Japan's LDP Rights Itself by Moving Away from the Right

By Philip J. Cunningham

Mukade, as the centipede is known in Japanese, are ubiquitous in the lushest parts of Japan, feasting on insects and small animals while scaring away competition. The hard-shelled arthopod can inflict a painful sting on anything that gets to close to its pincers, especially when cornered, but even after capture, the mukade is notoriously hard to vanquish. Merely stepping on it will not do the job, nor will a smack of the broom. To borrow the advice of a friend's father-in-law, you need a serious pair of scissors to do the job. Only when ripped asunder does the beast cease to resist.

That Japan's mountains remain green and thickly forested has something to do with the far-sighted and extremely selfish policy of cutting down other people's forests in places like Borneo and Burma to satisfy Japan's almost insatiable appetite for wood and wood products. But centipedes are also a force for keeping things green, as their aggressive ecology makes the idea of forest dwelling, or even living too close to a forest, icky and uncomfortable for human dwellers who don't like finding multiple-legged insects in their shoes in the morning or on the ceiling at night. The rainy season, when centipedes guard their young, is the most treacherous time of all.

Thus mukade, the humble centipede, provide a model of adaptation and persistance that anticipates, by several million years at least, samurai notions of hard-shelled toughness and the zealous guarding of turf.

The long-enduring Liberal Democratic Party of Japan recently came very close to being ripped asunder during the past rainy season after a devastating defeat in the polls followed by the humiliating retreat of a hard-line prime minister who rolled himself up into a protective ball when the going got tough.

A nuanced understanding of politics somehow eluded him, he, the cosseted scion of a rugged political family groomed for prominence from birth. Shinzo Abe, the champion of right wing invective and cruel innuendo complained sheepishly at the self-inflicted end of his tenure that politics was tougher than he thought.

Critically for the torn and tattered LDP, newly selected Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is a highly competent, low-key politician who is really hard to dislike. If you told him he didn't have any personality he would probably agree with you; it is precisely this genial agreeableness that makes him useful as a party unifier given the polemics of these times. The ultimate team player, though in every way Abe's senior, he had shrewdly withdrawn from running against Abe last year for the sake of party unity and as a gesture toward a multi-generational family friendship.

Taro Aso, in contrast, is naturally combative, controversial and careless in speech; not what the LDP needs to heal itself at this juncture.

I saw Fukuda and Aso duke it out at the height of their inner party campaign, during an unexpectedly generous whistle stop at the Foreign Correspondent's Club in Tokyo where the questions are tough and eligible voters are few.

What was most striking, aside from two very different conversational styles --Aso the raspy, straight-talking populist versus Fukuda, the mild-manner party bureaucrat whose voice barely broke the level of whisper—was that they held confusingly similar views on most topics.

But on closer examination there was method to that maddening lack of clarity.

Fukuda and Aso could have been two peas in a pod. It is true that, unlike Aso, Fukuda has made a clear statement that he will refuse to visit the Yasukuni shrine (controversial for Japan's neighbors because they consider some of the officers buried there to have committed war crimes during WW II). Fukuda's stance on the issue represents a clean break from the deliberately provocative stance of Koizumi and the deliberately ambiguous but essentially unapologetic stance of Aso, which echoes that of Abe. As veterans of the same old party, Fukuda and Aso are in every other respect quite similar. Aso's run for Prime Minister never really threatened Fukuda's chance of getting the nod, but it created sufficient political spectacle and democratic spirit to take the wind out of the sails of the LDP's real opponent, Democratic Party firebrand Ichiro Ozawa, who had held the initiative and political high ground for much of the summer, but failed to foil Fukuda.

It's no exaggeration to say that the LDP heaved a heavy sigh of relief when Fukuda took over the helm from the mysteriously absent and weirdly self-effacing Abe who had reportedly thrown in the towel due to intestinal distress.

One can only imagine the political bickering and crafty maneuvering behind the scenes in smoky rooms at which the wounded, staggering LDP found the gumption to suddenly reinvent itself. The right-leaning, war-glorifying wing of the party, led by Abe, had through mistaken policy and ineptitude, come close to cleaving the party in two. Like any well-designed bureaucracy, the LDP is composed of people, but it is also has a will to survive that extends beyond any particular individual member. When it found itself dangerously out of touch with what people were really thinking, the party did what it had to do, cutting its losses and changing tack.

So Abe's name is mud, despite the political blue-blood that flows in his veins. And Abe's like-thinking associate Aso, who by virtue of factional clout and service to the party might have rightly been the party's first choice for a shot at the top job, had to reconcile himself to the fact that it was in the LDP's best interest that he lose.

Indeed, there was audible relief outside the corridors of the LDP when the nod went to his opponent. For whatever Fukuda lacks in charisma, it is compensated by the perception that he is wise and willing to compromise. For whatever militant ideology he lacks, it is compensated by his political skills for getting things done more or less as they always have been done.

A TV crew from Fuji Television interviewed me immediately after the Fukuda-Aso debate. As I attempted to offer an impromptu "foreigner's" view, I said that I found Fukuda the more reassuring of the two because he wasn't so backward-looking as to want to drag Japan back into WWII values of the sort espoused by Abe and Aso. The crew shed the pretense of journalistic neutrality, nodding eagerly, as if they could hardly contain their hearty agreement. It wasn't an isolated incident, either, everywhere in the media, from newspaper stories to Sunday talk shows on TV, one could detect visible relief that, for the moment at least, Japan could put World War Two back in the past where it belongs and address more pressing social problems of the present and near future.

Koizumi got away with politically provocative but essentially naïve comments about international relations because he had the dramatic flair to wow an audience. I once saw him addressing a crowd outside a kabuki theatre and his presence drew a far more excited crowd response than the kabuki stars themselves.

In contrast, the dour Abe brought doubt to everything he touched. He frittered away valuable political capital inherited from Koizumi by re-imagining World War Two all over again and losing all over again. Whether it be in regard to the criminality of war criminals, or the willingness of comfort women to "comfort" or the mandated textbook changes that threatened to take the history of Okinawa away from the descendants of the people who suffered under the militarist's boot, Abe was tone-deaf and ideologically rigid to a fault.

Japanese democracy, imperfectly and indirectly expressed through a largely symbolic rejection of the ruling LDP in the Upper House elections in July, conveyed a message as clear as the last mid-term elections in the US; people are sick and tired of war talk and want politicians to focus on social issues, not warfare, real and imagined. On both sides of the Pacific, the people have said no to grandiose top-down ideologies that treat the common man as canon fodder for elite nationalistic dreams.

The people of Japan are inheritors of a twin tradition, as proponents of a terrible war and as victims of a terrible war. Japan's peace movement, born in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is powerful and not easily deterred. They have nurtured a war-renouncing constitution and citizen peace tradition almost unique in the world, and they have played a key role keeping Japan peaceful and at peace for six decades.

Japan's peace constituency, in terms of domestic power is the equal to, if not superior of the war-glorifying revisionist fringe, that gets all the bad press. The pacifists have spoken quietly and firmly and the message is simple: keep the peace.

Fukuda may consort with right-wingers and may depend on some of them for political capital, but he is hypo-allergenic and hygienic in comparison to the dirty politicians who propagate viruses of hate and nationalistic divisiviness. The Japanese body politic is showing signs of allergy to the right-wing revisionism of his predecessors. If Fukuda is to achieve anything at all, he must keep the rightists at bay.

Given the setbacks and debacles of Abe's singularly clumsy year of rule, the LDP has taken a corrective change of course that will prevent it from veering too far off course for the foreseeable future.

A centipede can lose a few feet and still feed itself, navigating the forest floor as before. To the consternation of Ozawa and other LDP foes, ready and waiting with scissors in hand as the dazed and disoriented political machine writhed on the ground, the multi-footed and functionally segmented LDP political machine has miraculously righted itself and is back on track.

The hard-shelled LDP is finding its way out of danger, one step at a time, doing what it was designed to do and always did best, which is to say, surviving, marching forward, despite daunting odds.

PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY
JAPAN Read more on this article...

Cunningham: Burma More or Less Needs Help

BURMA MORE OR LESS NEEDS HELP

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
SEPTEMBER 30, 2007

At first glance, the unfolding crisis in Burma ("Myanmar") offers America a golden opportunity—after four years of bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan, suddenly a popular uprising in a land hungry for the ostensibly American values of freedom, democracy and perhaps even capitalist development.

Problem is, US President George Bush has almost single-handedly frittered away US prestige and credibility to the point where just hearing him mention the word freedom is enough to send the smart, and in some cases shell-shocked, running for cover. Under his watch, an immigrant country that had a not entirely unearned reputation for caring about human rights and humanitarian causes has become a global laughingstock, if not bogeyman.

Bush has dug himself into a diplomatic hole so deep it is beginning to resemble a black hole. That a man at the end of his tether might be desperate for a bit of high ground, something to cling to, something to show he isn't an entirely spent force is understandable, but a Bush intervention in Burma would be an unmitigated disaster.

Anything Bush or his minions have to say is colored by the actions of an arrogant administration that has shamelessly promoted torture, eavesdropping and kidnapping, not to mention a self-serving and totally manipulative war on terror. Bush invaded Iraq for all the wrong reasons, a family vendetta being central among them, and he has continued to shamefacedly lie about it. Unfortunately for the people of Burma in their hour of need, Bush has shot the wad of US credibility, and anything he touches is likely to be contaminated, if not broken and crumbled to bits, by know-nothing neo-con greed.

Had Bush not invaded the wrong country, or had he faced up to his mistakes with at least an ounce of accountability, the US government, as the representative of the American people, might not be hamstrung in its ability to help. Had Bush and the cosseted "chickenhawk" architects of the war in Iraq, the most abjectly craven of whom are now pressing for a war with Iran, shown even a glimmer of humility to atone for setting Iraq on the road to disaster which has cost a million-plus souls, perhaps Uncle Sam could offer a lending hand without scaring the very people he seeks to help. But Bush remains unrepentant and imperious, making the prospect of a ham-fisted US-led intervention in Burma too frightening to contemplate.

Burma needs help, desperately, but with a "friend" like Bush trying to capitalize on his "freedom" agenda, they might do well to look elsewhere.

ASEAN is a good place to start, Burma is a member country and informal personal, cultural and trade links provide intelligence and potential leverage. Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN's new Secretary General is a veteran diplomat who as foreign minister under Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, chose not lend support to the dictators of Burma, in sharp contrast to the devil-may-care profiteering in Rangoon and elsewhere on the part of the successor government led by Thaksin Shinawatra.

And Japan, the largest aid donor and home to a community of Burmese exiles has a modest role to play.

But the real wild card in the Burma conundrum, with immense leverage for better or worse, is China.

Just as it might be prudent at this checkered moment in US history for the US to tame its impulse to intervene, China conversely, needs to discard its traditional policy of radical non-intervention, the product of a time when China was poor and powerless, to a more responsible global role commensurate to its rising power.

China President Hu Jintao and his foreign minister Yang Jiechi have inherited a seemingly idealistic and lofty model of diplomacy that was only truly lofty in proportion to China's poverty and inability to project power. Even during the heyday of non-intervention under the guidance of Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, China engaged in significant, albeit largely clandestine, meddling in Southeast Asia and provided some significant development assistance in Africa.

Times have changed and China is neither altogether poor nor powerless, indeed it is a lopsided power in which the supremacy of economic considerations is running havoc with environmental and humanitarian concerns at home and abroad.

For China to now claim fealty to political non-intervention at a time when it is economically active, if not rapacious, as it secures and consumes natural resources across the globe from Burma to Zimbabwe at an unprecedented rate is disingenuous. It's like trumpeting economic reform in the absence of political reform, it's awkward, ungainly and ultimately off-pitch.

What Hu Jintao's foreign policy needs is what pre-Bush America once claimed to possess in spades, a willingness to engage in humanitarian intervention not because it can be commercially profitable or even politically advantageous but simply because it is the right thing to do. China's deaf ear to people crying out for help is the mirror image of the US telling people what they need to do; both extremes overlook the genuine possibility of outreach to the downtrodden, the bullied and disenfranchised.

In recent months, China has made modest adjustments to its Africa policy, recognizing that being "neutral" with respect to cruel and tottering regimes in Zimbabwe and Sudan is not only a public relations failure in the run-up to the Olympics, but endangers long-term stability and interests in the region.

Similarly Beijing, which has enjoyed profitable if not entirely cordial relations with Burma's military dictators, is said to be cultivating some support among opponents of the current regime. In addition to solid trade and military ties, China additionally boasts perhaps a million of its own citizens eking out a living in Burma as a petty bourgeois Peace Corps of sorts, providing an unusual degree of leverage and exposure in both formal and informal terms.

For China's foreign policy to meet the needs of Burma's downtrodden calls for deft, timely intervention, a prudent policy guided by something more than laissez faire trade-at-any-cost and something less than the bombs-and-bullets of military intervention of the sort currently favored by the Bush administration.

A more nuanced and humanitarian thrust from China, effectively unmooring itself from the darkest forces in Burmese society, while putting economic considerations on hold, could prevent things from spiraling out of control and provide a bridge of interregnum stability until a new government can coalesce. The risk of continuing to put one's weight behind the despicable Than Shwe is that China will be a tarnished if not unwelcome player in the inevitable post-Than Shwe Burma that is certain to emerge from the ashes of the current crisis.

The courage of journalists covering the courageous mass demonstrations allows the world to peer into Burma's closed society with compassion and concern. And clearly help is needed. But for now, US governmental help would be as unhelpful as China's unwillingness to engage in truly humanitarian intervention. Read more on this article...