September 22, 2006; Volume 03, Number 35
of the
Japan Considered Podcast
[Listen to the audio file by clicking here]
Clink Links Below for Today's Topics
Good Morning! From the autumn-cool campus of the University of South Carolina. Today is Friday, September 22nd, 2006. And you are listening to Volume 02, Number 35, of the Japan Considered Podcast.
Thanks for dropping in again – to our regular listeners. And welcome to those of you who just found the program. I hope it meets your expectations. I’m Robert Angel, creator and maintainer of the Japan Considered Project, and creator and host of this Podcast. Each week at this time we consider the longer-term significance of recent events in the news for Japan’s domestic politics and international relations.
Now, this isn’t a comprehensive news program. Given time limitations, I have to pick only those items most likely to further our understanding of how Japan actually works. Items whose consideration gets us beyond the pages of regular media reporting in some way. There are plenty of comprehensive news sources around. NewsOnJapan does a terrific job, day in and day out. Visit them for links to English language media articles in several categories, including politics. And lately, even some video clips!
Earlier this week a nice e-mail arrived from Garrett De Orio in Tokyo. Garrett and a colleague have recently begun a podcast on Japan’s politics they call “Seijigiri.” I went to their web page and enjoyed their broadcast of live coverage of the September 20th LDP presidential election vote. Very nice work. Keep ‘em coming, Garrett and Ken. Those of you unfamiliar with the site, point your browser at www.transpacificradio.com and have a listen! I’ll put a link in the show notes and transcript. A different perspective on Japan’s politics, with far more sophisticated audio production than I’m able to bring to bear here. Wish I had their technical skills!
This week again we have to begin with the LDP presidential election. Japan’s political media is full of it, naturally. And, although Abe’s victory hardly qualifies as news, there are a few interesting points for us to consider. Then we’ll continue our look at the Democratic Party of Japan. This time considering the significance of the Party’s organization. Problems and opportunities. There we’ll have a few thoughtful comments from Professor Len Schoppa of the University of Virginia.
Kisshin-Maru 31 Incident Resolution
First, though, a note on recent developments in international relations. You’ll recall our mention in mid-August of the capture of a Japanese fishing boat in Russian-claimed waters. A capture during which one of the crew members was shot and killed by the Russian patrol boat.
This, I believe, was a potentially explosive issue. Especially given the LDP presidential election just around the corner. It’s easy to imagine one of the three candidates grandstanding on the issue, hoping to excite Japanese public opinion, and thereby enhance their candidacy with at least the LDP prefectural chapter members, if not some of the LDP Diet members.
Well, that didn’t happen. Were this a regular news program, there would be little sense of mentioning something like this that really isn’t news. But it’s still significant, I think. We should keep this in mind if we’re going make a genuine effort to evaluate how Japan will conduct its diplomatic affairs in the future. If we’re really just rooting for our favorite political team in Japan, just trying to benefit them with our public comments, that’s another matter, of course.
This fishing boat issue has been handled by both sides with as much diplomacy as possible. Given the unfortunate circumstances of the take-down. The surviving three crew members and the boat were taken into custody by the Russians. Japan officially asked that the body of the crew member killed, all of the surviving crew members, and the boat be returned immediately. They knew that wouldn’t happen, given past experience. But were bound to ask.
The Russians returned the body of the fisherman on August 19th, and released two of the surviving crew members on August 30th. The boat captain, Noboru Sakashita, was held for trial on suspicion of poaching. Sakashita was convicted by the Russian court of poaching on September 21st, and fined a total of 495,000 roubles, or about 2 million yen. And his boat was confiscated.
Japan’s government immediately rejected the Russian court ruling. Arguing that Japan doesn’t recognize Russian sovereignty in the area. But, it’s significant, I think, that the announcement of rejection was made by a deputy chief cabinet secretary, and not Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe or Prime Minister Koizumi. Had they wished to escalate the intensity of the issue that would have been another ideal opportunity.
Sakashita’s company is likely to pay the fine and the incident, while not forgotten, will be downplayed as much as possible. The best possible conclusion, for which both Russian and Japanese authorities should be given credit. We can only hope that it will serve as reference during efforts to resolve other pending territorial issues in East Asia.
Shinzo Abe Elected President of the LDP
Well, it’s finally official. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe has been elected to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as president of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. We’ve anticipated this development for some time. It’s no surprise. But there are a few related themes here worth considering, I think.
Abe just turned 52 yesterday. He’s the youngest person ever elected to the LDP presidency. And next week Japan’s parliament is expected to elect him as Japan’s youngest prime minister. That will make him Japan’s first prime minister born after World War Two as well. Quite a bit after World War Two. Not only is he a mere babe in traditional Japanese national political terms. But he didn’t arrive in the Diet until 1993. That’s an incredibly short period of service for any LDP parliamentarian. Let alone the prime minister. Koizumi had to make a real – sometimes painful-to-see – effort to appear young and “hip.” Abe, in contrast, actually IS young. Maybe not very “hip,” whatever that means. But at least he won’t have to work at appearing young.
I can recall sitting in undergraduate and graduate classes back at Columbia University during the late 1960s and early 1970s, writing down and trying to memorize lists of posts any LDP politician had to occupy before he could be considered as a candidate for the LDP presidency. They were quite long lists of Party and Cabinet posts. Well, that’s changed. At least for now. And it’s probably a change that will endure. Abe’s occupied very few of those posts. In spite of his head start as Shintaro Abe’s son.
As scheduled, the vote was taken and announced on Wednesday. The outcome wasn’t surprising. But Abe’s margin of victory was not quite what he and his supporters had expected. Abe won a total of 464 of the 703 votes cast. Foreign Minister Taro Aso came in second with 136 votes. And Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki was third with 102 votes. Abe’s forces had expected to receive more than the 267 votes actually cast for him by the 403 LDP Diet Members voting. And also something more than the 197 votes of the 300 cast by the LDP prefectural branches. Still it was a handy win, a clear majority with no need for a run-off. Japanese political reporters who are skeptical of Abe’s policy plans, domestic and international, are bound to write about this “disappointment” for some time to come. Speculating on where the anticipated Abe vote leaks occurred, and what that means. We’re likely to forget he received just under two-thirds of the total votes cast.
Participation of the LDP Prefectural Chapters
Another significant aspect of this LDP presidential election is worth mention here. In fact, Dr. Ed Lincoln wrote yesterday to ask about it. Ed’s a long-time listener and supporter of this program. And the new director of the Japan-U.S. Business and Economic Studies Center at NYU’s Stern School of Business in New York.
Ed wanted to know what happened with the prefectural vote. He recalled Koizumi’s first selection as LDP president in 2001. The election campaign in which Koizumi and Makiko Tanaka flew back and forth across the country gathering support from the LDP prefectural branches. With the intention of forcing a change in the Diet Members’ vote through a good showing in the earlier prefectural branch elections. The strategy worked. Koizumi bested the late former prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, to become LDP president and prime minister.
Good question! And one relevant to future LDP presidential selections. As we discussed some months earlier on this program, the LDP decided to change the rules just a bit for this election. Prefectural chapters were given 300 votes altogether. Apportioned among the prefectures according to population. But with two important changes. All prefectures were required to allocate their votes proportionally to each candidate, according to the percentage of votes received. That, rather than deciding at the prefecture level whether to proportionally divide the vote, or give the whole to the candidate winning the most votes.
Even more important, the prefectural votes were not announced until the LDP Diet Members voted on the 20th, rather than earlier, as was done in 2001. This made it more difficult, if not impossible, for an LDP presidential candidate to steamroll the Diet Members’ vote with a big win in the prefectures. This, of course, was done to prevent another Tanaka-Koizumi stampede like 2001. Significantly weakening the significance of the prefectural chapter portion of the vote. All else constant, further concentrating influence within the LDP in its Diet Members.
It will be interesting to see how this issue of prefectural chapter participation in party presidential elections is handled in the future. The rule was changed after 2001. And it can just as easily be changed again. It seems unlikely that there would be much support among LDP Diet Members for such a change, however. Unless someone took up the cause and made a fuss about it. That’s always possible. And could matter in the future. Stay tuned.
Japanese Political Reporting After Abe Win
I’ve mentioned this for the past two weeks now. But it really has been difficult to get much of value out of the Japanese political press on the significance of the Abe electoral victory, or Abe’s plans for the future. Still this week, the Japanese press has been full of political stories. But nearly all of them have a very high noise-to-signal ratio. Lots of speculation; lots of opinion. Minimal reporting of facts. Probably because there are so few known facts to report. And, in contrast to programs like this one, newspapers must fill column inches, and television stations must fill air time. Day in and day out.
Looking through the notes I’ve taken this week during the early-morning hours each day, there seem to be three sorts of Abe-related stories coming from Japan. First, social page-type articles that provide personal details about Shinzo Abe and his family. We learned, for example, that Abe prefers ice cream above all other foods. And that his wife enjoys a drink of alcohol from time to time – in contrast to Abe, who hardly touches the stuff. Then there are the articles that speculate on Abe’s appointments to the Cabinet and senior LDP posts. And the significance of those appointments. These articles usually are based on anonymous sources “close to Abe.” Third, there are articles speculating on the policies that Abe is likely to pursue during his premiership, inevitably comparing them with policies pursued by Koizumi during the past half-decade.
Often these articles include advice for Mr. Abe. Especially the latter two types. Many of these “advice” type articles attempt to maintain at least some appearance of journalistic objectivity by including interviews with authoritative figures, Japanese or foreign. And thereby present their advice to Abe as the opinions of the expert interviewed, rather than their own. Of course, those interviewees are selected on the basis of what they are likely to say. So, it amounts to the same thing.
There’s nothing especially novel about this state of affairs. It happens in all democratic societies where media efforts to influence attentive public opinion can actually influence political outcomes. But as news consumers, we have to be careful not to be misled into believing that we are consuming straight, objective reporting. We never are.
The more progressively inclined media in Japan consistently advise Mr. Abe to pursue more progressive domestic and international policies if he wishes to become a successful prime minister. The more conservatively inclined Japanese media consistently advise Mr. Abe to pursue more conservative domestic and international policies if he wishes to become a successful prime minister. So, if we really are trying to understand what’s going on in political Japan these days, and perhaps anticipate the likely course of events in the future, it’s important that we balance our Japan political news consumption with attention to editorially conservative outlets as well as editorially progressive outlets.
Debate over ideological classification of Japanese media outlets is endless. As it is in the United States. So I will refrain here from assigning labels. One observers “fair and balanced” reporting is another’s left-or-right-wing ideological tirade. But I will suggest that we should read carefully articles from outlets such as Sankei Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, as well as articles from Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, and the Japan Times, if we’re making a genuine effort to understand the Abe Administration. If, on the other hand, we’re just interested in rooting for our team, in the well-known fashion of spectator sports fans, or Fords vs Chevys, then it’s not necessary, and will likely lead to needless discomfort.
Shinzo Abe is scheduled to announce his decisions on cabinet members and senior LDP posts next week. He’s also scheduled to give a major policy address to the Diet on next Friday. That’s just a week away. Once we have those facts we’ll be better able to speculate on their significance for Japan’s domestic politics and international relations during the next few years.
The Democratic Party of Japan: Organizational Challenges and Opportunities
Let’s turn now to the second in our series on the Democratic Party of Japan. Last week we considered the DPJ’s overall importance as Japan’s leading opposition party. And then we considered the Party’s leadership, with emphasis on Ichiro Ozawa as the new Party president. This week we’ll considered organizational or structural issues. Both, challenges for the Party and its leadership. And opportunities, that if skillfully managed, could provide advantages as the Party struggles to compete with the LDP.
The DPJ was formed in 1998, during a period of considerable party system confusion in Japan. The long-dominant “1955 Party System” had collapsed. Groups of incumbent Diet members were forming and re-forming organizations they described as “political parties.” If only to be eligible for the government campaign funding that came as part of the reforms associated with the election law changes a few years earlier. Efforts to chart this process inevitably require high magnification and multi-colored ink to clarify the confusion.
Four “parties” merged in 1998 to formally create the Democratic Party of Japan. The effort was led by a former prime minister, Tsutomu Hata, civic activist Naoto Kan, and Yukio Hatoyama. Hata brought highly developed inter-personal, conciliation skills to the new group, as well as the prestige of his brief premiership. Kan brought a keen sense of how to harness public frustration over social inequities to political efforts. And Yukio Hatoyama brought both a long-famous political name and enormous financial assets. Essential at that point to get the new Party off the ground.
They were from the beginning a disparate group. Their common objective was opposition to the recovery of the LDP and its continued domination of electoral politics in Japan. In that sense, they were considered “political reformers.” And the DPJ they created could describe itself as “reformist” without eliciting snickers from listeners. But agreement beyond the universally supported opinion that the DPJ should defeat the LDP at the polls and become Japan’s ruling Party was hard to come by.
This diversity within the Party intensified in mid-2003 when negotiations began with Ichiro Ozawa over merging Ozawa’s Liberal Party into the DPJ. The merger inspired considerable debate within the Party at the time, cleavages that have yet to completely heal. By the end of 2003 the DPJ was a party that included both former Liberal Party [in the academic sense of that term] members and former Socialist Party members. Still, the merger did raise the Party’s profile in Japan’s parliament. And brought a new highly skilled political operative to the Party’s leadership ranks.
We will discuss the policy implications of all this diversity on a subsequent program, hopefully next week. But briefly, DPJ leaders since the Party’s foundation have been torn between endorsing specific policies and programs that reflect their beliefs, and that they hope will appeal to Japanese voters, on the one hand, and the institutional imperative of avoiding to the extent possible, debate among the Party’s leadership and members over specific issues bound to increase division and tension. This includes domestic economic policy issues, and foreign policy issues.
Comments From Professor Len Schoppa
Professor Len Schoppa joined us last week to provide his assessment of DPJ leadership issues. During that same September 11th SkypePhone conversation, Len offered some thoughtful comments about the Party’s problems with policy differences and personal rivalries.
[Schoppa] Certainly the Democrats have a bad reputation for being a divided party. Part of that comes from the fact that they are formed so relatively recently through merger. So many of the leading figures in the Party have reputations and histories in separate parties that make it easy for them to form camps in people’s minds. But it’s also, I think, because the Democrats have split publicly on national security issues on a couple of votes in the last couple of years. People like Yokomichi are willing to defy the Party discipline, and vote against the Party’s position when it tries to take on more “normal-country” positions on the role of Japan in security affairs.
I then asked Len if that was especially true when Seiji Maehara was Party president.
[Schoppa] Certainly there was open debate within the Party, not just when Maehara was leader, but every time the Party leader says anything about national security you’re bound to find somebody else in the Party disputing them.
[Angel] Is this a fatal flaw?
[Schoppa] Actually, the number of people who are on the left wing on this issue is relatively small. It’s about thirty. The group around Mr. Yokomichi. And it’s also relatively easy to paper over most of the time. When you have to make a decision on a specific deployment of troops abroad, of course you can’t fudge. You have to be on one side or the other of the issue.
[Angel] Let’s get back for a minute to your initial comment about the ease of exaggerating the divisions within the Party because of its newness.
[Schoppa] Yes. That is something that will dissipate over time. It’s already dissipated to a significant degree because the Party has added so many people since its original mergers. The big mergers took place in 1998 when a number of people who had come with Mr. Hata through the Minseito joined and almost doubled the size of the Party in the latter part of the nineties. But surprisingly since then the majority of the Party is now made up of people who have been elected only under the DPJ banner. They are new candidates who don’t have ties to any of those pre-merger parties. Over time they’re going to be moving up in the leadership ranks. Those people will not be as firmly associated with one faction or another. Among the key figures like this you currently hear from are Mr. Noda Yoshihiko and Mr. Furukawa Motohisa. These are pretty significant figures in the Party, who never belonged to any of the pre-merger parties. They’ve been DPJ their entire careers.
Thanks again. Len, for those thoughtful insights. They help to bring balance to our coverage of this issue. An issue that’s bound to be increasingly important during the next few years. Next week I hope to discuss the policy positions of the DPJ, and their significance under the leadership of DPJ President, Ichiro Ozawa.
That’s all we have time for now. It would be nice to know more about DPJ efforts to strengthen their prefectural branches throughout the country. I’ve found very little about it in the Japanese press. Any listeners with current knowledge of that important topic, please e-mail me at RobertCAngel@gmail.com. I’d be grateful to hear from you.
To go out today I have an exciting Bluegrass clip for you from The Master. Taken from “Let Me Be Your Friend,” this short clip illustrates how John Duffey made musical history with his high tenor voice and mandolin playing. You can find the full version of “Let me Be Your Friend” on the 2001 Sugar Hill Records album, “Always in Style,” or directly from iTunes as a single. Listen to this!
[bluegrass]
Goodbye all. Until next week.
