Japanese Citizens Can Run the Beijing Marathon after All

Yesterday (Nov. 10), the Japanese media (Kyodo and Yomiuri) reported that the Japanese citizens could not register for the Beijing International Marathon (BIM) with the hosts citing “security” reasons. The Japanese Embassy duly registered a protest, and the hosts lifted the ban, all in a day’s work.

The ban was obviously related to the Senkaku situation. But how?

It’s an international sports event; a ban makes them look—unsportsmanlike. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which “sanctioned and approved the BIM” according to the official BIM website, would not been pleased to hear of the ban, and likely would have imposed a penalty.

Nor is the original act the norm. Japanese skaters entered (and won both singles events at) the Beijing leg of the 2012–13 ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating last week. However, that was an indoor crowd, spectators with tickets and invitees. Outdoor spectators on the streets are another matter, and even a small number of protesters could cause a highly visible and embarrassing ruckus or worse. So the hosts made a call. But with the story gaining media attention, someone, possibly higher up the China’s political hierarchy, apparently decided that avoiding further embarrassment was worth taking the unknown risk of failures in crowd control.

More generally, the Chinese executors of the get-tough policy on Diaoyu must have to play much of it by ear, with a sharp eye for self-preservation. There must be lessons here for the Japanese authorities to figure out on the Senkaku Islands, I just don’t have any good ideas around that.

Sidebar: I suspect that this is indicative of how the situation is being handled over there. There must be broad general orders that sanction inconveniencing the Japanese presence in mainland China, but the details have to be delegated along the political food chain, ultimately reaching the actual executor. This means that execution will vary from situation to situation, institution to institution, and even individual to individual. (We saw this unevenness last year in what individual custom houses were doing to trade with Japan in rare earth and other merchandise.) Given the human propensity to take credit and avoid blame, the executors will be guided in the details by his survival instincts and his reading of the prevailing political mood.

Whose Ethnic Garb at the Chinese Party Congress?

Punk rocker and Eurasia Group analyst Damien Ma moonlights as a blogger for The Atlantic website. He’s being uncommonly productive there recently, what with the Chinese Party Congress in progress. He’s made it so far to the pageantry of the first day. There, he writes:

“For every major Communist Party occasion, most of all the congress, several set pieces must be present: podium wrapped in flowers, minorities in their ethnic garb, sprinkling of female delegates, sleeping octogenarians, and bored leaders. The congress' opening ceremony did not disappoint on any of these fronts.”

And neither did the rest of his post. But what’s this about “minorities in their ethnic garb”? Ah, there it is. But don’t the Han people have their own “ethnic garb”? I ask Damien, and it appears that the Han don’t need to be represented because they’re not a minority. Wait, didn’t the British Empire used to trot out overseas subjects in the ceremonial dress of their origin on festive occasions?

China may recognize 56 ethnic groups, but the Han are obviously more equal than the others. And you can be sure that Beijing is not consulting the other 55 in dealing with their Diaoyu question.

It’s also funny how the financial crisis has made the world all but forget Tibetans and the Uighurs and whomever else that may be refusing to submit, but that’s another story.

Mazie K. Hirono Would Not Have Been Elected Senator If She Were Not an Asian-American

And no, not because this was Hawaii, though that certainly must have helped, but because she’s by all accounts a self-described “non-practicing Buddhist.” And if you think I’m wrong, imagine a White politician trying to get away with being a “non-practicing Buddhist.” Let’s push this further and try “non-practicing Christian.” But I’m guessing that a “secular Jew” is acceptable. I’m also guessing that I know what “non-practicing” really stands for. And I’m guessing that the United States will see a woman become President well before any of these “non-practicing” people do.*

Such were the thoughts that this post on the Noahpinion blog (and some wine) touched off.

* Senator Hirono, of course, is not eligible for the Presidency since she is an immigrant. This is another one of the non-democratic anachronisms in the US Constitution.

A Few Thoughts around the US Election

1.    Obama or Romney?

In the past, the Japanese political and business establishment would have been saddened by Romney’s defeat. The perception there is that Republican administrations tend to treat Japan more gently, both in style and substance. And the Noda administration and big business here must have welcomed comments from Glen Hubbard, a prominent economic advisor to Romney and a probable candidate for a key assignment in the event of his victory, in Nikkei Shimbun that a Romney administration would support Japan’s participation in the TPP negotiations. This time around, though, China has been the one that has been getting the short shrift from the Democrats with the Obama administration’s abandonment of a G2 perspective and adoption of an Asian “pivot,” broadly regarded and largely welcomed in the region as a counterbalance to an increasingly aggressive projection of Chinese power. So, although the Romney campaign had been pushing a very forceful line against China, “four more years” must not have seemed to be a bad consolation prize. At least that must be why there was little to no debate here over the relative merits of the two presidential candidates for Japan, or any display of the by now familiar anguish over the Japan “passing” in the foreign policy debate. On the latter point, maybe we’ve become so used to being sidelined that we don’t notice, but that’s too depressing an idea, and unnecessary at this point to ponder when there’s a more plausible explanation.

2.    Value of a Vote

The electoral college system came under criticism as the possibility that the popular and electoral votes might go their separate ways, which actually happened in 2000 then almost repeated in 2004, was extinguished for good for practical purposes only when the networks called Ohio for Obama with just three more states out of the 50 remaining to be called. Another, less serious charge is that the electoral college system forces presidential campaigns to focus on at most ten or so “swing” states while taking the rest of the US more or less for granted. This cannot be a healthy state of affairs, or so the story goes. What’s funny, though, is that similar complaints are not being made about the Senate, where each Wisconsin vote is currently worth about 66 Californian votes. That makes the most recent 2.30 (House of Representatives, 2009) and 5.00 (House of Councilors, 2010) that the Japanese Supreme Court has condemned look…absolutely “constitutional,” yet the people in California and New York appear to be too stoned to complain. Could it be that John Q. Public just doesn’t care, and that the only reason that the electoral college is part of the national debate is because it’s another fish to fry when the US media dishes out stories on election night? I mean, who wants that extra attention in the form of ever-more negative campaigning, robo-calls and the like.

3.    Mandate, Shmandate

And what’s all this talk about a “mandate”? Depending on whom you talklisten to, President Obama got a mandate because he won the popular vote and smashed Romney in the electoral college tally, in the process producing a near-sweep of the “swing” states; or, he didn’t get a mandate because he ran against a weak candidate and still failed to convince nearly half the US voters who actually voted. Well, Bush only became president because he won a 5-to-4 vote in the Supreme Court, but he still got his tax cut…because the Republicans owned both chambers and managed to get enough Democratic Senators to cross the aisle, sometimes with timely advice from their donors and lobbies, to cross the aisle to surmount considerable procedural obstacles (particularly in the Senate). Obama will have more difficulties in getting any legislation passed because the Republicans own the House of Representatives. (It’s more complicated than that, but let’s leave it there for now.) The “fiscal cliff” will be avoided though, not because Obama has received a mandate but because both the Democrats and the Republicans will be held responsible if the US government goes over the edge, which will not be a good thing for incumbents come 2014. Same thing with the Japanese “twisted” Diet and the Japanese “cliff”—which BTW MOF has been GPSing away every few months as if it were a hot-road mirage. “Mandate” is the language of pundits and is of little utility for explication purposes and even less for forecasting, and it’s a good thing that we don’t resort to anything similar in our public discourse.

4.    Nate Silver

Nate silver has been the undisputed forecasting star of the media coverage, making Roger Federer at his career peak look like an also-ran. I’d wondered how arithmetically possible it was to give even a small number of, say, 7 to 3 odds and wind up making a near-perfect call on the outcome at state level unless his model was terribly wrong. Stupid me, I hadn’t realized that Silver would be refreshing his numbers right up to the point that they closed the ballot box, so the calls would grow shorter and shorter (or is it longer and longer?) for a candidate who, like Obama in this election, enjoyed a clear last-minute polling trend in his favor. Two thoughts flow from this: First, pundit forecasts tend to become less relevant as the day of the election approaches, but that is also when they get the most air time. It is no surprise, then, that many of them are directing plenty of visceral anger and scorn towards him (while selectively citing polls where convenient), or simply ignoring him altogether. Thankfully, there aren’t nearly enough detailed, much less daily, and publicly available polls in Japan, which allows arithmetically challenged people like me to concoct stories around what little is around. Second, Silver’s model can only be validated if the calls that he—more accurately, his model—makes along the timeline are also accurate, and it should not be difficult for a capable statistician to figure out ways to gauge this. This is important because people will be making business-investment decisions along this timeline, decisions that will be affected by the outcome of the election. Again, the dearth of useful Japanese polls means that we won’t be seeing any Nate Silver-like figures here for a long time, if ever.

Do You Want to Know what’s Going to Happen to the Three Prospective Universities after All?

No? Oh, well, I’m going to tell you anyway.

Yesterday, MEXT officials backtracked further, saying that  the three prospective universities hadn’t been denied permission since there was nothing in writing and they’d misunderstood Minister Tanaka. Today, Minister Tanaka went further and allowed that the MEXT Three would be given permission under current standards after all.

So all’s well that ends well? Not so for the Noda administration, I think. Noda’s not going to dismiss Tanaka and Tanaka is not going to take leave of her own volition. And the bureaucracy is not going to take the fall for the “misunderstanding,” certainly not when the Noda administration’s life expectancy is estimated in months, no not weeks.

So Four Cabinet Ministers (Two of Them Exes) Walk into a Symposium…

Nikkei Shimbun and CSIS held a symposium on October 26. The following is the list of the participants:

Japan:

Genba, Koichiro (DPJ): Minister of Foreign Affairs

Hayashi, Yoshimasa (LDP); former Minister of Defense

Ishiba, Shigeru (LDP): former Minister of Defense

Kitaoka, Shinichi: Professor, GRIPS

Maehara, Seiji (DPJ); Minister for National Policy (DPJ)

Yabunaka, Misoji: former Administrative Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs

United States:

Armitage, Richard: former Deputy Secretary of State

Campbell, Kurt: Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Green, Michael: former Senior Director for Asian Affairs, National Security Council (Senior Vice President for Asia, CSIS)

Hamre, John: former Deputy Secretary of Defense (President, CSIS)

Nye, Joseph: former Assistant Secretary of Defense

Campbell and Green are Japan hands and the other three (as well as CSIS) have been long associated with Japan. And who delivers the keynote speech? Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State.

This is what we are, where we are, in the Asia-Pacific region, which was the subject of the symposium. The DPJ and LDP should take heed.

Forfeitable Deposits Are the Least of Worries for Wannabe Diet members and Party Start-Ups

There’s an SSJ Forum thread developing on deposit requirements under the Public Office Election Act and its significance that was touched off by Michael Cucek on his blog. Anyone who isn’t subscribed to the Forum, should. In the meantime, here’s my comment minus a couple of quotes (and related text) from the thread.

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A forfeitable 3,000,000 yen deposit for a single-member district (SMD) in the House of Representatives (HOR) appears to be a significant deterrent against running for a Diet seat if you are out of work, have only illiquid assets if any, is unable to secure support from any of the established parties, and lack name recognition. If you do not belong to this demographic, you have other, more serious concerns.

An SMD bid is expensive. You must expect any candidate from a major party to spend up to the legal limit of (19,100,000 + 15 x number of eligible voters in the SMD) yen. Other candidates from established parties may spend less, but are highly likely to incur expenditures well above the 3,000,000 deposit. That limit would be 22,321,040 yen under the latest National Census, in Kochi District 1, currently the smallest SMD available to you. It would be significantly higher in any metropolitan SMD. You must be willing to spend a substantial amount of money yourself if you want to be competitive, or have some other compensating feature to your makeup, to which I will come back later.

Coming up with that kind money is not a problem if you have plenty of liquid assets; it’s somewhat more problematic if you are married and need to take out a mortgage on the family home for that. (Some people do that, though, apparently.) In any case, the buck does not stop there. The official campaign period starts when the election is called, but you will have spent months if not years before that laying down the ground works of your official campaign, and that costs money too. Affiliation with an established party will alleviate your money concerns, but you will still be footing much of the bill.

It will also cost your time. Running for office, if you are serious, can be a full-time job. That means that you will have to suspend or otherwise drastically curtail your day job. That takes a huge leap of faith if you are a salaryman—unless you’re say, a Panasonic employee and you’re running as the labor union’s candidate *wink wink* so you can go back to your day job if your bid fails. It’s easier, of course if you are a doctor, dentist, lawyer or other professional with a well-established practice and can pick up where you left off if your bid is unsuccessful.

Name recognition can be a good substitute for the above. This is not a HOR SMD example, but Yukio Aoshima, a well-known writer/comedian/actor, tossed his hat into a Tokyo gubernatorial race as an independent, left the country in the days when there was no internet to speak of, and still won the race.

Of course, none of this matters if you’re out-of-work and penniless, and the only campaigning that you intend to do is use the free TV broadcasting airtime that MIC gives to each of the candidates to hold forth on the subject of your choice: Legalize pot? Why not? Ah, but there’s the matter of the 3,000,000 yen deposit… so what you need here is the support of the DPJ or some other party with street cred so you can get at least 1/10 of the effective votes cast in the SMD on the party name alone so you can get that money back.

Sidebar: A better place to look for a legally imposed financial barrier to new entries would be the Political Party Subsidies Act, under which the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is distributing 32,014,332,000 billion yen this year to 11 political parties passing thresholds based on based on the number of Diet members they have and/or votes they received in the last lower house and last two upper house elections. (The Japan Communist Party refuses to accept the money on principle.) That can buy a lot of hay; in fact, this averages out to 44,341,180 yen worth of hay per Diet member. That means that you’re spotting the LDPs and Komeitos a huge cash advantage when you’re starting up a new party. It also explains the financial appeal of (presentable) B- and C-list Diet members to the latest crop of start-ups. (The arrangement is also likely to put regional micro-parties (four Diet members or less) at a disadvantage.)

The MEXT About-Turn: That Was Quick

On November 6, four days after MEXT Minister Tanaka announced that she had refused permission for three new universities to open for business in school year 2013, she finished a regularly scheduled press conference, then returned three minutes later to tell the reporters that she’s forgotten to say something important and announced that a “new framework would soon be established to decide anew under new standards, including the three universities.” This is being widely interpreted to mean that the three schools will be allowed to open for SY2013. The announcement took all of two minutes, and the minister refused to take questions.

She is playing within type. She tosses pointed barbs, which as often as not hit the mark, and the public is entertained. She makes an impulsive decision without considering the consequences or talking it through with interested parties. Forced to make a turnabout, she’s barely able to face up to the task of making the announcement, but not enduring the fallout. And that announcement as coda is typical behavior from a small child.

Noda all but asked for it. But I’m still surprised that it happened so quickly, from the beginning, to the not-quite-finish-yet.

I Don’t Get the Korean Wave, but That Doesn’t Mean It Sucks

The Korean Wave that has staked out a big chunk of Japanese entertainment turf has failed to touch me. Its contemporary and costume TV dramas leave me cold, while its pop groups, the articulate and well-groomed potpourri of eye candy, utterly fail to work their charms on me.* It’s not like South Korea’s offshore shenanigans have neutralized the potential of its soft power. My addiction to Chinese wushu serials, a misbegotten conglomeration of the Streetfighter arcade games, Chinese history mangled beyond belief, and the most hackneyed and unbelievable plots and narrative devices this side of Shakespeare, remains unabated despite Beijing’s repeated incursions into Japan’s undisputable territorial waters of the Senkaku Islands. And to be truthful, Perfume leaves me cold too,* so it’s not as if I have anything against pleasure-androidy song-and-dance groups just because I have a beef about Takeshima.

But that doesn’t mean Hanryu sucks; it only means that I don’t get it. So, if my professional interests dictate that I should understand it—it doesn’t, thankfully—I should at least make an effort to understand its public appeal, shouldn’t I?

Same thing for political analysis, yet it’s even harder to do.**

* I’ve always preferred disorder over order, which may be why I’ve always believed that Cyndi Lauper is vastly superior to Madonna.

** For corroborating evidence, you need only to look at what so many talking heads are saying around the US presidential election.

A Memo on Makiko Tanaka and Her Place in the Litany of the Noda Administration’s Ills

Prime Minister Noda’s cabinet assignments have been dictated less by the aptitude and experience of the candidates than by his desire to maintain party unity. He must have known the risks he was taking, the danger that any one of them could wilt in the national spotlight as the consequence of any combination of their verbal incontinence, occupational ineptitude and/or dubious associations*. He must have felt that he did not have the luxury of selecting what he thought was the best and brightest and let them pick their respective political teams, as Hatoyama did.

In the event, the risks materialized, forcing him to dress up four de facto dismissals as a couple of cabinet reshuffles within the first year of his regime, yet he failed to achieve his objective of maintaining DPJ unity. A drizzle turned into a downpour on June 26 as Ichiro Ozawa was virtually frog-marched out of the DPJ by supporters who feared the public backlash from Noda’s agreement with the opposition LDP-Komeito coalition to raise the consumption tax rate out, and wound up a couple of weeks later founding the People’s Life First Party consisting of 49 Diet members. It is unlikely that more than a sliver of that number would have left the DPJ if they had not believed that it would give them a better chance for political survival.**

But one of Noda’s more obvious traits is stubbornness, often but not always a virtue, and his third cabinet reshuffle in little over a year gave the public more of the same. On October 23, a little over three weeks after his third reshuffle in little more than three years, he wound up accepting the resignation papers of Keishu Tanaka, his Justice Minister for political financing irregularities—he had known that his political organization had accepted donations from a company controlled by a foreign national, which is illegal in Japan, and 30 year old associations with yakuza executives that he claimed to have severed after he became aware of their livelihood. Tanaka was a 71 year old pol who had been given a “safety” assignment despite his lack of legal expertise almost surely because of his role as leader of the group of DPJ members who traced their origins to the old Democratic Socialist Party***. Tanaka’s demise proved to be yet another nail in the Noda administration’s coffin, which continued its public opinion poll free-fall.**** And that brings me to the other hotspot in the latest cabinet reshuffle.

On November 2, another public relations disaster for the Noda administration occurred as Makiko Tanaka, the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, went against the advice of the duly required recommendation from the MEXT advisory council and denied three prospective universities permission to open for the next school year (April-March). Tanaka had been chosen purportedly to assuage dissidents who had talked of backing her in the leadership election. The reason given for Tanaka’s perfectly legal refusal is a plausible argument: more and more universities are chasing fewer and students, and the quality of the education is suffering as a result.*****

However, there was also a good case to be made for disconnecting the decision on the three prospective universities from the broader question of higher education reform and a very good case to be made for at least one and possibly two of them to go forward regardless of the direction any eventual reform goes.****** But Tanaka’s well-chronicled impulsiveness and willfulness got the best of her, drawing attention away from the very real problems of the Japanese higher education system, of which allegedly too much competition is but one, and towards the also very real problems of denying permission to three education business groups that had expended considerable resources to meet MEXT requirements, not to mention sending prospective students scrambling for alternatives—each of the three universities-to-be had a readymade customer base, at least for the first two years—that may not be readily available for them. As it is, given the dismal prospects for the DPJ in the next lower house election and the Noda administration even before that, it is all but certain that Tanaka will have a few months at most to oversee the reform process as MEXT Minister, all but ensuring that the three schools will open in 2014 after a one-year delay, possibly in 2013 in the case of an early snap election.

What is amazing if not surprising is that Noda assigned her despite the fact that many people had expected something of the sort to happen sooner or later. In fact, this will probably turn to be less devastating for Tanaka personally than the outbreak of ills during her last cabinet assignment as Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was her reward from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi for having helped him to win the LDP leadership election, leading to his election as prime minister. Of course Koizumi and the LDP were in much stronger positions than Noda and the DPJ, respectively, and they weathered the troubles free of the kind of existential threats that Noda is currently facing. As it is, the controversy provides yet more ammunition for the LDP and its leader Shinzo Abe, who currently have little more to offer the Japanese electorate than prospects that they may be less incompetent and less incoherent than the DPJ experiment is turning out to be.

* Amazingly, he appointed Kenji Yamaoka, Ichiro Ozawa’s one of few remaining longtime associates, Minister for Consumer Affairs even though his close association with the multilayer marketing industry was public knowledge. In Japan, multilayer marketing businesses are viewed with suspicion and are often conflated with Ponzi schemes. Actually, they are closer conceptually to the iemoto system for ikebana and other traditional arts, where each business group consists of layers of teacher-acolyte relationships piled on above another as a pyramid that the constituents climb layer by layer, coughing up ever greater sums of money for each laborious step up along the way. One wonders if the Japanese affinity for roleplaying games is not related with this historical cultural experience.

** Note that Ozawa himself was always reluctant to leave, since he was aware that it would leave him with a much smaller power base and little prospect of founding new, meaningful alliances .

*** The DSP is a conservative offshoot of the old Socialists hatched during the progressives’ version of the 1955 political reshuffle.

**** The Noda cabinet had fared considerably better (or considerably less bad) than the DPJ in public opinion polls. The most recent media polls clustered around the November 3-4 weekend showed the gap closing considerably.

***** The counterargument, which also has merit, is that competition is good. Just look at the proliferation of cheap, reasonable-quality merchandise and service at all the supermarkets and convenience stores. And don’t try to make me, the everyman consumer, sympathize with all those small, neighborhood grocery stores that went out of business as the consequence. However, let’s give the MEXT Minister the benefit of the doubt here, if only in view of the mismatch between social needs, personal aspirations, and the educational product and its packaging, as well as the massive personal investment involved for the customers.

***** One is being founded by a large group of vocational schools in medical and healthcare, both growth industries in a rapidly aging society. Another is an upgrade of a public two-year art school in a Northeast prefecture where such four-year education is not available. The third school is an upgrade of a junior college for women. Vocational school groups seeking more official status; junior colleges adding two more years to their program; and unisex colleges, almost always for women, going co-ed: those are the basic strategic decisions being made by existing higher education institutions, and the three examples fit right into those patterns.

Why Is the LDP Playing Nice?

The LDP is now willing to take up the deficit bond authorization bill in the Lower House Budget Committee and select members for the Committee for the Comprehensive Reform of Tax and Social Security and Tax, not to mention moving forward with the five-up, five-down mini-reform for the lower house. There are several very good post facto explanations for this change of heart. First, the LDP has historically been more attentive to pleas from Keidanren and other business authorities, who, already un-amused by the government belt-tightening on top of the global and regional disturbance, will be beyond livid if the LDP and DPJ manage against all odds to drive the Japanese economy over the fiscal cliff. Second, the LDP is ahead. It does not need a game-changer. It will be content to play the equivalent of a possession game, making sure that the opponent doesn’t get an opportunity to score.

Doesn’t the LDP want an early election? Yes, but not at all costs. Push too hard and it runs the risk of pushing Noda off the cliff. If Noda’s position deteriorates further, it could precipitate further DPJ defections, all but forcing the DP to call for what will surely be a successful no-confidence resolution. If Noda calls a snap election, fine. But he is more likely to resign and let a caretaker prime minister call the snap election. What kind of a birthday bump would, say, a Prime Minister Goshi Hosono receive? That has the potential of an LDP nightmare in the making. In fact, Noda may anticipate his demise and resign without waiting for the resolution. Which brings me to my third point: better to escort Noda to the goal line if need be to make sure that he fulfills his promise to chikai uchi ni call a snap election. And if that allows Noda to carry on for a few extra months and put a few feathers in his cap along the way, so be it; that’s a small price to pay for a stab at four years of plenty. Speaking of which, a double election in July is looking mighty attractive…

No, I don’t think the LDP wants to stretch it that far, for that would mean that the Noda administration will have stocked its items inventory with the FY2012 supplemental budget, the FY2013 regular budget, and some meaningful legislation. Still, the LDP appears to be playing not to lose. And that buys time for Noda and the DPJ, and time can do so much. Stay tuned.

My Take on the BOJ Governor's Reappointment

The odds of Masaaki Shirakawa's reappointment when his term expires in April dropped somewhat with the government-BOJ “accord,” since it binds the BOJ to the Noda administration. with the market response tepid at best, the LDP will hammer away at the package as inadequate and Shirakawa will suffer collateral damage. However, the LDP's action when it takes power will be tempered by the fact that the opposition will do its best to sink any new nominee, which means that Shirakawa is still a reasonably good bet for reappointment, if he wants it.

The Third Force in Japanese Politics? If There Ever Was a Horde of Cats…

There are four groups that matter: Your Party (6 House of Representatives members, 8 House of Councillors members.), Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s Japan Restoration Party (5 HORs, 4 HOCs), Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura’s Genzei Nippon (5 HORs, 0 HOCs; literally, Tax Reduction Japan)*, and ex-Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara’s new friendly acquisition Sunrise Party of Japan (2 HORs, 3 HOCs). They all reflect to varying degrees and in different ways the fears and mistrust building up towards the government around a whole array of issues, present and future. Unlike the established mini-parties, they are competing for more or less the same constituency. This means that they have a choice: cooperate or compete. Lacking game theory expertise, I can only point your attention to the following and ask that you come to your own conclusions.

1.      YP and Ishihara both claim metropolitan Tokyo and its near abroad as their strongholds. Think, Crips and Bloods.

2.      Ishihara supports nuclear power and the consumption tax hike, the others do not. Think, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey.

3.      Ishihara and Hashimoto are alpha males with massive egos. Think, Shaq and Kobe.

* Good friend Michael Cucek points out that “the DPJ yakuinkai has promised to sit upon…resignation letters [from the two recent defectors from the DPJ to the GN]…until hell freezes over.” This exposes the GN to two risks: potential criminal charges against the two defectors and, less likely, GN itself for misrepresentation under political party law; and political embarrassment over the allocation of the political party subsidies for 2013.

My Two Bits on What the Japanese Government Should Be Doing about the Senkaku Issue

I also offered the following suggestion to my friend in Ohio.

“There's also a fourth option, in which a private entity could be set up to purchase it and hold it untouched in perpetuity. That would restore the islands to their pre-purchase circumstances. Can Keidanren members pony up 2.5 billion yen? Yes, it can! Loss of face for the Japanese government. A little.”

Let me amplify this for my blog. I think that it would be acceptable to the Chinese authorities if they really meant what they said about keeping to the original tacit understanding, or finding third way as they are reported to have indicated in early September. If I’m right and business executives are willing to engage in a little private public diplomacy, it would be doing Shinzo Abe a great favor because he wouldn’t have to figure out how he, as prime minister, would stand up to the Chinese without totaling the Japan-China relationship.

Of course I know that the Noda administration would never do anything like that since it would be tantamount to admitting that they botched the whole affair. The catch? Chinese authorities are unlikely to roll back some of the measures that they took, like naming the islands and drawing territorial lines. Still, it’s more plausible than any idea for actual resolution that includes Japanese concessions on sovereignty, which would be unacceptable to any Japanese administration, while any proposal that does not include one would be a non-starter with the Chinese. Note that economic retaliations are not an option for obvious reasons.

I Have a Friend in Ohio Who Has Taken a Little Time off to Ask What’s Going on with the Noda Administration

And here’s my answer to one of his points, edits in parentheses.

[The story on the diversion of post-disaster aid funds] has been generating headlines intermittently and has surely been another drain on the Noda administration's credibility. Much of the delay, reported well before the Auditing Agency report came out (which may be the reason why it did not receive front page treatment), can be attributed to local causes—lack of planning and execution capacity at the prefectural and municipal level and/or consensus at the community level—though, which limits fallout on the national government. The diversion story is of somewhat more recent origin, weeks if not months old. Some of the items will be excusable as top-priority disaster prevention regardless of location, but the items identified as inappropriately connected to the disaster areas do appear to be stretch credibility. The bureaucracy, tasked to come up with the budget items to bring the total up to a politically desirable level, will use [three] tricks of the trade to that end.

1.      Request funds for items that would normally be part of the regular annual requests.

2.      Dump money into a fund, which will be spent over multiple fiscal years. (Supplemental budgets must in principle be spent within the fiscal year.)

3.      Relabel budget items to give them descriptions that fit the theme(s) of the supplemental budget. (This has been used extensively in the regular budget, where some expenditure categories (ex. energy, small and medium) have a higher ceiling than the overall ceiling.)

There are legitimate arguments to be made for all three practices, but they depend on the specific circumstances, and the political optics and the risk of abuse are always present. Of course the political teams in the ministries and agencies should be keeping an eye on those things so that they don't produce embarrassments down the line, but that's difficult to do when the prime minister, the cabinet ministers and vice ministers and parliamentary secretaries keep coming in through revolving doors, and unprepared for the for their mandates for the most part to boot.*

* Am I being a little too understanding with the bureaucracy? You be the judge.

Why Is No One Worrying about the Lower House Redistricting Process?

The House of Representatives Electoral Districts Determination Council Establishment Act (HREDDCEA) sets forth a process that requires the Council to issue a recommendation to the prime minister for redistricting the lower house single-seat constituencies based on the latest National Census, which is conducted once every ten years. The last time they did this, in 2000-2001, it took 30 sessions after the Census became available over a whole year for the Council to come up with its recommendation. The current Council met on and off since June 17, 2009, took a look at the preliminary results of the Census for the first time at its sixth session on March 28 of this year, but has lain dormant since then as the politics of the times overwhelmed the advisory process. So what makes people think that the Noda cabinet can call a snap election within the year based on a simple five-up, five-down deal if the Council must go through a couple of dozen more sessions before it can come up with a recommendation?

It can’t, of course. And that is why none of this matters.

For HREDDCEA is just a law that has no particular constitutional authority. As such, it can be superseded by subsequent legislation that bypasses it altogether.* In this case, the political parties have no choice but to ignore the Council in order to meet whatever political deadline they end up imposing on themselves.

There is a small possibility that Noda winds up calling a snap election without a deal in place. What happens then? An election, of course. Someone may file a lawsuit to try and stop that and, failing that, another one after the election to have it ruled null and void. I’ve gone over this question before; suffice to say for now that there is little chance that either of these lawsuits will succeed, since the courts are not equipped to resolve the more serious constitutional issues that arise from the kind of rulings necessary to satisfy the plaintiff. That said, there will be enough political fallout on whichever player or players who are seen as the main culprit for an election under the current single-seat districts to all but ensure that such an event will not take place.

* The laws of men and women must not be confused with the laws of physics, which prevent you from, among other things, decreeing that the Earth [is flat] and make that stick. The first are normative, while the latter are descriptive and moreover falsifiable.

Okada’s Whatever about Senkaku? Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Here

Michael Cucek kindly sent his friends the link to a South China Morning Post report entitled, “Japan's deputy PM admits Diaoyus dispute, opening path to China talks”. The lede, which I reproduce below, is no less incendiary (or conciliatory, depending, figuratively and/or literally, on where you’re coming from):

“The top deputy to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has acknowledged that a dispute with China exists over the East China Sea - a key concession and potential olive branch to Beijing.”

I had my doubts about that, since you would expect that Okada, a former MOFA minister and one-time bureaucrat, to know better. Since Michael subsequently posted on the matter, I decided to look a little further. Sankei, for instance, tells us that what Okada actually said was the following:

「尖閣は領土問題ではないが議論があることは事実で、対話を通じ今の状況を鎮めないといけない」

Translation: The Senkakus are not a territorial issue but it is true that there is a debate/dispute, and the current situation must be calmed down through dialogue.

Okada’s choice of words turns out to be in line with precedent. MOFA officials have always explicitly recognized that there has been an “issue of Senkaku” but has consistently denied that there is a “territorial (ed. usually translated as “sovereignty”) issue.” Unless you are willing and able, as I am not, to read some subtext into the replacement of “issue” with “debate/dispute,” there’s nothing to see here except the unilateral show of Japanese willingness to talk about Senkaku (but not about the sovereignty issue), a willingness that has been there for decades.

Has nothing changed, then? Well, if this report had appeared in the Chinese version of the People’s Daily instead of the English-language SCMP, it could have been read as a deliberate misinterpretation to prepare the Chinese public for a series of calm-the-waters, high-level meetings between Japanese and Chinese officials. As it is, it’s surely just a case of Teddy Ng, the writer, missing more than just a vowel. So move along, folks, nothing to see here.

Justice Minister’s Demise Highlights Prime Minister Noda’s Political Incompetence

Prime Minister Eisaku Sato was poorly regarded in his time by the progressive mainstream media and most of the intellectual class. But few doubted his ability to manage and manipulate the massive egos of the faction leaders and their more or less loyal capos and lesser underlings, a trait that earned him the sobriquet of “Sato of Personnel Management.” (It seems to have worked fine if results were all we had to go by; Sato is the second-longest serving prime minister in Japanese history, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he even went on to carve out a personal niche in Amnesty International.) By the same measure, Noda has messed up completely. Let me explain.

The October 22 evening edition of Nikkei has a chart listing the ministers that resigned or were dismissed during the three years of the DPJ regime. It tells us that Hatoyama lost two, Kan lost four, while Tanaka is Noda’s second loss. So one head better than par for the course? Not quite.

Hatoyama’s two losses were Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii, who resigned because of genuine health issues but stayed on to play an advisory role to the administration, and Mizuho Fukushima, the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, Social Affairs, and Gender Equality, who resigned over a critical policy dispute between the DPJ and her Social Democratic Party. Hatoyama is certainly responsible for Fukushima’s departure, but culpable? I think not. Noda’s two losses by contrast were precipitated by political and legal misdemeanors by obviously under-qualified if personable politicos being rewarded for their political attributes.

But that’s not all. Prime Minister Noda in what must be a national record has conducted three cabinet reshuffles in little more than a year in office. This is not exactly mitigated by the fact that two of those reshuffles were actually pretexts to get rid of a couple of appointees in each case who had exposed their lack of political toilet training and had to go.

Six incompetents kicked out, or three cabinet reshuffles in little more than a year. Pick his poison; whichever explanation you choose, he makes Hatoyama look good and Kan look at worst average as far as personnel management goes. And that’s probably not an easy feat to accomplish.

Newly Minted Justice Minister Keishu Tanaka Refuses to Go Gently into the Night

Keishu Tanaka, the recently appointed Justice Minister, skipped the Friday cabinet meeting and checked into a hospital, which is about as good a precursor of resignation as there is… only, according to Osamu Fujimura, the chief cabinet secretary who took a phone call from the medical patient, he has no intention of resigning.

 It’s hard to believe that Mr. Tanaka could have been hounded out of his assignment if he had faced the lower house Committee on Audit and Oversight of Administration, which not coincidentally happens to be chaired by a member of the LDP, the day before and convincingly repeated his claim that 1) he only met the yakuza capo because they were introduced by a third person and did not know that he was a yakuza at the time and that 2) he did not know that the person whose wedding he presided over as the formal matchmaker was a yakuza and told him when he found out that he should wash his foot of the yakuza business. After all, this is a thirty year old claim and it’s not as if he’d murdered somebody, which since 2010 is not subject to the Japanese statute of limitations. (Accepting political funds from a Taiwanese-owned corporation was destined to be a wash once South Korea-related funds turned up in the coffers of Shigeru Ishiba, the LDP’s new secretary-general.*) But he didn’t, and his evasive behavior compels the public to connect the dots on its own about a politician who had already served twelve years as a prefectural assemblyman at a time when the yakuza was a more acceptable and, if you were an entertainer or engaged in public works projects, unavoidable presence in the public sphere.**

Justice Minister Tanaka is the gift that can’t stop giving for the opposition. As for Prime Minister Noda, with friends like this…

* Pardon the analogy, but this is the closest political thing to having unprotected sex. I realize that it can be difficult to ask each and every one of your many donors and/or their executives/shareholders for proper ID, but if you’re not sure, shouldn’t you just say no? After all, the ban on direct and foreign contributions has been the law for quite some time.

** Tanaka’s still imminent demise reminds us of a greater passing, the passing of the days when the yakuza rode among us mere mortals in all their splendid Cadillac and Mercedez glory, the seamier if more glorified side of the Always - Sunset on Third Street, Showa nostalgia.

Why the Rich Are Not Like the Rest of Us: Professor Yamanaka and His Whacked-Out Washing Machine

You’re a 50 year old tenured professor pulling down upside of 10 million yen (roughly equal to 130 K US dollars) per year plus full health and pension benefits, a scientist who likes to work with his hands. In fact, you liked it so much that you initially set out to become a surgeon but gave up because you were too clumsy and patients would emerge from their anesthesia before you had finished.* So there you are, satisfying your itch for tinkering with something bigger, more tactile than the stem cells that you’re generating in a biological version of alchemy by working on your broken-down washing machine,… when the Swedes drop a Nobel Prize on you and all hell breaks loose. Specifically, MEXT Minister Makiko Tanaka, the heiress to the Kakuei Tanaka fortune, decides that Professor Yamanaka deserves better and begins soliciting donations from her fellow cabinet members to buy you a new washing machine.

Now, it appears that Mrs. Tanaka’s father never taught her the Second Rule of Feeding and Handling a Guy in Captivity, which is: never mess with him your guy when he’s trying to repair the family washing machine. No, you wait until he’s totally F’ed it up and the washing machine is little more than a scrap heap on your basement floor, which is when you gently suggest that maybe, just maybe, when he’s pulling down upside of 10 million yen per year, he can spring for a new washing machine?

Professor Shinya Yamanaka, of course, is too nice to suggest where the cabinet members who are taking away his pastime can stick that contraption where an automatic dryer will come in handy. No, and he knows that they mean well. And it probably helps that they’re forking over the cash, all 160,000 yen of it, instead of having kakaku.com shipping the real thing to Professor Yamanaka’s residence. Still, it’s a little depressing to think that the Noda cabinet apparently believes that Professor Yamanaka is either too poor or too cheap to buy a new washing machine for his spouse (assuming that he isn’t single and doesn’t do the laundry himself).

At least they could have asked first.

* This has the feel of an urban legend and Professor Yamanaka seems just the type of person who would make up that kind of story about himself. But let’s play along anyway, because it’s too good not to be true.

Phew, That Was Quick, Shukan Asahi; Next Up, Shukan Bunshun

On Oct. 18, two days after the latest edition of Shukan Asahi hit the kiosks with its lurid headline about Osaka Mayor and Ishin-no-Kai JRP head Toru Hashimoto’s “bloodline”, its chief editor issued an apology and promised that the next edition would carry an apology in print. Hashimoto and his Ishin-no-Kai are now gearing up to sue the publisher of Shukan Bunshun, a conservative weekly a notch above the sextertainment- yakuza fanzines, for defamation in its latest edition, which went on sale on the 18th. Bunshun most recently scored a hit on Hashimoto in July with a true confessions story on a night club hostess who had an affair with him before he became a politician. Its line of attack this time around is a politically more serious allegation, that Ishin-no-Kai had received 700 million yen in secret donations from Seicho-no-Ie, a conservative neo-religion founded in 1930. This story will play out over a much longer timeline, but it will give Hashimoto another opportunity for counterattack, on which he thrives so well. I realize they’re just trying to sell copies, but they’re doing him a great favor by drawing attention away from the significant growing pains of his Japan Restoration Party.

Phew, That Was Quick, Shukan Asahi; Next Up, Shukan Bunshun

On Oct. 18, two days after the latest edition of Shukan Asahi hit the kiosks with its lurid headline about Osaka Mayor and Ishin-no-Kai JRP head Toru Hashimoto’s “bloodline”, its chief editor issued an apology and promised that the next edition would carry an apology in print. Hashimoto and his Ishin-no-Kai are now gearing up to sue the publisher of Shukan Bunshun, a conservative weekly a notch above the sextertainment- yakuza fanzines, for defamation in its latest edition, which went on sale on the 18th. Bunshun most recently scored a hit on Hashimoto in July with a true confessions story on a night club hostess who had an affair with him before he became a politician. Its line of attack this time around is a politically more serious allegation, that Ishin-no-Kai had received 700 million yen in secret donations from Seicho-no-Ie, a conservative neo-religion founded in 1930. This story will play out over a much longer timeline, but it will give Hashimoto another opportunity for counterattack, on which he thrives so well. I realize they’re just trying to sell copies, but they’re doing him a great favor by drawing attention away from the significant growing pains of his Japan Restoration Party.

So Three Diet Members Visit Yasukuni…

...and I suppose it’s good enough for brief mention in the national media when they happen to be Shinzo Abe, the new LDP president and odd-on favorite to return to the prime mister’s office after the next lower house election, on the 17^th and Yuichiro Hata and Mukio Shimoji, two ministers from the Noda cabinet, one day later.* Pressed by the media on Abe’s visit, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman responded vaguely that “that Japan should strictly abide by its promise on historical issues and handle concerning issues in a responsible way.” As for the two cabinet ministers, my guess is that official China could care less.

For there’s been an unwritten deal in place for quite some time; As long as the prime minster, foreign minister, defense minister, and chief cabinet secretary stay away from Yasukuni while they are in office, official China will not make a fuss. But if they go… well, you saw how official relations chilled when Prime Minister Koizumi persisted in paying his respects at Yasukuni, his condemnation of Class A war criminals, his visits to official Chinese monuments, and the like to no avail.** Give credit to Abe, he declined to reveal whether or not he was visiting Yasukuni while he was prime minister, and he is now refusing to tell us what he’ll do if and when he becomes prime minister. So why should we think otherwise this time around?

I believe that Abe will instead focus on the substance, such as beefing up the Coast Guard and putting Self-Defense personal on Okinawa’s southernmost inhabited islands. There’s an increased potential for physical clashes, most likely unintended, down the line here. And that’s what people should be concerned about.

* The three men are members of the Minna de yasukuni Jinja ni Sanpaisuru Kokkai Giin no Kai (The Association of Diet Members Who Go Together to Worship at the Yasukuni Shrine) includes such notable sinophiles and doves as Ichiro Ozawa, Masahiko Komura, Yasuo Fukuda, and Makoto Koga. Hata and Shimoji went as members of the association.

** There’s an analogy of sorts here to the Chinese reaction to the Noda administration’s attempt to stave off fallout from a purchase of the Senkaku Islands by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Shukan Asahi Jumps Shark on “Hashishita”, Joins Mainichi in the Ranks of “Normal” Weeklies

It’s been eons since the weeklies published by the major newspapers were the magazine of middle class choice, and years since they lost their privileged place in the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists and the lobbies of banks and executive offices. Which is what happens, I guess, when you assign your disgruntled and/or out-of-favor reporters and editors to the task of producing your product while tying their hands by forbidding them from publishing nude photos, lurid sex scandals, true confessions and the like. For some time, though, Sunday Mainichi has made significant strides in going over to the dark side, where the “normal” weeklies reside, if its advertisements are any indication.* But Asahi joined the club, it seems, when its Oct. 25 edition came out with the first installment of a series of articles on Osaka Mayor Hashimoto with an advertisement headline along the lines of “exposing, through his bloodline, his true character that even he himself doesn’t know.”

In case you don’t know what Asahi is insinuating with “bloodline,” Hashimoto’s father, who committed suicide was a yakuza member with a burakumin underclass background.** For good measure, Asahi prints his name as Hashishita, which was the original family name before they changed it to the vastly more common Hashimoto. That’s mean. Understandably, Hashimoto is angry, and is imposing a personal boycott on the left-wing/Cold War progressive Asahi media group, which has always had a problem with the Japanese version of the neo-con, neo-liberal.

Actually, it’s a godsend for Hashimoto, who is at his best when he’s on a crusade. And he’s been there and done that on this particular narrative. A couple of non-newspaper weeklies hounded him with reports on his family background during the Osaka mayoral election, and we know how that turned out. But as long as there are people buying copies from the kiosks, I guess Asahi is cool with that.

* I don’t actually read weeklies anymore, because life is too short and the advertisement headlines provide enough information about their contents for my immediate needs.

** Norimitsu Onishi, among other people, have insinuated that Hiromu Nonaka failed to become prime minister because of his burakumin background. Onishi, as usual, was painting by the numbers with his Japanese outsider riff on that occasion, but it is true that it has not been that long since the burakumin stigma all but precluded a career and marriage in mainstream Japan.

Additional Comments on the Chinese Response to the Senkaku Purchase and the Japanese Reaction

Michael Cucek makes the point on his blog that “… the Chinese Communist Party has a vested interested in shutting down fast any discussion of the nature of property rights, especially as to the limits on state action such rights might impose.”

Agreed. That is an important point in the real world because it implies that the Chinese authorities will continue to act adversely to any further attempts by the Japanese authorities to explain the meaning of the government purchase*. It does not mean that the Japanese authorities should cease and desist. To the contrary, that is the Chinese government’s weakness, not the Japanese government’s. The Japanese government should redouble its efforts to get its own story out there, since the global information cloud is currently dominated by the precipitation from the “nationalization” narrative as forcefully iterated by the Chinese side. A MAFF senior vice minister’s clumsy off-turf attempt to get this point out—“let China buy the islands if it wants”—and the subsequent political fallout**, plus the underlying counter-anger generated by the Chinese reaction, has made it more difficult to actively profess the original passive stance, but it’ll still be useful on the global stage.

He also states, “I am not sure that Chinese local cadres and thugs are entirely bereft of an understanding of a concept of property rights as transcending and superseding law.” Just to be sure, I make no such point in my original post. Instead, it is the notion that it is highly difficult for the Chinese to understand that there is such a thing as property rights that are protected by law from the state that is the assumption for my argument.

Incidentally, I’ve given further thought to the matter of the Chinese assault and have some tentative conclusions that may be useful in forming prevention and mitigation strategies. I’ll try to find the time and energy to put something together.

* Shigeru Ishiba’s comment that “he doesn’t seem to know the law” shows that he’s 1) the one that doesn’t understand the law and the meaning of the arrangement under it; or 2) willing to sacrifice a useful line of Japanese counterattack for political gain.

** It also means, of course, that the Japanese authorities, Noda, Gamba, everyone, were barking up the wrong tree when they trekked to China and elsewhere to explain to their Chinese counterparts ex ante. So what was the vaunted China school at MOFA doing? Did they do any better than Ambassador Niwa?

Why Did the Heads of China’s Finance Ministry and Central Bank Skip the IMF-World Bank Plenary?

Xie Xuren, China’s Minister of Finance, and Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People’s Bank of China, failed to show up at the IMF-WB plenary session and sent their deputies instead. This is being interpreted as part of the Chinese government’s retaliation for the Japanese government’s purchase of the Senkaku Islands that they did not already own from their Japanese owner. I don’t get it.

This was a purely symbolic act. Unlike the reported slowdown of customs procedures or the 2010 cutback of rare earth exports, it had no effect on the real world. It makes no sense to keep the world in the dark about what your act symbolizes. So what gives? My guess is that Xie and Zhou were merely protecting their asses.

These two men are technocrats who first made their mark in the fiscal and financial arenas in the 1990s and kept moving up. In other words, these are B-list leaders. If you don’t believe me, just look at the CVs for Xi Jinping, the next Chinese President, and Li Keqiang, the next Chinese Prime Minister. They never served as state minister. And no, it not a coincidence; neither did the current occupants of the offices Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.

And now, there’s a massive transition of power going on in China and this is their chance to max out, say, Xie as State Council member and Zhou as the next Finance Minister. But the B-list hangers-on of the A-list people, who concentrate their efforts on the domestic CCP snakes-and-ladders game for influence and riches, must view these two men of the world with some suspicion mixed with envy for their global connections. So isn’t it likely that many of them would have brought their knives out if the pair had shown themselves at the plenary, where it could have been difficult to avoid engaging their Japanese counterparts/hosts in a photo-op planned or not? Likewise would they not have capitalized on the negative worldwide media coverage if the two did show but subsequently shunned their hosts, injecting undesirable discord to a global economy at a most difficult crossroads?

I think Xie and Zhou took the safe way out. And that fits to a T the typical profile of the Chinese leadership as a most cautious, risk-averse lot.

Another Poll, My Current Thinking around the Looming Lower House Election

The latest Sankei-Fuji News Network (FNN) poll confirms what other polls have already been telling us about the post-leadership election (LDP, DPJ), post-party launch (JRP)*, political landscape:

Support for the Noda cabinet: 25.6%
Party support: LDP 25.7% (+8.6%), DPJ 14.2% (+2.0%), JRP 7.7% (---)
Vote in next lower house proportional districts: LDP 32.1% (+10.4%), DPJ 16.8% (–0.6%), JRP 14.2% (–9.6%**)

There’s also significant public enthusiasm for Ishiba, not so much for Abe, who will be at the figurative top of the LDP ticket, but that should not affect the broader outlook: the LDP will come out on top in the next election, and the DPJ and the JRP will fight to come in second.

It is hard to see how the LDP can fail, since there’s not much room for an established opposition party to move the needle on its own one way or the other between now and the looming lower house election. It could lose some of its newly-gained support if the JRP manages to claw back some of its most recent losses. It will also come lose some percentage points to the DPJ if the Noda administration manages to maintain an even keel going forward.

The DPJ also has limited self-generated major upside because it has exhausted the two means to shift momentum in its favor with little to show for them: a leadership election, which resulted in the same-old, same-old; and a major cabinet shakeup that was broadly regarded as being all about internal politics and nothing about public policy and tainted to boot by a political financing violation by the new Justice Minister’s political financing organization***. The best that it can reasonably hope for is the gradual, modest upward trend in support for that accompanies uneventful stretches of incumbency. There’s more there than meets the eye, because the DPJ has a secret weapon: Prime Minister Noda. Seriously. The Noda cabinet continues to poll significantly better than the DPJ itself and, for what it’s worth, people that I talk to generally have good feelings for him and give him good marks, all things considered. Seeing also as how the LDP’s gains clearly came at the expense of the JRP, there’s good reason to believe that the DPJ has much less to lose from a JRP resurgence, which is part of the second half of my considerations, than the LDP. In short, it makes sense for the DPJ to play a waiting game.

Of course, the timing of the next election turns on the question of what the LDP (and Komeito) can extract from the DPJ (and PNP, if you insist) with regard to its date as consideration for allowing a deficit bond authorization bill to and possibly a countercyclical supplementary budget (which for practical purposes cannot be compiled until the projected full-year revenue deficit full year is legally covered) to be enacted. The LDP-Komeito coalition can probably do it with brute force****, but they want to look as pretty as possible while doing it, which may limit their tactics. This means that it will be highly desirable to have an election law amendment in place that at a minimum will not invite a media outcry over the election’s obvious unconstitutionality in light of previous Supreme Court decisions. In fact, both sides will be playing to the galleries with the media as the intermediary. Imagine the inevitable faceoff as a mating dance-off by two male birds-of-paradise—okay, tom turkeys—competing for the favors of an unenthusiastic female while yet another male, this one still very young, lurks nearby and you won’t be far off. And with that, I turn my attention to the JRP.

The JRP, despite its most recent setback accompanying the launch, still carries significant risk, up-side and down-, as the party and its public image is far from fully formed. How well Toru Hashimoto and his colleagues perform the following tasks will determine its immediate election outcome and its long-term prospects.

1) Establish a coherent process for decision-making and public communication—and stick to it.
2) Field a significant number of candidates, alone or in cooperation with other opposition parties, who are capable of avoiding major embarrassments.

The first one is the more problematic because of several structural complications in the JRP makeup. First, its leadership consists of two very different elements: the founding fathers led by Hashimoto on one hand and a group of B-list defectors from the DPJ, LDP and Your Party on the other. The media will play up every sign of dissonance between the two sides. Second, Hashimoto’s attention will be split between administering to his mayoral duties while transforming Osaka Prefecture into a new Tokyo-like metropolitan region on one hand and building and leading his new national party while serving as its most visible public figure by far on the other. His multitasking skills will certainly be tested while the national media’s attention will be doubled or more. Third, there’s the matter of Hashimoto himself. Hashimoto has strong opinions, and does not hesitate to air them, often in a colorful voice. This has served him well, first as a popular celebrity lawyer and later as the foremost advocate for his sometimes controversial policy initiatives. He relishes the ensuing public debate and has been willing to compromise or back down when the occasion demands. This refreshing openness has served him well so far, but I’ve never seen anything like this work on the national stage for any Japanese political leader. The commotion around the setup of the JPR’s decision-making process indicates that this is likely to be a more cumbersome process and therefore less appealing spectacle with a multitasking leader laboring under the magnifying lens.

The second task is complicated by the on-again, off-again romancing of the Your Party and the new regional forces mostly in the Nagoya-Aichi neighborhood. Hashimoto’s intermittent public musings, however exaggerated or distorted by the media (if you believe Hashimoto’s claims) on the relationships have if anything obscured the outlook. This does not appear to have materially harmed the prospects of Hashimoto’s movement so far, but an ultimate failure to coordinate election efforts will split the anti-status quo vote in the heavily populated Kanto (Tokyo et al) and Nagoya-Aichi regions with negative consequences at both the single-member and regional proportional district levels.

All in all though, I think that time is on the JRP’s side, now that much of the initial luster of something new and shiny has abruptly worn off. I think that time will help in the JRP candidate selection and preparation process. I think that time will help it in getting its domestic relationship in order and accepted by the media. I think that time will help it in coming to a definitive conclusion above its relationship with the other regional/reformist forces, at least removing one source of uncertainty and controversy for media fodder. I think that time will help it in moving from the laundry list that is the current JRP policy paper into something more presentable as campaign talking points. I think that my views may be colored by the fact of my disappointment with both parties going forward. Perhaps I am personally desperate for a viable alternative.

* You may have noticed that the JRP numbers in the Sankei-FNN poll most resemble the Kyodo News poll results.
** Figure for the Osaka Ishin-no-Kai, which preceded the JRP.
*** I continue to be amazed by the inability of the parties concerned to exercise the minimum precautions that would preclude these recurring political financing embarrassments.
**** There is a very remote chance that Ozawa’s Your Life First and other smaller parties that are just as fearful if not more so of a snap election may oblige and help the Noda administration cobble together enough votes to get the bill through the upper house.