Live Blogging The FCCJ Press Conference OF Tokyo Governor Masuzoe Yoichi

Note the empty chairs on both sides...

15:30 Introductory remarks, laughing, explaining what he has been doing in regards the Chinese poaching fo jewelry coral, and then it hits you - Holy crap Governor Masuzoe is holding his press conference in English WITHOUT A TRANSLATOR PRESENT. It is just the governor and David McNeill up there on the rostrum.

15:40 Reading from prepared remarks - and surprisingly, or not so, his English pronunciation is better when extemporizing or riffing on the prepared remarks than when he is reading.

OK, enough of the incredible bravery of the governor of Tokyo giving a press conference in what is his third language.


15:42 Brings up the possibility of regulations banning smoking in restaurants.

15:44 Talks about his visits to London and Moscow in city-to-city diplomacy. Great times with London's Boris.

15:45 Now the biggie - turning Tokyo into a more important financial center.

- one stop, English-language subsidiary registration for foreign cos

- more international schools, hospitals

Talks about the importance of foreign workers, notes the incredibly high percentage of foreign workers in London (real London envy/admiration from the git-go of this press conference)

15:48 Supplementary Tokyo assembly budget will subsidize Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to the tune of 1 million yen per vehicle. Tokyo will subsidize the building of 80 fueling stations.

15:52 Wild rhetorical flourishes to wind up the prepared remarks, calling the Olympics the last best way of reviving Japan.

15:56 Fireworks as a Japanese blogger (?) accuses the Governor of shady political financial declarations. Re of Masuzoe's eyes stand out as he cuts the questioner off, saying that all the questions on this subject have been answered at his Japanese press conference. Young man continues to try but Mazuzoe cuts him down. McNeill has to ask the young man to sit down.

16:00 Asked about 24 hour ATMs, asks questioner to consider the possibility of cashless, Internet banking. (In truth, probably in 6 year's time, we may be using cash a longtime).

16:06 Woman asking about the expansion of the size of the road expansion and whether it is not budget busting? (in Japanese)

Mazuzoe taks of a political leader is prioritization. If one does not create packages of policies, rather than an item here, an item there.

(Moderator should have the right to check the intentions of the questioners. Some folks show up just to complain...)

16:12 Casinos? Masuzoe does not say he is against them but he wants a deepened, national discussion.

16:14 The cost of the Olympics, materials and labor costs have indeed gone up.

As regards Fukushima, he receives no special information from the government. However, Tokyo will go from 6% renewables to 20% renewables in X years. Damn, how many was it.

16:25 Governor enthusiastically answers my question on Tokyo's responsibilities to share its good fortune and enrich the other prefectures as well. He argues that the relationship between Tokyo and the other prefectures must not be zero sum but instead win-win. His caveat is that Tokyo cannot be the only engine: Osaka, Fukuoka, Osaka must pull together with Tokyo (interesting implications for the shu-sized administrative unit plan, which would tend to divide the major cities and set them to competing with one another).

Live Blogging The Masuzoe Yo'ichi Press Conference

Preliminaries - smart move by Masuzoe - having his top assistant collecting name cards for a contact database. After the recent, almost searing contempt for the foreign journalist community by members of the Abe Cabinet, an endearing gesture of wanting to establish a continuing, fruitful partnership

14:00 Reading from a script in English - not bad for a Francophile and Francophone Japanese.

14:05 Extemporaneous joke on what used to be called MacArthur Street, now Shintora (from Shinbashi to Toranomon) -- since tora is "tiger" he wonders whether it makes Osaka's Hanshin Tigers fans happy. He asks journalists to please call the road Olympic Road or Paralympic Road. Unless one appreciates the level of envy Osaka feels for Tokyo and contempt Tokyo feels for Osaka, probably not very funny or even comprehensible.

14:10 Special programs for working women amidst the list of infrastructure projects - seems a zeitgeist box every politician has to tick off nowadays. For some reason I believe Masuzoe more than the PM on this subject, despite the efforts of the scandal media organizations to convince me that Masuzoe still holds on to odd ideas about women.

14:15 Uh-oh, talking about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles - seduction by technologies the central government and Toyota are pushing hard.

14:17 Strengthen WiFi networks - his visit to Seoul was highly instructive. Given how geolocation and enhanced reality are developing on smart phones, a foreign language information infrastructure will make Tokyo a more tourist friendly city.
(Clearly Masuzoe is up on existing infotech infrastructure and software).

14:21 Disaster preparedness - perhaps not sexy for the foreign media set, but a huge subject after the Kobe Earthquake, the March 2011 Triple Disaster and recent super storms.

14:24 Social welfare capital - like Tokyo is not such a place already. He talks about his experience from being Minister of Health, his commuting between Tokyo and Kyushu to oversee the care for his mother during her long fight with Alzheimer's and his raising children. (The mention of the last led some of my tablemates to roll their eyes).

Yes, Mr. Governor - but how to pay for more social welfare? This city is ageing fast too.

14:27 Defense of why he is doing diplomacy and the establishment on July 16 of a special office in the Tocho for advisors seconded from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Notes that it has been 18 years since a Tokyo governor visited Seoul - "Can you believe this? This is really abnormal."

He has visited Beijing and Seoul since he won election to his new job -- more than the nominally peripatetic Abe Shinzo has been able to do.

(DATA CRASH)

14:45 Does Tokyo have what it takes to be an Asian Financial Center? Especially since English language skills are a general requirement? Oooooh, that is a mean question. Masuzoe skirts the human resources implications of question by talking about how business forms can be submitted in English.

14:50 "I am checking the budget for the Olympics. A compact Olympics means in terms of budget too, not just the artificial 8 km radius for venues."

14:55 "I have no interest in being the mediator in between the national governments of East Asia."

"City to city talks are my interest. As regards difficult Japan history issues, academics should be separated from politics."


Later - The basic impressions one come away with are:

1) Experience and Erudition - Masuzoe can make cogent comparisons with other locales and offer the background to a decision

2) Aware of Priorities - when a Hokkaido Shimbun journalist tried to draw him into discussing the unification of the ownership of Tokyo's two metro systems, Masuzoe told the questioner that he Masuzoe had far too many more important things to do than tackle that thorny but basically irrelevant issue

One comes away with the sense one can trust what Masuzoe says. Well, except when he starts talking about improving social welfare services (shakai fukushi) without talking about costs.

Then again, every Japanese politician has to lie about social welfare services provision.

Stop. Wait. Do You Know Who I Am?

I suppose I should not try to double-guess Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor Masuzoe Yo'ichi. He did, after all, navigate through rough political waters to victory in February.

However, I must confess puzzlement at Masuzoe's willingness to be used as a ratings prop by news organizations. He is supposed to be running the world's richest and most populous municipality. How can he have time to sit helpless in TV studios doing nothing as producers run 4 minutes long features and as snide and chirpy hosts bypass the governor to elicit comments from other guests of decidedly minor stature, meaning that their utterances will be remarkable not only their dearth of knowledge but their lack of significance and/or relevance.

Seeing Masuzoe imprisoned in chair on the Nihon Terebi (Yomiuri Shimbun Group) Saturday and Fuji TV (Fuji Sankei Group) Sunday morning shows had me asking, over and over again, "What is he doing there? Is he afraid that if we do not see him continuing his ring-around-the-talk shows tours, we will forget who is Tokyo's governor? Or is he merely trying to feed the media beast pre-emptively so that when crunch time comes, the conservative media conglomerates do not bite him?"

For any and all politicians, Fuji TV's Sunday morning show is a particular ordeal. The announcers and other guests just toss bait -- annoyances, insults or irrelevant nonsense -- at the main guest trying to get him or her to create a scandal by a provocative or merely poorly thought out response.

Than again, Masuzoe seems to need no prompting to toss sharp and not entirely well thought out remarks on his own. On Saturday he dismissed of the Akasaka Detached Palace where the Government of Japan houses and receives its most honored guests as "a sham Versailles" unworthy and unrepresentative of Japan (Link - J). His longing for a "more Japanese" building fror housing honored guests begs the question, "OK, Monsieur Pantalons-Astucieux," -- Masuzoe is a Francophone and has taught in Paris -- "where in the budget of either the GOJ or the TMG is there the money to pay for a substitute?"

Dites-moi.


Later - While we are on the subject of Japan-France cultural interactions, the openings of two local exhibitions of note:

- "Okamoto Taro and his Friend in Paris," at the Taro Okamoto Museum in Kawasaki (Link - J)

- "Fer et Cocon" ("Iron and Cocoons") at the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History in Yokohama (Brochure - J - pdf)

Very Quickly On The Tokyo Metropolitan Governor's Race's Results

1) Masuzoe Yo'ichi won. However, there is little reason for the Liberal Democratic Party leadership to get all happy about the victory. Masuzoe only just surpassed the total for the two weak anti-nuclear candidates combined, even with 70% of the Liberal Democratic Party voters and greater than 90% of the New Komeito voters voting for him -- at a time when the LDP is eight times as popular as any of the opposition parties.

As for what happens next, Masuzoe has to get along with an LDP-dominated metropolitan legislature. As NHK so kindly reminded Masuzoe and the rest of this morning in the historical review clip prefacing the live studio interview of him, Masuzoe broke away from the LDP in 2009 declaiming, "The LDP's historical role in Japanese politics has come to an end."

Have fun with that.

2) The candidate the Democratic Party of Japan's supported, an ex-prime minister backed by the most popular prime minister of the last 40 years, came in third. Will heads roll at DPJ headquarters? No! Timidity and failure are now party trademarks.

3) The outcomes of Utsunomiya Kenji's candidacy was far from embarrassing. It was also far from victory. Interestingly, he did better the further away one drew from the Metropolitan district's core.

4) Tamogami Toshio received 610,000 votes. That is not enough in the way of a ground force to overthrow the government (not that Tamogami would want to -- in my recollection, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo appointed him head of the country's Air Self Defense Forces). However, it sure makes for a nice base from which to recruit new members for Tamogami's hard core revisionist, paranoid and xenophobic Ganbare Nippon! organization. We should also expect that his rallies, which were merely attracted thousands, will now attract tens of thousands, marching and shouting without police intervention (or Ishiba Shigeru complaining about the noise, I am guessing) right past the Diet buildings.

This was a fundraising and membership drive for Tamogami. The news media, by shying away from hard looks at Tamogami's past and his followers and their intimidating methods for whatever reason, served as silent enablers to this fiasco.

Go try to tell the South Koreans and Chinese this morning about Japan's deeply ingrained pacifism. They will laugh.

What Could Have Been - The Tokyo Governor's Election Edition

Campaign flyers for Tokyo Metropolitan District Governor's election. Left: Hosokawa Morihiro. Right: Tamogami Toshio. Click on image to open in large format.

Well let me tell you 'bout the way she looked
The way she'd act and the colour of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there.

- Rod Argent, "She's Not There" (1964)

This morning, election morning, the residents of the Tokyo Metropolitan District will be waking up to a city covered with a record-breaking but rapidly melting mass of snow. Fitting is it that a brief, intense and yet somehow empty gubernatorial campaign season ends with the metropole stuck beneath in a cold, damp white blanket.

Former Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare Masuzoe Yo'ichi seems guaranteed victory. He managed to campaign without controversy, on what seemed to be the unchallenging proposition, "Yes, I am good enough." And "good enough" seems indeed good enough to prevail, if enough of the electorate tramps out in the snow to the election centers.

Former Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro ran on the premise of "Utsunomiya Kenji, the anti-nuclear candidate, is too uninspiring to win" -- which might be true. However, Hosokawa turned out to be even less inspiring Utsunomiya or indeed any reasonably animate human being. Despite the electric jolt of having former prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro as buzz creator, Hosokawa's campaign was pretty much dead on arrival. As Okumura Jun pungently put it, "at least the Vasa sailed 1300 meters before it sank, much better than Hosokawa's candidacy." - Link).

Utsunomiya Kenji's candidacy needed more time. This seems weird for a candidate who did not stop running for the governorship even after losing to Inose Naoki in a landslide. In the year after finishing a distant second, Utsunomiya made 130 public appearances, as if he knew he was going to get another shot at the governorship soon. Of all the candidates, only Utsunomiya was ready from the git-go, his posters appearing in my mailbox the first day of the campaign season. As the campaign season progressed and voters could take a look at him his candidacy became more credible -- especially in contrast to Hosokawa's.

However, the presence of two strong anti-nuclear candidates, one supported by the traditional left parties, one not, divides the progressive and nuclear-phobic vote, meaning Utsunomiya seems destined to finish second again.

The candidature of former Air Self Defense Forces Chief of Staff Tamogami Toshio has been a travesty from beginning to end. The man has no business running for a local assembly seat, much less the governorship of the world's mightiest megalopolis. The news media, which should have buried him on the first day under a mountain of ugly facts about him and his followers, instead have at times seemed gleeful enablers of his candidacy. He will end up with an entirely revolting number of votes, most of which will come from voters who know next to nothing about him.

The voters of Tokyo, of course, have a right to feel robbed. In the build up to former governor Inose Naoki's resignation, the parties and the news media speculated about a whole raft of potential candidates, pretty much any of whom could have prevailed against the current core quartet. On the Liberal Democrat Party side, the potential nominees included Environment Minister Ishihara Nobuteru (whose home was literally around the corner from mine way back when in Suginami-ku), Education Minister Shimomura Hakubun (like he would ever give up that portfolio), former Finance Ministry bureaucrat/Koizumi assassin/Mr. Masuzoe and self-image train wreck Katayama Satsuki and former multiple Winter and Summer Olympian Hashimoto Seiko (I am sure Senator Hashimoto much prefers being where she has been, marching at the head of the Japan delegation at the Sochi games). On the Democratic Party of Japan side there was discussion of nominating of Nagatsuma Akira, the bureaucracy's bête noire.

Of December's would be candidates, there was one potential matchup that would have really sizzled. If only the Abe Shinzo LDP had put its reputation on the line by following up on the rumors and nominating Koike Yuriko to be its champion, with the Democrats responding in kind with Ren Ho. That would have been a battle for the ages, pitting sharp looks with sharp minds and even sharper tongues -- and one worthy of the prize that is Tokyo.

Very Kind Of Them #16

Over at the East Asia Forum, Peter Drysdale and his esteemed team have published my look at the Tokyo Metropolitan District's electing a new governor.

Tokyo governor election to spell trouble for the LDP?

On 9 February, voters in the richest municipality in the world, the Tokyo Metropolitan District, will elect a new governor. Despite the job's many attractions, Japan's stultified political parties were unable to find candidates within their own ranks. Instead, they have had to line themselves up behind independents — all men (there are no women running) who have either burned their bridges with the established parties or never had any bridges at all...

(Continue Reading)

As of today Masuzoe Yo'ichi seems assured of victory, with Utsunomiya Kenji again coming in second and Hosokawa Morihiro limping in in third place. The scary possibility is that General Tamogami Toshio (Ret.) has a more than a decent chance of finishing in the top three.

The DPJ's Failures Defeat Simple Description

In describing the downward arc of history, Karl Marx said that it repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Dear Karl, what comes after farce?

If you know, please write me, as I am at a loss to describe the level of ineptitude of the officers of the Democratic Party of Japan. Beyond pathetic they are, which is, what? What is beyond pathetic?

The latest episode in the DPJ's plunge into trans-Marxist levels of the ineffectual? The surprise announcement yesterday of the signing of a policy agreement in between candidate for Tokyo governor Masuzoe Yo'ichi and Tokyo Rengo, the Tokyo branch of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation. (Link - J)

So what?

Rengo (Link) is according to all common reckoning, the indispensible pillar of DPJ support. Without Rengo, the DPJ is nothing, electorally and otherwise.

Despite the seeming automatic coordination that should take place in between the two organizations, no one at DPJ Central seems to have made the call to Rengo's Tokyo offices to find out whether or not the folks there could support Hosokawa Morihiro, the DPJ's preferred candidate in the wild four-way* of those seeking to fill Inose Naoki's empty seat (Link). As it turns out, the union organization finds Hosokawa's anti-nuclear stance not to its liking, seeing it as a threat to the job security of the power and manufacturing sectors' unionized workforces. (Link - J)

So Tokyo Rengo is supporting Masuzoe.

That the DPJ officer who failed to block this incredible end around deep into DPJ territory is none other than the mouth from the south, the oleaginous Matsubara Jin (Link - J) does nothing to ease the sting of this most recent grostesque stumble. If Matsubara were in some way under threat of being held accountable for allowing Tokyo Rengo cut a private deal with the Liberal Democratic Party's favorite in the race for leader of the richest municipality of the known inhabited universe, then his humiliation would at least have a savor of Schadenfreude.

However, in Kaieda Banri's DPJ (Link) no one is ever held accountable for anything

That the present DPJ is moribund is not surprising, given its seeming inability to do anything right (lack of accountability having something to do with this situation). Do not the voters of this blessed land nevertheless at least deserve the semblance of a non-Communist opposition to the policies and practices of the Abe Administration?

As for Hosokawa, a DPJ endorsement minus support from Rengo is worth less than nothing. Thank goodness for him he has fellow former prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro in his corner.

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* Yes, I know that the field of candidates has five individuals in it. I am trying, desperately, to forget the candidature of Dr. Nakamats.

Eleven Party Leaders: By This My Hand Revealed

If the current public opinion polls hold up, and the Democratic Party of Japan suffers losses commensurate with its betrayal of the high hopes the voters had had for the party when they voted it into power in 2009, leaving the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japan Restoration Association as the top vote winners, then we are all in big trouble.

How do we know this?

Calligraphy.

The leaders of the eleven parties held a joint press conference yesterday at the National Press Club. The hosts had the party leaders write down, with felt-tip pens on giant stiff paper flip cards, the main theme(s) of their campaigns.

For those not familiar with this business of writing down slogans or mottoes, the request would probably seem a tad odd. The practice is quite common, however. A major sports figure can hardly get out of a one-on-one, sit down interview without being handed a white square of stiff paper and a felt tip pen.

Given the place of this little ritual in public life, the variation in the performance of the eleven was stunning. The majority of the leaders proved incapable of writing down a few legible characters in a white rectangle.

In so doing, the eleven revealed more about their personalities through their hands than they could ever hope to conceal with their speech.

The most beautiful and flowing calligraphy belongs, unsurprisingly, to octogenarian author and JRA leader Ishihara Shintaro. Of the eleven he was also the only one who chose to write in traditional columns, right to left -- the others all writing in magazine style, in lines, left to right.

Out of either vanity or habit or both, Ishihara finished by putting his signature on the card.

(Fished from out of the snark tank: "So this is one of your signed works, is it?" and "Do you have to leave your signature on everything?")

Ishihara’s calligraphy was not the most vain. That honor belongs to convicted felon (his case is on appeal) Suzuki Muneo of Nippon Daichi. His curlicues and hooks bring only one adjective to mind: affected.

Masuzoe Yoichi (the former Mr. Katayama Satsuki) of Japan Renaissance has pleasant enough calligraphy, if a bit uneven. Too bad that his party is just a figment of his imagination.

After the trio of self-important gentlemen, standards start sliding fast.

Shozaburo Jimi of the People's New Party wins the creativity prize for writing in two different calligraphic styles. He unfortunately also wins the stuffy pretension prize for his selection of the massive rashinban instead of the English loan word kompasu (compass).

New Komeito's Yamaguchi Natsuo's calligraphy is so formulaic and straight-laced it hurts to just look at it. The excessive angularity is matched only by the vapidity of the slogan: "Reconstruct Japan." Uh, Yamaguchi-sensei, what about reform and change?

Fukushima Mizuho of the Social Democratic Party certainly made the best use of the available space. The result unfortunately looks like a handwritten sign on a chair outside a salon listing the hair care services available inside.

Democratic Party of Japan leader and prime minister Noda Yoshihiko's style is that of a diligent student: simple, clear, considered and dull. He gets the structural design award for the neat, one-space offset of the two rhetorical questions "Do we go forward? Or do we turn around and go back?"*

The Communist Party's Ishii Shii Kazuo's calligraphy resembles my own. He has my sympathy. His slogan -- "Offer and Enact" -- encapsulates the hopeless of the Communist dream. The Communists keep offering, but since they never compromise, what they offer never gets enacted.

It is hard to classify Watanabe Yoshimi's calligraphy. Does the weird bowing of the word "fighting" (tatakau) crush the word "reform" (kaikaku) through design -- or did Watatabe just run out of space? Abstractly, is he being coy or is he just incompetent?

Now to the rock bottom.

Kada Yukiko of the Party of the Future uses the first line as a testing ground for various ways of holding the pen. It seems she has spent a life in academia and local government without ever once using a white board. Trying to read the first line, "Politics is the power to build the future" (Seiji wa mirai o tsukuru chikara) is exhausting and annoying. After making the effort and finding one has so little to show for it, one takes a glance at the succeeding to lines, sees all the splotches (How can there be ink splotches? It's a felt-tip pen!) and gives up.

LDP president Abe Shinzo's calligraphy is atrocious. No, that is not right. Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo's calligraphy is atrocious**. Abe's calligraphy is...demented. The gigantic, spindly ma followed by the minuscule tsu. The ugly, embarrassing collision of the characters sei and ji, as if the writer had never put the two together before -- which is unfortunate as seiji is "politics."

No one writes this badly. Even if one were trying to, one could not do it.

The irony of course is the slogan itself: Matto na seiji -- "right and proper politics."

For those more expert in the art, a photo collage of the leaders and their work.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Fukushima Mizuho is giving us a peace sign with her left hand.

Image courtesy: Jiji Press

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* Prime Minister Noda has been merciless in his mockery of the LDP's cringe-worthy campaign slogan, "Lets Take Japan Back!" (Nippon o torimodosu). His speeches are peppered with varying disparagements of "going back," "being taken back" or "heading back."

** I once viewed an exhibition of the personal effects and mementos of Donald Keene, organized by Columbia University on the advent of his retirement. Among the items displayed was a letter from Oe Kenzaburo in his fourth-grader scrawl. The kicker was Oe's plea in the letter, "Please do not show this letter to anyone. My calligraphy is abominable!"

Hashimoto's Women And Some Wishful Thinking

Over at σ1, Corey Wallace has a new post up about the Saturday opening of Hashimoto Toru's juku. In his post Wallace argues that the Ishin no kai movement has an Achille's heel: it seems to have only a limited attraction to women. Women candidates have had powerful symbolic force in the last two House of Representatives elections, yet fewer than 10% of the 3326 applicants for the Hashimoto juku have been women.

I am not sure I buy the argument. First, 10% of 3326 is 330, which 30 more than the total number of candidates the Ishin no kai is expected to run in the next House of Representatives election.

Second, Hashimoto, who will have final say as to the candidates, is no dummy. Where a woman candidate will have a better chance to win than man, he will select a woman to run.

Third, and this is significant, the current ruling Democratic Party of Japan is a disaster when it comes to empowering women. A glance at the current Cabinet and the sub-cabinet level political posts makes this abundently clear. It is true that former party leader Ozawa Ichiro recruited high-profile women candidates to run and win against male Liberal Democratic Party candidates. However, the association with Ozawa currently disempowers these women in intra-party politics and prevents them from receiving significant posts.

The Liberal Democratic Party, despite its reputation, did promote women -- not only to more significant posts but in greater numbers. The cabinets of Koizumi Jun'ichiro were very woman-friendly: a surprising outcome from a divorced politician with a reputation of one with an eye for, but not a commitment to, the ladies. Tanigaki Sadakazu had Koike Yuriko as his chair of the General Council; no DPJ woman has ever been anywhere near a top party post.

So if any party needs to fear its relationship with women, it is the DPJ. Contrary to misconceptions, the DPJ has historically had a greater popularity with men than with women. Given the current DPJ leadership's retrenchment on issues of special importance to women like the child-rearing allowance (E), a supposition that the DPJ will do as well among women as it did in 2009 is shaky.

As for the DPJ's views of the opening of the Hashimoto juku, the member of the party executive who states...

"Ishin no Kai's use-by date will expire in a year. If the dissolution of the lower house is moved back further, Ishin no Kai will lose its momentum."

(Link)

...is living on Fantasy Island.

The Ishin no kai will not just fade away into irrelevance like the LDP reform revolts headed by Kato Ko'ichi, Watanabe Yoshimi and Masuzoe Yo'ichi. The Ishin no kai is a popular movement with a base in the Kansai. It is not a just wooden horse from the Nagata-cho merry-go-round that has suddenly reared up and bolted away.

Stopping Hashimoto from reaching greater heights and amassing more power will require hard, hard work, with the news media colluding cooperating with the mainstream parties to hold him down. Just sitting around in the tatami room, drinking mugi-cha and swatting at mosquitoes, waiting for the Ishin no kai to fall à la Blood, Sweat and Tears, will just not suffice.

Faith In Numbers (1)

In the dip in the popularity polls of the Kan Cabinet after the quite responsible shout out by Prime Minister Kan Naoto to the Liberal Democratic Party to stop the catcalls from the sidelines and instead join with the ruling coalition in reforming country's revenues base (i.e. - raise taxes) the nation's liberal news organizations are beginning to lose their marbles panicking.

Here are the latest seat projections for the various parties in the upcoming House of Councillors election from The Asahi Shimbun.

And here are the projections from the Tokyo Shimbun


According to the median view of the of the Asahi, the DPJ will end up with exactly the same number of seats -- 54 -- in the House of Councillors as it now controls. In the Tokyo Shimbun, the party will actually lose two spots, slipping to 52 seats. In both cases, the DPJ will have to go hat in hand post election in search of (a) coalition parther(s), as it needed to win 60 seats in order to have a 50%+1 majority in the House of Councillors.

Not having a majority in the upper house is not the end of the world, of course. The most important piece of legislation, the national budget, goes into effect 30 days after it is passed by the House of Representatives, no matter what the House of Councillors does with it. The DPJ holds a comfortable 307 out of 482 480 seats* majority in the House of Representatives - so the budget is safe. However, for all other legislation or the confirmation of officials, the DPJ will have to rely on the kindness of strangers to make it to the 122 votes it needs to get anything done on the legislative front.

There also so problematic issues of control of committee chairmanships in the House of Councillors should the DPJ fail to win an outright majority. These are not on a par, however, with the simple fact that no legislation is guaranteed passage without a 50%+1 majority of the House of Councillors members present -- which opens up some interesting opportunities in the case the DPJ fall just a few votes short of an absolute majority for sudden absences of independents from the chambers at crucial moments. Two of the seven independent members of the House of Councillors are up for reelection this year, meaning that at very least, in the next Diet session, 119 votes might be sufficient for passage of legislation which the DPJ really want to see passed.

Anyway, both the projected polls leave the DPJ far short of the majorities it needs. Just how they do this seems unsound.

First is the pass given to the microparties in both polls. There are not just five, as listed in both sets of results. There are eight seven. Two of the left: the Social Democratic Party and the Women's Party. Six on the right: People's New Party, Sunrise Party (Tachiagare Nippon), New Renaissance Party (Shinto kaikaku), The Spirit of Japan (Nihon Soshinto) and the Happiness Realization Party.

The larger the number of little parties, the greater likelihood they will zero each other out the d'Hondt system, which is the method used to assign seats in the proportional part of the election. In each of the last three House of Councillors elections a party had to secure 2.2% of the national vote to win even a single proportional seat. At present, only the SDP is polling greater than 2%.

To see how the winnowing process happens, check out the wonderful d'Hondt system calculator here.

Using the calculator, I have run a basic scenario, assuming conservatively that

1) just as many voters show up in 2010 as in 2007
2) skeptical non-aligned voters choose Your Party as the non-DPJ, non-LDP alternative
3) that the Communists and the Socialists stay put
4) that Your Party captures the business lobby vote
5) that the conservative microparties steal votes that would have gone to the LDP, and
6) some voters will vote for the LDP out of nostalgia or force of habit

The results of the simulation, which you can see here, assigns the 48 available proportional seats this way:

DPJ 19
LDP 11
New Komeito 6
Your Party 6
Japan Communist Party 3
Democratic Socialist Party 2
Sunrise 1

One can fiddle about and get New Renaissance a seat that the cost of one DPJ seat. However, failing a huge jump in turnout of folks boiling mad at the DPJ, these are likely to be the results we see in the morning paper on July 12.

Sic transit nunc gloria the microparties and their purported seats.

If my simulation can be faulted, it is for being too generous to the LDP. The party chose last year to run as the anti-Ozawa Ichiro party, choosing stances not based upon their logical coherence but on whether or not Ozawa was for them or against them. Other than anti-Ozawaism, the party failed to produce a convincing reason for its wavering supporters to stick around, the reason why Masuzoe Yo'ichi quit, dismissing "LDP" as the acronym for "Lousy Dumb Party."

Which brings up my second, much larger objection to the Asahi and Tokyo Shimbun projections: the presumption of viability of the LDP as a political force in the district elections - the subject of my next post.

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*Kobayashi Chiyomi resigned from her seat the day after the close of the regular Diet session. The by-election for her Hokkaido #5 district seat will be in October. One other seat is also vacant.

The Paradox of the LDP in Opposition

The founding of the Stand Up, Japan! Party (a name that has engendered no end of sarcastic comment in the political realm) the defections of a total of nine sitting Diet members from the Liberal Democratic Party since the August election and the dispeptic vocalizations of Masuzoe Yo'ichi as regards the LDP's present leadership -- despite the absorption of Koike Yuriko and Kono Taro into the party leadership ranks -- all highlight the paradox the LDP faces as it tries to rev up its engines for the July House of Councillors elections. To whit:

The greater the decline in the support ratings for the leadership of the DPJ duarchy of Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichiro, the more fragile becomes the unity of the LDP.

That the unpopularity of the leaders of the ruling party ends up destabilizing the main opposition party is decidedly peculiar. One could almost believe a conspiracy was somehow subverting the natural order -- that Yosano Kaoru, Ozawa's counterpart in an ongoing friendly rivalry over who is the best Go player in the Diet, was conspiring with his board game buddy in a end-around play extracting from the LDP its heretofore most reliable pillars of support: fiscal conservatives and historical revisionists.

However, one need not appeal to a conspiracy to make sense of these seemingly contradictory results. The fissioning of even a rump LDP is entirely congruent with the Rule.

Third Time's The Charm - LDP Edition

It was another tough Sunday press event for the increasingly haggard-looking Tanigaki Sadakazu. The Liberal Democratic Party's president, on a probably poorly thought-through visit to Nago City in Okinawa, had hardly finished his canned demand for Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's resignation when he was asked to comment on the other Hatoyama, younger brother Kunio, who in a televised interview announced he would be leaving the LDP and forming a new party, with his estimated date of departure sometime during the Golden Week holidays. Kunio became the third well-known LDP member in last two weeks to issue a threat to leave and form a new party if Tanigaki did not not himself resign.

Tanigaki, so far from home and so close to becoming a footnote in Japanese political history, could only sputter that he was not informed as to the content of H. Kunio's announcement.

(Not an issue to hang one's hopes on, I am afraid. The discovery of content inside a Hatoyamo Kunio announcement would be a thing of wonder.)

Coming on the heels of Masuzoe Yoichi's appearance at the Foreign Correspondent's Club and Yosano Kaoru's essay for Bungei Shunju, both of which resulted in no appreciable punishment for the perpetrator (Masuzoe was replaced at the last minute as lead questioner in the House of Councillor's budget committee interpellations, which meant that the LDP had a lesser mortal asking the Cabinet the LDP's questions) H. Kunio's announcement pushes the core LDP leadership group to the brink. The party's most popular, most respected (at least in bureaucratic and business circles) and richest members have all now threatened to jump ship and form new parties if Tanigaki does not step down. It is inconceivable that the party leaders can just hunker down and hope for the storm to pass. They have to either expel the rebels, strip them of all party privileges or accede to their demands.

All in all, it looks like it is going to be a very interesting Monday at LDP headquarters.

You Do Not Speak For Us

Liberal Democratic Party House of Councillors member, former Minister of Health, Welfare and Labour and Ranking Member of the House of Councillors Budget Committee Masuzoe Yoichi was scheduled to lead the questioning of the Cabinet over the 2010 Budget bill in House of Councillors Budget Committee interpellation sessions today and tomorrow.

That is until the core leaders of the LDP decided yesterday to relieve Masuzoe-san of his responsibilities.

It seems they have a problem with sedition.

Petty of them, really.