Raw Japan

Opposition sees “Hitler Youth” in ruling party

When Japan’s new opposition leader compared ruling party lawmakers cheering the prime minister’s policy speech to “Hitler Youth”, the comment grabbed headlines, though it was perhaps just a sign of the depth of opposition frustration.

“I got  the impression that the atmosphere in parliament was similar to the Hitler Youth agreeing to Hitler’s speech,” Liberal Democratic Party leader Sadakazu Tanigaki told reporters after Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s first policy speech since his Democratic Party ousted the LDP in a historic August election.

Hatoyama’s Democrats trounced the LDP in the lower house election, taking 308 seats in the 480-member chamber, while the conservative party that had ruled Japan for most of the past half-century lost its grip on power after its presence was slashed to a mere 119.

The LDP defeat was particularly stunning given that in the previous general election in 2005, popular LDP leader Junichiro Koizumi had led his party to a massive victory with talk of bold reforms, only to see the tables turned four years later.

Despite some rough patches in his first month in office, Hatoyama is riding high in opinion polls, which also show Tanigaki has failed to excite voter enthusiasm.

Hatoyama, the wealthy grandson of a prime minister, promoted his core philopsophy of “yuai”, a fuzzy concept of  “fraternity”, in his speech and pledged to protect the weak from harsh economic competition while reallocating spending to improve individuals’ lives.

“It is obvious that leaving everything to the market and pursuing market efficiency to the point where you sacrifice people’s livelihoods and only the strong survive will not work,” Hatoyama said, although he also gave a nod to the benefits of market economics.

It’s only been a week

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama stepped onto the world stage last week, just days after formally being voted into his post. After his party’s decade in the obscurity of opposition, the sometimes dour academic seemed exhilarated by the whirlwind of top-level meetings at the United Nations in New York and the Group of 20 in Pittsburgh.   Some other party officials along on the trip appeared a little lost. “We’ve only been doing this a week,” followed by an embarrassed chuckle, was the answer to some of the more probing questions put by the Japanese press corps flying with the prime minister.   Hatoyama’s Democratic Party has made much of its determination to do things differently from the long-ruling Liberal Democrats, including how they treat the media.   Signs of change appeared almost immediately his official plane took off from Haneda airport bound for New York, when Hatoyama made an appearance among the journalists at the rear of the plane. That’s a rarity in itself in status-conscious Japan, but he caused even more of a stir by bringing along his wife, former musical star Miyuki, who handed out boxes of cakes for reporters to share.   Buns aside, the biggest sign of change was the regular briefings during the trip, which were given by a politician, rather than a bureaucrat. Some sessions turned into a bizarre game of Chinese whispers, with the briefer passing on information passed on by a bureaucrat present at the meeting.   But Hatoyama himself seemed eager to talk to reporters in person. After a detailed run-down of his first meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama left one interviewer speechless, he caught himself in mid-flow with: “Oh, did I go on too long?”He also chatted freely with reporters off the record.   Less of a joker than popular former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who initially attracted popstar-like adulation, Hatoyama could yet win fans in the press with sheer enthusiasm.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Japan vote decision a bit of a tough one

If the woman who works in my dentist’s office is anything to go by, some Japanese voters are having a devil of a time deciding how to vote in an election just over a week away.

Pollsters are predicting that the opposition Democrats will win by a landslide, ousting the conservative party that has ruled for nearly all of the past half-century.

Surveys show, though, that at least one in five voters is undecided, while another chunk might change their minds at the last minute.

“I’m really perplexed,” the dental assistant told me as I finished a less-harrowing-than-feared session in the chair this week.

“I really used to like Kakuei Tanaka when I was a kid,” she said, referring to the former Japanese leader credited by many with perfecting the system that kept the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in power with pork-barrel spending, close ties to business and bureaucrats and well-oiled local political machines.

“The LDP used to have an image as being strong,” she said. “Now, I don’t know.”

The decision of voters like her could either take the edge off an expected Democratic Party win or inflate it further, but analysts say the trend looks unlikely to change.

Aso flags LDP conservativism

To some people a national flag is little more than a piece of cloth, while to others it is a sacred symbol that embodies a country’s ideals. It was the latter that Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso apparently tried to score some easy points with this week in the run-up to the Aug. 30 election that voter surveys show his Liberal Democratic Party party is likely to lose.

In a televised debate, Aso accused the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan of defacing the national flag, commonly known locally as the Hinomaru or “sun circle”,  at a gathering for one of its candidates in southern Japan this month.

“My supporters told me that the Democratic Party cut up national flags and attached them to make a flag of the DPJ’s symbol,” Aso said. “I don’t want to believe it. Cutting up the national flag would be a very sad, unforgivable act.”  

Aso, who bows to the flag before speaking at news conferences, has been increasingly appealing to the LDP’s conservative base, saying the Democrats cannot protect the country with its weak security and socialist policies and using the word “conservative” more often in his speeches.

He has also recently criticised the Democrats for not displaying the Japanese flag at its headquarters. He said this was probably because of support from the leftist teachers’ union, a group anathema to conservatives. 

Indeed, seemingly looking to get maximum mileage out of the issue during this week’s debate, Aso commented that: “The most important thing is how much a party leader loves the country.” 

And DPJ chief Yukio Hatoyama took Aso’s comments on the chin: “If anyone had done such a disgraceful thing (tampered with the flag), I would deeply apologise.” 

Japan’s Democrats get ready to govern

Close your eyes and it could almost be a cabinet minister speaking.

Japan’s main opposition Democratic Party is gearing up for government after the Aug. 30 election, if a talk by the party’s No.2 leader Katsuya Okada is anything to go by.

Speaking at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event in Tokyo, Okada sought to display the politician’s gravitas as he answered questions on everything from foreign policy to the environment and the economy.

If the Democrats do take power, they will inherit an economy which is far from healthy and Okada was careful to manage expectations and not overpromise on what they can do.

As the election date has drawn closer, the Democrats have toned down some of their rhetoric on issues like currency reserve management and the status of the dollar the world’s reserve currency.

They have also taken a more pragmatic approach to relations with the U.S., after touting plans to stand up to Washington.

Nippon or Nihon?

What’s in a name? A lot, according to one Japanese lawmaker, who’s appalled by his country’s schizophrenia over how to pronounce the two ideographs rendered in English as “Japan”.

“What is the formal name of this country? Overseas, it is called ‘Japan’, but Japanese people say both ‘Nihon’ and ‘Nippon’,” opposition parliament member Tetsundo Iwakuni told me.

“There’s no other country that doesn’t standardise its own name.”

Seeking clarification, Iwakuni asked the government what the official view was, only to be told there wasn’t one.

Consistency is indeed lacking when it comes to how to read the two characters, whose literal meaning is “origin of the sun’.

The Japanese language is written with “kanji” ideographs — Chinese characters that symbolise an idea but can have varying pronunciations — and two phonetic scripts.

Bank notes and stamps are imprinted with “Nippon” in the Western alphabet, but the governor of the Bank of Japan, who’s in charge of money, calls himself the head of ”Nihon Ginko”.