Long Hot Summer for Kan, Ozawa and DPJ Coming to an Early End?

The following is a memo that I dashed off in response to this WSJ report that an esteemed colleague sent me. Its shelf-life might wind up being as short as a couple of days, or even counted in hours, so I thought that I’d share it publicly. For the record, I edited it slightly.

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More an essay than an op-ed, the WSJ is a good encapsulation of the situation. A few comments:

I still find it hard to think that Ozawa is going to stand, or win if he does. In fact, there’s a growing possibility that Kan will win by acclamation.

For Ozawa, there’s the risk that he will actually win. He is personally unfit to be the head of government in a democracy, what with the highly public grilling in Diet sessions and press conferences (which he could mostly skip when he was merely party chief), and he is surely aware of that. And he’ll be held responsible for policy decisions.

For the DPJ, an Ozawa victory invites a near-unanimously negative media coverage—Nikkan Gendai, the antiestablishment tabloid, a rare exception among widely circulated dailies—as well as the very real possibility that Ozawa will have no choice but to resign if the prosecution review commission forces the Public Prosecutors Office to prosecute him. (Even a one-step downgrade that allows the PPO not to prosecute is likely to lead to a media campaign against Ozawa that will hound him out of office before long.)

But can he win in the first place? I’ve always been skeptical of the 130~150-member Ozawa group headcount that we regularly see in the media. The estimates appear to include up to 2/3rds of the DPJ’s 150 or so first-term Diet members. Yes, those kind of numbers showed up when Ozawa made his annual pilgrimage to Bejing, and appear to show face when they hear the dog whistle. But will they rally for Ozawa when it’s time to vote? Remember, it’s a secret vote, not a show of hands. Besides, last week, when Hatoyama held his annual Karuizawa bash—God, it’s great to have money, even if it’s not quite Goldman Sachs money—up to 100 Ozawa supporters showed up. (There were 150 participants in all, of which up to 50 could have been Hatoyama group members, plus Koshiishi the Upper House don and others including one Kan flunky.) Subtract the core Ozawa supporters (up to 50) and maybe a third of the DPJ rookies. I don’t think Ozawa (more accurately Ozawa’s kitchen cabinet) has the numbers.

Note that all the other likely suspects are back-peddling like hell. Never-ready-for-primetime Kaieda has all but abandoned his non-candidacy; Tarudoko, who fronted the Ozawa group in the June election, says once is enough for now; and the Kan cabinet’s resident otaku Kazuhiro Haraguchi (he himself spells it Haraguti, and how more otaku can you get than that?) says he enjoys his job too much to run.

I think Kan realizes all this, and is appropriately keeping his head down.

Hatoyama will eventually throw his support behind Kan. Hatoyama’s conditions for his support, according to one of his top flunkies, Yoshikatsu Nakayama, local sovereignty, the New Public Interest, the East Asia Community, Hatoyama’s GHG commitment, and one other that I cannot remember. They are expansive and explicit but highly conceptual, so they are easy to accept. The GHG commitment, of course, is only as serious as the extent to which the Japanese government is going to go to fulfill it, a matter which was already seriously in doubt under Hatoyama after Obama and the Democrats—a nice name for a 50s throwback doo-wop group FWIW; do you think Sarah and the Republikettes works?—dropped the idea of any serious US efforts. (And of course there’s always China.) Ozawa keeps bringing up the 2009 Manifesto, but how seriously did the Hatoyama-Ozawa odd-couple take it when they were in control?

The big story, then, is what Kan is going to pull out of his economic tool kit once his summer vacation is over. The last couple of weeks brought a sea change in public opinion. Mainstream editorials, reflecting rising main street voices, have been calling for intervention in the currency market in the face of skepticism over the utility of a unilateral intervention. Meanwhile, Kan is still sticking to what is surely the MOF story of a modest 1.7 trillion yen stimulus package consisting of near equal amounts of emergency funds in the FY2010 budget and unexpected carryovers from the FY2009 budget—No New Money. I’d say that the possibility of intervention, though still less than likely, has risen considerably. Also, I look for a considerable stimulus package, likely including an extension in one form or another of the quick-release eco-point system and some new business tax cuts.

That said, there is one wild card, which I’m surprised to hear nothing about lately: the DPJ local yokel vote. The local chapters and assemblyhumans are allocated 400 points (300 go to the local chapters while the remaining 100 are pro rated among the local legislators), while the 412 Diet members get two votes each. It’s a secret vote, whose results are not to be revealed until the Diet members have voted, but do you think that the media is not going to canvas the local voters as they always do on these occasions? I thought so. And Ozawa is rumored to have a strong following out there because of all the legwork and money he and his henchpersons put in over the years right up to the eve of the July election.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Who would the next leader be for the DPJ?

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

-What is the LDP doing to capitalize?

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

Will the Prime Minister Take Last Orders?

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

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

Dead Man Walking; What I think It Means

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

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

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

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

Pre-election, Hatozawa Resignation?

Hey, yours truly, quoted in The Telegraph. I actually suggested it as a “very easy-to-carry-out scenario.” I know, I know, first someone has to bell the Tenacious Twosome…

From Dismissal to Reassignment to Good Job, Yukio: The Rehabilitation of Yet Another Yukio and What It Means

On 17 March, Yukio Ubukata, one of thirteen DPJ deputy director-generals—off topic, but that’s lot of DPJ deputies, a revealing detail in itself— gave an interview to Sankei Shimbun, the nationalist/free-market conservative daily, in which he offered a scathing criticism of the concentration of power in the hands of Ichiro Ozawa, the director-general, and the stifling effect that it had on DPJ policy-making. He went on to take Ozawa to task for failing to provide an adequate explanation of his complex political financing operations that brought criminal indictments to three of his political assistants past and present including an incumbent Lower House member, saying that “I guess [Mr. Ozawa] can’t explain.”

Retribution appeared to come swiftly. By the 19th, two days later, Ozawa had reportedly given the nod to Ubukata’s dismissal, which would be formalized at a couple of regular party leadership sessions on the 23rd. As the media unanimously came down against this decision, the decision was downgraded over the weekend to a less punitive “reassignment.” Today, the DPJ canceled the leadership meetings, Ozawa and Ubukata kissed and made up—okay, made up—and Ubukata agreed to stay on, with Ozawa’s blessing.

Now here’s the DPJ’s problem:

Ichiro Ozawa has serious, multiple, political financing issues that brought criminal indictments on three of his aides past and present. He dismisses questions with the assertion that the Public Prosecutors Office has given him a clean bill of health. Only a small proportion of the Japanese public swallow that claim or what little explanation he has given in the past. Few if any mainstream figures outside the circle of DPJ Diet members loyal to him are willing to defend him publicly.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has serious political financing issues that have brought a criminal indictment on a couple of his (now) ex-aides. Hatoyama claims innocence, but doubts remain. Nevertheless, there’s a widespread public perception that Hatoyama is just flaky enough that he may actually have been unaware of the goings-on. In any case, the public is more forgiving—if more scornful—of Hatoyama, since the million-dollar plus equivalent of illegal cash flowing annually into his political coffers came from his mom’s bank account and his own.

Tomohiro Ishikawa is Ozawa’s ex-aide Diet member under criminal indictment. He has left the DPJ of his own volition, but has not resigned from the Diet.

Chiyomi Kobayashi is a Lower House member from Hokkaido whose ex-deputy campaign manager is appealing a conviction for election campaign violations. If his appeals are rejected, Kobayashi will automatic lose her seat under Japanese law. Her fortunes took a further turn for the worse on 22 March when, in a different case, the Hokkaido Teachers Union and two of its leaders were indicted for making illegal campaign donations to Kobayashi, who was called in for questioning but was not indicted. She held a press conference the same day, in which she stated that she would not resign or leave the party.

Public opinion aside, it becomes evident why the DPJ cannot dismiss/reassign Ubukata, or otherwise punish anyone else who speaks up or otherwise embarrasses the party short of a criminal sentence whose appeal has been rejected conclusively by the Supreme Court of Japan. The DPJ has a train of political domino tiles.

Couple this with the rise of the Your Party in the polls and its ability to find willing candidates—not up around twenty—for the July election is making my bet that the DPJ won’t lose more than five seats a little shakier than I had thought. However, I strongly suspect that some of the Your Party gain will come out of the LDP, so I’m still willing to take that wager for, say, a nice lunch—with each of the first five takers?

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I’ll slice the odds to four seats for the first person who guesses the name of the “Other Yukio.”

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Forgot to post the title. Out of practice, I guess.

How They are Doing: The Odd Couple

Rarely does a week go by in the two month old Hatoyama administration without news of yet another outrageous Ozawa incursion on Hatoyama territory. The most spectacular and embarrassing example has been the crackdown on Government Revitalization Minister Yoshito Sengoku and Yukio Edano, the head of Sengoku’s team of parliamentary examiners tasked to squeeze a minimum of 3 trillion yen out of the 95 trillion yen FY2010 budget request submitted by the ministries and agencies as well as the pile of money—buried treasures?—already stashed in their public and private affiliates. Specifically, less than a week after the appointment of 32 examiners, Ozawa showed Sengoku and Edano and by extension the entire Hatoyama administration who was boss, forcing them to drop first-term members from the team; Sengoku/Edano eventually wound up with only 7 Diet members leading a team of 56 private sector experts to comb over the budget requests (closely aided by budget cutters from the Ministry of Finance). Also highly visible has been talk of Ozawa’s support for Diet member sponsored legislation for the extraordinary Diet session in direct contravention of his own ban on freebooting. (Most legislative bills are submitted by the Cabinet, although this is not what the framers of the Japanese Constitution envisaged.)

Such talk actually highlights Ozawa’s religious observance of his division of power. First, regarding the crackdown on the Task Force: Ozawa had installed an around-the-clock program for rookie Lower House members elected in the 30 August landslide victory. The Government Revitalization Task Force appointments, made without his knowledge, clearly interfered with that regimen; Sengoku and Edano, two Diet members with at best chilly relationships with Ozawa, had invaded the latter’s turf. The Task Force reassembled, Ozawa and his closest associates have maintained total silence on its actual work there. Second, talk of Ozawa’s contravention of his (constitutionally sketchy) ban on DPJ Diet member sponsored legislative bills appears to be mostly talk, and not necessarily coming from Ozawa himself. For the only bill that is likely to survive the ban is aimed at assisting hepatitis victims suffering as the result of government malfeasance—a bipartisan undertaking that dates back to the LDP administrations under popular MLHW Minister Yoichi Masuzoe. A couple of other legislative proposals have gone by the wayside, including a controversial if inconsequential—apologies to Yoshiko Sakurai and Sankei Shinbun—proposal, long championed by Ozawa and Hatoyama and Foreign Affairs Minister Okada among many (but opposed by coalition partner PNP’s leader Shizuka Kamei), to give permanent residents the right to vote in local elections. This one has been tossed back, if reports are to be believed, by Ozawa himself to the Hatoyama Cabinet—which appears to be shelving it for the foreseeable future.

In all this, it has often appeared that it is less Ozawa himself than associates of this enigmatic, often laconic, figure to using the shadows that he casts to push their own personal agendas. In truth, Ozawa has not weighed in on any of the substantive issues that are headliners in their own right. Contrary to headlines both mainstream and non, Ozawa has remained faithful to the compact that allowed him to exercise an iron hand on party matters while putting Hatoyama and his cabinet in control of policy.

Does this mean that all is well in Tokyo? No. Ozawa’s failure to discipline his henchpersons (yes, “henchperson” is recognized as a word by Bill Gates) still leaves Hatoyama vulnerable to charges that he is a figurehead for whom Ozawa calls the shots. Now, Hatoyama is doing more than his share to create political distraction by his own stream-of-consciousness explications of his political intent. He doesn’t need the media’s help to further erode public perception of his political authority—a turn of events which would seriously harm DPJ prospects come the 2010 Upper House elections there the DPJ hopes to rack up a simple majority, which would allow it to rule without the help of its demanding coalition partners.

In the meantime, the problem can spill over into substance. The downsizing of the Task Force (which also forced Sengoku and Edano to pick from multiple-term Diet members who had been passed over by Hatoyama and his ministers for sub-cabinet portfolios and by Ozawa for top party and parliamentary appointments) has forced it to narrow its focus, limiting the potential budget savings from its inquisition of the ministries and agencies and their cling-ons.

Failure to meet expectations plus a growing sense of powerlessness, if illusionary, nevertheless will spell a deadly combination for the Hatoyama administration. The Prime Minister must project a credible sense of being in control; otherwise, he runs the very real danger of allowing the situation to slip by him and create a future that will definitely not be to his liking.

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Sorry, have had enough time/energy to go over new comments.

Preliminary Thoughts on the Hatoyama Administration

My life has been taking/may be about to take some dramatic turns, so I don’t have enough time to generate meaningful stuff for this blog right now. So for the time being, much of what you see here will be material produced for other purposes. Such as following, which is my end of a Q&A as the response to an email that I received last night soliciting my comments regarding the Hatoyama Cabinet, typos corrected:

1. Very solid Cabinet, the strongest across the board that I've seen in a long time, if ever. Remember, Hatoyama, Kan, Okada, and Maehara are in a sense a throwback to the LDP faction leaders of the 50s and 60s, men who built, not inherited, their power bases from scratch. And old-school Kamei and SDP Fukushima are just as powerful personalities, if not more so. I'm not aware of any weak spots, though Toshimi Kitazawa came as a total surprise to me, with one year as the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the House of Councilors as his only significant exposure to the field. I did go through a few Committee records, where he came across as calm and collected, competent. I was also mildly surprised at not seeing Yoshihiko Noda, the other center-right leader, in the Cabinet*. But otherwise, it's a very Ozawa-Not Cabinet.

2. I don't know enough about the appointees to rank them. I'll give you the following instead.

Nagatsuma and Maehara will generate the most important headlines because they will be going after big game: the healthcare and pension systems, and public works. On the MHLW portfolio, Nagatsuma must remember that it's more than going after the missing pension accounts and the people responsible for that. He must show that he is more than a crusader, that he has the policy chops and leadership skills to bring the two systems in line with our future needs and fiscal constraints. Maehara's job is to slash public spending--a difficult task that is sure to alienate local powers. But he has to do it, if only to go some ways to finance all the spending promises and tax cuts that the DPJ has promised. I see two potential trouble spots: a restless Naoto Kan clashing with the Ministry Ministers, and a turf battle between Haraguchi—by all accounts one of those articulate, new-school policy wonks—and Kamei over the Post Office. Both the DPJ and PNP oppose the Koizumi privatization, but beyond that, I'm sure people like Haraguchi have a rather different view of where to go from that. Also, Kamei's heterodox views regarding financial services, his other portfolio, has a chance of bringing him into conflict with other Cabinet Ministers and the BOJ. I think Kamei is the joker in the pack, particularly since he has less to lose than the other Ministers. Fukushima has a safety portfolio, I think.

3. None of the people that I have an opinion on is "weak." That will be the weakness if Hatoyama is unable to keep everyone on message. He's probably as good as anyone else in the DPJ for that role.

4. It's Hatoyama's Cabinet, and Ozawa's party. Am I the only one that thinks it looks a lot like the Nakasone-Tanaka LDP of the 80s? That didn't turn out too badly, did it? Personally, I don't think Ozawa will meddle on the policy side. I think he has his dream job, another crack at sticking the knife into the LDP heart without the distasteful job of being accountable to the media.

That's it. Back to work. And preparing a late dinner.

Jun Okumura

Perhaps I should have also referred to Fujii in 3. That may have been my contrarian streak kicking in. Let me add that I’m pretty impressed with the way the Hatoyama administration is handling the administrative appointments as well. The message seems to be: If you’re okay with us, we’re okay with you. He trusts (but will verify) that the bureaucracy will follow where his administration leads—which is something I’ve been predicting for a while. He looked klutzy and indecisive throughout the lead-up to the election, but I’m impressed by the javascript:void(0)post-election process. For my sake—as far as I see it, I’m stuck with Japan—I hope the rest of his regime goes at least half as well. Otherwise, there are plenty of floater voters like me, if you catch my drift.

Sorry about your comments. I’ll get back to them later. Honest. I really, really feel bad about not responding, since dialogue is the point of it all.

* Noda is reportedly being taken care of with the Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary’s job on the HOR side, not exactly a political embarrassment, especially for a policy wonk like him.

Ozawa, for Better or Worse and Other Hatoyama Thoughts

The political world continues to revolve around Ichiro Ozawa as he is tapped by Yukio Hatoyama to take over the DPJ Secretary-General post. Several things indicate that Ozawa is not going to make it easy for anybody, including the Prime Minister in-waiting:

1) Hatoyama had planned to hit the ground running by pick the head of the National Strategy Bureau, the Finance and Foreign Ministers, and the Chief Cabinet Secretary as soon as the election was over, but quickly gave up the idea when allies SDP and PNP objected for fear of being marginalized in the policy formation process. Now, he has settled on a Chief Cabinet Secretary—close associate and reputed troubleshooter Hirofumi Hirano—as well a new Secretary-General, both decisions precipitated at the instigation of the Ozawa crowd if media reports are to be believed.

2) This slap in the face to incumbent Secretary-General Katsuya Okada undermines his authority just when he needs all the support that he can get from the party leadership in the ongoing negotiations with his SDP and PNP counterparts for a policy agreement as the prerequisite to a coalition government. From their point of view, why bother negotiation with a lame duck when the real power has shifted elsewhere—assuming that it had ever been otherwise?

3) Ozawa already held sway over much of the Diet rank-and-file through his domination of the election process from choosing and grooming candidates to managing their campaigns. As Secretary-General, he will hold the keys to the burgeoning party coffers—the DPJ’s government subsidy alone leaps from 11.832 billion yen (2009) to 17.32 billion yen (2010) while the LDP drops from 15.733 billion to 10.467 billion. Registers—as well as handle appointments to party positions. For most practical purposes, it’s his party now.

4) According to the Yomiuri,, on August 3, Ozawa arrived at party headquarters around 10:30PM to meet Hatoyama. He went into the party President’s room with a frown and came out with a smile because he had received a request—accepted—from Hatoyama to be the Secretary-General. As he is leaving the room, in full view of the press, he says to Hatoyama, “I was having dinner; so, I’m sorry I was late.” It may be nothing more than just another gauche moment for Ozawa; if this were a movie, it would be a classic “I made you, I can break you” putdown.

The Hatoyama-Ozawa storyline is a godsend for the post-election media, and Ozawa is not exactly starving the beast. Other incidents such as Hatoyama’s flip-flop over the impromptu, burasagari-clinger interviews, where the interviewee talks to the reporters in the corridors, in transit and his notorious ”anti-globalism screed*, not to mention the looming political financing prosecution of his ex-aide, suggest that Prime Minister Hatoyama, like his most recent predecessors, will be generating his due share of distractions.

* I am aware that there is a much longer text on his website, and that the condensed version distorts his views. Indeed, the original is prefaced by a lengthy explanation of the democratic impulses that gave rise to the concept yūai. However, I’m not sure that explaining yūai as a response to “totalitarianism, which tried to achieve equality at all costs, and capitalism, which had fallen into self-indulgence m which according to his people,” then depicting Japan as a nation “caught between the United States, which is fighting to retain its position as the world's dominant power, and China which is seeking ways to become one” is not overly impolitic. Note also that the original text repeatedly calls the United States a hegemon (覇権国家) and China as a nation seeking to become one. That is not the language of fraternité.

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.

Yukio Hatoyama’s Money Woes Take a Turn for the Worse

DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama’s issues with regard to his political finances management organization (PFMO) keep getting weirder. When he addressed the issue publicly on 2 July after completing an internal investigation employing a team of lawyers, he was left to guessing why the aide had used the names of unsuspecting acquaintances, some of them dead, to disguise illegal transfers from Hatoyama’s private account by recording them as donations from individuals in reports filed with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in compliance with legal requirements and available to the general public on the Internet*. I had been wondering why he or the team of lawyers hadn’t bothered to ask when, a week later, the saga took another turn as it was revealed that Hatoyama’s PFMO had sought and obtained from MIAC certificates that would enable a large number of these same unsuspecting individuals to claim tax credits for their donations. Now, at least some of these individuals—the ones who were alive at the time we assume—are claiming that yes, they had made those donations after all.

The best case scenario for the Hatoyama camp is that the “investigation” was so shoddy that the lawyers struck out a large number of individual donors without bothering to ask them if they had actually made those donations or not. The worst case scenario is that the aide obtained permission to use the names of Hatoyama acquaintances, and took the necessary measures to give them tax benefits as a quid pro quo, but forgot about that when he gave evidence during the internal investigation. In any case, like so many other “internal” investigations during institutional crises, it appears that the Hatoyama camp has avoided the kind of thorough process that uncovers questions that it would avoid if it only could. Except it couldn’t—wishing rarely makes things come true—and the result is a stream of embarrassing and often illegal revelations that could wind up destroying Hatoyama’s bid for the Prime Minister’s chair.

I think that attention will soon turn to what Hatoyama knew and when. He needs to explain himself, and do so soon, or he will be obliged to leave.

* It amazes me that the LDP and DPJ have not been using the information on the MIAC website to better political advantage. Is this a Japanese politics version of the MAD doctrine? But shouldn’t at least the JCP and Socialists be doing something about this?

A Closer Look at Hatoyama’s Political Finances

Anyone who wants to know more about Yukio Hatoyama’s personal political finances can look at the FY 2007 Yuai Seikei Konwa-Kai report as most recently corrected* You don’t have to be a Sankei Shinmun sympathizer to suspect that some donations from “individuals” that actually came from Hatoyama’s coffers remain uncorrected. (The rest of eh media does not appear to have reached that point yet, though even the liberal-leftish Chunichi Shinbun** isn’t accepting Hatoyama’s story.

Neither appealing to governance issues—the DPJ is the opposition—nor raising leadership questions—three words: Abe, Fukuda, and Aso—will turn the tide for the LDP, but nailing yet another DPJ leader for political financing irregularities once again just might cause enough floater voters to stay away from the ballot box or write in non-DPJ protest parties to keep the LDP-Komeito coalition in power. Thus, the best-case scenario for the LDP will be a half-hearted attempt by Hatoyama to hang tough, while grumbling within the DPJ remains low enough to allow him to keep his job—mirroring what is likely to be the situation in the LDP barring an unambiguous DPJ victory in the Tokyo Prefectural Assembly election on 12 July.

Hatoyama, of course, can stanch the bleeding by disclosing the list of under-50,000 yen donors or handing it over to a team of independent legal and accounting experts for a thorough check and showing that the under-50,000 donations were on the level. I believe that there will be increasing pressure from the media for him to do this.

Some details on the numbers follow for the truly interested.

Hatoyama’s FY2007 political finances as corrected now show that he received 49,926,000 yen in donations from individuals, Of the 21,860,000 yen in donations—two-fifths of the total—coming from the sixteen named donors, there were two donations totaling 9,000,000 yen from Hatoyama himself, eight 1,500,000 yen donations from eight donors including one from his Bridgestone heiress mother, two 1860,000 yen donations from one donor, two 100,000 yen donations, one 50,000 yen donation, and one 15,000 yen donation and one 10,000 yen donation—note that the name of the donor in each case did not require reporting. In other words, he and his mother accounted for almost half of the 50,000 yen-and-up donations. The 5,220,000 yen that Hatoyama now claims as a personal loan*** also deserves a close look. There are forty-eight such “donations”, one of which accounted for 500,000 yen. The rest mostly fell between 50,000-200,000 yen, with one each at 20,000 and 10,000 yen—amounts that did not require reporting. The last point in particular indicates that there may be more under-50,000 anonymous donors—accounting for 27,791,000 yen or three-fifths of the total—whose donations actually came out of Hatoyama’s political bank account controlled by the aide in question.

Incidentally, I have nothing against people spending as much of their own money as they want to get elected. As long as everything’s on the up and up, I’m cool with that; the electorate seems to have a way of separating the Bloombergs from the Forbeses. Ans if it doesn’t, tough sh!t. That being said, the law is the law, and Hatoyama is no different from me in that he is not allowed to donate more than 10 million yen each year to any personal political finance organization****.

* The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications website carries all available political finances reports as PDF files on this sub-portal. Enjoy.

** Although a local newspaper, it prints more copies than Sankei and leapfrogs ahead of Nikkei into fourth place (behind Yomiuri, Asahi, and Mainichi, I that order) if you add Tokyo Shinbun and two other affiliates.

*** This, as I explained in my previous post, is a dubious claim. I believe that it would be disallowed in bankruptcy proceedings.

**** Of course if you lift the ceiling, you also must close the massive gift-tax/inheritance-tax loophole that allows politicians to pass the political organization with its money and all to their heirs tax-free.

Yukio Hatoyama’s Political Financing Troubles

Reporter: Exactly what kind of correction was made with regard to the political financing report? Since Mr. Hatoyama is already donating 9 million yen annually, if he surpasses 10 million yen [as he obviously will with the additional 21.77 million yen over the last 4 years], he’s over the quantitative limit for personal donations, isn’t he?
Yoichi Ioroi, Esq.: I [as the lawyer employed to conduct a third-party investigation of the matter] will answer that question. With regard to the issue of quantitative limitations, we think that the money should be correctly treated as loans. We made the necessary corrections [in a supplementary report].
30 June press conference by Yukio Hatoyama and the lead lawyer for his investigation

The Hatoyama camp had been using his personal funds in recent years to cover shortfalls in his political financing organization. It came to light when it was revealed that the money had been reported as donations from individuals in the names of Hatoyama friends and acquaintances—without their permission. (Sometimes, the Hatoyama camp had no choice; in a life-imitates-satire version of Gogol’s Dead Souls, some of them were already dead.) As the above excerpt from Hatoyama’s press conference shows, the aide resorted to the ruse because the money would have put Hatoyama over the annual 10 million yen limit for donations by an individual to political organizations other than a political party*. Hatoyama denied any knowledge of the cover-up and blamed it on a top aide, who allegedly had been diverting funds entrusted to him to cover expenditures that should properly be attributed to Hatoyama personally and putting the money into Hatoyama’s political financed management organization. In the press conference, Hatoyama offered the conjecture that the aide may have resorted to such extraordinary measures because the latter had been too embarrassed to admit that he had not been able to secure enough individual donations in recent years. Hatoyama accepted responsibility and promised to clean up his operation. With this, Hatoyama wishes to move on; I suspect the legal problems have only begun.

Post facto corrections to the annual reports that political financing organizations file with the authorities are fairly commonplace. But can the underlying facts themselves be corrected, i.e. transform what could very well have been straightforward donations into loans? After all, the lawyer responsible for the investigation admitted in the press conference that the aide had no idea of using “loans” as a legal (and therefore infinitely better) means to circumvent the 10 million yen ceiling. In other words, it is at least plausible that the aide, being at both ends of the transactions as Hatoyama’s agent (by way of power-of-attorney over a Hatoyama bank account) and an employee of Hatoyama’s political finance organization, had intended to irrecoverably transfer said funds from the former to the latter.

If that is indeed the case, the aide maybe charged with two separate infractions as an employee of a political finance organization: A) making a false entry in a report , which is punishable under Article 25, paragraph 1, item (iii) by imprisonment of not more than 5 years and/or fine of not more than 1 million yen; and B) receiving a donation in violation of the 10 million yen ceiling, which is punishable under Article 26, item (i), by imprisonment of not more than 1 year and/or fine of not more than 500,000 yen. The excess donation is subject to forfeiture under Article 28-2. Theoretically, Hatoyama himself could be held charged with two separate infractions: C) as head of the political finance organization, negligence in appointing and supervising the CFO, which is punishable by a fine of not more than 500,000 yen (Article 25, paragraph 1); and D) making a donation in violation of the 10 million yen ceiling, which is punishable by imprisonment of not more than 1 year and/or fine of not more than 500,000 yen (Article 26, item (i)).

It’s hard to believe that the aide will not go down for A). Recasting the donation as a loan appears designed to avoid B), but that’s difficult to do when it is revealed Hatoyama’s agent—the aide—had nothing of the sort in mind at the time. Thus, I think that the lawyer’s admission during the press conference was a tactical error from a legal viewpoint, though understandable from a political perspective. If the aide goes down for B), forfeiture ensues. I have no particular views about C), though at least one former public prosecutor has repeatedly stated in public that this particular negligence clause is near-impossible to invoke and I have no reason to doubt that. I am even more doubtful about the possibilities of the Public Prosecutors Office charging Hatoyama with D), since the aide’s story and Hatoyama’s denial of any knowledge ring true to me**. In any case, you can be sure that the PPO is is the last of all institutions to overlook these possibilities.

In conclusion, as far as indictments are concerned, the yen will stop at the aide. However, recasting the donation as loans is likely to put the Hatoyama camp at odds with the PPO, with the case dragging out publicly over the coming months, possibly years, in a legal dispute over B)—instead of a quick guilty plea by the aide and a suspended sentence, plus forfeiture of the excess money. In the process, further attention will be drawn to Hatoyama’s “personal” fund—a substantial sum by his own admission—and its real purpose, seeing as it has been controlled by the same aide.

* Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, but this is close enough for our purposes here.
** Article 21-3, paragraph 3, bans personal donations over 10 million yen while Article 26, item (i) defines its criminality. They do not appear to have taken a case like this, where an agent makes the offending donations without the principal’s knowledge. There’s a chance that the PPO may try to push the envelope on this one and charge the aide at both ends of the donations.

Of Factions, Faction Leaders…and the SSJ Forum

As part of a new wrinkle for this blog, I am answering some questions from Mark about LDP factions, the DPJ, and political leaders. Now, I’m aware that there are at least two people (and probably a few more) who read this blog and happen to be far more competent to answer them. Message to those people: Please feel free to embarrass me.

The other day, the Japan Times wrote an interesting article on the factional politics in Japan. The article discussed the origins of the current factions. But I would like to know more about the evolution of the policies, thinking, and philosophies of the factions.

My take is that ideology was of only secondary interest to the factions in the first place, except perhaps Ikeda’s group, and has diminished dramatically in importance even from those modest beginnings. (That’s my excuse for not knowing much about the subject.)

According to the article, the Ibuki faction used to belong to Nakasone. How would you compare the thinking of Bunmei Ibuki to Yasuhiro Nakasone? The article also notes that Yukio Hatoyama and Ichiro Ozawa came from the Tanaka faction. The media often compares Ozawa to Tanaka. How does the thinking of Kakuei Tanaka differ from that of Ichiro Ozawa and Yukio Hatoyama?

The occasional, politically incorrect statements aside, Ibuki is far more intelligent and thoughtful than many people out there give him credit for. He also shares some of Nakasone’s nationalist leanings. But beyond that, I know little about his political philosophy or his policy preferences. But I’m not really embarrassed about that. For Ibuki has nothing of Nakasone’s vision, drive, or ambition, the last of which is symbolized by his unkempt, graying hair. This is not accidental in my view; given the drastically altered role of LDP factions, Ibuki is more the amicable manager of an intramural flag football team, where Nakasone was the head coach of an NCAA Division I varsity football team. More caretaker than leader, faction leaders have severely limited influence over their nominal subordinates, and if they harbor Prime Ministerial ambitions, they are no more than marginally advantaged over the others. In sum, Ibuki as faction leader is more comparable to his generational peers; likewise Nakasone.

It’s all about winning for Ozawa, winning big, winning it all. In that respect, he is Tanaka’s true disciple. His old school ways with money matters also reminds us of Tanaka. Where he differs most from Tanaka is a certain joylessness, an aversion to the spotlight and the winner’s podium. Tanaka’s political philosophy, if you can call it that, appears to have been: Make everyone rich, make my constituency rich, and make myself really, really rich. Ozawa comes across as someone who is even less interested in the substance of domestic policy. Making everyone rich also colored his interests, what there was of it, in foreign policy; he harbored none of Ozawa’s resentment of Japan’s second-class status in its relationship with the U.S. or desire to project the Japanese military in the near and far abroad.

I have no thoughts about Yukio Hatoyama other than that he’s a dutiful conciliator with few if any enemies but even less charisma. But then, given the quality of the enemy… Oh, he’s a foreign policy dove by inclination, which probably suits the majority of DPJ members and supporters just fine.

Apparently, the Aso faction and the Koga faction will merge. The article says Ikeda and Miyazawa used to lead the Koga faction. How would you compare the philosophies of Aso and Koga to Ikeda, Miyazawa, and Yoshida?

Koga is closer to the Ikeda-Miyazawa(-Koichi Kato) lineage of true, post-WW II doves, while Aso is much, much closer to the nationalist-conservative wing that includes such luminaries as Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa. Perhaps that’s what made it easier for Koga to merge/swallow Sadakazu Tangachi’s group. But, as you can see from the fact that Aso inherited his 20-band of parliamentary warriors from Yohei “Kohno Statement” Kohno, love transcends ideology.

The two ends of the ideological spectrum of the rich-nation, weak-army values underlying the Yoshida Doctrine were: a genuine aversion to the profligate expansionism of the inter-war decades; and the sense that Japan was biding its time until it could emerge glorious once again as a Great Power in its own right. Koga, who lost his father to the war, and Aso, descended from a pre-war magnate whose children married up in socially, are the metaphor for the two poles. As for Ikeda and Miyazawa, they can loosely be included in the aversion school.

But seriously, are they going to merge? Finally? Well, Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni got married, so why not, eh?

Also, I would like you to comment a little on the inter-faction politics. In a separate article, the Asahi Shimbun interviewed Yasuhiro Nakasone. The interviewer made the point that Tanaka had a great deal of power over Nakasone. But he didn't mention the specific issues in which Tanaka manipulated Nakasone. Could you help me out here? Furthermore, both Nakasone and the interviewer thought the relationship between Yukio Hatoyama and Ichiro Ozawa might be similar to the relationship between Nakasone and Tanaka. But the article didn't say how the relationship was similar. Do you have any idea on what the those similarities might be? Lastly, the interviewer said that Ozawa would probably have a harder time influencing Hatoyama than Tanaka had with Nakasone. He did not say why that might be the case. Do you have any idea on why that might be true?

I’m not aware of any substantive issue on which Tanaka forced his views on Nakasone (except, likely, where his personal interests and those of his supporters and constituency lay). I suspect for Tanaka that it was mostly about rewarding his allies with cabinet posts and other political appointments. In that sense and that sense only, I think that Ozawa will wind up reminding all of us of Tanaka, although he displays little of Tanaka’s visceral need for personal gratification.

Nakasone, of course, served at the pleasure of Tanaka. It is also clear that Hatoyama would not have won without Ozawa’s support. (Indeed, he may not even have run without it.) But Tanaka could pull the rug out from under Nakasone any time he chose to, because he had the troops and the control over political funds for it. That Ozawa cannot do, partly because (for now) there are at least as many people in the PDJ who hate him as those who love him, partly because the bulk of the DPJ money consists of government subsidies, which Ozawa is no longer in a position to control, and partly because the competition with the LDP takes the decision out of any kingmakers’ hands and into those of public opinion (including the media).

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Did that work for you, Mark? Incidentally, I’ve begun subscribing to the SSJ Forum. The Japan-U.S. Discussion Forum has many distinguished commenters, but I had a somewhat unpleasant experience there, and the talk there can get pretty cranky, so I haven’t gone there for quite some time now. SSJ Forum appears to be a youthful, nimble alternative.

The DPJ: Whose Party Is It Anyway?

Ichiro Ozawa is already strongly positioned in the Upper House wing of the DPJ by virtue of the 2007 election victory over the LDP-New Komeito coalition. Add to that his likely dominance over the Lower House as the result of the upcoming general election and the post-election DPJ will have a Dark Overlord that will rival if not eclipse Kakuei Tanaka, Ozawa’s mentor and role model, at the peak of his political power. Let me explain.

As the Koizumi Kids phenomenon shows, rookie Diet members tend to gravitate toward the leadership under which they are elected. Similarly, Ozawa’s group swelled its ranks when the DPJ took 60 out of 121 seats up for grabs in the 2007 Upper House election. Although lingering resentment towards Katsuya Okada over his past expressions of desire for Upper House reform played a major role in delivering the bulk of the Upper House vote to Hatoyama, Ozawa’s influence over their ranks must also have figured substantially in the outcome. The upcoming Lower House election is likely to have an even more dramatic effect on Ozawa’s power, since all 480 seats will be up for election—unlike the Upper House, which turns over only half its members every three years. The 2007 election produced a net gain of 28 DPJ Diet members. But in the upcoming election, a simple majority—something well within the DPJ’s reach—will produce a net gain of 128 DPJ Diet members.

Significantly, Ozawa has exercised near-dictatorial powers in selecting, monitoring, and even coaching the candidates; in the process overshadowing the customary role of the Director-General—Hatoyama!—who is supposed to manage party operations on a day-to-day basis. If anything, his “demotion” to Senior Acting President will enhance his influence over the candidates, since he will not be distracted by anything as trivial as the need to show up for Diet sessions and respond to pesky reporters and instead will be able to devote his full attention to the electoral process—over which he explicitly retains full control*. Thus it is likely that Ozawa will emerge from the upcoming election with behind-the-scenes political might whose likes we have not seen since his mentor Kakuei Tanaka.

All this does not necessarily bode ill for a Hatoyama administration. Remember that Yasuhiro Nakasone, who led one of the most long-serving and effective post-WW II administrations, was also widely regarded as a Tanaka hand puppet when he became Prime Minister. And there is another eerie, if oddly hopeful, parallel in the relative disinterest in statecraft, a trait shared by the two on the part of both Dark Overlords. We are likely to see whether or not the conciliatory and inclusive Yukio Hatoyama has the vision and determination to likewise measure up to his distant predecessor.

* This begs the question: What is the new Director-General—Okada!—supposed to do?

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As a final point, the shadow of the Overlord is obviously not helpful to the DPJ as far as the overall outcome of the election is concerned. I believe that this increases the likelihood of a need for a coalition partner beyond or in lieu of its more or less formal odd-bedfellows alliance with the People’s New Party (old-school-LDP) and the Social Democrats (old school Socialists), while simultaneously complicating any outreach to the LDP reformist wing—the source of the most likely candidates for a post-election breakaway. I’ll try to take this matter up in some detail in another post.

Election Bump for DPJ

Mainichi scores again with a 16-17 May poll. The table says:

1. Who is the more appropriate Prime Minister? Aso 21%, Hatoyama 34.
2. Do you have positive expectations for Hatayama? Yes 49%, no 49%
3. Your estimation of the DPJ? Went down 17%, went up 13%, unchanged 68%.
4. Who do you want to win the Lower House election? LDP 29% (34%), DPJ 56% (45%)
5. Do you support the Aso Cabinet? Yes 24%(27%), no 58% (52%)
*12-13 May poll in parentheses

Hatoyama was supposed to be the less popular candidate of the two, and surely was. But the exposure, the show of unity and determination, and the certainty now that the handover has been made have created a minor euphoria. though some of that is bound to wear off, it is now clearly the DPJ’s race to lose.

My Latest Thoughts on the DPJ Election

Woke up in the middle of the night (do not ask why), couldn’t resist looking at my email. Which led to an online look at the media’s reaction to the DPJ election. Basically, it boils down to: What the heck is Hatoyama going to do with Ozawa? My immediate reaction to that goes here, in my response to Ross’ comment.

I think I need a life. And sleep. Good night. If you like me, pray for the Celtics. And if you hate me, well, you know what to do.

DPJ Election Update: Okada Rising

I suppose Junichiro Koizumi’s upset victory over Ryutaro Hashimoto in the 2001 LDP presidential race started it all, but whenever the LDP is about to elect a new president, mainstream dailies dial up the deputy heads of prefectural party chapters—the heads are usually Diet members, so their views do not necessarily reflect the wishes of the local chapter rank-and-file—to ask whom they favor and print the prefecture-by-prefecture results. The influence of the rank-and-file LDP party members has reached the point where a considerable number of Diet members will at least take the local votes into consideration when casting their own votes. Now, after electing it three previous leaders elected by acclaim, DPJ, with its Hatoyama-Okada showdown, is undergoing the same treatment.

The DPJ locals are clearly less used to flexing their muscle through media exposure, and none of the polls reflect the views of more than a third of the prefectural chapters. (Off the top of my head, I’d say that two-thirds or more of the LDP chapter deputy heads will let us know whom they favor.) Moreover, the results are wildly uneven, even though they all appear to have contacted the same person in each of the 47 chapters. Still, for your benefit:

Asahi: Okada 9, Hatoyama 8
Yomiuri: Okada 13, Hatoyama 4
Sankei: Okada 9, Hatoyama 3
Mainichi: Okada 8, Hatoyama 3 (overlooked; added 15 May)

Iffy as the figures look, it seems that Okada is ahead with regard to the deputy heads who are not afraid to speak up. The online Mainichi online does not have a tally. However, just as important if not more so to the Lower House members (as well as other candidates) who must face an election in the coming months, Mainichi conducted an unscheduled national public opinion poll, in which Okada led the field with 25% to Hatoyama’s 13%. (Naoto Kan, Seiji Maehara and Akira Nagatsuma came in third, fourth and fifth with 12%, 8%, and 5% respectively.) Even the photos accompanying the Mainichi report—glum Hatoyama and radiant Okada—can’t resist editorializing, it seems.

Perhaps it was with this in mind that Tastuo Kawabata reportedly threw his support to Katsuya Okada this morning (14 May). This must be devastating to Hatoyama. On good terms with both Ozawa and Okada, Kawabata represents the 20 or so Diet members from former Democratic Socialists on the DPJ leadership council as one of the seven Deputy Presidents (outranked by three Honorary Advisors, the President, and two Acting Presidents but nominally outranking Hatoyama, the Secretary-General). There is no indication that he can actually carry the old DS vote, but he did make his announcement at the group’s morning get-together. Meanwhile, Naoto Kan’s group, in keeping with its leader’s arm’s-length approach to Ozawa, has released its members to vote their conscience. This has the looks of a surge for Okada. The question is: Are two days enough time for him to catch up?

Some worry that a split along faction boundaries—80 from Ozawa and Hatoyama’s groups vs. 50 from Maehara and Noda’s, while the rest scramble to balance the imperatives of their personal ties against those of their electoral prospects—will create a rift, particularly if Ozawa (and his closest associates) see a Hatoyama loss as a personal rejection. I don’t think that will happen, not to the extent that it will be a drag in the Lower House election. It’s the recriminations that will come if they lose or fail to form a stable working majority that the DPJ must be afraid of. All the more desirable it is then, to heed public opinion (even if it is to a great extent a media construct), as well as position itself to welcome post-election LDP splittists—the latter factor also favoring Okada.

Hatoyama Backing into the Picture in the DPJ Succession

Not much more to say, but I thought a brief follow-up was warranted since it looks like Yukio Hatoyama may be throwing his hat in the ring after all.

The odds for Yukio Hatoyama standing for the election to succeed Ichiro Ozawa as DPJ leader are improving with every moment that he doesn’t say no. So it may be useful to look at an interesting chart on the second page of today’s morning Yomiuri. The chart gives the group-by-group numbers for the DPJ’s 221 MPs as well as the relationship between the groups. With the caveat that some MPs belong to more than one group, here’s what it says:

A. (Ichiro) Ozawa Group 50
B. (Yukio) Hatoyama Group 30
C. (Naoto) Kan Group 30
D. (Seiji) Maehara Group 30
E. Ex-Socialists 20
F. Ex-Democratic Socialists 20
G. Yoshihiko Noda Group 20
H. Independents (Okada et al) 25

They add up to 225, not many more than the 221 MPs that the DPJ actually has, and they are approximate figures. So let’s assume that they do provide an accurate picture of the relative strengths of the respective groups.

Next, the relationships:

A ♥ B&E.
B ♥ F.
D♥G.
A definitely does not ♥D&G.
A lukewarm C.

Now Hatoyama made a good show of supporting Ozawa. So if Ozawa was the kind of person who put a lot of stock in such personal service, he could conceivably put 50+20 votes to Hatoyama’s disposal. Hatoyama in turn would bring 30+20 votes on his own. That’s 120 votes, more than an outright majority of the DPJ MPs. But will Ozawa oblige? All he cares about is winning, and Hatoyama’s late-life association with Ozawa is a definite negative.

Neither Hatoyama with his humorless, beady-eyed carping nor Okada with his Clark-Kent looks and demeanor to match comes across as the second coming of Barack Obama. That being said, they’re definitely an upgrade on the ghostly presence of their predecessor-to-be as far as electoral campaigning is concerned, and the other wannabies (Maehara and Noda) appear to be unacceptable to the pro-Ozawa crowd. So it comes down after all to a showdown between Hatoyama and Okada, assuming Hatoyama actually stands.

No matter. The important thing, to repeat, is that the DPJ is set for a Lower House victory with a leader (whichever) who will be a far more palatable partner for a post-election LDP breakaway group that would assure an Upper House majority without bringing one or more of the mini-parties on board. This is more important than the identity of the eventual winner. And we only have to wait until Saturday at most to know.

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I’ve been hitting the sauce early today after a hard day’s work, and it’s time to get to work on dinner. I promise to get back to your comments tomorrow.

Yukio Hatoyama Calls for Three-Year Window and Sequencing

I’ve already talked about the “emergent realism in the DPJ”. Now, Yukio Hatoyama, who has been the perfect deputy to DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa, is saying with regard to the next election manifest that it is “important to show the public as clearly as possible what we will do one, two, three years after we assume power”.

Give them three year for a chance to prove that they can get it done? Sounds to me like a reasonable request. Some of the things that are sure to be on the manifest are pretty nutty. But what of the alternative?