Kickstarting Abenomics: A Possible Scenario

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Later - Oh, serendipitous coincidence. (Link - J)

Original photo image courtesy: Sankei Shimbun

Before We Get All Excited About The TEPCO Ruling

Recommendation for indictment from the #5 Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution and the three TEPCO suspects

Let us run through the Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution drill one more time, shall we?

STEP ONE: The public prosecutor's office investigates suspects, deciding whether or not to indict them on charges.

STEP TWO: The public prosecutor's office, after careful consideration of the evidence, decides it cannot secure a conviction of the suspects in question.

STEP THREE: A private individual or a group, ticked off at the decision of the prosecutors, files a motion with the Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution to reexamine the prosecutor's decision.

STEP FOUR: The Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution, whose sole reason for existence is to question the decisions of prosecutors to not prosecute, comes to the conclusion that the public prosecutor's office should reconsider its decision. (This is what happened yesterday as regards the three former executive of Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner and operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station - Link)

STEP FIVE - The public prosecutor's office, upon being told that its decision to not prosecute was wrong, replies, "No, we got it right the first time: there is no basis for a prosecution" and rejects the Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution's conclusion.

STEP SIX - The Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution, pissed off that the public prosecutors refused to take its conclusion seriously, says, "Oh yeah? Why did we even bother to ask you to reconsider anyway? We'll just appoint our own, private sector lawyers to indict and prosecute the defendants. So there!"

STEP SEVEN - The Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution trudges over to the local bar association office to find three lawyers to serve as prosecutors. The local bar association tells the Committee to not expect much, as no competent lawyer with a thriving practice has the time to be a prosecutor. Furthermore, no lawyer concerned about his/her professional reputation would agree to step in after the public prosecutors have already twice determined there is no case. The Committee asks the bar association to try anyway.

STEP EIGHT - Three lawyers who are either incompetent, do not care about their reputations or have been browbeaten into accepting the role by colleagues saying, "Look, just accept the assignment, OK? Just go through the motions, fail and the Committee is off all our backs. We'll make it up to you later" agree to look at the evidence.

STEP NINE - Since the three lawyers were hired to file charges, they unsurprisingly find the evidence to prosecute compelling and indict the suspects.

STEP TEN - Either from a personal lack of smarts, zero cooperation from a resentful public prosecutor's office or the total absence of giving a damn, the three lawyers fail to convince a judge of the merits of the charges and the suspects are all found "Not Guilty."

And no, the above is not just a cynic's barking. This what happens when an interesting question -- "Is there not some way that average citizens, certain that the decisions of public prosecutors to not prosecute are the result of political interference or other nefarious forces, can demand that the prosecutors either do their jobs or stand aside?" is not followed up by the question "OK, what could go wrong?"


Later - The Asahi Shimbun sees the Committee's action in a less caustic light, giving extra credit for having at least the right intentions. (Link

Screen shot courtesy: NHK News

Horie Is Set Free And We Are Not

Internet entrepreneur turned target of prosecutors Horie Takafumi was released from prison yesterday after serving nearly three quarters of his sentence.

Fallen tycoon Horie freed from jail
The Japan Times
by Reiji Yoshida and Kazuaki Nagata, Staff Writers

Takafumi Horie, former president of the Internet firm Livedoor Co. and an entrepreneurial hero for young generations, was paroled Wednesday after spending 21 months behind bars.

In a news conference Wednesday night, an apologetic Horie, who lost 30 kg while incarcerated, expressed his intention to contribute to society by helping ex-prisoners get back on their feet. He also said he wants to reunite with his space rocket project and launch a website to critique how news is reported.

Horie walked out of a prison in Nagano Prefecture at around 7:40 a.m. He soon appeared live in video streamed by Nico Nico Douga, Japan’s leading online video service operator, while he was in a car headed for Tokyo to hold a news conference.

"I thank everybody who took care of me while in prison. Thank you very much. I received parole after serving 74 percent of my prison term," Horie said on Twitter.

In his later press conference, he said, "I caused trouble to many people in society and (Livedoor) shareholders over the Livedoor case and am deeply sorry."

(Link)

That Horie is now apologetic should not be read as his being accepting of his guilt. He is out on parole. He will, for as long as he is out on parole, keep quiet about the case brought against him.

We should not be surprised if Horie remains quiet about the actions of the judicial system even after his parole period ends. Horie fought hard against the law -- refusing to confess, even after his subordinates agreed to testify against him; asserting his innocence on all charges: appealing his guilty verdicts all the way to the Supreme Court.

Incarceration, however, brings a change in values. The primary one -- and it is particularly forgivable in those who never actually did anything wrong -- is the desire to never be incarcerated again. That Horie would never again want to be seen as challenging the status quo powers is understandable.

Rather than dwelling upon the injustice of his incarceration, Horie seems to have found a private liberty in serving as a caregiver to his fellow inmates. Whilst no substitute for real freedom, the right to care for others liberates the spirit, no matter the condition of the body. That Horie has expressed the desire that other inmates might enjoy the privilege of freedom he is enjoying indicates he has understood that behind the bars and the funny clothes, the imprisoned are human beings -- something he would have never known had himself not become one of them.

That Horie may no longer have the fire to fight for a more just judicial system does not let any of us off the hook. With recent reversals of false convictions and the of challenging of the Diet over the constitutionality of elections, it may seem that judges are waking up to their latent power to mete out justice, rather just impose penalties for supposed violations of the law. Unfortunately, none of the blatantly political cases of the 2000s -- the false accounting cases against Horie and his Livedoor subordinates, Murakami Yoshiaki's insider trading conviction (Link) and the cases against Ozawa Ichiro and his secretaries -- has been reversed on appeal (Ozawa managed to avoid all convictions in the cases brought against him by the controversial Committees for the Inquest of the Prosecution)

For all who dwell in this blessed land, doing anything, we must assume we are still at the mercy of the prosecutors, who need only to suddenly be told not to like us any more to go all Lavrenti Beria ("You bring me the man, I'll find you the crime.") on us.

The fight is not over.


Later - For a less morose take on events, see the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Horie's release. (Link)

What Is There To Not Understand Regarding The Rikuzankai Case?

I am still trying to understand the High Court ruling on the Rikuzankai case.

I am not confused by Justice Iida Yoshinobu's determination, following his throwing out evidence that could prove the contrary, that the determination made in 2011 by the trial judge had no errors in it. I mean, just look at Justice Iida's face.



Does this face not just scream, "Mind open to the possibility that the National Police Agency concocted this case out of perjured testimony, forced confessions and circumstantial evidence?"

I am confused by the underlined bits in this Yomiuri Online explanation of the appeal ruling:

The high court endorsed the judgment of the lower court that one motive for the falsification was to prevent secret donations from midsize contractor Mizutani Construction Co. from coming to light.

The judge accepted as credible the testimony of a former Mizutani Construction president that the company gave 50 million yen to Ishikawa to help the company secure a subcontract for a dam construction project.

The judge said Ishikawa falsified the political fund reports of the Rikuzan-kai fund management body of Ozawa, now leader of People's Life Party, in an attempt to conceal 400 million yen he lent to Rikuzan-kai to finance a Tokyo land purchase.

Iida said there were no factual errors in the lower court ruling from circumstantial evidence that the former secretaries deliberately falsified the reports in a conspiracy.

"This is a vicious crime that is against the Political Funds Control Law," Iida said.

The Tokyo High Court's not-guilty ruling for Ozawa, finalized in November 2012, recognized the falsification of the reports by the former aides but accepted that Ozawa may have not been given details of the land deal and may have been unaware of the illegality of the off-the-book treatment of the 400 million yen.

(Link)

Do you see the problem?

According to the determination of now two courts, Ishikawa committed two crimes.

1) He accepted a 50 million yen secret donation from Mizutani Construction, which he did not properly record

2) He falsely recorded a 400 million yen loan Ozawa made to the Rikuzankai

The problem is he cannot have done both. Because the Monday after Ishikawa supposedly receives a secret donation from Mizutani Construction, he deposits the 400 million loaned by Ozawa in Rikuzankai accounts. He does so by breaking up the 400 million into a number of smaller amounts, this in order, according to his explanation, to camouflage his boss' having 400 million just lying around the house to loan out to anyone without collateral or even a written contract.

One of the amounts of money that Ishikawa deposits is 50 million yen. This the prosecutors insist is not a part of the money that Ozawa loaned the Rikuzankai but is instead the secret donation from Mizutani Construction.

If that is so,

a) are prosecutors not arguing that Ozawa gave only 350 million, not 400 million, and

b) since 400 million was repaid to Ozawa a few years later, why have prosecutors not gone after Ozawa to return the 50 million amount allegedly received from Mizutani Construction?

Note that I am not even considering the glaring inconsistency of the prosecutors simultaneously asserting that Ishikawa was sneaky enough to split the entirely legal Ozawa loan into smaller amounts and too stupid to split up an illegal donation from Mizutani Construction.

No one denies the accounts were a mess regarding the 400 million Ozawa loaned the Rikuzankai, the emergency loan being necessary in order that Rikuzankai could in turn borrow from a bank the money needed to pay for the land for a staff dormitory near Ozawa's residence (the banker's rule being that if one wishes to borrow X amount, one has to show one has the full X amount in collateral).

Was the messed up accounting of the no-interest loan a crime? Only under criteria which, if applied to the loan officers of the country's financial institutions, would put hundreds if not thousands behind bars.

Ozawa, poised to become prime minister prior to the ridiculous arrest of his secretary Okubo Takanori on the charges that led prosecutors to seize the financial records of the Rikuzankai, enabling the discovery amid the tens of thousands of transactions this one bit of victimless funny business, now lords over a tiny rump party on the verge of annihilation. Oh, that and the 400 million.

Sic transit gloria? Not exactly.

The sad joke of the political application of the Political Funds Control Law now goes to a higher but not necessarily better place.

Committees For The Inquest Of The Prosecution - In Other News

Correspondent SG reminded me yesterday that Ozawa Ichiro's case is not the only criminal case that has been or is the process of being brought to the courts via a Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution -- the Orwellian-sounding citizens councils seeking indictments in incidents where the local prosecutors claim there is no case. Indeed a number of infamous incidents are in the process of being picked over by private lawyers hired by the courts, including:

- The Akashi Pedestrian Bridge Incident - where a crush of people, on there way to view a waterside fireworks display, lurched forward and fell down in a mass on the staircase of a pedestrian overpass, leading to the asphyxiation deaths of 11 persons, mostly children. On trial is the Deputy Chief of Police of Akashi, as the police were providing security for the event. A judgment in the case is expected in November.

- The Amagasaki JR Derailment - the most serious and idiotic rail accident of the last 40 years, resulting in the deaths of 106 persons and the maimings of many, many more. While the obvious culprit was the incompetent train engineer, who had a record of poor performance and sent his train hurtling off the tracks by taking a curve at excessive speed, this in order to make up for time he had lost in overshooting the platform at a previous stop, families of the dead and injured have been trying for a decade to pin the blame on senior JR West executives. The trial of the three past presidents of JR West for dereliction of duty leading to death begins in July.

- The Chinese Fishing Trawler Collision Incident - when a Chinese fishing boat rammed two Japanese Coast Guard vessels in the waters off the Senkaku Islands in September, 2010, the JCG detained the crew of the Chinese vessel, arresting the captain on charges of interfering with the activities of government personnel carrying out their duties. Other than the captain, the crew of the ship were returned to China. The case of the captain, hwoever,was remanded to the Nago District Court. After the Chinese government, both directly and indirectly, ratched the pressure on Japan, the Nago Court released the captain, on the bizarre grounds of his arrest being a matter of foreign policy, not law. Since the case had been remanded to the prosecutors, however, it left open the door for interested parties to pursue the original arrest through a Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution, which interested parties did. Without much of a fuss, an Okinawa Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution issued an indictment of the Chinese captain in March, with no trial date set.

It is difficult to approve of the actions taken by the Committees in the first two cases. These should be civil suits for damages, not criminal indictments for negligence and dereliction of duty. The persons being tried have only distant connections to the accidents, heinous as they were.

However, it is hard not give three cheers for Committee in Okinawa. The grotesque intrusion of politics into a legal proceeding, which the government promised it would not to do, no matter what the Chinese did, then reversed itself and did, then denied that it had done -- demolished the credibility of Prime Minister Kan Naoto and the Democratic Party of Japan. That the Svengali pressuring the Nago Prosecutors Office to release the captain was Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito was an open secret. His machinations earned him a well-deserved censuring by the House of Councillors, with Mabuchi Sumio, the minister in charge of the Coast Guard, getting censured in what amounted to collateral damage from the chastisement of Sengoku.

It is possible to read too much into the effect the indictment of the Chinese captain will have on Sino-Japanese relations. It will certainly be an irritant to the Chinese. The Japanese government will not pursue the captain, except perhaps by putting his name on a list of international fugitives at Interpol. Even if the courts allow the captain's being convicted in absentia, which he would be, given the video evidence of the collisions, neither government has any incentive to bring the matter up in bilateral negotiations -- so they will not.

Whether Japanese right wingers will transform the captain's indictment into one of their cause célèbres remains an open question. They have already so many different items on their plates...

Let Me Have A Look At That Memo

A few weeks back I hailed Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times for her report on the Olympus investigation and the peculiar investment advice handed out by a pair of banker brothers, the Yoko'os (E).

Last week, Ms. Tabuchi produced a follow up article that makes the startling claims of not only vastly greater losses at Olympus but also the involvement of organized crime, namely the Yamaguchi Gumi. This second claim backs up a statement an annonymous commenter left on my earlier post about the relative paucity of local news coverage of the Olympus scandal, at least as compared to foreign financial outlets and the local coverage of the Daio Paper scandal. If organized crime organizations were indeed behind the coverup at Olympus, domestic reporters would understandably be very, very cautious in their reporting on the affair.

Now I would normally say, "Brava!" to any follow up article that finds even more dirt on Olympus (I have nothing against the company or its employees...well, at least its non-director employees). Only this time I cannot feel but holding back on my applause.

What worries me is the source of the accusations.

Billions Lost by Olympus May Be Tied to Criminals
The New York Times

[snip]

In a memo prepared by investigators and circulated at a recent meeting of officials from Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission, the Tokyo prosecutor’s office and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, officials say they are trying to determine whether Olympus worked with organized crime syndicates to obscure billions of dollars in past investment losses and then paid them exorbitant sums for their services.

The memo — a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times from a person close to the official investigation — appears to link the Olympus losses for the first time to organized crime groups...

Eeeek! A police memo, from a person close to official organization! And that "may" in the title!

The Olympus scandal "may" be linked to the Thai floods. The Olympus scandal "may" be linked to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ooooh, this is such a bad time to go all Japanese news media practice on a story. In fact, any time is a bad time to go all Japanese news media practice on a story.

When an internal police or public prosecutors memo is leaked to the press "by a person close to the investigation" one can be almost certain that what is about to ensue is a fishing expedition, wherein the investigators arrived with their cardboard boxes and clean out a building or several buildings.

Now given the size of the sums bandied about in last week's article (US $4.9 billion of unaccounted for funds) and the specific mention of the Yamaguchi Gumi, it is possible that the police targets this time are actual Yamaguchi Gumi offices. If so, the police are either a) out of their minds or b) determined to put the Yamaguchi Gumi out of business -- which is, of course, a variation of a).

There is no doubt that if the police and public prosectors did raid Yamaguchi Gumi offices, they would find in the course of their extensive search for evidence of crimes linked to the Olympus scandal enough evidence of other crimes to put hundreds of gang members behind bars - if Japan had the courtrooms and jails to try and house all the suspects, of course.

There is, of course, the possibility that the police memo is all nonsense, meant either to smoke out any leftover questionable acquisitions that Olympus officials may still be hiding, or embarass Ms. Tabuchi for blowing the whistle on the Yoko'os before the police could nab them (one of them at least seems to have disappeared).

We shall see.

Oh Yes We Did So Get It Right!

Kudos the Public Prosecutors Office. After questioning Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro on Saturday and his former political secretary Ishikawa Tomohiro on Monday, the prosecutors are reportedly going to reaffirm their decision to not prosecute Ozawa.

This is a surprisingly positive, if not entirely surprising, result. While the prosecutors were unlikely to reverse their decision to not prosecute Ozawa, on the grounds that such would have been an admission that they, the professionals, had failed to be sufficiently diligent in the performance of their duties the first time out...that is until a randomly selected group of average citizens showed them the error of their ways...they also did not take the cowardly route out of their predicament. Rather than come out and say, "Yes, we were right, there are no grounds to indict Ozawa," the prosecutors could have just sat on their hands for another 82 days, at which time the Committee for the Inquest of the Prosecution could order its own prosecution, carried out by court-appointed lawyers. By tossing the case back to the Committee with the label "There is Nothing in Here" on it, the prosecutors are daring the Committee to grasp the nettle of actively interfering in the conduct of the House of Councillors election.

Now the case goes back to the Committee. Under normal circumstances, the Committee, having already come to a decision once to reject the judgment of the prosecutors, should have little trouble rejecting again. However, the reality that the Committee really will be ordering an extraordinary prosecution of the leader of the main party of government on the eve of a harshly contested election, may give Committee members pause. While those serving on the Committee have an interest in appearing consistent in their rulings, they also have an interest in not interfering too obviously in the political process.

The decision the prosecutors puts the Committee in the position to do just that -- be perceived to be messing with the election.

Just what the Committee will decide to do is very much up in the air; the disincentives are far to weak to inhibit a decision to second-guess the prosecutors again.

One matter is certain, however: there is a zero percent chance of Ozawa ever being convicted of the crimes of which he has been accused. The prosecutors, given a second chance at Ozawa, found nothing worth pursuing.

Members of the DPJ need to pray that Ozawa does not gloat at the Committee's failure to bullrush the Prosecutors Office into indicting him. Ozawa already was in high spirits after his questioning over the weekend, and on Monday seemed to be backing away from his earlier offers to appear before the House of Representatives Council on Political Ethics. An appearance before the Council, while superfluous given the prosecutors's decision not to indict, would put an exclamation point on the message that Ozawa has so far has failed to communicate to the public: that he has nothing, absolutely nothing to hide.

It is hard to overemphasize how lucky Ozawa has been in all this. Had just one of his former secretaries broken down under pressure and signed a statement that he had kept Ozawa fully informed of all transactions carried out by the Rikuzankai, it could have been curtains for the DPJ's Secretary-General.

Dribs and Drabs

Thanks to The Asahi Shimbun we now know two more attributes of the mysterious "Association of Those Seeking the Truth" (Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai), the group of amateur Javerts who have been pressing the Public Prosecutors Office into investigating the finances of the Rikuzankai, Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's main political fundraising organization. According to Satuday's Asahi, the group has "around ten members" and these include "former teachers" (moto kyoshi). On Friday, the group filed an appeal asking that a citizen's review panel reverse the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office's decision to not indict Ozawa as a co-conspirator in a plot to violate campaign finance laws -- the third action the group has taken in the past year pressuring prosecutors into tying Ozawa to Rikuzankai violations of the law.

So the relentless, unsleeping nemesis of Japan's most powerful politician is "a citizen's group composed of former journalists, administrative scriveners and former teachers and the like with about ten members in it" -- and that is all that the whole media news complex colossus of Japan deems we need know about it.

Terrific.

The Dark Side Of the Moon

"The Association of Those Seeking the Truth" (Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai).

No one seems want to say much about who they are -- or if there is even a "they" there.

On February 5, the Asahi Shimbun printed the most extensive description of them so far:

Gyōseishoshi ya motoshinbunkishara de tsukuru Tōkyō no shimin dantai...

"A citizen's group of the Tokyo Metropolitan District composed of administrative scriveners, former journalists and the like..."

That's it.

That is all we know about the citizen's organization that filed the first request last year for an investigation of the relationship between the Rikuzankai and the Nishimatsu Construction Company...and that is filing a request to have a citizen's inquest into the decision by the Public Prosecutor's Office to not indict Democratic Party of Japan Secretary General Ozawa Ichiro over the misleading accounting of a loan Ozawa extended to the Rikuzankai, an accounting sleight of hand that has led to the indictments of three of Ozawa's former secretaries.

An organization that has plunged Japan into political crisis twice in the last ten months and is set to do so again, taking advantage of legal reforms whose intent had been to give citizens the ability to prod prosecutors into taking on the politically powerful.

Who are these activists seeking truth on the behalf of the citizens from out of the shadows? Cat's paws for the Liberal Democratic Party, trying to undo the via the Prosecutors Office what cannot be undone at the ballot box? A front for regressive elements of the bureaucracy, attacking the government throught the Trojan Horse of a concerned citizenry, forcing prosecutors into investigations without merit?

Would you not feel better if the Shinjitsu o Motomeru Kai had a website? A published interview of one of its main members? A press conference?

Until such time as it turns out to be a handful of crochety, gray-haired former Waseda university graduates with too much time on their hands, permit me to feel scared out of my mind.

Kudos to Isabel Reynolds for bringing this group to world's attention.

Later - Many thanks to reader WA for pointing out the spelling and word usage errors.

Why Japan is Still Not Unique

From Paris, Guy Sorman draws parallels in between the actions of the Tokyo Prosecutors Office in the Ozawa case and the actions of magistrates around the world.

Some would call it treason...

Thank You, Martin Fackler

There, I have said it.

And this is why:

In Japan’s Scandals, a Clash of Old Order and New
The New York Times

TOKYO — It had all the trappings of a typical political scandal in a nation that has seen all too many of them: stacks of cash from construction companies, shady land deals and late-night arrests of grim-faced political aides widely seen as fall guys for their powerful bosses.

But the unfolding investigation into possible political finance irregularities by the kingpin of the governing party, Ichiro Ozawa, has also gripped Japan for a very different reason. It has turned into a public battle between the country’s brash new reformist leaders and one of the most powerful institutions of its entrenched postwar establishment: the Public Prosecutors Office...

Read the rest here. It is really good*.

That the prosecutors are out to get Ozawa Ichiro by hook or by crook does not excuse Ozawa from his responsibility to explain to the public where the mysterious 400 million yen originally came from...and if he has some time left over, the justification for the Rikuzankai's investments in illiquid assets like land and apartments.

-------------------
* I reserve judgment on the author's refusal to use the word "whom" when the reference seems to be to the direct object of the verb.

On Ozawa's Choosing To Fight

Democratic Party of Japan Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro came out fighting mad in his speech at the DPJ party congress today...as well he should. In arresting three of his former secretaries, one of whom is on trial in another case similarly built on unsupported accusations of construction company executives under criminal investigation and another who was 72 hours away from having parliamentary immunity, the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office has committed such a blatantly political act one should look for the daifuku boxes marked "Many thanks, your friend, the Liberal Democratic Party" on the desk of the head of the Tokyo District Prosecutor. That the trio will now be held in solitary confinement in cells that are not heated though we are in the middle of January, ostensibly for a maximum 23 days but in practice ad infinitum because judges, being deferential to the Public Prosecutors Office, almost never say no to a request for an extension of a detention, until such a time one of them signs a confession implicating himself, the others being held and anyone else living on this planet, does little to inspire confidence that justice will be done. Indeed, it pretty much guarantees that it won't.

The only hope is that the citizens, who are neither stupid nor particularly forgetful, will see the similarities between the prosecutors' actions in this case and their conduct of the Livedoor case against Horie Takafumi. You can take a pudgy, unattractive, widely-disliked renegade who is in the process of supplanting the Ancien Regime using its own weapons against it and try to bring him down by arresting his associates in mid-January, using the cold, dark, loneliness and police browbeating to coerce them to betraying their boss -- but please do not insult me by doing it twice in four years' time.

We like our heroes handsome, young and uncomplicated. We are not going to get what we want in this instance. Ozawa Ichiro is smarmy, arrogant, physically unattractive, secretive, wrong-headed, treacherous and insincere. He is far removed from anyone's idealized portrait of a hero. The prosecutors are counting our dislike of Ozawa the politician to blind us to the rampant disregard for due process, fairness and balance in the cases being brought against Ozawa's secretaries -- a belief in our gullibility that is far more ugly, arrogant, wrong-headed, secretive, treacherous and insincere than the prosecutors seeming ultimate human target.

The Ishikawa Arrest

The Tokyo prosecutors have just arrested Ishikawa Tomohiro, DPJ member of the House of Representatives for the Hokkaido #11 District, the former manager of DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's political fundraising group. Unless I am mistaken, only three more days and Ishikawa would have been covered by parliamentary immunity under Article 50 of the Constitution.

A pretty desperate gesture...

Prosecutors are a rogue element, beyond anyone's control it seems, driven by self-righteousness that transcends common sense. They will stop at nothing to bring Ozawa down.

Now more than ever he and the DPJ need a media relations strategy...and they do not have one.