Parties Talking To The Party

"Normalization? What normalization? Sino-Japanese relations have always been run throught the Komeito." *

Two weeks ago on Channel News Asia I tried to explain that newly announced Cabinet and Liberal Democratic Party line ups hinted that repair work on the Sino-Japanese political relationship was less likely to be conducted state-to-state as party-to-party. (Link)

Yesterday, at a lecture/press availability, New Komeito vice representative Kitagawa Kazuo revealed that unnamed high-level members of the LDP and New Komeito executive secretariats will be traveling to China in October to meet with counterparts in the Chinese Communist Party in what should be read as a preparatory visit for a possible Xi Jingping-Abe Shinzo direct dialogue on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in November. Unsurprisingly, Kitagawa made mentioned of the two high ranking officials of the LDP I highlighted when I talked on CNA two weeks ago. (Link - J)

Working party-to-party, in what I called in the video a privatization of the relationship, is not necessarily a bad thing, despite the negative connotations "privatization" has. Working LDP/NK-to-CCP certainly allows both sides to get past the cumbersome prerequisites each of the respective governments has declared are the minimal decencies that must be met before the two sides can sit across from each other in those grotesquely overstuffed armchairs the Chinese favor.

However, those of us who still harbor illusions of living in a democracy rather than in what is one of a set of strangely similar Asian plutocratic aristocracies (thank you, Indonesia, for keeping lit the pathetic tiny flame of meritocracy) still must wince at princelings convivially meeting each other in their private capacities rather than facing off against each other in the public arena.

Given how close we might be to stupid shooting breaking out between paramilitary forces of both sides, we possibly should not be so picky about how conversations get restarted.

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* Not an actual quote, of course. C'mon.


Image: Kitagawa Kazuo speaking on 17 September 2014.
Image courtesy: New Komeito official website.

Abe Shinzo's Virtual Referendum

Today is supposed to be crunch day: the day when the New Komeito decides whether to accept or reject the Liberal Democratic Party's sudden cram down of an expansion of Japan's definition of constitutional self-defense to include collective self-defense.

The choice is not a happy or an easy one.

The New Komeito's mothership, the Soka Gakkai lay religious (I know that that is an oxymoron. So does the SG. Hence its paranoia) organization has already expressed its opposition to the LDP's plan to reverse through a simple Cabinet Decision (kakugi kettei) the Japanese government's heretofore decades-old official position that the exercise of the right of collective self defense is unconstitutional. For the SG, the only proper path for such a reversal of a previous unconstitutional ruling is a revision or amendment of the Constitution (Link - J).

For the New Komeito, surrendering to LDP pressure on a Cabinet Decision would set the party formally at odds with the SG leadership. This would, of course, do wonders for the party's longtime claims to be independent of the SG. At the same time it would be extremely confusing for the SG flock -- who vote en masse for the New Komeito because is it the political face of the SG.

Why would the LDP be putting its ruling coalition partner through this ordeal? I have speculated that the Abe administration's appreciation of its inability to halt hemorrhaging of public support not only for "constitutional revision via Cabinet Decision" but collective self-defense itself has triggered a panic response. (Link)

What is making the rounds of Nagata-cho now (and for this insight I am indebted to Michael Penn of Shingetsu News) is the idea of a snap dissolution of the House of Representatives after the end of the current Diet ordinary session.

On the face of it, a House of Representatives election now poses unnecessary risks for the LDP and Abe Shinzo. The party already has huge majority in the House of Representatives reflecting the frustration and disgust the voters felt for the political process in December 2012. There is no guarantee that the voters, when given a chance at passing judgment on the Abe Administration, will not opt for independents in the district seat elections and opposition parties in the proportional seat elections. Yes, the polls numbers for the LDP and for the Abe Cabinet are fantastic and the opposition parties abysmal -- but as the House of Councillors election in 2007 showed, the public has the power to clip Abe Shinzo's pretensions of political mastery.

A snap election for the House of Representatives does, of course, nothing to change the seating arrangements in the House of Councillors. The break ups of the Your Party, the disgrace of Watanabe Yoshimi and the division of the Japan Restoration Party into two have only complicated, not eliminated, the possibility of a crafting of a Hawk-Hawk-Hawk (add as many Hawks here as you like) coalition in the House to replace the existing Hawk-Dove LDP-New Komeito coalition.

The argument for the prime minister dissolving the House of Representatives is compelling. Given the thuggishness of reversing a government constitutionality ruling by fiat, the Abe Cabinet will be searching for a means of justifying its actions. A snap election, with the certainty of a strong, possibly entirely extirpating, victory of the LDP over its scattered, fissioning and puny opponents, would demonstrate, according to Abe, the LDP and the Yomiuri media empire, that the public strongly supports the Abe Cabinet's behavior.

Of course, an LDP victory would not be a virtual referendum on the party's policies. It would be a reflection of the current pitiful state of the opposition parties. In a true referendum, such as the one that a revision of the Constitution would require, the voters would get the chance to choose between "Yes" and "No." In the whispered-about snap dissolution and general election, the choice would be between "Yes" and "Nothing."

The further arguments for a snap election are an increase in the LDP's freedom of action and a coverup of the Abe Cabinet's continued fecklessness as regards structural reform.

The LDP's rank-and-file, the young and militant mass of Abe Shinzo acolytes that Machimura Nobutaka finds distressing (Link) are not wrong in wondering why, in the face of polls showing support for the LDP in the 40% range, the LDP has not ditched its coalition with the cautious New Komeito. The relationship does seem an artifact of another time -- when the long term trend in voter behavior was away from the LDP, despite all the financial rewards being dangled, toward alternatives (the 1993 opposition coalition, the New Frontier Party, the Democratic Party of Japan, the Nippon Isshin no Kai, et cetera). for the wild things in the party the obvious choise is to force the New Komeito to chose one way or the other on a Cabinet Decision -- and if they balk, dump the coalition and go to the public for its response.

After the victory, the party could roll up its sleeves and set to work on really remaking Japan, free of the New Komeito's annoying obstructionism.

As for structural reform, on Monday the 16th the government is supposed to release a "third time's the charm" rerevised Third Arrow of Abenomics. All signs are that the government will, despite being given two chances to rethink and revamp its presentation, fail to include the details and synergies global investors and the world media crave. (Link)

What better time then, to turn around to the rest of the world with a defiant, "What? You don't like it? Well, we asked the Japanese voters and they love it!"

So what is the likelihood on this Friday morning of Abe and Friends going through with a virtual referendum after the end of the regular Diet session? Incredibly, I am thinking they are 50-50.


Later - Jiji is reporting that the New Komeito is looking for a duplicitous out smudging the line in between individual and collective self-defense (Link). Wish them luck -- given the time frame on coming to a decision on specific scenarios, New Komeito negotiators will have no opportutinity to coordinate their positions with the Soka Gakkai directorate.

Abe Shinzo's Prospect Of Unwilling Political Fidelity

Watanabe Yoshimi explains himself.

On Twitter, Corey Wallace makes an excellend point about the potential for Abe Shinzo and his allies to go on a revisionist breakout after the summit with President Barack Obama: with the Japan Restoration Party's Hashimoto Toru navel gazing about his Osaka Metropolitan District Plan (Link) and the revelations regarding the Your Party's Watanabe Yoshimi's astonishing 800 milllion yen in personal loans from the CEO of DHC (Link), Abe who was entertaining (literally, it was discussed over a pair of dinners) the idea of dumping the cautious New Komeito in favor of the militant and revolutionary JRP and YP and his Liberal Democratic Party find themselves in the unenviable poisition of no longer being able to threaten their long-time alliance partners with replacement.

Sticking with the New Komeito means attempting crazy policy fiddles like a "we will say this but cannot possibly mean it" promise to reinterpret the Constitution, making unconstitutional collective self-defense (CSD) constitutional, but only in the immediate geographical neighborhood of Japan and on the high seas (Link)

Note to Japan's present and potential security partners: stay close to Japan and away from land.

With Abenomics, the great legitimizer of this second coming of The Abe Cabinet, about to enter a very very rough patch indeed (Link) Abe will have a much reduced capacity to simply bludgeon the New Komeito into submission. Having to make concessions to NK conservatism, particularly in security affairs, complicates if not complete negates the Abe strategy of countering opposition to and criticism of his revisionist political program by the giving to the U.S. Pentagon everything it desires, whether it be in terms of bases or a more activist and proactive Japanese military posture.

Rather than the well-discussed shibboleths (Yasukuni, comfort women) of Abe Shinzo and Friends, what seems set to trip up the Abe Revolution are the sources of its heretofore terrible strength: a jazzed-up economy and clingy allies in the Diet.

Now The Home Wrecker

The Yomiuri Shimbun, ever ignorant of a newspaper's role being that of a reporter of news, not a creator, is playing anti-matchmaker again in the long-running drama Jiko renritsu seiken with its recurring question, "How long can the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito keep pretending they are not really made for each other?"

In the latest episode, the New Komeito, according to the Yomiuri、is "on pins and needles" (piri piri) over Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's overtures toward the Your Party and elements of the opposition. Abe is offering a policy agreement linkup (seisaku kyogi) to the Your Party and elements of the Japan Restoration Party in four areas: reinterpretation of constitutional restrictions on collective defense, actual constitutional revision, East Asian diplomacy and elimination of the power of local school boards. The New Komeito, which has stuck with the LDP through good times and bad, has very definite views on these items which are not entirely in line with those of Abe and his coterie. The New Komeito also has a definite sense of the sequencing of policy agreements: first the members of the coalition agree amongst themselves on the policies, then they approach the opposition or non-aligned parties and MPs with an offer of cooperation. (Link - J)

The link up of the New Komeito and the LDP after years of mutual animosity was one of the miracles of the 1990s, second in its shock value only to the eviscerating (for the Socialist Party) LDP-Socialist Party coalition, which for all time exposed the LDP's raw and bottomless appetite for power. The coalition has been extremely good for both the New Komeito and the LDP, the former for the protection it gives to The Corporation, the latter for the 7~8 million sure votes for LDP candidates in the Diet district and local elections. The loyalty of the New Komeito voters saved the LDP from utter annihilation in the August 2009 House of Representatives election, with approximately one quarter of all votes for LDP district candidates coming from New Komeito voters. The NK really took on the chin in 2009 too: all of its members holding district seats, the party's top leaders, were turned out.

However, the temptation for the LDP to dump the New Komeito after nearly two decades of cohabitation seems too strong to resist. With just the remaining members of the Your Party as partners, the LDP would have majorities in the Houses of Representatives and House of Councillors. With all or part of the JRP in a three party cohabitation (what I call the "Hawks-Hawks-Hawks Coalition" as opposed to the current "Hawks and Doves Coalition") the new policy cooperation arrangement would have a gigantic supermajority in the House of Representatives and a solid majority in the House of Councillors. Not the 162 seats Abe needs in the House of Councillors to pass revisions of the Constitution -- but more than enough seats to pass just about anything else tickling the fancy of the PM and his many advisers and hangers-on.

Abe and his minister of education Shimamura Hakubun cannot and probably never for a moment forget the New Komeito's spiking of Abe's first attempt to impose a more patriotic regimen and regime upon the nation's schools back in 2007. The New Komeito's rejection and rewriting of the first ever revisions of the 1946 Education Act left a bleeding hole in the side of the first Abe Cabinet -- not the first wound the first Abe Cabinet had inflicted upon it, certainly, but one of the most painful.

Ever since that experience Abe has probably been convinced that the coalition with the New Komeito was a marriage of convenience only. Pretty much everyone with a sense of Abe's mindset probably agrees it is now a highly inconvenient marriage for him.

The Yomiuri should nevertheless just stand back and let nature take its course, rather than cheering for the LDP-New Komeito break up.

Let us keep this seemly, folks.

While were are on the subject of keeping things seemly, Temple University Japan's Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies has uploaded the video of my January 9 talk to its You Tube channel. Please check it out (Link) to see if I indeed follow my own advice.


Later - If the above image mystifies, please read Yuka Hayashi's interview.

Later still - The Economist has checked in with an extended look at the subject, with The Corporation mentioned by name. (Link)

Original image courtesy: Nikkan Gendai

You Would Not Want To Be One Of His Allies

The Yomiuri Shimbun has published an account of the events leading up Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's visit to Yasukuni Shrine two days ago (Link). If the timeline and the quotations in the story are accurate -- and there is no reason to doubt that they are -- a picture emerges of a ruthless Abe, unbound by courtesy or caution in his dealings with his most prominent political allies.

Here is the snippet on Abe's call to Yamaguchi Natsuo, the leader of the party whose House of Councillors votes Abe relies upon to guarantee the passage of legislation:

"I'll visit the shrine at my own discretion," Abe told Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of New Komeito, the junior coalition partner of his Liberal Democratic Party, over the phone at about 11 a.m. on Thursday, about 30 minutes before he headed to the shrine.

"I cannot support that," Yamaguchi told Abe.

"I didn't think you'd agree with me," Abe said before hanging up the phone.

Abe also informed LDP Secretary General Shigeru Ishiba of his intention to visit the shrine in the same morning.

What the Yomiuri narrative fails to clarify is that Yamaguchi and Ishiba already knew Abe was on his way to Yasukuni before the PM made his courtesy calls. Major news outlets began publishing and airing alerts regarding the Abe visit 30 minutes prior to Abe's 11 a.m. call to Yamaguchi (like this story that appeared on the MSN Sankei News site at 10:26 am). Ishiba found out about the visit from the reporters covering him, when they all started shouting at him, "What is your opinion of the prime minister visiting Yasukuni?" An exasperated Ishiba replied, "Why are you all asking me my opinion of a Yasukuni visit?" The reporters shouted back, "Because it has been announced!" Ishiba, trying to appear nonchalant, turned and walked away, repeating the news to himself, "Oh, it's been announced. Hmmmm."

As for the Yomiuri's account of how Abe handled his chief cabinet secretary Suga Yoshihide -- the man charged not only with making policies happen but devising the cover stories -- that too is eye-opening. Suga's extraordinarily deft management of the policy agenda and the daily message have left many wondering whether he, Suga, is not indeed the de facto prime minister. The Yomiuri's account clearly puts Suga in a subservient role, left to devise a desperate strategy of damage control after failing to change the prime minister's mind on whether or not to visit Yasukuni.　The revelation that the Abe statement on why he visited Yasukuni (Link) was devised by Suga after Abe had made his decision goes a long way to explaining the raging insincerity of Abe's post-visit address.

[An aside: I know that the theory that speakers look up and to the right when they are trying to retrieve concocted versions of events from memory has been tested and found wanting -- but gosh, it sure looked like Abe was doing just that during the NHK live broadcast.]

Running roughshod over the leader of the LDP's ruling coalition partner, the secretary-general of the LDP and his own chief cabinet secretary tells all three men Abe's thinking as to who is in charge and who walks three feet behind in this government. The rock hard treatment of Yamaguchi indicates further that the dinners Abe has had in the last month with the heads of the Your Party and the Japan Restoration Party (the latest being a three hour affair with Osaka City mayor Hashimoto Toru on the Emperor's birthday - Link - J) were not mere social get-togethers. Even after the fission of the Your Party in response to Abe's dinner with party leader Watanabe Yoshimi (Link - J), the number of seats held by the Your Party and the JRP in the House of Councillors are more than enough for Abe to tell Yamaguchi and the New Komeito, "You know, you can be replaced..."

Which is what "I didn't think you would agree with me" means, ultimately.

Party At Watanabe Yoshimi's: An Early Post-Mortem

The steady if unspectacular rise of the Your Party (Minna no to - "Everyone's Party") Japan's answer to Germany's Free Democrats, the most liberal (in the classical, Edmund Burke sense of the word) party ever in postwar Japanese politics, is history. (Link)

The rupture in between party leader Watanabe Yoshimi and his former secretary-general Eda Kenji occurred months ago, leading to a peculiar situation of an authoritarian leader and his rebel former second-in-command cohabiting in utter contempt of each other. However it took the passage of the Special Secrets Protection Act, and the public role the Your Party played in transforming the Liberal Democratic Party's bill into law, to convince a decent number of Your Party members of the Diet to join Eda in defecting.

On the surface, Your Party did no worse in its attempt to modify the LDP draft secrets bill than the other two parties -- the New Komeito and the Japan Restoration Party -- who co-sponsored the bill. All three failed to demand from the LDP the severe changes the bill needed to serve its ostensible purpose of protecting Japanese citizens from possible harm. Fooled and/or perhaps tempted by the prospect of influencing an overwhelmingly powerful LDP, the three parties asked for only the weakest of amendments -- which a bemused LDP leadership, in a false show of magnanimity, gleefully accepted. In the case of the JRP's proposals, the LDP took the liberty of accepting the JRP ideas that made a bad bill even worse while ignoring the proposals suggesting a setting of limits on bureaucratic power. The JRP's humiliation at this cherry-picking -- which, to be fair, was inherent in the JRP's ridiculous mix of ideas -- led the JRP to boycott the final vote in the House of Representatives, leaving the New Komeito and the Your Party (minus some defectors led by Eda) to swallow their pride and vote for the monstrosity.

Classing the Your Party as a party in opposition has always been problematic. Your Party, despite its reformist creed, sat on the sidelines and cast stones during the brief three years a Democratic Party of Japan-led coalition was in power. Effectively if not openly Your Party was a cat's paw of the disgraced LDP, scratching and often wounding the upstart Democrats.

Once the change in power reversed itself last December, the Your Party has a right to take a seat at the table. It did not, however, leaving Eda and others in the party wondering what the party's role was. If all that the Your Party could glean from having been an agent of the LDP was a few more seats in the Diet, then the quid pro quo, such as it was, was unfulfilling. Collaboration with the LDP to tear down the Democrats should have resulted in significant influence on policy if the silent bargain was to be seen as worthwhile.

Your Party's survival as an entity entered a critical phase when it entered into negotiations with the LDP on the secrecy bill. No one could ignore the glaring contradiction in between the party's stated goals of trimming the powers of the bureaucracy and the secrecy bill's stunning bequest of power to the bureaucrats to wall off information from the public eye.

What doomed Your Party solidarity was what should have been the party's ace-in-the-hole: party leader Watanabe's close personal friendship with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Watanabe was one of a trio -- who with Abe formed a quartet jokingly called the "Abe Road Group" -- that pushed Abe in August of 2012 to run for the presidency of the LDP. Watanabe and Abe dined together and have kept in constant contact, even as the Your Party was in supposed opposition to the LDP.

That Watanabe could not capitalize on his friendship with the head of the ruling party, by getting more from the LDP in terms of concessions on issues supposedly vital to the Your Party, begged the question as to what, if anything, membership in the Your Party meant, as an electoral platform and in terms of influence on policy and governance.

The answer, according to yesterday's 14 defectors, is that it meant nothing -- which left them no recourse but to follow their instincts for self-preservation.

The fission of the Your Party poses a question to all the smaller parties in the Diet, including the come-hell-or-high-water LDP ally the New Komeito. With the LDP in such a dominant position, and given fates of the smaller parties that have taken part in ruling coalitions or coalitions of convenience over the past 15 years, what can a party do to retain relevance on the policy front while remaining viable as a political entity?

Later - Many thanks to the anonymous commenter who noted the error in the title.

Can This Piece of ...Not Fully Considered Legislation

So close...but no.

The latest edition of The Economist does the great service of alerting its readers as to what is becoming the bugbear of the extraordinary Diet session: the Liberal Democratic Party leadership's desire to pass an Official Secrets bill. Unfortunately, the article misses more than it hits. (Link)

The crux of the matter is whether or not the country even needs the legislation. As the article points out, there are already laws on the books meting out special, long (in Japanese terms) sentences for leaking military secrets -- the most important class of secrets. However, the instances of SDF personnel intentionally leaking or stealing classified information that we know of are few and pathetic. The police thought they had a huge case in 2007 when the pick up of a Chinese national on a passport violation led to the discovery of Aegis radar data on the laptop of her husband, a Maritime SDF officer. However, the case against the MSDF officer collapsed in confusion over whether or not the data was a file miscopied in an exchanges of pornographic images done with other SDF officers or indeed was a part of the openly available teaching materials of an MDSF training facility in Hiroshima Prefecture. Eventually the officer, who was facing a possible 10 years in prison, was given a four year suspended sentence. (Link)

As for other government employees, as the cover up of the Green Cross HIV-tainted blood product sales and the refusal of successive governments to acknowledge the existence of the three so-called secret accords on the Okinawa turnover demonstrate, Japanese officials, even retired ones, have no problem keeping secrets. In the latter case, officials continue to protect the secrecy of the accords even after the U.S. copies of the documents in question could be viewed in U.S. government archives (Link). That one would become unemployable, lose one's pension, be ostracized from one's social networks and be liable for arrest on even a minor charge of mishandling public information has been more than enough of a deterrent against leaking information in need of protection.

Indeed, as the case of the Green Cross HIV-infected blood products showed, the problematic tendency is that Japan's public servants do not, indeed, serve the public. Health, Labour and Welfare ministry officials refused to acknowledge the existence of documents supporting the assertions of HIV-infected claimants until a crusading, non-LDP minister of health named Kan Naoto forced his subordinates to cough up the documents the bureaucrats had claimed either did not exist or could not be found. (Link)

The proximate stimulus for the current bill -- the contents of which, in a bit of trial baloonery, the LDP has assured friendly reporters is "largely settled" (osuji goi shita) with the LPD's cautious coalition partner the New Komeito (Link - J) -- seems to be the prosecutors office's inability to find a serious crime in the incident three years ago of an irate Japan Coast Guard officer's uploading to video sharing sites of the recordings demonstrating conclusively that a Chinese fishing ship had been steered into collisions with two Japan Coast Guard vessels. The then DPJ-led government had desperately sought to suppress the videos in an effort to prevent the spiraling out of control of a diplomatic crisis over the arrest of fishing vessel's captain.*

The government (actually, if we are going to be pointing fingers, the preening, tone-deaf and self-adoring Chief Cabinet Secretary of the time) had sought to cover up the facts of the case against the captain. However, a maniac had viciously attacked Japanese government employees. In the case of the rear ending of the JCG Yonaguni, the Chinese captain rammed his boat into a manned vessel that was neither in his way nor moving. Covering those facts up, or even trying to, never should have been accorded the mantle of realist diplomacy. It was a dereliction of an elected politician's duty to protect Japan's national interests -- or at very least, the health and welfare of Japan Coast Guard personnel. It was also, as the Banyan blog argued at the time, a politically costly insult to the intelligence of the Japanese public. (Link)

Which highlights the reason why the Abe government should abandon the secrets bill -- or if some tightening of the legal consequences of information leakage has to be passed in order to please the intelligence communities of Japan's partners, why the government should scrap the current bill in favor of one drawn up by a cross-party team of the smartest legal minds in the Diet, including, most importantly, legal experts of the Communist Party: the legislation will not be used to protect secrets. Instead it will be used most often, if not exclusively, to declare secret, either pre-emptively or ex post facto, horrible mistakes and crimes.

Ask former prime minister Kan Naoto, who was not only the hero in the Green Cross scandal but the unfortunately hands-off prime minister at the time of Chinese boat captain incident and the hero again in his shaming of the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company and central government bureaucrats trying to keep him from getting a handle on the situation at the Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power plant. Mr. Kan can probably talk from dawn until dusk about the obstruction, lying and malfeasance done in the name of the greater public good.

Later - The press is reporting that the New Komeito's project team on the Official Secrets bill (in J. - Tokutei himitsu hogo hoan) has given its a approval for a revised version of the bill that purportedly has provisions guaranteeing the freedom of the press and the people's right to know. When one considers how much those principles were trampled when officials lacked an ability to class certain information as officially secret, one is left to wonder how these new countermanding rights are supposed to be engaged and enforced. (Link - J)

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* One largely forgotten part of the Chinese fishing vessel story: the captain was not initially arrested for ramming the JCG vessels. Instead he was arrested on the charges of illegal fishing. While this is standard Japanese law enforcement practice -- arresting a suspect on a laughable minor charge until the suspect confesses or evidence can be collected proving the existence of a major crime -- charging the captain with illegal fishing was an assertion of sovereignty charge, which the Chinese government could argue violated a mutual understanding that it had with the Japanese government to merely encourage fishing rules violators to run back to their home countries, rather than a violation of the free and safe use of the seas charge, which was the actual crime of the Chinese captain.

One Simple Answer To A Complex Question / A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

A Nagging Question: How is it that Japan's opposition parties, particularly the Democratic Party of Japan, are now so moribund? Did not the DPJ win a landslide victory in 2009? How can these once high fliers now be so irrelevant?

Something Like An Answer: Holding aside the New Komeito, which is an entirely different genus of political beast from anything else out there, there are only two parties in Japan with deep bases -- the Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party. Commitments to these parties are reliable, in the first case thanks to personal ties, self interest and a recognition of the durability of power elites, in the second in a faith in an ideology and notions of the family.

For the other parties, loyalty is largely a matter of the head, not the heart. In the specific case of the DPJ, its support, save among members of the Rengo league of labor unions, was at its height a kilometer wide and a centimeter deep. When the going got tough, public support evaporated.

As Pink Floyd asked:

Was it love?
Or was it the idea of being in love?

(Link)

During the DPJ's rise in popularity to where its leaders cobbled together a surrogate, but supposedly honest and trustworthy, big tent center-right party, public support arose from out of the latter: the idea of an opposition rather than the actual opposition party in question. The same seemingly holds true for the backing for the other non-Communist opposition parties -- their supporters are not in love with them, they are in love with the idea of being in love with them.

Reviving the DPJ (Link) is thus unlikely on a technical level -- for the most part, its supporters had a crush on it, not a relationship with it.

OK, So I Am Surprised, I Really Am

Hey,

Hirano Tatsuo, my apologies, you really do know Iwate Prefecture.

When you quit the Democratic Party of Japan in April, I thought the decision daft or at least confused (Link). However, when the smoke cleared from the circular firing squad this Sunday night, you were the one still standing. Omedeto!

You in Iwate and Itokazu Keiko (running with Social Democratic, People's Life, Green Breeze and Communist support, of all the lefty things) in Okinawa kept the Liberal Democratic Party from sweeping all of the single seat constituencies.

May the LDP send more former college rugby coaches to run against you in the future.

Democratic Party of Japan, congratulations. Seriously.

Everyone knew you were a goner in the single seat districts. Everyone knew you were in dire straits in the proportional seat voting.

However, in the two- and three-seat districts, your candidates toughed it out.

This was a bad election for you, the party garnering fewer votes in the proportional side of the ballot than the New Komeito. Still, third place is far from a full blown catastrophe. With a new leader (Yes, Mr. Kaieda Banri, your time, though brief, is up) and some decent candidates, the party can revive to serve as an honorable opposition.

[An aside, but the most wicked bon mot of the morning? The commentator on the Asa Zuba! wide show who cheerily suggested to DPJ bigwig Nagatsuma Akira, "Well, now that there are fewer of you, it should be easier to smooth over differences of opinion."]

Your Party and Japan Communist Party, what happened to your supposed juice? You, the opposite ends of Japan’s economic policy prescription spectrum with your shared contempt for the bureaucracy, you were supposed to be the havens of protest votes forced to run screaming from out of the wreckage of the DPJ.

In the end though, you both came up short, with 4.7 million and 5.1 million votes, respectively.

This was your big day, your opportunity to do some damage on the proportional side. Your performance, however, was only OK, with strong district candidates bailing you out in the end.

Social Democratic Party, you live! Of course, by losing one of the two seats you were defending, you are now down to five seats, meaning that while you are still considered a party in Diet, you are at the five member limit.

So you live to die another day.

Anti-nuclear activists Kira Yoshiko (JCP) and Yamamoto Taro (independent), you not only won district seats in Tokyo, but shoved Takemi Keizo, an LDP Washington insider running as the representative of the health care industry into the fifth and final slot. You both now have six years to harass the nuclear industry and its supporters from the inside, rather than cacophonously from without.

Zing! No, Double Zing!

[How can anyone resist having a young (she’s only 30) Communist woman senator whose name is pronounced “Killer”?]

Japan Restoration Party, they must like you in the Kansai. They must really, really like you. At 6.3 million proportional seat votes, you are effectively half as popular nationally as you were seven months ago. With everyone was writing you off, though, winning six proportional seats must feel good.

It has been hard not to notice, though, that your two top vote winners in the proportional vote were:

1) a professional wrestler close to the Pyongyang regime and an eager participant in that regime's propaganda actions and

2) the militant anti-Pyongyang former finance ministry bureaucrat who has fought, fought, fought to win freedom and justice for those abducted by the DPRK

That these two are your #1 and #2 in the proportional vote reflects what we can only call awesome party message coherence.

Do The Forces Of Constitutional Revision Have A Chance? (2)

[Part 2 of 2. Part 1 I published yesterday.]

Assuming that everything goes perfectly -- and I do mean perfectly -- for the Liberal Democratic Party in the district seat elections on July 21, and assuming its allies in constitutional revision the Japan Restoration Party and the Your Party pick up the majority of the seats remaining after one subtracts the four seats the New Komeito must/will win, the combined forces of constitutional revision will control 123 of the 161 162 seats they need to have a 2/3rds majority in the House of Councillors.

Can the forces of revision win the further 38 39 seats they need to reach the magical 161 162 total?

In addition to voting for the district candidate, voters write either the name of a party member or the name of a party on a separate ballot. These votes are tallied according to party, with the vote for the individual counted as a vote for the party with whom he or she is affiliated.

The 48 seats up for election on this separate ballot are the proportional vote. Seats are divvied up using the d’Hondt method, meaning the vote totals are divided by one, then by two, then by three..with the largest remaining result getting the next available seat.

If you do not want to think to too much about the method but just want the results, here is a great calculator (Tip of the hat to Tobias Harris of Observing Japan).

The first guess one needs to make regarding the inputs, and it is a doozy, is how many folks will show up at the polling stations on July 21. As I insinuated in a post the other day major elections of the past year have featured record-breaking or close-to-record-setting low levels of voter turnout.

The causes of the low level of voter participation in 2013 are not hard to discern:

-a secular reduction in interest in elections since electoral reforms in the 1990s,

-a reduction in interest in politics after the collapse of the credibility of the Democratic Party of Japan as an alternative to the LDP,

- the exhaustion from having had a national election and a change of government only six months earlier and local elections only a few weeks ago,

- ridiculously high support ratings for both the Cabinet and the LDP in the public opinion polls (the demoralization factor) and

- the absence of real policy choice in between the parties.

The last items does not mean that the parties are indistinguishable, for they do offer different mixes of policies. However, none of these mixes is either inspired or inspiring, leading voters more likely to choose, when they show up, the parties that can enact any policies.

To these reasons for sitting out this election out we have to add the possibility of unpleasant weather on election day actively dissuading folks from leaving their homes to go to the polling stations (this summer has been naaaaassssty!).

The number of persons casting ballots I come up with, in a brutish, what-the-hell calculus, is 48,000,000 . That is a whopping 12 million voters down from the House of Councillors elections in 2007 and 2010. It is also a greater drop than the huge fall in between the 2009 and 2012 House of Representatives elections, when 10,000,000 voters who showed up in 2009 failed to show up last year.

The voting rate in this guestimate is nevertheless still more than 44.67% recorded in the 1995 House of Councillors election. The median age of the voters has risen since 1995, and older voters vote more, so that despite all the negative forces listed above, a turnout rate of 46% (based on the latest, July 8 figure from the Ministry for General Affairs and Telecommunications of 104,780,660 persons eligible to vote) seems about right.

Now, how will these votes be divided up?

Let us make two incredibly generous assumptions to critics who find me too solicitous of the LDP, one supposition regarding the DPJ based on atmospherics and one boneheaded assertion. The first is that the LDP does no better in the vote than its current 42% rate of support in public opinion polls, despite the concentration of power the drop in voter participation gives to vote machines. The second is that centrist voters, wary of giving the LDP too much support, will give their votes to the main center-right opposition DPJ, JRP and Your Party in about equal amounts. The third is that public trust in the DPJ has sunk to the point where the Your Party and the DPJ win exactly the same number of votes. The fourth, the dumb one, is that at least 7,000,000 folks plunk down for the New Komeito and its candidates.

The voting numbers I get, in aggregate, are:

LDP 20,000,000
New Komeito 7,000,000
DPJ 5,000,000
Your Party 5,000,000
JRP 4,500,000
JCP 3,500,000
SDP 1,800,000
Other parties 1,200,000

Plugging these raw vote totals into the D’Hondt calculator, the following proportional seat distribution pops out:

LDP 22
New Komeito 7
DPJ 5
Your Party 5
JRP 4
JCP 3
SDP 1
Other parties 0

The projection, biased upon the assumption of no last minute reversal of the decay of support for the DPJ, still only secures only 31 seats for the revisionists, 7 seats short of Constitutional Revision Nirvana.

The fly in the constitutional revision crowd's punch bowl is...surprise! (not really) the NEW KOMEITO. Unless the leaders of the New Komeito or That Which Cannot Be Named tell their voters to not show up on the 21st, their immobile mass will outweigh any projected "rightward shift" in favor of constitutional revision.

I invite readers to play around with the calculator, trying out higher voter turnouts and different support levels based on the public opinion survey the individual reader may fancy.

Fiddle as one might, the leap to the 161 162 seats needed for constitutional revision -- even when making assumptions equivalent to pretty much everything goes the revisionists' way on election eve -- remains just too far off.

The July 21, 2013 Elections - By the Numbers

Total number of candidates: 433

Total number of seats up for election 121

Number of district seat candidates: 271

Number of district seats up for election: 73

Number of proportional seat candidates: 162

Number of proportional seats up for election: 48

Total number of candidates, by party:

LDP 78
JCP 63
DPJ 55
JRP 44
Your Party 34
New Komeito 21
Life 11
SDP 9
Green Breeze 8
Other 83

Support for the parties (NHK poll of 7-9 June 2013)

LDP 41.7%
JCP 2.2%
DPJ 5.8%
JRP 1.5%
Your Party 1.5%
New Komeito 5.1%
Life 0.1%
SDP 0.4%
Green Breeze 0.0%
Other 0.2%
None of the above 34.6%
Don't know/can't say: 7.0%

The number of seats "X would have to win in order to do Y"

- parties nominally in support of constitutional revision to have the 2/3rds majority of seats in the House of Councillors necessary to revise the Constitution: 100

- the LDP to have all by itself majorities in both Houses of the Diet: 72

- the LDP and the New Komeito to have majorities in both Houses of the Diet: 63


Voter turnout - the last time

- last time these seats were up for election (29 July 2007): 58.64%

- last House of Councillors election (11 July 2010): 57.92%

- last national election (House of Representatives, 16 December 2012):　59.32% (historical low)

- latest major election (Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, 23 June 2013): 43.50% (second lowest ever)


Voter Turnout - Lowest

House of Councillors: 44.50% (23 July 1995)

House of Representatives: 59.32% (16 December 2012)

Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly: 40.80% (6 July 1995)

[Complete revival of the (Lack of) Spirit of '95 will guarantee Abe a historic victory on the 21st. It will also put a permanent asterisk mark next to the victory, with the explanation "Earned But Not Merited"]


Demographics

% of candidates who are women: 24% (second highest % in last 30 years)

% of candidates who are younger than 50 years of age: 43%

% of candidates who are 60 years of age or older: 26%

An Impossible Result

It's impossssssible!
To put a Cadillac in your nose.
It's just imposssssible!

- Steve Martin, Let's Get Small (1977)

Public opinion polls are supposed to be a reality check for politicians, keeping them from getting either too big for their britches or too far out ahead of the curve.

However, sometimes the results of public opinion polls demonstrate that the pollsters, the public or both have a slippery grip on reality.

NHK on Monday released the results of its June 7-9 public opinion poll. The results were largely in accordance with expectations:

- the Cabinet is still popular (62% supporting, 20% not supporting)

- the turnout for the July 21 House of Councillors election will be poor, but not historically poor (58% of the respondents said they "definitely will vote" - indicating that actual turnout will be around 50%)*

- a solid majority of the voters (64%) want the Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito alliance to win enough seats in the House of Councillors in July to be in control of that House. Only 29% want the twisted Diet (nejire kokkai), the current splitting of control of the Houses of the Diet in between the ruling and opposition parties, to continue

- a more than two-thirds majority (69%) of the voters appreciate the government's economic programs, a.k.a., Abenomics

- the LDP is the only major party around today

Q: Which party do you support?

LDP 41.7%
DPJ 5.8%
New Komeito 5.1%
Communist 2.2%
JRP 1.5%
Your Party 1.5%
SDP 0.4%
Life 0.1%
None 34.5%

There is one unexpected result -- and it is a doozy.

To the question of whether the respondents personally felt they had accrued benefits from Abenomics, the replies this month were:

I am feeling them 11%

I am not feeling them 46%

I cannot say either way 37%

What is so charming about this result? It is impossible.

Last month (10-12 May 2013) NHK asked exactly the same question. The responses NHK pollsters recorded then were:

I am feeling them 21%

I am not feeling them 36%

I cannot say either way 40%

You read that right.

In May, 21% are feelin' it, baby.

In June, only 11%.

So, the Abe administration is in place one more month, initiating and implementing more and more of its policy program each day. During that month the percentage of those declaring that they have felt the effect of Abe's economics policies shrinks by 10 percentage points.

For the NHK statistician, the options are not terrific. Either

1) the poll has a colossal margin of error, capable of accommodating a 10 point drop and a 10 point rise -- which means the polling is unreliable, or

2) at least one poll has a perverse and crippling sampling error, or errors, wiping out 10% of the population at a go -- which means your polling is unreliable, or

3) when asked about their own lives respondents tell the poll data collector not what is happening in their lives but what they think is happening in their lives -- or what they think the pollster wants to hear is happening in their lives -- which means your polling is unreliable, or

4) combinations of the above, which means...well, you know already.

The most likely reason for the evidently possible (it has been recorded and reported) but obviously unusable set of results is #3, with the respondents getting caught up in the earlier zeitgeist and answering "Yes!" without looking at their own situations with objectivity. However the party support numbers for the JRP and the Your Party are also suspiciously low in this poll. In most other polls support for these two parties hovers in the 4% to 5% range. So options #1, #2 and #4 could also be in play.

Whatever the cause(s), the loss of 10% of the "Abenomics - Are you feeling it?" believers over a month should be attracting a heck of a lot more attention.


Later - In comments, a reader offers an Option #5.

------------------------------------------------------

* The lowest turnout ever for a House of Councillors election was in 1995, when only 44.5% of the voters showed up.

The Ruling Coalition Double Dares The Supreme Court

Holding over his head a piece of paper with the words "+0/-5" written on it, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo runs out into a rainstorm saying, "I'll be fine with this!" A flash of light marked "Unconstitutional" zigzags down. In the distance, figures holding umbrellas cry out to the PM, imploring him, "Wait!"

The punning caption: "More than the opinions (iken - 意見) of the opposition, he fears unconstitutionality (iken - 違憲)."]

Yesterday, with a vote that went along party lines, Abe Shinzo and the ruling coalition threw down the gauntlet:

Constituency reform bill gets green light

The Yomiuri Shimbun

The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill to rezone single-seat constituencies that would reduce the number of lower house seats by five to address vote-value disparities.

The bill is expected to be enacted before the current Diet session ends June 26.

The bill to revise the Public Offices Election Law was passed at a plenary session with a majority support mainly from the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito. Five opposition parties--the Democratic Party of Japan, Your Party, the Japanese Communist Party, the People's Life Party and the Social Democratic Party--voted against it. Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party) lawmakers were absent. The bill was then sent to the House of Councillors...

(Link)

The Yomiuri Shimbun is being fastidious with its "(t)he bill is expected to be enacted" phrasing. The LDP and the New Komeito hold a 2/3rds majority in the House of Representatives. The Diet is in session until June 26. If the House of Councillors does not take action on the bill over the next 60 days, the House of Representatives will override the upper house's inaction.

There is, of course, an infinitesimally small chance of the ruling coalition allowing the passage of a rival bill through the House of Councillors, setting up a joint conference of both Houses to craft a compromise bill.

For all intents and purposes, yesterday's bill is the law, unrepentant and unmodified.

Opposition parties tried to get the LDP and the New Komeito to see reason. The opposition boycotted both the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors committee sessions examining the new electoral district map, the +0/-5 solution having been declared insufficient by more than one high court judge in March. The opposition parties hoped their show of unity would demonstrate to the ruling coalition parties that whatever may have transpired in the past, the +0/-5 solution was no longer viable.

The boycott ended up being futile and what was worse mystifying, none of the leaders of the opposition managing to make clear what it was that they were trying to do.

After boycotting the committee meetings, almost all the opposition parties returned for the full plenary vote. Only the Japan Restoration Association failed to show up for the defeat.

The Democratic Party of Japan had a decent enough reason for showing up at the massacre. DPJ leaders wanted to demonstrate that the DPJ was not disinterested in the legislation but indeed actively opposed to it. Unfortunately this admirable attempt to clarify the party's stance on electoral district reform got drowned in a cacophony of catcalls. It is just too easy to point out that yesterday the DPJ voted against the bill fleshing out the +0/-5 plan despite having voted for the +0/-5 plan in December (Yes Secretary Kerry, they were for it before they were against it).

By boycotting both the committee and the plenary votes the JRA walks away from the fight with a clean record. When and if the JRA wants to join hands with the LDP, it can excuse itself, saying, "Look, we may not have voted for your odious little electoral district reform bill...but we did not vote against it either."

The new map is unconstitutional, de facto if not de jure. Using the results of the October 2010 national census, districts in the new map have been drafted so that the maximum disproportionality ratio is 1.998. This number is so ridiculously close to the unconstitutional ratio of 2.0 that one suspects the compilers were just trying to finish up and go home. Analyses by various news organizations have found that when one plugs 2013 population figures into the new map there are districts already above the 2.0 limit.

Had the ruling coalition taken the March decisions of the high courts to heart, showing contrition for disproportionality in the 2012 election, and making concerted effort at real reform in 2013, the Supreme Court could tut-tut about the 2012 results but exonerate all with a "Go forth and sin no more" decision later this year. By staying stubborn and selfish, by insisting upon the +0/-5 framework despite its non-resolution of the disproportionality the Supreme Court finds objectionable, the ruling coalition is daring the Supremes to find the 2012 House of Representatives election unconstitutional and invalid.

The justices of the Supreme Court would love to step away from this fight. They may find they cannot if they want to protect the Court's constitutional stature.

A storm is indeed coming...

Source of image: Sankei Shimbun, 19 April 2013
Artist: Yamada Shin
Click on the image for a larger version in a new window.

Bound Hand And Foot

In my most recent post on Abe Shinzo's soft and lazy tyranny, I referred to the New Komeito as a "restraint" upon Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party. Yesterday, in party leader's debate, Japan Restoration Party co-leader Ishihara Shintaro used a far more colorful term to describe the role the New Komeito will play in Abe & Company efforts to revise the Constitution:

"The New Komeito will without question become bindings on your hands and feet."

The term Ishihara used -- ashide matoi (足手まとい） -- is a pejorative, usually referring to clingy, needful persons rather than actual physical bindings.

Hecklers (The New Komeito has hecklers? Who knew?) immediately cried out, "Rude! Rude!" Ishihara, ever the self-assured provocateur, responded:

"What I am saying is the truth."

(Link - J)

So, a sign of the apocalypse: Ishihara Shintaro and MTC in agreement -- with the caveat that the Blinking One and I may not be copping the same attitude.

The great unfulfilled dream of the LDP is the revision of Article 9 of the Constitution. If the LDP joins forces with the JRA after the House of Councillors elections, the two parties could, with help from conservative independents and the DINOs inside the Democratic Party of Japan, get within striking distance of the 2/3rds majorities in both Houses of the Diet necessary for putting revisions of the Constitution to a national referendum.

One of the explanations for the pacifist New Komeito's continuing alliance with the LDP, an alliance that has persisted through thick and thin, with the New Komeito seeing its entire leadership go down to defeat in 2009, has been that the tie up keeps the LDP's commitment toward revision of Article 9 on an aspirational level.

With a seeming entente between the LDP and the JRA on lowering the 2/3rds threshold in Article 96, transforming constitutional revision into a cakewalk, New Komeito leader Yamaguchi Natsuo has issued a warning -- that no national consensus exists on a revision of Article 96. (Link - J)

The warning is something of a non sequitur. There is, as far as anyone knows, no national consensus on the LDP and the New Komeito controlling the government. However, because the two parties did well in the December 2012 elections, they do.

As for constitutional revision, the same principle should apply: if you have the votes, everything's on the table. Consensus is nice but nowhere in the rules. Only a believer in essentialist myths about a Japanese way would insist upon consensus being a prerequisite for action.

Despite Ishihara's labeling the New Komeito a shackle upon Abe Shinzo's and the LDP's ambitions, a JRA-New Komeito war is not preordained. Osaka City mayor and JRA co-leader has appealed to the Osaka New Komeito for its help in passing his municipal/prefectural reorganization plans, offering to cooperate with the New Komeito in national elections. The New Komeito also remained neutral in the gubernatorial and mayoral campaign last year, helping Hashimoto and his deputy Matsui Ichiro win both spots. (Link)

Furthermore, the JRA, which received an astonishing 12 million proportional seat votes in the December election and which is largely on course to pick up whatever seats the LDP and the New Komeito do not win in this summer's election, failed to win what should have been walkover municipal elections on April 14, revealing a precipitous deceleration in the forward momentum of the Hashimoto juggernaut. (Link - J)

We might be seeing Hashimoto paying a rare courtesy call on New Komeito members, asking them to quietly ignore the Sick Old Man and his "truths."

As for Article 9, the Cabinet has in its usual unanimous way (meaning with the New Komeito going along) just issued a Cabinet Decision approving a bill making it possible for members of the Ground Self Defense Forces to deploy for the purpose of facilitating the evacuation of Japanese citizens from foreign war zones or disaster areas. Until now, the law on Self Defense Forces overseas rescue dispatches only permitted the dispatch of Air Self Defense Forces planes and Maritime Self Defense Forces ships, with the transports and their crews confined to airport or port areas of the foreign country. (Link - J)

If the language of Article 9 can be construed as not impeding an armed and ready GSDF from driving around hither and yon in faraway conflict zones looking for folks to rescue, the imperative for revision of the article seems rather weak.

Later - For an English language report on the Cabinet Decision from Kyodo News via The Japan Times, click here.

Image courtesy: NHK

Care To Try Governing For A Little While, Mr. Abe?

The Yomiuri Shimbun scored an interview with the prime minister. According to the PM, a revision of Article 96 of the Constitution is his number one priority going into the House of Councillors election. (Link)

What? Revision of Article 96, lowering the threshold for constitutional amendment below the current 2/3rds of both houses of the Diet standard? Opening the door for a gusher of revisions, including ones with the sole purpose of extending LDP rule non erit finis?

Abe enjoys a supermajority in the House of Representatives, meaning that right now he and his party can pass any legislation that the New Komeito can be stiff-armed into accepting. Come August, even this restraint will be removed, as barring an unimaginable catastrophe, the LDP will have robust majorities in both the House of Representatives and House of Councillors. Abe can look Yamaguchi Natsuo in the eye and say, "If you do not like my policies, then vaya con Dios, mi amigo." The New Komeito for its part will likely not leave the ruling coalition, partly because breaking with the LDP would open up the possibility the government looking into the activities of NK's mother ship, the Soka Gakkai.

Whether or not the New Komeito stays or goes (and Abe & Company will be smart enough to make sure that a break up looks like the New Komeito jumping rather than getting pushed) Abe and the LDP will have no effective constitutional or coalition partner brakes upon their legislative agenda.

With essentially total control in his grasp and the only threat on the horizon the remote one of the Supreme Court invalidating the 2012 House of Representatives election (Link) Abe sees his primary duty to be…constitutional revision?

Why?

Well, of course we know “why” in the sense of a legacy or mission, as both the LDP and Abe have pledged since the beginnings of their respective existences to rid the country of this constitution drafted by New Deal idealism-inspired staff members of the Occupation.

However, what should be on everyone's lips – most importantly the lips of Democratic Party of Japan leader Kaieda Banri and Your Party president Watanabe Yoshimi – is:

"Why do you need to fiddle around with the Constitution, when you have tyrannical legislative and executive powers? Why not use your constitutional powers and your current popularity to govern the country, seeing as how you do not have to pay the least bit of attention to us at all? The Constitution is not blocking you from running the country as you see fit – only your own timidity and sloth are."

It is a mark of the intellectual and ethical vacuity of the LDP that when it possesses the ability to do anything except mess with the constitution, it wastes its energy on trying to mess with the constitution.

The reason for this pointless obsession with constitutional revision? Oh, Abe & Company (and the Hallelujah Choruses inside Japan’s news media universe and the Washington DC nomenklatura) will give you a list of reasons a kilometer long.

The actual reason, though? Governing a country is work…and who wants to do work when agitation and propaganda opportunities beckon?


Image courtesy: The Yomiuri Shimbun

Landslide In The Making

From Kyodo's latest public opinion poll:

Which party or candidate from which party will you be voting for in this summer's House of Councillors election?
(all numbers are %)

LDP 48.2
DPJ 6.7
JRP 10.4
New Komeito 3.9
Your Party 4.5
Communist 3.2
SDP 1.6
Livelihood 0.5
Green Breeze 0.4
Other party 1.3
No preference 19.2

T'is a funky question, since the two ballots choices are separate -- one for a prefectural district candidate, one for a party in the proportional seat vote.

Still, the numbers are daunting for any of the opposition parties. Simply put, unless there are district spaces set asides, such as the Liberal Democratic Party may do for its ally the New Komeito, the LDP could basically win all the district seats and two-thirds of the proportional seats.

Perversely, the 48.2% of voters who say they are voting for an LDP candidate in July is lower than the party allegiance numbers. In this latest poll 50.6% of respondents identified themselves as LDP supporters.

Try to figure that one out, over coffee, preferably.

The LDP's Latest Electoral Reform Chimera

Cognizant of some voters remembering that in November representatives of the Liberal Democratic Party promised then Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko that they would cooperate in cutting the number of seats in the House of Representatives if Noda would dissolve the Diet -- and cognizant that some kind of action looking like electoral reform is in order -- the LDP is now proposing to scramble the electoral system worse than ever.

In 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan promised to cut the number of House of Representatives proportional vote seats from 180 to 100. Nominally this proposal sought to reduce Diet expenditure. However this explanation was facetious: the House was to be left with a still extraordinary 400 seats. The actual goal of the proposal was the further cementing of a two-party system, this by starving the mini- and micro-parties of opportunities to win seats. As a such, the proposal never had a chance of being enacted after the losses of the 2010 House of Councillors election, as the DPJ by itself no longer had the votes necessary to prevail in both Houses of the Diet. Had the LDP, the other party desirous of a two-party system, been willing to accept a short term sacrifice for a long-term gain, the proposal could have been passed at any time. However, the LDP had no interest in cooperating with anything the DPJ offered.

So the matter sat, fermenting, until revived to provide camouflage for Noda's reprehensible surrender on every front.

However, with the courts beating upon the doors of Diet demanding reform (Link), the LDP has taken up the promise to reduce House of Representatives seat numbers.

Cutting the number of proportional House of Representative seats has nothing to do with the sort of reforms the courts are demanding. However, better to be seen doing something, no matter how perverse and pointless, than be hounded for doing nothing.

Hence, the latest cockamamie proposal. That, and the desire the LDP has to retain the New Komeito as an ally until the July House of Councillors elections are over.

Here is the LDP's proposed reform of the House of Representatives:

- Retention of the +0/-5 plan for rectifying the disproportionality of districts, a solution which the courts have derided as "nothing but the barest minimal reform meeting the mandatory standards." (Link – J)

- Cutting the number of proportional seats by 30

- Dividing the remaining 150 seats (180-30=150) into two, with 90 seats being apportioned by the current d’Hondt distribution from regional blocs and 60 seats apportioned among the parties other than the top finisher in the proportional bloc vote, with the proviso that greatest number of seats a party other than the top vote getter can win inside a bloc is equal to the number won by the top finisher (Got that?)

- Reducing the number of blocs from the current 11 to 8 (Link – J)

The DPJ has already come out against the LDP proposal, iterating the obvious point that "voters would find this reform hard to understand." (Link – J)

A reform which accomplishes none of the things the public and the courts have asked for, while adding at three new layers of complexity to the existing process is "hard to understand?" Really?

The great thing about having the LDP back in power with Abe Shinzo at the helm? One never needs to knit together tenuous webs of inference and intrigue in order to make plain the time-wasting self-interest at the heart of every ruling party initiative.

The Second Coming Of Abe Cabinet - The First Opinion Polls

Go figure:

Do you support/not support the Second Cabinet of Abe Shinzo?

Kyodo [Dec 26-27]

Support 62%
Do not support 22%
Don't know/no response 16%

The Asahi Shimbun [Dec 26-27]

Support 59%
Do not support 24%

Mainichi Shimbun [Dec 26-27]

Support 52%
Do not support 26%
No feeling 21%

The Kyodo finding of a 62% support rate is stunning, with The Asahi Shimbun result in the same neighborhood. We will have to see if later polls, when the electorate will have a better sense of just who is in the Cabinet and how radical the New Paradigm Liberal Democratic Party is, will be closer to the Kyodo or the Mainichi findings.

If the 60% level holds, the Abe Cabinet will be starting out with a level of support commensurate with the best of support levels of the six Cabinets preceding it – a remarkable outcome, given the small percentage of the electorate that voted for the Liberal Democratic Party and its candidates on December 16.

Just why the people support the Cabinet tells an interesting tale of salesmanship, voting strength in the Diet and voter desperation.

Why do you support the Cabinet? [Top four answers]

Kyodo

Hope for measures spurring the economy 30%
Nobody else is appropriate 27%
I believe in the prime minister 11%
Is an LDP-New Komeito government 10%

The Asahi Shimbun

Is able to enact policies 30%
Is an LDP cabinet 25%
My reason is indescribable (nan to naku) 18%
Abe is prime minister 17%

As for party loyalties, a noticeable shift has occurred toward some of the top performers of the December 16 election.

Which party do you support? [Results of Dec 17-18 poll in ( )]

Kyodo

LDP 34% (30%)
DPJ 13% (8%)
Restoration 13% (17%)
New Komeito 5% (4%)
Your Party 6 (6%)
Future 2% (3%)
JCP 4% (2%)
SDP 1% (1%)

None 25% (22%)

The Asahi Shimbun

LDP 36% (31%)
DPJ 9% (11%)
Restoration 8% (9%)
New Komeito 2% (3%)
New Party 6% (3%)
Future 2% (2%)
JCP 2% (2%)
SDP 1% (1%)

None 29% (29%)

The odd persons out from the story are the Japan Restoration Party (Association) and the New Komeito. New Komeito voters hiding their true numbers is nothing new. However, the decay in the popularity of the JRP(A) is surprising. The party did, after all finish second in the party proportional section of the ballot, burying the third place Democratic Party of Japan 12.2 million votes to 9.6 million votes. The Mainichi finds support for the JRP rising – but it is as compared to a poll from a month ago, so the results may not be comparable with the Kyodo and Asahi Shimbun findings.

The depth of the hole the DPJ has dug for itself can be grasped from the responses to the questions about expectations for the party and its newly elected leader, Kaieda Banri:

Do you expect anything from the election of Kaieda Banri as the head of the DPJ?

Kyodo

Have expectations 36%
Have no expectations 54%
Don’t know/no response 9%


The Asahi Shimbun

Have expectations 29%
Have no expectations 61%


Do you have any expectations of the rebuilding of the DPJ?

Mainichi Shimbun

Have expectations 29%
Have no expectations 64%


Sources:

Kyodo
http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/News/Sp201212280052.html

The Asahi Shimbun
http://www.asahi.com/politics/update/1227/TKY201212270894.html

Mainichi Shimbun
http://mainichi.jp/select/news/20121228k0000m010068000c.html

Results From Sunday - Proportional Vote, National Totals

How badly did the Democratic Party of Japan debase its brand?

LDP 16,624,457
JRA/JRP 12,262,228
DPJ 9,628,653
New Komeito 7,116,474
Your Party 5,245,586
JCP 3,689,159
Tomorrow 3,423,915
SDP 1,420,790
Nippon Daichi 346,848
New Renaissance 134,718
PNP 70,847

Nationally, the party did not even manage to win 10 million votes.

Interestingly, the New Komeito total declined in between 2009 and 2012 in line with the decline in voter participation rates for all voters, from 8,054,007 in 2009 to the above figure, a decrease of 11.64%.

If the stereotypical image of NK voters were true, that should not have happened.

Final Tally

The seat totals in the House of Representatives, as confirmed by national broadcaster NHK at 5:04 a.m.

Oops! I Did It Again 294
New Sentinel 31

Deservedly Chastized 57
You're Scaring Me 54
Politics Is So Icky 18
No Future 9
Cash Burn 8
Left Behind 2
Post Office Players 1
Great White North 1
Anonymous #1 0
Anonymous #2 0

Independents 5

Key points:

- The OIDIA and NS have a supermajority of 325 seats. They can ignore the House of Councillors in all matters except appointments. This is a great gift; it is also a great burden. Given the power to deliver on domestic and international promises, the alliance has to produce results.

- 10 million voters who had participated in the last two House of Representatives elections stayed away from the polls this time. The result was the lowest voter turnout for a general election in the postwar era.