Comment by Tobias Harris

September 29, 2007 @ 10:47 pm

I’m not sure if party discipline is Japan’s problem — or if parties are as disciplined as you think.

The votes within the Diet, of course, end up being disciplined, but that’s by no means unusual for parliamentary systems. And the process of policy formulation has been anything but disciplined (i.e., the role of PARC and zoku giin in LDP policy making).

Comment by Tobias Harris

September 29, 2007 @ 11:15 pm

Oh, and thanks for the props.

Comment by Kristófer

September 30, 2007 @ 2:06 am

I’m not sure about everyone else, but the Trans-Pacific Radio feed has been dead on my iTunes for some time now. The last Seijigiri to appear on there was #30

Comment by Garrett

September 30, 2007 @ 2:33 am

Really?

I’m sorry to hear that. Thanks for letting us know. We’d heard about some trouble, but thought we had fixed it recently.

Is it only TPR you’re not receiving or is it other podcasts as well?

Comment by Kristófer

September 30, 2007 @ 10:22 am

I’m supposed to be subscribed to all the podcasts but currently the only one showing on iTunes is “TPR’s Ken Worsley Discusses Nova on Radio New Zealand…”

Comment by Arudou Debito

October 2, 2007 @ 8:47 am

Hi TPR. Bringing the discussion back to the subject line, I saw a fascinating examination of Fukuda’s opening policy speech yesterday on this morning’s Toku Da Ne.

Amongst the word counts and the perfunctory skeptical shots of politicians who wish they were where Fukuda is, the most interesting theory offered was this:

Fukuda’s speech was bland and boring–and most people surveyed didn’t even know he was giving his policy speech yesterday (honestly, I didn’t ).

That might be a deliberate strategy on the part of the LDP.

Public interest in politics is not what the LDP politicians want. They’re sick of the spotlight brought about by Koizumi’s era. Abe withered under it.

So choose the less charismatic of the two candidates (Aso was the far more personable), have Fukuda read a 20-minute speech with his eyes down and a few sops to public interest (such as three minutes on kakusa, but no mention of even the nenkin mondai), and downplay things to the point where people go to sleep.

(Mori even said the opposition said they should just go to sleep instead of going to the polls during one of the elections when he was PM, remember. Mori is very much in charge of things in the resurgence of habatsu politics…)

Suggest TPR keep an eye on this administration with this vantage point in mind from now on. I will too (but reporting is on this is more your purview; Debito.org is less Diet politics, more how it influences the NJ communities). Thought I’d just let you know.

Arudou Debito in Sapporo

Comment by Adamu

October 2, 2007 @ 11:46 am

Thanks for listening.

What I would like to see is for the Diet to actually become a place where politicians make their case and where the real debate actually happens and the system of backdoor dealing between Diet Affairs chairmen and the vast institutionalized, bureaucratic, and secret LDP-bureaucrat decision-making process just doesn’t let that happen.

It’s becoming very obvious with the election results taht Japan’s democracy just hasn’t been well-prepare, intentionally or not, for changes in government - note the laborious formal lawmaking process (even though it is in principle a good thing for there to be a second house to disrupt the ruling party should the people will it so, an extra 60 days for each bill is way too much just for example) and note that the rules for selecting a Bank of Japan president never imagined a situation in which the two houses would disagree, leaving the Bank in danger of there being no one in the position after Fukui leaves.

Low profile for the LDP: Well it’s true - the more you pay attention to politics here, the more rotten and in need of a shakeup it seems. It makes perfect sense to give the press and the public nothing whatsoever to sink its teeth into. It’s just like the junta in Burma - with no one in the streets anymore and no Internet, there’s nothing for the foreign press to cover and hence no way for pressure to build momentum.

And I have to admit as a spectator that Fukuda is even less fun to pay attention to than Abe was, who was less interesting than Koizumi before him. If they can’t master the politics of distraction and misdirection as Koizumi did, then maybe they are better off slinking away. Koizumi had his bicycle safety training - Abe had his “go eat school lunch with the kids” events - what’s Fukuda going to do? sit around and watch classical music before falling asleep at 8pm?

Assuming that’s the strategy, I wonder if laying low can actually work though since the LDP doesn’t have control over the press or even the Diet anymore. The DPJ or even the Communists Socialists or Kokumin Shinto can cause embarrassing spectacles and pick high profile fights. And without participating in the public debate it will leave Hatoyama and the press to paint the LDP as it sees fit.

Comment by DeOrio

October 2, 2007 @ 2:36 pm

The DPJ or even the Communists Socialists or Kokumin Shinto can cause embarrassing spectacles and pick high profile fights. And without participating in the public debate it will leave Hatoyama and the press to paint the LDP as it sees fit.

And that, despite the LDP’s slide back into its old ways, is what makes me kind of hopeful for the future.

Comment by Bryce

October 3, 2007 @ 8:53 am

Hmmm…

I wonder if the Japanese political system is as much of a “sham” as Adamu believes it to be. As Garett pointed out whipping and backroom dealing are clearly a part of any parliamentary democracy.

Gordon Brown stands as a case in point. A leader with unpopular views stepped down and was replaced by a safe pair of hands whose succession was determined by a backroom deal made some time ago. Yet we wouldn’t call Britain undemocratic for it.

Later on in the podcast comparisons are made between the way in which Abe and George Bush have handled political inconvenience and scandal during their time in office, but there is one major difference. In parliamentary systems leaders who are unpopular have to fight consistently to keep their jobs. Presidents only have to do that once every four years. In that sense at least the Japanese system is more “democratic”.

If the public are similarly unimpressed with backroom dealing they can turf the whole party out come election time, something Japanese voters have seldom chosen to do. I don’t believe that the reason for this is systemic. (Political weight was certainly distributed towards rural interests, but this is the same elsewhere.) Rather the stability of Japanese politics reflects the choice on the left of Japanese politics during the Cold War to act as a check on the “revival of fascism” as Maruyama Masao might have put it, rather than as a viable party with alternative policy options.

The key then, was in changing the nature of the opposition. This has been done and the opposition now stands a chance of winning. Nothing undemocratic about that.

Comment by Bryce

October 3, 2007 @ 9:16 am

Garett and Adamu,

I didn’t really get what you were saying about the foreign media “attributing everything to domestic developments.” Abe’s ill-health notwithstanding his resignation came after scandal upon scandal had ground him down, he had lost the uh election and was now facing an opposition with the power to challenge the government at every turn. Not that I trust the reporting of the NYT or the Economist on Japan, but are these not the “domestic developments” that caused Abe to resign (or made him sick enough so that resigning was his only option).

Comment by Ken Worsley

October 3, 2007 @ 9:18 am

Adamu,

To a large degree, who cares if anyone replaces Fukui? At this point it could be done with a computer that takes all the relevant input, makes a decision, and that decision is announced. Twice every six months or so that decision will be reversed by the ruling party, and the computer can come to press conferences and say, “The Japanese economy is recovering on a moderate pace. We must pay attention to all indicators.”

Comment by DeOrio

October 3, 2007 @ 11:17 am

Bryce, I’LL go back and listen to that exact part, but, if I recall correctly, Adam and I were lamenting the foreign media’s tendency to give too much weight to public pressure or public discontent. For example, I agree with your contention that leaders in a parliamentary system must constantly protect their jobs in theory, but in practice, that leader only has to keep key members of his own party happy. Only the leader can call a general election and scheduled elections are a bit less common than those in the American system (although called elections are more common than American elections.) If a PM could keep his party behind him, he’d really only have to defend his job one every three years under current LDP rules and there’s no reason the LDP couldn’t extend the presidential term of office as they did for Koizumi.

In other words, the people being upset matters only right before an election and is unlikely, in and of itself, to be the cause of the election.

Comment by Adamu

October 3, 2007 @ 11:52 am

The sham I refer to is the ridiculous coverage of the LDP election as if it were an actual election conferring public legitimacy on whoever wins. I am not sure of exactly the internal Labor Party election process that chose Gordon Brown, but I am certain that the British media put on no pretensions that the process required “multiple candidates” and “thorough debate” like the Japanese media calls for during the LDP “Sousaisen”. I don’t necessarily beleive Japan is undemocratic for this reason or Japanese democracy on the whole is a sham (the fact that prime ministers must be constantly responsive to the public and cannot, for instance, start wars with other countries without Congressional approval, is one aspect of Japan’s system that I like), it’s just disgusting to see the patently false media coverage.

On a separate issue, whipping and backroom dealing are indeed a part of politics, but in the LDP’s case the process is a) unnecessarily bureaucratized (just look at their organizational structure on the LDP site) and b) far from the public eye. Why am I being pressed to support this? One thing I liked so much about Koizumi was the insistence of him and his brain trust on actually disclosing the policy debates such as in the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy and the committee on privatization of the highway corporations.

If I said something about the foreign media “attributing Abe’s resignation on domestic developments” I would like to take it back and say that the likes of Norimitsu Onishi instead blamed Abe’s failure on pet issues (comfort women and Abe’s conservative legislative efforts).

On the idea that the left’s own perceived role as a permanent opposition party - that’s certainly a fact that they were resigned to that position, but why? I do believe it was systemic because of the vast advantage that the LDP had in the ability to front a large number of candidates nationwide in the multi-member district era and their exploitation of the reins of government. There are some pretty persuasive arguments that the 55 system was necessary for a number of reasons and that the left provided a critical corrective influence, but now it is a whole new ballgame.

The whole reason that the DPJ can be a viable contender now is because of the Ozawa-led effort back in 1994 to create a mainly single-seat Diet.

I don’t really see much disagreement with this basic interpretation in the Japanese press (except for the part about how their coverage of the LDP presidential race stinks).

BOJ: Your image reminds me of that robot radio DJ on the Simpsons (”Can you believe those clowns in Congress? What a bunch of clowns.”).

Comment by Bryce

October 4, 2007 @ 7:59 pm

Garett

“leaders in a parliamentary system must constantly protect their jobs in theory, but in practice, that leader only has to keep key members of his own party happy.”

Key members, who, one might assume, are responsive to public opinion as their jobs rely on it (of course proportional representation systems may be an exeption here, but even in mixed PR systems the powerful members generally run in the constituency/district seats anyway, so their majorities are always under threat if their leader is deeply popular).

Adamu,

I don’t think anybody really believed there was any competition between Fukuda and Aso. Even the media reports I read pretty much proclaimed Fukuda the winner once the factions had slipped in behind. The only journalist I saw calling either the election a close thing or a win for Aso was a salty old foreign hack published in a provincial rag in my home town:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=209&objectid=10464469

As for the “structural (electoral) factors” versus “left wing intransigence” argument, the left decided fairly early on that they were going to take a course of action inimical to the right. It wasn’t something they “learned” from the structure of the system. From at least 1948, after the moderate socialist-led government fell from power because of scandal, the left wing of the party dominated the party.
From then on the left socialists were more concerned about advocating idealistic policy than posing a credible opposition. That was the reason the moderates split away from the party. Of course, with the left split three ways (CPJ, Left Soc, Right Soc) there was no chance of a credible opposition. This was even the case in the early 1950s when the LDP didn’t exist - hardly evidence that failure at the polls was caused by an LDP conspiracy. The Socialists tried to reunite in 1955, but were outmaneuvered by the creation of the LDP and the soon to be DSP just couldn’t stomach the left’s rigid position, so they left again. There was no notion that the electoral system had cheated them of victory at the time. So the socialists - at least the left-wing, were rigid from the start.

There are other factors related to the SPJ’s political activities that prevented their moderation. In contrast to the socialist parties of Western Europe which had become moderate the more it became clear that the Soviet Union presented a threat to European democracy (and hence their existence), the SPJ (and indeed the Liberals, including Yoshida) didn’t consider the Soviets much of a threat. It no secret that the SPJ was in close contact with (some would say taking orders from) the Soviet Union for at least the early part of the cold war.

And backing this all up was the intellectual grunt of the Heiwa mondai danwa kai, which from 1950 (again, the LDP didn’t exist) was waxing about the benevolence of socialism and the evils of secondment into the American camp at the expense of cooperation with the socialists.

The (left) socialists had been set on their course of action since the late 1940s. While the electoral policy may have played into their rigid stance, I simply can’t accept it was the main - or, as some would have it, only - reason they took an unrealistic stance.

And I may be wrong here, but wasn’t it Ozawa - not the socialists - who led the charge for electoral reform in the early 1990s? More proof perhaps that they weren’t really in to win, even if they could restack the system.

Comment by Bryce

October 4, 2007 @ 8:01 pm

“deeply popular”

shit

deeply unpopular

Comment by Bryce

October 4, 2007 @ 8:05 pm

Adamu, I do want to hear what you have to say about the foreign correspondents club.