly volatile. All that being said, if you look at how the numbers have moved as the Nishimatsu scandal broke over DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa’s head and led to his replacement by Yukio Hatoyama, it’s safe to say—knock on wood—the following:

1) The DPJ has closed in on the LDP with regard to bedrock support; the 10% or so lead that the LDP held after the Kozumi administration appears to have dissipated altogether.

2) The switch from Ozawa to Hatoyama has restored much of the DPJ lead among the “floaters”—one-third or so of the electorate—who are going to end up determining the outcome of the Lower House general election.

The LDP gave its best shot on the economy, as it put forth its latest economic stimulus package to mixed reviews. Its game plan going forward appears to consist of bashing the DPJ over a) the unrealistic cost-cutting assumptions as the basis of its four-year plan and b) the lack of a short-term plan of its own. Beyond this, there seems to be little more that the LDP can do except hope against hope for a miraculous third quarter economic recovery; that, and wait for a serious DPJ mistake or two—possible but highly unlikely, given that the DPJ as the opposition won’t have to worry about wayward cabinet members and other high-profile political appointees.

Worse for the ruling coalition, it continues to be distracted by side issues. Kunio Hatoyama, the Internal Affairs and Communications Minister, has been attacking the Post Office at every turn, scoring some political points for himself at the expense of the rest of the LDP and Koizumian reformists in particular. Prime Minister Aso jumped at a proposal to re-divide the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, but the MIAC Minister—Yoichi Masuzoe, the one bright spot in the Aso Cabinet—has come forth with a request for more staff as a condition for going along with it. And that’s not to mention the bullet the Aso administration dodged when Ozawa’s resignation and subsequent race to succeed him pushed the sacking of a Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary for sexual escapades at the expense of public coffers—which Aso foolishly tried to brush off as resignation for “health reasons”—to the media sidelines.

On the DPJ side, there is lingering worry that Ichiro Ozawa’s daily press briefings as he stalks the provinces may cause some grief. I doubt it. The press can only ask the same question—Will you explain yourself regarding the Nishimatsu money—so many times and get the same answer—I’ve explained it already and everything is legal—every time before the editors stop printing it. In fact, that’s what it’s beginning to look like already. The issue will resurface from time to time as Ozawa’s political aide’s prosecution for political financing irregularities moves forward (or fresh allegations are raised*), but the most eye-catching event—the verdict—is not coming down before the general election—assuming that the Public Prosecutors Office decides to bring the case to a trial before the election in the first place.

All this of course has little to do with what the DPJ is going to do after it catches the milk truck. I’ll get back to that if I have something meaningful to add to what I’ve said before. Otherwise, I’ll continue to focus my meanderings on the chase.

* A 24 May Mainichi report relates how the Ozawa team dunned 5 million Yen from major zenecon Kumagai-Gumi from 1996-2000 under a scheme remarkably similar to the Nishimatsu arrangement. No, the report has nothing to say about the LDP side of the picture.

Faceoff against Aso Shouldn’t Hurt Ozawa

Ichiro Ozawa has finally consented to face off on May 13 against Prime Minister Aso in the Diet session party-leader debate—launched nine years ago as (it is widely believed) an Ozawa initiative—that he had done his utmost to avoid even before his most recent political troubles began.

Frankly, I’m surprised that it took Ozawa so long to come around. He may be no great debater, but Aso isn’t one either. Nor is Aso an effective attack dog; he’s more of a friendly-banter, small-talk guy, cast in the same mold as George W. Bush. More important, the debate is brief (45 minutes according to Wikipedia and should in principle be focused on policy issues, of which there are plenty. Thus, a concentrated personal attack on Ozawa can damage public perception of Aso’s leadership. More seriously, it will backfire on the LDP, whose own far more extensive reliance on corporate money provides plenty of material for a counterattack. If it comes to that Ozawa could even decide to play to the crowds by throwing in a DPJ proposal to ban all corporate funds, though he personally dislikes the idea. Although I do not believe that the principals will avoid discussing political financing altogether—that would be bad for Ozawa as well—it should be a relatively minor factor in the debate.

This will give Ozawa and his DPJ allies and associates some ammunition to claim that he is not hiding himself and moreover has yet again publicly addressed the issue. It obviously will not slake the media’s thirst for political blood, but it will go some ways in quieting—though certainly not silencing—less friendly elements in the DPJ. That in turn means less material for the media’s Ozawa deathwatch.

State of the Nation: Aso, LDP on Mini Roll While DPJ Flounders

Spring and the new fiscal year have brought Prime Minister Aso and the LDP-Komeito coalition good tidings. April did begin somewhat inauspiciously with front-to-back coverage of the flap over a false missile alert—the North Korean authorities wound up launching the Taepodong 2 one day later, on a Sunday morning—but it did them little harm, since the tracking system itself worked flawlessly and the SAC-3s and Patriot 3s never were tested. The fact that the mid-range ballistic missile is never going to be targeted at Japan also must have had a lot to with the fact that the whole incident blew by with little fallout on the domestic political scene.

But after that mini-setback that never really was, things have been looking up for the Aso administration. The official response to the swine flu epidemic has been generally good from a political point of view. The coordination between the national authorities and local governments (and immigration services) appears to have proceeded with few hitches**, and rapid disclosure of suspected cases—all turning up negative—has helped keep the media off their backs. The SARS experience must be serving them well. An actual outbreak—not just an isolated case—will change all this if they mishandle it, but so far so good. Thus, the DPJ has found little to slam the Aso administration here.

Just as important, the economy has shown some signs of bottoming out, with industrial production showing a modest uptick in March, with promises of a couple of more months of better times (compared to what, cynics will say, but any good news is welcome these days), and the stock market has been holding. The rise in industrial production has nothing to do with the latest stimulus package now in the hands of the Diet and everything to do with the precipitous inventory drawdown coming to an end, but the media is not going to deny the authorities some credit for the first two stimulus packages, which most importantly directly provided badly-needed financing to the business sector. The stock market (and ultimately the economy itself) continues to rise and fall with the U.S. market and the dollar-yen exchange rate, both matters that are out of the government’s hands. But so far, the FY2009 economy has been raising (I’m not ready to say “floating”) the Aso administration’s boat.

It has also helped Aso that the DPJ’s economic program has received little public attention. The media hasn’t been helpful, but that’s at least partly because there’s nobody around to sell it. The policy wonks who work on this sort of thing are generally not close to party leader Ozawa in the best of times; these days, many of them must be sticking pins in effigy dolls to hasten an outcome that should be increasingly inevitable**.

This of course brings us to the DPJ’s real problem. The only thing the media care about as far as the DPJ is concerned is what’s up with Ozawa, and, with few exceptions, that’s all they’re going to report. So the damage to the DPJ—to its credit and the LDP’s likely worry, public support for the DPJ has held up much better than it has for Ozawa personally—becomes greater with every day that passes without change. Unfortunately for the DPJ, the beleaguered Ozawa has reverted to type, retreating into a shell and digging in his heels at the same time. Yet the other leaders cannot force his hand because there’s a good chance that he’ll call forth his men and pocket his money and once again sunder a party that he helped create.

And that’s where things stand, as the Japanese political scene begins to awaken from the slumber and the overseas junkets of Golden Week (the short version***).

* A potential dustup between Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Yoichi Maszoe and Yokohama Mayor Hiroshi Nakata was avoided when Nakata brushed off unwarranted accusations of unpreparedness from the impetuous Masuzoe with minimum fuss. Incidentally, the coolly competent and still youthful Nakata should be at the head of the line or thereabouts when you make a list of local politicians who could play major roles in a national realignment of party politics. (And no, conservative nationalists will not rally around Shintaro Ishihara, only partly because he won’t indulge them.)

There were reported cases of doctors refusing to treat fever outpatients, but that seems to have been the result of a misunderstanding of an official notice to refer suspected cases to designated treatment centers. A few days have gone by without any further reports of such incidents.

** According to this Sankei report, the outside experts commission hasn’t been acting so kindly with regard to Ozawa either, as what I posted here also indicates. It’s Sankei, who wants Ozwa’s hide badly, reporting, but it does dovetail with my take on the commission.

*** Some people are taking this Thursday and Friday off too, stretching it out to a 26 April-10 May string of 15 uninterrupted holidays. And who says we Japanese work too hard?

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There’s some talk of a cabinet reshuffle to spice things up before going into a Lower House election. That’s the one thing I’m very skeptical about. Every major makeover in recent years seems to come with shakedown problems, as political finance issues and gaffes force apologies and even resignations from newly-minted Ministers. The Aso administration finally got its act together after it ditched Shoichi Nakagawa and, tellingly, added the Finance Ministry to Economy Czar Kaoru Yosano’s portfolio instead of taking on a new Finance Minister. I think that the LDP will ditch Aso before he falls into such dire straits that he sees no harm in making that gamble.

The Staying Power of Incumbents?

For all the recent messiness regarding the Nishimatsu political money, Ichiro Ozawa and the DPJ for the most part still led or at least tied Taro Aso and the LDP in the weekend opinion polls. On Tuesday, the DPJ leadership met and closed ranks behind their leader (though many lesser members apparently kept talking otherwise—anonymously—to the press) and vowed to support him through the upcoming Lower House election. Following the leadership meeting, a newly contrite Ozawa held a press conference where he issued an apology to the Japanese public but made it clear that nothing short of his secretary being convicted of bribery* would force him to leave under anything but his own terms. Sankei will continue to push for his resignation, and Yomiuri will be hard put to contain its disappointment when (and if) the indictment comes down and Ozawa holds on, but it looks increasingly likely that RS is right and Ozawa has dodged the bullet for the time being. If, as RS believes, Ozawa’s continued presence will deny the DPJ an outright victory=simple majority, so be it, it seems.

Given the smallness of their own improvements in the polls even after what was supposed to be a devastating blow to the opposition leader, I would think that LDP members could read the writing on the wall and be getting busy pushing the Prime Minister out of the kantei and replacing him with one of any number of electorally more palatable alternatives. Except that they aren’t. In fact, if anything, the tide seems to be flowing the other way.

Last week, when ex-Prime Minister Koizumi followed through on his vow to sit out the March 4 Lower House revote on the legislative bill authorizing funds for the 2 trillion yen handout, only one LDP member, one of his secretaries when he was Prime Minister, flowed suit. The same day, the LDP youth (and not-so-youth) movement Sumiyaka na Seisaku Jitsugen wo Motomeru Kai (Association of Concerned Diet Members Who Seek the Speedy Realization of Policies) shed its hardcore anti-Aso members and renamed itself Jimintō wo Sasshin-shi Nihon wo Saisei-suru Kai (Association to Reform the LDP and Regenerate Japan). Koizumi Kids protector Tsutomu Takebe is still openly calling for an election fight under a new leader, but even he is willing to let Aso serve out his term. Nothing that has happened since the weekend polls indicate that the Aso administration is facing a serious challenge from the party faithful.

In hindsight, I feel that I should have remembered that the LDP meekly acquiesced when Shinzo Abe decided against all expectations to stay on as Prime Minister after the 2007 electoral debacle. The Upper House loss had put the LDP-New Komeito coalition well behind the DPJ there with little hope of regaining the majority for the next two three-year election cycles. Still, Abe managed to hang on until his health gave out and left him with no other choice but to pass the baton to…Yasuo Fukuda, who also quickly earned the disapproval of the Japanese public but likewise managed to leave under his own volition after an admittedly brief reign.

As for Ozawa, given the 2007 landslide victory, he has a greater claim to intra-party legitimacy than Aso. Plus, he has more troops, both relatively and absolutely, who are loyal to him than the LDP mini-faction leader. There’s still plenty of noise in the DPJ, but it’s all behind-the-scenes. Although the electoral benefits of Ozawa fading into the background seem pretty obvious as well, there’s a common thread running here of allowing party leaders to choose their fate regardless of the short-term consequences to the parties themselves. All this may only mean that everybody believes that the prospects for an early Lower House election are diminishing and is consequently taking a wait-and-see approach. But it is a pattern that I’ll take into greater consideration going forward.

* I’ve mentioned before that there are two types of bribery on the books: the garden variety wairo (bribe) involving shūwai (the receiving) and zōwai (the giving) that ordinary public servants take part in and the more nebulous assen (intermediation) that Diet members and their publicly-installed secretaries engage in. I am referring to the former here.

METI Minister in the Hot Seat; The Good News-Bad News Story of the Weekend

News reports say that Toshihiro Nikai, in his second tour as METI Minister, has been singled out by the Public Prosecutors Office for special attention out of the rest of his LDP colleagues on the take from the Nishimatsu (alleged) dummies. This is obviously good news for the DPJ because it spreads the…manure around. Adding spice to the….okay, what’s particularly…delicious is the fact that Nikai is a sitting Cabinet member, which means that the Aso administration is taking a direct hit and that the Prime Minister’s judgment and leadership are yet again being called into question. Less obviously, I think that this story has extra legs because Nikai’s relationship with one of the main Nishimatsu figures goes all the way back to his days as Wakayama Prefecture assemblyman—an heirloom that he inherited from his father. In other words, other things being equal, there is a greater likelihood of establishing a direct politician-donor link for Nikai than Ozawa. This is significant because the bar is high for the PPO when it comes to bringing indictments under the Political Finances Regulation Act against individual politicians for acts committed by their political finances management organizations and making them stick.* The DPJ won’t look any better, but the LDP will look worse, which is almost as good for escaping the hungry bear.

Nikai’s plight is actually bad news for Ozawa, though, if he really wants to stay on—something that I’m not completely convinced is the case. A Nikai resignation will touch off media pressure on Ozawa to follow suit, and “we’re no worse than the LDP” is not good, as an excuse or a campaign slogan. Now a Cabinet member, who serves at the pleasure of the Prime Minister, is far easier to get rid of than a party president, who can in principle stay on if he//she so desires short of being kicked out by an intra-party majority. Moreover, taking leave from the Cabinet, like so many of his LDP colleagues have done in recent administrations alone, is personally less damaging as political careers go. So Nikai is much more likely to take leave, which will ratchet up media (and hence voter) pressure on Ozawa. If I knew game theory, I’d probably be saying that the odds of the DPJ rank-and-file not in thrall to Ozawa will anticipate such an LDP move and raise objections to Ozawa’s continued stewardship have improved as well. In fact, I think that there is now a good chance, depending very much on how the criminal investigations unfold, that both Nikai and Ozawa will end up resigning by the end of the month, allowing the latter to concentrate on the experientially more comfortable and physically less taxing role of political strategist/fixer extraordinaire. Needless to say, that would not be good for the Prime Minister, whose LDP support base has always been tenuous and is increasingly so.

* A politician is criminally liable for acts committed by the chief financial officer of his/her political finances management organization only if he has failed to exercise due diligence in the appointment and oversight of that officer. Japanese jurisprudence places the burden of proof on this judgment call squarely on the shoulders of the prosecution. A direct link is easier to make a call on the evidence and conviction carries far greater penalties—potential jail time, if most likely suspended, and suspension of the right to stand for election, which leads to automatic disqualification for elected officials—than mere lack of due diligence, for which there are provisions only for a fine and the suspension of political rights is at the discretion of the courts.

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I’ll post on the weekend opinion polls later if I have the time. Suffice to say that they look bad for Ozawa, and that the DPJ and LDP have traded a few percentage points of support between them. The Aso administration shows a slight improvement as well. Given the circumstances, this all looks like a case of dead cats bouncing on the part of the ins. The media will seize on this though to put more pressure on Ozawa, who in turn is likely to dig in. Which brings the story back to the first point; that is, the fate of the METI Minister. The probably indictment two weeks later is likely to be the inflection point.

Aso Meets Obama, Medvedev. What Gives?

There’s little that can be settled between someone with a four-year lease on power with a one-off extension option for the landlord and another guy who faces near-certain eviction in less than seven months. No to worry though; there are no purely bilateral issues of major concern, and the global financial/economic crisis is…well, global. At the regional level, Futenma, Guam, and the rest of the U.S. troop realignment issues are what they are (where Ozawa’s latest statements are far more interesting and somewhat alarming, given the political winds), and North Korea is…North Korea, the pending Taepodon 2 “satellite” launch notwithstanding. So Prime Minister Aso took the twelve-hour flight to Washington, had a one-hour get-together (half that, really, if you consider the interpretation) with President Obama—no lunch, no press conference—and took the flight back home; the clock started running again on the embattled Prime Minister as if nothing had happened.

The only effect seems to have been to give the President of the United States a four-year pass against charges of Japan passing NTTIAWWT. Think of it as a follow-up to Hillary Clinton’s visit and talk with family members of abductees. Speaking of whom, it may only have been a scheduling glitch, but I think it was a clever idea to insert Indonesia between Japan and China and South Korea in her itinerary. By breaking the sequence with a country of clearly less political consequence, the U.S. government minimized the political significance of the order of the visits.

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Russian President Medvedev made an offer his Japanese counterpart couldn’t refuse when he invited Aso to Sakhalin Island for the Wednesday launch of the LNG plant that will send 65% of its 9.8 million-ton annual production to Japan*. It should be good publicity, foreign and domestic, for the Kremlin in the face of issues with Ukraine and serious knock-on effects on Western European customers, all of it unfolding within a broader, alarming context of plummeting energy prices. Aso’s visit also provides political closure to an obscure but not insignificant legal issue regarding the final status of Sakhalin Island. The USSR never signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty, under which Japan gave up sovereignty over what was then a strategically significant but barely habitable piece of real estate, along with the Kurile Islands. So Sakhalin (and the Kurile Islands) must be part of the final bilateral treaty that will settle all issues including the four islands most commonly referred to as the Northern Territories. It was a bargaining chip, albeit very minor. Aso’s visit laid that issue to rest.

In return, Aso got a promise of a May visit by Prime Minister Putin and a pledge to settle the issue within “our generation”, which the Japanese side is spinning as “during the current administrations.” The last point should be alarming to Japanese nationalists; Russia has never shown any hint of any intention to give up anything more than the two near-most (from the Japanese perspective) and smallest islands except in President Yeltsin’s weakest moments—only a hint at that, mind you—and Putin’s Russia has gone some ways in reverting to its old empirical ways since then. Meanwhile, Aso as Foreign Minister all but gave away his own game plan when he talked about splitting the islands in half by area—giving Japan the three smaller islands and a significant portion of the fourth—before there was any inkling that negotiation were going to start any time soon. At bottom, actually, is Aso’s moderate pragmatism—something most Western observers miss because of his sometimes nationalistic pronouncements—but it certainly won’t help him with a significant portion of his support from the LDP right.

* The rest goes to South Korea and the U.S.

The Perils of the Shakedown Process

The three most recent administrations have been plagued by Cabinet appointments gone bad. In fact, the Abe administration arguably lost control of the political game and the 2007 Upper House election because of botched assignments and poor damage control. Now, the Aso administration just had another one, and it has been a doozey.

But before you accuse the LDP of institutional fatigue—which I have done quite recently, actually—you have to remember that the great Junichiro Koizumi, whose passing into the political afterlife continues to be mourned by his diehard supporters, invited his own appointment fiasco in the first year of his administration when he rewarded Makiko Tanaka, the charismatic but ill-disciplined daughter of the late former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, with the Foreign Affairs portfolio for her indispensable help in his LDP campaign. It is to be remembered that Koizumi failed to show any leadership skills in managing the ensuing crisis at MOFA and her ultimate resignation. In fact, the Tanaka incident was so damaging that (according to Wikipedia) the Koizumi Cabinet’s poll numbers fell 30%. Nor is this a purely Japanese phenomenon. Barack Obama has been President of the United States for exactly one month (three if you count, which in all fairness we should, his two months as President-elect) and he’s already lost three Cabinet nominees and one White House appointment (two if you double-count Tom Daschle) requiring Senate approval.

What we’re seeing, then, is the initial shakedown process. At some point, the Obama administration is going to reach full operational capability, just like the Koizumi Cabinet did. Prime Minister Abe cracked before he made a real attempt to regain his footing, but Prime Minister Fukuda had been making a slow but steady improvement in the polls before his nerves gave out at the thought of contesting a Lower House general election. So it is not inconceivable that Prime Minister Aso could, over time, make the necessary adjustments to engineer a comeback.

Of course there is an institutional constraint to that rosy scenario. Aso always had at most only a year to reach full stride, since he had to call a Lower House election before the current four-year term expires this September. That gave the newly-appointed Prime Minister very little time to recover from any shortcomings detected during the initial shakedown.

As a second constraint, there is the cumulative effect of the two previous failures. This meant that each successive administration has begun with progressively less political capital and consequently narrower margins of error. Prime Minister Aso, among other calculations, gambled that he could add to it and deferred the snap election that his predecessor had expected him to carry out. He has squandered most of the depleted store of chips that he inherited.

Which brings me to the third and most painful constraint for the Aso administration: In the eyes of the public, the Prime Minister has arguably been his own most disastrous Cabinet appointment. And that’s a mighty difficult flaw to remedy.


That’s it for now, folks.

DPJ Wants to Keep Aso Alive?

Coming from Sankei, this report supports another contention of mine (the other was that the LDP doesn’t want to push him out until April comes around): the DPJ doesn’t want to push Prime Minister too hard (and the other opposition parties are upset about that). The Sankei report clearly sees the best-case DPJ scenario as a mortally wounded Prime Minister Aso calling a snap election, which he is allowed to do under the Japanese Constitution regardless of the LDP’s wishes. Which means of course that the LDP will not allow that to happen which means that the DPJ…

Stepping away from that cloud of conjectures, I expect things to quiet down over the coming weeks (unless another shoe drops), in which case Aso’s poll numbers will begin edging up again over the coming months. But that’s a slow process, Aso’s starting from single-digit numbers, and he only has seven months.

Odds and Ends from the Nakagawa Resignation

Yomiuri was the most favored of all.

I’ve noted that Yomiuri was kindest to the Finance Minister when the story about the press briefing meltdown first broke. It turns out that Yomiuri reporter was the only journalist at the preceding lunch with the MOF Minister and his bureaucrats. One bureaucrat testifying today in the Lower House Budget Committee said that the Minister asked for the wine himself but barely touched the stuff. The MOF bureaucrat further testified that there was a similar dinner the previous night that included four journalists, one of them being the same(?) Yomiuri reporter, while two of the others asked that their identities not be revealed and the fourth did not respond. Asahi is the only online source that is reporting on that dinner. With these clues, you have four guesses to name the other three. Don’t worry, you’ll find the answer in one of the tabloids. In the meantime, if you really need to know what I think, look here* where I’ve written them down in size”0” font, backward.

The LDP isn’t pushing Aso out until April at the earliest.

At least that’s what the mainstream media is telling us. Party faithfuls want the Aso administration to preside over late-April, supermajority overrides for FY2009-budget-related bills. After that, they want him to leave the stage or stay on to preside over yet another stimulus package, depending on whether or not they are diehard Aso supporters and/or speaking on the record. It’s not really a bad game plan, actually, considering the DPJ has nothing but the same old four-year schedule for its 2007 manifesto rev.2 in response to the economic collapse. However, there’s no one ready in the LDP to step up—帯に短し、襷に短し, if you will—and frankly, after the last three offerings, the Japanese public will be excused if it decides to kick the tires some, then goes to the other used car dealer’s lot down the street.

Everybody is talking about Nakagawa’s alcohol issues.

It’s one thing for a DPJ member to talk about how he’d seen Nakagawa held up on both sides as he left the local airport twice, it’s totally another for LDP cohorts to give eyewitness accounts on the record about his numerous public meltdowns and chronic late-shows. Never mind the usual backstabbing friends; these colleagues are shooting him in the face. Casper the Friendly Ghost he is not.

* ieknaS dna ,ihciniaM ,iekkiN

No East Asia Miracle for Finance Minister

The proprietor of Shisaku sends his friends a Reuters link that Shoichi Nakagawa just announced his intent to resign after the Lower House passes the budget and budget-related legislative bills. End of story. A few percentage points in the opinion polls this way or that don’ t matter anymore for the Aso administration.

Out of Sight, Out the Door? The Media on Finance Minister’s Last? Gaffe

This post is dedicated to Drs. YH and PS and the letters C, O, and H.

Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa’s latest spacewalk at the G7 meeting in Rome—his previous one came at the January 28 Lower House plenary session, where he made 26 acknowledged errors while reading the fiscal statement for the administration—when he fell asleep during the closed meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors and later slobbered through a subsequent press briefing. Widely reputed to have a drinking problem, credible reports have had him in previous administrations showing up late and hung over for the twice-weekly morning Cabinet sessions. In this case in point most likely the consequences of a combination of jet lag, cold medication and, yes, alcohol, his latest travails have forced him to take the day off today (February 17) to seek medical help, while the Lower House shut down work on the budget and budget-related legislation for the day. Regardless of the medical prognosis, only a political miracle will allow the near-terminal Aso administration—the only administration other than the Mori Cabinet to fall to single-digit approval figures in public polls—to keep him on as Finance Minister. I drafted a fairly long post last night on this affair, but it looks trivial and already dated in the light of day—Mr. Nakagawa, detox helps!—so I’ll merely give you a brief rundown of how the story broke in the media.

Two different stories initially came out, one in Japan, the other in the English-language media. The Japanese media wrote up the post-meeting briefing for the Japanese media, some of whom were embedded members of the MOF kisha club while others were correspondents dispatched to Rome or possibly other places in Europe. Although the Finance Minister acted as drunk as a skunk and the Japanese journalist who is not aware of his alleged substance issues is rarer than a dodo-passenger pigeon mix-breed, the Japanese media tiptoed around the matter at first, speculating about things like fatigue and jet lag, while using question marks (Asahi) or a code phrase ろれつが回らない(unable to articulate properly) (Nikkei) or both (Mainichi) to drop a hint to the political cognoscenti (i.e. tabloid readers, bloggers, and chatroom denizens) that there might be more to the story. (Yomiuri kindly decided to be nonjudgmental.) The post-meeting late-afternoon press briefing for the Japanese media by the Finance Minister and the BOJ Governor was preceded by a lunch with the Japanese media and a hour-or-so-long break.

An ABC News blog broke the story overseas with a riff on close-up shots by APTN / AP of Nakagawa nodding off at the meeting. The blogging White House correspondent for ABC News only mentions jet lag, but Sankei brought the two strands together in a story that raised the “drunk” question in conjunction with the “nodding off” issues. Then it was open season as ex-Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori—yes, Mr. Single-Digits— went on national TV on one of those morning wide shows ahead and noted, “I was surprised. (Mr. Nakagawa) is a person who likes alcohol very much, so I’ve often told him to be careful with his alcohol”, intimating in the bargain that he had disagreed with Taro Aso when the latter decided to nominate Nakagawa as Finance Minister.

I do not think that it was a coincidence that none of the postprandial reports from Rome explicitly used the A-word, nor that the Yomiuri was the most reluctant to hint at the issue. Likewise that the Sankei was the first to pop the question and that it bundled it with overseas reports—the shame of it! Although I watch little regular TV programming, I believe that the morning wide shows have helped drive the print media along the narrative.

That’s all for now.

Koizumi Reams Aso

I don’t know what—carelessness? fearlessness? mindlessness?—that was driving Prime Minister Aso when he wandered all over the map expressing his dissatisfaction—assuming there was—over the cornerstone of Junichiro Koizumi’s legacy as Prime Minister, that is, Post Office privatization, only to further diminish himself in the eyes of public opinion. No matter. He roused the lion from his stupor—half-hearted support for “reformist” candidate Yuriko Koike, bequeathal to his nondescript second son and all—who dismissed the hapless Prime Minister on a phone call, then strapped on his guns and unleashed a full-bore attack in a talk to a raggle-taggle, eighteen-member clutch of diehard reformists gathered around Hidenao Nakagawa, his trusty second-in-command during the glory years. The Prime Minister’s chances of leading the LDP into the next Lower House general election have obviously been further diminished. I would also bet against, though I would still bet on the legislative bill authorizing the funding of the 2-trillion-yen handout in the supplementary budget obtaining a Lower House supermajority in a revote*. (The magic number is between 16 and 3247*, depending on the number of defectors and mere abstainers in the voting.) Beyond that, I hesitate to guess what the fallout will be.

The full transcript of Koizumi’s talk is here. As a public service, I offer the following translation of the Yomiuri summary:

With regard to the Prime Minister’s recent statements, it’s as if I am more, like, laughing instead of being angry; I am truly stupefied. A couple of days ago, the Prime Minister “want[ed]to talk”, so I talked to him on the phone, and I told him, “I’ll fax texts from Jiro Ono, Lower House member, and Hironari Seko, Upper House member (criticizing the Prime Minister on their blogs[!]), so please read them carefully.”

When young LDP Diet members express opinions critical of the Prime Minister and party executives, the executives try to suppress them, saying, “No backstabbing”, but isn’t the recent situation such that the Prime Minister is shooting people in the face who are trying to contest [the election]? I told him, “Be careful what you say.”

He seems to be saying about me, “You can’t reason with the guy,” or, “Weirdo, an eccentric,” but I think that I’m a normal person, who has common sense. We have to fight the election by September. We’re all worried what’s going to become of the LDP. I may do some irrational things at times, but it’s necessary to really talk it over in order to come to a rational outcome.

The twisted Diet [LDP-New Komeito has a Lower House (super)majority, but is an Upper House minority] is not a bad thing at all. Currently, the Japanese public is making powerful demands that policy should take priority over politics. If there is a (policy) difference between the two Houses, then it wouldn’t be a bad thing to discuss a plan that the public can be satisfied with, would it?

Regarding the [2-trilllion-yen] handout, the Prime Minister says that it is sordid [for the wealthy] to accept it. He’s been saying a variety of things, such as, “I’m not going to accept it,” and, “No, I didn’t say such a thing.” I don’t think that this legislative bill is one that must be passed if we must resort to the 2/3rds majority (in the Lower House). I don’t want to say later, “I supported it then, but I really hadn’t.” I want them to reach an appropriate conclusion after more consultations with the Upper House.

We must seek the confidence of the public by September. The most important thing in politics is trust. In particular, if the there is no trust in the words of the Prime Minister, we won’t be able to fight the election.

* ADD 14 Feberuary: Bad arithmetic. I always get it wrong unless I do it on paper. I found a way to visualize it, so it won’t happen again. In any case, 47 abstentions? That’s a pretty big number. More importantly, the media have talked to LDP Diet members including first-term Koizumi kids and close associates of Koizumi and are drawing the conclusion that there will be relatively little dissent when the legislative bills come to a Lower-House revote.