Japanese Politics

[Shadow Kira01]

Originally Posted by ShimatheKat

His East Asia Community brings forth WWII overtones.
Beware. He isn't the Tomichii Murayama China thinks he is.

Why do you sound so much like another Goda Ryuji?

The reason why the ideal of building an "East Asian Community" is doomed to failure because there are way too many "Goda Ryuji" on all three sides. Its kind of sad.. *shakes head*

The will to build good bilateral ties with other nations is not the equivalent of bowing down to them and neither does it mean to give in to their unreasonable requests and demands. It is simply put to ensure regional stability and financial cooperation, as well as peaceful relations with a tone of friendliness. It appears too many people have misunderstood this very important point to the concept of building an East Asian Community.

[TinyRedLeaf]

There were a few posts in the News and Japanese Culture about Japan's latest Prime Minister, Mr Yoshihiko Noda. It's only now that I remembered this long-dormant thread created specifically for discussing Japanese politics.

As a follow-up to those posts, this article sheds interesting insight into the backroom manoeuvring that allowed Mr Noda to take leadership.

Japan's new leader: The mud-lover

ON MOST mornings of his political career until he became finance minister last year, Mr Yoshihiko Noda doggedly courted voters at the railway station near his home in this commuter town east of Tokyo. He started out with none of the three ban, or attributes, aspiring politicians are meant to possess: an inherited constituency, prestige and bags of money. So he stumped every working day for almost 25 years to build a name for himself.

Using skills honed at Funabashi station, Mr Noda, 54, pulled off what supporters call a miracle. His speech to parliamentarians of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) before they voted for a leader was unusual for a Japanese politician. He spoke plainly, exuding honesty and consistency. And he made people laugh, comparing his puffy appearance to that of a loach, a fish that loves mud.

Supporters say his speech also contained a coded message aimed at healing a paralysing rift in the party between those for and against Mr Ichiro Ozawa, the party's indicted (and suspended) kingpin. The loach reference was taken from one of the favourite poems of Mr Azuma Koshiishi, a 75-year-old elder in the DPJ who is close to Mr Ozawa, with rare influence over him.

It was a deftly cast fly. Soon after Mr Noda was named Prime Minister, he persuaded Mr Koshiishi to become secretary-general of the party. That put the onus on Mr Ozawa to bury the hatchet.

THE ECONOMIST

It's hard to be optimistic about Japanese politics these days, but here's hoping that Mr Noda does turn out to be a dark horse.

[Sumeragi]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

It's hard to be optimistic about Japanese politics these days, but here's hoping that Mr Noda does indeed turn out to be a dark horse.

Probably when Japan is annexed by Korea. Noda is probably the lesser of two evils, but he's certainly not who Japan needs.

[Guardian Enzo]

The problem is that both major parties are deeply unpopular, and the public wanted - by a staggering margin - Maehara Seiji to take over. He's the sort of bright, charismatic personality that might have been able to restore some interest in salvaging the system on his own, as neither party is capable of capturing the public's imagination on its own merits. The odds are overwhelming that Noda, too, will fall within a year and the LDP will win the next election on the pretext of punishing the DPJ, not on their own popularity. If they'd listened to the voters and chosen Maehara they might have had a chance to recapture some of the momentum that swept them into power.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo

The problem is that both major parties are deeply unpopular, and the public wanted - by a staggering margin - Maehara Seiji to take over.

I believe Japanese politicians from both DPJ and LDP have learnt that popularity with voters is both fickle and ephemeral.

PM Noda enjoys strong voter support

Tokyo (Sept 4, Sun): Two thirds of Japanese voters back new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda as his call for unity within the ruling party and conciliatory stance towards the opposition raised hopes for speedy policy implementation, newspaper polls showed today.

Support for the Noda government was at 67 per cent, according to a poll by the Nikkei business daily, compared with 19 per cent for Mr Naoto Kan's Cabinet in the newspaper's previous survey conducted in late July.

Polls by three other major newspapers, the Yomiuri, Mainichi and Asahi, showed that support for Mr Noda came to 65 per cent, 56 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively. Another poll by Kyodo news agency showed similar results yesterday.

The Japanese public usually gives relatively high approval ratings to a new prime minister, and Mr Kan's own Cabinet won 68 per cent support in the Nikkei poll when he came into power 15 months ago.

REUTERS, AFP

===========

Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo

(Maehara) is the sort of bright, charismatic personality that might have been able to restore some interest in salvaging the system on his own, as neither party is capable of capturing the public's imagination on its own merits. The odds are overwhelming that Noda, too, will fall within a year and the LDP will win the next election on the pretext of punishing the DPJ, not on their own popularity. If they'd listened to the voters and chosen Maehara they might have had a chance to recapture some of the momentum that swept them into power.

The problem, apparently, is that Mr Maehara has very obvious skeletons in his closet:

The pro-America former foreign minister could have used his popularity among the ordinary electorate to galvanise people’s interest in politics after so many weak prime ministers. But he failed to excite his fellow lawmakers and has had funding irregularities of his own, which he admitted during a weekend of campaigning.

If he had become Prime Minister, there was the risk that he would be almost immediately vulnerable to attacks by the opposition LDP. Given such a scenario, I think it's probably a good thing he didn't become the new leader. Japan doesn't need another scandal to create yet another political gridlock at this critical moment.

[Guardian Enzo]

Maehara's skeletons were already out of the closet, actually - and that would have been to his benefit. He already resigned as Foreign Minister due to the campaign contribution issue, and the public didn't care. Now, as it turns out, it looks as if Noda has previously undisclosed illegal foreign contributions that are just coming to the surface. That could be a huge issue for him.

Noda's brief popularity is a normal honeymoon and means nothing in terms of his lasting appeal, scandal or no. I'm not a believer in the cult of personality and I'm not a fan of the only PM who's thrived in the last 20 years - Koizumi - based on it. But the fact is, Japanese voters are so apathetic and so disgusted with the system that it may be the only way to have a little stability, and Maehara is the only politician with enough personal popularity to have a chance to make that happen.

[Autumn Demon]

Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo

Now, as it turns out, it looks as if Noda has previously undisclosed illegal foreign contributions that are just coming to the surface. That could be a huge issue for him.

I don't think Noda's campaign contributions from a Korean resident will damage his popularity with the people but the LDP might make a huge deal about it. More worrying for Noda are some of his cabinet appointees who were put in place for their political connections (to Ozawa and the LDP) rather than their competence.

Originally Posted by Guardian Enzo

But the fact is, Japanese voters are so apathetic and so disgusted with the system that it may be the only way to have a little stability, and Maehara is the only politician with enough personal popularity to have a chance to make that happen.

Popularity with the voters doesn't matter because elections don't matter. The DPJ got way more votes than the LDP in the upper house elections last year - 39% to 33.5% in prefectural races - yet the DPJ won 28 prefectural seats to the LDP's 39. The LDP knows it doesn't need to be popular to win elections: it just has to make the DPJ look bad enough to not win elections by a landslide like in 2009. A DPJ prime minister can only be successful if they are able to pass legislation through the upper house.

[Sumeragi]

Originally Posted by Autumn Demon

I don't think Noda's campaign contributions from a Korean resident will damage his popularity with the people but the LDP might make a huge deal about it. More worrying for Noda are some of his cabinet appointees who were put in place for their political connections (to Ozawa and the LDP) rather than their competence.

Look at Maehara Seiji. While Maehara himself already took the fall once (and came out pretty good after all the troubles), Noda's problem is just starting.

[Autumn Demon]

Maehara's donations from "Koreans" may have cost him the DPJ presidential race. Members of the Diet think it is a big scandal but Maehara's popularity indicates the people don't care.

The 60%+ approval ratings for Noda's cabinet are a little surprising; hardly anyone had an opinion on him before he became prime minister and his cabinet has some first-timers (maybe the people like that...). When Aso Taro first took office support for his government was less than 50% so the DPJ can't count on changing prime ministers every time they become unpopular (they're clearing doing just that). The DPJ has become the most popular party again, but they're only leading the LDP by around 4% in most polls. I predict in a few months the LDP will top opinion polls again.

[killer3000ad]

Japanese trade minister quits over gaffes

Japan's trade minister has resigned, after just eight days in office, following two separate incidents where comments he made were deemed to be inappropriate and insensitive.

Yoshio Hachiro announced his departure at a news conference late on Saturday, apologising repeatedly for calling the evacuated area around the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant "a town of death".

[TinyRedLeaf]

Ozawa quits DPJ over sales tax

Tokyo (July 3, Tue): The ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has split as 50 rebel lawmakers, including former party leader Ichiro Ozawa, said yesterday (July 2) that they will leave the party over their opposition to a consumption-tax hike that has been pushed by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

Mr Ozawa is expected to launch a new party soon with other DPJ defectors. However, the DPJ will maintain a majority of the seats in the lower house of Parliament. The move came after 57 lower house DPJ members, including Mr Ozawa, voted last week against legislation for the tax hike, saying that it went against the party's campaign promises in the 2009 elections that swept the DPJ to power.

While Mr Ozawa's new group can try to block the legislation by submitting a no-confidence motion against the government, it lacks sufficient numbers to topple the DPJ. The opposition Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP's) support of the tax makes passage through the upper house likely, and it has shown no sign of cooperation with Mr Ozawa, who left the LDP two decades ago.

Mr Ozawa, who engineered the DPJ's 2009 election victory, was acquitted in April of violating campaign-finance laws. He has been nicknamed "the Destroyer" for his 20-year history of leaving political parties and forming new ones.

Opinion polls show the tax Bill is unpopular with voters, but this does not translate to support for Mr Ozawa. In a survey published in the Asahi newspaper on June 28, some 52 per cent of respondents said they opposed the Bill, while 78 per cent said they did not have high expectations for Mr Ozawa's breakaway party.

Having staked his political career on passing the tax hike legislation, Mr Noda is adamant about seeing the planned doubling of the consumption tax rate to 10 per cent by October 2015.

He has repeatedly said that raising the tax is necessary to address the world's largest public debt and soaring welfare costs. The International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have both urged Japan to be more aggressive in tackling a debt that the OECD predicts will reach 223 per cent of gross domestic product next year.

THE DAILY YOMIURI, BLOOMBERG

[TinyRedLeaf]

Abe's plan: Avoid repeating his errors

Tokyo (Dec 17, Mon): Mr Shinzo Abe's comeback says more about the spectacular failure of the leaders who succeeded him than about a revival on his part. But Mr Abe, 58, is in many ways a changed man. Though analysts say he remains deeply nationalistic at heart, he has toned down his hawkish language and instead has focused on reviving Japan’s moribund economy.

NYT

He'll have to work harder on his plan...

Abe trips over Bush-Obama gaffe

Tokyo, (Dec 18, Tue): Japan's presumptive premier, Mr Shinzo Abe, got his American leaders mixed up when he told business chiefs he had been speaking to "President Bush" after receiving a phone call from Mr Barack Obama.

The gaffe came in one of Mr Abe's first speaking engagements since his landslide victory in weekend polls that saw his Liberal Democratic Party returned to power.

Mr Abe, who was prime minister in 2006-7 during the final years of Mr George W. Bush's presidency, quickly realised his error when assembled journalists and business leader began chuckling.

The 58-year-old corrected his verbal misstep and told officials from the Keidanren, Japan's business lobby, that he and Mr Obama had agreed on the importance of the Japan-United States security alliance.

AFP

[sa547]

Dang, that old man will have to keep up with the rest of the world if he wants to get some renewed respect.

I wonder how in the world the younger generation would look up to him, as I think some of them seem to be completely apolitical -- with the LDP being around for too long and dominated largely by geriatrics or old-boy alliances.

[willx]

So here's an interesting article that a Canadian economist was blogging about Japan's new/old Prime Minister Abe and its fiscal situation.

The Duke of Wellington on the best way to start a Japanese debt crisis

I happened to read Michael Schuman's article in Time. The title is "Will Japan's Next Prime Minister Start a Debt Crisis?" .

My immediate reaction: I hope so. Because the only thing that can save Japan is a debt crisis. It's a pity Japan didn't have a debt crisis 20 years ago, but better late than never. And the longer Japan waits before having a debt crisis, the harder it will be to control. And it will have a debt crisis eventually. But can he do it? And what would be the best way to start a debt crisis?

When people don't want to hold your debt, or your money, they will spend it, which is exactly what Japan needs. But (as I said in this old post) too much of a good thing is a bad thing, because you end up with too much inflation, rather than just an end to deflation and recession. So if you get too big a debt crisis you have to offer much higher interest rates to persuade people to buy new debt to rollover the old debt. And you have to increase taxes or cut spending so they know they will eventually get repaid.

It's a lot easier to control a debt crisis when debt is 25% of GDP than when it's 250% of GDP. If you need to raise interest rates 1% to control a debt crisis, that's an extra 0.25% of GDP in taxes in the first case, and an extra 2.5% of GDP in taxes in the second case. If you need to raise interest rates 4% to control a debt crisis, that's an extra 1% of GDP in taxes in the first case, and an extra 10%% of GDP in taxes in the second case.

It won't be as scary as those numbers make it look. The debt crisis will be partly self-solving, because the economic recovery that comes with it will increase tax revenues, and because the government will be able to stop spending on things that weren't really needed except to create demand. And long run growth will mean the denominator in the debt/GDP figure will be rising. Britain had debt/GDP ratios that high in the past two centuries, and survived. But the fact that it doesn't look that scary yet is precisely the problem.

I can think of two ways for Japan to start a debt crisis.

The first is monetary policy. Something like a level path target for nominal GDP would make real assets and goods more attractive relative to nominal bonds and money, so people would want to sell bonds and money to buy real goods.

The second is fiscal policy. Keep on increasing the debt/GDP ratio until it gets high enough to frighten the bondholders so they don't want to hold any more.

There's one big problem with that second strategy: unless Japan's bondholders scare easily, and they don't seem to, a debt/GDP ratio big enough to frighten the Japanese bondholders would be frightening.

As the Duke of Wellington once said: "I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but by God, they frighten me."

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthw...bt-crisis.html

Reply hazy, ask again later

[willx]

So this was completely random:

Upon visiting Vancouver, BC (Canada) my hometown last week, I managed to get in touch with a very close friend I hadn't seen in years. He has an MA in philosophy (if I recall) and/or some major or minor in political studies. He was always interested in policy and whatnot, but I had no idea what he had been up to for the last couple of years.

Apparently he was in Japan working in/around politics! He had apparently joined some small independent political party and was on the verge of (according to him) running for some position in the Diet. He could not, however, afford to personally fund the required campaign expenses and did not participate. He did research extensively on the TPP (Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership) which I did not know existed, which I found to be incredibly interesting, considering it's extensive reach -- which he is very much against from both a Canada and Japan perspective.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by willx

So this was completely random:

Upon visiting Vancouver, BC (Canada) my hometown last week, I managed to get in touch with a very close friend I hadn't seen in years. He has an MA in philosophy (if I recall) and/or some major or minor in political studies. He was always interested in policy and whatnot, but I had no idea what he had been up to for the last couple of years.

Apparently he was in Japan working in/around politics! He had apparently joined some small independent political party and was on the verge of (according to him) running for some position in the Diet. He could not, however, afford to personally fund the required campaign expenses and did not participate. He did research extensively on the TPP (Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership) which I did not know existed, which I found to be incredibly interesting, considering it's extensive reach -- which he is very much against from both a Canada and Japan perspective.

I think you are slow on the TPP. A number of us from SEA have agreed that it is bad for everyone.

[willx]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

I think you are slow on the TPP. A number of us from SEA have agreed that it is bad for everyone.

I am very slow on it .. because Canada isn't in it yet. Apparently we started negotiating it in Canada only as recent as October 2012. I had no idea..

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by willx

I am very slow on it .. because Canada isn't in it yet. Apparently we started negotiating it in Canada only as recent as October 2012. I had no idea..

The next time you are in the toilet, read it.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

I think you are slow on the TPP. A number of us from SEA have agreed that it is bad for everyone.

It's potentially SOPA^1000 dumped on Asia

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

It's potentially SOPA^1000 dumped on Asia

And they are using it as a way to sell bad business plans under the pretext that they are banding together against China.