Raw Japan

from Global News Journal:

Japan voters seek change, may get chaos

Five years ago, Japanese voters seeking change from stale politics and a stagnant economy backed maverick leader Junichiro Koizumi's calls for reform, handing his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a huge win in an election for parliament's powerful lower house.

Two years, several scandals and one incompetent prime minister later, they dealt the same LDP a stinging setback in a 2007  upper house election, creating a "Twisted Parliament" where the upper chamber could stall bills and delay policies.

The gridlock toppled the LDP's Shinzo Abe and his successor,  each after about a year in office, and finally last summer the same electorate -- still longing for something new and better -- swept the novice Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power, ending more than half a century of almost non-stop LDP rule and ejecting  Taro Aso from the PM's seat. The DPJ, voters hoped, would make good on promises to change how Japan was governed, ending bureaucratic control of policies, and somehow ensuring that Japan emerged from two decades of the doldrums.

Now, after less than a year  of chaotic policymaking,  indecisive leadership and more scandals under DPJ premier  Yukio Hatoyama, followed by sudden talk of a sales tax hike from former grassroots activist Naoto Kan, who took over when Hatoyama suddenly quit,  frustrated voters did it again.

On Sunday, they delivered a harsh rebuke to the DPJ and a tiny ally, depriving them of an upper house majority and setting the stage for another bout of deadlock as Japan struggles to engineer growth in a fast-ageing society and curb a gigantic public debt.

"Voters were not trying to create political confusion, but that is the result," said independent political analyst Hirotaka Futatsuki, adding that calls for a snap lower house election that might not solve anything would grow. No lower house poll need be held until 2013.

Scenarios abound for possible ways out of the political bind.

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.

I really don’t want much for Christmas

“I want to give dreams and hopes to the Japanese people,” Hatoyama told reporters on Christmas Eve when asked what “Hatoyama Santa Claus” wants to give the public this year, Japanese media said.

Hours later, Hatoyama apologised for the indictment of his former aides, who were charged over falsifying political funding records to make cash funneled from Hatoyama’s own family fortune look like donations from individuals.

In a related scandal, the prime minister came under fire for receiving 15 million yen a month over the last seven years, or  a total of 1.26 billion yen, from his wealthy mother, a daughter of the founder of tyre maker Bridgestone Corp. The premier has repeatedly said he was not aware of receiving such cash from his mother said he would pay as much as 600 million yen in gift taxes if that was deemed necessary.

So when a reporter asked what he wants from Santa Claus, Hatoyama only said, “I have been told that I have been given too much.”

I guess no Christmas present for the Japanese prime minister this year then — not even a jump in his sagging poll ratings.

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Issei Kato

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.

Tizzy over emperor’s China audience

Just one month after U.S. President Barack Obama set off a furore in the blogosphere with his deep bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito, the elderly royal is back in the headlines due to a hastily arranged audience granted to China’s heir apparent.

Visiting foreign dignitaries are often granted audiences with the emperor — nothing unusual there.

But the meeting of Chinese President Hi Jintao’s likely successor, Xi Jinping, with Akihito sparked a furore in the Japanese media when it was revealed that the government had obtained a waiver of a customary requirement that applications for royal audiences be made a month in advance.

The decision prompted an outpouring of criticism from conservative as well as liberal media, opposition lawmakers and even some ruling party members, who charged that Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s three-month-old government was making “political use” of the emperor, a sensitive topic in a country where World War Two was fought in the name of Akihito’s father, then-Emperor Hirohito.

Japan’s U.S.-drafted, post-World War Two constitution designates the emperor as a “symbol of the State” without political power, although Akihito, who turns 76 next week,  has played an important diplomatic role in improving ties with Japan’s Asian neighbours, including through a historic 1992 visit to China, during his two decades on the throne.

Circumventing the one-month “rule”, said to have been created by Imperial Household Agency bureaucrats to protect the frail emperor’s health, also raised concerns in some quarters that Hatoyama’s government was leaning too far towards long-time regional rival  China and distancing itself from key security ally Washington, with whom ties are being frayed by a feud over a U.S. Marine airbase on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa.

Hey look, we shrank the budget

Japan’s ruling Democratic Party has long vowed to wrest power from the country’s bureaucrats. Now it’s taking its battles with them over spending onto live internet TV.

Three government backed budget-cutting panels operating from temporary premises in a Tokyo gym, have called in a series of bureaucrats to answer for projects deemed unnecessary or too expensive. The live internet broadcast of the resulting stand-offs can make for compelling viewing.

It’s also pleased voters concerned about Japan’s national debt, which is set to approach 200 percent of GDP next year. The website almost crashed on the first day of the hearings, when thousands of people tried to watch the broadcast at once, the Yomiuri newspaper said. 

For those who don’t follow it live, edited highlights appear nightly on news programmes, often focusing on Democratic lawmaker Renho, a stylish former TV presenter, as she grills squirming bureaucrats.

In a media poll this week, 76 percent of respondents said they thought Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama was doing a good job with cost-cutting.

“What a wonderful broadcast,” said one poster on a news website. “The bureaucrats’ excuses are disgraceful.”

Oops, that was a secret?

It seems to have been an honest mistake for a new minister and Japan’s new government.

“I didn’t know about that (the release time). I’m sorry. Don’t make much of a fuss” Japanese Trade Minister Masayuki Naoshima told a TV reporter on Monday, right after he accidentally revealed the GDP figures ahead of their official release.

The minister looked sincerely surprised when informed of the official release time, but the light tone of his comments suggested that he did not fully understand the gravity of the error. 

He later offered a more formal apology, and Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano reprimanded Naoshima for his leak of the market-sensitive data, which showed Japan’s economy grew much more than expected in the third quarter.

Still, I was surprised to see Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama smiling when asked about Naoshima’s mistake.

“I can understand his wanting to spread the good news to the public,” Hatoyama told reporters.  “But the rule should be maintained. If you say he was careless, he surely was, and in that sense, it was regrettable.”

Naoshima made the blunder in a speech to the oil industry, but the small crowd of domestic reporters covering his event did not report it, and in that sense, the new minister was lucky.

Friends with issues

They may be on first-name terms, but Barack’s discussions with Yukio during his 24-hour stay in Tokyo have left unresolved a feud over a U.S. military base and deeper questions about the future.

They agreed to review the five decade-old U.S.-Japan alliance as both countries adapt to China’s rising regional and global clout, and they agreed to resolve as soon as possible a dispute over the U.S. Marines Futenma airbase on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa.

But President Obama and Prime Minister Hatoyama remain at odds over how to resolve the feud over Futenma – located in the middle of a city whose residents are sick of the noise and worried about the danger of accidents. 

Obama made clear he wants Tokyo to implement a 2006 deal under which Futenma would be closed and replaced with a facility on a less crowded part of the island. The agreement was part of a broader realignment of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan, including a shift of up to 8,000 Marines to the U.S. territory of Guam.

But Hatoyama said that comments during the August campaign that vaulted his party  to power had raised the hopes of Okinawa residents who want the base off the island.

High-level talks could begin as early as next week, reviving the headache the leaders played down at their summit before an APEC meeting in Singapore.

They can’t let the base row drag on. The victory of an anti-base candidate in a local mayoral election in Okinawa in January would make it even harder to agree to implement the deal, even with some changes.

Japan’s bulging debt

How much is too much?

When it comes to Japan’s bulging public debt, no one quite knows, but at about $75,640 for each of the country’s 127 million people, the burden is starting to worry both voters and investors. You can even see it climb in front of your eyes on an unofficial Website.

That’s why some pundits say it’s time for new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to make some tough decisions about delaying costly spending programmes promised in the August election that vaulted his Democratic Party to power.

But with the economy fragile and an election for parliament’s less powerful upper house less than a year away, many wonder if he will.

Support for Hatoyama’s cabinet slipped eight points to 63 percent in a Yomiuri newspaper poll this week, while 85 percent said they’d rather see some campaign pledges broken than a rise in a public debt, already headed for more than 200 percent of GDP this year.

Taking voters at their word, however, could backfire.

“In terms of spending prioritites, it might be possible to prepare public opinion for changes in details in the run-up to the upper house election,” said Sophia University’s Koichi  Nakano. “But it would be risky.

Will Obama find time to shoot hoops in Tokyo?

U.S. President Barack Obama will have his work cut out during his 24-hour stay in Japan from Friday as he and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama try to soothe concerns that the decades-old alliance is fraying as the two countries adapt to China’s rise.

 Other U.S. presidents have also had rough agendas in Tokyo, given a relationship historically plagued by trade spats and security angst.

But most have found time for a friendly photo op — sampling local culture or cuisine or squeezing in some exercise time.

Jimmy Carter jogged and swam at the U.S. ambassador’s residence and sampled “yakitori” chicken kebabs at a restaurant in downtown Tokyo with his family in 1979.

Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy were served Japanese tea in a traditional ceremony by Yasuhiro Nakasone at the then-prime minister’s mountain cottage, where the two leaders famously forged their chummy “Ron-Yasu” relationship at a summit in 1983.

George H.W. Bush lost a tennis match against Emperor Hirohito and his heir, then fell ill and threw up at a state dinner in 1992.