Raw Japan

Japan lawmakers getting poorer?

Japan’s prime minister may also be the country’s richest politician, but parliament is no longer the preserve of the wealthy, according to an analysis published by broadcaster NHK.

Lawmakers from the country’s lower house of parliament declared an average of 31.5 million yen (around $350,000) in assets, down more than 18 million yen on a previous declaration four years earlier.

That’s partly because of the large  number of new lawmakers who made it to parliament in the Democratic Party of Japan’s historic election victory last year.  Seventy lawmakers, most of them newcomers, said they had no assets whatsoever, almost double the number in the previous announcement.

At the other end of the scale, the assets of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, a grandson of the founder of Bridgestone Tyres, weighed in at 1.6 billion yen, media said. 

Ruling party No. 2, Ichiro Ozawa, whose aides have been charged in a funding scandal, declared  about 190 million yen in assets, NHK said.

The Kyodo news agency said Ozawa declared no bank savings, but it noted that there was no obligation to declare cash kept at home. During the investigation into suspected misreporting of political funds, Ozawa was said to have told prosecutors he kept 300 million yen in cash where he lives.

Ozawa’s image headache

Shadow Shogun, The Destroyer and Backroom Fixer.

Japan’s ruling party kingpin, Ichiro Ozawa, has earned several less-than-flattering nicknames for an approach to politics that has seen him shaking up government in the country for decades, culminating in his party’s historic election victory last August.

Ozawa’s tough, combative image was reinforced when he vowed in public to fight against prosecutors after three of his current and former aides were arrested on suspicion of misreporting political funds. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and said he would stay in his key position as the Democratic Party’s secretary-general.

But Ozawa’s tone seems to have changed slightly recently as voter support  for the party has increasingly eroded due to the deepening scandal, ahead of a mid-year election .

I was at his news conference after Ozawa was questioned by prosecutors for more than four hours over the scandal. He appeared his usual determined and confident self, but seemed to choose words carefully to avoid provoking either prosecutors or the Japanese media.

 ”I told everything I knew today. They (the prosecutors) may not be fully satisfied, but they listened to me seriously,” Ozawa told the news conference.  “I will continue to cooperate as they conduct a fair investigation.”   

Japan’s ‘shadow shogun’

Often said to prefer to rule from the shadows, ruling party Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa dominated the front pages of most of Japan’s major newspapers on Thursday, after giving Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama what reports said was a dressing down over government spending the previous day. 

Ozawa and other party officials had presented Hatoyama and several cabinet ministers with a list of suggestions that included scaling back a key election promise to provide universal child allowances and abandoning a pledge to abolish an unpopular levy on gasoline.

When the mild-mannered Hatoyama took over the Democratic Party leadership in May, critics said he would amount to nothing more than a puppet of his brusque predecessor, Ozawa, seen by many as the architect of the party’s sweeping August election victory.

A poll in the conservative Sankei newspaper last month showed nearly 42 percent of respondents saw Ozawa as the most powerful man in the government, compared with just over 18 percent who picked Hatoyama. Ozawa also grabbed the spotlight when he led a recent delegation of more than 140 Democratic Party lawmakers on a trip to China to help improve ties.

Speculation about the role of the ‘shadow shogun’, though a favourite topic of Japan’s mass media, has so far done little to damage support for Hatoyama’s government, which has slipped from initial highs but still hovers around 56 percent in the latest survey, although some experts forecast it could add to doubts about his ability to steer the world’s second-biggest economy.

Despite the charges that Ozawa is trying to run the show, some media speculated his tough words for Hatoyama were really a rescue mission in disguise.

Are Japan’s rookie lawmakers being treated like kids?

Name tags on their chairs so their “teachers” can take attendance; instructions on how to greet their elders politely; orders to turn up on time.

Rookie lawmakers in Japan’s ruling Democratic Party are, critics say, being treated like first-grade students instead of a talent pool the government can draw on to tackle tough policy problems from a bulging debt to strained ties with Washington.

Political mastermind Ichiro Ozawa’s strict control of the 141 new lawmakers swept into office by the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) huge August election victory that ousted their long-dominant rival has cast a spotlight on the paradoxical power of the man many credit with engineering the historic win.

Fears that Ozawa, who bolted the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1993 and spent the following years plotting its overthrow, would pull the strings in Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government have simmered since he took over as the Democrats’ No. 2 after their stunning win at the polls.

His grip on the party grabbed fresh attention recently when he scuppered a plan to draft 14 first-term lawmakers for a new task force set up to identify wasteful projects that can be cut from the national budget, an urgent chore now that Japan’s public debt looks set to exceed 200 percent of its GDP this year.

“Why is Ozawa doing this? Because for him, political power means numbers and numbers mean elections, so the Democrats need to keep the seats they won and to get ready for the next election now,” said political commentator Hirotaka Futatsuki.

“But taken to an extreme, the result would be that all the new lawmakers have to do is raise their hands to pass laws.”

A storm brewing

I watched Japan’s election returns from the rocky Pacific, with the satellite TV reception suprisingly crisp on a ferry heading south.

A typhoon is headed towards mainland Japan and travel and other ways of life have been caught up in its headwinds, while the impact of the apparently changing political climate has only just begun.

Northern Hokkaido, once a stronghold of the Liberal Democratic Party with never-ending highway, tunnel and bridge projects as testament, deserted the long-ruling party with all but three seats going to the Democratic Party, including prime minister-elect Yukio Hatoyama.

LDP losers in Hokkaido included former foreign minister Nobutaka Machimura, head of the party’s largest faction, Tsutomu Takebe, a Koizumi Cabinet loyalist, and former finance Shoichi Nakagawa, whose family had represented the middle of the vast prefecture for almost half a century and whose struggles were chronicled last week in this blog.

In Tohoku, the northern part of Japan’s biggest island, Honshu, and the home of Democrat founder and former leader Ichiro Ozawa, the beating was also fierce, if not quite as emphatic, as the LDP took 9 seats and the Democrats 26.

“Tohoku is generally conservative, with farmers supporting the LDP’s policies. But before the election their attitude had changed,” said Masaki Hara, a retired Sendai resident, who joined me watching results, along with many other captive ferry passengers, some of whom had lost interest in the Yomiuri Giants game on a competing TV screen.

Seven election words to watch for

Here is a quick tutorial on seven words you might find helpful to follow the Japanese election on Sunday.

どぶ板選挙 （Dobuita Senkyo) means a grassroots election campaign.  The term became popular to illustrate how veteran lawmakers from the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), struggling in the campaign and worried about losing their previously safe seats, have been running around in their constituency to meet as many voters in person as possible. ”Dobuita” means wooden boards laid across a ditch to cover and “senkyo” means election. So the term suggests that candidates visit voters door-to-door, walking on the “dobuita” to enter homes. But the Japanese election law forbids candidates to visit individual houses during the official campaign period.

ねじれ国会 (Nejire Kokkai) means twisted parliament. The term has become a buzzword since the opposition Democrats and their allies won the control of the less powerful upper house of parliament in 2007, allowing them to delay bills and jamming up the government’s policy plans.

だるま (Daruma). Japanese use daruma dolls, which are usually bright red and shaped like a human head, to seek luck for everything from passing exams, finding love, to winning elections.  The tradition is for election candidates to paint in one eye and then if they win, paint in the other.  Sales of daruma dolls have risen as candidates seek a little help ahead of the election.

小沢チルドレ ン (Ozawa children): This expression comes from “Koizumi children”, a term for candidates picked by charismatic former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi four years ago to run against his party rivals who opposed his postal reforms.  Former Democrats leader Ichiro Ozawa, who in charge of the party’s election campaign strategy, has created his own “Ozawa children” (or Ozawa girls) by sending young, often female, candidates to run against veteran, LDP lawmakers.

政権選択 (Seiken Sentaku): Many Japanese media outlets have called this election an election of “seiken sentaku”, which literally means choosing a government. If you think about it, every election is about choosing a new government but the term reflects how hard it has been to even think about an opposition victory in past elections in Japan.

Japan two-party system — long in arriving

Observers of Japanese politics who have long thought the country was ripe for a real two-party system are watching Sunday’s election with a dual sense of incredulity — surprise that it has taken so long to oust the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and surprise that it finally looks like happening.

Media surveys show the decade-old opposition Democratic Party is set to win the poll for parliament’s powerful lower house – and probably by a landslide, ushering in party leader Yukio Hatoyama at the head of a government pledged to spend more on consumers and workers than the companies that benefited most from LDP policies.

That would be only the second time the LDP has lost its grip on government since it was founded in 1955.

“Every one I talk to has that feeling — they aren’t sure it’s really going to happen because they thought it would happen before,” said Steven Reed, a political scientist at Chuo University who has been analysing Japanese politics for decades. “A lot of people predicted based on hope, and that’s not a particularly good variable for predictions.”

Those with long memories can’t help but recall the only other time the LDP lost power, when heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa and dozens of other lawmakers bolted the party in 1993 and voted in favour of a no-confidence motion against then-premier Kiichi Miyazawa, triggering a political quake that led to the formation of a multiparty, anti-LDP coalition under the telegenic Morihiro Hosokawa.

Hosokawa entranced a public more accustomed to staid, dark-suited and often inarticulate leaders with his media-savvy ways — striding before cameras at an international leaders’ summit with a white scarf around his neck, using a teleprompter at news conferences — and promising to cut the bureaucratic red-tape that critics said was strangling the world’s second-biggest economy.

Make mine a milk

Japan’s far north, once home to pet projects of scions of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, looks set to become an even hotter bed of opposition Democratic Party success in this weekend’s Japanese election capped, if polls and analysts are correct, by a local son becoming the nation’s next prime minister.

But while the country decides whether opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama will become premier, voters in Hokkaido will also decide the fate of a certain disgraced former finance, trade and farms minister who is battling for his political life.

Shoichi Nakagawa, who last graced this blog when his antics at February’s G8 finance ministers’ summit in Rome prompted his resignation from the cabinet, is trailing his 36-year-old DPJ rival, Tomohiro Ishikawa, for a seat his family has held for nearly half a century, according to the local Tokachi Mainichi newspaper on  Wednesday.

Nakagawa, once a rising star in the LDP — and still a relatively young hand in the party at 56 — quit the cabinet after having to deny he was was drunk at the summit, which an often replayed video of his departing news conference did little to support, undermining his already weak ally, Prime Minister Taro Aso.

His departure speech cited “careless health management”, which has morphed into potential careless career management, as the LDP prepares for a likely lashing on Sunday.

In the last election in 2005, Nakagawa won his seat by about 23,000 votes, but judging from newspapers and the ample Nakagawa posters in the city of Obihiro this week, confidence is lacking in Hokkaido’s 11th District this time around.

Nakagawa, like DPJ chief Hatoyama, followed a family line into politics, but his entry after a Tokyo upbringing stemmed from the suicide of his then 57-year-old father, a former farms minister who locals say is still revered among the prefecture’s politically strong agricultural community.

Grooming a prime minister

What does it take to be a leader in Japan? 

Luck and charm, according to the late founder of a school near Tokyo that has tried to groom political leaders for the past 30 years.

I visited the Matsushita institute of Government and Management recently, curious to see what it was doing to fix Japan’s shortage of strong leaders. 

Ever since the charismatic Junichiro Koizumi left the premiership in 2006, two leaders quit just after a year each and the current Prime Minsiter Taro Aso’s job is hanging by a thread before a general election this year.

Konosuke Matsushita, who set up the school in 1979, is said to have looked for luck and charm when interviewing applicants, but in reality, the his institute has worked to instil students with much more.

Students spend a large part of a three-year programme researching a topic of their choice with little guidance from the school. They receive funding and living expenses, but only in exchange for writing reports and undergoing grueling interviews with a school committee on their research.  Alunmi said the twice-yearly interviews force them to think about how to contribute to society. 

On campus, I watched students meditate in a small tea house and practice Japanese fencing, slapping wooden swords onto each others’ helmets.  The activities, the school says, are part of training to clear the mind before making tough decisions.

Ozawa wipes away tears, but not doubts

When Ichiro Ozawa, leader of Japan’s main opposition Democratic Party, became teary-eyed as he announced his intention to stay in his post despite a funding scandal plaguing his bid to become prime minister, he may have won some sympathy.

Whether he gets to keep his job, though, is another matter.

The pugnacious political veteran has been trying to oust Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party since he bolted the long-ruling party in 1993, helping replace it briefly with a reformist coalition, only to see his former conservative colleagues return to power the next year.

But just as his opposition Democrats looked set to win an election this year and end more than 50 years of almost unbroken LDP rule, prosecutors arrested a close Ozawa aide and on Tuesday charged him with breaking a political funding law by accepting corporate donations.

Speaking at a nationally televised news conference on Tuesday, a subdued Ozawa — wiping tears from his eyes as he spoke — denied any wrongdoing, adding he wouldn’t quit for now. He left the door open to resigning if public support for the Democrats slides and endangers his long-held dream of defeating the LDP at the polls.

Japanese politicians and other high-profile figures have been known to shed public tears, even blubber, when they found themselves in a pinch. But an excess of emotion can backfire and women, as well as men with less macho images, are best advised to keep their eyes dry, some pundits say.